A hit man in the hard-boiled style — terse, efficient, sarcastic, a guy with a code — wanders around a postapocalyptic New York City in which Times Square is off limits owing to a dirty bomb attack and the rich have retreated into a virtual reality existence. His name is Spademan and he's the main character in Adam Sternbergh's debut novel, Shovel Ready. Sternbergh, an editor at The New York Times Magazine (and a former editor at New York), was excited by the idea of smashing together two types of formerly lowbrow yet equally entertaining scenarios. "So many of my favorite things, from Star Trek to Neuromancer to Firefly to Inception, are basically built on taking the conventions of one genre and grafting them on to another."
Sternbergh spoke with Lev Grossman — Time magazine book critic and author of The Magicians, The Magician King, and the final book in his trilogy, The Magicians' Land (out this August) — about nerd-dom, genre crossbreeding, and why literary fiction is just as conventional as fantasy books.
Sternbergh spoke with Lev Grossman — Time magazine book critic and author of The Magicians, The Magician King, and the final book in his trilogy, The Magicians' Land (out this August) — about nerd-dom, genre crossbreeding, and why literary fiction is just as conventional as fantasy books.
Sternbergh: Let’s start with my thoroughly untested but undoubtedly groundbreaking Grand Theory of Nerd-dom. It's pretty simple: There are essentially three kinds of nerds: Sci-Fi Nerds (e.g. Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.); Superhero Nerds (e.g., superheroes and comic books), and Fantasy Nerds (e.g. Tolkien, D&D, etc.). My theory is: You can’t be all three. You can be one, you can be two, but never all three.
Grossman: I tend to be leery of theories of nerd-dom. It’s always been my experience that nerd-dom in general is inherently resistant to theorization. I don't think we like to be nailed down in that way — we like to think of ourselves as weirder and less predictable than that. To paraphrase (I think) Godel, Escher, Bach, the nerd-dom that can be spoken is not the true nerd-dom.
Sternbergh: Growing up, I was always deeply, DEEPLY into Star Wars and comics, but fantasy stuff like Tolkien left me cold. Never played D&D. Didn't really get into C.S. Lewis (despite encouragement from my parents, who thought it was much more wholesome than reading X-Men).
Grossman: I like to think of myself as a three or even a four-quadrant nerd: SF, fantasy, comics, and video games. Though, granted, my obsessiveness about them isn't very equally distributed. Especially since becoming a dad, I have nowhere near enough time to keep up with games or, really, with comics either. I might suggest a refinement along the lines of, one’s nerdiness is a fixed quantity, a non-expanding pie, which can only be allocated to one genre/medium at the expense of another?
Sternbergh: I like that — the Quantity Theory of Nerd-dom. There’s only so much individual enthusiasm to be allocated, yet the potential objects of allocation keep multiplying. As a new dad myself (as of 5 days ago!) I’ll be interested to see where my precious nerd-dom resources are allocated. This year I went to New York Comic-Con for the very first time, and I, in my dotage, could I.D. only about 30 percent of the cosplay costumes. It reminded me how many galaxies of enthusiasm there are out there to be enthusiastic about: Doctor Who, Manga, Bioshock Infinite, and on and on and on. Which felt kind of wonderful: so many gardens of imagination in full blossom.
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Sternbergh: I like that — the Quantity Theory of Nerd-dom. There’s only so much individual enthusiasm to be allocated, yet the potential objects of allocation keep multiplying. As a new dad myself (as of 5 days ago!) I’ll be interested to see where my precious nerd-dom resources are allocated. This year I went to New York Comic-Con for the very first time, and I, in my dotage, could I.D. only about 30 percent of the cosplay costumes. It reminded me how many galaxies of enthusiasm there are out there to be enthusiastic about: Doctor Who, Manga, Bioshock Infinite, and on and on and on. Which felt kind of wonderful: so many gardens of imagination in full blossom.
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