Tunnel in the Sky discussion

I've noticed that through most (if not all) of Heinlein's juvenile work, there was no ultimate evil bad-guy. He certainly contributed his share to the literary world. These days everything seems to be about rules, which stifle the creative process: "you must have an antagonist" seems to be the most aggressively enforced. This ends up putting everybody (authors) into sheep mode. Last night I went through at least 20 pages of Amazon results on a search for Young Adult Science Fiction. I was shocked: everything looked the same! MOST of the protagonists were female (at least 90%); if they weren't time travel romances (which seem to be all there is anymore in the time travel genre), MOST of the covers did their very best to portray the protagonist as the same stock, generic "Rambo in a Bra" character. I found myself browsing faster and faster because everything looked exactly the same. This is not creativity. This is sheep mode.

Ultimate evil antagonists bore me to tears. Any story using one has little choice but to end on a low note that renders the entire story irrelevant, as the final climax - the final conflict - is nothing more than a duel or fisticuffs between the good and bad guy, which would yield the exact same outcome. With or without the story, it's just a bar fight or a duel or whatever it is that decides everything. It's about as exciting as a tug of war: I'll pull one way; you try to stop me by pulling the other. Yawn.

I think that today, far more than ever before, we need a whole new crop of authors who are willing to break the silly rules, depart from churning out obedient "me too" material and start writing from the heart. When that happens, there is little to no commonality among a thousand books.

Sheep tailor their stories to make other authors and critics happy. Trail blazers forget all that and write from the heart, allowing each story to be what it is, no matter what the reception. It's like we have a mafia-style group of SS goons pressuring every author to enter sheep mode and conform. When somebody is willing to dismiss them, let them scream and rant and rave and criticize, miracles happen.