Panel Discussion: The present and future of AH

[Thande]

I wonder how much of that is due to the sheer glut of literary science fiction of all forms that made up the contents of bookshelves at the turn of the century. As we've discussed previously it represented a high watermark for spin-offs of the likes of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars but even beyond those recognisable properties think the science fiction paperback was seeing a boom of every type and aimed at all ages. Maybe that rising tide lifted the AH titles along with it.

Very true, it's notable that there are noticeably fewer Star Trek and Star Wars novels on the shelves of your average Waterstone's now than there were about 15 years ago, when both (especially Trek) were going through something of a relative doldrums in popularity compared to now. It's not as if spinoff novels aren't still being written, they just seem to be noticeably less present there than on the Kindle store and so on.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Yeah. Most casual fans turn to spin-off novels as a last resort for their fix. Video games are next up the totem pole, and for a while Trek in particular was very badly served there. But above all people who are fans of screen-based franchises want to see them on the screen!

Now there's such a glut of content on the streaming services, only the truly devoted want to go read whatever hack equivalent of Kevin J Anderson is out there now.

 

[Thande]

Yeah. Most casual fans turn to spin-off novels as a last resort for their fix. Video games are next up the totem pole, and for a while Trek in particular was very badly served there. But above all people who are fans of screen-based franchises want to see them on the screen!

Now there's such a glut of content on the streaming services, only the truly devoted want to go read whatever hack equivalent of Kevin J Anderson is out there now.

Historically there was an element that what (some) fans wanted to see in their franchises were things they were told could never be on the big (or small) screen, hence the popularity of spinoff material in which it could happen there. That's less true now that there's, depending on your perspective in each case, either commendably more fan input into what appears on screen or running the asylum and appealing to nostalgia bait.

 

[Coiler]

I think the fact that excellent published/publishable works emerge from fora like here, the other place, and so on, doesn't mean the vast majority of works on such fora are written for only the forum audience?

The glass half full part of me wants to say that it's just Sturgeonism at play (ie 90% of everything will be mediocre-to-bad), made worse by online fiction with no entry barriers having an extra-low Sturgeon Bar (which is what "mediocre-to-bad" means in practice).

The glass half empty part of me says that it's because timeline AH just has more potential to be bad.

I suspect this is about the insular nature of internet fora - the immediate audience finds a reference to UserHJ's timeline on Nigeria more fun (as in immediate gratification laughs) than weaving in links to Wole Soyinka's works, which sadly, fewer in the immediate audience might have read.

The dreaded Fuldapocalyptic World War III is a weirdly good way of showing me what's influenced by what. There's a pretty clear slide from "Historical analysis/wargaming" to "Red Storm Rising and other Larry Bond books" to "other TLs on the topic, with more wiki-plucked mush and stuff that's intended to be edgy and/or dramatic".