"Uh ... yes. But you don't seem to be interested in the modern adventure fiction. May I ask why?"
"Sure." Jayjay found himself becoming irrationally irritated with Hull. He knew that the young sociologist had nothing to do with his own irritation, so he kept the remarks as impersonal as possible. "In the first place, you, as a sociologist, should know what market most fiction is written for."
"Why ... uh ... for people who want to relax and—"
"Yes," Jayjay cut in. "But what kind? The boys on Pluto? The asteroid slicers? No. There are four billion people on Earth and less than five million in space. The market is Earth.
"Also, most writers have never been any farther off the surface of Earth than the few miles up that an intercontinental cruiser takes them.
"And yet, the modern 'adventure' novel invariably takes place in space.
"I can read Westerns because I neither know nor care what the Old American West was really like. I can sit back and sink into the never-never land that the Western tells about and enjoy myself because I am not forced to compare it with reality.
"But a 'space novel' written by an Earthside hugger is almost as much a never-never land, and I have to keep comparing it with what is actually going on around me. And it irritates me."
"But, aren't some of them pretty well researched?" Hull asked.
"Obviously, you haven't read many of them," Jayjay said. "Sure, some of them are well researched. Say one half of one per cent, to be liberal. The rest don't know what they're talking about!"