Special story sauce

Another comment about John van Sickle's excellent Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. The introduction contains one of those blanket statements about what a good story needs:

Clichés are not in themselves necessarily bad, but their overuse shows that the writer has forgotten what separates the strong tale from the hollow: "the human heart in conflict with itself," as Faulkner said. Where there is this conflict, the tale stands; where the conflict is absent, the tale falls flat, and in neither case does it matter how many ships get blown up.

There's some truth in that. Harlan Ellison has written whole critical essays arguing something similar: he says, for instance, that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a fundamentally bad story because the only interesting, conflicted character in it is a machine. But statements like this always bother me, because some of my favorite stories don't have very much of "the human heart in conflict with itself" at all... and in fact have been criticized on those grounds.

For example, Greg Egan can do intense, anguished character drama (his short story "The Cutie" is so wrenching that it is almost physically difficult to read). But one of my favorite novels of his is Diaspora, an extra-extra-hard-science-fiction adventure that is mostly about posthuman software-beings trying to prepare for the possibility of astronomical catastrophe, and eventually going on a phantasmagorically wild journey into a five-dimensional universe and beyond. They come into a sort of conflict with stubborn meat-humans in one chapter, but most of the time the character conflicts and personal decisions they have to deal with are much more abstruse than the ones we have to deal with, lying somewhere in a gray area between ideology and aesthetics: they have arguments over issues like the extent to which an individual's choice of sensorium should reflect the physical world. Not exactly the stuff of the great tragedians. From reader reviews, I gather that lots of people find that this keeps them from caring about the characters, and makes them want to throw the book across the room. But I keep wanting to re-read it.

What does this say about me? Nothing good, perhaps. I felt burned when I read the little author statements at the end of the (excellent, superb, brilliant) anthology Women of Wonder: The Classic Years, and read Kit Reed in a quote from Dream Makers: Volume II: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction saying

I've seen too many people who have escaped into genre fiction as a way of avoiding any of the real things about living and writing. The minute you put two characters on a planet and get busy with the hardware and the scenery and all the rest of it, you have caught the interest of a certain kind of reader, when you wouldn't have caught his interest if your characters were living right here and now in a split-level, where you might have to look a little more closely into what their souls are like and what problems they might have... I don't think books can tell you how to live, but on the other hand, I don't think they should tell you that you don't have to think about it.

That's the problem writing science fiction: you get read by all those icky people who actually like it. I think I might be the wrong kind of reader for Kit Reed; I don't always want to eat my peas.

Seriously, I do understand what she's saying; I'd be dissatisfied with an uninterrupted diet of whiz-bang fluff with no other content. And really bad, unconvincing characters can always sink a story, as James Patrick Kelly says here. But I also think that if you want to, you can write a story that is more about ideas than about characters, and make it good. There was so much fulsome self-congratulation about SF as the Literature of Ideas back in the John Campbell days that there was something of a reaction to this later on (and by 1985, when the aged Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "The Little Tin God of Characterization" in which he argued that SF didn't need it, few agreed). But the notion of a Literature of Ideas has merit, and one of the good things that happened in the 1990s was that writers like Egan and Vinge and Stephenson started to revive it in a big way.

Update: And now I see that according to Nancy Kress I'm totally wrong; many fans, writers and critics agreed with Asimov and to even advocate decent characters has become a radical opinion. Whatever. Nancy Kress is a really good writer, incidentally.

Women and men

chicken_cem mentioned a (not always applicable) difference between female and male science-fiction writers with regard to characterization. In that same Women of Wonder appendix, Alice "James Tiptree, Jr." Sheldon said she thought that "by their sins shall ye know them, which is to say that there are separate styles of bad writing." She said (crediting the idea to Rebecca West) that when their writing goes bad, men tend to spiral into grandiose speculation with cardboard characters, and women tend to write obsessive, over-internalized stories about trivialities. The good writers can walk the line and transcend the traps characteristic of their sex (note that Robert Silverberg insisted that Tiptree was a man). Of course it's a sweeping generalization, but I've seen enough to find it an interesting idea.