here's one thing LEGACY OF IRON made me realize, though: you know what genre of fiction, long totally extinct, merits a revival? sports fiction
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back in the days of the pulps, there were pulps for all genres, and one of the biggest was sports stories -- fictional stories about prizefights or races or what have you Robert E. Howard wrote some *brilliantly* fun boxing stories
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closest thing I've read in years to sports fiction was a mystery novel my mom bought, the title and author of which escape me and googling fails, but it was a mystery where the protagonist was a football player and the author was a former professional football player
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the mystery in that book was stupid and incompetent and uninteresting the sequences where the protagonist was playing football or practicing football were involving and garking brilliant I kept thinking, "why couldn't this just be a novel about sports? it would be terrific!"
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obvious answer: there is a book industry community around literary novels there is a book industry community around romance novels there is a book industry community around science fiction novels there is a book industry community around mystery novels ...a sports novel? what?
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If some author wrote a popular sports novel targeting the mainstream audience, nobody would know how to sell it, which reviewers to push it to, or even where to put it in the bookstore.
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Replying to @hradzka
Genre evolution is fascinating in the same way that political party evolution is fascinating. The old thesis / antithesis / synthesis dialectic works, but plays out - it digests everything it can, and then can't eat the rest. Also, part of human character is preferring novelty >
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so there is a need for something new...but what? Old tired systems are old and tired...but they have infrastructure. Also, the incentives push everyone to HODL. Switch away from X a day too early, and you're punished. Hold to the bitter end, and you were blindsided...but normal
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Humans are social, and risk averse. If you switch early, you both starve AND are made fun of. The latter is almost worse than the former. So everyone is incentivized to hang on and not change until it's too late. Also, there's a Schelling point with the old genre >
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If spy novels are selling, than the "stay" strategy is VERY SIMPLE to implement : you keep buying / selling the same authors and the same plots. If spy novels are getting played out, though...what do you switch to? What's new? Football novels? Police novels? Nurse novels?
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The really interesting thing about 2018 is that we now have a "reserve army of unemployed [ by Big Five publishers ]". In 1985 you had NO IDEA what the new thing was. In 2018 you can look at Amazon kindle sales figures and realize "wait - dino porn is a thing!?!?"
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dino porn is *so* 2015 i think? things zoom by so fast 0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes Reply Retweet Like View Tweet activity End of conversation
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*Hugo-nominated
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