We’re entering ‘The Age of [What]?’
After posting my blog “Times have changed for fantasy writers… or have they?” about the timeless struggles authors endure because of genre-restraints, one of my readers posted a very clever discussion point in reply, relating to the rise of urban fantasy.
First thought after charting urban fantasy as a trend: "Please don't let 'Breaking Dawn' be the end – go Team Jacob!"
I love a good urban fantasy story. At the same time, I don’t believe I’ve read enough to know when urban fantasy first became popular, or why, or whom might be the most significant urban fantasy authors. So I found myself charting the rise of urban fantasy as a trend before responding to my reader. It was a very enjoyable experience (click here to comment too), but it was the concept of shifting trends that stuck with me long after I’d responded to my reader, and it occurred to me that multiple yet similarly themed trends often grow and turn into cultural movements.
The Renaissance spanned from the 14th to the 17th century. That too is a long time for a cultural movement!
A cultural movement is “a change in the way a number of different disciplines approach their work”. Famous cultural movements include the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romanticism, Realism, Art Nouveau, Modernism, Postmodernism and (since 1990) Post-postmodernism.
Now, ‘modernism’ began for Western society in the late 19th century and, from what I understand, every cultural movement since has been classified according to its relation to moderism because they’ve either emerged from or reacted to it (ie. postmodernism and post-postmodernism). But doesn’t the logic of that classification astound you? Surely all cultural movements emerge from and react to their preceding cultural movement! So why are we still being classified according to a cultural movement that began over a hundred years ago?
It also makes me sad to think we don’t have a name for our own current cultural environment. Don’t we deserve one? Isn’t it time for a new age of something that doesn’t have the word ‘modernism’ in it?
"That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." Still, at least a rose has its own name!
Intrigued by the idea of having our own ‘age of something’, I’ve been trying to invent a name for us. Cultural movements usually influence all art forms, the sciences and philosophies too. I only really know about writing, so what writing trends have dominated authors over the last few years? Irrespective of the genre in which you write, adverbs are generally ‘out’, whereas their use was perfectly acceptable in the past. Indeed, writers have become quite outspoken against adverbs – Debra Adelaide, author of “The Household Guide to Dying”, recently stated in The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Spectrum” magazine that:
“adverbs should be treated like a feral species, a cane toad or Indian mynah. They provoke the Dalek in me. Total extermination is recommended.”
Don't waste your readers' time!
Similarly frowned upon are denouements reliant upon ‘deus ex machina’ (‘god out of the machine’, ie. using miracles/magic/benefactors to resolve plots), and aftermath scenes (in which characters digest what’s just happened before deciding what to do next).
On the other hand, dramatic chapter endings are ‘in’, all novels should commence with an ‘inciting moment’, and narrative pace is paramount. Of course trends like these are a little like rules – they’re there to be broken (as long as you know how they work first, for more on this see “How to Build Worlds” by Bothersome Words). Yet, as a film fanatic, I can see similar trends reflected in both Hollywood/Bollywood movies and world cinema. Certainly if you watch any movie from, say, thirty or forty years ago, the action is slower and my 2011 brain has to adjust to the pace. I’m used to seeing more images per second and greater stimulation. So I wonder whether we’re entering ‘the age of speed’. Let’s give it a fancy name though… How about ‘The Age of Alacrity’ or ‘The Age of Expedition’?
Or perhaps we ought to look at subject matter rather than form? When a new cultural movement emerges, certain genres tend to suffer from attack and new genres are generated in their place. Perhaps urban fantasy has replaced an older one that has grown stale and repetitive? There’s also been a growth in crime and thriller novels/movies whose plots centre on speculative fiction elements. So maybe we’re entering an age that prizes inventive difference (let’s hope so!)… ‘The Age of Aberration” perhaps, or ‘The Age of Divergence’?
Speculative fiction gets a look in everywhere these days – even chick flicks!
Quite possibly, we need to enlist creators of other art forms, philosophers and scientists to help answer this question more thoroughly. So, if you too are intrigued by the idea of naming our ‘age’, let’s ask around. We could ask for ideas through our Facebook status updates and use the Twitter hashtag #ageofwhat to gather opinions. The question is out there now… what’s your answer?
It seems difficult to filter the current cultural zeitgeist into a convenient statement. It is an age of individualism, pluralism and syncretism. We’ve fractured our identity and put on ideas as though they were fashion accessories. True belief in one set of values is akin to heresy.
I suggest The Age of Caffeinated Globalisation.
Hmmm, the mere mention of the word zeitgeist has me resting head on hand in appreciative contemplation of your suggestion. It also has me craving a diet coke 😉
Ooooo, I love your tweet-suggestions too, Adam – very funny 🙂
The Age of Caffeinated Globalisation with a side order of fries and a cappuccino.
The Age of Meh.
The Age of Me.
The Age of I.
(which denotes so many aspects, and not just an allusion to a technological product)
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We’re still in the post World-War-Two Age, of rapid technological development and an ascendant West.
That’s my take. But times and places are usually named and described in hindsight. It is very difficult to know what features of our time will be most important or interesting to people in the future. We can certainly see how we differ from the past, but that usually isn’t enough.
Hindsight, eh? Good point, David. What interests us now about people living in the late nineteenth century probably didn’t interest them at all!
@ToddMaternowski just said a similar thing on Twitter (see the #ageofwhat hash-tag). He reckons…
He he.
I deal with science trends in my day job – and in line with your blog post ( I really like the ‘Age of Alacrity’) but in terms both of genre crossover in the arts and discipline crossover in science, I’d probably call it the Age of Confluence.
The genre crossovers are those you have alluded to, but in the sciences I’m increasingly encountering ‘bio-physicists’ or quantum chemists and every technology, whether bio or inorganic, has both a nano element and a quantum effects element. Even photosynthesis in leaves has been shown to run quantum pathways for photons to maximise the efficiency of solar energy in plants – which leads us towards better inorganic photovoltaic cells.
Each of these disciplinary confluences leads to more branches of science and more things that can be achieved with each new branch than with the traditional disciplines. So we can program viruses to lay down electronic circuit paths (bio-mineralisation), and we are engineering more and more devices to work in the same way as its biological analogue (bio-mimetics), and so on.
So I’d call it the Age of Convergence – which multiplies individuality, rather than the homogeneity produced through aptly named ‘disciplines’.
Cheers
Jerry
My background is science as well and there are many areas of science that could give rise to transformational cultural pressures. Something unexpected in quantum physics or space warping or something entirely inevitable in genetics or AI. The possibilities are so immense that we might no longer recognise the society/culture that developed (I think too much SciFi is much too conservative in this regard).
Anyway – I think history may define us by what we are not yet, ie by what happens next. Like “early 21st century, pre-singularity”. Singularity being the first smarter than human AI, or space warp, or time travel or quantum fusion generator, or first entirely engineered life form.
Or maybe we won’t do any of that and we’ll be simply known as “early 21st century, pre-apocalypse”.
If you put science aside, the big cultural shift is going to be when we really work out how to use facebook (TM). Already our (urban) lives have been transformed by online communities like this one (and a whole range of other smartphone linked-in-edness). Young people like you Zena don’t remember (crotchety old-timer voice) that this is all less than 10 years old. What will we be like in ten more?
This does three things – clearly it links you to your (loosely local) community, second it creates opt-in communities of shared interest that are intrinsically non-local, and thirdly it allows the emergence and coordination of momentary coalitions to respond to extremely dynamic events (arab spring). These change the way people live, love and organise politically (obviously, it affects the way science, art, education work as well). That’s got to be a profound enabling change in global and local culture. It’s early days, clearly, but people seem to be beginning to look to the interweb for more than porn and looking up movie times. So, cop out, I can’t guess what will happen … but it’s sure worth speculating about!
Sorry, I haven’t got a snappy name for it. Maybe, Age of Affiliation? Affiliation is a group of common interest, and it’s the process of joining in and being connected.
Meh … I was right first time … early 21st century, pre-apocalyptic!
Wow, a great post that stimulates so many ideas.
Regarding recent trends in writing: I would add disdain for head-hopping, or POV changes within a scene. So many finger-wag and yell foul. Yet, it’s done nicely in Dune every now and then, a classic if there ever was one.
And regarding a name for our age. LOL, this is one of those topics we can just talk about forever 🙂 It’s a little bit like a discussion I started in LinkedIn called “how many sub-genres are there in SF”. So my take on it is thus: we live in an age where so many topics/issues/problems are made transparent via the Internet, its hard to generalize anything. Everyone can focus on small niche, and thus give all manner of names to anything and categorize. Some feel this is bad, but I don’t mind.
So what are my ideas to name this age? I sadly (being a New Yorker) must use some four letter words within my personal naming convention. For reasons of political correctness, I shall abstain from submitting them here in this nice forum. But… I’m sure you might be able to guess a few 🙂
Looking forward to your next post.
Thank you Jerry, Rob, Saul and Ross.
It seems that we can all see things speeding up, and the globe becoming a smaller place through affiliations and convergence. Where this will take us exactly, we’re happy to wait and see. Since we’re living longer these days, while also using our technology to use time more efficiently, perhaps this is the Golden Age of Time? There’s a four-letter word for you, Saul! Perhaps even iTime, Adam? He he.
I guess only time, itself, will tell…
Not a scientist but I think it’s rather apparent that we have entered The Age of Universal Stupidity.
Examples
– bloke in Northern Ireland who decided to get into alchemy but rather than trying to convert lead into gold, he tried to convert his own pooh into the noble metal, cooking it on his living room heater – not a lot of gold but several thousand quid in fines and three months gaol
– couple in the US flying Grandpa back to Florida – Gramps died in his sleep on the flight but it was too much trouble to actually tell anyone so they dumped him back into his wheelchair, collected his baggage and was wheeling him out when a keen-eyed airport official noticed something was astray – “what? no, he’s asleep – true dinks. No, he always smells this way.”
– the armed bandit who help up a convenience store in Germany armed with a fluoro light globe and got away with it
– the armed bandit who held up a bank armed with a snake (I shared accomodation with him briefly after he got out of gaol)
Truly, this is The Age of Universal Stupidity.
Now you shall have to excuse me as it’s time for me to put a bucket on my head and go stand in the corner in the cat’s litter box.