From: charless@sco.COM (charles stross)
Subject: Re: Research in Fiction
Organization: The Somewhat Contagious Operation, Inc.
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 09:14:37 GMT


In article <e9HFoB2w164w@nlbbs.UUCP> willdorr@nlbbs.UUCP (William Cutlip) writes

	[ stuff about research in Star Trek deleted ]

>     As to all that other stuff: I'm not sure that anyone will be 
>helped by an admonishment to "do good research and tell a good story" 
>-- what passes for common wisdom on this thread. There is a tendency 
>in the sci fi (pardon me, "spec fi") community to mistake good 
>research for good storytelling. 

This pre-supposes that novels have anything to do with stories. Go 
forth and read some modern literature and you will see this this ain't 
necessarily so.

Of course if you're trying to write a _story_ as such, your 
objection has more merit; much hard sf goes in for technological
overkill and ignores the real interest in the setting, which is
how human beings respond to the postulated developments. Nevertheless, 
you seem to be missing the point ...

>     For instance, Greg Bear's _The_Forge_of_God_ was well-received 
>(to put it mildly).  The first three pages of the paperback edition 
>contain excerpts from reviews from dozens of newspapers and fanzines 
>across the country, all of which praise Bear unto the welkin. 
>
>     Keep turning the pages and you will find that there is 
>_NO_FUCKING_STORY_. 

Nope. Because that's not what this book was about!

>     Planet Earth awakens ond day to discover that it is host to at 
>least two strange monolithic objects, one located in Australia's 
>Victoria Desert, and the other located in America's Death Valley. 

[ ... deleted ... ]

>     But nobody -- no *human* -- does anything in this book. Instead, 
>great good fortune comes to the human race in the form of yet another 
>BSSM, a race of benevolent technospiders who unselfishly rescue a 
>remnant of the human race, along with a tall stack of comic books, 
>historical documents and a comprehensive collection of accordian music 
>and all -- our culture is preserved, huzzah. 
>
>     And there's your denouement, boys and girls: Deus ex machina, a 
>limp cliche. This is a story? 

No, it's not a `story', if by `story' you are looking for a jutting-
jawed and steely-eyed engineer-hero who goes forth, susses out the
aliens' evil plan, gets the girl, saves the world, and lives happily
ever after. What it _is_ is an attempt (IMHO a flawed attempt) to
portray the likely course of events if we are _not_ alone in the 
cosmos and not everyone out there is friendly. In this reading,
the human species _is_ helpless and passive, buffeted by forces
utterly beyond its control. As indeed we would be. In other
words, Bear commits the cardinal sin of attempting to write a 
realist, as opposed to a heroic, fiction.

It may interest you to know that it's a lot harder to write a 
fiction of this type; you don't have a whole load of mythic
archetypes you can deploy to keep the plot rolling. Instead,
you've got to use your head. Hence the somewhat cerebral, almost
dispassionate or disinvolved tone of the narrative. Personally
I think The Forge of God is a flawed novel, but for entirely
different reasons from those which you seem to have picked. 
Your critique does not convince me; you seem unable to analyse 
the book within its own terms of reference.

>     I don't know about you folks, but I like my characters to *do* 
>things -- to *attempt* things, to *accomplish* things. I want to read 
>something and say, "If I'm ever at the bottom of a well with a 
>thousand pounds of pewter rhinocerous chained to my neck, I'm gonna 
>get out of it just like Captain Spiffy did on page 539!!!" 

Look, if you don't like the book, *don't read it*. But if you
must criticize it, at least try to choose a reasonable frame
of reference within which to do so! This is not a book about
Flash Gordon saving the Universe; in many respects, there are *no*
real characters in it, except the earth itself (which gets
whacked by the climax -- which should have clued you in). That's
because it's a different type of fiction, that deserves to be
analysed in different terms of reference. Gwynneth Jones once
pointed out that the act of cognizing sf may well be as 
conceptually different from the act of comprehending traditional
prose fiction as, say, poetry. Hard sf in particular is _not_
about people; it's about _ideas_. This may make it flawed in
conventional terms, but if you analyse it in its own terms
it may well be very successful.

You appear to be making the same mistake as the fan of Westerns
who criticizes a detective story because there are no horses
in it and the lawman doesn't shoot the villains dead; the action
isn't what the reader expects, so the book must be wrong. 

>     You don't get that from _Forge_of_God_. But you do get a sense of 
>what is possible in science fiction these days. The plot is weak, the 
>premise is old, the characters are helpless, the prose is subadequate 
>-- but the research is "first-rate," and so Locus Magazine describes 
>_Forge_ as "One of the most striking novels in modern science 
>fiction."  

No; this is a reviewer brown-tonguing it to a publishing corporation
who pay Locus a lot of money for advertising space. Film at eleven.

>     Tell me: Is hard science fiction so rare that it can only be 
>beautiful? More to the point: If I do the proper amount of research 
>and come up with my own Big Science Space Monster/end-of-the-world 
>story, will I be exempt from critical standards of story and character 
>development? 

No. You're not called Greg Bear. You do not get A-list promotion,
custom displays in the shops and signing tours to Outer Mongolia.
Look, Greg is _not_ a dim-bulb, whatever you may think of the literary
merit of his big fat bestseller. All you've proven is that you can rip
the shit out of it if you try to deconstruct it in the terms of 
Flash Gordon. To get to where Greg Bear has gotten in the 
publishing industry takes a _lot_ more than good research and a
plot-generator out of the back of a  `how to write SF' book. It
takes more than meticulous research and extrapolation (which seems
to occupy in hard SF the niche reserved for plotting in other
branches of the genre). It takes more than good writing skills,
or even mediocre writing skills. It takes business acumen. Got that?
This is an industry, supplying highly customized consumer goods
to a market that laps up everything from ST:TNG to War and Peace,
and Greg Bear has found a highly lucrative niche in it.

If you think what Greg does is easy, suck it and see. You may
be right, but it will still take you fifteen years to establish
a market presence on anything like the scale he's achieved.

(As for critical standards or story and character development, you
will be exempt from them if you pick a field of writing in which they 
do not apply. Like computer manuals, or their bastard offshoot, hard SF :)

>     If so, get my Hugo ready. The book will be called _It_Came_From_ 
>Space_. I'll write it next week; it may take all afternoon. 

I look forward to reading it ;-)

-- 
Charlie Stross aka charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals. 
Newsgroups: misc.writing