Should We Be Sending Pyr Books to the Oval Office?

The Telegraph recently released Barack Obama: The 50 Facts You May Not Know. Among them, the facts that he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books and that he has read all seven Harry Potter books. And we’ve all seen the MSNBC clip (on YouTube and below) where he admits to being born on Krypton.

When you remember that JFK’s remark that From Russian, With Love was one of his Top Ten favorite books was what launched Ian Fleming’s James Bond to widespread popularity, having a president that is genre-friendly is fantastic.

New Pyr author Mark Chadbourn agrees about what having a Geek-in-Chief could mean for genre fiction:

A new president always sets the wider cultural tone for a country (and in America’s case, the world). Look how Bush spawned all those testosterone thrillers, in novels, and on TV, like 24. Obama is already likely to have a much wider cultural impact than Bush, purely because his election was so much more iconic. Knowing that he loves genre stuff is bound to leech into the mainstream and give it a certain kind of cachet, at the very least.