Special story sauce

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think it comes down to balance. If you've got good characters, you'll want a good idea to let `em stretch. If you've got a good idea, you'll want good characters in order to deploy the idea well. If your idea is SO FRICKEN COOL that you think you can get away with paper characters, well, you're Stephen Baxter and you need a good whuppin. And if your characters are so deep and complex and real that you think you can just feed standard plot #7B, well, the line forms to the left. Bleh.

I think that writing about ideas is possible, but it would take a real champ to extend an idea the length of a novel. I'm curious that you'd include Stephenson in that list, but then i've only read "Snow Crash" and "The Big U" and it seems that he would rather disavow ever writing the latter (not entirely without reason, but still). To further add on this, i haven't read a lot of SF, but that is probably in part because of those many facile books out there that slap together a makeshift plot and thin characters on top of a cool idea.

And if i were van Sickle, i'd red-cross time travel. Time travel is ruined forever and can no longer be used in a serious SF novel, period. NEVER EVER EVER.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Baxter has some problems with characters, yes indeed. I think of him as being Larry Niven if he were depressed and British.

Van Sickle seems mostly to agree with you about the time travel, if you look at all the standard time-travel plots in the list. One of my major disagreements with him, actually, is that he seems to be fixated on a particular fictional theory of time travel as the only permissible one, and I think others can work too if the rest of the story is good. But the basic time-travel stories are all so threadbare by now that you've really got to have something radically different in there to make one work.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention Larry Niven, as the reason i made my "serious novel" proviso was because i just finished reading Rainbow Mars. I find the time travel contained therein (and the other Svetz short stories) to be treated with an appropriate amount of silliness (the short stories more so than the novel[la?] proper).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's another thing: different forms lend themselves to different kinds of storytelling. The idea-centered story works best at a very short length, and the characters in such a story will probably be drawn with simple, bold strokes (a real master can make them breathe nevertheless). Novels usually need more fleshed-out characters and involved plots.

I often think that the range of lengths called novellas or short novels might be the ideal length for science fiction, since it lends itself to developing a setting, and setting is so important in the genre. Unfortunately there's not much of a market for them today, so people pad out their stories and sell them as novels.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Diaspora, by the way, is essentially picaresque, more a series of linked episodes than an integral novel.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Connie Willis has a pair of superb novels, Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog (same universe, different characters and settings) featuring time-travelling characters, but like all of her characters, they're wonderfully readable unheroic screw-ups who can't stop thinking of themselves.

She also fairly neutered time-travel: you just can't use it to affect major historical events. (You can certainly take a WWII-era rifle back in time, but somehow you'll never get near Hitler, no matter how hard you try.) As a result, since you can't use time-travel to solve problems, it's really just a kind of chronoscopic research. Hence, both novels are kinds of period pieces that take place in two somewhat-intertwined periods.

Willis tends to write human stories in slightly-fantastical or -futuriffic worlds, which is why she's on the SF shelf. You do get the sense that the plots add up in the end terribly well, which may be the point of her stories, but it's all the more unexpected when characters run in such different directions to start out. Willis does tend to pour in trivia (like the "famous last words" bits in Passage, but I've always found it pleasant or at least bearable. (Not a ringing endorsement, but whatever.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've only read short stories of hers, but they were very good.

Whatchutalkin' 'bout, Willis?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Wills has a certain type of peripheral character that can best be described by generalization-- a person who has strong opinions about what's to be done, and who serves as an obstacle to the protagonists. Some of these people are mild bigots (such as the anti-smoking people in Bellwether) but mostly they're social bureaucrats, or possessed by neuroses or something else that prevents them from understanding the protag's needs or being helpful. In short, they are People Who Don't Listen. I'm terribly amused by them all, and I wish I could write characters like that. But I know at least one person who won't read Willis because she's turned off by those types of characters. They tend to be peripheral people who become accidental antagonists (perhaps I repeat myself), but they're one reason I keep coming back to her books.

You in particular might like Passage which features an lovably intolerable character who's like Uri Geller if Geller was about out-of-body experiences instead of bending spoons.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, most really crap SF is a makeshift plot and thin characters on top of a boring, hackneyed idea out of the big pile of standard tropes. If the story has a really novel idea, that's at least something. To my mind, the story will work well if all of these elements are at least competently handled (as they weren't in, say, Raft), but at least one of them stands out (pick any one).

With regard to Stephenson I was mostly thinking of The Diamond Age, which has some interesting idea-musings in it, though as a novel it's not as readable as Snow Crash. Actually the ideas about franchise-society in Snow Crash are kind of interesting, in a jokey way, though the neurolinguistic programming stuff is just nuts.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I think it comes down to balance. If you've got good characters, you'll want a good idea to let `em stretch. If you've got a good idea, you'll want good characters in order to deploy the idea well.

There, ronebofh said it for me. Excellent, nicely worded.

I was going to say that women SF writers tend to be better at characterization than the men -- but hey wrong!

Because

-- Sweeping generalizations, never true. Never. Haha.

-- A ton of women do fit the bill (Octavia Butler, Marion, Ursula, James Tiptree, Jr.) BUT,

-- There are a bunch of women who suck at characterization. For example, I never cared for Melissa Scott's characters. To be all "Yay Us! Go Lesbians!", I tried really hard to like them, I really did. Hey, out writers are sorta rare. But I just could not like them or care about them.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I know Matt's seen it before, but since you bring up women SF writers, here's my review of The Fresco.

I think it boils down, as always, to Sturgeon's Law.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I never liked Tepper's writing. To me it seemed pretty formulaic and uninteresting and appealing only to a certain kind of sexually repressed, "feel bad for me, I'm a Victim" kind of martyr types. Bleh.

Sturgeon's Law, while over-cited generally, is in fact applicable as always.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sam read "Beauty" a few years ago and found the didactic heavy-handedness difficult to take.