#grrm is the same way except grrm is a scifi writer.

[naggascradle]

honestly the moment i stopped thinking about asoiaf as trying to be historical fiction and realized that grrm still writes like a scifi writer, my understanding of how everything in the series works meta-wise improved significantly.

like think about it. scifi as a genre is about making criticisms of current modern culture, but placed in a futuristic time period in order to take modern concepts and take them to their most extreme examples in order to emphasize them & say something about them. is a song of ice and fire not doing the same thing of taking modern criticisms and placing them in a different time period, just backwards in time instead of forwards?

yes a huge amount isn't historically accurate, but he isn't trying to be. he's making commentary on modern society with a veneer of the medieval!

[kraken-spines]

I met an author the other day...

spoiler alert: It started off good and then just got worse. But, in a mild way.

Not my typical post at all but...I’m not going to out anyone. I’m only going to make a point and make sense of what happened. I was in a bookstore recently, and I had an author come up to me in the designated Science Fiction and Fantasy isle. (No, no one I knew, nor anyone extremely popular, nor anyone you probably know) . I’ll call him Fred. 

Fred asked me:

“Do you read a lot of science fiction and fantasy?”

And I said a variation of...: 

“Yeah, totally. All the time, live and breathe it, basically.”

And we talked. He asked me questions about books and was an all around friendly guy. We wound up chatting for something around 2-3 hours. Then the conversation got to bookstores in general:

“I’m surprised that millennials would even bother going to brick and mortar stores. All things considering...you know what I mean.” 

It was accompanied by some sly side eye smirky face. Me being me, and not being able to resist stating the obvious: that he was talking to a Millennial in a physical bookstore naturally I had to say:

“Not really, considering I’m a Millennial in a brick and mortar bookstore. I have friends my age that go to bookstores. We like to support independent bookstores, kind of a thing we do.” 

Fred then said something like:

“Yeah, but not really.”

Because recognizing my statement as true meant admitting his perceptions of the world were false or made with broad strokes- this is where things go down hill- Then he proceeded to go the nostalgia root. Anti e-reader, anti-tech, anti any fiction written after the 1989 so it seemed. Almost as if Millennials couldn’t understand ‘twue’ fantasy or ‘twue’ scifi. Basically, looking over any author that existed after 1985 (Besides GRRM’s ASOIAF...but he was writing in the 70′s --note this was his actual excuse). 

 As if any fiction written after Fred’s youth is transitory and had nothing worth note to add to the genre.  And again, stated that I wasn’t “really a millennial”. The conversation went downhill for the last half hour of it as I looked for the best evacuation route with a perfected excuse. 

I was born in 1993. I have yet to find a definition of Millennial that excludes people born in 1993. I think that people seem to think that Millennials are some nefarious hive mind celestial entity. That they have a singular focus: to annihilate anything Baby Boomers love and cherish. 

As if they don’t really exist except in the abstract form to be blamed for all that goes wrong in the U.S.of A. Usually the definition for millennial goes around 1980-1995. But it’s variable depending on whom you ask.

I’ve occasionally seen Millennials talking about Baby Boomers in a similar way too but not nearly to the same extent. -Granted, that’s only my anecdotal evidence. It would be interesting to see statistics on generational animosity.

The oldest of my generation is around 37 - meaning they could be married and be parents and, hell, in some circumstances they could be grandparents. And Fred’s just going to write them off because of some sort of weird disdain he carries. 

I know a lot of baby boomers that are cool people, I know silent gens that are cool people, gen xers that are cool people, gen “Z” - if that’s what we wind up calling it- that are cool children, and yeah, I think my peer group can be pretty cool sometimes. (srry, don’t know any GI gens personally but I’m sure there are great ones) 

Millennials are real Fred. I’m really a millennial. And believe it or not, you can’t herd a group of people into a box and expect them to talk, walk, and think the same way. Then deny they exist when they contradict your perception of reality. It also blows my mind that you’re going to overlook your fellow current authors when you’re a writer in this day and age and not in the seventies and eighties. 

You didn’t just step out a time machine, you don’t have a time machine to go back to the good old days. If you think your only audience is your age, and if they have the same mentality as you, they won’t read your work. Because there’s a lot of ~real~ and ~authentic~ seventies/early eighties fantasy out there left for them to read, reread and cherish. 

Think about it before you publish your next book or before you start to talk shit about Millennials again. 

BTW, I threw out your card.