Hard Fantasy redux
Jun. 29th, 2006 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is me, avoiding my book which is due in a month.
Cleverly, I have found an occupation that feels just like grad school only without the part where I ever have to leave the house.
But I've been thinking. This is what happens: I make a post, people respond, I think, I make another post. Lather, rinse, repeat.
And I've decided that the concept I want to hang "hard fantasy" on is rigor.
This is, in some serpentine fashion, where "hard sf" gets the moniker from, too. The "hard sciences" are the ones with (self-proclaimed) rigor (i.e., mathematics); hence the anxiety in the "soft sciences" (I'm going to have to send the cabana boys out for more quotation marks here in a minute) about designing studies to achieve greater and greater mathematicality, and the hand-wringing and despair in the humanities that they can't be reduced to mathematics at all.
Hopefully, some of these attitudes are outdated, but they were definitely alive and well at my undergraduate institution (Case Western), where the superiority of the engineering side of campus to the liberal arts side of campus was proclaimed on one side and contested on the other, but always there.
We will notice also that you get points for abstractness. The myriad impenetrabilities of certain French literary theorists and the Anglophone writers who imitate them may be seen as a kind of Azaz's Revenge: "We can be just as incomprehensible as you!"
So, anyway. Rigor.
I'm going to define rigor as thinking things through. Notice that things is not specified in this definition. It can be your scientific whirligig, or your sociological speculation, your system of magic or your proposition about the nature of ghosts. What gives rigor (in my new and shiny model) isn't the premise. It's the treatment of the premise.
"The thing about magic?" Spike says to Willow and Xander at the beginning of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "There's always consequences." BtVS had a kind of mixed track record on its own follow through, but it articulated the principle.
There's always consequences.
And so when I say rigor, what I mean is, consequences. There have to be consequences, and they have to be far-reaching, like Asimov's comment about the influence of the invention of the automobile on the sociosexual behavior of American adolescents. Cause-and-effect is a good start, but things are never that simple. Think of V's dominoes in V for Vendetta. My favorite thing about rigorous sff is the moment when, as a reader, you say, "I never would have thought of that. But he's right." That little mental click! of the Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson machine completing its circuit--that's the payoff.
The other thing about rigor, and why it's valuable as an apparatus, is that it cannot coexist with clichés. I think one of the worst things a work of sff can do is think with its genre conventions: to have things happen because "that's what always happens." So you put a Dark Lord in because all fantasies have one, or you let your spaceship captain get the girl, because that's how the story goes. And you lose some fraction of your readers' attention, because they've seen this all a thousand times before. Worse than that, you shut yourself off from whole ranges--positive Himalayas--of possibilities. What if the Dark Lord's dead, and his minions are trying to figure out what to do now? What if instead of the spaceship captain getting the girl, the girl gets the spaceship? And those are just simple examples--a mere foothill, as it were.
I'm indicted in this, as well. One reason I'm avoiding my book that's due in a month is because I have to dismantle and rebuild great tracts of character motivation and interaction that are based, in the current draft, on genre conventions. Not on the characters themselves, but on fitting them into a particular bracket where, as it happens, they don't belong. Their part of this book has been, therefore, trite and wrong, and I'm only grateful
matociquala called me on it.
Now, obviously, the last couple of paragraphs have gotten very prescriptive, rather than simply descriptive, as my theorizing elides into my practice. So, no, of course not everyone agrees with me, and of course there are very enjoyable books that don't set so much as a toe outside of the wading pool of convention and trope. (Even some very good books: I can't deny my love for Georgette Heyer, or that she was brilliant at what she chose to do. But, then, she wasn't writing sff. Romance is a different genre; its engine runs on different fuel.) But this is what I think about the genre I love.
Cleverly, I have found an occupation that feels just like grad school only without the part where I ever have to leave the house.
But I've been thinking. This is what happens: I make a post, people respond, I think, I make another post. Lather, rinse, repeat.
And I've decided that the concept I want to hang "hard fantasy" on is rigor.
This is, in some serpentine fashion, where "hard sf" gets the moniker from, too. The "hard sciences" are the ones with (self-proclaimed) rigor (i.e., mathematics); hence the anxiety in the "soft sciences" (I'm going to have to send the cabana boys out for more quotation marks here in a minute) about designing studies to achieve greater and greater mathematicality, and the hand-wringing and despair in the humanities that they can't be reduced to mathematics at all.
Hopefully, some of these attitudes are outdated, but they were definitely alive and well at my undergraduate institution (Case Western), where the superiority of the engineering side of campus to the liberal arts side of campus was proclaimed on one side and contested on the other, but always there.
We will notice also that you get points for abstractness. The myriad impenetrabilities of certain French literary theorists and the Anglophone writers who imitate them may be seen as a kind of Azaz's Revenge: "We can be just as incomprehensible as you!"
So, anyway. Rigor.
I'm going to define rigor as thinking things through. Notice that things is not specified in this definition. It can be your scientific whirligig, or your sociological speculation, your system of magic or your proposition about the nature of ghosts. What gives rigor (in my new and shiny model) isn't the premise. It's the treatment of the premise.
"The thing about magic?" Spike says to Willow and Xander at the beginning of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "There's always consequences." BtVS had a kind of mixed track record on its own follow through, but it articulated the principle.
There's always consequences.
And so when I say rigor, what I mean is, consequences. There have to be consequences, and they have to be far-reaching, like Asimov's comment about the influence of the invention of the automobile on the sociosexual behavior of American adolescents. Cause-and-effect is a good start, but things are never that simple. Think of V's dominoes in V for Vendetta. My favorite thing about rigorous sff is the moment when, as a reader, you say, "I never would have thought of that. But he's right." That little mental click! of the Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson machine completing its circuit--that's the payoff.
The other thing about rigor, and why it's valuable as an apparatus, is that it cannot coexist with clichés. I think one of the worst things a work of sff can do is think with its genre conventions: to have things happen because "that's what always happens." So you put a Dark Lord in because all fantasies have one, or you let your spaceship captain get the girl, because that's how the story goes. And you lose some fraction of your readers' attention, because they've seen this all a thousand times before. Worse than that, you shut yourself off from whole ranges--positive Himalayas--of possibilities. What if the Dark Lord's dead, and his minions are trying to figure out what to do now? What if instead of the spaceship captain getting the girl, the girl gets the spaceship? And those are just simple examples--a mere foothill, as it were.
I'm indicted in this, as well. One reason I'm avoiding my book that's due in a month is because I have to dismantle and rebuild great tracts of character motivation and interaction that are based, in the current draft, on genre conventions. Not on the characters themselves, but on fitting them into a particular bracket where, as it happens, they don't belong. Their part of this book has been, therefore, trite and wrong, and I'm only grateful
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Now, obviously, the last couple of paragraphs have gotten very prescriptive, rather than simply descriptive, as my theorizing elides into my practice. So, no, of course not everyone agrees with me, and of course there are very enjoyable books that don't set so much as a toe outside of the wading pool of convention and trope. (Even some very good books: I can't deny my love for Georgette Heyer, or that she was brilliant at what she chose to do. But, then, she wasn't writing sff. Romance is a different genre; its engine runs on different fuel.) But this is what I think about the genre I love.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 06:03 pm (UTC)Cleverly, I have found an occupation that feels just like grad school only without the part where I ever have to leave the house.
Oh god, yes. Tragically, yes.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 06:57 pm (UTC)Exactly that. When I was writing my first fantasy, it took me a while to work out why I felt seventeen again; but when I was seventeen, I was spending my mornings in the school library and the rest of my day hammering a typewriter. Now I was thirty-seven, and spending my mornings in this lovely Georgian library we have here, and the rest of my day hammering a keyboard, and...
And rigour is, surely, the key to all good writing? From haiku to high fantasy, it's always about discipline, control, respect. I think Heyer was as rigorous within her genre as you are in yours; from conception to execution, those books are almost immaculate. Even if they do conform to the expectations of the genre, she does none the less find ways to do that while still, as you say, thinking things through.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 08:38 pm (UTC)That's pretty much what I was thinking, about good writing noting and using the consequences of the characters actions and the worldbuilding. Perhaps it's just me, or perhaps I'm just appropriately paper trained (heh), but I can't help but believe that, while you can have a story that doesn't explore and hold firm to those consequences, the story will be undeniably (again, to me) better if you do.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 10:40 pm (UTC)It's odd to be a person who academically straddles the hard science (biology) vs. soft science (psychology) divide, but mostly works in the hard science these days. For one thing, I see what you're saying, but if you defined "rigor" was what makes a science hard, well, they all fall in there.
I mean, everything published in an established journal has, we can only hope, been peer-reviewed, evaluated, examined, lathered, rinsed, and repeated. In psychology this is doubly-true because before you can even conduct experiments on subjects you must go before an evaluation board that will determine whether your experiment is valuable, actually assessing what you want it to assess, and is worth the whatever-it-is you'll be putting your human/animal/plant subjects through.
In some ways, though no hypothesis can ever be truly proven, psychology is more rigorous than biology.
So while I don't disagree with there always being consequences (in fact, I prefer them), I don't agree with the statement that rigor == "hard" whatever.
I do think, however, that you are correct in saying that rigor in writing will lead to natural and logical consequences through plot, character development, and all those elements that make a good story.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 10:47 pm (UTC)And all of them strive for rigor. It's just that there has historically been some confusion about whether you had to be mathematical in order to achieve it.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 10:58 pm (UTC)I like this definition because it explains to me why a squishy science like biology ultimately falls on the "hard" side.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 12:56 am (UTC)Something like psychology, the problems are not solely mathematical in nature. Or rather, the mathematics can obscure the real issues in a destructive way. The lack of equations does not *automatically* mean a lack of rigor. I still remember my total shock at realizing that my dad wasn't kidding when he told me the average person thought Reese's Pieces taste like chocolate.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 04:23 am (UTC)The useful thing with equations (provided you have the training to use them) is that it's simpler to demonstrate rigor with 'em. The down side of this is someone who favors "hard" science might not realize that it's not the only way to be rigorous, and well... you've taught yes? Isn't it *fun* trying to get it through their thick skulls that there's more than one way to think out there?
And I'm now perilously close to ranting about math being a blunt instrument, and about the idiocy of the average engineering student. So I'll stop :)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 02:06 am (UTC)Whereas in psych not only was the course rigorous (there it goes again) but statistics was a prominent feature of any lab work we ever did, and was repeatedly brought up in nature.
It is an inherent need, I think. If you can't state outright "no, that's wrong" or "yes, that's right" you need to state what evidence you have for things leaning in that direction.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 04:37 am (UTC)So I tend (wrongly, but logically given my biases) to neglect the stats side of psychology, because to me it's the toolset for constructing a good experiment.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 11:48 pm (UTC)Oh yes. One of my favourite modern-day fantasy trilogies is Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads trilogy, about a group of veterinary students who go on a mythical animal rotation, learning to treat griffins and unicorns. Naturally, that's not all they learn.
Here's a passage from the third book, trimmed for spoilers:
"Chaos is formulaic. I suspect that magic is mostly chaotic."
BJ said. "Actually I'll bet that magic is formulaic. It's life that's chaotic. My life, anyway."
[...]
"I learned the formulae when I was very young," Harriet said softly. "In any number of fairy tales. When magic is formulaic, its equations balance; there is no learning without a cost. Did you learn that?"
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 11:53 pm (UTC)When I was thirteen, I had an English teacher who tried to teach us about fantasy writing. I suspect he'd never read any (he also didn't understand the use of the comma: admittedly, I used them too much, but he took them *all* out then wondered why my sentences no longer made sense.)
Among other spectacularly stupid utterances (apparently, all fantasy has to have a happy end. It gets issued one at the press, I suppose,) he told us, phrasing it as a rule, that anything can happen in fantasy. I held up the whole class by arguing with him that an individual work has to follow its own internal rules unless it has a darned good reason for breaking them.