Notes from the Labyrinth

[truepenny]

We need a new word.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I call "science fiction" and "fantasy" modes.

---L.

[pbprincess.livejournal.com]

I think the term "mode" is useful as well.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My tendency has been to use "form" to describe format -- prose vs. poetry, length, standalone-ness -- but I've never tried to describe SF or fantasy as anything but "setting", and that only when I am trying to minimize the SFness of it for someone who "doesn't read SF".

I like "subjunctive" as a writing mode, to describe the counterfactualness of SF and fantasy writing -- its elegance pleases me. What do we call parody and satire? I should think those would be comfortable being called modes as well, since one satire does not look to another for its conventions; it looks only to the thing being satirized. Right? Right?

And I'll finally be able to call a cautionary tale a cautionary tale, whether it's about robots or about bad marriages. That pleases me.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Errrr. I had always sorted f and sf by f being immpossible under any conditions in our world and sf being impossible with the present state of our knowledge and technology. "Contrary to fact" isn't the same; all fiction is contrary to fact.

(So, other fictions are not impossible, but are highly improbable and/or untrue (e.g. romance, mystery). Occasionally real-world situations do follow the patterns of romance or mystery, but never fantasy, and science fiction patterns can appear (the prizewinning flight of SpaceShipOne this week being an example, or---very early example---Clarke's telecom satellite prediction) but the sheer quantity of sf patterns/predictions compared to the paucity of real-world outcomes means that this too is not common or ordinary.)

Mode is the word that's wanted.

That aside, hasn't Delany said/written much on just this subject?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The problem with mode, for me, is that I've been indoctrinated by papersky. Mode means something else, in my lexicon.

Which is inconvenient, and we need a standardized vocabulary, and yadda yadda. But there it is.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Delany may have (I don't pretend to be well-read), but, you know, it clearly hasn't made it out into the popular consciousness yet. So it can't hurt to make the argument again.

And, yes, of course, all fiction is just that: fiction. Calling f&sf subjunctive was an effort to get at the way in which both are very much thought-experiment types of story-telling. X isn't true, but what if it were? They aren't, as "mainstream" literature and mystery and romance etc. etc. try to do, counterfeiting the real world. They're taking a blatantly not-real world (subjunctive) and treating it as if it were real (indicative).

[larryhammer]

Mode means something else, in my lexicon.

Namely?

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um.

It's a concept that skates along the edge of being articulatable. The best I can do--tho', since it's papersky's concept, maybe she can do better--is the particular way in which a particular story demands to be told. "Way" being here much wider than point-of-view or voice or tense or person or setting or anything of that sort, but something to do with the way the story feels in your head as you try to grapple with it.

Which is probably about as clear as mud, but is the best I can do at the moment.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Parody is ... well, the best analogy I can come up with is the monster in the X-Files episode "Humbug," the parasitic twin.

Satire is harder, because it can be applied to such a broad range of topics, and can be combined with other genres. Some works are only satires (e.g., The Dunciad), while others are satire combined with mystery, or with comedy of manners, or with whatever genre happens to have struck the author's fancy. Satire isn't a zero-sum kind of operation.

Now that I've said that, I don't have the least idea what to do with it.

[larryhammer]

Um, no, not very clear.

---L.