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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Is this culture war? I'm not entirely sure anymore. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not, not really, just wearied of it all.

So... list of recommendations of new SF/Fantasy popped up on a social media site (okay, it's Tumblr) and it's a mix of some continuing series (that I've never read but have at least heard of, e.g. Murderbot and the Ann Leckie Radch universe) and new novels. Much what you'd expect, except this one stuck in my attention like a splinter:

We Dance Upon Demons, Vaishnavi Patel (12 May). A reproductive health care worker fights both human attacks on her clinic and supernatural attacks after she develops mysterious powers.

My immediate reaction was "that means abortion provider". And whaddya know?

In We Dance Upon Demons, depressed twenty-something Nisha is the volunteer coordinator at an understaffed and beleaguered abortion clinic. After a strange encounter with an Indian statue in the museum, Nisha is plunged into a strange world of demons and monsters–but in the end, the supernatural may not be as dangerous as the very human threats to her clinic…

So where's the culture war? Well, apart from the pro-life protestors being portrayed as screaming bigots and (of course!) the obligatory raped twelve year old*, it's just that I'm tired. There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water. We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".

Yeah. I'm tired and I don't know where we're going from here on in, but if AI does turn us all into paperclips, we have no bloody leg to stand on in opposition.

*You think I'm joking?

While the individual scenes are brutal, like a raped twelve-year -old being called a murderer by protesters as she tries to get into the clinic, it’s the sheer relentlessness of it all that stood out to me. Every day, Nisha’s job is to escort patients trying to access basic health care through a mob screaming abuse, and it never stops.

Abortion opinion has stabilized, and pro-life views are better represented legally now than they've been in decades. Socially, although the book is definitely something that reeks of the 2020s, abortion opponents aren't in the worst place they've been.

There's a narrower critique to be had about why this particular book was published and marketed, and here vibe-wise I agree there's been a shift in the culture war aspect. But it's more about the class that written works now originate from: not to put too fine a point on it, well-educated, materially comfortable women, who have cohered into a distinct block that takes a maximalist pro-abortion position. This was relatively uncommon in the safe, legal, and rare era, but it now dominates elite institutions, including publishing. Men mostly don't care about abortion except insofar as opposing it cuts off social opportunities, so pro-abortion wins by default.

What I would like to know is sales numbers on the book, and how much purchased copies of it are read. Does it have an actual audience that reads it?

Does it have an actual audience that reads it?

Probably, though I agree sales of books are going down. It's one of those "fifty different versions of romantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal chick-lit churned out by not even mid-tier authors now self-publishing is viable" and will sell on Kindle but not set the world on fire with sales figures.

There's a small but definite audience for this kind of feminist LGBT+++ representation stuff, and the bonus cherry on top is probably that "she's a BIPOC author!" so the white readers can pat themselves on the back for their broadmindedness in expanding their reading list (we're a good few years on from Racefail but there are still new finger-waggers coming up who want to lecture us all on what we're reading and how we need to read more Black queer feminist genre works or whatever, there was an amount of this for Black History Month in the USA).

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