{"id":22098,"date":"2019-01-05T23:41:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-05T20:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=22098"},"modified":"2019-01-05T23:41:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-05T20:41:16","slug":"trends-in-imaginative-genre-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2019\/01\/05\/trends-in-imaginative-genre-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Trends in imaginative genre fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the ebook coal-face, “Through a Glass Darkly: The Trends of 2018 and 2019”<\/a> among commercial fantasy and science-fiction writers. Trends that interest me…<\/p>\n

* “publishing a million words and more a year … is becoming standard practice [for fiction] … some will publish a fantasy pentalogy on a weekly basis.”<\/p>\n

So… presumably they’ve got some kind of flash-card system that runs off a coded script that semi-randomises a canned-plot formula, and then the author does an improvised speech-to-text riff to each flash card?<\/p>\n

* indie “audiobooks are now the fastest growing segment of the book market” and moving toward “full cast recording”, music etc.<\/p>\n

Great! The gold-standard for that is free, Phil Dragash’s magnificent full-cast unabridged reading of LOTR<\/em>, with FX and the movie music expertly woven in.<\/p>\n

* illustrated episodic “Web novels”.<\/p>\n

Cool, I’ve not seen any… but apparently they’re huge in China and I’ll keep a look out for English ones. Although anything episodic (other than podcasts) is a huge turn off these days. Give me a complete finished story.<\/p>\n

* apparently there’s a growing “American market for giant robot battlefields and taut political manoeuvrings”. <\/p>\n

Good old fashioned knights-in-armour, as mecha-tech, by the sound of it. Not my thing, and del Toro got to the ‘giant mechas vs. Lovecraftian-looking monsters’ thing several years ago, and possibly there’s something similar going on in current Mythos fiction that I don’t know about. But… interesting for being yet another way to twist the stock medieval warfare adventure into a future-tech setting. Presumably there must be public domain novels from the 1920s, where the plots and descriptions can be re-purposed to become that type of science-fiction?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the ebook coal-face, “Through a Glass Darkly: The Trends of 2018 and 2019” among commercial fantasy and science-fiction writers. …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odd-scratchings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}