As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.
Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.
It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.
Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" — and the number of pop-culture creators — has more than tripled worldwide.
This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.
And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.
I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.
For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.
I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.
It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.
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