Via Castalia House > the Worlds Between Wasteland and Sky blog, I've learned that over at the 'Fictional Influence' Substack, which is maintained by Kristin McTiernan, there is a lengthy interview between McTiernan and Beau L'Amour, the son of the western writer Louis L'Amour.
The interview touches on L'Amour's efforts to maintain his father's legacy by issuing new editions of selected titles, as well as unpublished novels. L'Amour must contend with perceptions by people in the publishing industry that 'men don't read.'
Beau L'Amour has some interesting observations about how boys learn to read, and what sort of content appeals to them:
I really started reading compulsively with Lester Dent’s amazing (though today probably dated) Doc Savage series. This was considered adventure fiction for a general audience, adults and kids, in the 1930s. I read the Bantam reprints in the 1960s and 70s.
If you crossed a down-to-earth “superhero” like Ironman’s Tony Stark and injected him into the mystery, political thriller and science fiction genres, that’s pretty much who Clark Savage Jr. was. It was very male oriented, with lots of action, exploration and gadgets (Dent, along with writing hundreds of short stories and magazine novels invented telephone answering machines, garage door openers and mine detectors for the US navy). I also devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and later Larry Niven. A lot of kids of my generation read Ray Bradbury, a real poet. He might be kind of underappreciated these days … certainly he was under appreciated by us when we were youngsters.
All of this was hard hitting, fast moving, and relatively short fiction. Great stuff! Today the material for kids and young people is too careful … or too transgressive! It’s too inward looking, too slow paced, and not technical enough to really activate a boy.
Personally, I don't have high hopes that the industry is going to make any concerted effort to engage with men. All I have to do is walk through my nearest Target store and see the shelving for books, either in the dedicated book section, or in the 'impulse buy' racks at the checkout line: titles by, and for, women. Like the novels of Sarah Maas and Rebecca Yarrow. That's where the money is.
The sci-fi novels I review here at my blog are artifacts of the popular culture as it was forty to sixty years ago, when there was no internet, no smartphones, no podcasting, and no social media. TV had maybe 15 - 30 channels, if you paid extra for 'cable.' And a video game console meant an Atari system, with 8-bit graphics rendered on your 25-inch, picture tube color TV. Nowadays, there's simply so much more content that is available at the press of a button, or a swipe across a screen...............
1 comment:
I think one of the issues with getting young boys and men to read is that computer games and video games offer a lot of what fiction offers--characters, plot, story, some kind of subtle or not so subtle ideology. The computer games and video games I loved as a kid and a college student, Space Invaders, Scramble, Berzerk, Telengard, Angband, Doom, Wizardry, etc., had little or no story, and were about fast reflexes, calculating risk, resource management, exploring a maze, and killing, killing, killing (and avoiding getting killed yourself.) Now games all seem to have a big cast of characters, some kind of agenda, plot twists, etc., like a novel or a film. Boys and men like to DO things, and a pastime that gives them characters and narrative and offers ideas about life and the world AND allows them to make decisions and test their reflexes and puzzle-solving abilities is going to be stiff competition for novels and stories, which only have the story elements and not the active and interactive elements.
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