On Longtime Fans

I remember how when I first started to look into science fiction seriously, and read some of the history and criticism of the field in the course of that--much of which was, for better and worse, written by veteran authors--they often seemed to me jaded and picky and snobbish and negative.

Later, though, I came around to understanding their attitude. When a fan starts taking an interest in something their interests are fairly wide, and they are prepared to give a lot of things a chance, enough so that they may find the jaded, picky, snobbish, negative attitude hard to understand. But eventually they develop likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies--becoming aware of things they would enjoy more of, and things they never want to see again--at which point they, too, appear jaded and negative, perhaps even in the same ways.

Certainly this happened for me. Many years ago my patience was at an end with dystopia (especially the progress-hating kind designed to crush people's hopes of anything ever being better), and disaster (I think we've seen enough real-life disasters these days to find the fictional formulas unconvincing), and the post-apocalyptic situations to which disaster leads (especially of the reptile-brained survivalist variety), and robot stories of the Frankenstein complex type (I'm on Asimov's side here), and the Luddism generally associated with that (because, aside from being wrong-headed, it's trite and boring). As might be guessed from such a list I also have less patience with ostentatious Modernism and postmodernism in form and content, from the nihilistic poses of the self-satisfied edgelords down to the kind of science fiction storytelling that strives to overwhelm the reader's ability to process what they are reading with minute details irrelevant in any conventional narrative sense (Bruce Sterling once compared it to the "hard-rock wall of sound"), while if still willing to look at a long book, I find myself ever more demanding in regard to their justification of their length. (Basically, if you are going to make me sit through a thousand pages, or even just three hundred, you had better make them count, and few do. Art aside, how often do our adventure storytellers these days match their pulp predecessors for pace, incident, fun?)

Alas, such dislikes rather limit the options these days, or so it seems to me. What do you think? Are we seeing less of these things in recent science fiction than before? And what are we seeing more of?