Darius Bacon ([info]darius) wrote,
@ 2008-01-19 00:05:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
QOTD
Quoth [info]papersky on reading a biography of George Eliot:
In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it's just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That's my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can't really compare to people who are juggling four.

Mostly I just wanted to share this because it made me smile, but it did trigger some thoughts:

Seeing A Fire Upon the Deep on this list took me aback a bit because I'd give higher accolades to its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. But this choice does make better sense here: aDitS is a story of superlatives, and one of these is the blackest irony, that all the brilliance and hopeful plans are lost in the Slow Zone, with no character having the least hint of a clue of this. (Almost.) You need to have read aFutD to get that -- in that sense the book's worldbuilding doesn't stand alone like the books above.

This difference of genre has an analog in the programming world with works written for the mainstream ecosystem, fitting into a gigantic tangle of shared assumptions, versus more self-contained systems like Smalltalk... growing their own tangles. Funny how I lean towards the latter in this world, too; I wonder how much the reasons are the same.

I've wondered how we might take more advantage of allusion in programming -- in 'literate programming' can't the code itself be more literary? Today's new thought: maybe Vernor Vinge was thinking along the same lines with his 'analogical programming' in True Names.

And I really should check out Middlemarch.

(5 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]papersky
2008-01-19 04:51 pm UTC (link)
I like Deepness better too, and the reason I said aFUtD is exactly what you thought -- I also tend to think of the two of them as one thing, illuminating each other.

(Reply to this)


[info]fictualities
2008-01-20 04:52 pm UTC (link)
Hmmmmmmmm.

I love science fiction and fantasy, and write fanfic, and also love mainstream -- but my take on the relative positions of these three is a bit different, I suppose. (No, I'm not going to argue here for the equal status of fanfic -- certainly not my own.) I'm more interested here in the criterion Papersky used to rank the genres. It's interesting to see fanfic and mainstream being put in the same category as genres in which you do not have to start from scratch. I suppose they do resemble each other in that way: they start with a universe of (relative) givens. But, two problems:

1) (This is about mainstream, not fanfic.) Why is the project of persuasive and effective mimesis supposed to be easy? Sucky mainstream often sucks because the writer can't persuade us that her world is "real" -- that is, presenting a world familiar to the reader is hard in part because the reader already has some idea of what that world looks like, and it's COMPLICATED. Sitting on my desk is a glass of water; it's an ordinary glass (bought at Ikea) and ordinary water. But the visual reality of this glass is immensely complex, a pattern of light and shadow and reflection and movement (the water trembles while I'm typing, and yes, my desk is that cheap! :D) Presenting this glass of water to a reader, describing it persuasively, and most of all weaving it meaningfully into a narrative would surely be no easy task. It would be hard in part because as a reader I know exactly what a glass of water looks like and feels like. I've had the experience of having a glass of water mean something to me as a person. If an author tries to reproduce this experience in a way that isn't fully imagined, I can compare her narrative to my experience and say, pffffft, doesn't work.

I'm not saying that an sf writer trying to explain why a blexit has a thurm of splide sitting on its mipwit wouldn't also face a very considerably challenge of persuasiveness: the sf writer faces the burden of making up details that don't exist in life and persuading the reader that they do exist. That's hard, yes, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE seeing it when it happens. But I think that it's just as hard to persuade readers that something they're familiar with exists in a narrative, and to bring that familiar object to life so that it plays a role in a story. The tasks are hard in different ways (the burden of presenting details that readers can judge against their own experience, the burden of creating details that must work together as a coherent system), but it seems to me that the two tasks are equally hard.

2. Also, hmmm. Let's assume that everything I said in (1) is totally off-base, and that it really is more difficult to write sf than to write mainstream. It seems to me that there's a problem with using that as a criterion for the relative ranking of genres. Here's the problem: the criterion is writer-based rather than reader-based. That is, the fiction is being judged by how much work the writer has to do to practice the art form well, rather than on what effect the art form has on readers. And, well, this is one of those fundamental assumptions about value that can't quite be argued; the two sides just end up staring at each other in mournful incomprehension. Suffice it to say that for me personally, and ymmv -- my classification of the greatest novel would rely less on how hard it was for the writer to create and more on what the reader got out of it once the writer was done.

(That said, The Lord of the Rings is my favorite novel, as you've probably been able to tell for quite some time. But Middlemarch is good too; it's somewhere in my personal top twenty. You should give it a try sometime.)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]darius
2008-01-20 09:17 pm UTC (link)
First, I have a deadline whooshing up to spare you the long and rambly reply I'd like to write, because as usual you raise many points I'd love to explore. I totally wish you'd taught my literature classes, only, well, not really, because I was the kid who'd blow off the reading and give a gag answer to every question on the test, or answer the epigram assignment with "A poem a day keeps the teacher away"... and worst of all, you'd be stuck teaching high school. Thank god we have livejournal instead.

I think she was half-joking here -- though it's easy to miss, and I've been following her posts for, like, 15 years, back unto the Usenet age. (Here's another playful recent post.) My impression is, she was serious about good SF being harder to write, serious about her personal canon leaning heavily to SF, and then couldn't resist a deadpan upending of the way mainstream critics tend to treat genre. I'm sorry I didn't signal this better!

I'll try and come back to this sometime with a post on SF/fantasy vs. mainstream when I can in honor give it some attention.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
P.S.
[info]darius
2008-01-20 10:40 pm UTC (link)
When I say "explore", mostly I mean "go off on tangents from", you know... but that sounds less impressive.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]darius
2008-01-21 01:36 am UTC (link)
Since I feel like a bit of a bounder for starting this conversation and immediately going "Oh no, I'm much too busy, call me next weekend" -- a few thoughts on your points, without any tangents:

I was struck by the grouping of mainstream and fanfic, too. (There was actually a bit of extra bite since I know [info]papersky dislikes fanfic.)

1. This is true, but I wonder, doesn't most SF have to do this too? Even radically different settings, by our human standards, usually share a tremendous amount with our reality -- they need to, to have a story that can grab us -- and the quality of mimesis in the shared aspects is part of how the new aspects gain reality by association. Of course, this argument acts against the claimed advantage of SF worldbuilding (that it's there) -- but I think this is not decisive, because even what are little tweaks to the universe, from the godlike point of view, are difficult and rewarding to us. OTOH maybe mainstream literature develops this mimesis to a much higher standard, or uses it for different ends, and I'm too narrowly-read or imperceptive to see this? Certainly I can't judge this as a writer of fiction -- I never even started down that road -- making up stories never came naturally. I wouldn't want to make any claims, myself, on which is harder.

On another hand, SF can succeed even with lousy real-world-mimesis given enough strength along other dimensions.

Incidentally I wonder how much the key to worldbuilding is what you leave out, and how.

2. Yes, totally. In fact, often in programming at least what was easier to write was a better program, too -- the trick is to see the program that wants to be written. Though I will confess some fondness for the bizarre contortions of the Obfuscated C Contest. :-)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(5 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…