The rumors of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie — without any input from Joss Whedon — are true. A press release says writer Whit Anderson has an exciting new take on the character. Be very scared.
Rest of the post here at io9...
And with that, a brightly light has been smothered in our universe...
Back in day, when I was a wee young ‘un just discovering the wonders of the written word (that golden age known as the 90’s…) Y/A fiction was basically Sweet Vally High and other stuff general shoved in a shelve at the back of the book store. For hardcore geeks, fantasy was a genre generally seen as being for adults, or at least for all ages. There was never the assumption that any of it was being specifically targeted towards young readers – generally speaking, if you were into fantasy, you started one on the more accessible stuff (Dragonlance Chronicles being the gateway of choice for a whole generation…RIP, TSR!) and moved on up as your tates matured (Robert Jordan, GRRM, Gaiman….) A big help was that a lot of the stuff being written back then was really accessible and didn’t take itself too seriously. Ad that was true of all speculative genres…scifi, horror and so on.
Now, it seems like a lot of the creative energy is coming from books that, technically speaking, are written for teen and tween readers…except that a large part of the audience are adults looking for a good read. While it seems like a lot of “adult” fantasy, scifi and so on come across as stale…which begs the question…why? How did Y/A get the genre-fic mojo?
Here’s an article from the LA Times that might shed a little light on the subject….
What are the roots of fantasy?
The standard response has been to point to Tolkien, mutter some stuff about Western folklore and Arthurian romance, throw in some educated remarks about Greek and Roman mythology and the Kalevala, and then declare the Lord of the Rings the foundational text, full stop. But it seems to me, at least, that fantasy is a genre with many fathers. Tolkien casts a long shadow, to be sure – anyone writing epic fantasy for the last few decades has basically been following in the path laid by LOTR, despite many heroic efforts to the contrary. But that shortchanges other authors as well, who have had just as much of an impact on the development of the genre.
If there were such a thing as an ancestral
Anyone else care to venture a thought?
