'Middle Class' Fantasy

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 12:09pm

I've been re-reading a lot of old Weird Tales style stuff lately, like Clark Ashton Smith and the like and it fired upan interest to look over the fantasy section in Borders. Having browsed it, there seems to be in no way any sort of imaginative or progressive element to the genre, it's all trilogies set in knight land and magic dragons.

Where's the weirdness that a lot of the pulps produced and the early paperback authors like Poul Anderson and Karl Edward Wagner? Or even straight up adventure stories like Robert E Howard?

poprock · 24th January 2007, 12:11pm

I reckon blandness sells better. As with CDs, so with books.

MarkMono · 24th January 2007, 12:14pm

Through my early childhood, I watched both bookshops and reading dwindle away to nothing in the country around me. Then just when I thought nothing worse could happen to literature, reading was re-packaged for the fashionable hip young faux-riche as a symbol of status at a princely sum of £10 a paperback. They don't actually have to contain any thought-provoking or interesting reading, just a well-designed spine so it looks good on your bookshelf.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 12:18pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by poprock

I reckon blandness sells better. As with CDs, so with books.

I think I'll look online, plenty of retro pulp paperback companies out there

Ness · 24th January 2007, 1:12pm

i think you lot are full of shite.

the only difference is, we now are at a "modern" level of technology where we can print/make more books cds and movies that they can make more.

thats the exciting thing about going into borders and looking at the bookshelf, you pick something up give it a try and it might just turn out fantastic.

then again it might be dross, you just dont know.

there has always been pish in any given genre, wether it be books or cds or what not.

PS - mark, you grew up in baillieston for christ sakes, they didnt start teching kids to read until 1990 in the east.

you had middle class relatives, al dente as they where, still middle class

this last fact may or may not be true.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 1:22pm

You've miised my point entirely

Hammer · 24th January 2007, 1:26pm

Borders is very possibly the worst bookshop I've ever been in as far as variety of stock is concerned. Waterstones comes close second.

But yeah, the fantasy genre is stagnating. Everyone wants to be Tolkien and most of them fail miserably, creating half-assed clones of Lord of the Rings.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 1:27pm

http://www.vintagelibrary.com/pulpfi...WeirdTales.php

wahey

endless psych · 24th January 2007, 1:28pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Charlie Parker

Where's the weirdness that a lot of the pulps produced and the early paperback authors like Poul Anderson and Karl Edward Wagner? Or even straight up adventure stories like Robert E Howard?

I reckon that theres probably a fair bit of stuff in this ilk lurking about the internet as oppossed to being published in literary magazines and the like. Its just a matter of finding the wheat amoungst the chaff I suppose.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 1:29pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hammer

Borders is very possibly the worst bookshop I've ever been in as far as variety of stock is concerned. Waterstones comes close second.

But yeah, the fantasy genre is stagnating. Everyone wants to be Tolkien and most of them fail miserably, creating half-assed clones of Lord of the Rings.

The crime sections are awful, you don't even get the imports you used to get

Foxglove · 24th January 2007, 1:39pm

I suspect a couple of things happened. Firstly Delila Smith convinced her publisher and her husband (who is high up in the Sainsbury's empire) to allow her books to be sold at a price lower than the RRP so starting the fall of the book pricing agreement. Supermarkets and nationwide bookshops reduced the cost of their most popular titles. The authors of less popular fiction who a publisher could previously publish at a loss given the pricing agreement of books found that it was harder to find a publisher.

Secondly, the internet has made it very easy to buy books so companies such as Amazon can keep smaller stocks of less popular books and sell to their customers at less of a cost to Amazon than the books taking up space on bookshop shelves.

I don't believe the books are not available and not read, I think it is just that they are bought from different places now so are not seen in the popular bookshop chains who cater for the mass markets.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 1:41pm

I just bought a replica of Spicy Mystery magazine

http://www.vintagelibrary.com/pd.php?pcode=gir44

mm spicy!

Ness · 24th January 2007, 1:45pm

i always notice a decent book or two in the recently deceased ottakers.

and also forbidden planet is good to pick up a gem.

*Potatojunkie* · 24th January 2007, 1:52pm

Don't know if it'd be your thing at all, but China Miéville's stuff is fucking amazing, and about as far removed from cod-medieval generic Tolkienesque horseshit as you can get.

*Charlie Parker* · 24th January 2007, 1:58pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Potatojunkie

Don't know if it'd be your thing at all, but China Miéville's stuff is fucking amazing, and about as far removed from cod-medieval generic Tolkienesque horseshit as you can get.

Cheers for that, just typed in his name to amazon and I like the way folk describe him, will check him out. First review I read uses ''weird', can't be bad