Beside the obvious ridiculousness of beginning a reply with, “Granted, I haven’t [read] much SF/F published after about 1995…” and then going on to criticize the state of the genre at length, you display an appalling lack of compassion (or interest!) in groups you admit have been oppressed and were woefully underrepresented before, oh, say, 1995 or later. But that was well after you stopped reading in the genre.

Furthermore, what is ridiculous to you is just that: ridiculous to you. Get your elitist head out of your elitist ass.

And, just to belabor the point: judging the talent of authors in a genre you don’t widely read is… well, it’s appallingly presumptuous.

But yeah, good comment.

Designing your own characters for video segments, that I could see wasting a lot of time on if there were templates that were easy enough to customize. Having the reading/viewing/listening experience segue into a social networking interaction is not something an old fossil like me would care much for, but think of the kids Will Ludwigsen talks about above. Those are the people who would really need to be hooked in to make this type of ebook fly.

The New Pulp would be written by underpaid and probably underage authors fueled by dreams, adrenaline or caffeine, and a lot of it would be bad, like a lot of the pulp paperback novels were from the late ’30s through the early ’60s. But good, even brilliant, stuff would emerge. And the whole enterprise would have lots of energy and a consistent appeal to all of our baser instincts, just like comic books and pulp paperbacks when they first came into existence.

I did read “Angelmaker”, there’s a review for it somewhere on SF Signal if you’d be interested in reading it. I liked it a lot.

I own “The Passage” but my wavering attention span can’t help but be intimidated by the size of it. I’ve become a sissy when it comes to book length.

I have two copies of “Ready Player One” but I couldn’t really get into it. Rack it up to nostalgia of a different generation I suppose.

I wonder if perhaps this trend is nearly unacknowledged because of the way the “literary” community has largely looked down upon broad appeal mainstream fiction? Maybe. That would be cause for another great Mind Meld topic. Thanks for the feedback!

Examples:
DOG STARS by Peter Heller
The Road by C. McCarthy
Breed by Chase Novak
Age of Miracles by Karen Walker
The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Something Red by Douglas Nicholas
Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenberger
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Zone One by Colson Whitehead