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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Replying to
I just put together why: Elder gods are gods of incomprehensibility. That's going to be an even larger theme this century than it was a hundred years ago. Little wonder they feel relevant / ascendant again.
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Replying to
1/ The "Cthulhu Mythos" is an invention of August Derleth. Ugh. First, "EU" is a commercial construction that postdates the 20s, and is colored by a 2020s understanding of "platforms". A more robust explanation is writers cranking out story types they could write, at top speed.
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