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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CarlZog" data-source="post: 1341274" data-attributes="member: 11716">So the question was, "Is fantasy literature going down the toilet?" I don't think so. Any creative media can seem to be going through a slump if you take a short enough view. "Things were better in the old days," is the common lament, with "...before everything was commercialized" often tacked on. The simple problem, I suspect, is that most bad stuff fades from our memory (and our bookshelves), while good stuff sticks around. In 10 years, the Fifth Sorceress will likely be forgotten like thousands of other bad books published in every genre every year. The Gor books several people mentioned only scratch the surface of bad fantasy published in the '60s and '70s. God knows I read my share of it growing up! A friend of mine has an old summer house in New England that's been in the family for nearly a hundred years. Scattered on the bookshelves in one corner of the library are piles of lightweight summer "trash" reading from the first couple decades of the 1900s. These are titles that have never been reprinted or archived in any library. The authors are unknown. You'd have a very hard time finding other copies of this stuff if you wanted to, but you wouldn't want to. It's mostly bad writing; shallow stories designed to meet public appetites of the time. And it's been forgotten. I like thumbing through them when I visit, and occasionally reading them, because they remind me that the publishing business has always been driven by commercial expectations, which aren't necessarily the best predictors of lasting literature. I'm certainly no expert on the history of fantasy literature, but I know Tolkien didn't invent "Once upon a time..." Stories of fantastic creatures, brave knights and cunning wizards are nothing new to this century or the last. And neither are bad writers or profit-seeking publishers. I think there are some great fantasy books being written and published these days -- books we may still be reading and talking about 50 years from now. The rest of them will be forgotten and any trends they may represent will only be preserved by academics and collectors writing history books. Similarly, few of the "pulps" from the first half of this century are still widely circulated or read, but there are plenty of books still being written that analyze the pulp industry and the pop culture phenomenon they represented. Carl</blockquote>

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