Comments on: For the most part, the answer is no

By: Black Gate » Blog Archive » Children Are Reading Fantasy

Black Gate » Blog Archive » Children Are Reading Fantasy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:40:40 +0000

[...] recently been a bit of discussion here about kids reading sf/f. I spent some time this morning looking up sales figures for [...]

By: doug

doug — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:07:37 +0000

I remeber readin around 15 years ago an editorial by Robert Silverberg stating the same thing. SF and Fantasy readership is getting old. Look at the books shelves. mostly media related books (Films, TV and gaming related.). I’m 47 and I cut my teeth on Wells, Verne, ERB. Most of what I read before Jr. High was either victorean of a little bit later. Most “Fantastic” antholgies for “young people” were full of Wells, Hodgson, Saki, M. R. James or early Weird Tales or Astounding writers. This was a different kind of writing than what we see today. I’ve seen bloggers on the web complainng that this stuff is “unreadable”!! Hell, I know plenty of people over 30 who’ve never heard of Harlan Ellison, Clifford Simak, Jack Williamson or any other famous “older writers”. I define “older writers” as those who were still in print or in the libraries back in the 1970s and not just goleden age authors from the 1930/1940s either. The world has moved For better or (most likely) worse. I’m depressed. sorry for rambling.

By: Theo

Theo — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:33:06 +0000

That’s a good point. In a recent post on John Scalzi’s blog, a commenter noted that the library near his house didn’t even carry Asimov or Heinlein, much less any of the less-influential science fiction writers that many of us grew up reading.

Scalzi seems to think that the YA market is a reasonable substitute, but I’m less skeptical that a teen Twilight lover who reads books about fairies and uglies and whatnot is going to go for SF/F in the long run. I think they’re more likely to end up in Romance.

I don’t think we can relegate either the young boys or the young girls. I tend to think that they’re the ones who will decide who gets relegated where. My solution is to write High Fantasy for a very small and select literate market, knowing that it won’t sell well, while designing an Urban Fantasy game - complete with sensual, stylish vampires - for a largely non-literate market.

The interesting thing is that the game requires about 35,000 words of text. So, it’s still writing, it’s still fantasy, it’s just a different medium.

By: Soyka

Soyka — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:10:06 +0000

Well, what they are missing out on is a prose style that will probably strike them as stilted in situations where technology is quaint, in some times just scientifically wrong, with cultural references with which they are unfamiliar. And nobody texts or uses facebook.

Which is not a criticism, necessarily, of those works or those young boys (and, hey, what about those young girls, or do we just relegate them to bad vampire take-offs?). Just that they’re not “entry drugs” anymore.

By: Ryan Harvey

Ryan Harvey — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:00:43 +0000

To all young boys who are reading this: if you are not reading Verne, Welles, Orwell, or Huxley, you are doing yourself and society a huge disservice. You don’t know what you’re missing out on.