They don't make readers like they used to
antipope.org
antipope.org
I think it is almost the opposite. People (readers or the people making the stories) are increasingly unwilling to accept ambiguity and uncertainty in fictional universes.
It used to be that every time you told a story like a fairy tale, it could be slightly different. Maybe cinderella was told slightly differently at my home than at yours. But that is fine, as long as the basic points of the story are there. This concept is totally alien to many people. Stories are no longer rough archetypes, but the exact media (film or book) with all it's details. People can't tolerate contradictions, and clamor for canon. And that leads to the urge to explain and connect everything, and stuff like Midichlorian, the virus that makes Klingons look human, or the convoluted Zelda timeline.
A couple years ago J. Michael Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) suggested to reboot the original Star Trek. Not as a prequel, or an alternative universe, but just a new show with new actors, unconnected to the original, telling new and modern stories. He said, let's treat Star Trek like a Shakespeare play. If multiple actors can play Hamlet, why can't there be multiple interpretations of Kirk?
Just don’t call it “Hamlet”! Copyright infringement aside, Star Trk wasn’t that great, as Charles suggests, it was all we had.
We did get a reboot of Star Trek with someone else playing Kirk. It was technically an in universe reboot and it was dumb. It probably would have been just as dumb if it wasn’t an in universe reboot.
Why doesn't Doctor Who fit your classification?
Star Wars and Family Guy are totally different genres. Family Guy is a farcical comedy.
When I was young and read scifi, it was more solitary and personal. I read it, thought about it, and moved on in a solitary way.
But over time, things have changed. Now I read more fiction, I select the fiction differently, and I communicate with others about it.
The big difference seems to be that when young I encountered my fiction, and nowadays I choose my fiction.
Do other people do this? Does it lead to higher expectations?
Also most iterations of Star Trek were almost entirely unconnected to the others.
And I'd put all of Picard in the same bucket as Discovery. The characters in each of those felt like someone saw the fan-made Star Trek Renegades and pitched the core ideas with a bigger budget. And I expect more of that with the Section 31 show.
Assuming he really said that... it's really irksome that he took a scenario where the classic Shakespeare plays are interpreted by different actors while still using the original scripts, and claimed he would be doing something similar if hired to write his own star trek scripts.
It's pretentious B.S. to make the Hamlet comparison when what he's proposing is closer to how they make James Bond flicks.
I've come to believe that one of the interesting aspects of the Mad Max movies is that often (not always) director George Miller makes them using the current popular language of cinema -- Mad Max and Road Warrior were Ozspoitation, Thunderdome (though admittedly not entirely his vision) was a Spielbergian blockbuster. Furiosa works wholehearted in the current vogue, building off and elaborating Fury Road. Not judging really, just observing. It's where we are now.
But I often feel that way about prequels.
As somebody who really enjoyed Lev Grossman's book The Magicians, I remember being somewhat perplexed by the bizarrely high number of one-star reviews on Goodreads until I realized that the predominant reason for the poor reviews was because the protagonist is self-destructive, not particularly likable, and the story isn't one of conventional redemption.
The Magicians currently sits at 3.5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, whilst pedestrian pablum like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has around a 4.5 rating, so make of that what you will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanzine
Many things associated with the internet and forums and social media predated its existence, they were just harder to learn about when distribution was more difficult.
And with franchises like Star Trek and Doctor Who also being incredibly popular back in the 60s, a lot of things that people associate with modern fandom were quite visible back then too. The actor who played the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) was into the show enough that his demands to run the fan club and letters to the BBC had some of the production staff joke they wished the Daleks would exterminate him:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2386587/Young-Peter...
The last showrunner before RTD's return (Chris Chibnall) was a vocal member of the fanclub that appeared on TV complaining about the state of the program and its writing:
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/bbc-archive-dr-wh...
And fans have written off storylines and elements they dislike since who knows when. If you follow the history of fandom through things like letters and BBS boards and Usenet and whatever else, you'll see many of the same things you see on social media today, whether that's fans rejecting the series 'canon' or timeline or worldbuilding, criticism that things have gone downhill, fanworks and concepts, etc.
The internet merely took this sort of media engagement from something you'd have to specifically seek out, to something that's front and centre on platforms with millions of people.
The future was already here — it was just not very evenly distributed.
> Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone ‘stole’ an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it’s carried, and what statement is made by the answering ‘statement.’ In other words—if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night—do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?
(unless someone has been messing with time gates, Cherry has over a decade on Stross, and Stross wasn't even FIAWOL enough to publish as Strhoss)
- _Rimrunner_ takes a powered armor trooper out of her armor and then examines the place of military in society from a compleatly different angle than Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_
- The Faded Sun trilogy takes an honour-bound warrior culture which has a strange alien life form as a central aspect of society and examines its workings and the interactions with the life form and ecologies in a way which is not possible in Frank Herbert's _Dune_ with its physics laws defying sandworms
- the Morgaine trilogy takes the concept of gates and looks at how such devices might relate to and interact with not just societies and cultures, but the very fabric of reality
Piers Anthony didn’t quite rail against his fans but he complained bitterly about having a contract that obligated him to write Xanth books at a superhuman rate even if it made him rich. He probably hates Xanth more than I did.
Similarly Douglas Adams hit it big with Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which created a new kind of fan. I read an Asimov book and then read more Asimov books and then Heinlein and Pohl and Herbert and Anderson and Leiber and Smith and Anthony and many others. People whose first book was Hitchhiker followed the trajectory of reading the same book hundreds of times rather than hundreds of books by different authors. Adams’ success left him typecast and boxed in, something he was resentful about, probably more resentful than I was at feeling really alone in a world of ‘sci-fi fans’ who had never branched out past Doug Adams (and who wouldn’t have even bought a Doug Adams book that was the slightest bit different.)
——-
I’ll not though I enjoyed Stross’s early books (Iron Sunrise and Singularit Sky) and I like his antipope blog but I could not stand following him on Mastodon because he uses the word “fascist” the way some people use another f-word, as in “Keir Starmer is a fascist”
He gets halfway through that article before he uses that word, to his credit.
I grew up around the same time as Musk and certainly the branch of 1970s sci-fi he talks about appealed to me a lot, but he leaves out the story of the “new wave” which formed in opposition to the strand he’s talking about but ran out of steam in the 1970s and the rise of Tor Press which had a much more militaristic (would someone dare say “fascist?”) orientation which turned me off.
EDIT: upon reflection: if we weren't, it would be proof positive they don't make readers like they used to.
It is great commercially because fans will eat it up but I think many authors aren’t happy with working under the constraints it brings.
D&D can be a really great game if you have a group of players which is really cohesive in that it gives a lot of room for character development, world building and all of that. Gygax was really interested in the improvisational acting aspects but D&D can get bogged down in the mechanics, statsmaxxing, etc.
On top of players taking it too seriously and the burden that puts on the GM you have the problem that it needed too many dice, too many books (you need the Player’s Guide and the GM guide and a Monster Manual to start and after spending that much money you don’t have have a sample scenario; granted there was a lot of great material for campaign settings that you could buy.). Combat is OK but not great.
There was a 2nd generation of games such as Paranoia, Toon and Call of Cthulhu which set out to address the problems of D&D and all of these come in the form of one book with a scenario which makes it easy to start as a GM.
When my son was younger I would run Paranoia and Toon games for pre-teens and they would have a blast. Games like that can be run on a pickup basis, if a kid comes in late you can give them a preroll and not interrupt the flow at all. One of those kids became a D&D GM later so I’d say those games are a great introduction to the genre and ought to be better known.
Irrelevant personal politics aside and in entire fairness to Stross, his use of "fascist" in this article is quoting someone who had complained about the fascism supposedly implicit in worldbuilding.
An author can always get a fresh start using a pseudonym.
I have never met anyone meeting that description. Back in my day, nerdy pursuits were not very tribal. A franchise did not form someone's identity mostly because there wasn't enough content about it to devote oneself to. You watched a movie, read a book or whatever and liked it. A superfan would be someone who sought out a game or a graphic novel but it gives you only a few extra hours in the world at most. A fan club would be a yearly magazine or something. You had to find other things to entertain you.
My friends were pretty core Hitchhiker generation with very similar background/humour to DNA. It was a pretty common early book. We might have reread it, played the infernal video game, loved the radio show, and could recite the famous bits but there really wasn't anything you could fall into some solipsistic hole about. There isn't enough there. It would be something to obliquely reference as an in-joke but wasn't something that could even sustain a conversation other than complaining about that game.
Hitchhiker fans were also likely Python fans, Tolkien fans, Pratchett fans, Harry Harrison, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, graphic novels, Red Dwarf, Warhammer or like DNA, very much into the birth of the home computer which really was a bottomless pit of discovery and conversation.
Now there is a thriving ecosystem around these discussions. People put forth their theories, other people debunk them. They spend hours reading and writing fan fiction to flesh them out. They immerse themselves in the act of participating in the world-building in a way that was simply not possible before.
There is a feedback loop here - more engagement leads to more controversy leads to more engagement.
Certainly some people have always questioned things, but it seems impossible to me that these new ways of engaging haven’t resulted in changes in the quantity and qualities of these types of fans/readers.
Otherwise, you will be left scratching your head about the era the opinion is from.
Notably, the author has another post with a "recipe" to success (a recipe that they now believe to be outdated), again with no timestamp.
You can only figure out the date of that writing (2007) by looking at the comments
> Posted by Charlie Stross at 16:10 on August 23, 2024
> looking for the date of this text is detective work
indeed, readers are from different generation and expect different things.
For the vast majority of human history, fiction was transmitted by word of mouth, performances, rituals, and countless retellings in which each storyteller could add their own flourishes. There were many versions of the same story that often conflicted with one another, and people were okay with that. Even stories that were written down were often modified as they were copied by hand, translated, and re-copied over the centuries.
Moreover, it is no secret that many authors struggle to choose between alternate endings to their own masterpieces, and often change their minds after their work is published. That's how we get revised editions with new scenes, changed scenes, and sometimes even radically different endings.
Every fictional world is a spectrum of possible worlds with vague boundaries. The author gets to write about one of them, usually only one of them. The rest is left to the reader's imagination, and this broad space for reinterpretation is exactly what makes literature so interesting.
> One obvious corollary is that this new generation of readers (not you: if you're reading this blog then, like me, you're probably pale, male, and stale) are inclined to reject the immutability of a described reality that contradicts their own preferences. "The people in this story are not like me: I find this implausible so I'm leaving it a one-star review" is to be expected. But that's already the case
Is the author saying that that new readers lack empathy?
The author makes the point that readers are more likely to reject the author's imposed world/structure/facts. The hypothesis is that we (readers) think reading is interactive, but I wonder if it's more postmodern ("inviting the reader to participate") than that.
I love Bret's work, but I sort of imagine this is the kind of analysis that a modern author might find frustrating: https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
In my opinion, there's crappy "gotcha" analysis like cinema sins which is mostly cheap entertainment. It doesn't really encourage one to engage deeply with the original work like Bret's posts do.
Regardless, I thought the author was discussing this type of readership/fandom
The word "canon" is also an interesting choice for this concept. It references that the church - sticking to the most popular example - "decided" what was canon when christianity was forming, and so can authors about their works. Cynicism aside, I don't think religious leaders understood canonicity as their favored interpretation, but as actual truth, which is obviously not the case with modern media.
It’s not like fanfics or theories are illegal.
People always have their “headcanons”
Official canon, at that point, is just a marketing tool. If you as the reader don’t like it, don’t engage with it.
The only real restriction placed upon readers is that they can’t sell their alternative stories under the franchise name, which seems fair to me. It’d cause too much market confusion otherwise.
edit: using an alt bc I use antiprocrast on may username and wanted to answer. hey, it's a saturday!
If it's the same author writing these pieces of fiction, then speaking by definition, the author's opinion is more special by being the creator of those works and therefore can create fiction that reinforces their headcanon (which is why it's called canon). So I think calling the author's opinion less special is wrong for the author's tie to the work will always be more special than the consumer by virtue of being the creator.
My impression is that this is more a consequence of the rise of sequels (and prequels) than of interactive media, in combination with the internet facilitating fans to communicate with each other at an unprecedented level. The longer a franchise is going on, the more likely it is for it to become incoherent and to diverge from the expectations of those who absorbed the previous installments, in particular (but not only) if different leading creatives are involved over time.
TV miniseries suffer from the similar problems. See "Lost" for incoherency.
Okay, serious question, is "tweet" trademarked? Can we start putting tweet/retweet on Bluesky/Mastodon already?
It's an interesting perspective but it's sad that the author seems obsessed with terrible opinions they found on the Internet. I make this mistake, too, sometimes. I think the best alternative is not to share it, however much we want to rant about it, but focus our energies on sharing good things. It's very hard to me to do this, though.
As I grew with interactive media, video-games, I never thought about the static-ness of pre-vidya media.
I do have my bias toward the era I grew up with, though. I'll never be able to understand people's focus on realistic graphics, when games peaked with cartoonish Dreamcast graphics.
I can't imagine what the generation after me will be biased toward compared to the one that will come next. Imagine if VR ever becomes a thing? "Back in my day we used smartphones instead of spending all day in the metaverse!"
I suppose the problem is whether you can respect someone's viewpoint without agreeing with it. As people say these days, it's "valid" to write the story however you want, just as it's valid for me not to enjoy it. It's a good idea to avoid making assumptions of the authors' character based on their works, but I suppose it's not hard to find someone who does that, specially in the world wide web.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
Why anyone hasn't made this into a miniseries is baffling. It's quite an epic. Not only that, it really happened. No worries about canon. No worries about sequels and prequels, because there is no beginning or end to historical stories. The stories are fractal, in that there's no end to going into a particular aspect in depth.
There are plenty of others.
People will always explore the "what ifs."
Not sure if there is some way to iterate given online feedback. Like, write a book from the pale, male, and stale point of view. Use an LLM to gather feedback on what people criticize. Then write almost the same book again, from the POV of a different character, taking into account interesting criticisms.
However, it may be better for a successful author to just get away from these hyper-online criticism spaces and write what they want to write, as long as they've got books lined up they're already excited to write.
For 50 years I've read vast swaths of fiction, all kinds. Almost all of Stross and fellow travelers for instance.
So I'm pale, male, and stale, and (thus?) I can't for the life of me understand where the majority of the commenters here are coming from. I sure as hell don't want the miasma here bleeding into one of my favorite authorial sources of entertainment.
There have been a some novels and novel-length works written a chapter at a time in public. The Martian by Andy Weir, for example is probably the most commercially successful. Many works by qntm (https://qntm.org/fiction) that are popular in this community have been written that way too.
By garbage I don't mean low-quality, I mean systematically bad. From sports where you have to look out for slave labour and greenwashing; clothing where you have to look out for PFAS, microplastics, ocean pollution; food where you have to look out for various poisons and almost-poisons categorised by the western diet; tech where you have to look out for privacy and all else covered on HN; online services where you have to look out for enshittification, addiction and depression caused by social media; and so on.
Nothing is simple anymore. If you haven't proved or signalled that you are on the right side of history before I start consuming your content, you get a critical eye. I wish it wasn't like this, but it has to be, because of the garbage world we/certain systems have created.
Example usage (found randomly by google, likely can find others):
https://www.veterinarywoman.co.uk/2015/02/the-stale-pale-mal...
Interestingly, google's search results indicate the phrase may be (currently) a UK thing (based on the domains of the results).
But of course this being Hacker News, we don't grok humor.
Interesting way to phrase it. I think this could probably apply to the flu or HIV equally well as to the more recent one.
Ultimately, the author is reacting to what he's hearing on BlueSky, which is a left-wing-coded sort of echo chamber:
> This essay was in part triggered by a bizarre opinion I saw re-tweeted on Bluesky, asserting that the very act of world-building is "fascistic":
> "I view worldbuilding as fairly fascist tbqh. Refusing to allow spaces for the reader's imagination to flourish. Removing the part of the contract between writer and reader that is communal and shared. Grabbing them by the hand as you try and map out a land that does not exist."
He knows that it's a bizarre opinion, and yet he feels compelled to generalize from it.
I think that it's such a strange and uncommon -- truly bizarre -- opinion that it must not be generalized from. Then, I suppose, there'd be no essay -- but it contained few or no true insights, so that's okay.
Sure, but I don't understand why that requires him to ramble about anti-vaxxers, some weird political stunts by RFK Jr. that I never previously heard about, or how various billionaire's pet projects are somehow dystopian (the linked article there is even worse). It certainly doesn't require him to use the phrase "inexplicable, unprecedented, intrusion from the Taliban dimension" to describe and validate a plausible take on the political strategy of the Republican party in the USA.
And then at the end he seems almost unaware that the "pale, male and stale" catchphrase is intended as an insult. The whole thing reads to me like a smorgasbord of political signalling. It's as if he's afraid that fen who come up with arguments like the quoted one will try to paint him as a fascist otherwise.
If you're dealing with a batshit insane, self-evidently "bizarre" take -- made by somebody terminally online in what is well-known to be an echo chamber -- then it's the height of folly to generalize from it. I'm completely sure that < 0.01% of the reading public shares that weird opinion, so why write about it as though it's indicative of a normal viewpoint or coming trend? That is the height of folly.
The genre of Greek tragedy took characters and events from the Homeric epics but created original works elaborating on specific events and characters. By modern standards we might call this fan fiction, but the Greek did not consider it fiction since these were supposed to be historical events.
I’m annoyed by the amount of sequels and prequels and reboots in the cinema, but I recognize that Shakespeare mostly remixed existing stories and still did pretty well.
This is brainrotted shithead opinion is the worst of the modern world. Using a political term for this deprives the meaning of the word. Also I read pricicley to get world building. I love hard scifi.
Intentional pun?
Sure, some will read the random wattpad smut, or isekai royalroad story, or the random fanfic; but that's the equivalent of eating soda for dinner: feels good in the moment, bloats you up and it's completely devoid of any nutrition whatsoever. Also messes up the mouth and stomach bacterial ecosystem.
And so no one puts in the hours, nobody puts in the effort and dedication to build taste and to build the necessary mental stamina for difficult readings. To read becomes a very niche activity, like calligraphy, or drawing. A gaping hole widens in mankind's soul and there's nothing that would fill it up again.
[1]: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish... It assumes book price trend = CPI, but I don't buy it. Recreational books are one of the few things that have become cheaper [2], likely due to e-books.
[2]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Recreational-books/price-infla...
at least the omegaverse is not formulaic to the hilt
and also has actual smut