Changing Tastes

(People are also into fancy ice creams now too!)            

I’m grabbing coffee in the Castro district in San Francisco when the waiter brings me an iPad so I can read the morning papers.  It seems that it is mostly standard issue today, when something suddenly grabs my attention, as I were a bull and I just got grabbed by the horns to hear all this gloom and doom that is somewhat, well, disappearing.  It’s an odd conclusion to hear on this day and age when everybody is cynical to the bone, or at least looks like.  The article written by one Adam Dominguez believes that this country is suddenly becoming “happier”, and less depressed with itself.  Dominguez cleverly mentions that not so long ago, science fiction had become all the rage in the west coast literary scene, and that it was those writers who wrote about that gloom and doom who suddenly are struggling to sell.  Just like week, the most read and talked about book in the country was not this, instead it was a book called of all things, Paradise, which was written by my very own ex-girlfriend Amy Sherman, and whose plot simply revolved around the quirky lives of quirky people living in a quirky town. Scary it was not.

                So how did this happen?  In my opinion, it probably was because the whole sci-fi phenomenon was a fad.  Quirky people living in quirky world can be a tiresome subject, but the difference now seems there are only so many depressing Blade Runner-like stories that people can stomach.  Also, books like Paradise can be brilliant escapism in a way that does not require an emotional toll from the reader,  and of course, there’s only so much genre fiction we can in an era of flying cars. And you know what? I can't complain about that.