[noch]

> Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas?

That's just, my opinion. :-)

It's difficult to explain if you, with access to the entire corpus of literature humans have published until now, and having read 10, 20, 50, 100 or more of past and current books, don't already know why.

It's impossible to explain if those are the things you already think are most important.

One way — and there are many others — to think about it is to ask: what can I use these ideas in this book to build that will advance humanity? Another is: what is new about what this author is saying that hasn't already been said by anyone in the past?

> Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?

This one is more simple (but you can probably invent a better method here as well): Read any recent award winning book that "interrogates identity" (or pick another MFA blurb descriptor) then write down what you think the author's values are. Often enough, if you simply take the view that the author's values are slightly or completely mistaken, the entire novel ceases to have a purpose.

Holding a conflicting view in my mind means being able to wholeheartedly (and at least, while writing) believe that my fundamental values and assumptions about the world are wrong.

p.s. Another reply to your comment also explained it rather nicely.

[trescenzi]

To try to succinctly respond to both points, I think the most clear way to describe the conflict is that you have different fundamental values than these authors do. Which of course I'm sure you understand.

I think you'd agree with the statement: "things that do not advance humanity are trivial". And that's totally fine, plenty of people feel that way. But not everyone does.

Furthermore that also assumes that "advancing humanity" is a clearly definable thing. I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.

But of course none of that really matters. I fully agree that there should be a multitude of awards which exist to promote diversity of thought and topic in literature.

My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.

[noch]

> My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.

That makes sense. I think I mostly agree with you.

I do think that some values are objectively better than others. I believe, for instance, that societies that survive while other decay, do so because they happen, intentionally or accidentally, to discover or adopt objectively better values. Sci-fi is an especially well-placed genre to think about such questions: What got us here so successfully? What will take us into the future?

The practical definition of "things that advance humanity" is: the values/priorities/ideas that enable human civilizations to survive and not go extinct.

> I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.

I feel bad that such people are having so much difficulty that they need a stream of new novels to understand their relationships, assuming that these books even succeed at that. But such is life I guess. :-(