My two cents

matociquala has some lovely and interesting things to say about the sf genre as a chimera.

I understand Matt Cheney's point at a deep gut level, possibly because I've had that conversation with undergraduate students, who were deeply offended by the experience of reading a story they didn't understand. And I didn't know what to say to them.

I think this may be an attitude one sees less of in the sf/f/h readership, because sf readers, like mystery readers, are in love with puzzles. We (since I definitely include myself in this category) go into a story assuming that we won't understand everything immediately, that we will have to invest a certain amount of faith in the narrative to get to the payoff. We understand deferred gratification in the narrative sense.

It always comes as a shock to me to be reminded that not everybody reads this way.

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Another way to put what he's saying is what Terry Pratchett once said: That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"

I wouldn't necessarily draw that dividing line down the middle of the Atlantic, but like Cheney, Pratchett is pointing at two very different ways of approaching a text. (And we can rework Pratchett slightly to make the two options: (a.) what am I missing? and (b.) the author is doing something wrong.) And we can observe that one of these methods protects and barricades the reader from having to cope with anything new. The other at least gives breathing room and some rope to the idea that we can LEARN when we read.

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This doesn't mean that the author is omnipotent and can do no wrong; it doesn't mean the reader should allow himself to be browbeaten and cowed by an author's claim of intellectual superiority. It means that you try to read with sympathy rather than with entitlement. Give the author the benefit of the doubt; assume that if she does something you don't understand, there may be a reason for it, and it may be rewarding to figure out what that reason is. Don't assume (like the students both Matt Cheney and I have encountered) that the author is being difficult just to be a jerk.

But don't be afraid to say the emperor is bareass naked if he is.