Science Fiction And Fantasy Books Are Popular Once Again
Thursday, January 19th, 2012Today science fiction and fantasy books are no longer the reading material of choice for geeks, or people who read White Dwarf or role-players at the weekend. Hollywood productions have focused on this genre and have turned it around.
Throughout the decades since Lord of the Rings was written between 1937 and 1949, most of it during the Second World War such books have been constantly produced. It is only now with the movies of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Northern Lights trilogy, that it is once again cool to read this genre.
This could also describe sci-fi, also marred with the nerd and geek association. The sight of a Star Trek convention can make many run a mile from this genre. However Hollywood movies such as i-Robot, Matrix, inception and of course Avatar, have made sci-fi seem a little more interesting to the ordinary reader.
The books themselves may be the reason that the genre has a bad or rather sad reputation. Although a literary masterpiece, Tolkein’s trilogy is unreadable to a lot of people. It contains excessively detailed and lengthy descriptions, and myriad characters. This means it can be a slow read and not one you would stay up all night to read.
The other end of the literary scale are widely the available trashy novels. These are often badly written with unbelievable plot lines.
Si-fi could also be considered in this way; as some contain too much scientific information (description of electricity in Frankenstein for example) that the plot can be easily swamped. Low grade SF can also be written poorly and with farcical story lines.
However in this new era new types of science fiction and fantasy books are being introduced so you don’t have to read about wizards and goblins or robots and aliens. For example horror has relinquished vampires to the fantasy genre, and writers like Haruki Murakami whilst seemingly writing quite ordinary stories give them a fantastic twist. There are many new worlds to explore, between pages of one of these novels.
Do you want to get your kids from in front of the television for a time? Maybe you can get them into reading for fun. Such novels for teenagers are numerous as are the quality authors, with the genres of young adult fantasy novels, science fiction and dystopian novels in the vanguard. One upcoming work like this is the Victoria Foyt’s “Revealing Eden”, the first novel of her “Save the Pearls” trilogy.