Simon Pegg has a Franzen moment: Book criticism needs a poptimist revolution to take down genre snobs
Modern science fiction and comic books are "childish"? They're not -- and it's time for this debate to end
Simon Pegg, Jonathan Franzen (Credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth/AP/Tamas Kovacs)
Actor Simon Pegg may have thought he was making an original statement when he lamented to Radio Times that modern science fiction and comic books are “childish” and that we’re all on the way to becoming so infantilized and dumbed down we can’t think about anything serious, as reported by i09, but his statements are just the latest variation of cultural snobbery masquerading as concern for the impending downfall of society. (For a primer, see BookRiot’s translations of “Shit Book Snobs Say”).
i09 does a great job of defending the nuances of comics and science fiction, but this issue crops up every few months and isn’t specific to those fields. I don’t need to know much about superheroes to relate, because I do read two genres that are often seen as just as deplorable, ruinous and facile: romance and young adult. In the wake of the success of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” it’s become almost obligatory for any respectable publication to offer simultaneous awe at its commercial success while finding even faint praise too kind.
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