tmoney007nc22 asked:
Considering the recent success of ERAGON and HARRY POTTER from bookshelves and movie theaters, does anyone else believe that the stories lack the substance many well-developed classics have come to be known by? Can anyone else tell me why characters and plotlines are so predictable and one-dimensional? *For those who are fan-boys and fan-girls, look away and do not answer. I will simply not regard your angry replies with interest, because it has been established that ERAGON and HARRY POTTER are both commercial fiction and hold no literary value, as far as depth is concerned.*
Dora
Considering the recent success of ERAGON and HARRY POTTER from bookshelves and movie theaters, does anyone else believe that the stories lack the substance many well-developed classics have come to be known by? Can anyone else tell me why characters and plotlines are so predictable and one-dimensional? *For those who are fan-boys and fan-girls, look away and do not answer. I will simply not regard your angry replies with interest, because it has been established that ERAGON and HARRY POTTER are both commercial fiction and hold no literary value, as far as depth is concerned.*
Dora
Tags: Bookshelves, Fan Boys, Plotlines
Simple. A simple rephrasing of your question will answer your question. “Can anyone tell me why junk food is selling nowadays?”
Well, because we don’t have the time to digest things properly, it’s easier to just munch your way through stuff mindlessly, and one must keep with the plebeian times.
Wait - Eragon and Harry Potter are sci-fi? You mean fantasy, right? To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen any great fantasy writers since, oh, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis comes to mind. As for science fiction, Poe, H.G. Wells, and Verne are excellent excellent excellent. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are politically-minded sci-fi, naturally. I suppose that Science Fiction and Fantasy just tends to run into the trashy side of fiction, since it’s pretty easy to get off-track what with the dragons, magical agents, spaceships, and gadgets one stuffs in.
Just a reminder, people - good literature is thought-provoking AND entertaining. Have YOU tried Mark Twain or Thomas Hardy yet? I hope you do, before passing your judgments on the literary tastes of others. And it is an acknowledged fact that the laurel of the Nobel Prize for Literature shall never grace J.K. Rowling’s head. I beg of you to ask any qualified authority to differ.
I can suggest three reasons recent sci fi is much worse than the classics.
1. Objective prose writing means you never tell anyone what to feel or judge–you give your reader the evidence first; recent writers tell you what to feel, and fail to give the evidence, and have done so for the last 40 years.
2. The writers are younger; nothing wrong with being young but I don’t want to see work by anyone done all by himself who’s under 39 years of age–and I expect writers to get better later, as they stop[ imitating and gain life experience, writing experience, “readiness” to do something original.
3. Editors no longer publish only good work; now they try to use false advertising to sell hack work by people already known instead of investing time, advice and even teaching in someone with a lot to say or great means of saying it; the days when fine editors, usually writers themselves, worked with authors to help them develop, refused sub-standard work and made suggestion for a writer’s direction or growth have unfortunately ended.
That’s why we have free speech in this country. Any one can like whatever he or she likes, period. No doubt some cave man wrote on the wall of the cave and another cave man raved about how bad it was.
We’ve progressed to where fiction has been discovered and thus anyone can write predictable stories and they may be about anything he or she wants. We all want to know what is in our future and science fiction does give us things to think about. There are one-dimensional readers, too. Let’s be politically fair, and allow people to read the same thing more than once. Remember when you were a child and how many times you wanted the same story read over and over?
If I could have made as much as Rowlings has, I would be just delighted, and you can call it whatever you like.
Harry Potter sells for one simple reason — it’s a thumping good, entertaining story. Still, there’s no book that will please everybody.
To call it terrible just because it’s not to your taste seems a bit snooty. And your opinion doesn’t “establish” anything to anybody other than yourself. The fact that hundreds of millions of Harry Potter books have sold shows that some people disagree with you.
As for literary depth, it’s intended to be popular entertainment — just like Shakespeare’s work and HP certainly is as deep as Shakespeare.
Do I guess correctly that you haven’t actually read a Harry Potter book? That’s okay, you may stick with Shakespeare and no hard feelings.
I can tell you exactly why they sell. Those books are targeted at children that have never read good literature. You throw a bad tasting candy bar to a kid thats never had candy and they will still eat it up.