I had for a bit thought about blogging about quiet, but the day has been long with work and a bad eye (doctor’s appointment tomorrow), so I will take the suggestion of a quiz from the main A-Z blog.
For my ‘quiz,’ I’ll do some very unscientific marketing research. Feel free to answer these questions in the comments or on your own blog (although please comment with a link to your entry).
First, when you read fiction, do you read from the genres of westerns, action, fantasy, or science-fiction and, if so, which? If not, what are your major genres?
Second, if you read fantasy, what sort is your primary sub-genre? I’m talking here of things like epic fantasy, magical realism, urban fantasy, swords-and-sorcery, and so on.
Third, if you read science-fiction, what is your favorite sub-genre?
Fourth, what is your favorite length of fiction? Do you like short fiction ( < 17,500 words), novellas ( 17,500-40,000 words), pulp-era through the 70s novels (40,000-70,000 words), modern-era novels (70,000-140,000 words), or long novels (140,000 words plus). The novel categories are rough and my own formulation.
I didn’t know there would be a quiz. I just started reading Louis L’amour Westerns which I love but have not read much more in the genre. I don’t read much fantasy. The only fantasy I have read in the past 10 years is rereading all the Chronices of Narnia each year and I finally read that Madeline L’Engle book a few years ago right before the movie came out. I read some detective fiction and some historical fiction .
> Westerns
Not my thing. I’ve read some, and admittedly some of those were quite good, but I’m not particularly attracted to the era/backstory/genre.
> Fantasy
What I liked tended to be proto-urban-fantasy: Lord Darcy, Harold Shea, Amber, that sort of thing. But what flies as “urban fantasy” now is nothing I care to read.
> science fiction
I like Campbellian “hard SF” more than “social SF”, and I mostly despise “New Wave” and its imitators. Of the sub-genres, alternate universe stuff has always been my favorite, starting with Laumer’s “Worlds of the Imperium” and Bulmer’s “The Key to Irunium”, both of which I first read when my age only had a single digit. Alternate universe stories have always been scarce in the SF genre; I suspect good ones are harder to write than it might look.
> favorite length
Whatever it takes to finish the story. No, seriously. Some of my favorite novels would be novellas by modern standards; Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” for example. Some novels were so long they were printed as trilogies or tetralogies; not series, but essentially one book printed in pieces, like Meredith’s Timeliners or Zelazny’s Amber Cycle.