POLL FOR ALL
Oct. 12th, 2004 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
d_aulnoyA quick, open question for everyone: as f&sf, and, specifically, the hybridization of genre, is one of my minor fields, and as one of my advisors is interested in having me explain my positioning of it in such a crucial place in the orals, and, as I'm a psychotic anal-retentive who can't just give him a pithy two minute response but needs must write a frikkin' paper on it ... why are f&sf important? My *basic* response is, simply, that one can't understand a society until one comprehends their views of the future, be they utopic or dystopic, and that one sees the values of a society represented in their visions of the timeless struggles analogized in their fantasies. Also, one - or, I, more properly - can't help but think that the changing forms of those visions represent an enormous shift in how we view the world - not in compartmentalized little sections, but as part of a whole (I think that this ties in to Postmodernism, personally, but more on that later, as I'm going to be writing up an ICFA abstract tonight). Blah, blah, blah - I've got more, don't worry, but not time enought to write a nice long entry here. (If we had but world anough and time ...) But I'm curious - most of y'all are also f&sf readers, so tell me why *you* read it, live it, love it, lump it, variety being the spice of life and all ... escapism is a valid argument, but why turn to *this* for your brand of it? Why not horror, or Western, or romance? C'mon people, help to satisfy a sistah's curiousity.
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Date: 2004-10-12 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 08:06 am (UTC)It's what entertains me. It's what makes me think more than anything else. As a kid, it gave me other options that were much more energized than the literature that was supposed to be "good for me". Granted, much of what I read in the genre as a kid makes me cringe now, and some of the "good for me" literature I actually find more appealing, but that may be beside the point. Chosing sf/f for escapism (and horror with a speculative bent falls into that category, too, rather than strictly here-and-now no-magic true-crime-esque horror) means I really am escaping Somewhere Else (this may also explain why when I was in high school, I loved reading historical romance novels), rather than just a few states over, or to a different city or country. I'm going to a world that doesn't exist (even the here-and-now worlds that have magic of some sort), and in a lot of cases, a world that I wish could exist when I'm done reading, because even some of the most dystopic worlds have a lot more hope and potential in them than I feel like this one has at times.
I'm sure there are other reasons I read it, love it, write it, whatever, but I need to wake up a little bit more before I can dredge them up from inside my skull.
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Date: 2004-10-12 09:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 09:14 am (UTC)P.S. - Which titles are you thinking of w/this? I get Mieville, Link, Goto ... all of the semi-Interstitialist New Weird people. Are you thinking more Gibson, Stephenson, who ... ?
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Date: 2004-10-12 09:17 am (UTC)why scifi?
Date: 2004-10-12 10:48 am (UTC)Not much, but that's all you get when I'm home on lunch break. :)
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Date: 2004-10-12 12:21 pm (UTC)(the rug looks amazing.)
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Date: 2004-10-12 12:32 pm (UTC)It's the existance of the paths themselves. The sign-posts that say, "You can go here, if you want to. If you have enough courage, enough daring." It's knowing that if you follow some of the paths, there's no going back, no settling for where you were before because there is more out there, whether you can see it or not, because following that path is going to change you forever. It's about the discovery that following the paths provides.
So, for example, Fitcher's Brides... Fitcher is a path in and of himself, and is a lot of different possibilities for different people: salvation for the Fitcherites (assuming he's right), wealth for the girls and their step-mother, death, transformation. And once you step down the path, you've got all of these possibilities ahead of you, and even if death is the "end" of the path you end up on, there's the possibility that there's more beyond that. Coupled with that is the hope that if you don't follow that path, there is still something more out there because you've seen one path, and if you choose not to follow it, there must be more paths to take and what are the possibilities down that path?
I feel like sf/f gives you more paths and more choices, paths that are more hopeful than mainstream literature, because the sf/f can, because it isn't limited to the reality of here-and-now, because it isn't limited to a path that society deams "possible", because there is the impossibility, the stretching beyond. And that stretching beyond, even if it is to a "beyond" that is dark and desolate, means that there is the hope that we've come to this path, and maybe there is still something beyond that. Sort of a fractal of dividing and splitting paths that hint at the existance of more beyond them because we've already stretched beyond what's real in the here-and-now.
Does that make any sense?
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Date: 2004-10-12 12:36 pm (UTC)Re: the carpet; Excellent! We knew it would ....
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Date: 2004-10-12 05:24 pm (UTC)I don't get the question!
--V.
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Date: 2004-10-12 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-13 03:26 am (UTC)that sort of thing
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Date: 2004-10-13 05:54 pm (UTC)I could replace "fairy tales" with fantasy and the statement would still be true, for me. I love the options fantasy provides to read or write about love, hate, death, fear, loyalty, betrayal, oppression. The list could go on and on.
Since metaphor is what fantasy is to me, partially, this quote by Jane Yolen also seems apt: (From "Throwing Shadows" in Touch Magic)
"So slowly, agonizingly, I came to understand that metaphor and her sisters -- poetry and story -- are as natural to humans as breathing. And, further, I began to understand Archibald McLeish's beautiful line in Hypocrite Author, "A world ends when its metaphor has died.""
Fantasy is the metaphor that helps me make sense of the world. It is the one that speaks most deeply to me.
Sorry to go on and on.
Laura
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Date: 2004-10-14 07:10 am (UTC)This isn't specifically tied in to what you have to say,
I think it would be important to mention at this point that if one was to substitute S&SF (more-or less a marketing term) with its scholarly appelation "speculative fiction", every reference that's been made to fairy tales and Victorian "science heroism" would all fall under the same banner.
I had something to say about how F&SF basically took the essential truths one finds in standard literature and adds the factor of not only their protagonists and situations being devised by the author but the entire culture or era or planet or universe as well- essentially thematic exploration beyond the boundaries of "what we know to be true" into a blend of hypothesis and literature - but the caffeine hasn't kicked in and it was sounding even more intellectually masterbatory than what you just read.
I might also point out at this time, Helen, that SF writer Larry Niven considers Dante's DIVINE COMEDY as the first SF novel and has gone on at length about this. I personally suspect that he wanted to go on further and include the Old Testament, but he's afraid of waking up to an effegy burning on his lawn.
Yes, you can run, but you can't hide from Dante, it seems.
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Date: 2004-10-14 07:12 am (UTC)I don't understand why "Contemporary romantic self-exploratory tretise" is seen as a more legitimate genre then all of the others, either, but I've been told that I'm a little too broad minded sometimes...
"Quick, limit my literature - Lest I have too much to read!!"
Feh.
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Date: 2004-10-14 07:15 am (UTC)Speculative fiction has always embraced an application of technology.
Spoken word to written word was probably one of the first of these.
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Date: 2004-10-14 07:18 am (UTC)I think its important to mention as well, that classic literature is only contemporary to the culture that writes it.
Compare the Canterbury Tales to any chatty historical fantasy novel and there are far more similarities then differences. Is the world created in Moby Dick "more real" than the one in Neuromancer? I'd find it hard to say "yes" right away...
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Date: 2004-10-15 06:09 am (UTC)To add to this, there's the Chabon article on Pullman, discussing the influences of fantasy and its place in literary tradition. He also discusses fantasy's relationship to Milton:
"Any list of the great British works of epic fantasy must begin with Paradise Lost, with its dark lord, cursed tree, invented cosmology and ringing battle scenes, its armored angelic cavalries shattered by demonic engines of war. But most typical works of contemporary epic fantasy have (consciously at least) followed Tolkien's model rather than Milton's, dressing in Norse armor and Celtic shadow the ache of Innocence Lost, and then, crucially, figuring it as a landscape, a broken fairyland where brazen experience has replaced the golden days of innocence; where, as in the Chronicles of Narnia, it is "always winter and never Christmas."
A recent exception to the Tolkienesque trend is Pullman's series of three novels, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass (with a promised fourth, The Book of Dust), which reshuffle, reinterpret, and draw from Milton's epic both a portion of their strength and their collective title: His Dark Materials."
Chabon, Michael. "Dust and Daemons." New York Review of Books. Vol 51, Num 5, March 25, 2004. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17000