nemorathwald (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nemorathwald) wrote2005-02-02 09:43 am
nemorathwald) wrote2005-02-02 09:43 am
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Why Do You Go To The Bookshelf?
In my recent post about e-book copy protection, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avt_tor asked me if I remembered how Karl Schroeder's Permanence ended. Since I couldn't remember, I tried looking up reviews of the book on Amazon.com. It was interesting that the reviewers criticized it mostly for the same reasons that I liked it: "too often resembles digressions that belong in an anthropology study, not a novel." "...the author packs in enough material for several volumes." I didn't care about his characters any more than they did, but I don't demand to; and I noticed that some of them were thrown in for little reason but I didn't care; I would have been just as happy had Schroeder never mentioned any individuals by name and simply invented a future history. I'm just wierd that way. It's an awesome book that kept me up at night thinking about Fermi's paradox, experimental techno-religion and intellectual property. SF literature seems to be dominated by the publishing world's literary values just as much as TV and movie SF is dominated by prosthetic makeup limitations, and gravity on the set, and the need to keep the same actors on every episode.
At ConFusion this year there was a panel on "Is the demand for scientific accuracy killing the creativity in SF?" with Robert Sawyer and Anne Harris. Ms. Harris gave many cogent arguments for why her invention of fake science is good and valid writing. Each argument was from a literary, not intellectual, standpoint and was therefore, although perfectly sound, more or less irrelevant to me. Soft SF and hard SF have no need to appeal to each other's audiences for validation. There is no doubt in my mind that she must be an author of surpassing characterization and plot, but I dislike the fact that it's automatically assumed that is my first priority. When I go to a bookstore's SF & F section and witness the monolithic steamrolling hegemony of shelf upon shelf of film and TV franchise novels, and the clerk says "Egan who?" I am in no fear that soft SF is in danger of not having an audience. Quite the opposite. I fear that the literature of ideas is the one at risk. At cons I usually hear the assumption "everyone wants what we want" not from futurists, but from the publishing world for whom narrative story is the priority.
Even the defender of hard SF on the panel, Robert Sawyer, didn't seem to think SF had anything to do with the future. He merely said that science fiction has to have real science for the same reason mystery has to have a crime to be solved. This is an excellent comment but to stop there would be argument from definition; there remains the question of why these genres contain these things. What motivates someone to choose hard SF, or soft SF, or to even go to the bookshelf at all instead of TV? To any authors reading-- if you think about motivation, there's no sense trying to poach readers away from hard SF. Some people go to the bookshelf because they are thinking "I have a hankering for a good book." This may be impossible for an author to comprehend, but I have never had that feeling. I have never aspired to be an author, either (we do exist, even in fandom!). Some of us only read narrative stories because we want an illustration of what it might be like to live in the kind of future we see in the non-fiction works of Eric Drexler or Marvin Minsky or Ray Kurzweil. Books worth reading are a dime a dozen, but my reading time is a carefully-guarded commodity and I just have to choose what's most important to my personal obsessions. Greg Egan, as it has been said, tends to write chapters on physics that resemble the passages about the biology of sperm whales in Moby Dick, and he has deep-seated double-ply issues, but they're my issues. I choose reading material that provides a real-life kind of intellectual stimulation, and a real-life kind of scary, and a real-life kind of hope, which is why I rarely make time to read fantasy. Why should I care deeply about the implications of a technology on my life and on the real world, unless I believe it just might possibly exist?
avt_tor asked me if I remembered how Karl Schroeder's Permanence ended. Since I couldn't remember, I tried looking up reviews of the book on Amazon.com. It was interesting that the reviewers criticized it mostly for the same reasons that I liked it: "too often resembles digressions that belong in an anthropology study, not a novel." "...the author packs in enough material for several volumes." I didn't care about his characters any more than they did, but I don't demand to; and I noticed that some of them were thrown in for little reason but I didn't care; I would have been just as happy had Schroeder never mentioned any individuals by name and simply invented a future history. I'm just wierd that way. It's an awesome book that kept me up at night thinking about Fermi's paradox, experimental techno-religion and intellectual property. SF literature seems to be dominated by the publishing world's literary values just as much as TV and movie SF is dominated by prosthetic makeup limitations, and gravity on the set, and the need to keep the same actors on every episode.At ConFusion this year there was a panel on "Is the demand for scientific accuracy killing the creativity in SF?" with Robert Sawyer and Anne Harris. Ms. Harris gave many cogent arguments for why her invention of fake science is good and valid writing. Each argument was from a literary, not intellectual, standpoint and was therefore, although perfectly sound, more or less irrelevant to me. Soft SF and hard SF have no need to appeal to each other's audiences for validation. There is no doubt in my mind that she must be an author of surpassing characterization and plot, but I dislike the fact that it's automatically assumed that is my first priority. When I go to a bookstore's SF & F section and witness the monolithic steamrolling hegemony of shelf upon shelf of film and TV franchise novels, and the clerk says "Egan who?" I am in no fear that soft SF is in danger of not having an audience. Quite the opposite. I fear that the literature of ideas is the one at risk. At cons I usually hear the assumption "everyone wants what we want" not from futurists, but from the publishing world for whom narrative story is the priority.
Even the defender of hard SF on the panel, Robert Sawyer, didn't seem to think SF had anything to do with the future. He merely said that science fiction has to have real science for the same reason mystery has to have a crime to be solved. This is an excellent comment but to stop there would be argument from definition; there remains the question of why these genres contain these things. What motivates someone to choose hard SF, or soft SF, or to even go to the bookshelf at all instead of TV? To any authors reading-- if you think about motivation, there's no sense trying to poach readers away from hard SF. Some people go to the bookshelf because they are thinking "I have a hankering for a good book." This may be impossible for an author to comprehend, but I have never had that feeling. I have never aspired to be an author, either (we do exist, even in fandom!). Some of us only read narrative stories because we want an illustration of what it might be like to live in the kind of future we see in the non-fiction works of Eric Drexler or Marvin Minsky or Ray Kurzweil. Books worth reading are a dime a dozen, but my reading time is a carefully-guarded commodity and I just have to choose what's most important to my personal obsessions. Greg Egan, as it has been said, tends to write chapters on physics that resemble the passages about the biology of sperm whales in Moby Dick, and he has deep-seated double-ply issues, but they're my issues. I choose reading material that provides a real-life kind of intellectual stimulation, and a real-life kind of scary, and a real-life kind of hope, which is why I rarely make time to read fantasy. Why should I care deeply about the implications of a technology on my life and on the real world, unless I believe it just might possibly exist?