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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      Hmm. Can any long-arc extended universe type stuff be traced to the 1920s? Especially in genre fiction? Considering a hypothesis that it was a slump decade for EUs.

      11 replies 3 retweets 18 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      There’s a weird period between 1890s-1910s when pulp fiction was enabled by cheap offset printing on cheap paper. You’ve got some EUs like Tarzan in the 1910s, but the big ones begin in the late 20s. Buck Rogers is 1928. Flash Gordon is 1934.

      2 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      Poirot is one of the rare EUs I can think of that booted up in the 20s. And it’s a weaker EU than Sherlock Holmes a couple of decades earlier.

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      The Lost Generation artistic boom is mainly stand-alone literary fiction. EUs are a genre thing. So if I’m right WW1+Spanish Flu plus end of baroque-Victorian age made EUs hard. The world itself was a fragmented mess. No reference implementation universe to work with.

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      The modernists (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hemingway...) broke with the very complete and fully realized baroque condition of Victorian civilization. It had become artistically sterile. But the new world, while generative, was still in pieces. Too incoherent EUs.

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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      EUs, whether MCU in 2015 or Holmes’ Victorian/Edwardian England in 1915, require a real world that’s almost complete but not yet dead.

      9:53 PM - 19 Oct 2020
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      • DAVID SUGARMAN -- Kerry Gordon Brander
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          EUs are fraught with cosmic gestalt tensions. Moriarty symbolizes shadowy specter of coming European unraveling after a century of relative order post-Napoleonic wars. Tarzan a rejection of its essential irredeemable fatal corruption.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Likewise MCU, LOTR, and Nolan Batman trilogy all evoke a rhyming modern condition. A universe that’s simultaneously on the brink of fully-realized perfection and unraveling from a fatal flaw.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Poirot too doesn’t really pick up momentum till the 1930s. There are 6 Poirot novels in the 20s and 15 in the 30s. Partly of course Christie getting warmed up but also partly I think pacing the world being born. Poirot is born with the world. A modernist and psychologist.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Astonishing doesn’t launch golden age sci-fi till the 30s. I think we’d find similar patterns in other world-building genres. SF from the 20s is barely known outside of genre historians. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells are known. Asimov and Heinlein are known. In between few are.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Transitional characters are interesting. The Phantom was between Tarzan and Superman and is noticeably no longer popular in the US (huge elsewhere in the world for complex reasons). Hybrid Victorian and Modern universes.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Point being, the next decade is going to be the worst time to launch EU franchises. It will be easier to do literary fiction than genre for a while. Weird inversion. BUT!!!! If you can launch in this winter culture, you could be as big as Agatha Christie.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          There will be a rush of talent trying to do the Woolf/Hemingway/Fitzgerald type thing. EUs will be in a countercyclic slump.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          So... I rarely make predictions like this, but I think there will be a genre fiction recession for a decade. And less confidentially, a literary fiction boom (stuff people actually read, not MFA program lit)

          2 replies 3 retweets 10 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Kapil Gupta

          I was going back and forth about PG Wodehouse. I’d classify it as Edwardian nostalgia mostly set in the 20s. He wrote mostly in the 20s/30s but began writing it pre-WW1. Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth both first appear in 1915.https://twitter.com/kapilgupta/status/1318421606499274753?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Kapil Gupta @kapilgupta
          Replying to @vgr
          Interesting thread/hypothesis. Not sure if PG Wodehouse would fall into your categories for EUs? I think the first Bertie Wooster/Jeeves came out ~1915 but didn’t take off until after the War in the 20s.
          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          He’s not a hybrid between old and new. He was just pure escapist nostalgia for a vanishing world even in his own time. He basically ignored all the bad shit going down. It’s basically a funny version of Downton Abbey.

          2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 19
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          Wonder if there’s a good survey of world literature 1910-1940 in relation to its historical context.

          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 20
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          Hmm randomly trawling for stuff down this bunny trail I remember reading most of the Biggles series as a kid. A fictional fighter pilot turned “air detective” with career spanning WWI to 1950s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biggles 

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 20
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted John Bissell

          Hmm. HP Lovecraft is to post WW1 apocalyptic conditions as Godzilla is to post WW2? 🤔 An extended anti-universe of forces that destroy human attempts at creating universes.https://twitter.com/bysl/status/1318446561190322177?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          John Bissell @bysl
          Replying to @vgr
          HP Lovecraft started writing in 1919 and continued through the 20s. It’s pretty well-developed and has held on through the years. Pretty niche up until the recent HBO show though.
          0 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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        15. End of conversation

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