Aram Zucker-Scharff

“It’s a valuable question for gaming culture—and “nerd culture” more generally—to ask itself: Do we want to tell stories that make sense of the things we used to love, that help us remember the reasons we were so drawn to them, and create new works that inspire that level of devotion? Or do we simply want to hear the litany of our childhood repeated back to us like an endless lullaby for the rest of our lives?”

– Laura Hudson, review of Ernest Cline’s Armada, “Serious Bill-Paying Skillage”.

“

No, instead, proper mature adults should be reading appropriately literary fiction—which, presumably, you find in the part of the bookstore marked “Literature.”

I’d hate to hear what she thinks about my comics collection.

This argument is a familiar one to anyone who has ever heard that serious literature can’t contain spaceships or aliens or, god forbid, dragons. For decades, science fiction and fantasy fans have dealt with people dismissing our favorite books as “mere escapism” — no matter how many William Gibsons or Neal Stephensons or George R.R. Martins came along. But as science fiction and fantasy are being taken more seriously, it seems that we need to find more targets for our elitist sniffing.

”

– Really? Are We Still Genre Shaming People For The Books They Like?

“

No, instead, proper mature adults should be reading appropriately literary fiction—which, presumably, you find in the part of the bookstore marked “Literature.”

I’d hate to hear what she thinks about my comics collection.

This argument is a familiar one to anyone who has ever heard that serious literature can’t contain spaceships or aliens or, god forbid, dragons. For decades, science fiction and fantasy fans have dealt with people dismissing our favorite books as “mere escapism” — no matter how many William Gibsons or Neal Stephensons or George R.R. Martins came along. But as science fiction and fantasy are being taken more seriously, it seems that we need to find more targets for our elitist sniffing.

”

– Really? Are We Still Genre Shaming People For The Books They Like?

You should be embarrassed to like Young Adult novels.:

katiecoyle:

You should be embarrassed to like novels at all. You should be embarrassed to know how to read. You should be embarrassed to take pleasure in words, arranged into sentences, arranged into paragraphs, arranged into scenes, arranged into books. It’s unnatural, and you should be embarrassed.

You…