I think the advent of the Internet makes generation gaps (and culture gaps) much less of an issue than prior to that access. Even those who choose not to read or experience the culture of another individual can at least readily find the information that allows them to understand it.
I think that is true to a certain degree Mark. As a research (disclosure and dispersal of information) and communications tool the internet allows one great exposure to numerous subjects, and even to various sub-cultures (if one wants to make the effort to investigate them).
But as a social tool and medium the internet has a tendency to produce greater and greater specialization of sub-cultures and therefore to further fragment and shatter such sub-cultures into ever smaller and smaller units or clique-groups. A good example of this is lingo. Military cultures and sub-cultures on the internet have their own lingo. Gamers have their own lingo, but this lingo is split into ever more specialized sets of terminology, such as that employed by video gamers, role play gamers, board gamers, LARPers, etc, etc. Even within the same basic sub-cultural set you have the "old-school crowd" and the "new school group" and I have noticed the subtle differences in not only background influences of development, but even the basic and generalized terminology used.
That said, as for me, and I'm definitely old school in this subcultural respect (pushing 50), fiction was an early influence on my gaming and gaming styles. Fantasy fiction was an personal influence prior to me ever playing D&D, though about concurrent with my initial wargaming and military interests. And I was rather well schooled at the time in the "classical fantasy literature including Lord Dunsany and Tolkien and others.
But after my teenage years I gave up fiction altogether and truth be told I couldn't even stand to read it for well over twenty years. So non-fiction and history and the real world became my inspiration for what gaming I did, including fantasy gaming. I'm not sure if that's entirely unusual or not, I suspect it might not be in many cases, but nevertheless fiction died away for me as role play gaming inspiration a long, long, long time ago.
I read fiction again now, having taken it back up a couple of years ago. Occasionally I even read fantasy and science fiction, and some of it is now actually good to me. (I sometimes enjoy reading it.) I haven't though seen a fictional book, setting, or idea that would in any way interest me as inspiration for a game though. Fantasy or otherwise. Maybe I will consider the idea of adopting small discreet elements of something an author has suggested or implied.
I guess it's because I have read non-fiction for so long, or studied or been involve din so many real world things or events or undertakings, that whenever I read fiction nowadays almost the first thought that passes my mind is, "I know the real world event or person or occurrence that gave the author the idea for that." Reading somebody like Michael Crichton for instance is like going backwards away from the original source to me. (I like some of his books by the way, but the ideas they discuss don't seem very original to me. And I think in this respect the internet makes it very hard for modern fiction authors to strike any kind of real blow for originality. I say that as an author myself. I know the limitations modern forms of information dispersal place upon authors, game designers, artists, etc when it comes to being original. Of course very few things under the sun are new, but nowadays it is very hard for an author or anyone else working in fields like that to surprise his readers because they do, or should, know pretty close to as much as he does. Unless of course the readers just don't bother to expose themselves to what is current or what is being research in the world. For sentence at one time fiction authors served a popular function of information dispersal to the masses. They took real information, reworked it, and then disseminated it to the crowds which tended to be far less highly educated and who did not have easy access to the research materials many authors had. With the internet, satellite channels, etc. it is no longer so much a function of information dispersal in a popular form as it is "information reminder.") So to me the idea of taking a fictional idea and then running it through a game adaptation seems to me like straining chicken broth through a sieve just to reheat it when I could just take the original source of inspiration (for the author's functional interpolation of the original real thing) and work that out instead.
Still, I enjoy some fiction nowadays, I'm not saying that I hate it. I'm just saying it seems kinda weak to me comparatively speaking as a source for gaming material. So I skip it in favor of mostly non-fiction.
What I objected to is that I cannot be an effective roleplayer without reading them. Yet I have been.
