Meaty, thought-provoking post on how the act of reading genre fiction has fundamentally changed since he and I were young.

… the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.

Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we’re now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we’re seeing the consequences.

Those seeds were: Dungeons and Dragons (which sparked the whole field of Role Playing Games, which constitute a wholly new mode of fiction in which the story emerges through a collaboration between the GM and the players–the GM provides guidelines and mediates between the player characters and their environment, but doesn’t dictate their lines): computer games (which are similarly interactive, but the map or procedural generative content is established before the players arrive): and the first of the big superhero movie franchises (notably the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies, which, starting from 1979, dragged Superman–and then the rest of the DC universe, with Marvel in its wake, out of the comic books and onto cinema and TV screens).

I was an English major in college in the early 1980s, and then it was breathtaking, revolutionary and controversial to suppose that the author was not the ultimate authority on their own work — that readers and authors were coequal creators. Only the greatest minds of literary analysis were capable of comprehending that rarified thought, and many considered it blasphemy.

Now, the idea is commonplace, and every 14-year-old fan is just as great an authority on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kevin Feige.

The transitions in the art of genre reading might go a long way to explaining why 99% of the sci-fi and fantasy being published today just bounces off me. Even the award-winning stories. Maybe even especially those. I fail to connect with them. And yet, when I was a teen, I consumed science fiction voraciously.

(Does anybody under 60 even remember Theodore Sturgeon anymore? Poul Anderson?)