tl;dr I need some way to find audiobooks that aren't leftist propaganda. Is there a site or something out there? Books recs don't need to be completely clean of SJW trash (it's great if they are), but it can't be some infinite genders shit where the MC is a gay 6-spirit 800 years in the future.
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So my job involves a lot of driving, and I like listening to fiction audiobooks (scifi and fantasy pretty much exclusively). For years I just googled for recommendations, and that led me to some good, popular books, but I've gone through a lot of the obvious stuff that fits what I want now.
Google of course leads me to articles, and Reddit. Reddit worked for me for a while, but I started checking books and authors for certain content in advance. i.e. I usually search an author's name with the word LGBT to see what comes up. Only now it's like...half or more of the authors I see recommended, from reddit or otherwise, end up being activists with clear agendas in their work.
While doing my filtering last night, I came across this article, which explains why there seems to be endless LGBT books everywhere, with everything else buried:
https://thefederalist.com/2017/10/25/never-satisfied-social-justice-mobs-ruining-ya-book-publishing/
Obviously, I can try to just read much older material, but I don't want to stick to that exclusively (and I still have to find those books anyway). Basically I'm wondering if any of you know places where I can get decent book recommendations, because subreddits aren't useful. The books don't even have to be completely SJW free - they just need to not be fucking obvious propaganda pieces.
You can find audio books on the high seas. I found The Expanse, Dune, and Hyperion that way.
I've listened to all of The Expanse, book 1 of Dune, and all of Hyperion. Hyperion was trippy, and I hated the ending, but it was...an extremely unique experience. Dune was pretty good. The Expanse was almost great, except for some of the later books where 80% of the book is the author describing this woman and her like 8 bisexual spouses. Literally listened to most of the book on 2x speed, not even caring about what I missed. Character was detestable too.
To this day I can't tell if the authors are crazy, or if they deliberately wrote a lot of belters to be the most hateable people possible. I can't tell largely because they made the central protagonists sympathize with them at every turn no matter what they did.
RE: The Expanse, I think the authors caught a mild case of TDS, which influenced a lot of their later writing and the TV show. They obviously weren't right leaning before, but the last 4 books have a noticeable increase in leftist setpieces.
That's a plausible explanation. Part of why I wonder though is how often LGBT characters were presented in a negative light. They keep showing up in later books, but you're not generally given good reason to like them, even when they're pov characters. Just the opposite in several cases, including at least like 2 actual supervillains?
Also seem to remember them toning the leftist stuff way back down in the very last book at least (released November 2021, possibly relevant), but the ones leading up to it were such an obvious shift. I may be misremembering the supposed improvement in the last book though.
I remember preferring the last book to the preceding two as well (though that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I despise Naomi, and she's a major focus in those two books.)
And yeah, they do seem to be avoid the modern progressive pattern of only allowing white male villains (or making them "sympathetic".) I don't think that a single main villain/antagonist is a straight white male until book 5.