Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work area.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.
> The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas
There's a long list of very good scifi that has never been made into a movie.
Instead, we get the Mandalorean which rehashes every spaghetti western trope. The character even sounds like Clint Eastwood. It has the hero breaking in the horse while the old ranch hand leans on the corral fence, for example. And training the village to defend itself from the bandits. And so on.
In the specific case of Star Wars, that’s exactly how you make something decent within the Star Wars framework: pick a few elements, including characters, plots, shots, scenes, lines, whatever, from a broad set of genre media, mash them together, and apply Star Wars lipstick. The first film basically defined the genre pastiche film, and it’s still the straightest path to making something Ok within Star Wars. Most failures (and there are so many) are creatives failing to appreciate this, or not leaning into it hard enough.
Mandalorean has one episode that’s about 50% The Wages of Fear and I bet the other main element of accidentally finding some officer you’d really like to get revenge on but while in the middle of committing another crime is also from something else, but I’m not sure what. The AT-ST episode is basically a Conan the Barbarian story plus any of a few westerns (the training-the-town-folk thing—even the woman who’s an uncannily good shot for no reason ever explained is lifted from westerns). That show got how to do Star Wars.
More broadly, yes, more original (at least, not based on an existing visual-media franchise) sci fi movies would be cool to see.
I wish I could describe the near physical pain I feel that "Rendezvous with Rama" isn't yet a great Denise Villeneuve movie, and the "Night's Dawn Trilogy" isn't yet a multi-season series on Apple TV.
Planet of The Apes remakes are not movies, they're just a way to reliably turn 200 million dollars into 300 million dollars - similarly to all the American comic book crap. As long as the multiplier stays above 1.0, the process will continue.
In fairness, IMO the latest Dune(s) were the first that weren't deeply flawed. I do agree that The Mote in God's Eye--and perhaps associated shorts would make a fine basis for a series--hopefully one that ignored the sequels.
Rendezvous with Rama is basically a travelogue. I enjoyed it well enough but there are probably 100s of SF books/stories I would choose to adapt to film before that one. But we'll see. I may well be wrong but the necessary adaptations probably won't be loved by fans.
My local bookstore dedicates a large part of their fiction section to "local authors". Maybe 30 or more authors there, some with several published books. Once, I went through all of them, randomly choosing a couple chapters and reading a few pages, hoping to find a hidden gem. Eating a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup would have been more satisfying.
Aside from Andy Weir (who got picked up by a publisher and properly edited), the self-published books I've read have been remarkably awful, including some stuff that was widely recommended.
The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.
Hindsight Bias is blinding here. Judge whether something is "genuinely great" before you know its success or failure, and then we'll see if that's a true statement.
Indie games are interesting because you'd think given the nature of their development they'd do more interesting things, but stunningly they've mostly stayed within a few codified genres (roguelike/ deckbuilder/platformer galore). There aren't many successors to the giants of the old like Terrarria or Dwarf Fortress.
I'd have to chalk it up to a lack of vision (I don't genuinely believe someone grows up wanting to make a roguelike deckbuilder), but then that begs the question of why are they in game dev in the first place.
Indie means low budget (although even that is getting perverted), not hobby like development done as a labour of love.
The latter are few and far between, but they have always been.
Can a game historian count the Doom clones that showed up after Doom? Does anyone remember any of them with the exception of Hexen and Rise of the Triad?
You don't think it's because the audience is already familiar with those types of games? It's like asking why studios are all producing super hero movies instead of avant guard indie films.
> The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.
Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of good or great works go unnoticed. In movies and gaming that's often a timing thing (releasing too near popular works, releasing at a bad time of year, releasing on a console that's on its last legs, etc), but for other types of works it can simply be a failure to market said work at all, or the subject not immediately catching people's attention.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.