With every passing day, it seems that global pop culture disappoints us more. Classic franchises are vandalized into self-parodies to “modernize” them, creative talent increasingly treats fandoms as the enemy, and geek-oriented media champion the intimidation and silencing of creatives who don’t toe a very particular ideological line.
Some have taken to YouTube in the hopes of convincing the big brands to respect their fanbases and restore the classic IPs to their former glory, but no such restoration has come no matter how many viewers the YouTubers amass or how many snarky jokes pass through their mouths. The owners of the afflicted brands merely laugh as these Youtubers give them free advertising; just ask Captain Marvel.
Others put their hopes in Japanese popular culture, pointing to the abundance of enjoyable, professionally-made shows that come from there — many of which don’t conform to the extreme progressive biases of well-financed Western creatives. However, cracks are starting to show. Amazon has delisted a number of popular light novels and manga — common sources of anime adaptations. American money is increasingly financing anime as Japan’s domestic market shrinks due to lack of children. Western anime distributors do have an extreme progressive bias, allowing them to influence what shows and books reach the lucrative US market, and if those products will be censored. Sony has targeted games with sexual content for banning, while Nintendo made a censored version of one of their games the definitive global edition. I have seen nothing to change my prediction that by the year 2024, anime will be every bit as full of far-left propaganda as Western-made cultural products.
Thus, there is only one real solution to our dilemma: create our own geek culture. And this is where friend of the blog JD Cowan’s newest book The Pulp Mindset comes in.
It is not a book on how to make millions with one simple trick. It is not a book about gaming Amazon’s ever-changing algorithm. It is a book about having the right mentality for storytelling.
It’s main message is that readers and viewers are your audience, and your creative peers are not. According to Cowan, too many creators try to prove how clever they are by denying satisfying payoffs to the reader, instead trying to impress critics with new ways to subvert heroism and morality. This drives audiences away — and if done long enough, can poison an entire storytelling medium (the short story is a good example.)
He also emphasizes the need to be prolific. The modern creative does not have the luxury of spending years or even months between books, nor does he have the luxury of writing large doorstoppers. Rapid release is key.
Edgar Rice Burroughs. Without him, shonen anime would not exist.
Lastly, he shows how the very notion of “genre” is artificial. Stories of wonder are stories of wonder — it doesn’t matter if they have dragons or rocketships, or if dragons interact with rocketships. Reading the pulps of the early 20th century, along with the Dungeons & Dragons Appendix N reading list, will educate the modern writer on how storytelling was done in the old days — because virtually every piece of modern pop culture is either directly or indirectly inspired by the fantasy stories of the pulp era.
For a particularly striking example of this, one can draw a direct line from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp hero John Carter to Masashi Kishimoto’s manga hero Naruto Uzumaki. Burroughs is most known from writing Tarzan, but his influence extends far beyond that work; you see, one of the links in the above-mentioned line of heroes is Dragon Ball, a show that shaped anime as we know it today. One can make a case that Edgar Rice Burroughs, an American man who was banging out stories on his typewriter in the 1910s, was the grandfather of shonen anime.
As for the old pulps, they aren’t even hard to find. Apart from the aforementioned Appendix N, there’s an entire site full of scans of old story magazines, all available for free. And don’t forget to raid Project Gutenberg as well.
If you truly want to create something different from what modern pop culture puts out, get The Pulp Mindset and learn what has been taken from you. You won’t regret it for one second, and you’ll see things in a whole new light.
“Lastly, he shows how the very notion of “genre” is artificial. Stories of wonder are stories of wonder — it doesn’t matter if they have dragons or rocketships, or if dragons interact with rocketships.”
Because as we all know, not one person or group in the entirety of the pulp era wanted a magazine to curate and collect stories all centered on a specific theme such as space, or sports, or detectives, or focused primarily on romance, or taking place in the Near East. “Railroad Stories” apparently just doesn’t exist in you and your friends’ eyes.
“Genre conventions are arbitrary distinctions and social constructs” so are ethnic groups and murder laws. This is such an asinine drum to keep banging, I lose more patience every time you Pulprev guys go on this rant.
Most people like certain story conventions over others, and get picky when you mix them too many at once or do so very haphazardly. Which is one of the reasons Tolkien and his circle of dedicated fableists have prestige. To deny this is to deny coherency in narrative; you don’t write an epic fantasy war with the same beats and tone as a cyberpunk saboteur thriller.
By all means, blend things, make new combinations of settings and action sequences and themes. Just stop, please stop, insisting that everything goes with everything, that there is no distinction between Mythopoeia and Futurism. It’s barely different from post-modernist “art is what we say it is and quality doesn’t exist” sentiment. Normal people can and do agree pretty definitively on which parts of a “science fantasy” story come off more as “science” and more as “fantasy”, and how best the two interact together to maintain verisimilitude. You look like obnoxious autists when you say it’s all the same.
Tastes exist, and are pretty strongly defined, whatever you say. Accept that you have to cater to them. I thought that was what this movement was all about.
A fair critique; when people open up a novel they do want to know what they’re getting, to a certain extent. It’s actually one of the reasons I think short story anthologies have such a hard time today — since they have wildly different stories in them, you don’t know if you’ll enjoy one or another, and you won’t pay the asking price for just one or two stories.
Getting back to the point, you are correct — genre does make sense for the precise reason you mentioned. Perhaps the issue isn’t “no genre!” but “nothing needs to be purely one thing or another.” The distinctions are real.
By the way, thanks for the comment. It shows you’re paying attention.
Thank you for your understanding, and I apologize if my language was overly acerbic. That outburst had been building fir a while, but that’s no excuse to vent my plebe on the most convenient bystander, especially when I’ve long found you to be one of the most personable in this particular blogosphere.
My major gripe with this area of discussion, is how most of the other pulprevvers seem utterly unable to recognize that genre dividers were a long-term consequence of fans and publishers sorting stories according to their preferences and habits. It is at worst a necessary evil of advertising and book-shelf categorizing, not an evil plot by Futurians to ghettoize everything. If people cared to branch out, they could just shuffle to the next rack.
(It becomes doubly galling when these same guys always chanting how “genres are fake” also advocate content tags, and complain about Amazon allowing other authors to “misclassify” their works and take over niche book categories. It comes off disingenuous.)
Even within a “genre-mashing” story, a delicate balance must be met: it doesn’t break the flow of a sword and sorcery yarn for an adventurer to stumble upon a flying saucer buried under a collapsed mountain and then have to cut his way through snarling reptilians breaking out of crypto-sleep. It absolutely does if that adventurer then goes to meet his barbarian king patron who then reveals he just so happens to casually know the aliens, regularly deals with them, and owns and uses a lot of their technology, and in fact has an automated factory making plasma rifles, and a skyscraper housing a hydroponic farm, you didn’t see them on the way in? There’s a reason Burroughs and Kline set their swashbuckling Planetary Romances in post-apocalypses or worlds with medieval stasis.
Your apology is accepted.
Yes, genre is important so that readers know what they’re getting, and not mixing things up doesn’t make one a Futurian. On top of that, a story must have a consistent logic; don’t suddenly introduce entire concepts you didn’t bother to set up. While worldbuilding doesn’t have to be hyper-detailed, it should be coherent. If there’s a mash-up, it should be established in some way, unless the point is to surprise the reader.
Re: genres I often wonder if the real genres are action, drama, comedy, mystery, love story, thinkpiece, etc. Fantasy, scifi, horror, etc. often serve as a backdrop for one or more of those. A lot of the tension between pulp fans and hard scifi fans might come down to pulp fans being primarily action fans; action stories (whether prose or film) rarely adhere to real world plausibility.
Cowan actually addresses “action” in the book. It is indeed the case that pulp is heavy on action and fast pacing.