Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 22 notes
I s2g Anne McCaffrey must have mixed up her How to Write Romantic Fantasy and How to Write Romance Novels notes at some point
Like, something you can see reflected in how the female protagonists relate to men in the Pern, Talents (which does not get nearly enough attention for being all late-‘70s incest-“gifted” ESP special children when the core novels were published in the early 90s), and especially Crystal Singer series is that before she was a big-name author she had been a fixture of institutional SFF fandom and as her publishing career took off at the start of the '70s she divorced her husband and moved to Ireland.
Anne McCaffrey is absolutely a writer of romantic fantasy romance novels for women who got divorced in the early '70s and the daughters they hope won’t have to.
Photo reblogged from certified dejenerate with 632 notes
The Running Man (1987)
why is LA always so fucking dark in the future, I saw a video of LA this morning and the sun was so bright it blew out my monitor
Like I was saying, ‘80s visions of the future were often really “neon noir” pulp detective renaissance, lifting from an aesthetic where specifically in Los Angeles (see also the 1982 Blade Runner) it is nighttime.
Post reblogged from left unity with 8,338 notes
Due to the exciting successes of ‘weird horror’ and 'hopepunk’, we’re happy to announce a new slate of literary genres for release in Q3 2023. From now on you can expect to start seeing marketing TikToks and insufferable thinkpieces responding to marketing TikToks about:
- Nicepunk
- Eastern Orthodox Fantasy
- Old Adult
- Cosmic Horror But Without The Racist Parts
- Yiffbong
- Ahistorical Romance
- Political Snoozer
- Erotic Mystery
- How Does This Have A Netflix Show It Just Came Out?
- Mormon Realism
- Dog Isekai
- Shampoo Ad Novelization
- Rock-hard SciFi
- Smileglad
- Nasty Fiction
- Cosmic Horror But It’s Only The Racist Parts
- 'The Scottish Genre’
- Penis Books
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 98 notes
My take on this missing submarine is it’s part of the thing where since Harambe the world operates on novelistic logic. Like, it’s not even that it’s poetic justice for these billionaires to die so much as that it’s a dramatic event arising from the confluence of several major themes of the contemporary world
Also I’ll say the prospect of awaiting inevitable death trapped at the bottom of an ocean in an ersatz high tech tin can with a few other representatives of a wildly wealthy novelty-seeking class is very 80s horror, that could have been a Tales From the Crypt episode back when it was Black Mirror about yuppies.
(Fuck if I know how you’d shoehorn in the practical effects gore and tits.)
Post with 28 notes
Honestly cyberpunk’s not that insightful about or even really about neoliberalism so much as that a lot of the early defining stuff should really be counted as part of the “neon noir” 80s detective renaissance, so obviously “a client hires a private agent to resolve some shady issue in a world too complex and multilayered for legitimate authorities to exercise hegemony over” is the basic narrative drive
Post reblogged from i am reginald reagan aka RAGIN' RAYGUNS with 10 notes
i’ve read two Philip K Dick novels, both of which involved the Earth being gradually abandoned as it becomes uninhabitable, in one of them because of radioactive dust, in the other because of global warming. Recently I started on a book of his short stories, and a lot of them involve people living in the aftermath of apocalyptic wars. It seems similar, but neither of the novels involve wars. The radioactive dust in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was unexplained iirc, whereas one of the short stories I read had the world becoming uninhabitable due to radioactive fallout from a nuclear war. Anyway, more of a fixation than id realized, though idk exactly a fixation on what
Dick’s mind is really in the period from the end of WWII to the consolidation of the Cold War in the ‘50s, I’d say it’s a projection of the pre-ICBM fear of nuclear war as the inevitable third step of progression in World War strategic bombing which would finish off the entire old European system of civilization
Post reblogged from Old and grumpy with 52 notes
Escapist books aimed at women have more sex than escapist books aimed at men which I think is interesting. Like the typical male fantasy lit is like Punchy McSquarejaw who Fights or Shoots and maybe he has a girlfriend but she’s generally a bit superfluous. And then you have girl wish fulfillment books about falling in love with a vampire or dark fairy. And maybe she is also like an assassin or wizard or has a sword or something, but the war and fighting is secondary to the fantasy of being dicked down by a broody sadboy. And sex is part of this fantasy, often explicitly. But guy books spend more time describing spaceships or shootouts or fistfights than sex scenes, even tho the stereotype is that men’s fantasies are mostly sexual
I bet @autisticandroids will have thoughts on this.
This is a very valid and interesting point. Gonna reblog it to see if anyone following or visiting has some insight and in case I think of something.
Reading fanfiction these past few years I definitely think female sexuality seems to be more thematic, where it pervades the whole thing, including the non-fuck scenes, things like “the dynamic between these two characters and how one invoked the other’s use-value in ways that shifts their self-value”, where male sexuality seems to be more purely sensory, confined to scenes, actions, and descriptions that can be included or omitted to various degrees to serve the fiction product requirements without affecting the arc of the story
Post reblogged from youzicha with 148 notes
it’s weird how much “science fiction” involves ESP or other “psychic” abilities. I feel like there’s just this like 20th century woo mindset that accepted psychic powers, potentially old fashioned superstitions like poltergeists considered as psychic phenomena, as well as alien encounters. And you get some sci fi from that (especially let’s say AA Attanasio), but also that’s definitely where Stephen King is coming from so you can have aliens as well as vampires as threats to small towns in Maine.
Apparently a lot of this is due to a single guy! John W. Campbell, Jr. became a big believer and promoter of parapsychology/“psionics”, so in the 1950s lots of science-fiction authors used it as a story premise to increase their chances of getting published in Astounding, and this solidified the concept as an SF trope…
Post with 1 note
Kind of want to do a Chandler pastiche where the big hush-hush MacGuffin some guy has at his Hollywood Hills spread is a child pornograph
Post reblogged from alluring heian courtesan with 953 notes
Reminder that most of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories are set in or near Massachusetts, so you should be mentally giving all the characters Boston accents.
“Oh my gahd it’s an eldritch harrah from beyahnd the stahs.”
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