sci fi, fantasy, and mainstream today

[lettered]

I’ve always loved the fantasy genre. When I was younger, I had two major problems with it:
-It was sort of looked down upon. I saw fantasy/sci fi authors writing about it themselves, that it was not a “respected” genre, and the flack the writers receive for not being “literary” or “serious”. Mostly I didn’t like this because my sophomore English teacher told my mom she wished I’d read higher brow novels instead of reading Dune.
-When I was around 6-12 years old, I could never find anything aimed at me I wanted to read. I liked the fantasy novels, but they were some hard reading for a 9 year old sometimes. There was A Wrinkle In Time and Narnia and some others, but finding things was hard work!

I feel like all of that is different now. And I feel like the number one cause or effect is named Harry Potter.

Is it just me, or is fantasy more in the mainstream now? I mean, Twilight is everywhere. Ann Rice was admittedly very popular, but I still feel like you didn’t have your average highschool cheerleader madly in love with it. The Road is a bestseller, even if many people deny it’s sci fi. I feel like every other movie preview I see is for sci fi or fantasy. And when I go to the YA bookshelves, I have difficulty find books that aren’t fantasy.

Is Harry Potter? a cause or effect? Was it the LOTR movies coming out around the peak of HP’s popularity, connecting generations of fantasy lovers? Was it advances in special effects, allowing movies like LOTR and The Matrix to be made, thus sharing fantasy/sci fi with a broader range of people? Is the sci fi movie explosion and fantasy book explosion connected? Was it mystical realism in South and Latin America influencing literature today? Did people just get bored? Is it just me, or is the world so much better now?

Not that I need my tastes to be mainstream. But I do love getting to see fantasy and sci fi movies, of which there exist so few in the past, and I love having more books to read.

I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this. Is there more fantasy and sci fi available; if there isn’t more, doesn’t it at least seem more mainstream? Or do these things come and go in waves? If that’s not just my imagination, what are the causes? Has it been slowly growing? Does it have anything to do with HP? Is HP a cause or an effect? Discuss.

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

Have you seen this post from seperis?

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

The comments are wonderful, too.

My own experience was different. Books grew on trees. I got stacks of fantasy novels (and other novels) for Christmas, from parents and relatives. Lloyd Alexander, Lewis and Tolkien, Susan Cooper, Peter S. Beagle, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne McCaffrey, Patricia C. Wrede, Robin McKinley, G.G. Kay....oh, the nostalgia. Before there was a big chain bookstore in Nova Scotia, we would stop at the Borders in Bangor, Maine every summer when we drove down to visit relatives, and I would pick out two or three new fantasy books by authors I'd never heard of. The place seemed so huge, it was like being Belle in the Beast's library in the Disney movie.

I think fantasy is more mainstream than it used to be. But there was Willow and Labyrinth and The Princess Bride. And Fairy Tale Theater; I watched those over and over. And I sure remember my dad flipping out when Star Wars came out on VHS.

[lettered]

I hadn't seen that. Cool.

My parents would buy me any books I wanted and we went to book stores all the time. My problem was that no one read the books I wanted to read (my brothers read some fantasy, but were not as voracious as I was), which made it more difficult to find good books, or at least the kind of books I liked. I definitely did the browse-fantasy-shelves-and-buy-random-things-I'd-never-heard-of, but that often ended in disappointment.

(I also had this problem when it came to classic literature. I'd read Jane Eyre and loved it, and realized it was the type of thing I liked. So going to Barnes and Noble, I'd go to the part at the front of the store where they had the cheap classic series published by B&N, and basically buy a new one every time.)

Willow

I loved that movie hard.

[seraphcelene]

It's kinda like the 80's all over again. Sword and Sorcery films were big back then, I remember. There was all the straight up sci-fi and then the serious fantasy stuff. Recently, there's been this weird collision of elements that's resulted in the current trend in sci-fi/fantasy becoming mainstream fodder. Harry Potter is definitely a huge component of that. I'd also say that the tanking economy (resulting in a population looking for thinly veiled escapist entertainment), the YA response to HP and then Twilight. And let's not forget the rising effect of the internet, its increasing presence in homes world wide, and the "outing" as it were of fannish subculture. Look at the exploding popularity of ComicCon. And let's not forget the impact of BtVS on models of femininity. In films, I think the trend is based on a whacked misconception from the studios that translating comic books, movies and video games into films will guarantee them an audience and bigger box office returns. It's a wild mesh of Stuff. Either way, I think HP is definitely a cause.

[lettered]

Well, I wasn't alive/cognizant enough in the 80s to really know. But I still feel like Sword and Sorcery then was a side genre, "those kids who play D&D" type stuff, not mainstream. There was Legend and Willow, but not so many fantasy movies. There was a lot of sci fi though, it's true.

I think the trend is based on a whacked misconception from the studios that translating comic books, movies and video games into films will guarantee them an audience and bigger box office returns.

Well, but it appears to be true. There seems to be less and less original cinema in Hollywood, but it's bigger than ever.