It feels like some/increasingly more SpecFi/SciFi authors want their readers to be masochists…

Right, so let me acknowledge/pre-emptively counterpoint two things off the bat:

1. Tension is important. Yet somehow Clarke/Asimov/Herbert managed this without excruciatingly detailed scenes of an infant having its head smashed in after entire chapters explaining this is what’s going to happen unless Protagonist X does Impossible Thing Y.
2. I’m not saying this is “the state of the genre” or whatever. I’m specifically referring to two authors whose early work appealed to me for its balance of pain/reward, but from what I understand seem to be examples of a growing trend in the genre.

So… Christopher Ruocchio and Pierce Brown. Both are the authors of middling, easy-to-read space opera sagas which became an exercise in masochism, both somewhere around book 4/5.

I can skip 100 pages in the relevant books (Ruocchio: *Ashes of Man/Kingdoms of Death*, Brown: *Dark Age/Light Bringer*) and literally not miss a thing relevant to the overall plot. There will be some in-book relevant “scenes” where one or more of the following will happen:

1. The protagonist’s plan will fall apart in a horrific fashion due to Satan Ex Machina.
2. A formerly outclassed/incompetent/unknown/underdeveloped antagonist somehow becomes (Evil) God Almost Almighty, but evil, with little reasoning and only the thinnest threads of justification.
3. Multiple chapters dedicated to torturing the reader vis-a-vis the protagonist. Sometimes actual torture (Ruocchio), but usually it involves slowly, and in explicit detail, destroying everything the protagonist cares about (both Ruocchio and Brown).
4. Things otherwise established as impossible or at best wildly inconsistent with the rules of the in-book universe become available (to the antagonists) or commonplace (typically horrors inflicted on anything the protagonist cares about).

And I think I understand *why* this is happening. What used to be a series of chapters in a book or at most half a book within a trilogy dedicated to the Abyss in the Hero’s journey becomes two or more volumes of horror when that book/trilogy gets stretched out into a 6+ book saga. So in a way, this makes literary sense.

However, the drawbacks are that, first of all, I just don’t care to be tortured for an entire book+ or two+. I just lose emotional investment and metacognitively skip ahead. Secondly, the endless series of horrors inflicted on the protagonist become predictable. Even if I *wanted* to stay emotionally invested, the *knowledge* that whatever the protagonist does will result in some sort of horror makes the “shock” of learning the protagonist’s children were killed by being impaled on… IDK superheated tungsten pineapples… not that shocking.

by ManhoodIsOverrated