And, as Francis Fukuyama tells us, history is over…evrything has been done…we are just repeating stuff.
No need to quote the whole OP, mmkay?
I think your response is an example of false templating. You are doing the same thing as the poster who templated what I said under “there’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s a type of straw man argument.
There is lots of new stuff in the world right now. We’ve recently (in the scheme of things) been going through the whole cell phone/tablet revolution, and at the same time the whole social media revolution. These have created quite new types of activities, such as posting “memes” and whatnot. That’s new stuff!
I am saying that redundancy has become an issue in specific areas.
And when you look at it in the really long run, the common peasantry was wearing variations on essentially the same shirt for five hundred years, “fashion” being something you saw among the court or bourgeois high society. Technology, resource availability, urban life and better communications made “mass” fashion possible but you are right, clothing’s nature as a basic necessity eventually forces a stabilization in the direction of what you can work and live in day-to-day.
And with media/literature as mentioned we now have a magnified word-of-mouth system with online communications, as well as the loss of the editorial intermediaries that characterized 20th century publishing – editors used to be able to look at a manuscript/screenplay and say "oh come on this is just a thinly disguised bad rewrite of _____ " and send back the SASE with a note to not quit your day job. Now you just put it on your blog page.
are you planning on doing anything about it? Or are you one of those people who just sits back and criticizes everyone else?
False templating alert. I’m not criticizing anyone. The trends I’m talking about are a virtual necessity based on the prevailing conditions, mostly technological.
Right, it’s an example of a technological change that creates a trend. The gatekeepers have lost their power to a large extent, and those who are sufficiently motivated to get their art out there can do so. This in turn creates more redundancy and noise in the system.
I am not a Star Wars fan and haven’t been paying much attention to the new movie, but I suspect that no matter what it was like there would be some noisy subset of people on the Internet giving it terrible reviews. That’s just the way people (especially people on the Internet) are. And IIRC, many Star Wars fans have spent the last sixteen years slamming the prequel trilogy for not being *enough *like the original trilogy.
Copyright law is a murky area, and often the only way to be absolutely sure something isn’t a violation is to get sued and win. Or to put it another way, the Gaye estate probably couldn’t be certain that their copyright wasn’t being violated until they sued and lost. They could of course have chosen to just turn a blind eye to “Blurred Lines”, but since Marvin Gaye isn’t producing new music these days and a victory in a case involving a major hit song presumably would have brought in a bunch of $$$ it’s not surprising that they went for it. That’s just business though, it has little if anything to do with what the public wants.
The “vulgar masses” make up the majority of our species and culture, so if they don’t care or notice then this is not a species- or culture-wide issue. I don’t think it’s a given that even critics and lawyers would care, depending on the specifics of your new song. If the riff you copied was in the public domain or you could justify it under fair use (e.g. parody) then you’d be in the clear legally, and if your song was good then plenty of critics would be willing to defend it.
I don’t know if it’ll be great or not, but that’s what will happen, don’t you think? I might be more cynical since I’m not sure a lot of the new stuff is actually new at all. At least when it comes to fiction.
From what I’ve seen a lot depends on how much of a lumper or splitter you are. Like if you think Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars are basically the same movie. Or Inception vs. The Matrix. I tend to be a reductionist when breaking down stories, but a lot of people aren’t, so they have a low bar for originality.
Ultimately there’s only so many character types, relationships, and plot structures.
On a smaller scale: every once in awhile I see a cartoon do a parody of the I Love Lucy chocolate conveyor belt scene. Now this is a famous gag, so a lot of people recognize it, but a lot of the younger generation doesn’t. I wonder how this will go in another 100 years, let alone less famous gags. Maybe it’ll hop around from work to work every couple years, maybe part of a library of gags, or maybe forgotten and independently re-invented. There’s already too much pop culture to know.
Well we basically agree. Fiction had a big head start over video entertainment, and I think it burned out its “broad strokes” ideas in advance. Even before Star Wars hit the big screen as a fresh sci-fi flick, sci-fi on the printed page had long passed its golden age. I mean, Dune is from 1965.
I’m quite forgiving of subtle difference but not very forgiving of broad tropes. When Star Wars came out, some critics were able to point to the fact that it was a bunch of pieces (Pauline Kael), but it hardly mattered to the public, since it all seemed fresh. And it should have. They (including 6-year-old me) had never seen its like, at least not done so well. No one was thinking in terms of tropes, cliches, etc., since pop culture still seemed relatively fresh.
Now we have www.tvtropes.org, in which every nuance of pop culture has been sliced and diced to intellectually satisfying effect.
And my question is: to what degree will such repetition be palatable across the generations?
A delightful example! His short stories are the berries! “The Same To You Doubled” and “Cordle to Onion to Carrot” are true delights. One of his very best isn’t sci fi or fantasy at all, but just a “Rashomon” sort of treatment of a singular event as seen by three different persons: “Pas de Trois of the Chef and the Waiter and the Customer.” It’s acidly funny, and one of the best satirical insights into human nature anyone’s ever written since Mark Twain.
And…yeah, he’s very little known today.
“Life isn’t fair. I hope you didn’t think it was.” Alexei Panshin. (Himself not as well known as he deserves.)
There is actually one small tool in the toolkit that can help you, as an individual, seek that balance: a moderate degree of contrarianism. If you deliberately seek for material that is obscure or little-known, you will very likely find some of these forgotten gems. It’s like sifting through mine-tailings: occasional nuggets are to be found!
Haunt those used-book bookstores! You’ll be amazed!
(I discovered the works of Thomas Burnett Swann in a used-book store, and went on quite a binge. I adore his books! He isn’t “great” by any means, but he’s sweet, and comforting, and sentimental, and a tad sexy. George Barr did a lot of cover art for him.)
Yep! 
Highly! Just as every few decades we get a new Robin Hood, and a new Bible Epic, and a new Pirate tale, and a new Western. (I find it amusing that Al Capone and the gangster era has become mythologized into something very akin to Robin Hood. Capone is not a “hero,” but he has become an archetype.)
We’ve set some very, very high bars. It’s going to be a DAMN long time before someone makes a “Lord of the Rings” movie that’s better than the ones we’re enjoying on DVD today, and it’s going to be a DAMN long time before someone does a better Sherlock Holmes than Jeremy Brett did. But both of these things will happen…and we, the audience, will pay to see them…and argue vehemently over how bad they are! 
(Emphasis added)
You’re missing something obvious here: if you were six years old today, it’s quite likely that you wouldn’t have seen anything like Star Wars before either. I think you’re making the mistake of assuming that your own feelings about pop culture are universal, but there are babies being born every day who’ve never seen Star Wars. Few, if any, young children “think in terms of tropes, cliches, etc.” or read TVTropes.org. I suspect that even among adults it’s a minority of people who are concerned about these things…and plenty of those who are (including TVTropes itself) don’t consider them to be a bad thing.
I’m a librarian, and like most librarians I’ve read a lot of books. I’m currently reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which came highly recommended to me by two of my colleagues. The basic plot involves the characters trying to solve an online treasure hunt with a huge prize that was designed by a programmer who grew up in the '80s, and all the puzzles are based on '80s pop and geek culture. It’s not a particularly deep book or anything but I’m finding it quite entertaining, and if anything it would probably be less fun if it weren’t full of familiar tropes and references to John Hughes movies and arcade games.
I’ve always wondered exactly how he was defining “crap.”
If his definition of “crap” is something that is not a classic destined to last the centuries, then, yes, he significantly understates the problem.
If his definition of “crap” is simply something that is badly done, then, no, he significantly overestimates the problem. At least in my opinion, most of what I read is not “crap” – most of it has what I call craftsmanship. Not genius that’s going to last the centuries, but craftsmanship which serves the moment. (I believe Sturgeon was specifically referencing published written material with his statement.) I rarely read something and think that the writing was crap even if I didn’t think it was a classic.
Years back a boy who was in his tweens was telling me about the Twilight movies. He said to me with a kind of awe in his voice that Bella wanted to be turned into a vampire.
I leaned into him and, in a whisper, imparted a secret. I told him (putting it in simplified terms) that always either the girl wants to be turned into a vampire or the vampire wants to be turned into a human.
That was the difference of my decades of seeing vampire love stories compared to his single experience of vampire love stories.
It was new and wondrous to him. To me it was old hat and boring.
Just because I’ve seen it all my life doesn’t mean other people have. They’re entitled to their firsts too ------ just don’t ask me to watch.
Rather the opposite. Someone said, ninety per cent of science fiction is crap, and Sturgeon, off-handedly (and without any intent of crafting an eponymous law!) shot back, “Ninety per cent of everything is crap.”
It wasn’t a considered opinion, just a zinger.
As for science fiction, remember that this could include unpublished material, such as the thousands of stories that editors have rejected over the decades. 90% may be too generous!
I read somewhere that Stephenie Meyer has said she wasn’t really a vampire fan and prior to writing Twilight had read one Anne Rice novel and was otherwise just familiar with cliches. I thought that explained a lot, really. Twilight isn’t all that similar to Anne Rice’s vampire novels, but it seemed to me like the work of someone who knew little enough about vampire fiction that she thought things like having vampires that weren’t killed by sunlight were original twists on old cliches rather than being a pretty old hat themselves.*
But as you say, a kid isn’t going to know the difference unless they’re a vampire fan already. And if they are a vampire fan already then they’re probably eager for more vampire stories. So Twilight becomes a massive hit despite not being especially original and IMHO pretty badly written.
*As has been discussed here before, vampires not being killed by sunlight is actually the older idea. Anne Rice’s vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, but in Bram Stoker’s Dracula the Count can and does go out by day, although he generally prefers not to. In Le Fanu’s Carmilla the title character has to sleep until after noon, but is up and about well before sunset.
Glad you appreciate Sheckley. He’s very readable and I think still fresh in many/most of his ideas, so I’m curious as to why he was forgotten as early as he was. Although, I think it’s fair to say that most old-school sci-fi writers don’t have much of a following these days. Only the biggest.
I wish someone would come out with a complete edition of his stories. I have read all of his story collections in paperback form but checked some out from the library, lent books to others, etc. I’d like to go through them all again.
I think this is the open question, but you have provided me a nice argument here. Fiction is one thing–it costs nothing but time to write a book. But movies on the scale of LotR are very expensive to make, and you are right: no one is going to reboot LotR unless they are damn sure (or think they are) going to get their money back. So people are going to keep watching the old one.
I think we are already seeing this phenomenon: there is a stock of fiction, music, and movies that reduces demand for new works. Heck, you have entire channels on cable rerunning old TV shows. I am going through old noir films on Amazon Prime. And ya know, 100 years from now, I think someone is still going to be watching Bonanza.
In fact, I could turn the argument the other way 'round and say this: Hollywood is rebooting so much because putting out the new is so risky. I don’t think that is even a controversial statement. New would-be trilogies, such as Jupiter Ascending are flopping left and right. The weight of the past is so great that that’s the only safe bet these days.
This is an argument in favor of my position! Because yes, they are born blank, and they can be just as satisfied with the Star Wars OT as a new movie.
Young people today are often quite satisfied to listen to old music as well. They will listen to the Beatles, other 60s stuff, and demonstrate their own kind of nostalgia for the 70s and 80s. I was looking at a Quiet Riot video, and young people were saying, “Man it would have been a blast to live during the 80s!” Mmm, not really, but the music really did seem new then (often new and terrible, but new).
So yes, kids being born in 2016 will have 120+ years of movies and recorded music and several centuries of fiction to enjoy. This doesn’t put downward pressure on creation of the new?
This was true even when I was a kid. I listened to 50s rock collections and watched Brady Bunch reruns. The two big TV events of the year were watching Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. Plus we had Disney stuff.
And now, you have 40 more years of pop culture thrown on top of that plus–the real game changer–the Internet. Instant access to most if not all of it.
I think there is infinite scope for new fiction, movies, music, etc. My point is that the broad strokes have been done and done. You can write a zombie novel 1M ways, but the concept of the zombie itself is not going to be new and shocking to someone, as it probably was to the vast majority of people who saw Night of the Living Dead in 1968. The book you describe sounds like fun, and I understand your point about how it uses nostalgia. But it only marks off a small amount of territory that someone might want to use. Chosen One Wizard Boy in Magical School, however derivative it itself may have been, marks off a very large amount of territory.