Matt
Maybe I'm wrong. Heavens! I hope I'm wrong. But it worries me.
Publishers will continue to publish what sells. As the young generation of genre (romance, horror, F&SF) lovers grows up, there will be a trend to more genre-influenced mainstream literary fiction.
It's the nature of the beast.
second - I've noticed also that there's also some fantasy/SF bleeding going on too (like in my WIP...I've got "magic" (codenamed psionic...hur hur...real original) in my story, as well as fantasy-like characters)
Just my quarter cent (meaning a fourth of a penny)
- starsin
When I go to Barnes and Nobles I feel a little stupid going to the Scifi/Fantasy section, like the only people that read that kind of stuff are Trek nerds and people who live in their mother's basement. (Okay, I like Star Trek, sue me.)
Matt
Oh, and vampires-as-villains pretty much died with "Buffy" the series---not that they were all villains-or-heroes there, but that's just the time frame.
While I like knowing what to expect from an author, that can be done without confining them to a genre. Piers Anthony jumped from fantasy to horror for a novel and it was just as good, although it seemed more real than his Xanth series. Stephen King is known for horror, yet he actually writes Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Suspence. The same is true for Michael Chrichton, Dean R. Koontz, Robert R. MacCammon, and John Saul.
Brian Lumley crosses genres throughout his "Necroscope" Series. He is the DEFINITION of genre bleeding. He is almost so fluent at it that you can't tell what genre it's intended to be. "Necroscope" is Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy, Suspense, Spy-Thriller, and Mystery all wrapped up into one. (If you are unfamiliar with the series, it's about a vampire hunter that can talk to the dead. He is emploed by London's ESPionage branch--E-branch. The vampires are sentient aliens that come from another world where there is three "days" of sunlight and three "days" of moonlight. On the Vampire world, Starside/Sunside it is a fantasy realm with "tribes" of gypsies and vampire-mushroom swamps.)
I think that genre-mixing by an author shows the diversity in their imagination, and genre-bleeding (which I would consider Lumley a master of) forces the bar that much higher for the rest of us.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited February 28, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 03, 2007).]
Yeah, me too.
For one thing, there are so few sf novels. They get buried in all the fantasy ones. For another...I don't know. Half seem to be repetitive space war sagas and the rest seem to be depressing views of future societies. I find it hard to find sense-of-wonder sf novels. The few I do find... seem awkwardly written compared to the crime novels out there.
The authors I do buy regularly are Iain Banks, Karl Schroder, CJ Cherryh...hm...anyone else? A few on a book-by-book basis -- that is, I read the first few pages and the back cover blurb and decide whether or not to risk the money.
I've always liked vampire stories, if they have a good, creepy, yet still kinda sexy tone to them. Maybe it's because I'm a girl that has never really been adored, but the idea of some powerful male creature choosing you out of the entire world of beautiful young women is ego-inflating, even if he IS pretty much planning to just saahk jour blaaahd.
Not to mention that most of the vampires are beautiful and sexy and mysterious and all that jazz.
HOWEVER, I do NOT like most of the vampire movies out there (buffy excluded because that movie was fantastically funny - gotta love Paul Ruben's death scene! ROFL), especially ones made from books. John Carpenter's Vampire$ Inc. book was pretty darned good, and had a slightly different twist on the whole vampire thing, but the movie SUCKED ROCKS. They took out all the good stuff, completely changed characters, and butchered the story line.
but anyway. I like vampire stories...for the most part. Then again, my greatest weakness is a kiss on the neck.
This while my non-fiction reading has grown by leaps and bounds. I'll go into a mainline bookstore, and come out with a hundred dollars of books (five or six easy). I can't even cut down. I'm drawn to the notion of writing a lengthy non-fiction book ("an interesting history of the United States,") but have not yet done more than block out a few ideas in my head. (I have no qualifications other than writing skills and a searching mind.)
Matt
Look at the popularity of Star Wars... if it weren't for the cheesy romance it would have been just another SF movie... Though i think i could have written a better script than lucas when i was 12, alot of women i know DID find it a good movie.. ( Ep 3 ) .
But in literature, it's possible more women buy books, but there is still a huge male market. I think especially in SF it's a male market, I don't see a lot of women reading it (though I got my wife to read Ender's Game-she loved it). I think fantasy is the market dominated by women in spec fiction. Good thing the MC in my WIP is a woman.
Matt
quote:
I think the original 3 Star Wars were geared towards men and men made it big.
NOT! Do you know how many teen and pre-teen girls (me among them ) had the hots for Luke or Han? Do you know how many of us swooned over Han and Leia's first kiss? Clear sexual tension going on from the very first film!
You were watching the same movies I was, I presume?
If you want evidence that Star Wars are guy movies (who wouldn't want to kiss Leia in episode 5?) look at "Attack of the Clones". George Lucas can't write dialog. The scenes with Anakin and Amadala are just painful.
Matt
I think Lucas is brilliant, on film. He's a wonderful mad-genius-wizard that creates what he can't find readily available. His writing was brilliant in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi, but what was truly incredible was his passion. He tapped into the pulse of the populace, and got enough of a grip to quit the Director's Guild, without it effecting his career.
The prequels, however, did not have the same elemets or effect. Even a genius has faults--look at Thomas Edison.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 03, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 03, 2007).]
Remember, too, that "Star Wars" was, then, the one and only movie in that universe---I figured a sequel was planned 'cause of what went down and how, but it wouldn't appear for another couple of years---so none of the stuff that was piled on later was evident or implicit at all.
(I must've gotten over any qualms about "Star Wars," 'cause it's the only movie I've ever gone to see in theaters three times. Several rated two viewings, but this is the only threepeat. (Twice in 1977 when it first came out, once when it was rereleased in the late 1990s.))
It was a different world back then.
And...I heard that the first two movie screenplays were written not by Lucas himself (he wrote the treatment or something to guide her) but by sf writer Leigh Brackett. Then she died and the third movie wasn't as good, or any since then...in my opinion.
Leigh Brackett only worked on "The Empire Strikes Back"---she died before it came out. (A painful memory for me.)
On the subject of Star Wars. I don't know why it's so damned appealing, but even I love it. Maybe it's the lack of a central race, or a sense of freedom and adventure that only space can give us. I don't know. I do know that Lucas is a terrible Director though, and that his latest stories (episodes 1-3) are so ridiculously tightened together that it's like a bolt that has start stripping. Terrible waste of a backstory that could have been so much more. That's what a lot of money and security does to you... it makes taking every effort to produce something of quality more expensive. Effort you don't need to take won't be taken. Lucas botched it up.
[This message has been edited by Zero (edited March 05, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by Zero (edited March 05, 2007).]