Killing the story

I'm reading yet another SF novel which I can't fall in love with this week.  The worldbuilding is original and exotic, but I just don't care about the story.

It's said often that stories are about people, and that's just as true of SF stories as any other genre. There's no point in building shiny and exotic cityscapes if nobody inhabits them.   And often the people who do are problematical for me.

I've lost count of the number of books I've read where the characters come from the underbelly of that world.  They're always living in poverty, and struggling to survive.  And in far, far too many cases, these  characters are killers.  And often they kill with a casualness which curdles my guts.

This week one such book I read a while ago has gone into its third printing this week.  I've never hated a book more than that one.  Dark and blood-soaked would be best description of it.  It wasn't the description of an occasional battle, it was whole-scale slaughter of billions of people.  If you're going to do that then I need a degree of detachment from the horror to make it bearable.  But not in this case.  The scenes of wholesale slaughter were lovingly described in excuciating detail.  I almost got the feeling that the author revelled in the blood and gore.  And for the record, this author is female.

It seems to me that Game of Thrones and its accompanying grimdark movement has set up a kind of competition where authors compete with GRR Martin to see who can kill the most characters in the most gory way.  I find that particularly disappointing when a female author does this.  It seems to me that she's telling  her story by macho rules, keen to prove to the boys that she can be as dark as them.

For me, that just means another woman author gets added to be 'never to be read again' list.  There have been many occasions when the killings in a book have killed the story for me.   Often it occurs half or two-thirds of the way through the book, when I'm already invested in those characters.  And it feels like a betrayal when a character I've come to empathise with turns around and kills someone.

But those are the books in the genre which are getting published and lauded.  And they are the complete opposite of my writing.  Reading these stories makes me feel as isolated as ever from the science fiction community.