![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pouring gas on the choir
May. 18th, 2003 07:51 pmSven Birkerts on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Whether or not you agree with this critique of SF, you have to admire Birkerts's boldness in laying it out straight, and in the NYT Books section. Has to be a career-limiting move around those parts.
Anyway. Actually, I'm sure I catch the tone, but I don't even understand what he's saying. "Proceeds from premise"? Does he mean that in the writing of an SF story, premise is chronologically first in the author's mind? That premise determines character? Conversely, that an author of Literature first conceives of character in a void, and then casts about for a premise to support it?
Somewhere in here is the fact that SF exists which cares about premise and not about character. But the idea that they're opposed is bizarre. If I do start by choosing a premise, how does that meaningfully constrain what I do with character, unless my premise is something like "A Sweeping Epic of the Unthinking Depths!"? People, or something like, are always with us.
SF can be written in other ways, too. I don't know, but I would not be surprised if Bone Dance proceeded more from Sparrow than from the world around. Or "premise" and "character" can both emerge far downstream of whatever else generates the structure of the work.
The best I can rejigger this critique is to say that we have a hard time writing the (non)human experience of a situation alien to us. (One might then be reassured that so much SF is so basically non-alien.) On the other hand, we have no easy time stepping back to write about what's familiar.
In the "Ten Pounds of Sheesh in a Five-Pound Sentence" department:
Ed Regis on Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything:
I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ''L,'' and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character. It sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters, and elevates scenario over sensibility.
Whether or not you agree with this critique of SF, you have to admire Birkerts's boldness in laying it out straight, and in the NYT Books section. Has to be a career-limiting move around those parts.
Anyway. Actually, I'm sure I catch the tone, but I don't even understand what he's saying. "Proceeds from premise"? Does he mean that in the writing of an SF story, premise is chronologically first in the author's mind? That premise determines character? Conversely, that an author of Literature first conceives of character in a void, and then casts about for a premise to support it?
Somewhere in here is the fact that SF exists which cares about premise and not about character. But the idea that they're opposed is bizarre. If I do start by choosing a premise, how does that meaningfully constrain what I do with character, unless my premise is something like "A Sweeping Epic of the Unthinking Depths!"? People, or something like, are always with us.
SF can be written in other ways, too. I don't know, but I would not be surprised if Bone Dance proceeded more from Sparrow than from the world around. Or "premise" and "character" can both emerge far downstream of whatever else generates the structure of the work.
The best I can rejigger this critique is to say that we have a hard time writing the (non)human experience of a situation alien to us. (One might then be reassured that so much SF is so basically non-alien.) On the other hand, we have no easy time stepping back to write about what's familiar.
In the "Ten Pounds of Sheesh in a Five-Pound Sentence" department:
Ed Regis on Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Bryson might go on for too long about such (to my mind) anesthetizing subjects as trilobites, mosses, lichens, continental drift, plate tectonics, taxonomy and cladistics (don't ask) [...]
