What Geek Media Do You Refuse To Partake In?

[Pedantic]

Is it? What do you base this on? Do you mean re: other stuff getting called "romantasy"?

I think this is just the discoverability problem clashing with widening readership and genre splitting. For a specific kind of reader, the was certainly a time you could really pick up a random book in the fantasy section at a library or bookstore and more or less know what you were getting within a certain band of expectation.

That's changed from both the supply and demand sides. More (and more diverse) people are writing books and more people are reading them, which is a good thing, but changes the experience if you were in a more narrowly targeted group to begin with. What "fantasy" or "sci-fi" entail as genres has expanded, less in the core content and more in what story structures or tropes are no longer normative. We're seeing more kinds of stories with broader focuses using fantasy trappings, especially as self publishing pushes more and more content out to begin with.

This is an insane thing to recommend at 4 hours, but I found Laura Crone's excellent essay on Lev Grossman's The Magicians incredibly clarifying on this point. She loved those books and I found the one I read very disappointing; she explained exactly why that mismatch occurred, left me feeling absolved of missing anything, and I thoroughly enjoyed the secondhand experience of her enjoyment which I was never going to get myself.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This is an insane thing to recommend at 4 hours, but I found Laura Crone's excellent essay on Lev Grossman's The Magicians incredibly clarifying on this point.

I only found out the series was based on books after the final episode.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is an insane thing to recommend at 4 hours, but I found Laura Crone's excellent essay on Lev Grossman's The Magicians incredibly clarifying on this point.

I am always interested in excessively long YouTube video essay recommendations! This one has appeared in my YouTube recs before but I ignored it because of the title, but with your recommendation I'll add it to my to-watch.

 

[Belen]

I think this is just the discoverability problem clashing with widening readership and genre splitting. For a specific kind of reader, the was certainly a time you could really pick up a random book in the fantasy section at a library or bookstore and more or less know what you were getting within a certain band of expectation.

That's changed from both the supply and demand sides. More (and more diverse) people are writing books and more people are reading them, which is a good thing, but changes the experience if you were in a more narrowly targeted group to begin with. What "fantasy" or "sci-fi" entail as genres has expanded, less in the core content and more in what story structures or tropes are no longer normative. We're seeing more kinds of stories with broader focuses using fantasy trappings, especially as self publishing pushes more and more content out to begin with.

This is an insane thing to recommend at 4 hours, but I found Laura Crone's excellent essay on Lev Grossman's The Magicians incredibly clarifying on this point. She loved those books and I found the one I read very disappointing; she explained exactly why that mismatch occurred, left me feeling absolved of missing anything, and I thoroughly enjoyed the secondhand experience of her enjoyment which I was never going to get myself.

Good post.

Combine that with a distinct lack of good cover art for novels. They all use a similar style now that tells you nothing of the book. Honestly modern books are ugly.

Discoverability is a huge problem. I do not use social media and I have not left the bookstore with a new book in 2 years.

I still buy a lot of books but mainly by authors I trust who have written books I enjoyed.

And if I see “booktok” on the cover, then I do not touch it.

My favorite authors tend to be Weber, Lackey, McCaffrey, Moon, Haydon, Rawn, Islington, Tad Williams, Hobb, etc.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Honestly modern books are ugly.

I mean, was there a time when most SF/F books weren't? After the 1970s anyway. Maybe there was a brief window in the 1990s and early 2000s when increasing taste levels combined with more careful use of art so some SF/F books didn't routinely look like the tackiest junk imaginable, but a lot of very popular series have looked exactly like romance novels in the worst possible way in most of their US editions. Covers now in SF/F tend to be bland but rarely hideous and tacky (not never though, never say never!).

I will say, maybe you're not in the US and UK though, and maybe seeing very different cover art trends. US cover art has almost always been worse than UK cover art, unless you really like tacky romance novel vibes, embarrassed to read it in public vibes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I only found out the series was based on books after the final episode.

It was one of those rare cases where I quite liked the TV show, but when I tried to read the books found I bounced off the first one fairly thoroughly.

 

[Reynard]

It was one of those rare cases where I quite liked the TV show, but when I tried to read the books found I bounced off the first one fairly thoroughly.

I never watched the show mostly because I found all of the characters in the books so thoroughly unlikable that I did not bother.

 

[trappedslider]

Good post.

Combine that with a distinct lack of good cover art for novels. They all use a similar style now that tells you nothing of the book. Honestly modern books are ugly.

Discoverability is a huge problem. I do not use social media and I have not left the bookstore with a new book in 2 years.

I still buy a lot of books but mainly by authors I trust who have written books I enjoyed.

And if I see “booktok” on the cover, then I do not touch it.

My favorite authors tend to be Weber, Lackey, McCaffrey, Moon, Haydon, Rawn, Islington, Tad Williams, Hobb, etc.

I've discovered a lot of the more recent good books i have read due to social media, and if i see booktok on a cover, i'll read the inside flap or look it up on amazon to see what the book is about or goodreads. But ymmv

 

[Thomas Shey]

I never watched the show mostly because I found all of the characters in the books so thoroughly unlikable that I did not bother.

The ones in the show have an odd effect; some of them are really obnoxious but still somehow grow on your (at least they did with me, my wife, and some of her coworkers she exposed them to) over time. And oddly, they don't become less obnoxious in that process, its just they become like that friend who is really kind of a jerk but you've come to understand has a heart and other virtues underneath it.

 

[Autumnal]

Ever hear of “drapetomania”?

Drapetomania - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

De Bow’s Review was one of the most…I don’t have good adjectives for it. They set out to be the intellectual powerhouse of the slave states. This led them to host things like drapetomania, and a theory that slaves’ blood naturally circulated more sluggishly, so that hard labor and vigorous whipping improved their circulation and therefore made them think closer to white people’s natural level, and many many other such ideas, mixed in with crop rotation schedules and irrigation technicalities and tariff regimes and such. If Lysenko had been writing in the 1830s-40s, they’d have fallen on his work with glad little cries. Reading a bunch of issues in history classes in college did a lot to show my sense of what the slave power is like if you don’t keep smashing it down and plowing it it under, and made me very strident on related legacy topics. Further deponent sayeth not because the moderators have enough work.