url URL date not supplied after the talk at ut austin i spent saturday at the turkey city science fiction writers workshop at bruce sterling s place turkey city is a venerable science fiction workshop that has spawned many good writers and a lexicon of science fiction critical terms that is the de facto standard for understanding what works and what doesn t in a work of science fiction squid on the mantelpiece chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act they should be fired in the third in other words a plot element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis however in sf plotting the macguffins are often so overwhelming that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse it s hard to properly dramatize say the domestic effects of dad s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city this mismatch between the conventional dramatic proprieties and sf s extreme grotesque or visionary thematics is known as the squid on the mantelpiece card tricks in the dark elaborately contrived plot which arrives at a the punchline of a private joke no reader will get or b the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the author this stunt may be intensely ingenious and very gratifying to the author but it serves no visible fictional purpose attr tim powers i had the cold from hell all weekend and i m jetlagged but i wanted to get some links up before i hit the sack until tomorrow link NUMBER discuss NUMBER NUMBER URL NUMBER URL 