I found the links on your site, and will dig in. I’ll look forward to your post about the ALA conference.

Thanks!

It IS on line. I’ve got a link to it from my site. Just seach under NEA or “literacy.” I’ll be posting more about it this week. I just got back from speaking at the ALA conference and have a number of interesting numbers to share.

I bet I could punch harder than Howard could. Five years of boxing’ll do that for a girl.

…Merely making an observation, of course.

…I’m waiting for that punch to MY face, Howard. See, I said it correctly this time. Howard’s supposed to punch ME in the face.

Howard did say that if you went to Dragon’s Keep he’d punch you in the face. But see, if you were in Reading Excuses, you could verbally abuse us. So see, there’s benefits.

=P

Thanks!

The latest NEA study on literacy asked a genre question: “Which do you like to read?” Note the dramatic decline in interest in SFF as the populace ages.

AGE % OF RESPONDENTS
18-24 34%
25-34 31%
35-44 28%
45-54 22%
55-64 19%
65-74 22%
75+ 13%

It might be because the older folks weren’t there for the blooming of fantasy (although they would have certainly been there for SF). Or it might just be that fantasy presents belief or topic hurdles to many people as they age, e.g. tiny people just aren’t as fascinating to a 50 year-old as they are to a juvenile. Or it might be that because fantasy is so chock full of young protagonists, it’s not as appealing to as many people who are looking for more adult themes found in thrillers and mysteries.

The bottom line, however, is that the main audience for fantasy right now is a younger audience (middle-grade – early thirties). And if a writer chooses to make his or her protagonist much older, I would think they’d begin to close their story off to a big part of the market. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Maybe they start a new trend. Just that I don’t think you’re going to get many teens to read about middle-aged men and women and their middle-age issues.

However, I will say the Incredibles did a great job of blending the youth and adult groups, making the story for both.

But yes, this is why I raised the issue. The most middle-aged major POV character I can think of in recent sci fi and fantasy is in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series. The character’s name is escaping me (and I feel too lazy to Google it or walk across the room and check in the book) but she’s, like, 34 or something. You know, “old.”

There are actually quite a few middle-aged women in sci-fi and fantasy works. Many of Robert Jordan’s most memorable characters are middle-aged women. Terry Pratchet is way ahead of the curve in this area, though. However, most women in sci-fi/fantasy are not allowed to be actually middle-aged, they are usually rejuvinated through magic or science, a la Honor Harrington. I think there is an interesting academic treatise waiting to be written about the treatment of middle-aged women in fiction generally and sci-fi/fantasy in particular and how it reflects our perceptions of the “real” world. The common stereotype is if a a middle-aged woman is powerful, she is usually (at least) an unpleasant ballbuster, regardless of whose side she is on. Often, a powerful woman is not allowed to be gentle and nurturing unless she is overwhelmingly powerful, in which case she is then not permitted to actively assist one side or the other — she gives gifts to the heroes in the form of healing or magical items, etc.

I find the character of Siun Sanche in the Wheel of Time series as a very interesting case study. But, I won’t say anything more because I don’t know whether Howard has gotten far enough in the series.

BTW, I recently had an idea for a middle-aged woman as the main character in a story, that I have filed away for later. All of these issues came to mind when the character occurred to me.

So about the same as in real life, eh?

Still, I think this Dan’s and Audrey’s comments highlight the practical answer (versus the literal one Howard gave) to the “if a book isn’t read, does it exist?” question. The answer seems to be no.

For example, people in the SF world were writing about nan0 catastrophes long before Michael Crichton wrote his novel about it. Same thing about bringing dinosaurs back. But this didn’t stop Crichton, and for hundreds of thousands of readers, his books became the introduction. Elvis, as I understand it, sang literal rip offs from Black singers. But for that big White audience he was fresh and new. What Elvis and Crichton had were the resources to popularize to a whole new audience.

I’m not advocating lazy copying. Or that Howard’s wrong in his statement above. I’m just saying it’s nice to know as we contemplate the topics that jazz us and we want to write about that the “that’s been done” argument is probably worthless when used in general. Even the stronger “that’s been done to death” argument depends entirely upon the specific audience.

Of course, being a fiction, I imagine this particular POV might be different. Perhaps she might live to 1000 years, making her effectively an infant! But… I don’t think the hook will be the same.

The genre blend between vampires (their own sub-genre these days) and teen romance turns that cautionary tale on its head and (depending on who you talk to) sends all the wrong messages to young women who might be engaging in abusive relationships.

Whoops. I slipped into moralizing. Sorry. My point was that blending teen romance and vampire fiction is a lot different than putting young women in a vampire novel 25, 50, or a hundred years ago.

Interesting point about the Firefly theme tune and opening. I think the same thing happened to Enterprise with much the same results. The sci-fi fans thought it sounded like a soap and the soap fans thought sci-fi. End result: low audience figures.

Lj.

Just thought I’d share that.

I read Twilight–my only exposure to the vampire genre–because it didn’t have a cover that I felt I would need to hide in public and I wanted to find out what all this vampire hype was about. I still don’t get the fascination with vampires though (hello, necrophilia!).

I agree, bdagger was awesome. I will freely admit my experience in the horror genre is limited to the Ring, Twilight, Higurashi, and I Am Not a Serial Killer. Oh, and watching my roommate play Fatal Frame.

(It happens to me all the time.)

In these kinds of discussions it really comes down to how well-versed you are in a given genre. I think bdagger wins the thread for showing pre-Buffy examples that are apter examples than Buffy was.

Steampunk!

Shadowrun!

Orcs in space? Warhammer 40K!

And don’t get me started on the Final Fantasy series or WoW.

Did a bit of genre blending myself: Techno Thriller/Urban Fantasy. Nothing new there, of course.

While John Brown’s claim might’ve been technically inaccurate, he does have a point. Buffy first aired shortly before my eleventh birthday (March 1997) and ended a little after I turned seventeen (May 2003). By the time I was in Buffy’s target audience, the show was in its last seasons. I never watched it. Sure, I knew it existed, but diving into a show after it’d been on the air for so many years was too daunting. It wasn’t an age where teenagers knew you could stream/download entire TV shows online, and if they did know, chances were they still had dial-up, and that would have made things nightmarish. (My parents didn’t graduate from dial-up until this summer. Ugh.)

Twilight came out in 2005, when I was 19. If you accept Twilight’s target audience as being somewhere in the audience of 12 to 17, that means those kids were between 4 and 9 when Buffy first aired and 10 to 15 when the show ended. The majority of them were definitely out of Buffy’s target audience. Chances are if you ask a kid who was in Twilight’s target audience range at the time it came out (currently in the neighborhood of 16 to 21) if they have ever seen an episode of Buffy before being exposed to Twilight, the answer would be no (unless their parents or older siblings were fans). For Twilight’s target audience, Twilight was the first they’d ever seen the teen romance angle with vampires.

Awesome. My idea was a challeng from someone else actually to make a universe with heavy influence from Starship Troopers and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.

Once I wrapped my head around the sheer insanity of the task, it… evolved. Took on a life of its own. Absorbed concepts and tropes from across the military scifi and magical girl genres, as well as from tangent sources. Never before have I had a setting come together so easily.