There’s a highly specific style of sci-fi written by a highly specific kind of author: straight, white, male, Gen X, usually from North America and with a STEM degree, who was a Nerd in high school and still has a vision of Nerdiness strongly defined by a straight, white, male, Gen X experience. An experience of reading a lot of Heinlein and Asimov and Tolkien in high school, where Apollo 11 happened before he was born and space exploration was happening at what felt like an ever-increasing pace, where computers were rapidly advancing and every advance was exciting, where video games were played in arcades or were text adventures with minimal graphics, where Star Wars was mind-blowing and Star Trek was experienced as reruns so The Next Generation was cool and exciting, where fanfiction is not part of their fannish experience and probably never occurred to them, where blogging on your own website was a natural part of internet culture, where the economic boom of the 80s meant engineering/programming/IT jobs were easy to get.
These influences define the niche that Andy Weir and Ernest Cline both write in, as well as certain other prominent figures like John Scalzi, Randall Munroe, Cory Doctorow, and kind of Rich Berlew.
It’s not an indictment of them; it’s just a particular niche. However, due to the specifics of such authors’ identities and experiences, they can often write with the apparent idea that they are not specific; that they are universal and apolitical. This often comes with an idea that they believe in racial/gender/sexuality equality, and they do because they believe equality is good and humans are all more alike than we're different and humanity is fundamentally decent, but also they not-infrequently write like they don’t really know any gay people or people of color and have never really thought very hard about it.
And one of the reasons I still haven’t read The Martian or Project Hail Mary even though I have been intending to for years and I’m confident I would enjoy them… is that in my large and ever-growing TBR I tend to de-prioritize this particular sci-fi niche. There are SO many good-sounding books in the world that I want to read and I tend to prioritize books by women, by authors of color, by queer authors, by authors with social science backgrounds. The only Scalzi I’ve read was Redshirts and it wasn’t that great and was kinda thoughtlessly sexist; and I have many, many thoughts about Ready Player One and Ready Player Two (almost none of them good lmao). I definitely have my beefs with Cory Doctorow despite respecting him in other ways. I found his YA novel Little Brother respectably ambitious but also kinda mediocre. And I have followed Order of the Stick and xkcd for more than a decade and you can really see the political/social evolution of the authors over time. That’s another trend; you can see these authors reacting and adjusting to more nuanced gender/race/queer issues over time!
It just feels to me like a highly identifiable style, one that has been more miss than hit with me, which sometimes is made more frustrating by recurring beliefs that there’s nothing uniquely identifiable about it; that books by Gen X straight white men aren’t identity-based books like books by and about women and people of color and queer people are.
And. Like. I love Order of the Stick! I have Munroe’s first “What If” book, autographed! And though I’ve read little of his fiction I think John Scalzi is overall a cool guy (though sometimes thinks he’s funnier and cleverer than he is). And when I get around to reading The Martian and Project Hail Mary I also genuinely believe I’ll like them—I floated on fuzzy warm emotions for days after seeing the PHM movie, certainly! This isn’t to say this automatically makes a work bad. It does however make a work specific, in a way straight white men are rarely expected to think of their work as specific. But like. It’s a style, a niche, that’s definitely specific.
And Andy Weir takes it and writes widely beloved stories about hope and humanity and Ernest Cline takes it and writes about how being able to play video games and quote 80s movies better than anybody else means you’re the most important person on the planet.
