Geek Confessional Thread 2024 [NOW 2026!]

[Ruin Explorer]

Here's a Geek Confession: I almost miss when "Magical Realism" was what you called a book when you didn't want it shelved in the "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" section at the back of the bookstore /s. On the other hand, I DO appreciate the growth of the SF/F over-genre, and it's nice having a whole wall at my local Barnes and Nobel instead of a four-foot section of paperbacks at Waldenbooks, as it once was.

I don't really remember a time when a SF/F didn't have a pretty large section in most UK bookstores (I was born in 1978), and like, for example I bought the White Wolf (!!!) reissue/collection of Corum stories (so pretty obscure Moorcock) at a totally normal mainstream bookstore in Hampstead in the mid 1990s (I think Waterstones and I think the Waterstones is still there amazingly, albeit only because that is one of the most maximally gentrified but not emptied-out by absentee landlord parts of London).

By the time I was seriously looking for fantasy in the US it was the very late 1990s (like 1999) and I found bookstores there to be the same way, but by then we were into the ascension of fantasy as a really major genre.

But I do seem to remember the genre of "magical realism" getting really stretched in the mid 1990s!

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

I don't really remember a time when a SF/F didn't have a pretty large section in most UK bookstores (I was born in 1978), and like, for example I bought the White Wolf (!!!) reissue/collection of Corum stories (so pretty obscure Moorcock) at a totally normal mainstream bookstore in Hampstead in the mid 1990s (I think Waterstones and I think the Waterstones is still there amazingly, albeit only because that is one of the most maximally gentrified but not emptied-out by absentee landlord parts of London).

By the time I was seriously looking for fantasy in the US it was the very late 1990s (like 1999) and I found bookstores there to be the same way, but by then we were into the ascension of fantasy as a really major genre.

But I do seem to remember the genre of "magical realism" getting really stretched in the mid 1990s!

'78 also; Gen X for life! (I refuse to ID as a Xennial, no matter what my childhood was like.)

So, I wonder if that's a factor of "American Mall Culture" and what I had access to in suburbia. I didn't experience a "big" bookstore (e.g. Borders, Barnes and Nobel) until I went away to college, I pretty much frequented the malls stores (e.g. Kroch's and Brentano's, Waldenbooks, Crown Books, etc.). I remember those smaller stores having the small novel section (D&D, Vampire, etc.) and maybe an equal-sized section of TTRPGS, but I don't have any more active memory of that. There was a small "local" books store in our vacation town, and they had a wider selection of TTRPGs--I would get a Dragonlance adventure every trip. I don't remember the FLGS having a big novel selection, and the FLCS was more comics-and-cards and not really RPGs. By the late 90s, I was in college and there were multiple game stores (RIP Bear Productions and Fantasy Realms), Borders, Barnes and Nobel, and three campus bookstores.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm going to explain my sadness to you again...

I'm going to moan about something that will not initially seem to relate to this, but very much does.

I'm a big fan of 50's SF movies; I'm not quite obsessive about them, but pretty close. Now, a lot of 50's movie SF is junk. And a lot more carries the baggage that older films always do to a modern viewer, which is to say they carry social assumptions of their time, and also do stylistic things that have generally fallen out of favor.

But some are, when viewed the right way still excellent movies in many ways. I try to curate what I show people to the higher quality cases, because I can't expect them to have my love for older style things that are just going to look dumb to most modern viewers. And mostly I say away from the low-hanging fruit of the original versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still or "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." One of my favorites, and one I still think can be rewarding to a modern viewer is--*Them!" Yes, the one with the giant ants.

Now I could get into why, yes, you need to get yourself around the limits of SFX technology (even modern practical effects could probably do a better version of the ants, because, well, its' 70 years), and the above mentioned social issues in spots, but its still a tight, often suspenseful (especially in the first third), and sometime atmospheric movie that can show some of the benefits of working with black-and-white.

But even, maybe especially among modern SF fans I'll often get, and have to clamp my jaw against "But its so derivative!"

No, most likely everything you are thinking of derived either directly or indirectly from it. But there's usually no point in saying that.

Its the curse of what happens when what was once an orignal or semi-original concept has had the world move on.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Back on confessions, I dunno if I confessed with before, but I was reminded by another thread - I'm a huge Trek fan, but when I first saw The Original Series, back in like 1985 or whenever, on UK TV (I think it was on Sunday mornings), I was told Star Trek was this big deal, but I guess I got unlucky on what episodes I saw, because I'm pretty sure based on the fragments I remember from when I was 7 or so lol, that they were Bread and Circuses and Assignment: Earth, i.e. the last two episodes of season 2. My overwhelming impression was thus that Star Trek was a dumb and confused show maybe about annoying people time-travelling or encountering time-travel-like situations. Like, what if Doctor Who was bad and American?

So I continued on with this belief until like 1990 when The Next Generation got on to the BBC, at which point I realized this show was actually awesome, and in 1992 the BBC started re-showing TOS again and I was actually able to appreciate it!

That's an intrinsic risk with a show with any sort of decent episode count; some episodes are going to be duds, and if you hit those first your impression will be, at least, incomplete.