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▲ strictnein 2 days ago

Interesting observation here. I still read a lot, but airplanes have become a place I rarely do. I used to always pick up a book every time I flew and would finish it on the flight home. I would still much rather read a real book on the beach than doomscroll though.

> "We're losing the person who reads one book a year," he says. "And that was the person who bought their one Tom Clancy novel when they went on vacation, because you needed something to read on the plane because there was nothing else to do on the plane. Now that the plane has Wi-Fi, and so does that beach, that person is scrolling, not reading."

▲bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent [-]

Personally, I have basically stopped reading since my 20s, but I used to read a ton. I like pulp fantasy and scifi and noir detectives and other nonsense, no one seems to write that sort of thing anymore. I loved Dragonlance when it was around

I don't want fantasy with "the most unique magic system ever created" or "the most complex society" I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms

I get it, I'm boring but I guarantee the whole "men don't read anymore" would be less true if publishers still put out books like I'm describing

Instead when I go into a bookstore for the one time a year I shop for my wife for Christmas, I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"

▲derefr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms

If you're okay with these characters and kingdoms existing in vaguely-medieval China (with magically-empowered monks and Taoist-Buddhist symbolism) rather than vaguely-medieval Europe (with magically-empowered knights and Christian symbolism), then I think you'd be very happy to learn about the genre of xianxia (lit. "immortal heroes"). Unlike the Western high fantasy, xianxia fiction is at a peak of popularity right now, with tons of new stories getting published each month.

As you might guess by the name, at first this was only a literary movement in China; but these days there are tons of English-language xianxia stories as well. And they're not necessarily being written in Chinese and then translated, as you might guess; there are some Western authors writing in this genre too.

---

That being said: while you can find some xianxia stories in published physical form in stores, as a "new media" genre being written mostly by younger digital-native people, most xianxia stories are first being published digitally online as serial fiction.

Among websites where these serials are published, https://wuxiaworld.com is popular for authors writing in Chinese (I believe the site offers professional translation services to authors), while https://royalroad.com is popular for authors writing in English.

Also, as a "new media" genre, these stories are "not well understood" by traditional publishers (i.e. they don't know how to market them), so these stories tend to need to achieve a very high level of popularity before the traditional publishers are willing to engage with them. So even when these authors do produce novelizations of their originally-serial stories, they often end up finding no physical publisher willing to pick them up, and instead end up self-publishing only for digital distribution through Kindle/iBooks/etc.

▲bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent [-]

I like wuxia films quite a bit so I bet I would like this too. I don't own an e-reader or anything but I'll see what I can find. Thank you for the kind recommendation

▲kevin_thibedeau 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bookstores aren't for you. As you've seen, they cater to a certain type of customer now. Similar to how department stores are biased to one type of customer and dedicate much more floor space to them.

There are plenty of old books in the genres you like waiting to be read. Some of them will be in digital format. None of them will be AI dreck.

▲BigTTYGothGF 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Give this a try: https://www.blackgate.com

> I'm greeted by the likes of "Morning Glory Milking Farm"

The genre survived John Norman and Jack Chalker, it can handle a little sex stuff aimed at women. I haven't read that book, but I have read "In the Barn", from famous award-winning anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions" and as such one really has to lean into the dairy-themed smut for me to raise an eyebrow.

▲TFNA 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I interpreted the OP as complaining not that romance took over specifically his subgenre of fantasy, but rather it has taken over bookshops and related venues completely.

You can see this on Goodreads, which in decades past saw active community about all kinds of literature, but now is overwhelmingly centered around romance and romantasy novels. There must still be a lot of people out there who read other stuff than romance (or genre fiction in general), but I'll be damned if I know where they can hang out and feel community online, let alone IRL. Literary blogs are few and have largely retreated into Substack, which is a pathological for-profit corporate platform. Goodreads is declining because its old tech was less attractive to younger readers. Competitors to GR like Storygraph tend to be designed mainly for fiction instead of the full range of things an erudite person might read.

▲bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.

I grew up on Redwall, Riftwar, Dragonlance, Mercedes Lackey and Troy Gibson and probably a few others that I'm forgetting now.

Nowadays they would probably be criticized as being too generic or too slow or not engaging enough or whatever but I loved them

Actually, thinking about it. All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.

Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it. Salvatore cured me of that.

But this Blackgate looks interesting. I'll take a closer look when I'm home. Thank you for the recommendation. Love your username too, gave me a good laugh when I saw it.

▲BigTTYGothGF 2 days ago | parent [-]

> My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.

I too am a middle aged dude who grew up reading and I think there's a simple explanation for that feeling: we got old. The market has moved on and left us behind. It happened to the ancients, and it will happen to the young.

> Nowadays they would probably be criticized

I don't know who Troy Gibson is, and Redwall generally got a pass because of the target audience, but all the rest certainly got tons of criticism from readers at the time. Riftwar was too generic and RPG-like. Dragonlance was also generic and the RPG elements were only barely pasted over. Mercedes Lackey was repetitive, you read one you've read them all. (Did I read all three of those in my teens and enjoy them a bunch? I certainly did).

> Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it.

We had those back in our youth as well, most notably the now-almost-forgotten Thomas Covenant books.

> All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.

Glancing over at my bookshelf, you might like the trilogy starting with "Range of Ghosts" by Elizabeth Bear (the 2nd trilogy is fine, the third book kind of fizzles out, and its biggest sin is establishing a character who's basically "Miles Vorkosigan, except a villain" and then not leaning hard into that).

Ultimately tho this plus "dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms" means you really should start reading Malazan. It's not perfect (parts of it are rapey, and the later books, especially Toll the Hounds, can be really pretentious) but it is the sprawling epic fantasy with a cast of thousands.

Dudes and ladies with huge swords? Check. And magic? Check. Killing dragons? Check. Conquering kingdoms? Well, there's a lot of attempts to reverse previous conquests and stop ongoing conquests, so I'll give that a chek.

▲bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for the recommendations.

And I somehow warped "Larry Dixon" into "Troy Gibson" in my brain

Absolutely embarrassing. I dislike getting old :)

I asked my wife to put some of those books on hold at the library for me though. I'll check them out. :)

▲cindyllm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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▲cindyllm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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▲stevenwoo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The first book in The First Law series was published in 2006 and the last in 2021, it’s kinda like pulp noir fantasy combined, I am guessing you haven’t read those based the age you listed but could be wrong.

▲ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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▲cattenwallen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean they 100% exist. Brandon Sanderson isn't some excessively complicated fantasy world (despite what fans may say, Sanderson is very approachable). Dungeon Crawler Carl is all the rage. Hell, The Locked Tomb trilogy has tons of big swords and stuff. The reason why morning glory milking farm and other smut exists on bookshelves now is that women were finding and buying the small stuff when no one gave them the time of day. If you want your stuff back on shelves, start buying them, for they 100% exists even if it's a self-publishing sword and sorcery guy.

▲strictnein 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to read a ton of that stuff too and I really miss it. Terry Brooks type stuff. Enjoyable adventures that focus on a small group of characters. I also don't want overly complex worlds and stories for that type of book. The rest of my life is already too complex as it is.

▲chocochunks 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Dragonlance is still around. A new book came out this month, War Wizard. There's still Forgotten Realms books too. And lots of books about people in parties that aren't DnD spin-offs.