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icepixie...Okay, I want to be part of a choir singing "Diaspora Oratorio." (Listen.) It's amazing just listening to it; I think it would be transcendent to be surrounded by other musicians, helping create the sound.
And there are several other pieces I'd like to choreograph to ("Blood on the Scales" comes particularly to mind).
*
I'm reading through some science fiction theory to use for my 102 class, and I came across an essay written in 1968 (this will be important) by Samuel R. Delany.* The whole thing is quite interesting. Delaney describes some interactions with college professors who read "literature"/"the canon" easily, but not science fiction, and he posits that there's essentially a language barrier between the genres--essentially, people who don't like SF often have a problem replacing the real world with the imagined world of SF**. In his words, "Such readers, used to the given world of mundane fiction, tend to lay the fabulata of science fiction over that given world--and come up with confusion. They do not yet know that these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds. The hints, the suggestions, the throwaways, and even, sometimes, the broadest strokes by which the skillful SF writer suggests the alternate world do not come together for them in any coherent vision, but only blur, confuse, and generally muddy the vision of the given world they are used to" (297).
I can understand and admit the logic of his point to a certain degree, but I wonder, now that SF movies dominate the summer blockbuster market, and shows with SF elements are all over TV, if it's true anymore. You don't have to imagine the world of a Star Trek or a BSG because it's right there staring you in the face, with all of its space ships and replicators and aliens and robots. (Or did the people Delany was talking to turn into the killjoys who complain that it's all CGI and not realistic and not worth watching?)
Anyway, that's a tangent, and what I really wanted to quote was the following (and keep in mind this was written before debit cards came onto the scene):
"These readers, who are perfectly comfortable following the social analysis of a Balzac or an Austen, or even of a Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, are at sea when they come across a description of a character who, on going to the drugstore to purchase a package of depilatory pads, '...inserted his credit card in the purchasing slot; his bill was transmitted to the city accounting house to be stored against the accumulated credit from his primary and secondary jobs.'
"To the SF reader, such a sentence implies a whole reorganization of society along lines of credit, commerce, computerization, and labor patterns. Certainly from a single sentence no one could be expected to come up with all the details of that reorganization; but by the same token, one should be able to see at least a shadow of its general outline. And that shadow should provide the little science-fictional frisson that is the pleasure of the plurality of the SF vision" (297).
I haven't seen it put down in such words before, but this defines a lot of SF for me: characters operating in a world that is familiar to them but unfamiliar to me, but which gradually becomes familiar to me by way of these descriptions or actions that are used to further the narrative in a way that a cell phone or an e-mail would be used in a narrative set in the present day. It lets me think, "How cool would it be if we really could travel in a spaceship/go to an alien restaurant/have robot maids/whatever the device I'm reading about lets characters do?" Not all sci-fi has these things, but enough does that it's become a defining feature for me. (I think this is very likely related to my general love for setting and description.) I mean, I like the Big Ideas as well, and of course I care about character/plot/style like I would for any fictional work, but the universe, man...that's what it's really about for me.
What do you all think?
* "Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction," from Speculations on Speculation, ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, 2005.
** I know (from reading the essays in this book!) that there are various overlapping conotations to the terms "science fiction," "SF," and "sci-fi," but I'm lazy and will use them interchangeably. I sort of feel like the days when the distinctions mattered are either gone or waning anyway; now we seem to use more obviously descriptive terms like "bad/good sci-fi," "space show," "military SF," "hard SF," etc. Maybe that's just my perspective as someone who reads SF, but as a fan tends to hang out with TV/movie fen.
And there are several other pieces I'd like to choreograph to ("Blood on the Scales" comes particularly to mind).
*
I'm reading through some science fiction theory to use for my 102 class, and I came across an essay written in 1968 (this will be important) by Samuel R. Delany.* The whole thing is quite interesting. Delaney describes some interactions with college professors who read "literature"/"the canon" easily, but not science fiction, and he posits that there's essentially a language barrier between the genres--essentially, people who don't like SF often have a problem replacing the real world with the imagined world of SF**. In his words, "Such readers, used to the given world of mundane fiction, tend to lay the fabulata of science fiction over that given world--and come up with confusion. They do not yet know that these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds. The hints, the suggestions, the throwaways, and even, sometimes, the broadest strokes by which the skillful SF writer suggests the alternate world do not come together for them in any coherent vision, but only blur, confuse, and generally muddy the vision of the given world they are used to" (297).
I can understand and admit the logic of his point to a certain degree, but I wonder, now that SF movies dominate the summer blockbuster market, and shows with SF elements are all over TV, if it's true anymore. You don't have to imagine the world of a Star Trek or a BSG because it's right there staring you in the face, with all of its space ships and replicators and aliens and robots. (Or did the people Delany was talking to turn into the killjoys who complain that it's all CGI and not realistic and not worth watching?)
Anyway, that's a tangent, and what I really wanted to quote was the following (and keep in mind this was written before debit cards came onto the scene):
"These readers, who are perfectly comfortable following the social analysis of a Balzac or an Austen, or even of a Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, are at sea when they come across a description of a character who, on going to the drugstore to purchase a package of depilatory pads, '...inserted his credit card in the purchasing slot; his bill was transmitted to the city accounting house to be stored against the accumulated credit from his primary and secondary jobs.'
"To the SF reader, such a sentence implies a whole reorganization of society along lines of credit, commerce, computerization, and labor patterns. Certainly from a single sentence no one could be expected to come up with all the details of that reorganization; but by the same token, one should be able to see at least a shadow of its general outline. And that shadow should provide the little science-fictional frisson that is the pleasure of the plurality of the SF vision" (297).
I haven't seen it put down in such words before, but this defines a lot of SF for me: characters operating in a world that is familiar to them but unfamiliar to me, but which gradually becomes familiar to me by way of these descriptions or actions that are used to further the narrative in a way that a cell phone or an e-mail would be used in a narrative set in the present day. It lets me think, "How cool would it be if we really could travel in a spaceship/go to an alien restaurant/have robot maids/whatever the device I'm reading about lets characters do?" Not all sci-fi has these things, but enough does that it's become a defining feature for me. (I think this is very likely related to my general love for setting and description.) I mean, I like the Big Ideas as well, and of course I care about character/plot/style like I would for any fictional work, but the universe, man...that's what it's really about for me.
What do you all think?
* "Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction," from Speculations on Speculation, ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, 2005.
** I know (from reading the essays in this book!) that there are various overlapping conotations to the terms "science fiction," "SF," and "sci-fi," but I'm lazy and will use them interchangeably. I sort of feel like the days when the distinctions mattered are either gone or waning anyway; now we seem to use more obviously descriptive terms like "bad/good sci-fi," "space show," "military SF," "hard SF," etc. Maybe that's just my perspective as someone who reads SF, but as a fan tends to hang out with TV/movie fen.
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Date: 2009-08-10 12:33 am (UTC)It is. Absolutely. And I can assure you of that from my own experience. You wouldn't believe the number of teenagers I've come across who wrinkle up their noses at the words Star Wars. I was shocked when I first encountered the phenomenon, but it's there. I had a student last year literally wail when I said them, whining and moaning about how much she hated anything that wasn't "reality"--which, she later defined for me, did not mean she hated all fiction, just stuff set in an "unreal" world. She literally could not abide even the thought of it, and because she can't, she's immune to the effects of SF shows on TV, as I expect many others are--because she refuses to watch them. So saturation is not, IMHO, a valid issue here. People who hate SF hate it across the board from a very young age, avoid it henceforth, and that's that.
Their loss, really, but based on what I've seen even among teens, he's spot on.
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Date: 2009-08-10 05:20 am (UTC)I think that's different from what I was commenting on, though--I mean, even commercials have sci-fi elements nowadays, to the point where I'm not sure if the deficiency of imagination can be blamed as much as it used to be. There's still no accounting for taste, but I question if there's as much of a "language barrier" as it was before the current level of saturation. In his essay, Delany quoted a lot of people he'd talked to as saying, "But why wouldn't you just do [something normal; the example from the bit I quoted was "pay with cash from his pocket"] instead of this weird thing?" because they just couldn't imagine the idea of, well, debit cards, basically. But even the kid who moans about hating Star Wars has to have seen at least part of the movie to base her dislike of it on (...right?), so she would see the universe developed in front of her, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that "these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds" instead of being overlaid on a familiar foundation.
Basicaly I think I'm saying that I totally think people still hate SF, but now it seems to be more a matter of lack of taste than cognitive impairment. Does that make sense?