john carter!

[mordicai]

Comments

[kingtycoon]

See that's what pulp is all about - contemporary fantasy all sucks at JRR's tip and bores everyone to tears - there are some gems from the 70's and 60's too but the pulps are where it is at - the days of high adventure! Evidently sometime around the roaring 20's. It's weird to think of what this stuff was up against in the mainstream - Fitzgerald? It's strange.

[mordicai]

fucking gatsby, i hate him. john carter, stab him! STAB HIM! gatsby is the same as all those manhattan nanny tell-alls. THE SAME.

[mordicai]

you are a lunatic.

[ravenface]

I like both equally!

[mordicai]

this is why you are sometimes called "mister reeses".

[fordmadoxfraud]

To be fair, the thing he, Burroughs, has that separates him from all that are his obsession with male virility (neither Wells nor Verne really give two fucks about dudes who don't solve everything with their brains) with a somewhat quaint and 19th century ish conviction about the kind of people that would make up a good, civilized society, and how those people would require a small number of weird, asocial mavericks to survive.

[mordicai]

it did seem like a weird halfway between lovecraft's gentlemen & howard's barbarian.

[mordicai]

i don't know that you can point to fiction of the past couple of years-- since that is the changing of a trend, & are all still outliers. anyhow, saying that burroughs is doing the same as his recent contemporaries places him on the fore-front. besides which, astral projection & superman's powers? what!?

[mordicai]

i agree with it being fantasy fufillment-- but i don't care about that. i mean-- it isn't dishonest about what it is. as to the genre mish-mash, it is SO much better than being "in genre."

Fantasy fulfillment

[fordmadoxfraud]

See also: pretty much all pulps and comics, the entire romance and erotica genres, and a great deal of YA.

The only genre that really bucks the trend consistently is modern literary fiction, which instead of telling people about the wonderful things they could possibly be, tells them how just shitty they really, in fact, are.

[mordicai]

what is up with modern fiction? man.

[fordmadoxfraud]

Also, in the teens, the genres you're talking about either basically don't exist or are so in their infancy they're unrecognizable by today's measure.

[mordicai]

this is true, see my comments re: being on the frontier himself.