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Okay, so I was a good interwebs correspondent and wrote a post early for the day of my nine-hour drive. But then a snowstorm knocked out the electricity here and something delayed my internet connection’s resurrection, so here I am, needing to do like three posts to catch up. I’m going to include them all here, in one post, for ease of reference.
Oh, of course, you can find my last post, day five, over on SF.c.
[you can find my 12D4 post on SF.c]
Sorry for the truncated post. I’m moving out for the break, back home, and I have to dash this off before I go to bed and drive tomorrow. I’ve been packing and finishing my grading… Bleh. Anyway. My fourth moment is the conference I presented at.
[You can find my 12D1 over at SF.c]
I know, weird, right? But hey, I liked it.
Or Why an Author’s Day Job Matters.
While reading the latest in my summer’s course of Gothic methodology, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (Maggie Kilgour, 1995), I found an interesting line about the life of Ann Radcliffe. Here it is:
. . .the mystery of her own [Radcliffe's] life stimulated the public’s imagination to construct a suitable fiction around it, and it was rumoured that she had been driven mad by her own stories. While the artist demanded a total separation of her art and life, her audience, educated by reading gothic novels, insisted that the two were the same. (113)
This tendency in readers explains something that has puzzled me for a while now: the insistence of SF readers that SF writers have science backgrounds or enough research on the given topic to replace it.
This was not always the case. Hugo Gernsback, in the 1920s, insisted that the stories he published were scientifically accurate, but they weren’t. John W. Campbell insisted the science be pretty accurate and that the focus should be on a realistic portrayal of how that science affected people, but the portrayals weren’t that realistic. Honestly, it’s not until the 60s that the kind of psychological realism Campbell was insisting on finally made it into the genre in general. Delany’s Dhalgren takes the ruined city, a microcosm of the post-apocalypse world, and explores, in detail, what would happen to the people who remained. Since none of the people are scientists, the reader never learns what actually caused the ruining of the city or the apparent addition of a new moon (dubbed “George” by those few who saw it in person) or the enormous, too-close sun that rises over the city one day.
But before that we got people like Asimov and Clarke, who rarely, if ever, engaged in what we could call “realism.” But even today, when fan-standards for writing have risen (somewhat), Clarke and Asmiov remain ascendent. B-whuh?
Kilgour’s summation of Ann Radcliffe’s public life holds the answer. Readers want to attach the writer and the text, and one of the ways that’s done is to demand reassurance that the writer does the stuff inside the text. It’s not only possible, but traditional, that a well-written SF story that gets some science wrong will be thrown to the wayside, while a poorly-written piece of tech-porn by a scientist who’s decided s/he can write will be accepted, if not always eagerly. Asimov and Clarke were both (nominally) scientists. Clarke probably had a good, lifelong claim to that, but Asimov became more of a literature critic than a scientist in later life. And track down the “science” of the Asimov robots. Yes, the three laws of robotics are a cool idea, but they’re not science, they’re extrapolations from ideals of just behavior. The obelisk (from 2001 and its originating short story, “The Sentinel,”) are cool ideas of sociological change (that is, something caused humans to evolve), but there’s no science to it in the movie or the short story — maybe Clarke added it to the novels, I haven’t managed to find a copy of the first one, yet (I have the second one, mind you). The short story reads like a ham-fisted Gernsback SF imitation of Lovecraft more than anything else.
But any literary ideas (and these are all literary ideas, keep in mind, making them different in kind from scientific ideas) advanced by a writer who is known to have a scientific background will answer the urge in the reader to identify the author and the text, thus making the ideas advanced by the scientist as scientific as the people are. It’s effectively the fallacy of authorial intent, but hinging on the reputation of the author rather than the actions.
And keep in mind, this is not a repudiation of the desire to see the literature of science. Delany remarked (in an interview, I think), that he never wrote anything he felt went against the contemporary views of science regarding the way the world works. Further, he toyed with scientific ideas just as much as anyone: Babel-17 is an exploration of linguistics (and amazing, by the way, though it succumbs a little too much to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
If we’re going to discuss the idea (rather than the story, which necessarily includes the idea, but not necessarily vice-versa), do that. It’s basically fine. I usually begin a recommendation of a SF or fantasy book by describing the idea. But we don’t really have to bring the authors into it; they don’t matter to the reading of the text.
I can turn this against a writer you all know I love, too — Tolkien. Part of the reason The Lord of the Rings is so well-loved is Tolkien’s reputation as a medievalist. Fans who don’t pay attention to anyone else’s academic record call him “Professor Tolkien.” They are identifying Tolkien’s professional study of medieval literature and the text they love, LotR. Did one influence the other? Yes. But so did Tolkien’s status as a husband, a father, and a symbolic Christian (that is, he once told Lewis that all religions pretty much get to the same point, and the symbolism of Catholicism was particularly agreeable to him — I don’t know if that has a real term, I just made up “symbolic Christian”). And while readings of the text pull all those sources in, the fan view of the book doesn’t. He’s never “Christopher’s father,” is he?
It’s not revolutionary to point out that Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is about what really matters in life, as compared with what we take too seriously, but I thought I might spend a few moments doing so anyway (i.e. I finally got around to the first episode, which I’ve had since it dropped).
Or Exploding Canons
If you don’t get the pun, really, there’s not a lot of hope for you.
At any rate, I’ve been considering the question of canons. Of course I have, I’m a member of a literary group considered to be “fringe” according to the establishment (or possibly, the Establishment, i.e. The Man). What else would I be doing with my time?
No. Really, I’m just closing the poll from a few days ago. If you’d been putting off voting, it’s too late now. You can see the results under the cut.
I thought I’d run this by you, as I am incapable of living my life without public approval. I am a day or two away from finishing Banner of the Stars II, my latest anime viewing “project.” I thought I should check out what everyone thought my next such project should be.
Once I catch up with all the other stuff I need to do, I wanna start some classic SF stuff. Catch up on what I’ve missed. Thus, I have a poll for you. Answer it. Answer it good.
You may find the poll here. I make no guarantee of blitzing through anything. If you suggest, say, Turn-A Gundam, I may finish that and then move on to LoGH, or K-On, for all I know. But there you go. I’m fickle. I will do whatever tops this chart, though. I’ll close polling and publish results, uh… sometime. Probably when I catch up with all my other shit to do.
If I do this every time I see something outstanding in a book, I might be writing “addendums” forever, but I thought those of you who appreciated the original post, on the reasonings behind privileging certain forms of fiction, might like this, from Brian W. Aldiss’s Billion-Year Spree:
[H. G. Wells] speaks of ‘the supreme importance of individualities, in other words of ‘character’ in the fiction of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Throughout that pierod character-interest did its best to take the place of adustment-interest in fiction . . . It was a consequence of the prevalent sense of social stability . . . Throughout the broad smooth flow of Nineteenth-century life in Great Britain, the art of fiction floated on this same assumption of social fixity. The Novel in English was produced in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment of secure people who liked to feel established and safe for good. Its standards were established within that apparently permanent frame and the criticism of it began to be irritated and perplexed when, through a new instability, the splintering fram began to get in the picture.” (127-8)
The general rule of thumb is that the “reader” of a mystery should be able to figure out the culprit before it is revealed. Mysteries are considered puzzles for the reader as well as the characters.
This actually puts them at odds with detective fiction, where the point is to watch a genius of some sort figure out things we couldn’t possibly. Think Sherlock Holmes, or his illustrious antecedent, Auguste Dupin. There are all sorts of examples, but the most profuse is the mystery. Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, so on. The television mystery/detective drama adds a wrinkle, as it’s impossible to give the reader the clues without making it obvious. Thus the police procedural, such as Dragnet, CSI, Law & Order, even, to some extent, Bones (which I love, by the way). It’s a mix of the mystery and the detective, emphasizing the procedure rather than the intuitive leap.
These can get tiring, at least for me. However, there is a delight that is almost unfaltering for watching the genius at work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read every single Sherlock Holmes story (though I usually skip the middle section of A Study in Scarlet — I pointedly re-read the entire novel last year in Leslie Klinger’s delicious annotated edition). Thus comes our Monk and our Psych.
This is all due to a late-night episode of The Mentalist, which, when it is on-stride, is excellent, but can fall flat sometimes. Eventually these people would accept that Jane (the main character) can, indeed, do what he does.
I only know of two Japanese forms of all this: Detective Conan and Daughter of Twenty Faces (which, of course, calls to mind the writings of Edogawa Ranpo). Does more than this make it to Japanese television? The mystery, in all its guises, is and almost always has been a mainstay on American TV. Any other anime examples I should know about?
