D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Mannahnin]

This is what I was told as well. Which story would you pick as the best starting point?

Just sort the Moorcock Elric bibliography by Publishing Order instead of by Internal Chronology. Start at the beginning by picking up The Dreaming City and go from there.

Lol it is. This is one reason why my criticism here is somewhat measured if you look at all my posts. But I do think a lot of publishing now is looking for that NPR listener type, and a lot of more mainstream readers feel sneered at. And just being in publishing, you see the attitude among writers and publishers in general. And I would say it is worse now than it was say ten or 15 years ago. I think there is a reason you are seeing this reaction. On the other hand, I think we are starting to see a shift. I am not sure if that is going to lead in a better or worse direction though. Like I said, some of the people who raised legitimate criticisms have simply inverted the gate keeping, or set up even worse criteria

As a few folks have pointed out, the Hugos specifically are a fandom vote. So it's not the tastes of critics specifically that the Sad Puppies were mad about, but their fellow fans.

The thing is 80s fantasy in particular was just bad. There were exceptions. Orson Scott Card, for all his controversies today, was someone who stood out to me at the time. But stuff like Eddings, Brooks and Piers Anthony felt very conservative in terms of just sticking what was considered the safe parameters of the genre. So I think one of the things that kind of made that era bad was it had this conservative strain that filed down a lot of the rough edges (I think now we are living through a kind of progressive conservatism that people have been reacting to, that files down different edges).

I don't know that I'd single out the 80s. I think Theodore Sturgeon captured a valid point with his "law" about 90% of everything being crap. Xanth and the Shannara books started out in the 70s. Raymond Feist's Magician, and Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles are 80s, and those are crap (I'm just picking ones I enjoyed as a teenage D&D player but whose writing I can now acknowledge is at best mediocre or actively bad). I'm not clear on how the books you mentioned are particularly conservative/playing it safe. Obviously The Sword of Shannara is Tolkien pastiche/rip-off, so in that sense it's hewing close to what's popular. Is that what you mean? Eddings' Belgariad was also modeled off Tolkien, but that was five years later. So I guess it follows the same plan of capitalizing on LotR's popularity, only several years after Brooks and others had already showed that to be a successful strategy.

Card was indeed great for those first three Ender books, '85, '86, '91. Damn shame how he turned out as a human being later.

"progressive conservatism" is oxymoronic. Do you mean "political correctness"? Obviously this isn't a good forum for snarl words like that.

I found stuff from the 70s and 90s to be a lot better. And lately I have had tremendous difficulty connecting with anything (though honestly a lot of that is just me being old: styles change a lot with time and a lot of what I am reacting negatively to isn't even any of the stuff we are talking about but things as simple as younger people have a different way of approaching humor than the previous generation, they have their own language that I don't understand). Even the last period I genuinely enjoyed this stuff, say the mid-2000s, isn't what I would call a golden era by any stretch anyways. Like I said I am largely content now to go back read the stuff people all agree are classics and occasionally find something new that is surprisingly good

I have attention span issues now, as I think I lot of us suffer from. In recent years I've enjoyed some old pulp classics and some newer stuff like Jemisen, but I don't make enough time for novels in general. :/

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I've never read any of T. Kingfisher's romantasy books but her horror ones are very good and have things I would 100% steal for tabletop ideas.

I really enjoyed Nine Goblins and Minor Mage. Both are very, very charming.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Just sort the Moorcock Elric bibliography by Publishing Order instead of by Internal Chronology. Start at the beginning by picking up The Dreaming City and go from there.


As a few folks have pointed out, the Hugos specifically are a fandom vote. So it's not the tastes of critics specifically that the Sad Puppies were mad about, but their fellow fans.


I don't know that I'd single out the 80s. I think Theodore Sturgeon captured a valid point with his "law" about 90% of everything being crap. Xanth and the Shannara books started out in the 70s. Raymond Feist's Magician, and Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles are 80s, and those are crap (I'm just picking ones I enjoyed as a teenage D&D player but whose writing I can now acknowledge is at best mediocre or actively bad). I'm not clear on how the books you mentioned are particularly conservative/playing it safe. Obviously The Sword of Shannara is Tolkien pastiche/rip-off, so in that sense it's hewing close to what's popular. Is that what you mean? Eddings' Belgariad was also modeled off Tolkien, but that was five years later. So I guess it follows the same plan of capitalizing on LotR's popularity, only several years after Brooks and others had already showed that to be a successful strategy.

Card was indeed great for those first three Ender books, '85, '86, '91. Damn shame how he turned out as a human being later.

"progressive conservatism" is oxymoronic. Do you mean "political correctness"? Obviously this isn't a good forum for snarl words like that.


I have attention span issues now, as I think I lot of us suffer from. In recent years I've enjoyed some old pulp classics and some newer stuff like Jemisen, but I don't make enough time for novels in general. :/

When I have more time will answer in more depth but I meant conservative as in not edgy like stuff from the 70s (I realize some of this stuff was not all started in the 80s, but by the mid to late 80s you had things like this dominating the shelves). But mostly meant conservative in that much of the 80s fantasy, and we can quibble over who and how so, felt extremely derivative of Tolkien. It felt like they didn’t want to venture past those boundaries

 

[Bedrockgames]

"progressive conservatism" is oxymoronic. Do you mean "political correctness"? Obviously this isn't a good forum for snarl words like that.

I meant it more on this way. But more how both progressives and conservatives have things they object to on moral or social grounds that I think can limit expression in art or at the very least, often result in things feeling unadventurous or fun. Both make ‘think of the children’ arguments. Not political conservatism as much as a set of norms that starts becomes a kind of etiquette you need to adopt (in the 80s this might have you would avoid doing things that would upset the moral majority but today it might mean avoiding anything that upsets a certain strain of progressivism)

 

[RhaezDaevan]

Maybe this is a stupid question to ask, since writing styles have probably changed a lot over the years, but are there any new-ish fantasy series you'd recommend to someone who enjoys books by Roger Zelazny?

 

[Umbran]

Because when I hear their account of what the other side is like, or how bad this movie or book is for X reason, when I go and look myself it almost is always clear I was getting a distorted picture of the thing or person in question. Also the narratives are usually just so cartoonish, they demand a skeptical response

Not a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, then? Cartoons can contain much truth.

While we can talk about the presentation of arguments about individual works, those discussions do not enlighten us on "the industry" as a whole. The point about the entire genre narrowing from a publishing standpoint is a different kind of question, one that we should, at least in theory, be able to measure, rather than rely on feelings.

Do you care to be more clear about what you think "the industry" is, what it means for it to "narrow", and what your basis for the impression might be?

To me, the industry isn't narrowing if works of various outlooks are still making it to the public - books get published, visual media makes it to screens, and so on. Critics and social media responses are not "the industry".

So, as I said - Correia and his like are still getting published, alongside authors with quite differing viewpoints. How is that "narrowing"?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Something published by a university press? Not, like, the annual World's Best SF anthologies, which started in '72?

Definitely a hardcover schoolbook- purple, if I rightly recall. I remember the JRRT excerpt was the chapter where Gollum and Bilbo were trading riddles, and the McCaffrey excerpt was something like “The Smallest Dragonboy” (1973). And with the Bloch piece- which one, I don’t recall- the book defies genre boundaries.

Beyond that, the JRRT excerpt would have been 4 decades too old for inclusion in an annual anthology.

 

[SteveC]

Maybe this is a stupid question to ask, since writing styles have probably changed a lot over the years, but are there any new-ish fantasy series you'd recommend to someone who enjoys books by Roger Zelazny?

For me: go to used bookstores to find that mysterious book by him that I've somehow not seen as of yet.

Roger was a very special writer: very literary but also using some pulp tropes. I wish I had better advice for you but if there are any other Zelazny fans out there, I'd love to hear suggestions too.

 

[nyvinter]

Steven Brust is a huge Zelazny fan, and I think you can tell from his writing — especially the science fantasy Vlad Taltos series. (It's not new new but it's also has two books left so not finished. Which makes it current.)

But yeah. a Zelazny "replacement" is hard to pinpoint.

 

[The Firebird]

So, as I said - Correia and his like are still getting published, alongside authors with quite differing viewpoints. How is that "narrowing"?

You've mentioned "Correia getting published" a few times as evidence that there has not been a narrowing, but this fact doesn't support your claim. The fact that one thing X exists does not demonstrate a lack of structural barriers to thing X existing.

It would be better to ask: do the sales of titles in certain subgenres outperform? E.g., does the median sword and sorcery book outsell the median romantasy book, or vice versa? That could be a sign the publishers are not accurately reflecting the market.

Or: are there independent publishing houses (or just independent publishing as a whole) which are successfully publishing certain genres but not others? If sword and sorcery does great when published independently, but the big publishing houses aren't picking it up, that could be a sign they're missing things.

I have no insights into statistics regarding either. If someone knows though, it would be cool to see.