{"id":473,"date":"2006-08-09T08:44:25","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T08:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/09\/genre-followup\/"},"modified":"2006-08-09T08:44:25","modified_gmt":"2006-08-09T08:44:25","slug":"genre-followup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/09\/genre-followup\/","title":{"rendered":"Genre Follow-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/the_sorry_state_of_genre_ficti.php\">my weekend post on genre fiction<\/a>, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here.<\/p>\n<p>Over at Brad DeLong&#8217;s, he <a href=\"http:\/\/delong.typepad.com\/sdj\/2006\/08\/accelerando.html\">highlights my comments about story pacing<\/a>, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days, compared to the past. While there&#8217;s no denying that many books have swelled, I think that&#8217;s sort of orthogonal to the sort of pace I was talking about&#8211; you may or may not think that the action advances the plot quickly enough, but there&#8217;s more happening at any given moment in most modern books and movies than there was in the past. Peter Jackson&#8217;s <cite>The Return of the King<\/cite> goes on for three hours, but there&#8217;s no good place in the movie to get up and go to the bathroom&#8211; there&#8217;s <strong>stuff<\/strong> happening all the time.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, Todd Suomela says that the apparent loss of near-future SF is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toddsuomela.com\/ecec\/2006\/08\/existential_threats_and_silly.html\">all about the Fifties<\/a>, when things seemed cleaner and clearer than they do today. There&#8217;s probably something to that, though my vague impression is that the SF of the Thirties wasn&#8217;t all that radically different in outlook than that of the Fifties, despite being a much darker period in world history. I&#8217;m not much of a historian of the field, though, so I could be way off base.<\/p>\n<p>And, of course, there&#8217;s free=wheeling discussion at Making Light, both <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/007820.html#007820\">following the YouTube explosion<\/a>, and in <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/007823.html#007823\">John M. Ford&#8217;s response<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It also picked up a link from The Valve, which I mention mostly as an excuse to link their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thevalve.org\/go\/valve\/article\/samurai_champloo_anachronism_revision_hybridity_eclecticism_and_all_that\/\">analysis of two deeply odd episodes<\/a> of <cite>Samurai Champloo<\/cite>. There&#8217;s even an attempt to tie in the &#8220;and then a meteor killed them all&#8221; ending of the wasabi zombie episode, which is pretty impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to my weekend post on genre fiction, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here. Over at Brad DeLong&#8217;s, he highlights my comments about story pacing, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/09\/genre-followup\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Genre Follow-Up<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-movies","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}