Beat me to the punch with the Rabinowitz citation. *g*
Non-sff readers tend to see puzzles as failures, either theirs or the author's.
I see what you mean by this, but I wouldn't state it in quite this way. I mean, what about mysteries? Plus, novels like Midnight's Children or Foe (or hey, let's just say metafiction generally) are also puzzles of a sort — not, I grant you, the same sort as either SFF or mysteries, but still.
I would actually say that *any* text is a puzzle in the sense that the author supplies the pieces and the reader puts them together: we track and respond to characters, anticipate and react to plot developments, and otherwise connect the dots. As Rabinowitz points out, even before we open a book we apply our knowledge of genres (and, we might add, modalities), the aggregations and mutual influences of texts that share assumptions or traditions.
So I think it's not that non-SFF readers don't like solving puzzles; it's just that the puzzles they expect to solve are frequently not the puzzles (or not the only puzzles) with which SFF presents them. One way of thinking about this is that, with SFF, the reader is expected to supply more of the pieces themselves — but again, this is not unique to SFF (hello, historiographic metafiction!)
It occurs to me as I type this that idea of narratives as puzzles offers one potentially interesting approach to answering the question of why so many recent metafictional novels incorporate elements of what mainstream critics and reviewers insist on calling "magical realism"; certainly this is the case with Midnight's Children and Foe. I would not call either of these novels SFF (though MC has its moments), largely because of the settings, but they do point in that direction rather more than most mainstream literary fiction.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2007-07-14 04:25 pm (UTC)Non-sff readers tend to see puzzles as failures, either theirs or the author's.
I see what you mean by this, but I wouldn't state it in quite this way. I mean, what about mysteries? Plus, novels like Midnight's Children or Foe (or hey, let's just say metafiction generally) are also puzzles of a sort — not, I grant you, the same sort as either SFF or mysteries, but still.
I would actually say that *any* text is a puzzle in the sense that the author supplies the pieces and the reader puts them together: we track and respond to characters, anticipate and react to plot developments, and otherwise connect the dots. As Rabinowitz points out, even before we open a book we apply our knowledge of genres (and, we might add, modalities), the aggregations and mutual influences of texts that share assumptions or traditions.
So I think it's not that non-SFF readers don't like solving puzzles; it's just that the puzzles they expect to solve are frequently not the puzzles (or not the only puzzles) with which SFF presents them. One way of thinking about this is that, with SFF, the reader is expected to supply more of the pieces themselves — but again, this is not unique to SFF (hello, historiographic metafiction!)
It occurs to me as I type this that idea of narratives as puzzles offers one potentially interesting approach to answering the question of why so many recent metafictional novels incorporate elements of what mainstream critics and reviewers insist on calling "magical realism"; certainly this is the case with Midnight's Children and Foe. I would not call either of these novels SFF (though MC has its moments), largely because of the settings, but they do point in that direction rather more than most mainstream literary fiction.