[HN Gopher] The cultural decline of literary fiction
___________________________________________________________________
The cultural decline of literary fiction
Author : libraryofbabel
Score : 206 points
Date : 2025-06-22 16:00 UTC (1 days ago)
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| TimorousBestie wrote:
| While I disagree that "the publishers went woke" is a salient
| reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props
| for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down
| to a single causal factor.
| peacebeard wrote:
| Some better versions of this take might be "In the culture war
| many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly
| signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem
| antagonistic." or "Our culture changed and I don't like it
| anymore, get off my lawn."
| MangoToupe wrote:
| For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of
| the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't
| want to read for the most part--even those who purchase the
| books.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of
| the terminally online.
| peacebeard wrote:
| Maybe if you include "terminally watching the news on
| TV". But either way, it's a lot of people.
| hotmeals wrote:
| Most TV news now is talking about stuff in Twitter and I
| Can't Believe It's Not Twitter.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very
| predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The
| other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of
| wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent
| manner in which it is delivered.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the
| message to keep you interested.
|
| As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for
| Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted
| for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
|
| However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is
| happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
|
| But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not
| "literature" :)
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Was Tolkien woke? I wonder.
| brazzy wrote:
| It seems to me pretty clear that the article is arguing that
| "wokeness made fiction crap" is really just the most current
| result of "authors are optimizing for critics and editors, who
| are competing for status, and neither are interested in
| producing stuff readers like".
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Those repeated allusions to how _we all know how publishing has
| gone woke_ really made me cringe.
| fullshark wrote:
| Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on
| cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed,
| there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important
| books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| How has that changed since the mid 20th Century?
| dmoy wrote:
| Self publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply
| (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if
| you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time
| and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there
| was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more
| esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
| vintermann wrote:
| So it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the
| internet has an unlimited supply of critics?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why
| I should be reading any of that stuff.
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| The reason you read literary fiction is because you're curious
| about the outer edges of human thought or experience.
| nottorp wrote:
| This is HN, they may be looking to put a monetary value on
| it.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Interesting. That's exactly why I read science fiction.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| But that's new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary
| fiction because it was high quality, much more than because
| it was unrelateable. O'Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not
| writing about the outer edges of human experience.
| esafak wrote:
| But does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to
| write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the
| writer writing about something that is inherently complex,
| and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel.
| The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm
| also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to
| justify the investment.
| tekla wrote:
| It's not inaccessible. Its just that you don't have the
| reading skills from lack of use.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure it all our faults, not that of the product.
| tekla wrote:
| Yep, skills need to be practiced before you engage with
| harder material
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, authors need to be subservient to the needs and
| desires of the customers.
| antasvara wrote:
| Around 54% of adults read at a 6th grade level or below:
| https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
|
| Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
|
| 1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average
| adult.
|
| 2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels
| are inaccessible to the average adult.
|
| The first statement (which I think is where you're coming
| from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very
| popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade
| level.
|
| The second statement is more a statement of values. Some
| people (such as myself) find it problematic that the
| average adult can't read/understand a book that is more
| complex than Harry Potter.
|
| You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot
| of people don't. But I think understanding _why_ someone
| might find that problematic is important. Personally, I
| think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can 't
| be written at a 6th grade level.
| protocolture wrote:
| >In the US
| trinix912 wrote:
| If their goal is to write bestsellers, sure. That's where
| the EUR5 leisure novels come from. OTOH, if their goal is
| to push boundaries or be original, being subservient to
| the desires of the customers is counterproductive.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Don't be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly
| readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn't accessible
| is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I'm happy to
| debate ... but only using specific examples. Authors and
| titles.
|
| The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the
| discussion. It's an important example. Most people won't
| ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99%
| of us will literally listen to anything else, or to
| nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I'm
| simply not going to acquire that taste.
| antasvara wrote:
| >Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for
| normal humans. Lots of what isn't accessible is just not
| that enjoyable to anybody.
|
| The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address
| what percentage of adults can read and appreciate
| "literary fiction."
|
| The first part of the definition of level 3:
|
| >Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across
| larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in
| order to identify and formulate responses. They can
| identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of
| information, often employing varying levels of
| inferencing.
|
| The first part for Level 4:
|
| >At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts
| presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks
| that involve access, understanding, evaluation and
| reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across
| multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can
| infer what the task is asking based on complex or
| implicit statements. Successful task completion often
| requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
|
| The full definitions can be found here:
| https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
|
| Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of
| metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A
| simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
|
| Based on the recent survey results, only half of US
| adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level
| 4 or above.
|
| I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample
| questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t
| &source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
|
| Based on that, what level of literacy do you think
| indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying
| literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is
| somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
|
| Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book
| "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super
| charitable, at _most_ 50% of people would be able to read
| and comprehend that book. If we 're being less charitable
| with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're
| probably looking at closer to 30% of people really
| understanding it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Is it inaccessible? Some books are, but there is a huge
| amount of literary fiction that follows traditional
| narrative and is comprehensible to anybody with a high
| school education. There are more than enough such books to
| fill a lifetime.
| esafak wrote:
| I don't mean every work of literary fiction; only those
| commonly regarded as difficult, like Pynchon's.
| voidhorse wrote:
| This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.
|
| This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but
| you chose all the wrong instruments.
|
| Obviously, the entire _character_ of a song depends not
| only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments
| chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
|
| For literary fiction, the words _are_ the material. What
| distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas"
| they present but the _way_ in which they are presented. The
| words are the author 's instruments, his paints. This is
| the difference between writing/reading _for information_
| and writing /reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary
| fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is
| predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the
| point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
|
| This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary
| work is missing the point.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| "This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature"
|
| No it is not. It is a central and vital part of
| literature.
|
| Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us
| using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
| voidhorse wrote:
| Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding"
| is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of
| comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of
| whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative
| ones.
|
| That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading
| literature only for the information it imparts is missing
| much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their
| plots and characters, but also for their stylistics--the
| difference between a great writer and a passing one is
| often little more than the well considered phrase. The
| arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major
| component in a literary work.
|
| My point is that asking a writer to "express it more
| simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to
| asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt
| achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of
| work they wanted to produce.
|
| If one is given a business briefing it is probably the
| apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there
| cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work
| would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an
| author to simplify their _entire aesthetic approach_
| generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated
| a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic
| expository writing.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works
| and authors? That would help a lot.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Sure, here are some of my favorites:
|
| Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James,
| Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite
| Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
|
| These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them,
| probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most
| experimental, but I would argue that none of them
| aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I
| don't think I could argue that any of them should have
| simplified their themes or style or general employment of
| language to be more accessible.
|
| Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls
| of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But
| this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all
| of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks
| to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into
| their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed
| out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they
| were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content.
| This is why I think it's absurd to complain that
| someone's work is "not accessible" --its really silly to
| demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of
| any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
|
| Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less
| experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found _As
| I lay Dying_ or _The Sound and the Fury_ more accessible
| if a narrator mediated between the various first person
| voices he presents, but this would so drastically change
| the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you
| 'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and
| would not be equivalent pieces of art.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I'd agree with your original assertion. Liking the
| content but not the form is like looking at a Turner and
| wishing the ship were closer and he'd chosen a clearer
| day, or thinking that Monet had some nice flowers in his
| garden but you'd like him to have painted them more
| clearly to be sure.
| awongh wrote:
| There's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at
| transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author
| directly into your brain.
|
| I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much
| fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the
| subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary
| fiction doesn't have that constraint.
|
| Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by
| taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with
| a new perspective you can't get any other way.
| drakonka wrote:
| Fiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about
| the decline of literary fiction.
|
| I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much
| of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick
| up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that
| can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and
| accessible ways.
| awongh wrote:
| I think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a
| useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires
| to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry
| Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight.
|
| Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-
| literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all
| recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than
| others.
| LordShredda wrote:
| It's fun
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?
|
| Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying
| what you claim to support.
| julianeon wrote:
| I can give one.
|
| As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go,
| literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind.
|
| Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer
| games, movies, TV.
|
| "Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations
| with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized
| benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction
| enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default
| network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases
| brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and
| sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading
| session."
| protocolture wrote:
| Literary fiction is a category of fiction. Why read literary
| fiction over other fiction?
| BalinKing wrote:
| What's the source of that last quote? I Googled it but got no
| results....
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It's probably AI but you can find the studies here and in
| the related links below
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38602788/
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Simply put, these are some of the greatest stories ever told
| and can teach about the world, its history, and the fundamental
| questions of the human experience.
|
| "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." - Albert
| Camus
| jl6 wrote:
| > Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers
| Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year,
| more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.
|
| I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old
| books haven't gone away. Even if we assume there are good new
| books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books,
| which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of
| consumers.
|
| Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only
| consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A
| new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth
| your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
|
| Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is
| going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats
| that you already don't have time to read?
| Animats wrote:
| > I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The
| old books haven't gone away. Even if we assume there are good
| new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing
| books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and
| attention of consumers.
|
| That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete
| with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty
| good.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of
| the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably
| available for free from the library's DVD collection?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Relevance!
|
| eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of
| AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi
| imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-
| phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the
| transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
| whstl wrote:
| True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
|
| For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of
| new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing
| the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all
| about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their
| own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the
| "new thing".
|
| Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners
| rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books
| are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, music is arguably more timeless, in that
| the contents of lyrics is less crucial for the enjoyment of
| music.
| galaxyavenu wrote:
| I don't think that's true at all, plenty of my friends
| has some kind of aversion to "old" music because they
| could not "get" the aesthetic. Plus I'm sure most people
| are sick of Fur Elise.
| whstl wrote:
| Compositions: absolutely.
|
| More "evergreen" genres like classical, jazz,
| soundtracks, and also stuff by established artists?
| Surely!
|
| But pop music recordings get "too dated" quite fast for
| the mainstream and mainstream audiences. This kinda keeps
| Spotify and Radio charts fresh and newer artists make
| some money. IMO of course!
|
| EDIT: Wait! One thing however where you're right and I'm
| wrong is with live concerts. Today older legacy acts
| compete and often surpass attendance of newer acts.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| To note, books have a different networks: they can get
| movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news
| forefront, their author can also play the SNS game.
|
| There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how
| tougher than other media it is.
| 7jjjjjjj wrote:
| I heard a joke that you don't write a political book for
| people to read, you write it so you can go on all the
| talk shows to be interviewed about your book.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That is of course not a joke at all depending on the
| field. It's kinda like being published in prestigious
| papers.
|
| While specialists and enthusiasts will enjoy and peek at
| the content, being recognized as someone who writes about
| the subject and can be presented as an expert of the
| field can absolutely be the main impact for the author.
| galaxyavenu wrote:
| Yeah I would say books got it worse, there's a strong
| tradition of re-arranging old classics in new music, e.g.:
| kamasi washington remaking clair de lune. so listening to
| old pieces are not only rewarding, it's even necessary.
| boznz wrote:
| and the author of course is only sampling a very tiny dataset
| of the works pushed by the algorithm. Many authors like me
| will never get on their radar.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to
| compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which
| is pretty good.
|
| John Philip Sousa was right about recorded music.
| golol wrote:
| I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of
| media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion
| always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of
| creating more of what exists already.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Video Games were immune for a while because technology was
| changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become
| really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics
| as they used to.
|
| People will quite happily pickup and play games from many
| years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made
| before they were born.
| taormina wrote:
| Well, graphics plateaued and then we started to remember
| that fun and highest fidelity graphics don't necessarily
| have anything to do with each other.
| int_19h wrote:
| People do care enough about graphics for Bethesda to spend
| time and money making e.g. Oblivion Remastered, though.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Oblivion is nearly 20 years old now and looked terrible
| at the time. (compared to other games that shipped at the
| time) Oblivion is a _big_ game not a polished game.
|
| update: I found this screenshot and I think I was
| remembering Morrowinds characters.
|
| https://slayweb.blogspot.com/2011/08/elder-scrolls-
| evolution...
| int_19h wrote:
| Morrowind had very janky animations, but it wasn't too
| bad for 2002 otherwise. Definitely not top notch, but,
| well, look at faces in Deus Ex for another example from
| this period...
|
| Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty
| good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
| bandrami wrote:
| There's a cave in France where somebody started painting a
| horse and 10,000 years later (but still tens of thousands of
| years ago) somebody finished it in the exact same style and
| technique. Novelty isn't required in art though it's
| currently prized.
| sotix wrote:
| > genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because
| what's the point of creating more of what exists already
|
| Well aren't we mostly retelling Greek myths and great works
| the same as Shakespeare did in his time?
| eviks wrote:
| > A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more
| worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000?
| Decreasing
|
| Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the
| bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is
| the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to
| watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
|
| Also there is this factor of new films being able to
| incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's
| another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >bigger social part
|
| Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've
| found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all
| the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING
| their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply
| presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
|
| Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are
| 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to
| make theirs heard.
|
| I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies
| watering things down. Either way someone is doing it
| intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a
| micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain
| a significant following.
| nottorp wrote:
| > It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their
| micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply
| presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
|
| That may say something about the declining quality of
| writing.
|
| You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic
| that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack
| London :)
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
|
| I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer
| understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who
| no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are
| basically completely absent from any modern piece of
| mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's
| decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and
| subtlety.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >That may say something about the declining quality of
| writing.
|
| It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
|
| I know how business and money works. I can say for sure
| there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group
| didn't understand this, make the message POP
| more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are
| willing to cut a check.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well if it works for the movie industry why wouldn't it
| work for "literature" too...
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading
| written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has
| ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing
| suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster.
| Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems
| to transcend the particular political position taken, if
| any.
| pomian wrote:
| It could be that reality is more "exciting" than any
| fiction, and your mind can't handle any more.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be
| strictly ranked "best" to "worst." There are a million metrics
| by which we might try to measure it, but well... that's just
| not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental
| lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most
| important metrics is "relevance to, and effect on, the state of
| the world as it is right now." And pretty much any arbitrary
| "1000 best" list is not going to take that into account.
|
| That's why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-
| instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks,
| instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the
| latter may be "superior" in nearly every measurable way. Part
| of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact... I might
| argue that that's all of art, with metrics about it being an
| entirely different, not-art thing.
|
| (I say all this as a classical musician and senior software
| engineer with a math background, myself.)
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty
| much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven
| takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve
| and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
| voidhorse wrote:
| This equates the value of art with technical difficulty,
| which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I would not say that the value of art is strictly
| equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that
| there is a level of technical competence required for art
| to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g.
| that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not
| good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
| Avicebron wrote:
| The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it
| 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the
| cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's
| literally called Comedian.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This guy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Ducham
| p
|
| killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
| int_19h wrote:
| I don't see any art in the linked article.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| killed off the argument that X isn't art for some Y,
| where Y is people trying to decide if X is art or not.
| 65 wrote:
| I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but
| rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana,
| just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel
| something.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back
| and more recently tried to get him to play _Sugar
| Mountain_ by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and
| struggled with it because even though it is simple it has
| to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he
| discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough
| with _The Day I Tried to Live_ by Soundgarden and
| _Rooster_ by Alice in Chains.
|
| Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's
| gotten him into David Bowie songs from _The Rise and Fall
| of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars_. For a long
| time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically
| trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock
| because it had commercial potential, but he found many
| songs on that album to be great songs that were within
| his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like
| Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in
| 24 hours and he 's building instruments like a Guitar-
| harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of
| which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the
| physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two
| below a regular bass guitar.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa
| Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of
| The Stone Age.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar
| tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
|
| I barely know anything about music, and probably less
| about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you
| can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might
| readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that
| essentially gives you another hand on that side of the
| guitar.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the
| fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
|
| As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables
| you can tweak are: * length *
| mass/length * tension
|
| There's some limit to how long you make the strings or
| you can't play it or otherwise you need something to
| extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The
| other two are inside a square root which is not in your
| favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really
| heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can
| get the tension.
|
| But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was
| in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment
| rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I
| had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the
| things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build
| those things now.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-
| thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of
| hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the
| size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has
| done it...
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in
| the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling
| than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when
| we have an audience.
|
| I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can't
| vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be
| tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar
| or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used
| that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward
| in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position
| is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable
| string beyond the last point of contact with the strings,
| and that contact could be released to increase the string
| length?.
|
| You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two
| different string gauges. The top four could be heavier
| gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate
| gauges and silence the strings? I don't know much about
| playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to
| build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and
| style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and
| tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not
| be such a big deal if he's the only one playing it, but
| if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other
| guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
|
| It might also be possible to teach him how to build
| simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in
| post-processing once you know how the parts fit
| conceptually together.
|
| Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a
| good post for HN if you can find the time.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Get him a multiscale/fanned fret 5 string bass and just
| size up the gauges. A 37" scale bass trying to hit E0
| will need about 0.18ga on the low string to be playable,
| which will definitely require a nut modification, but is
| doable.
| autarch wrote:
| An electric bass that's tuned an octave lower exists -
| https://www.lignum-art.com/product-page/4-string-sub-
| octave-...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There is no two octaves below a regular bass guitar. On a
| 5 string bass, the lowest string is B0 in standard
| tuning, coming in at 30hz. You can get a long scale
| length bass and put really chonky strings on it and drop
| that down as low as E0, which is 20hz, but past that
| point most people just can't hear the notes anymore.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| To be clear: I _have_ spent the years to memorize and be
| able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the
| years required to even get to that point). I can also play
| them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn 't do that in
| any paid/professional performance situation). I literally
| did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use
| my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my
| family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
|
| And _none of that_ makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell
| Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of
| "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or
| what art is.
|
| On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the
| name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M
| listeners per month, replying to a comment that did
| correctly spell her name, _is_ a pretty objective reason to
| not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps,
| much else, at least until you address whatever underlying
| issues /pathologies have you thinking this way).
|
| Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I
| did music for a living, I often _did_ think this way. I
| thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn 't
| offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical,
| or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor
| background, I believe it was more a survival instinct
| (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as
| "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me,
| though. It required me being dishonest with myself about
| what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a
| multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-
| adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the
| software world (as long as you stay out of
| Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat
| races).
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness
| in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
|
| You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
| crq-yml wrote:
| Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite
| comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens
| of art towards technical and political measurements. When
| a work is _incomparable in the way in which it achieves
| verisimilitude_ it is escaping this system.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| You are basically talking about the part where the system
| is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is
| through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good
| automatically.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Agreed here. Every time my kids bring up tier list
| rankings I have to again explain this to them.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay)
| that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm
| familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I
| understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the
| argument made in the quote fwiw.
| nine_k wrote:
| There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's
| the measure that matters most in your unique and finite
| life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your
| time on, objectivity be damned.
| bccdee wrote:
| Are you honestly tell me that you would let someone
| correct you on a matter of taste? That an authority could
| tell you, "no, you're wrong for enjoying this piece of
| art. It's bad and you ought to dislike it," and you would
| obey?
|
| If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the
| first step to connoisseurship.
| whstl wrote:
| Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in
| Europe sometime.
|
| Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it
| but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the
| 10000 drunks in Waldbuhne will belt it.
|
| Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will
| get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical
| concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with
| Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and
| feather the conductor.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when
| walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the
| German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum
| Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two
| pieces suck?
|
| (I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc
| Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed
| choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom
| designed for drunken singalongs.)
|
| I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps
| reconsider your chosen metric.
|
| https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM
| jl6 wrote:
| You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective
| ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on
| shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is _The
| Great Gatsby_ better than _The Catcher in the Rye_? It doesn
| 't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's
| stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works
| not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the
| world?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made
| comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare
| it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic
| I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today,
| stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
| technothrasher wrote:
| And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great
| Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have
| universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The
| classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem
| to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't
| blame the books, it's just what captures my particular
| interest. Given that, I have never really used "the
| classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading
| fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I
| may receive, whether they be old books or new.
| stirfish wrote:
| I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick:
| chug the book. You were probably trained to really
| analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but
| you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory
| experience instead.
| memonkey wrote:
| I read both twice, once in high school and again a few
| years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I
| loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page
| is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The
| Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and
| juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or
| watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero
| of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the
| ultimate lesson.
| mathgeek wrote:
| > That's why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-
| instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks,
| instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the
| latter may be "superior" in nearly every measurable way.
|
| As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I
| absolutely start humming and making up words to classical
| music far more often than anything from this century.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Conversely, watching looney tunes is the only way I can
| enjoy classical music.
| anotheruser13 wrote:
| I would love to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play
| the classical music in "What's Opera, Doc?" and other
| Looney Tunes classics. Saw them do that with The
| Godfather and a couple other full-length films which was
| great.
| 65 wrote:
| Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music
| because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the
| other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make
| classical music worse? No.
|
| Just because something may have been popular in the past and
| is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical
| music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular
| now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
|
| If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and
| more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games
| but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and
| storytelling still blows me away.
| wbl wrote:
| Very little rhythm and emotion?
|
| First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs
|
| https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG
|
| Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion
| sequence of all time
| https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD
|
| Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal,
| electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on
| the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and
| complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up
| to new music.
|
| I don't think there is any video game that comes close in
| depth to the Ring Cycle.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous
| col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow)
| at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow
| me to add that one to the list.
|
| https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa
|
| And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture
| always sends chills up my spine.
|
| https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj
| lucyjojo wrote:
| All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented
| were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable.
| This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they
| have plenty, but they register as little more than noise
| to my brain; to which i prefer silence...
|
| That said, I do enjoy some classical music. For instance,
| I deeply enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvx
| x9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lz...
| 65 wrote:
| You didn't correctly read my comment.
|
| > Art has no objective measure.
|
| That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also
| missed this point:
|
| > compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
|
| Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of
| how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about
| complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not
| just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to
| your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most
| complex pieces of art ever made.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be
| pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V
| is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I
| mean, first we'd have to define a piece of art, then we'd
| have to define what it "complexity" means in that
| context...
| jl6 wrote:
| Eh, he's right though. You could get sidetracked
| quibbling about the edges of the definitions, or you
| could just use their centers and see that there obviously
| are some modern works of art that are immense team
| efforts and substantially justify the label of "one of
| the most complex pieces of art ever".
| ElFitz wrote:
| I'd add to that that classical music was made at a time
| recording and listening whatever you want, whenever and
| wherever, wasn't a thing.
|
| Many pieces were intended as a whole, and optimised for
| specific settings.
|
| I've long thought I wasn't an opera person. I listened to
| pieces of some on my iPod, or on the tv in music class in
| school. Then, years later, some friend told me he had
| extra tickets for the opera.
|
| It hit very, very differently. It is likely the
| experiences I had gone through since school helped the
| opera's theme and songs resonate with me. But I'm pretty
| sure listening and witnessing it, from beginning to end,
| in a room carefully crafted for this specific purpose and
| left little room for distractions contributed immensely.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no
| emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from
| plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about
| the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without
| some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty
| controversial opinion
|
| That's very clearly not what they said at all.
| HeartStrings wrote:
| Hans and Williams aren't classical music.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to
| Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical
| for different reasons
|
| But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then
| there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like
| a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled
| compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of
| counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a
| pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational
| principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western
| music.
|
| That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
| stirfish wrote:
| Counterpoint is cool, but a lot of the time is carries
| the emotional weight of listening to someone solve
| sudoku.
|
| Objectively, Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to
| write a song about that lonely feeling you get when you
| drink too much and get kicked out of the party (a
| foundational principal of Country Western music)
| wbl wrote:
| Mozart can be really singable. The catalogue song, the Figaro
| aria, etc. it's not all hell's fire burns in my heart.
| yyyk wrote:
| >This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all
| be strictly ranked "best" to "worst."
|
| Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old
| media can still appeal to modern people, at which point
| quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
|
| Think about public libraries. They have limited space and
| budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll
| still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid
| goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be
| older books.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I visit libraries wherever I go and that's not true
| anymore, outside of university libraries. The average
| municipal/county library is almost entirely books published
| in the past 15 years. Most classics have to be procured
| through ILL, if they're even available then.
| slibhb wrote:
| But it's true in book stores. It's not only old classics;
| there's a lot of well-known 20th century literature,
| often in new editions.
| slibhb wrote:
| > This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all
| be strictly ranked "best" to "worst."
|
| No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true
| assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all
| fiction ever written.
|
| It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy
| more classics because the classics are objectively better.
| (Although that is, in fact, he case).
| galaxyavenu wrote:
| Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure
| that most serious listeners will venture to music from all
| kind of eras and cultures.
|
| I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I
| don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't
| budget time to listen to this kind music".
|
| Or maybe this is just me.
| pif wrote:
| > Probably one of the most important metrics is "relevance
| to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right
| now."
|
| Actually, no! It's more of "relevance to the state of the
| world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that
| teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then
| we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we
| keep committing the same errors."
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| I have _no idea_ whatsoever what a "Chappell Roan" even is.
| Sorry.
|
| (I do know Beethoven and Mozart though.)
| seaports wrote:
| She's a good pop musician. No need to be snarky just
| because she might not be your thing. Comments on HM tend to
| put down popular music / art / whatever for the sole reason
| of having some kind of pop sensibility
| graycat wrote:
| > "Chappell Roan"
|
| Just now listened to some of her music, two of her pieces
|
| _Good Luck Babe_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBl
| b...
|
| and
|
| _Pink Pony Club_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBw
| b...
|
| So, with the definition of _art_ as the "communication,
| interpretation of human experience, emotion" what I saw in
| those two pieces was that they were intended for some teen
| girls and young women -- single, lonely, generally afraid
| of their circumstances, don't understand what they see of
| reality, eager for sex but afraid of it, lost, i.e.,
| missing any good cultural, social, or intellectual
| foundation for understanding reality or facing life, ....
|
| So in the music, the costumes and stage shows are rapidly
| changing, outrageous, meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e.,
| are communication, interpretation of those women's
| experience, emotions, rapidly changing, outrageous ....
|
| In simple terms, those women have circumstances that yield
| strong emotions that the music communicates.
|
| "Communicates"? Why? As common, to the audience
| comfortingly confirms that they are not alone and instead
| like many others.
|
| How could this be? In the past the women lived in a culture
| based on strong social, practical, economic, religious,
| parenting forces. Now (1) for millions of those women the
| culture is weak or gone and (2) the Internet permits
| getting confirming, reinforcing communication,
| interpretation of their scary circumstances from the loss
| of the culture.
|
| In short, the music really is communication, interpretation
| of the experience and emotions of those women.
|
| To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much the same, i.e.,
| similar audience, but Chappell Roan is stronger, louder,
| more outrageous for an audience with stronger emotions.
|
| As a young man, the teen girls I knew, right, had the
| anxieties from their circumstances but much more
| constrained and less scary than now.
|
| The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the sets, costumes,
| dancing, and words and take just the background music (a
| lot of drum beating) and the singing. In places, the
| singing is pretty good, i.e., _expressive_ , but really the
| singing, as art, is all nearly the same, that is, the same
| vocal content for the same communication, interpretation of
| experience and emotion.
|
| I expect that even the current devoted audience will soon,
| a year or so, give up on the current Chappell Roan -- for a
| cruel joke, "A one trick pony.".
|
| From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms ...
| Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., Barber there is a lot of
| effective communication, interpretation of a wide range of
| experiences, emotions, that is, really good _art_.
|
| For level 101, a major key is _glad_ and a minor key,
| _sad_. Then changing keys, selected chords within keys,
| pitch, volume, variety of sounds from the variety of
| instruments, combinations, ..., give a lot more tools for
| expression than used by Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a
| lot more music, _art_.
|
| Next, the tools were just means, and Bach, Wagner,
| Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good in the _artistic
| content_ , that is, again, communication, interpretation of
| human experience emotion.
| bloomca wrote:
| There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.
|
| Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and
| stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this
| point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
|
| Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and
| chances are high that it is all old stuff.
| watwut wrote:
| I kind of think a lot of these are bought as gifts, not really
| a thing people actually intend to read.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Or for college classes.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a
| Mario game _really_ top Super Mario World? Not to say some
| later games aren 't fun, but _Persona 6_ could only really top
| _Persona 5_ by being something really different, and if it was
| different it wouldn 't be _Persona 6_.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that
| most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I
| remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well
| though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much
| better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design
| has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to
| go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a
| game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any
| 16-bit or earlier game.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That might be true about the time period from the SNES to
| the present but it's not clear to me that we're really
| getting better games post the PS3.
|
| I have _Persona 5 Royal_ on my mind because I am playing
| through it now maybe a decade after I played _Persona 4
| Golden_ on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art,
| but the music isn 't up there with P4G (how can you beat
| _Reach out_ or _Make history_?) and I think it 's a
| disappointment as a _game_.
|
| Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with
| the characters and raise your social stats but practically
| you're not required to make hard choices because you have
| enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so
| long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough
| which stretches out the game even longer.
|
| It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the
| industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs,
| debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for
| most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased
| to matter in _Fire Emblem_ games a long time ago.
|
| My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel
| + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours
| per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be
| happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
|
| Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction"
| since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional
| VR games like _Sword Art Online_ and _Shangri-La Frontier_
| have NPCs you can just talk to, I 'd love to see that in
| real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can
| make a storefront in _Horizon Worlds_ but you need to have
| a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one
| person.
| corimaith wrote:
| We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the
| industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized
| there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and
| remakes than producing something innovative. That being
| said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing
| the limits of that.
|
| >It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in
| the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments,
| buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the
| case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons
| triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long
| time ago.
|
| I think that's more a function of the games you are
| playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy
| there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona,
| whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life
| simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music,
| it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is
| jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or
| ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is
| better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily
| comparable.
|
| >Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La
| Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see
| that in real games.
|
| Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the
| MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than
| being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the
| riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to
| funding something that really pushes the line due to the
| sheer risk involved.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got stuck 1/3 of the way through Xenoblade on my New
| 3DS, I oughta figure out how and finish it!
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the
| industry has become incredibly risk-averse
|
| Slay the Spire was released in 2017. Are you accounting
| for indie games?
| akarlsten wrote:
| They mostly seem interested in JRPG anime slop, and even
| then Expedition 33 was released just this year and is
| probably the best example of that genre from the last 20
| years? That's also by a relatively small studio though..
|
| I would agree that big AAA studios are basically entirely
| creatively bankrupt at this point, but that's not
| exclusive to games, the same trend is apparent with
| movies (remakes of Disney movies, Star Wars sequels,
| etc.).
|
| Another end-of-ZIRP casualty?
| corimaith wrote:
| There will always be exceptions to any trends, but I
| wouldn't say the deluge of generic roguelike platformers
| with 16 bit art has been paticularly flattering to the
| indie industry. Have things really progressed in 2024
| since 2012 in the same way that 2012 was abjectly
| different from 2002? Not really, you could release Slay
| the Spire in 2012 or 2024 and it wouldn't look out of
| place.
| decretum wrote:
| >It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in
| the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments,
| buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the
| case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons
| triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long
| time ago.
|
| You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all
| about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got that on my New 3DS, gotta try it some day!
| default-kramer wrote:
| To be fair, Persona 5 is my least favorite out of 3/4/5.
| Most fans of the series agree it's embarrassingly easy.
| Persona 3 (Portable is best, or FES if you're a
| masochist, but not Reloaded) offers a perfect challenge
| on the hardest difficulty, and Persona 4 was pretty well-
| tuned also. It wouldn't surprise me if P6 was closer to
| P4 or P3 than P5.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| There are mods for Skyrim that hook into LLMs for
| dialogue and voice, some people seem to like it but from
| the videos I've seen I'd call it more of a curiosity or
| an experience than an engaging system.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right
| on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people
| rating older games very highly, more than many new
| releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released
| with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy's,
| arguably Oblivion Remastered).
|
| While I absolutely agree _some_ games age like milk (IMO
| Persona 3 FES /Portable mechanically play like garbage and
| P4 ain't much better) there are many games that were either
| the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental
| ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that
| no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are
| honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there's a
| _bunch_ of PS1 /PS2 era games having a big second life with
| the younger generation.
| imtringued wrote:
| Video games are stagnating hard. I've basically quit gaming
| for like the past 5 years, playing maybe two graphically
| undemanding games to completion per year, and what I'm
| seeing is that it's the same old games that have remained
| popular. From my perspective as someone coming back, it's
| as if time had stood still. In fact, one of the games I
| played was initially released 10 years ago in early access.
|
| Bethesda even decided to just remake Oblivion rather than
| show off more of TES 6.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment
| : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume
| any new instance of a particular media type? In other words,
| you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-
| trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement
| you won't read a book released after June 2025.
|
| Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might
| accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't
| accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new
| technology will result in some new classics in the coming years
| - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much
| higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
|
| This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the
| value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability
| to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies
| would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with
| people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of
| an issue.
| ativzzz wrote:
| It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There
| has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal
| entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old
| books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
| corimaith wrote:
| The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something
| good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable
| works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up
| waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better
| understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will
| become less relevant.
|
| That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to
| prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in
| "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable
| metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the
| classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't
| neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
| intuitionist wrote:
| This might prove too much, particularly for the case of
| literature. There were people writing commercially successful
| and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you
| already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes,
| plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think
| there's books published in the last 50 years that deserves a
| place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don't think it has
| much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being
| published at that time.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to
| compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without
| bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
|
| There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing
| books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to
| whatever's been made in the last X years.
| simianwords wrote:
| This reason doesn't seem to be correct. Why do we have so many
| YouTube videos published that still garner views? Why TV shows?
| We still make culturally relevant movies every year. Why?
|
| Books don't need to compete with all previous books but just
| have to be culturally relevant now.
| HeartStrings wrote:
| Novelty bias.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| Culture evolves. There's no accounting for taste.
|
| Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at
| the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than
| classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia".
|
| Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output.
| Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible.
| The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen
| observation.
| foxglacier wrote:
| I've wondered about this with children's books. Classics like
| Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows are still
| wildly popular. I can't believe nobody has been able to write
| anything better since those days. It must exist but I've never
| managed to find them in the library or know how to find them
| among the tidal wave of slop. Most of them are very similar
| and, to me, low quality fluff with no nuanced characters, no
| rich fantasy worlds, no serious human interactions. 80% of what
| I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or
| dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy. The
| other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's
| books. Why do authors crank out so much low-quality crap
| instead of masterpieces?
| randcraw wrote:
| IMO, a large part of the appeal of classics is that you know
| others have also read the book so there will be opportunities
| to quote from it and share the experience, perhaps for
| decades to come. In contrast, most recent best sellers
| disappear off the radar so quickly that the reader knows the
| opportunity to share them will be ephemeral. This if you
| can't enjoy the reading experience of a recent work all by
| yourself, without sharing it with others, then your only hope
| to share it socially is to join a book club that reads it.
| watwut wrote:
| I assure you there are more interesting books for children.
| At least judged by the "do kids actually want to read it"
| factor. I do not know "The Wind in the Willows", but Alice in
| Wonderland is not all that interesting. I mean, the
| philosophy parts were good, but the storyline something to be
| skipped.
|
| > 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing
| in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like
| losing a toy.
|
| You are talking about books for very small kids here. At that
| age, they were not understanding Alice in Wonderland. But,
| the small ones actually liked those losing a toy books.
|
| > The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into
| children's books.
|
| Kids books and entertainment was always vehicle for teaching
| kids rights and wrongs. You have that in Narnia, you have
| that in Thomas the Tank Engine, you have that in pretty much
| any Christian kids books. The moralizing ethical aspect is
| especially clear when you look at older books, because
| distance makes it all that more apparent.
|
| Even Alice in Wonderland is meant to teach you philosophy
| first rather then be just a story.
| reedlaw wrote:
| The authors of those works (Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace,
| and The Brothers Karamazov) were greatly influenced by Greek
| classics, Milton, Shakespeare, or their contemporaries (such as
| Charles Dickens) who were also shaped by some of those same
| sources.
|
| > At this moment, there are not even any famous literary
| fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of
| America under the age of 65.
|
| > Literary fiction peaked on the charts in the 1950s and 1960s
| and was quite present before then. There was a sustained
| decline from the 1970s onward.
|
| Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary
| environment. How could we expect them to compete with those
| whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly
| attuned to what has been considered great throughout the
| centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow
| up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded
| or read?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished
| literary environment. How could we expect them to compete
| with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was
| more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great
| throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and
| Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no
| longer widely regarded or read?
|
| You are operating under the asumption that the issue is
| authors. I think the issue is the readership. Great books are
| still being written. They are just not widely read anymore.
|
| The problem is that it's easier to mindlessly scroll through
| Instagram or watch meaningless YouTube videos than take the
| time to read a book. There are large teams dedicated to
| ensuring this stays so and that these products are as
| addictive as they can be.
|
| We, as a society, have apparently decided that it's
| acceptable to turn a large part of the population into idiots
| to sell more detergents. It's sad but at least we are
| selfdestructing through global warming so the problem will
| have an end.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| I had to look it up but mark Z Danielewski (author of House
| of Leaves) is 59 years old, doesn't push back the age very
| far though. For a 55-year-old they'd be 10 in 1985, I imagine
| they'd be more influenced by Star Wars, Brazil, and The
| Breakfast Club, than Her or We and go on to write Severance,
| Fleabag, or Atlanta than Heart of Darkness or 1984.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| At this point I honestly feel the same about those books as I
| did later in life when I did that IMDb top 250 in college. I
| wish I would have read "different" books when growing up. But I
| guess that's how you go to somewhere -- gradually. It's a bit
| like how I read a lot and if it were not for those not so-
| literary pulp fiction books and cheap action comics, I would
| have never picked up reading.
|
| A lot has to do with language in those books. They read as kind
| of "foundational" and well structured (and I am speaking
| exclusively about English and Hindi classics, two languages I
| can read and write in). This gradually takes you on a journey
| of not only enjoying the language but also learning it. From
| there, different people branch off in various literary
| directions, and majority just drops off from the literary
| journey altogether.
| sotix wrote:
| This exactly why I push back to people such as Sam Altman
| making the claim that AI will allow us to create more art,
| which people want. Do people truly want or need that?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Turns out that most people enjoy the process of creating art
| themselves, with any tools that are available. It's a nearly
| universal method of human expression.
|
| This is completely orthogonal to whether anyone else likes
| that art or finds it valuable.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| You point out the exact reason why I am so blase about the
| potential for AI art and (back in the Bush years) rampant
| piracy to destroy creative fields. Who cares? We already have
| multiple lifetimes of quality work to enjoy.
| joshvm wrote:
| Music is a lot easier than visual media or books though. You
| can listen to new songs daily and have a good knowledge of the
| last century's music. It's also easy to listen and concentrate
| while doing something else, like walking or driving. You don't
| need light either.
|
| Films are a 1-2 hour commitment. A TV series could be anywhere
| from 10-100 hours. A novella might be a couple of hours, but
| most people would take at least a day to read a novel. And
| these need close to 100% attention. Reading all the Hugo
| winners at a book a week would take 1.5 years, and you've not
| touched the nominees or books in series.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod
| Magazine.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| To be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse.
| You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a
| listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford,
| and 35 pages of advertisements.
|
| The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online
| tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss
| physical magazines though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I knew where to get the upgraded speed parts I wanted from
| the advertisements. The advertisements were the main
| attraction.
|
| Some magazines in the olden days were literally nothing but
| ads - like Computer Shopper.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was
| mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s,
| so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and
| read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a
| few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of
| ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-
| internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when
| that was common.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I ran a BBS for a while. Still have it on a hard disk,
| but no way to read it.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I'll add it to the Dlang roadmap;)
| strken wrote:
| I used to wait for dad to come home each Thursday because
| that was the edition of the paper with quarter-page ads
| that were just price lists of refurbished computer
| equipment. I'd sit there with a highlighter and go through
| them, trying to figure out a way to afford my own Pentium 3
| on $10/week of pocket money, or get my Pentium 1 to run a
| little faster.
|
| It was also the edition of the paper with a new TV guide,
| which I'm sure made my habit very annoying when the rest of
| the family wanted to see what was on.
| jerhewet wrote:
| Wood-working magazines. I subscribed _because_ of the
| advertising.
|
| I can't afford Fesstools, but that doesn't mean I don't love
| seeing / reading their ads.
|
| I dropped my very long time subscription to Maximum Computing
| when they went digital. The end of an era...
| anotheruser13 wrote:
| It's not hard copy, but you might like The Autopian (ex-
| Jalopniks David Tracy and Jason Torchinsky are among the
| editors/writers/founders).
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| That's the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can't
| really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read
| Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael
| Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are
| very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just
| inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud
| was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster ... I love
| what nonfiction writing I've seen, but the New York trilogy is so
| dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.
|
| Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really
| postmodern??
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool
| writers want to prove they are making something challenging by
| stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in
| narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings
| that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull
| and predictable, but they're better than watching the
| protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to
| suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at
| night too.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise
| music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a
| matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic
| interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly
| noise music doesn't support a lot of full-time jobs compared
| to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which
| was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what
| Stephen Foster did.
|
| We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing.
| But one may come at the expense of the other.
| tptacek wrote:
| The time frame for Pynchon fits and, of course, so does the
| style. He's postmodern.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I'm in a sci-fi book club with friends and we decided to read
| one modern literary fiction book and while I am enjoying it,
| the prose is beautiful and the deep dive into the characters is
| interesting, it's literally exhausting to read.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It's
| been shoved in my face from middle school through college.
| Everyone writing "genre fiction" is not a Real Author.
|
| Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is
| completely missing the point. It's one thing to follow a
| tradition. It's another to think that tradition makes you great.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| This is my issue with it too. If you're a good student, then
| you're done with any book that even hints at its own self-
| importance by the time you graduate high school.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and
| sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction.
| The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude
| (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel
| placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a
| set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it
| had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.
|
| Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative -
| authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th
| century South America, they can invent whatever systems they
| like, and then the question is whether their world-building
| skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
|
| Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian
| Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and
| host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical
| realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of
| history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of
| their day).
|
| You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late
| 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth
| reading.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Turning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal
| statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
| lmm wrote:
| And yet we somehow excuse it when the fans of literary
| fiction do it.
| com2kid wrote:
| 99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now
| In Space(tm).
|
| I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores
| forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also
| explores systems of government and commerce that may need to
| happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and
| arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-
| fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space.
| (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't,
| though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so
| they may have changed).
|
| This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our
| existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less
| racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
|
| As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an
| undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which
| is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too
| much.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| 99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty
| much every other genre inside it. At this point it's
| infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and
| shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I hate when my Science Fiction doesn't have any Science.
| com2kid wrote:
| Eh, popular sci-fi is zero sci.
|
| Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its
| technology on people. Some good books have been writing
| exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general
| does nothing with the premise except make tea.
|
| The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits
| end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads,
| people who live for eternity spend time terra forming
| planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies
| and exploring the universe, or just becoming something
| not human at all.
|
| ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality
| would be trivial to accomplish with that science level.
| But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Some good books have been writing exploring what post
| scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the
| premise except make tea.
|
| The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent;
| it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity.
| Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's
| a lot of indication to the contrary.
|
| Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe
| propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military
| dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as
| Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.
| com2kid wrote:
| I'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a
| completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are
| occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out
| stuff ever gets adapted.
|
| But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a
| samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written
| after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and
| people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
|
| That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets
| read.
|
| Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what
| Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
|
| Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books
| have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his
| novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens
| that are easily related to!)
|
| It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction
| was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and
| some really damn good science!"
|
| I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind
| of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point
| possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists
| turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An
| occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and
| then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very
| pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing
| with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| The homage and direct copy of shots of Kurosawa's The
| Hidden Fortress nothwithstanding, George Lucas is on
| record saying the Alliance represents the Vietnamese, and
| The Empire is the United States of America and the films
| are partly commentary on the civil war in Vietnam.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Sure, aliens are well represented, but that's a long way
| from "it's all historical fiction in space"
| rakejake wrote:
| Greg Egan's work has its share of humans but also some
| extremely imaginative aliens. I am not sure who can
| relate to the aliens in Wang's Carpets.
|
| Greg Egan is a very good example of a novelist who is a
| GOAT but will be dismissed by most critics of lit-fic
| because "his characters don't have arcs" or some such.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think there is a LOT of sci-fi that doesn't try to
| sugarcoat monarchy. I'm looking at my book shelf and don't
| even see any that do.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, I was trying to think of a "monarchy is good
| actually" scifi novel, and can't, offhand (it's somewhat
| common with sci-fi TV shows/movies, however).
|
| Maybe the Dune sequels, if you're willing to really,
| _really_ stretch the definition of 'good'.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more
| tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot
| easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get
| masterworks. (I decided to check _The Left Hand of Darkness_
| off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually
| heavier than the last three books I 've read put together. The
| _introduction_. And it 's about five pages long.)
|
| Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll
| not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know
| that. There's enough of it that I can find something
| interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years
| of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
| amacbride wrote:
| A well-known observation!
|
| "Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage
| stating 'ninety percent of everything is crap'."
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Oh boy, _Left Hand of Darkness_ is a good book. And I always
| tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is
| brilliant. "Prediction is the business of prophets,
| clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of
| novelists. A novelist 's business is lying."
|
| I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty
| successful realist "literary" writer if she'd chosen to. I am
| grateful that she chose genre instead.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I love that first chapter where the main character meets a
| politician and says something like "I'd seen his type
| before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably
| see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
| nottorp wrote:
| One Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :)
|
| No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be
| culture.
|
| Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
| hotmeals wrote:
| Eh, I think there's a difference that make both terms useful.
| Fiction set strictly in the real world with mysterious yet
| mundane magical/supernatural elements, versus fiction in a
| fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of
| magic(tm) must be extensively explained.
|
| I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that
| big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for
| making it palatable to elitists.
|
| I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred
| Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and
| it's cultural context. True, it _wouldn 't be impossible_ to
| translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The
| Martian Chronicles after all.
| nottorp wrote:
| > versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world"
| where the existence of magic(tm) must be extensively
| explained.
|
| Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has
| to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.
|
| Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just
| happens without explanation. Compare with something like
| Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great
| detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter
| boring.
|
| Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
| hotmeals wrote:
| Sorry, I meant that fantasy usually is in a unrelated-to-
| our-own fantastical world or it's in the real world (e.g
| urban fantasy), but the fact that magic exists and the
| reader "didn't know" about it must be explained (e.g
| Harry Potter, Dresden Files).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What's the alternative to not explaining here? Is it
| making the magic subtle/weak/uncommon enough that the
| answer is "you didn't notice, and this is plausible to
| claim"? If the magic is blatant enough and there's no
| explanation, the story becomes even less attached to
| reality than "there's a lot of magic but it's
| deliberately kept hidden".
| easterncalculus wrote:
| > Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
|
| Yeah, and LOTR is in Middle-Earth, a fantastical world
| that isn't Earth. The point of the term "magical realism"
| is that there is still "realism". It's about what happens
| when something impossible or absurd happens to you and
| you have to deal with the ramifications in the real
| world. No one would read The Satanic Verses, think about
| the themes involved and compare it to LOTR.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I really like magical realism, but mostly ones where
| everything isn't so depressing like the Night Circus and the
| Starless Sea books.
|
| One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The
| closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which
| is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with
| lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| *I meant to say that Night Circus and Starless Sea are good
| examples of books that are not depressing.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yeah, I can't for the life of me see why Regency/Victorian
| fiction or US civil war fiction wouldn't be "genre".
| troupo wrote:
| > authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of
| 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems
| they like, and then the question is whether their world-
| building skills are good enough to avoid obvious
| inconsistencies.
|
| To do that authors need to very well versed in the
| sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and
| ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors
| couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford
| to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and
| you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
|
| I've read _a lot_ of scifi over the past few years. Most books
| are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor
| language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and
| adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level
| sentence structure etc.)
|
| Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow
| and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages
| wholesale.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| What sci-fi books are you reading with a "complete lack of
| adjectives, non-existent metaphors, and middle-school
| sentence structure"?
| troupo wrote:
| _Humanity 's Fire_ by Michael Cobley
|
| _Lightspeed Trilogy_ by Ken MacLeod
|
| _Revenger_ by Alastair Reynolds (the first book started
| off quite well, but the other two became a boring slog)
|
| _Rise of the Jain_ by Neal Asher. This one is just so
| egregiously bad, I don 't know how I managed to finish. If
| I ever have to read another "erstwhile ship" I'll barf.
|
| etc. etc.
|
| Since I'm reading a lot of sci fi, I've ran out of top 1%
| or so of books an authors pretty quickly. Now I feel like
| I'm running out of middle-of-the-road authors, too.
|
| ---
|
| Edit. I'll add that most sci fi is incapable of even
| writing characters that have more distinction than "she's a
| woman, he's a man". They all talk and behave the same.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I liked reading "this is how you lose the time war"
| recently if you want something that is essentially sci-fi
| themed poetry. If you haven't already read it, maybe
| that'll be a fun break.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| It's easier to name the ones that don't.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| There are thousands upon thousands of science fiction
| novels. I can't imagine they're all like that.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| It's comments like this that remind me I'm on HN. Let's be
| honest for a minute - take a sci-fi book of the shelf, any of
| them, current (Weir, Pierce Brown, etc) or classic (Asimov,
| PKD, etc). Almost always, you will find paper-thin characters
| and themes, written with the crutch of 'worldbuilding'. Here's
| the lineup - a downtrodden nerd, usually the protagonist, some
| stereotypical caricature of a woman, like a nagging wife, or
| ditz, or hag. A few archetypes for a boss, and some equally
| stereotypical villain. You won't find a Karamazov in sci-fi.
|
| This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters
| fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor
| memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just
| downright bad. It's the status quo.
|
| Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is
| some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just
| plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most
| important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and
| characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's
| because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years
| you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural
| implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how
| that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered
| characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only
| possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi
| author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never.
|
| Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is
| because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into
| space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not
| "what if storms lasted longer".
|
| It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited
| to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more
| believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the
| ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing
| boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say
| they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept
| that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Great comment. Even lots of sci-fi shows and movies suffers
| from the "talking heads" trope you describe, where a paper
| thin character mouths dialogue that makes no character sense
| in order to push the plot forward or to dump a ton of lore
| onto the watcher/reader to introduce the world.
|
| The first few Asimov Foundation novels were notorious for
| talking heads.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| A related (counter?) point - OP's article talks about the
| demise of literary magazines.
|
| I feel like SF magazines have the same problem? Ut looks like
| all the SF magazines are on the downward slope, to quote
| Wikipedia:
|
| >[Asimov's] Circulation declined steadily over the life of the
| magazine and as of 2020 it was below 20,000, more than half of
| that coming from online subscriptions.
|
| If people would still read SF, why do these magazines fail just
| like the literary magazines?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think the magazine thing is just _wrong_, tbh;
| serialisation in magazines, as means of distributing novels,
| is dead. As you say, sci-fi, which used to be particularly
| heavily dependent on serialisation, has survived this.
| Litfic's problems lie elsewhere.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I think I agree with you: in the age of the internet, where
| you can 'sample' SF fiction on every corner, you may not
| need a middle-man (the SF magazine) going around collating
| those samples for you. You can find them on your own now!
| for free!
| rsynnott wrote:
| Even before the internet, the magazine serial was dying,
| tho; its heyday was probably the 60s or so.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Honestly I think that some sci-fi has been somewhat accepted at
| this point; people write serious analyses of sci-fi these days,
| and you no longer really see sci-fi pretending not to be sci-fi
| (notably, Atwood did this with Handmaid's Tale, and _at the
| time_ you can see where she was coming from, because
| contemporary sci-fi was mostly pretty narrowly trope-bound...)
| ang_cire wrote:
| This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it.
| I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and
| this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling"
| anything.
|
| There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to
| figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations
| (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those
| corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely
| profitable.
|
| I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to
| 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our
| FOSS funding problem.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'll toss two theories into the pool:
|
| The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.
|
| The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education.
| This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of
| _needs_ formal training and schooling in the historical
| development of the form to appreciate experimental and more
| contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual
| art.
|
| Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a
| general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't
| actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and
| appreciate modern work in a sufficient way--just like someone
| untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time
| understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in
| computer science.
| whstl wrote:
| This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two
| terms, Rockism and Popism.
|
| I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace
| different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the
| result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy,
| pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as
| deep just because it's popular or polished.
|
| Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music
| in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts
| for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening
| progressively, with critics increasively and progressively
| adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't
| conflate popularity with genius.
|
| For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I
| could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could
| understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was
| trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of
| Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological
| arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and
| when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not
| saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were
| blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become
| grating.
|
| Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture
| centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the
| personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the
| constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms,
| the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
| strken wrote:
| Maybe anti-intellectualism, novels that nobody wants to read,
| and a move to STEM might be three symptoms of the same root
| cause: the cutting edge of the humanities moving so far away
| from popular taste that academics are no longer legible to
| ordinary people.
| voidhorse wrote:
| This was a great read!
|
| I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up
| until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the
| world of literary fiction--I had participated in several circles
| in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group
| of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it
| aside.
|
| I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I
| was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a
| typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done
| somewhat tenable.
|
| As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this
| quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day,
| unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're
| incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that,
| rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.
|
| When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it
| establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better
| writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support
| those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern
| experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you
| can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being
| exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-
| writing job being a big one).
|
| From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much
| analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would
| meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just
| as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a
| quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with
| this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This
| has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common
| taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the
| concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding
| asset. That can never happen with literature, which is
| definitionally reproduced at scale.
| tolerance wrote:
| > What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of
| memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the
| characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world
| after. > > -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341
|
| People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore.
| People are not "literary minded". For the average person,
| interpolating another person's experience against their own
| through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible
| and detached.
|
| It takes a literary mind to _feel_ through text. Electronic media
| of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically
| is just that; electrifying.
|
| I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to
| all writing and when we go further:
|
| > Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal,
| performative, and anti-intimate.
|
| The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
|
| Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand
| that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the
| same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach
| total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > it spoke the language of memory,
|
| We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same
| "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor
| behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level
| of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal
| beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak
| about other forms of personal belief or preference that
| conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into
| going along with another belief system (compromise) due to
| economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization
| unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
|
| Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined
| words in modern politics.
| tolerance wrote:
| Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared
| language.
|
| I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in
| society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst
| each other than something like what we expect the effects of
| culture and art to be.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Tech doesn't change human nature. We are still the same as
| 100,000 years ago without tech.
| tolerance wrote:
| In my original comment, I said that I believe that our
| brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same
| things as before.
|
| Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our
| nature is exercised, at the material level.
|
| Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial
| dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not
| register.
|
| I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm
| curious what made you make the claim that took us in this
| direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a
| logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
|
| Thanks.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Tech changes human culture. The changes are at a
| population, statistical level.
|
| Asimovs Foundation book described it well.
| hoseja wrote:
| Except for the thousands of years of civilizational-
| directed breeding in parts of the globe.
| ljsprague wrote:
| You can share a language and still talk past each other.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > And they no longer are coerced into going along with
| another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from
| the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to
| lack of coherent direction.
|
| I mean... you think this is _new_? See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
|
| Civilisation, you will not, survived a few hundred years of
| _that_.
|
| I'm not sure that the sort of ultra-conformist society that
| you seem to be thinking of ever really existed.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?
| tolerance wrote:
| He isn't, and I won't be convinced that he is until Supreme
| puts his face on one of their shirts.
| LeonB wrote:
| He's not that popular, but Billy Pilgrim keeps wandering back
| and forth in time, buying up all the Vonnegut books, juicing
| the figures.
|
| What Billy really wants is a good Kilgore Trout book, but the
| supply of those seems to be dead. So it goes.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that
| make arguments similar to the quoted post--that we are entering
| or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new
| language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram),
| immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand
| allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express
| a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher
| friends tell me that the typical student's reading
| comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
| tolerance wrote:
| Check these out:
|
| https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/hartford-grad-
| sues-s...
|
| https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/mass-literacy-isnt
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination
| that goes with it.
|
| Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery -
| especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What
| you see is what you get.
|
| Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse
| in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been
| pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and
| anime.
|
| It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
|
| Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the
| standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
|
| It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that
| can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the
| standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
|
| The older culture, where the tropes stem from, doesn't
| follow the tropes? What?
| tolerance wrote:
| I don't think that's what he means.
| lmm wrote:
| Older works often conform _less_ closely to the tropes,
| because the tropes weren 't established at that point.
| When a medium or genre is new it often goes through a
| Cambrian explosion phase where there are all kinds of
| wildly varied pieces, and then things settle down and
| coalesce on the specific approaches that have proven
| successful.
| tolerance wrote:
| I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because
| I think you're on to something. My assumption is that
| denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as
| "elitist".
|
| Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and
| feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever
| shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
|
| "Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples
| imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the
| immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does
| the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
|
| > It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures
| that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined
| already.
|
| If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what
| you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the
| "Slow cancellation of the future".
| Izkata wrote:
| Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't
| seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation
| again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on
| social media just within the past month of a large amount
| of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient"
| (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just
| what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all
| fiction I've read is written).
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the
| standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
|
| Hrm, I'm not sure what culture you're thinking of, but many
| genres are considerably _less_ trope-bound today than fifty
| years ago. Partly just because there is just _so much more
| stuff_. It is far easier to publish books. The end of the
| top-40 system as a curb on what music anyone actually gets
| to hear has allowed for far more diversity there. Total TV
| output today must be at least 10 times what it was 50 years
| ago, maybe more. All of this allows more experimentation.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's
| ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested
| by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
|
| D&D? How does a book based roleplaying game fit into the
| argument about lack of imagination.
| jtwoodhouse wrote:
| "A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a
| caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which
| nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really
| smart person."
|
| -- Stephen King
| cubefox wrote:
| Sour grapes. I've read enough of Stephen King in my youth to
| know that he is a very skilled writer, but he only produced
| large amounts of popular genre literature. The literature
| equivalent of enjoyable but forgettable popcorn movies. He
| wasn't taken seriously by literature criticism because he
| didn't produce anything sophisticated.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I don't know if that's entirely accurate.
|
| I just read The Body (basis for Stand By Me) and it was as
| personal and emotionally complex as any literary-approved
| fiction. It reminded me a lot of The Things They Carried,
| actually.
|
| I think the biggest issue is that once he was pidgeonholed
| into being a "trope-master, scary fiction guy", no one would
| look at his writing any other way. And to be fair, MOST of
| his writing is overwrought genre stuff, but he has certainly
| developed into a fine craftsman at his best.
|
| The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and
| navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or
| push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any
| other publishing trend, only less fun. Historically, most
| fiction (or art in general) that persists was wildly
| successful in its time as a prerequisite.
| cubefox wrote:
| > The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible
| and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure
| somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just
| as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun.
|
| I think that's just prejudice. Literary fiction simply has
| artistic or intellectual value beyond entertainment, and
| beyond using familiar tropes.
|
| It's possible that King has some of these qualities
| somewhere. I have only read ten to fifteen of his novels.
| But that was enough that I could e.g. predict the ending of
| The Shining after about 50 pages.
| Spivak wrote:
| Calling Stephen King enjoyable but forgettable I don't think
| works as an argument because I think it's pretty rare for an
| author to have 5+ novels that are so influential as to be
| cultural touchstones for multiple generations. The amount of
| fiction that he directly inspired or can trace their ideas
| back to one of Stephen King's novels is overwhelming.
|
| Of all the criticisms I expected to be leveled at the man
| forgettable was perhaps the last one on my list.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There
| is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-
| series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to
| stay on top of the recent thing...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite
| explanations for literary fiction's decline that have been pushed
| by its adherents ("the internet made people stupid") to really
| try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why
| not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.
|
| His point that people still read challenging literary fiction,
| just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN's recent
| discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for
| contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good
| writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up
| writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.
|
| I do wish he'd discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the
| exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her
| books that's different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to
| appeal to a wide readership?
|
| Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary
| and "genre" fiction that I'm not sure always exists. Ursula Le
| Guin is a good counterexample here.
| sitkack wrote:
| If someone likes Le Guin, they also like the writing of Toni
| Morrison. Morrison follows a more complex but similar abstract
| structure in her writing.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Iain M Banks is another example of "literary sci-fi" or
| whatever you want to call it.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Even the most challenging work of fiction wasn't challenging to
| an 18 year old contemporary reader of average intelligence. The
| fact that in order to appreciate these works in present day
| requires more intellectualism doesn't actually say anything
| about the works themselves.
| Spivak wrote:
| I feel like this is a pretty bold statement for a population
| that depending on what year you're calling contemporary was
| probably somewhere between 30-50% illiterate.
|
| I really wouldn't expect reading proficiency to be radically
| different from the distribution we have today which is to say
| the distribution centers around levels 2/3 which is "can make
| basic inferences from text."
| mkoubaa wrote:
| In some ways we are 30-50% literate now which means I
| completely agree with you. I only meant the above about the
| literate 18 year old. If a 17 year old kid with a 3.2 GPA
| can't follow the prose without a headache then it isn't the
| same kind of writing that Tolstoy did. That's not to say
| that same person would appreciate the content of the novel
| in its richness.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Yes, and the amount of people being taught to read was a
| lot lower than "basically everyone" (assuming we're talking
| about the developed countries where this is measured).
| Literature being considered a hobby anyone can get into is
| a relatively recent concept.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Charles Dickens was a very popular author. Modern English
| majors struggle to even "make basic inferences" from the
| text!
|
| https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-
| majors-...
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I think you're confusing critical and analytical reading
| with narrative reading. It is definitely true that
| critical reading ability is uncommon but that doesn't
| mean a typical reader can't follow a story.
|
| Sidenote - Dickens is unreadable to me for two reasons:
| that version of English is not the same language I speak
| natively _and_ he uses so much visual descriptions and I
| 'm an aphant.
| masfuerte wrote:
| The task wasn't sophisticated. The English majors were
| being asked to describe in simple terms what the text was
| saying. If they were unfamiliar with any of the words
| they were allowed to look them up. This was beyond them.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Nobody talks the way that text was written anymore. This
| is a test of a different skill than ability to grok a bit
| of narrative.
| Spivak wrote:
| So as a comparison I asked AI to translate the text as
| closely as possible to modern English. Which I know is
| the task given to the students but the text isn't hard
| once it's in roughly your native tongue, it's just
| written using unfamiliar prose.
|
| > LONDON. The Michaelmas term recently ended, and the
| Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Relentless
| November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the
| waters had just recently pulled back from the surface of
| the earth, and it wouldn't be surprising to encounter a
| Megalosaurus, about forty feet long, waddling like an
| elephant-sized lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke hanging low
| from chimney tops, creating a soft black drizzle with
| flakes of soot in it as large as full-grown snowflakes--
| gone into mourning, one might think, for the death of the
| sun. Dogs, unrecognizable in the mire. Horses, barely
| better; splashed up to their very blinders. Pedestrians,
| bumping into one another's umbrellas, in a widespread
| outbreak of bad temper, and losing their footing at
| street corners, where tens of thousands of other
| pedestrians have been slipping and sliding since daybreak
| (if this day ever broke), adding new layers to the crust
| upon crust of mud, sticking stubbornly to the pavement at
| those points, and building up with compound interest.
|
| The Feast of St. Michael's just ended. Some guy who is
| roughly akin to the Chief Justice of The Supreme Court is
| chilling at what is basically "The Supreme Court
| Building" (The US was so creative with the name). It's
| raining, a lot. Everything is muddy. Dickens when writing
| this clearly had just learned recently what a
| Megalosaurus is. Oh my god Dickens is so pretentious
| describing chimneys doing absolutely nothing special. The
| dogs and horses are covered in mud. The people are
| struggling to get around and are becoming frustrated at
| one another. The mud is building up on the pavement
| because of all the people tracking it.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Something hinted at in the essay is what I consider a funnel
| effect. If you have N people starting on some project, N/2 will
| get distracted after a while, some proportion of those who
| remain will just suck, some smaller proportion will be OK, and
| so on until you manage to find a few real geniuses. If you
| shrink the size of the funnel, you get less geniuses.
|
| An important part of having a large funnel is giving people a
| way to really spend their time doing the thing. For example,
| writing short stories for magazines was once a reasonable way
| to support yourself for a few years as a young writer, and led
| to a very large funnel. Take away that infrastructure for young
| writers, and you get a smaller funnel, and an attrition in
| quality of the best work.
|
| (Now, consider what happens 10-20 years after we stop hiring
| new grads for programming jobs...)
| stevenwoo wrote:
| One thing I got from reading Sally Rooney is I can relate to
| the many of the character's situations, thoughts/opinions and
| emotions even though I am almost forty years older than they
| are and her books are easy to read for lack of a better
| description (though this latter features in much contemporary
| writing). Is that her secret sauce, I dunno.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >her books are easy to read for lack of a better description
| (though this latter features in much contemporary writing).
|
| Maybe linguistic evolution is playing a role? Contemporary
| writing is easiest to read because it's written in
| contemporary English?
|
| I also think _The Elements of Style_ had a real and positive
| influence, in terms of e.g. sentences getting shorter:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xYn3CKir4bTMzY5eb/why-
| have-s...
| bigthymer wrote:
| > I do wish he'd discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be
| the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about
| her books that's different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to
| appeal to a wide readership?
|
| I suppose part of the reason is that the Irish have cultivated
| a strong literary culture.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/20/we-
| all...
|
| [2]
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/30/irish-...
| all_factz wrote:
| Because Rooney writes dressed-up romance novels. They're
| mediocre. But to the author's point, at least they're readable
| and touch on real emotion, even if I find them a bit trite.
| Some balance could be struck between Rooney and the more
| highbrow experiments the author bemoans. Elena Ferrante is a
| decent example here, and she does get sales. But even then, I
| do think the author understates the competition reading faces
| from new forms of media - yes, there are more people, but the
| amount of distraction has scaled disproportionately to the
| number of new people. Massively.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between
| literary and "genre" fiction that I'm not sure always exists
|
| The litfic people would never agree with this, but litfic is
| also a genre. It has its tropes, and especially it has its
| snobbery. I think part of its decline may be exactly that: the
| social circle which values litfic for exclusionary snob value
| was always small, but now it has been eclipsed. Apart from
| specific fandoms like Joyce; the Joyceans are closest to SF
| fans in the way their fandom operates. They even have
| conventions.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be
| "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes
| in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just
| what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today
| as "genre" and not literary is the problem.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Interesting idea. Literary fiction never actually existed; it's
| an artificial construct.
|
| I'd really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk
| story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf
| wrote it.
|
| It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog's
| scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion.
| From what other people have told me, it does.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Scifi is somewhere in the transition from "always genre
| fiction" to "sometimes respectable literary fiction" (people
| write serious analyses of sci-fi, now!) Granted, furry
| solarpunk might take a bit longer.
| api wrote:
| Literary is a genre. Like all genres it has its popular tropes,
| fandom, cliches, etc.
|
| A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book
| as a "TOBADNY" -- a "trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional
| New Yorkers." I LOLed and then realized this was totally the
| case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I mean, maybe that's part of the problem, it's a genre that's
| just becoming less popular? Akin to Western novels?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Hrm, not sure I _totally_ buy this; a big part of "is it
| literary fiction?" is just "it is _proper, respectable_
| literature that people write analyses of?", and that tends to
| shift over time a bit. Some current novels which are not
| considered literary fiction today will be in 2050.
| api wrote:
| That's a genre. Genre boundaries always shift and are
| always a bit fuzzy. Most great works could be put in more
| than one genre.
|
| I'd say literary fiction is a genre that focuses on the
| craft of writing, usually through either poetic prose or
| deep character study. There are bonus points if the topic
| or style is challenging, so you get tropes that lead in
| this direction: deep studies of complicated often
| problematic characters (Lolita), deep studies of society
| (Pride and Prejudice), unusual plot structures (Cloud
| Atlas), experimental prose style (Ulysses), etc. These are
| literary tropes because they're challenging to write -- in
| terms of the craft of writing itself. The most literary of
| literary fiction is "writer's writing" in the sense that
| some experimental jazz is "musician's music."
|
| And of course you can have deliberate genre crossovers.
| Literary sci-fi has been popular lately, like Ishiguro's
| _Never Let Me Go_ or the already mentioned _Cloud Atlas_.
| raincole wrote:
| I wonder which genre fiction today will be deemed as 'literary'
| in 2200s?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Sci-fi may be a slightly obvious answer; I think things like
| Blindsight would probably get tagged as literary fiction
| except that they are already genre fiction, say. That'll
| probably happen sooner than 2200, tho; it has already started
| happening in edge cases where everyone kinda pretends it's
| not sci-fi (Handmaid's Tale, say).
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I agree it's going to be SciFi, but maybe also some
| fantasy. So much of SciFi consists of speculative
| philosophy about the intersection of technology and
| society. Fantasy is somewhat similar if you abstract
| technology to include magic.
|
| There are already debates as to whether _Lord of the Rings_
| is "literary" when it checks all the boxes.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Don't have to go back that far :) - the author mentions
| Portnoy's Complaint (1969) which contains the big sight gags
| for the raunchy comedies Something About Mary(1998) and
| American Pie(1999).
| rsynnott wrote:
| Also Ulysses, of course; it was essentially banned in most
| English-speaking countries for a decade or so after
| publication, on grounds of obscenity.
| simianwords wrote:
| I believe you have got it right. How do you think people will
| talk about half life in a few decades? Would it be considered
| high brow?
| ema wrote:
| I think half life already is well on its way to be considered
| high brow. I played it a few years ago and while I did enjoy
| it part of my motivation to play it was "this is what the
| people who have more experience than me think is good".
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, this is kind of the trouble with this sort of thing. Even
| ignoring the obscenity issue (_many_ great works of English
| literature were not originally published in English-speaking
| countries, but rather in France, which was more laid-back about
| this sort of thing), it is not that long ago that novels as a
| form were considered kinda inherently disreputable/low-brow;
| even into the 19th century, _all_ novels were kind of seen a
| bit like how we now see genre fiction.
| archievillain wrote:
| This is something that gets forgotten all the time: the common
| man could go watch a Shakespeare play for a penny and sip on
| ale between one dirty joke and the other.
|
| _Pride and Prejudice_ , perhaps the most romance novel to ever
| romance novel in the history of romance novels, is described as
| literary fiction (and so presumably not genre fiction) by the
| author. I think history--and hundreds of entries on
| fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org where teenagers gush
| about their own dark-haired and standoffish but secretly gentle
| imaginary men--has shown that the reason she's remembered is
| the _substance_ , not the _subject_ of her writing, as well as
| the historical significance in her being a pioneer, of course.
|
| I recently watched _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_. A
| historically and artistically important movie, and then you go
| check the Wikipedia page and the producer described it to the
| effect "Yeah from the script it looked like some quick slop
| which would turn a buck."[1]
|
| I think starting out with the idea of making a "literary" work
| and creating a genre out of "literary fiction" inherently
| doesn't work. I think the avenues for greatness are either
| making something experimental that breaks new ground, or
| something more conventional but that, in exchange, shows you
| complete mastery of that well-known material. But you can't be
| great just by appropriating the superficial qualities you
| identify in past works you yourself consider to be great,
| because again, it was the substance and not the mere subject
| that made those work great.
|
| [1] 'Pommer later said: "They saw in the script an
| 'experiment'. I saw a relatively cheap film".' Citation [36] on
| Wikipedia
| rsynnott wrote:
| To be honest, I suspect that someone reading Pride and
| Prejudice _after_ reading a bunch of ao3 stuff is going to
| suffer from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Seinf
| eldIsUnfunn... to an extent; part of why was significant was
| just in establishing a bunch of tropes which have now been
| absolutely _done to death_.
| archievillain wrote:
| I've made sure to reference "historical significance" when
| referencing P&P and the Cabinet for this exact reason. I
| think every classic undergoes some amount of 'rot', but
| I've also found a lot of classic to be perfectly enjoyable
| if you allow them some slack.
|
| And, not to insult fanfiction writers (I've been known to
| partake), but I would guess Jane Austen still writes a
| better broody man than most of them... although probably
| not _all_ of them. That 's a secondary consequence of
| simply having more people partaking in art to begin with:
| the more millions of artists you have, that many more one-
| in-a-million geniuses you're bound to find.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > but I would guess Jane Austen still writes a better
| broody man than most of them...
|
| Whatever about that, she remains absolutely unbeaten in
| writing awful vicars.
|
| (I assume this wasn't her intention, but the vicar is by
| far the most memorable character, for me.)
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a
| chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also
| the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best
| would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard
| earned lesson.
|
| But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being
| read in general.
|
| It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the
| radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was
| succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but
| television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV
| companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that
| they keep bleeding.
|
| All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve
| out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true
| across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are
| decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world,
| the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I
| stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership
| is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that
| they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them
| more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast
| forward a few decades, and there you go.
|
| The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater?
| Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? _You 'd have to pay
| or coerce me_ to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions
| hosting these are living off of government money, as they're
| simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't
| care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum
| exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in
| this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune
| with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the
| communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal
| position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect
| with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is
| assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Plenty of people still read and read a lot. I also have other
| hobbies, but I don't think it's going away. There are more
| books being published than ever before. There are also genres
| like science fiction and fantasy that are HUGE now and were
| once much smaller.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I mean happy for you, but that's a bit of a non sequitur,
| isn't it? The thread we're in is literally called "The
| cultural decline of literary fiction", and none of what you
| say is actually mutually exclusive with that.
| int_19h wrote:
| Indeed, it's about the decline of _literary fiction_ - a
| very specific subset of literature that comprises a tiny
| part of fiction, nevermind the totality of all literature.
| People still read books, just not these particular books.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Agreed. Sorry for getting off topic. I interpreted some of
| the comments as veering off into talking about the decline
| of literature as a whole.
| goldfishgold wrote:
| For a supposedly moribund institution, live theater (esp
| Broadway) makes a ton of money.
| mrob wrote:
| Comfort can be improved by using a dedicated ebook reader. It's
| lighter than a paper book, makes it easier to turn the page,
| and the text can be configured so that every book uses
| identical typography (the most legible typography is the
| typography you're used to).
|
| Eye strain suggests you probably need corrective lenses of some
| type. If so, fixing this will improve your quality of life in
| more than just reading books. Good lighting is also important.
| E-paper has the advantage that it can be used in bright
| lighting, e.g. outdoors. For indoor reading you might want a
| desk lamp positioned to shine extra light on the ebook reader.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are
| doing fine.
|
| The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted
| specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have
| some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a
| story physically printed on paper.
| unignorant wrote:
| I really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary
| fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since
| 2001 isn't really true:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
|
| It is true that there isn't that _much_ literary stuff that
| breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat
| crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of
| Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved
| under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles
| in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of
| mine, at least among books published in recent years.
|
| Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The
| Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but
| nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or
| libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-
| midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).
|
| I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the
| best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high
| literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the
| top 10 list for any year.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Yeah, and looking through the lists makes one suspect that
| there's a problem of incommensurate measurements... There's a
| lot of 'very hungry caterpillar' in the recent lists, but I'm
| unsure whether children's books were even in the running in the
| 1960's. Or else there's been a revolution in buying books for
| children since the 60's, which, honestly, I wouldn't be sad
| about...
| cafard wrote:
| Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up
| on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the
| others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.
|
| Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary
| years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| I've been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It's
| easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it's $19
| (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.
| LeonB wrote:
| Take a slow and steady look through _every_ second-hand book
| store within travelling distance.
|
| You might find it or you might not. But the search will be far
| more interesting than browsing any website.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Keep an eye out for library sales in your area. The selection
| is usually very good and you can buy books/CDs/etc. by the
| pound.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Mass market paperback is $6 on Amazon
| mkoubaa wrote:
| To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a
| story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.
|
| By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1)
| they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the
| work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always
| be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and
| give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to
| satisfy their audience.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely
| that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good
| anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with
| weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of
| "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but
| it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be
| something other than pure entertainment".
|
| > after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate
| literary fiction
|
| I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I
| hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of
| those people the article talks about who does read a lot of
| novels, just not many _new_ ones.) Although it 's contrasted here
| with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as
| the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing,
| is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive
| "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very
| weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many
| writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny
| range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this
| sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and
| read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.
|
| Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics
| scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand
| reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you
| know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to
| another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings
| true today.
|
| The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this
| issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or
| gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But
| if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has
| influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just
| get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about
| characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying
| to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their
| involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is
| overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue
| that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.
|
| I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling
| effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that
| a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of
| people _in the real world_ who are somehow similar to that
| character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting
| stories that can potentially speak to many readers across
| cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn 't decisive,
| but it's real.
|
| When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical"
| music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary"
| fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond
| with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met
| people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not
| sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary
| classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become
| an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move
| beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is
| secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass
| comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same
| phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems
| to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that
| is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.
|
| In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:
|
| > For the last twenty years American literary culture has been
| unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at
| least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be
| worried.
|
| That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of
| irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason
| literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern
| world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge
| about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire
| or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care
| acceptance.
|
| But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may
| be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who
| the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo,
| alas!"
| lapcat wrote:
| I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most
| plausible part. The argument:
|
| Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined
| dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel
| writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing
| and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has
| suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the
| second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of
| governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the
| humanities.
|
| The second half of the article argues that authors have made a
| tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book
| sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the
| obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
|
| This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real
| explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article
| author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are
| still some important open questions: the exact role of the
| critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.
|
| I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own
| suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the
| problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the
| ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except
| for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is
| derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in
| audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless
| series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry
| don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can
| guarantee a massive hit.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Magazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750
| for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no
| expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a
| magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that
| market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th
| audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The last time I checked (2022), top-tier lit mags will pay
| about $50-100 for a story. They pay mostly in "exposure"
| these days.
| morkalork wrote:
| Many well known authors got their start in magazines like
| Hunter S. Thompson; Where would he be if he was starting out
| today? Probably doing podcasts and the youtube circuit
| instead.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| My assumption is that many people are trying to break into
| the podcast circuit and the vast majority basically fail.
| The winners being those who are best suited for it. My
| assumption would be that Hunter S Thompson happened to be
| suited for a different attention market in a different era.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I agree with you that the economic factors are much more
| persuasive.
|
| I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary
| fiction, do you think that it _hasn 't_ undergone a
| transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to
| where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now
| just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or
| Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a
| transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he
| gives for it?
|
| Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary
| fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who
| mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary
| sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books
| by Sally Rooney.
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm not trying to present myself as an expert in the field,
| and certainly not as a tastemaker. I'm just a regular reader
| of contemporary literary fiction. My personal taste doesn't
| match well with the critics, or with the best-seller charts
| for that matter, so I don't pay a lot of attention to either.
| The article author is much more familiar with the empirical
| facts than I am.
|
| My objection was that, from the perspective of a reader of
| the submitted article, there seems to be a giant plot hole in
| the author's story. The author claims:
|
| > beginning in the 1970s, authors were willing to optimize
| for critical praise at the expense of sales to a degree they
| had not been before.
|
| This may or may not be empirical true, but the question is
| _why_? As far as I could tell, the author never explained
| why.
|
| > It's easy to see how a vicious cycle could have arisen from
| the preoccupation with status, not sales:
|
| > 1. Authors start to optimize for critical praise
|
| You can't just start the argument there! Ironically, the
| author talks about a vicious cycle, but that's actually a
| circular argument. I want to see 1 as the conclusion, not the
| first premise.
|
| > How exactly did this cycle start? I think there's reason to
| believe it began in the 1970s.
|
| That's an answer to the question of _when_ it started, not
| _how_ is started.
|
| The author places as footnote at that point and admits at the
| very end of the article, "Epistemically, this section is the
| shakiest."
|
| There is a theory presented about mass behavior, the behavior
| of novel writers as a group. Yet a psychological motive is
| lacking. Writers all just decided to change their writing
| fundamentally, for no apparent reason?
| stanleykm wrote:
| > My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the
| same as the problem in music and movies: corporate
| consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-
| pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization
|
| Agreed. I think this was a big miss in the article.
| scythe wrote:
| >Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined
| dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel
| writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine
| writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine
| circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the
| internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities
| have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities,
| especially in the humanities.
|
| >The second half of the article argues that authors have made a
| tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book
| sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share
| the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
|
| I think that the second half of the article seems weak because
| the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't
| declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is
| down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of
| English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and
| university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The
| situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment
| media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the
| algorithmic feed.
|
| This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have
| suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the
| field, we need to consider changes in the _relative_ importance
| of various factors.
|
| The expected consequence of this is that authors become _more_
| dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to
| critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the
| article then follows.
|
| There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience
| was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller
| lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary"
| interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for
| the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media
| does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that
| world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not
| have any useful insight here.
| lapcat wrote:
| > departments are open and there are still thousands of
| English professors out there
|
| Wow, that's a pretty low bar.
|
| Ask newly minted PhDs about the job market. The submitted
| article even has a chart and a link about the job market, so
| which part of that are you disputing?
| scythe wrote:
| The answer to your question is just the next paragraph
| after the sentence you quoted.
| lapcat wrote:
| No, it's not? Could you please be more specific?
| allturtles wrote:
| To elaborate on lapcat's point, you have to look at this
| from the point-of-view of a young, would-be aspiring
| literary fiction writer. From that vantage, it doesn't
| matter what the steady state of English/MFA
| professorships is, all that matters is your
| ability/chances to get one of those stable
| professorships. And the odds are very, very low, because
| lots of new PhDs are being produced, the turnover on
| those jobs is tiny (they are very comfortable positions,
| and there are few other job opportunities that use the
| same skills), and ~no new jobs of that kind are being
| created. Even if you get into a top-tier PhD program,
| chances are you will never get a tenure-track position,
| much less achieve tenure. You will either scrape by on a
| series of poorly-paid, labor intensive adjunct teaching
| positions, or abandon academia.
|
| This is all very well-documented, search for "humanities
| phd job crisis" and you will find lots of information,
| e.g. [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/upshot/academic-
| job-crisi...
| simianwords wrote:
| You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives
| opportunities not exist if there were still demand?
|
| If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet -
| wouldn't internet then be the real cause of decline and not
| some vague reason about wages?
| lapcat wrote:
| > You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives
| opportunities not exist if there were still demand?
|
| Novels can take years to write, and sometimes years to sell.
| In the meantime, authors need to pay the bills. Only authors
| who are already famous get substantial advances for unwritten
| books. Therefore, aspiring novelists need sources of income
| to support themselves while they write a novel. Magazine
| writing and academia have been two of the most common sources
| of income for aspiring novelists. If those sources dry up,
| then the supply of aspiring novelists dries up too, and thus
| the supply of novels. Even if there's a demand for novels,
| publishers have little idea who will write a great novel
| before that novel is actually written; publishers can't just
| throw around money to support a bunch of unproven writers.
|
| > If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet -
| wouldn't internet then be the real cause of decline and not
| some vague reason about wages?
|
| Ironically, "because of internet" is the vaguest of reasons.
| Here's what the submitted article said, specifically: "the
| internet killed magazines, not because people's brains turned
| to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue.
| U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to
| 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on
| Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn't rely
| primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are
| thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still
| profitable."
| protocolture wrote:
| >Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or
| artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2]
| encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-
| driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition,
| or that are simply considered serious art by critics.
|
| Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont
| listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary
| rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be
| added to the category. I say category because _anyone_ can write
| fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when
| you add literary to the front.
|
| Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots
| clutch pearls over its literariness.
|
| Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great
| nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"
|
| Meanwhile _genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr_ which contains a
| lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you
| never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.
|
| Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it
| is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from
| process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be
| separated from it. People complained video games could never be
| art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days
| its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| My problem with books is that it takes a lot of time to read a
| book, and it's very difficult to tell beforehand if I'll like the
| book.
| allturtles wrote:
| Isn't this easily solved by reading part of the book and then
| deciding whether you like it enough to continue?
|
| The typical novel takes no longer than watching a season of a
| serialized TV show... and because it is written as a coherent
| whole rather than piecemeal, it is much less likely than a TV
| show to suffer from a bad ending that undermines everything
| that came before it.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| Younger people don't read books as frequently as they did when I
| was young (pre-internet). Bookstores are flooded with junk, with
| the SEO-equivalent of publishing spam having won out on the
| bookshelves. Libraries are as bad or worse. Students do not
| pursue Greek and Latin and classical literature, and have no
| reference point of high culture apart from the distracting now.
|
| And the English language has declined. English has always been a
| scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and
| abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German
| have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal
| indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a
| slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism
| degree.
| ryao wrote:
| I had no idea that literary fiction was a genre rather than a
| generic term for fictional literature until I read this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
|
| There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are
| garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force
| children to read in school. The description "Literary fiction may
| involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or
| reflection on the human condition" is full of antipatterns that
| are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core
| purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is
| why "light novels" out of Japan and adaptations of them are
| popular while literary fiction is not.
| Filligree wrote:
| Literary fiction is not a genre. It's disjoint from genre
| fiction, which contains SF, fantasy and so on.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| when has litfic ever been relevant to the wider culture? There
| are exceptions of course but those are remarkable specifically
| because they are the exception. The average reader has always
| wanted Peyton Place, not Proust
| sandy_coyote wrote:
| If it's true that lit fic started leaving the best seller lists
| around the early 70s, could that also be due to people finding
| other media to express themselves? Like experimental music, film,
| and other fiction genres?
| dsign wrote:
| If I or anybody else publishes a novel about LLMs taking over the
| world, it would be classed as science-fiction, not as social
| commentary.
|
| We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred
| years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and
| "enjoyed" it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able
| to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and
| expect to have the same impact.
|
| Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries
| are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary
| creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction
| works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our
| broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they
| did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn't be
| recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction
| writers... Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful
| works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this
| article refers to.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Video killed the radio star.
|
| I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be
| wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as
| far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just
| literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics
| excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.
|
| Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok
| (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few
| months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had
| sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-
| fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.
|
| Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall
| demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant,
| engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding
| stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still
| be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DVC8XG1X/
| BlackFly wrote:
| According to the author this isn't the case, but the take is
| complicated:
|
| > People don't read books or short stories in magazines anymore
| because they're too busy scrolling? There's data on this:
| according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of
| Americans who "read literature" has fallen from 56.9% in 1982
| to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I'm not even going to bother
| pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their
| phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend
| less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading
| literary fiction in particular because it's weighty, boring,
| dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is
| that the facts are wrong -- the actual size of the fiction
| reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount
| (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts
| were right, it couldn't be correct: in 1955, the number of
| Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it
| is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the
| golden-age of American fiction. What's actually going on?
|
| Most easily digestible evidence submitted by the author is
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/DRBKRA3A086NBEA showing that
| actual per capita expenditure on reading material has increased
| indexed to 2017 dollars...
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Lies, damned lies and statistics, but I'm not sure any of
| that contradicts my view. Print sales are down since the
| pandemic bump, they're back at ~2008 levels when the US
| population was >40m fewer.
|
| That the percentage of people who can read (and do read one
| book per year) is higher, clearly isn't translating to more
| book sales, so people are reading, or at least buying, fewer
| print books.
| sublinear wrote:
| Got too politcal
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| What is "literary fiction"?
|
| Is it possible that the word "literature" just refers to fiction
| which has had time to accumulate gravitas, in part due to being
| old?
|
| If that's true, "literature" production will _always_ appear to
| be in decline ;-)
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Many years ago, I was in Foyles in London, trying buy A Portait
| of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
|
| I scoured the fiction section, surprised that they didn't have
| it. Then I asked a staff member. He told me to look in the
| Literature section....
| HeartStrings wrote:
| Don't forget rise of audible.
| Zaylan wrote:
| I've noticed my reading habits changing too. I used to read a lot
| of literary fiction in my twenties, but now I mostly go for
| nonfiction or short-form stuff. It's not that I think fiction is
| less important, it just feels harder to make space for slow,
| quiet stories that don't offer an immediate payoff.
|
| Maybe it's not just a cultural decline, but a deeper shift in how
| we deal with time, attention, and meaning.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I read books to have fun, and litfic isn't really fun for me. I
| absolutely acknowledge that I read schlock -- mostly progression
| fantasy these days -- because it's immediately fun and engaging
| to me. If I wanna think harder, I read about politics and current
| events, or work on side projects, or maybe play a strategy or
| puzzle game.
| BlackFly wrote:
| Yeah, this is basically the argument of the op. That somewhere
| in the 70s, that whole genre started to target critics as the
| audience instead of the general population and sales have been
| dwindling since that alienation.
| hoseja wrote:
| Whenever I look at some award list of contemporary "serious"
| literature it's filled to the brim with variations on "semi-
| fictional biography of a 20th century human". I have no idea why
| this is. Why is this the only type of story that is "taken
| seriously"?
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| it doesn't help that the craft of writing is being forgotten,
| even if you don't read you can see the same issue in film and
| television.
| narrator wrote:
| I'm a bit of an old timer so I'll throw something out there.
| Entertainment used to be rare. Albums used to cost $20 back when
| that used to be a lot of money. TV was 13 channels, and that was
| if you had cable. People had to read because there was no other
| option. Now there's absolutely unlimited free/cheap entertainment
| and literary fiction is highly politicized because of critics.
| There's no such thing as a controversial novel that gets any
| mention by anyone post 2008.
|
| The last contemporary literary novel I read was Michel
| Houellebecq's "Submission" and I read it only because it was
| controversial, extremely well written and Hourllebecq writes
| novels that appeal to middle aged men. I'm always up for a novel
| like that, but it seems impossible to find these days.
| tgv wrote:
| Plus what 'social media' has done to our attention span. It
| takes some to read a book, especially literature.
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| at least takes away the ability to comprehend substack
| articles
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Wtf is "literary fiction?" Sounds like a genre invented by snobs.
| Same old [people from past generation complaining that x medium
| art made by the current generation is worse/lacks a soul/etc/etc]
| that has been happening since the beginning of art. There is a
| wealth of extremely artful, literary written works being made by
| young people today. Just like there's a wealth of extremely
| artful, boundary pushing music being made by young people today.
| You're not gonna run into most of it if you only listen to top 40
| radio but that doesn't mean it's not there.
|
| Even so, with the "top 40" songs/books/what-have-you, I feel like
| these things are always framed as "cultural decline" when in fact
| it's "cultural change" and you just don't like the thing it's
| changing into currently.
| alexitorg wrote:
| I wonder if the same thing is happening in genres like sci-fi.
| These trends sound familiar: Publishing books to appeal to
| critics, more prestige fiction published, less published white
| male authors, less published books on best seller lists (by
| published I mean published by a professional publishing firm). I
| am not sure that big authors of the 80's and 90's such as Iain
| Banks, Neil Stevenson, Peter F Hamilton would get published now
| days. I've noticed the big sci-fi awards seems to have a lot more
| books with social justice themes than I remember. I find I don't
| like a lot of the newly published sci-fi. I'm reading a lot more
| self published books amd, at least judging by best seller lists
| on amazon, so are a lot of other people. It is a pity, I think
| professionally published books are generally better written,
| perhaps it is the pipeline of authors writing about themes I like
| being broken?
| antupis wrote:
| Pretty much all the best stuff is self-published first weekly
| basis on sites like Royal Road, and then some mainstream
| publisher will pick it up when it gains momentum.
| thom wrote:
| I assume you're joking, but hopefully everyone will be aware
| that Ian (M) Banks was woke as fuck, and Neil Stevenson and
| Peter F Hamilton continue the noble struggle of publishing
| through such minor imprints as HarperCollins and Random House.
| philwelch wrote:
| This is a bad faith response. Of course publishers aren't
| going to drop established best-selling authors; alexitorg's
| point is that these authors would not get the same chance if
| they were starting out today.
|
| Also, I think Banks was more of an old fashioned utopian
| socialist, which is very different from "woke as fuck".
| thom wrote:
| I guess it's at least some comfort that Banks didn't have
| to live to see a world where a white man couldn't publish a
| series about gender-bending space communists.
| metalman wrote:
| it's quite clear to me that the author, and peers of the article
| dont get out enough. the issue is not the decline of literary
| fiction, it is rather the fact of fiction it lself is no longer
| possible, which is quite evident when listening to the surreal,
| harrowing, epic tales to be told by the people all around the
| edges, haltingly, and reluctantly told, but everywhere. we no
| longer live in a "golden age" where we can mull over the causes
| and effects of human lives lived large and bold, as the
| inescapable reality is serving you coffee, in a 3d printed sci-fi
| setting, the furnishings hard, the light eminating from an
| incomprehensable device operating at frequencys absent from any
| literary narative, a high whine wavering beween revelation and
| impending doom, more in line with some mythical description of
| the advent of deamons and spirits than anything a civilised and
| literate culture would ever allude to. Cervantes and Hobbs stand
| as proxy's for two possible paths, Hobbs bieng the overwheming
| choice, all of the impossible to reconcile inconsistansies,
| simply ommited from our narative, and twisted into a
| booming(pun.acknowedged) busniess of exporting our conradictions.
| krapp wrote:
| cuil story, bro.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I don't see it. For one thing, the classic creative pieces of
| literary fiction continue to sell and be read (and we don't even
| know how many other people read pirated or freely available
| copies of them every day), while more new fiction than ever in
| human history is being published constantly.
|
| About the vast majority of that new fiction, we really have no
| easy way to tell which of it will one day be considered literary
| fiction too. Many of the books and other pieces of creative
| fiction we consider "greats" and literary today, were at some
| point just, fiction. Tehir future reputation wasn't yet known.
|
| Not quite literary fiction, but Shakespeare's plays were their
| era's versions of Hollywood films for the masses, but look at
| them now. Similar applies to many books.
| resource_waste wrote:
| "Poets lie too much"
|
| What is the goal of fiction? Escapism. What does it matter if its
| deep or shallow? The deep ones arent entertaining enough?
|
| If you are expecting a character to enlighten you on a new
| problem, you are being corrupted by lies.
|
| From Nietzsche to Plato, its agreed, fiction corrupts. Using it
| for anything outside entertainment is horrifying.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Book sales figures are so private that I don't know how to
| validate this, but my intuition is that this is just the mirror
| of the rise of genre fiction. It was never unpopular in the first
| place, and there's little if anything left of the 1960s-era
| consensus that genre fiction is fundamentally lesser. I read a
| lot, and it's just never occurred to me that I have to find
| literary fiction if I want something deep or thought-provoking.
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