Here is a problem I have. I wonder if you share it. Not reading new things. Specifically, new fiction. And in that I mostly mean “genre” books, like mysteries and sci-fi.
When I was young I’d go down to Grayling where they had a paperback swap store which specialized in, or at least had a large section of, sci-fi. Not unusually, they also had a ladies room, an actual separate room, for Harlequins and those other numbered(!) romance books. Hard by the sci-fi were the westerns and mysteries. The general books sat by themselves, rather forlorn.
Anyway, I grabbed tons of this stuff. I even read the bad books. Not knowing they’d be bad in advance, of course, but I’d stick through the poorly written ones to see how they’d come out. I recall hearing Harlan Ellison wrote dirty books, and as a teen, I was avid to find them. I did. One collection had a story of a being with three pertinents, which he found relief only in the holes of a bowling ball. Yes, really.
That might have been in an anthology, and maybe not by Ellison himself. But that was all I needed of him. I wanted girls, not weirdos.
Anthologies were big then, too. Short stories and novellas crammed in cheap print book club editions. This was also before collector mania hit and nobody cared about the form, only the words. These were a good inexpensive ways to get a lot of them.
Do they still have book clubs?
But then sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, books got bigger and thicker. Older novels didn’t run to more than 250 or 300 pages. They fit nicely in pocket paperbacks.
Which incidentally no longer exist. The last of them are stopping being printed even as you read this. No more orange- and green-colored edges!
Anyway, to be a proper well considered book somehow meant becoming obese in pages. And authors, and publishers, were never satisfied by single books. How many times have you (in the old days) gone into a used bookstore, seen an intriguing cover, read the blurb, found something of interest, then saw the small print “Book 12 of the acclaimed 38 part series” or the like? Back on the shelf it goes. I hadn’t, and haven’t, the patience to search for its mates.
A short while ago I saw that a noted author died, one Dan Simmons, of whom I had never heard. But many who I respect had, and they lamented his loss as they gushed about his prose. I looked him up. I quote Google search: “The Hyperion Cantos is a critically acclaimed four-novel science fiction tetralogy…”
Tetralogy.
Used to be a trilogy was de rigueur in sci-fi. Inflation hit and now it’s tetralogy. Or whatever numbers comes after. Frank Herbert ruined me on series: he should have stuck with Dune alone. He’s dead, but books in his name, or rather namesake, still appear. Energy is going into squeezing old wine skins that have dried up decades before.
Here is a portion of the books done in the name of Dune (I couldn’t get more in the screenshot):
If you’re in love with the world of Dune, then this isn’t enough. If you aren’t, then the size is intimidating—and off-putting. Why should I start on this?
But size is a silly complaint. If Simmons’s, or anybody’s, books are as good as my mutuals say they are (one said an ending brought him to tears), then what’s four more books?
Yet, in my weakness, I find my interest wanes.
It isn’t that size is always a barrier. I am currently on my eighth pass through Patrick O’Brian’s Maturin-Martin twenty volume book, the greatest in the English language. (The horrible old Leopard has just landed on Desolation Island after running into an iceberg, and an American whaler with its valuable forge has been spotted.) It’s the same situation as Dune. You can pick up a book mid-series and get something out of it, but not nearly as much as starting from the beginning. And that means a commitment. (One advantage O’Brian had: he wrote all his books alone.)
So size isn’t the real problem. It’s not that now I read less, or that I won’t read new things, but what I read has changed. I just finished a book, new to me, another compilation, this of Ellery Queen mysteries. Biographies, history written by non-current academics, memoirs, philosophy and the like still hold interest. I shy away from many newly written books, though. They worry me. How woke will they be? Did AI “write” this? (One notable sci-fi author, I was told, boasts of his use of AI.)
But I haven’t read any new sci-fi in a long time, in spite of what are very likely terrific new entries, such as issued by friends at the Based Book Sale. Is this a symptom of advancing age? A buildup of cussedness? A sadness of the passing the great unfulfilled, and (now I see) unfillable, promises of science?
I don’t think I’m the only one who suffers this malaise. A good author says he now takes to giving away electronic copies of his books, in the hopes true fans buy paper copies. He said, what I think is true of new writers, “Writing is a side-gig to your real life. The age of the Stephen King rockstar is over.”
It isn’t screens, either. I haven’t been to the movies in more than fifteen years. I have no cable, pay for no streaming services. I have an antenna, but up where we live I can only reliably get one channel (I can’t even remember what it is). I do watch electronic repair videos and old movies on YouTube (and not on a phone).
And, as said, I still read widely, but for fiction only old novels. It seems the promise of new fiction isn’t there; at least, for me. Is this just me?
Here are the various ways to support this work:
- Subscribe at Substack (paid or free)
- Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs
- Zelle: use email: matt@wmbriggs.com
- Buy me a coffee
- Paypal
- Other credit card subscription or single donations
- Hire me
- Subscribe at YouTube
- PASS POSTS ON TO OTHERS
Discover more from William M. Briggs
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Too long didn’t read.
Reading is a construct of the white male patriarchy.
It’s not just you. SciFi and Fantasy died in the 1980’s, and was buried under a mountain of dreck in the 1990’s. However – There are a few bright spots.
The “Garrett, P.I.” fantasy gumshoe detective series (complete at 14 books) by Glen Cook is very good. You can read any individual novel with no background, but you get more by starting at the beginning (Sweet Silver Blues). Things that happen stay happened, and the world around Garrett changes along with him. Especially after the great war (having lasted three generations) abruptly ends.
If you have any interest in fantasy humor, then please read the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. They’re the finest works in English since Kipling. Each one stands by itself, by they run in series by main character. Again, things that happen stay happened, so you’ll get more by following along. A couple were turned into pretty decent made-for-TV short serials in England – “The Color of Magic” (based on the first 2 books in the setting) and “Going Postal” (a much later and less farcical novel).
I will recommend without reservation anything published by Raconteur Press (headed by LawDog). They started up three years ago or so, and have published dozens of anthologies and novels. They proudly publish pulp fiction (in various genres) for men and boys. https://www.raconteurpress.com/
If you want some light SciFi, try starting with the “Quarter Share” series by Nathan Lowell (a Coast Guard veteran). There are no battles, no aliens, no galaxy changing events. These are novels about a young man (“Call me Ishmael.”) pulling himself up by his bootstraps on a Solar Clipper cargo ship. Ishmael can make a good cup of coffee, so he is not without skills. (There are 15 books written as 5 trilogies, plus another trilogy, a stand-alone novel, and a short story that all tie-in as background.) Nathan has novels in other series, as well. “The Wizard’s Butler” is an excellent stand-alone story. (Now with a sequel that isn’t as good. He had a stroke and his daughter is “helping” him write.)
I am quite partial to the “tactically correct romance” (anything beyond kissing happens off-screen, but the blood is all on-screen) novels by Dorothy Grant. Her husband Peter (a South Africa bush wars vet) writes really good action in SciFi and Western genres. I’ve enjoyed everything J. L. Curtis has written (SciFi, Western, and modern SpecOps/Western). I immediately purchase and read everything Alma Boykin and Cedar Sanderson publish. (These folks, along with LawDog, are “the North Texas Troublemakers, a shooting club with a writing problem”, are friends or co-conspirators with Raconteur Press, and have their own blogs.)
For cozy humor, try “The Chronicles of Luna City” by Celia Hayes and Jeanne Hayden. Richard Astor-Hall, a celebrity chef on the run from a very public disaster, wakes up with a hangover in a tiny Texas town full of history, personality, and personalities. Now complete as a 12 volume series, you really do have to start at the beginning.
No, not just you. Yes, many of us are thinking and feeling the same way! The publication years of the books I read are always moving further and further back. I think it has to do with what Chesterton observed, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” And the truth of a modern secularist author, to again quote Chesterton, is that “He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.” We don’t want books that make us feel pinched and small; we read to breathe air coming in from a window that looks out onto the eternal.
When I was growing up, being an avid reader was touted as the way to success in life. I was not an avid reader and wondered if I was missing out on something. Looking back, It was good that I was not. The world is full of junk values; and I’m glad that I minimized my exposure to them.
I’m at least your age, probably older, and I read both novels and non fiction constantly. I’ve made the mistake of reading 21st century novels and history, and far too much of it is woke. I stick mostly to books published before 2000, and there’s plenty I still haven’t read, so I’m not going to run out of new-to-me things to read.
The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian is the best series I’ve ever read.
I’d also recommend the “Alphabet” mysteries by Sue Grafton, the Travis McGee mystery series of John D. MacDonald, and the Joe Picket mysteries by C. J. Box, although the last few entries in that series have kinda run out of steam, in my opinion. For science fiction, the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold is terrific.
Even most mass market paperbacks aren’t really the “pocket paperbacks” of old. Either because they are too large or (more commonly) because they are too thick. People still haven’t gotten out of the idea that every great story needs to be the length of Dune or The Lord of the Rings, especially in the speculative fiction market. I have some old paperbacks that actually do fit in your pocket, including multiple copies of Robert Ripley’s delightful Believe or Not series, but it’s very hard to find things like that after the 80’s. (One joy of getting into Japanese fiction is the fact that the common Bunkobon format really is a pocket paperback: about 4 by 6 inches, and not very thick in most cases. But they are if anything even worse with the long series.)
For new fiction I do find some stuff, but it’s almost entirely by word of mouth. Brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble are hellscapes when it comes to finding good new fiction (their non-fiction isn’t horrible if you look in the right places, but the fiction is full of authors I’ve never heard of and that I instantly put down after reading a page of their prose; my local store doesn’t even stock popular authors like Jim Butcher or Brandon Sanderson anymore.) Better works are available on online stores, but online stores seem to be set up in such a way that you’ll never actually find what you are looking for without a direct link.
I’m with you Briggs.
I’m a Jack London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Louis L’Amour reader.
The nice thing is my memory is so defective that I can enjoy these over and over again in the course of a couple of years.
Definitely not you.
Writing has changed, or if not writing, publishing has changed.
It seems obvious that written works are chosen for publication on the basis of 3 primary criteria: 1) How much does it weigh? Obviously BIGGER books must be serious books and everyone is all about ‘serious’ fiction…because it’s like….serious and Women’s Book Clubs love that stuff. 2) Is the author a woman? Because when it comes to telling searing truths about patriarchal oppression, truths that can reshape an emotional landscape and explain why the world is the way it is, ya gotta get a woman author who specializes in searing truths that can be read in Women’s Book Clubs! …. and 3) Is the primary theme one which emphasizes how important Diversity, Inclusivity, or Equity must be? Of course they must be important. The world we live in (yacky poo) was made back when no one recognized how critical DIE actually is.
That being said, there are some great books out there. And there are some equally great movies out there. Not all are current, of course, most of the best aren’t. But there are some… hard to find, kind of obscure or perhaps forgotten, never on the end-of-aisle displays at B&Noble for all the typical reasons. Some that come quickly to mind, trigged by the lists above…
If you love Patrick O’Brian you should read Forester’s ‘Horatio Hornblower’ books. If you enjoy Ellery Queen, then you should try Raymond Chandler’s ‘Philip Marlowe’ mysteries. I, too, have never read the ‘quatrology’ which is Hyperion by Simmons….but several of his other books are worthwhile: The Terror, and Flashback were both memorable. If you like a strong, recurrent main character, Stephen Hunter’s ‘Bob Lee Swagger’ books are addictive…but I’d probably only really recommend the first 2 or 3 in the series. Thomas Perry’s characters typically do no repeat but “The Butcher’s Boy” is compelling (and does repeat). Don Winslow is excellent and I’d strongly recommend “The Power of the Dog” for a look at Mexican drug cartels that convinces you to never go to Mexico. Robert Parker’s cowboy duo of ‘Virgil Cole & Everett Hitch’ are well worth following for a short, fast-read, 4 book series beginning with ‘Appaloosa’. The dialogue alone is worth the price of admission. And if we’re talking dialogue you can’t beat Elmore Leonard in practically everything he wrote.
But I’d say the best writer out there in the here & now is Mark Helprin who produced the unforgetable, albeit large and heavy, ‘Winters Tale’.
The list of outstanding fiction is long and tastes, of course, may differ. But it is out there….just as excellent films are out there. But you won’t typically find the books front and center in the Big Bookstores…and you won’t find the movies headlined at the local multiplex. Rather they creep into nooks and crannies more stumbled upon than not….manytimes from articles and lists just like these.
Yep, finding the same thing. Unfortunately many of the good authors have died. We lost Michael F Flynn a couple of years ago. You may find his stuff enjoyable.
Briggs, have you tried ONE PIECE ?
People have a variety of different reading habits. So the best thing to accommodate that is to preserve a variety of different books. Unfortunately, that is not happening. The old good things are being pushed out by the new. And people did not use to operate this way; they used to preserve the old. Yes, they are available online, but that is not the same thing.
As far as old authors go, one thing that many were good at is pacing. Maybe that is why books were shorter. I listened to The Time Machine a while back, it is only 4 hours, but there is a lot of story packed into those 4 hours. The Lord of the Rings is a long book, but a lot happens in it; some modern authors might require two to three times as many pages to tell the same story. Around the world in 80 days is another one, only about 7 or 8 hours, but plenty of things that occur.
Well, I do knpw that Malchi Martin and David McCullough were great authors….
The Final Conclave and John Adams, respectively.
God bless, C-Marie
First of all, you only need to visit a big chain bookstore to know that the fiction market is driven by women who want to fantasize about being raped by a werewolf but don’t have the imagination to make up a fantasy on their own.
Second, the likely reason prestige author’s books are so hefty and their series endless is that there aren’t any remotely decent editors in the publishing industry anymore.
(The reason genre publishing is dominated by a few aging prestige authors is of course that churning out feminist rape porn is what is profitable, so publishers don’t have any interest in finding new authors and would rather churn out “GoT: Absent Fathers Mean Spoiled Child, part eleven” because then they don’t have to do any work, for which they have no training regardless.
However, it’s not so much that there isn’t good new genre fiction, but that there is so much good old genre fiction that most people haven’t read. Most new authors very obviously are illiterate, by which I mean they do not have an understanding of the literature. For the experienced reader, novel-length genre fiction inevitably results in realizing that the author has re-hashed a story that an already more successful author wrote 60-plus years ago, but that the newer author hasn’t read much older fiction and clearly thinks he re-invented the wheel. There are plenty of younger authors who write well, and can craft a good short story or novella, but those don’t make money so, as you say, they give away free samples and subsist on donations.
The problem is technology.
Spider Robinson’s short story “Melancholy Elephants” explains the problem. It is about how perpetual copyright would end civilization because everything men create is derivative of what came before us. There are no stories that have not been told, in some fashion, many times before. The problem Robinson’s story does not predict is that even with limited copyright, anyone can now go find those old stories, usually for free. It used to be that if you were retelling the Anabasis in a sci fi book, some other guy’s sci fi retelling of the Anabasis was out of print or at least not stocked on the shelves. Now you look up your book online and immediately get links to multiple other similar books, many of them legally available for free (and the rest illegally).
This means that when those illiterate zellenial men who do actually read real books (the women only read softcore porn, except when they read the explicit stuff) find something “new” that they like, when they are finished they are invited down a rabbit hole of similar books from fifty to two thousand four hundred years ago.
Then you have the few modern authors who are well-read, like Gene Wolfe or Dan Simmons, who have an extensive knowledge of literature both genre and otherwise and who deliberately borrow from that body of literature in ways that reshape the old stories for a different perspective. They are able to create something “new” by combining a broad spectrum of literary elements and references — but only if the reader has a similar depth of literary understanding. Otherwise it goes over the reader’s head, which is why there are myriad blogs and even published books which exist to explain Long Sun or Hyperion or similar works to readers who don’t understand the literary references.
Probably there is no solution to this problem. Art forms have a life cycle. We know the CIA killed classical music, but also, if there were any hopeful up-and-coming classical composers, whatever they think of Beethoven already did it. Unless Mozart did first. If you want to compose “classical” music that isn’t just poor imitation, you have to be like Philip Glass and incorporate ragtime and jazz. Otherwise anyone who has never heard classical music before but is interested and likes your new piece is going to go online, find out what they missed, and never listen to anything else you compose. Not because you’re a bad composer, you might be brilliant, but you are not Beethoven.
Likewise not many people were writing novels 500 years ago. Then the printing press happened, then railroads, and you could get printed materials in shops throughout the land. For a couple hundred years the novel was the major form of new artistic expression. Film didn’t replace it because reading is artistic intercourse with the author whereas watching a movies means submitting to artistic rape. Or whatever consensual rape is called, but obviously in the one you are an equal and active participant whereas in watching a film you are a submissive. Thus novel-reading and film-viewing appeal to different people, or the same people at different times.
Now that the technology for artistic expression has changed, probably some new form of art will emerge which replaces the novel. Film is, obviously, simply becoming openly pornographic, catering to female submission fantasies and male dominance fantasies (which are actually just gay.)
The obvious thing to do is to look to science fiction for a prediction of what might come next for the discerning patron of the arts looking for an interesting way to experience a story which has already been told many times in many ways. The obvious answer is some kind of personally-catered interactive experience. That’s pretty much what any non-dystopian* future tech sci fi story assumes people will be spending their free time doing (that or sex with aliens – porn has always been more popular than art). Video games are already more popular than books or movies because video games are interactive, and the tech is pretty much there to make something that is interactive and also personally catered to the experiencer’s specific choices and interests.
Or, there’s always civilizational collapse and sharing the oral traditions of your people while huddled around the tribal cooking fire. That’s also an option.
* The dystopian future tech entertainment phenomenon is experiencing an interactive personal experience specifically catering to another person — the whole “brain scan recording” thing that appeals to people who think it would be titillating to be a passenger inside another woman’s head while she is raped by a werewolf. That’s a possibility but would not last, because cyberpunk dystopia is just a stepping stone on the path to civilizational collapse. Because Spider Robinson was right: civilizations die out if they don’t try to create something new, impossible as that may be. It’s the thought that counts.
Might I interest you in a book? It is called Mumbai Singularity, and it is a mythic cyberpunk detective thriller set in India. It’s 311 pages and standalone so no commitment. It’s independently published so no SJW gatekeeping. The pacing is tight, the characters compelling and the setting rich and lived-in. What do you say?
Idonotreadcomments: you are making the wrong observation from bookstores. Certainly that sort of smut is plentiful in bookstores, and this is a bulk of what is being published. Publishers will claim that they must publish this stuff, because this is what women want and men don’t read. But this is backwards: men don’t buy stuff from major publishers BECAUSE they just publish “romantasy” crap. Men have historically flocked to military and adventure fiction, which was popular as recently as the 00’s. The very fact that publishers no longer publish such fiction shows that they are NOT chasing profit, but instead trying to shape fiction.
That is, men don’t buy from major publishers because major publishers pushed them away.
There are many men who are voracious readers; they just read indie fiction and (even moreso) used books that don’t show up on sales charts.
quote from Idonotreadcomments:
“everything men create is derivative of what came before us. There are no stories that have not been told, in some fashion, many times before.”
Of course, no story comes to be in a vacuum; everyone is influenced by other stories as well as life experiences, history, and other things. But I would say that there is pretty much infinite variety in stories. If something is described abstractly enough, then it can appear to be identical to something else but under closer analysis, it may not really be so. One might say, “there are only two types of people: male and female, so really no one needs to meet anybody besides his parents”. But of course, people are very different. Likewise, stories can be sorted into a variety of abstract categories but despite that if one reads or listens to the stories, they are found to be distinct.
Good to hear you are an avid reader, Professor Briggs.
The word processor gave us the boat anchor novel, and no putting that genie back in bottle.
I buy my a lot of my reading material at Thrift Books, online, which are largely used and pretty cheap.
When I find an author or character I like, used Grok to help find similar.
For no woke, go back in time and read stuff like the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald, or Elvis Cole series by Robert Crais. There is fun new stuff from author Larry Correia and I liked Joe Abercrombie’s first law series. Maybe you will too. Enjoy.
“I do watch electronic repair videos and old movies on YouTube (and not on a phone). ”
Same here. Big Clive dis-repairs things in amusing ways. Carlson’s Lab is fun. Several vintage repair channels.
As for the books, when I was a bachelor and in the Navy, I had plenty of time to read books, either sitting in the barracks or waiting for a surveillance flight to return. Over 400 science fictions books, some of them “skiffy” (the pronounciation of sci-fi according to Isaac Asimov). I almost never discarded a bad book but after encountering a short story by Philip Jose Farmer I started being more careful (that was “JC at the something-ranch”).
The most sciency flavored stories include those by Dr. Robert L. Forward. The least scientific by… well, whoever wrote the Pern dragon stories.
Most of the authors had enough science to not do something really stupid BUT an example that kicked me right out of the story was on Mars and the hero is riding in a balloon and he’s up in the rigging and the hurricane force winds are trying to pluck him off the ropes. Umm, yeah; the balloon is going WITH the wind and while you might be traveling 100 kph over ground, it will be relatively calm on the balloon and its rigging.
Frank Herbert stories tended to be well enough researched and also thought provoking; the Dosadi Experiment being a great example of “what if”. ”
The Dosadi Experiment is a 1977 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, set in the same universe as Whipping Star, exploring themes of survival, ethics, and cultural conflict within the galactic ConSentiency. The plot centers on a secret, brutal experiment on the planet Dosadi, where humans and the frog-like Gowachin are confined in extreme overcrowding, creating a society bred for vengeance that threatens to break free and overrun the galaxy. A government saboteur, Jorj X. McKie, is sent to investigate the experiment”
Ah yes, BUSAB. Bureau of Sabotage. Governments had become so efficient (how likely is that?) they tended to act and re-act too quickly for their own good so a bureau was created to deliberately slow down the government’s own rash decisions.
Frank Herbert and of course Poul Anderson often used real-world situations as the framework. The “mouse utopia” experiment probably contributed to the Dosadi Experiment framework and it is nearly obvious that the Dune series relies heavily upon Arabic culture, and why not? Islam is Messianic (the 12th Imam) as is Christianity. Poul Anderson’s stories often involve Earth historical elements; some of his aliens apparently speak Danish (“People of the Wind”). Several are unabashedly retellings of Earth History such as “Hrolf Kraki’s Saga”.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (did it STAY a trilogy?) is the poster child for this sort of thing and seems patterned on the fall of Rome and the eventual Renaissance. He proposes that this kind of fall is inevitable and unstoppable BUT you can shorten the dark ages, the “interregnum”. He explores the extent to which population behavior can be predicted and the consequence of actions by one or a few influential people ( the “great man” theory) that disrupt predictions.