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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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Hmm your Weimar thread had some stuff about art from the losing side of the evolution of modernist culture 🤔
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It all fed into the mainstream as subtext. Remember, we’re playing the Germans this time around 😬
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Good question. I dunno. Germany and France probably see themselves carrying the burden while they wait it out for us to go either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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