Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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Has a history.

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.)

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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.

Can go back to Arthur Conan Doyle, who disliked having to keep writing Sherlock Holmes stories. (Famously killing him off, only to bring him back later when a successful story was needed.)

One can imagine poor, blind, Homer, having been fed up with his Odysseus fen asking for yet another year's worth of adventures, deciding to sing about Ithaca and Penelope once and for all.

Sherlock Holmes is the index case for serial fiction featuring the same characters through a long number of stories. (Though The Odyssey and myths about Hercules and Theseus could be elaborated upon and sliced up to make a TV series and the same is true about some Chinese stories such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West)

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.

I was thinking of that. And G.K. Chesterton killed off Father Brown, and had to bring him back.

Reminds me of J.D. Salinger and how he was always mildly irritated that despite having written many other novels (Franny and Zooey, Bananafish, etc.) he is only ever remembered for Catcher in the Rye.

Tor had a militaristic orientation? That must have been before the Nielsen Haydens were running it - my first instinct was to think "surely he means Baen, yes?" But Baen was always niche even for sf, so far as I can tell.

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.

(Look who only learned in 2024 that Jim Baen was one of Tor's founders. Not that I was precisely wrong in what I said, but that's a pretty significant and obvious piece of relevant history to have overlooked!)

Pedantry: he gets halfway through that article before he mentions a use of that word.

Are we seriously not doing use/mention distinctions anymore?

EDIT: upon reflection: if we weren't, it would be proof positive they don't make readers like they used to.

> People whose first book was Hitchhiker followed the trajectory of reading the same book hundreds of times

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.

I've only met one person who spoke of HHGG (or "H2G2"), and it's surely a fandom like Star Trek, Star Wars or something, but I feel confused at your characterization. Is it especially common in HHGG to not branch out?

I remembered in the 1980s going to various events which targeted “gifted” kids and I met more than 5 of those but nobody who had a broad interest in sci-fi.

It's remarkably common for D&D 5E players to only play that TTRPG. The existence of the acronym ought to be a clue that there are several thousand others...

Exactly. It goes way back.

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.

> boxed in

An author can always get a fresh start using a pseudonym.

It also prevents angry reviews from readers who expected a different genre.

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