As someone else pointed out below, speculative fiction magazines are doing just fine, and you'd be hard-pressed to find ideas that WOULDN'T be considered "wild" in the field of SciFi or Fantasy.
1) Wild ideas INSIDE a given work of literature
2) Wild ideas ABOUT a given work of literature
Eg. Most recently this surfaced outside of the literary community around Sam and Frodo's relationship in LOTR and whether or not they were gay.
This seems to me like a perfectly legitimate question.
>No. I think it's become something of a parlor game for some people to read that kind of thing into everything they encounter. HAL was a "straight" computer.
From an interview with Kubrick in 1970[0]. The attempt to transform every male-male relationship in every piece of media to homosexuality has sadly killed the concept of friendship in media, just like it did to Xena and Gabrielle. It's okay for friendship to just be friendship.
I think what is interesting, and most valuable, is that people will find one way or another to attack any normalization of non-cisnormal sexuality. Why is that?
(Also, one example doesn't prove anything.)
To sum it up in a snarky pithy phrase: the culture was so misogynistic that it became gay, because romance requires another person. It is reflected a bit in sheer rarity of female characters in LOTR.
Romantic friendships were a norm in the past largely forgotten in more open times where we are used to noticing obvious repression and "closet cases". In a way the real past manages to be even more alien than fantasy worlds with elves and dwarves.
I think the way to approach that is, what makes it necessarily 'wild', and why does that matter? Nonbinary sexuality is hardly political - it's been a natural part of the human race (and our ancestors and cousins) forever, long before current politics.
What makes it 'wild' is that it challenges norms to even ask the question. What makes it political is that anyone challenging norms tends to have their views politicized and suppressed - grab the torches and pitchforks. Later, when the same thing becomes normalized, it becomes something the next generation of conservatives defends.
The old saying is very true: 'First they laugh at you, then they say it violates the scripture, then they say they believed it all along.' (Except it omits the hatred and lynching.)
F&SF is down to six issues a year (they had 8 in 2009, and 11 from 1991-2008). Analog and Asimov's each dropped from 10 to 6 in 2017 (and each went from 11 to 10 in 2003).
That's not what I'd call 'just fine'.
50 years ago, it was largely considered pulp and not real literature (though I would argue that plenty of "real literature" was being written in the genre, it just wasn't widely accepted as such by contemporaries). Even the few works that were accepted, people often claimed that it wasn't really SF.
More recently, it is increasingly being accepted that being SF doesn't inherently reduce something's literary value, so SF magazines have had more room to grow.
Even with that, a lot of the traditional leaders among SF magazines have been struggling. What's doing well are the newer online-first magazines, most notably Tor.com, which has boatloads of money to throw around (by short fiction standards) and doesn't need to be financially self-sustaining because it is effectively a loss-leader for their novels.
Mid-tier literary journals generally don't, and their editors often act insulted if the topic is raised, so the issue doesn't seem to just be that they can't afford to pay. There's seemingly an expectation that until you've already "made it" you should be working for free.
Indeed, I would suggest that we encourage curiosity in others when we see it.
Isn't this what happens on every HN thread, people expressing opinions relevant to the topic? Or is it only forbidden when criticizing descendants of the Frankfurt School?