Venkatesh Rao

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.

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.

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.

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.

There will be a rush of talent trying to do the Woolf/Hemingway/Fitzgerald type thing. EUs will be in a countercyclic slump.

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)

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 …

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.