The first order result of this is that I'm not near as well read as I should be. Even such stalwarts of the high school scene as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Catcher In The Rye, and Catch-22, anything by Hemingway--all have escaped my attention. As for the real heavies...I've dabbled in The Canterbury Tales, read exactly five of Shakespeare's plays, muddled through Paradise Lost, and tried to read the Iliad last year, giving up fairly quickly. As for monsters like War and Peace and A la recherche du temps perdu: you won't catch me in the same room.
I'm a close attentive reader if the story holds my interest, but I'm the laziest reader ever you'll find when it doesn't. And sad to say, most don't.
I really don't like fantasy. I prefer my characters human, for one thing--about the only book with almost entirely non-human characters to make my top 100 would be Watership Down. Whereas I love science (or, more properly, speculative) fiction--which many consider a subset of fantasy. The difference for me is important:
If anyone were to force me to make a thumbnail description of the differences between SF and fantasy, I think I would say that SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past. Both can be entertaining. Both can possibly be, perhaps sometimes actually are, even inspiring. But as we can't change the past, and can't avoid changing the future, only one of them can be real.
If anyone were to force me to make a thumbnail description of the differences between SF and fantasy, I think I would say that SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past. Both can be entertaining. Both can possibly be, perhaps sometimes actually are, even inspiring. But as we can't change the past, and can't avoid changing the future, only one of them can be real.
--Frederick Pohl
That's it in a nutshell. It seems paradoxical, but when I'm reading fiction, I'm looking for a sense of the real...and when I'm reading fantasy I can't "shake the fake". There's always a little critter niggling away in my head going this never happened, this couldn't happen, c'mon, now, ogres and hobbits and elves, oh my! It seems--and I recognize how blasphemous this sounds--childish.
Oh, really, Ken? You can't abide a troll, but if you take that troll and give him a troll society about three hundred light years from here...and suddenly you're fascinated.
I have no defense. Except to say that if trolls do exist, they're probably...on some planet about three hundred light-years from here. And just what does their world look like? What are their hopes and dreams and failings, and how will they greet the human beings hurtling towards their planet? What does troll society have to teach us about human society?
SF is the literature of ideas. Some authors take a single what if? and run with it--James Halperin's The Truth Machine is a superlative example. What if somebody invented a 100%-accurate lie detector? How would that change the world? It's clunky literature, but the speculation is gripping.
Many of Robert Sawyer's novels take a single SF trope (like uploaded consciousness, rejuvenation, or first contact) and examine it in detail, from unexpected angles.
Other authors toss off ideas like sparklers. Charles Stross loads his stories up with so many thought-provoking premises I occasionally have to stop reading just to catch my mental breath. His far-future novels read just as I imagine the far-future looks: crammed full of technology that's almost unimaginable to us and yet boring and routine to the denizens of his worlds. And for all that, the people are recognizably human...which brings up the relationship of man to his technology, a key SF theme. The dystopian works resonate with me because I believe our spiritual growth as a species lags far behind our tech; the utopian works resonate because I derive a deep sense of satisfaction envisioning the two spheres of human growth equal, each driving the other...and I do think we're headed that way, albeit grudgingly.
Peter F. Hamilton--my latest discovery--manages somehow to maintain an intimate focus even as he's populating his universe with hundreds of characters on dozens of planets. I love this galaxy-spanning space opera: I feel like I'm reading six or seven books for the price of one.
And there are many, many authors I haven't read yet and intend to. That's another trait of mine, true with both books and movies: I understand that things are called 'classics' for a reason, but with so many new things constantly coming out I can't be bothered to make time for the old. My loss, I'm sure. But I'll bear it.
2 comments:
I'm a big fantasy reader, and dabble in SF. Right now I'm wading through Steve Erickson's epic Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Its great writing, way beyond trolls and elves.
I like fantasy for the purely escapist aspect of it. While it can and does tell tales of the human condition, that's not purpose of the story. I find SF can often be preachy or moralizing, the narrative is a vehicle for a moral point. That ruins the story for me.
But on the other hand I voraciously read everything LE Modesitt Jr. publishes (fantasy and SF, and the cross overs too), and all his stories are variations of the same theme.
I totally agree. I usually read non fiction but when it comes to fiction, I prefer science fiction and the possibility that comes with it.
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