Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enaknomolos" data-source="post: 9613964" data-attributes="member: 7047434">Riffing on <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/no-one-reads-conan-now-so-what-are-they-reading.712124/post-9608175" target="_blank">this post</a> where Google's Ngram viewer seemed to show an increase in interest in Howard since about 2000, I thought I do a similar thing for some other classic authors: Leiber, Smith, and Vance.I fed in a bunch of their stories and kept the best representative result for each. The same pattern seems to roughly hold for Smith and Vance, but not for Leiber.[ATTACH=full]399842[/ATTACH]Some notes:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Dying Earth does a lot better than the other Vance titles I tried, probably because it is also the name of the series. Other titles roughly follow the same pattern though. Even case-sensitive, "The Dying Earth" may also be a common enough string that some noise is boosting its results a little.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Similarly, Xeethra does easily the best for Smith, but the shape is roughly the same for a load of his stories.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A whole load of Leiber's stories follow roughly the same pattern as The Swords of Lankhmar, but at a lower level. I didn't find one that bucked the trend and was a unique enough string that I trusted it.</li> </ul>I'm not shocked at the apparent revival of interest in Howard and Smith, it fits what I've seen in the bubbling S&S revival. I'm slightly surprised by the level of the Vance revival, though. Leiber peaking in the 80's to 90's fits my memories, but the lack of any more recent revival across a whole bunch of titles was unexpected.</blockquote>

Verification