Genres

[Primarch]

Not having much else to occupy my mind this morning, I was wondering what genres people were interested in. Be it books, TV or gaming, what types of setting gets you all worked up. Please note that I am not asking about specific games, rules or minis, just what genre(s) you prefer.

I realise that the list above is not exhaustive and that there are some genres that overlap and others that deserve their own space. Sorry.

[Primarch]

Personally, I enjoy SF a lot, I used to be really into Star Trek, I love Asimov's writing and I enjoy both hard and soft SF stories.
Recently I've been reading a lot of historical stuff, mainly about Britain from around the 1700's and onwards. The Napoleonic era is fascinating, but it is the heroic stories of the late 1800's (not to mention the sometimes tyrannical nature of the British Empire), that attracts me.

[YellowStreak]

Only 3 choices!

[job]

My first game was Warhammer 40k back in 6th grade and Star Wars and Carl Sagan's Cosmos introduced the fascination with spaceships and interstellar travel to me. (That and Ender's Game and Homeworld.) There's always a place I guess for 40k in my imagination.

Then there's historics. I've always loved historics since my first copy of the Trojan War in 4th grade and the beautifully illustrated Black Ships Before Troy. Flames of War and The World at War series really engrossed me with WWII stuff. I love Naps because of Sharp and the romanticism of the period. But, some how I've failed to collect anything for pre-1800. I'm horribly tempted to collect samurai or classical age stuff, but Warhammer surfices at the moment.

@ Y-S: I was thinking the same.

[The Other Dave]

Only 3 choices!

I know!!

[Konrad]

Love sci-fi of all shapes and sizes. The 2nd movie I ever saw in the theater was Star Wars and it was my religion from age 6.
Victorian stuff is fun too. After Batman, and Han Solo my hero is Sir Richard Francis Burton. Sherlock Holmes stories are great. And nothing beats a classic Spaghetti Western.
Dig spy stuff too, as long as it is not tooooo serious. The old Mission Impossible TV shows were awesome. I'm a huge, huge Avengers fan, just ask my daughter Emma and am literally holding my breath until Spectre comes out.

[The Other Dave]

But to actually answer the question:

As for wargaming and role-playing, I'll basically play any old thing - I guess for me the social aspect outweighs any genre considerations, and a fun game is a fun game. So I voted in terms of media and such.

First for me is science fiction, the harder the better. I'm a big fan of Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Peter Watts, Iain M. Banks, the list could go on and on. On the other hand, while I've never been much of a Trek fan (I could take it or leave it, and the hit-or-miss nature of its long-running episodic nature makes it too much trouble to separate the wheat from the chaff, IMO), I do love me some Star Wars, so there is room in my heart for space opera. Everyone, go to your favorite quasi-legal online media consumption portal and watch Star Wars: Rebels now!

My next vote was fantasy, because fantasy, although I don't read or watch nearly as much as I did when I was younger. I've comparatively recently discovered a love for pulp and pulp-esque authors, and have become a big Howard fan (although I cannot get through more than a page or so of Burroughs), as well as Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. I like Tolkein of course, although these days I don't have much patience to actually read it. Dude was a great world-builder, but man oh man his prose... I sort of missed the boat on big multi-volume sprawling fantasy epics, though - never touched anything by George RR Martin, and only got through the first episode of Game of Thrones on TV before giving up.

Then is post-apocalyptic, although that really has a lot of overlap with both sci-fi and fantasy. Zombies I can take or leave, but who doesn't like Mad Max and Thundarr the Barbarian? (Man, I need to organize a group to play Gamma World for serious, now that I think about it.)

Things I would have voted for if they were on the list: Horror, "urban fantasy" (although I guess that probably does fall under the fantasy umbrella), and the like - stuff set in the modern day with supernatural goings-on.

[Primarch]

Only 3 choices!

I know!!

Well, otherwise everyone would have voted for everything. There are a few more on that list that I would have checked.

[Lovejoy]

I could have chosen a lot of these, but I went fantasy, sci-fi and other- other being whatever genre battling arcane-blasphemies in the jazz age is. Pulp, I suppose.

[The Underdweller]

Honestly for me it depends on the author as much as the genre, but I suppose if I had to pick it would be Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Victorian/Western, in that order.


Due to authors like Philip K. Dick, Robert Charles Wilson, H.G. Wells, Tolkien, Weiss and HIckman, Stephen King, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Fleisher, and lots of others I can't think of right now.