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.
Conversation
There will be a rush of talent trying to do the Woolf/Hemingway/Fitzgerald type thing. EUs will be in a countercyclic slump.
1
2
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
3
12
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.
Quote Tweet
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
3
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
2
Wonder if there’s a good survey of world literature 1910-1940 in relation to its historical context.
2
1
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.
1
1
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.
Quote Tweet
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.
7
6
Okay this thread finally comes together with Alan Moore mashing up P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. I finally understand the 1920s. It’s not there wasn’t an extended universe. It was just underground Cthulhu stuff. Like a mushroom extended universe. scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/447926.html
2
1
10
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.
1
4
11



