James Davis Nicoll
Books Received, January 4 — January 10
15 books new to me, of which 12 are fantasy, one is a role-playing game, and two are science-fiction.
Two are stand-alone, eleven are series, and one I wasn't sure how to classify.
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/books-received-january-4-january-10
First four.
Charlie Stross
@jdnicoll No judgement here, but IMO your tsundoku pile this week is overall pretty dire ...
James Davis Nicoll
@cstross I am not keen on the current cover art fashions.
Charlie Stross
@jdnicoll Yeah, but it's not just the cover art: there's a reissue of two Becky Chambers novellas in one binding, a romantasy web serial in four volumes, and as for the rest, I just wanna throw a brick at whoever wrote the cover copy (it's trite and unoriginal). When did SF/F become so cliched and stereotyped?
Charlie Stross
@graydon @jdnicoll But there's a huge element of me-too marketing in these cover blurbs—they're all aiming to steal ACOTAR's customer base, despite the problem that ACOTAR is still in print and Sarah J. Maas is still writing. In other words, it's doomed to second place at best. Publishing seems really risk-averse these days. Exception: self-pub web serials/light novels/LitRPG writers doing their own thing. 90% painfully clichéd, 10% wild originality.
Graydon
@cstross @jdnicoll The larger the perceived potential market, the more trite and unoriginal the marketing copy. There was academic study of this existing in the 80s about the novel as an art form; you can basically go Jane Austen/Brontes to Dickens/Hardy/George Eliot to Hammet/Sayers as a periods/general social progression and track how normative reading novels was seen to be by the kind of things people said in the ads. (If there were ads.)
Charlie Stross
@graydon @jdnicoll I like to read in different fields every so often to see what other folks are doing: circa 2020-22 it was romance, now I'm catching up on LitRPG and cultivation/progression (although I lack the cultural referents for xianxia/wuxia). *Just because* I am old but I don't necessarily want to resign myself to being out of touch.
Charlie Stross
@graydon @jdnicoll You can't market to everyone, true, but publishing has—for over a century—been a collection of micro-targeted markets: consider the christian fiction market, or the white supremacist market, and their likely overlap with the stross market (about zero) …
The problem is corporate C-suites who drem about owning *all* the readers eyes with one cheap-to-build product.
Can't be done.
Graydon
@cstross @jdnicoll The whole "singularity" as technology is abject nonsense, but culturally? Either "only facts" or "never facts" are really distinct from what has come before, and I think the disjunction is getting sharp enough that the ability to market is in question.
(There's this obvious analogy to feeding an LLM its own output to the eventual fate of marketing. Tough thing to demonstrate rigorously, but the feel is there.)
Graydon
@cstross @jdnicoll I don't think publishing consolidation/being at the peak of the mammonite surge helps at all, but this has always happened; on the writing side, reading is so much faster than writing there's an inherent supply problem, and on the business side there's this major cultural shift going on. (I think "never been lost" was your observation; "grew up swimming in the sum of human knowledge AND the malice of morgoth" is as new a thing as printing was in Gutenberg's time.)
Charlie Stross
@graydon @jdnicoll These days I tend to think of the singularity as a component of post-19th century Christian religious heresy. (But you've both got access to the locked Dreamwidth account with the WIP exploring that, so …)
Charlie Stross
@graydon @jdnicoll See also this dude, theologian and the wellspring of Russian cosmism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)
Taught Konstantin Tsiolkivskii, which is how it infected the space settler crowd and the extropians and cryonicists.
The AI/uploading singularity gave them post-Jesus eschatology with afterlife: Roko's Basilisk is a drop-in replacement for Satan/hell.
And it all comes together as TESCREAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
Graydon
@cstross @jdnicoll You know the "rather than go to therapy" meme?
It does seem a lot like a willingness to invent a religion to deal with their fear of death once the ancestral religion stops working because it's factually poorly supported.
(I'm doubtful there's enough Christianity in there to qualify as a heresy, and otherwise I'm agreeing with you.)
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