Black Gate

Last week I had no figures at hand regarding children and teen reading rates. A 2007 National Endowment of the Humanities report on the topic is available here in pdf format (number 47). The short version is that the reading rate is not declining for children, but that as teenagers increasing numbers of kids stop reading. The 20-page executive summary does not define what they mean by “literary reading,” but in the summary for report 46, it’s given as “The reading of novels, short stories, poetry, or drama in any print format, including the Internet. Any type was admitted, from romance novels to classical poetry.”

Also, I inadvertently posted an outdated bestseller list. Here is the most recent PW children’s fiction list online; the ABA’s indie children’s bestseller lists overlap but are not identical. Both are heavily weighted toward fantasy, and this is even more true of the series lists.

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Yesterday (my yesterday; I’m 8 hours ahead of EST) Theo asked about subgenre preferences. I write in several different subgenres ranging from mythological fantasy to hard sf, and all writing is difficult, as far as I’m concerned. I do think there are differences, but first, a quibble, terminological or semantic as you prefer: all fiction is fantasy. Those of us of Indoeuropean linguistic and cultural affiliation participate in a set of related literary traditions who knows how many millennia deep, in which there are major narrative genres consisting of stories not considered true. This isn’t so in all other parts of the world. …

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I live about a half hour from the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, where the spring season opens with interrelated performances of Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead, which features two minor characters from Shakespeare in Godot-like circumstances. If you’ve never seen the Stoppard, there’s a movie version from 1990 featuring Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss. (and if you’ve never seen Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, get thee hither to Netflix.) Shakespeare, of course, was a great fantasist, and is himself sometimes a character in  reimaginings of his historical period, if not outright fantasies involving a cast of faeries and ghosts.  Harry Turteldove, he of vast historical reimaginings, has a story up at Tor.com which imagines a future acting troupe that is somehow transported to Shakespeare’s time and puts on a performance of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It’s an amusing tale that sets you up for a half-expected punchline, but anyone interested in Shakespeare or theater or absurdism will appreciate the jokes.  And, since it is a fantasy, I won’t even complain that Shakespeare would no more understand modern English than the players from the future would be able to converse with true Elizabethan accents.

First, something which might seem like a naked shameless plug, but which is in fact a plug modestly garbed in news that might be of interest to Black Gate readers. As part of the run-up to the release of Blood of Ambrose, Pyr has put the complete text of a couple of Morlock stories on their “Sample Chapters” blog: “A Book of Silences”, which originally appeared in Black Gate 10, and a new novelette-length sequel, “Fire and Sleet”. Read and enjoy; no salesman will call. Send before midnight.

Anyway.

After several weeks of reviewing Nebula nominees, I was somewhat at a loss in trying to figure out what I should write about this week. Mulling it over, I decided I should publicly commit heresy.

My heterodoxy (not as interesting as it sounds): I believe that adjectives and adverbs are good things. Not just good things, in fact, but essential.

More shocking confessions beyond the jump.

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There’s recently been a bit of discussion here about kids reading sf/f. I spent some time this morning looking up sales figures for children’s and YA speculative fiction, to discover that the most detailed information is in market reports that you have to pay for. Still, a few points.

First, no argument that gaming is a huge and growing market. I recall hearing recently that it has now surpassed movies in the entertainment hierarchy, but whether this was in terms of total dollars or percentage of people who consume, I can’t now remember.

The percentage of kids who read is still in decline, though I haven’t seen recent figures. As population grows, the total number of kids who read seems to be going up, however, or the kids who do read are reading more, as book sales are rising.

“In recent years, children’s books have emerged as a welcome bright spot in the world of general bookselling”; children’s books are helping to keep indy bookstores afloat.

And here is relatively recent publishing market data: “Total unit sales fell 6.7% in the week ended Dec. 7, 2008, compared to the week ended Dece. 9, 2007, according to BookScan. The adult segment had the worst week; adult nonfiction units were off 20.9% at the outlets that report data to BookScan. Juvenile fiction continued to be the strongest segment, with units up 24.1%.”

The most recent overview I could find was a couple of years old; the gist is that kids are not getting tired of fantasy and in fact are demanding more. “HarperCollins children’s publisher Susan Katz points out what she sees as a key difference. ‘It’s not our experience that the kids are saturated [with fantasy],’ she says. ‘It’s more that book buyers are.'”

The most recent children’s bestseller lists show a bunch of fantasy titles in every number category. …

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Apologies to David Soyka and all for posting off my usual day, but I thought I should keep finish what I started (for once in my life). It’s been a busy week, but I did finally manage to acquire and read the remaining Nebula-nominated novels.

And I’m glad to say that my preliminary generalization in the first installment of this post holds up: these books are not all created equal, but they are, in their way, all worthwhile reads. And none of them is genre-lite. Space squids could get freaked out reading some of this stuff.

Below the jump you’ll find the usual what-passes-for-thoughts.

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The March/April Intertzone has a short interview with Bruce Sterling in promoting his latest novel, The Caryatids (haven’t read it yet, but sounds intriguing). Here’s one question: “Couldn’t it be argued that SF itself is a long running ‘War on Wonder’? Is our tolerance for spectacle increasing with each passing year — we’re demanding more eyeball-kicks for the bucks?” To which Sterling replies: “If that were the case, why would anybody read Verne, Wells, Orwell or Huxley? Yet they do.”

Now, I’m not all together certain I understand either the question or the response. I think the point is that people who watch SF-inspired movies may not read SF because it isn’t as exciting. Well, maybe, but those folks don’t read in the first place. I suspect readers are, for the most, disappointed in most cinematic SF, Battlestar Gallactica, notwithstanding. Of course, I’m guessing that’s the case based on my own perception as a reader of SF.

But as far as Sterling’s response goes, I wonder if people still read Verne and Wells. Orwell and Huxley are typcially assigned in school (and I once assigned The Time Machine to an eighth grade English class), but do people still read these guys for entertainment, let alone to consider their ideas, outside of  academia or people who really care about SF as a genre and seek to be knowledgeable about its historical development?

And my guess is that most people who went to see the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds (a flick I never bothered with) didn’t pick up the source material. Or, if they did, wouldn’t have finished.

Or am I just being a snobbish elitist?

I haven’t actually read all the novels on the Nebula list yet, so this can only be Part One of the Final Nebulation (which began forty two billion subjective years ago with a look at the Nebula nominees for short stories, continuing with the novelettes and the novellas). But I should be able to post on the rest of them in a couple of days (assuming John and Howard and you don’t mind me making an extra post this week).

Not having read them all, I probably shouldn’t make any global comments about the group. But it does seem to me that the novels are by far the most impressive set of nominees this year. Maybe this just means I like novels better than short fiction (though I don’t think that’s the case). Maybe it’s just a so-so year for shorter fiction, or maybe it’s all due to AIG.

Anyway, here are my thoughts (if that’s not too strong a word) about three of this year’s Nebula-nominated novels: Schwartz’s Superpowers, Doctorow’s Little Brother, and Le Guin’s Powers.

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