Wondering about that Emotional Punch to the Junk

Over the past year or so, I've slowly become less and less inclined to read a work of overt speculative fiction, as I have become more and more enamoured recently with the works of a great many Latin American authors, from Jorge Luis Borges to my current read, José María Arguedas. I never really sat down and thought about why this was happening until I read a couple of pieces that made me wonder about what possibly could be missing from most contemporary speculative fiction.

I think what I miss most is that sense of connection, as if the plight of the characters were somehow important to me. Reading Arguedas's Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) has made me think about the oppression of the indios of Peru, of those impoverished, yet proud, descendents of the Inka, whose rich cultural tradition has had a layer of European architecture and values superimposed upon it as the streets of Cusco have Inka foundation and European storeys. Where is this sense of loss, this sense of an utterly human tragedy in most fantasy or science fiction stories? Where is the connection between the lives that the characters have lived (or died) and that of my own? Where is the realism that underlies our fantasies?

Is it because it is so very difficult to write a scene set outside our perceived world and have it become 'meaningful' to us? Can we truly experience such a sense of shared triumph or communal loss as some have while reading works such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises?

Recently, I was reading the comments over in wotmania's WoT messageboard in regards to the apparent 'insensitivity' that readers were showing toward a moment in the just-released latest WoT book, Knife of Dreams, that the author himself said should make people "gasp." The relative blasé attitude toward that stuck me as rather interesting - was it due to people being desensitized, or could it deal more with a greater difficulty in becoming emotionally attached to a fantasy world and its peoples and their struggles?

Is there something inherently lacking in the way that most fantasies and science fiction works are written that prevents us from associating ourselves, perhaps in cathartic fashion, with the characters being represented? It is a question that puzzles and troubles me.

Perhaps others reading this will have thoughts on this issue. Perhaps they can think of exceptions to what I have mentioned, or perhaps other ways of viewing this. Shall be interesting to see what the Blog readers here will make of this.