posted
I've been doing some thinking lately (uh oh). After watching a couple of exceptionally good movies and a couple of exceptionally bad ones, and then after reading the fantasy novelist's exam thread, I have come to a conclusion:
The biggest mistake speculative fiction (scifi and fantasy) writers make is leaving out the people (or sentient beings).
Basically, I think that really good fiction in whatever genre you care to write is about people. It's not that there aren't other aspects that can be of interest as well, but that people connection is what transcends genre and brings in readers from all walks of life.
Science fiction and fantasy stories (whether in novel or move format) do not tend to be about people. I think this is why, despite my love for the genres, I usually rank scifi and fantasy movies with one or two stars on my Netflix account. Last week was Legend and Dune...yikes they were bad!
Then I watched Finding Forrister, a movie I'd been putting off seeing because it seemed to me to be in that sappy, written in order to win an Oscar, sort of thing. But it was wonderful. It was about two people - real people -- who came alive and made me want to watch despite the movie not being in my preferred genre.
That's what I'm trying to say -- not that there's anything wrong with your epic fantasies or space battles, just that if speculative fiction wants to break out of its traditional shackles and appeal to a wide audience it needs to get the people in the stories.
posted
That's a great point, Christine. In thinking about it, those tales that are about people, like Ender's Game, Lord of the Rings (more so the movies than the books), and others that are so popular, are so because of the human connection and the characterization. The reader/viewer needs to have that emotional connection with the character or it's just another poorly written book or poorly made movie.
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posted
The lack of really interesting and believable characters is why I generally prefer classics to sci fi and fantasy. It's hard to find a Raskolnikov in a fantasy novel. But then you sometimes get characters like Dr. Susan Calvin, and that keeps me reading in the genre.
I disagree about Lord of the Rings, though. The reason I didn't enjoy those books more was because the characters were very flat. The story was fantastic, and the world was amazing; but I feel like all the time went into creating an interesting place and history, with little left over for developing good characters. As far as worldbuilding goes, though, LoTR is great.
posted
I found your comment about "Finding Forrester", screenplay by Mike Rich, interesting. I take a special interest in Mike Rich's work, in part because he's a local guy and in part because we share a common friend, so I got to hear some of the inside stuff around his sudden rise to fame when he sold the script.
Mike Rich is an intelligent, thoughtful guy and spent years as a journalist before switching careers. He has some great comments about writing that you can read in this interview:
posted
That is a great point Christine. I have always gravitated towards stories that are character driven. Not only character driven, but ones that make the characters come alive. It is the only way that I can fully connect with the story. There are characters that I love and love to hate because the author has done such a fine job of delving into their thoughts and feelings. It usually begins with a subtle introduction and then the character unfolds and you really get to know and care/hate them over the course of the book.
This is something that I strive to do in the stories I create. I don't think I've mastered it yet, but I keep trying. When I start a story, I usually think of the character doing something, then build the world around that Character. If I can envision the character and the action, then I can usually build the surroundings to fit that idea.
I almost hate to say it, but this coincides with my role-playing past. We would usually create the characters first then insert those characters into whatever world we were going to be playing in. We never used the pre-made adventures you could buy at the hobby store. We created everything, depending upon the kind of adventure we wanted at the time. It is the same for me with story creation.
posted
I've always thought that American science fiction spent far too long incubating next to science magazines back in its formative period (1920s through 1940s). This produced the "have slipstick will travel" school, where the science is sometimes so dense that you need advanced degrees in chemistry and physics and biology to understand what's going on. (I have none of these, only what information has stuck to my flypaper mind.) Seems that all that came afterwards was either in this evolved form, or in a reaction against it.
I said "American" in this, because British science fiction spent too long next to the British literary establishment for its own good.
posted
there's room for all sorts, but character driven stories can generally hold a wider audience, methinks.
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posted
It's interesting that LOTR came up here because I did not find the characters in that story particularly compelling or believable, especially in the movie version. To me, the story was very distant, very black and white, and only interesting in the fact that it broke new ground.
In fact, this is why I dont abhore all Tokien rip-offs, though I'm getting sick of them. A very few of them have taken the groundwork of Tokien and IMPROVED upon it through things like better characterization. (Although most are still D&D hacks.) I feel that literature can piggy back on older inventions the same way science does...had to discover electricity before you could invent the light bulb. Anyway, this is why I likED (past tense) Robert Jordan's stuff. Before he started writing the epic that would not end, I found that I enjoyed the interesting and diverse characters that gew and changed as the series moved on.
posted
Oh yeah...my favorite science fiction story (written or acted) is Babylon 5 for a lot of reasons...one of them is the incredible way the characters grow and change in the five years the story went on. (You have to watch a few episodes before you start to see this.)
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posted
I think I have more charactization than world in my fantasy novels at the moment, simply because I don't have the ability to create a full world yet. I always start off with a cliche beginning where you're either in a castle, or small village. I write my character, then put my surroundings around him/her.
I don't know if that's relevant, but I think it is.
posted
"It's interesting that LOTR came up here because I did not find the characters in that story particularly compelling or believable, especially in the movie version."
Funny, I would have said the same thing, except reverse it. The characters are standard fantasy material with no real depth, but I think they are a little better developed in the movie than in the book. At least the hobbits (who in the book seemed interchangeable to me).
posted
Smaug started a thread recently that evolved similarly to this one:
My post there applies here too: (PS the area in bold below, is a serious stumbling-block for me. I think it makes sci-fic a real junk-genre.)
quote:
I'm tired of people saying fantasy tends to copy Tolkien et al. It is not true and it is lazy analysis. It is like saying that sci-fic tends to copy HG Wells or Jules Verne etc. Only sci-fic has no juggernauts the way fantasy does with Tolkien etc.
Sci-fic has two problems. First, we are often told that for a story to be real sci-fic, technology must be an essential plot element. In other words, if you remove the tech, the plot don't work. However, this 'essential' element becomes obviously hokey, dated, naive, quaint or preposterous in the light of subsequent technological advances. Sci-fic stories inevitably lose relevence over time. Old stories become 'museum' pieces. Most sci-fic has in-built obsolesence.
Of course some might say, 'yes but the characters are so cool,' or, 'but it is an excellent story even without the technology stuff.'
This leads to the second problem with sci-fic, that if the story was excellent and works WITHOUT the technology, by definition it is not REAL sci-fic.
danged if ya do... danged if ya don't.
Fantasy remains relevent over time because it does not rely on such superficial and mutable elements. That is why something written in the 1930s or the 1890s or the 1500s can still be considered a benchmark today.
Many reader's defintion of fantasy is too narrow and limited.
Let me explain: The problem with the anti-tolkienesque dialogue that often erupts in these threads is that if a story contains some 'fantastic' element but does not have elves, dwarfs, orcs etc, then many readers don't recognise it as real Fantasy. They call it something else like Contemporary Fantasy or whatever. HP is a classic example, it is clearly fantasy, but people don't call it that. Seriously, would you describe it as a fantasy series? If not, what do you understand 'fantasy' to be?
In the minds of many readers, if the story doesn't have tolkienesque attributes then it is not fantasy and if it does, it is a tolkien rip-off. Its hilarious and shows unclear and incomplete thinking to continue to make such assertions.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited March 26, 2006).]
posted
Well, what makes books different than movies is the way you can portray characters. Sci Fi Characters may be easy to write about but to put them on a screen you have to sometimes take something away from them.
Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment was mentioned in an earlier post here, and if you've read the book, its easy to see that its damn near impossible to create a movie from it because all the character developements are in a non-visual experience. You cant display what happens in Crime and Punishment without it seeming underdeveloped.
I think its the same theory, with any genre, not just Sci Fi. Books can add depth that movies sometimes cannot, just as movies can sometimes add visual that a book cannot.
posted
As a Brit, I've never come across "slipstick". I did own a slide rule, briefly, but before I really got to grips with what it could do, pocket calculators arrived on the scene.
posted
I have often found that while plot is what makes me leaf through the pages on first read, characters are what make me reread the book.
Though there is a strong chance that I won't go on reading the book if I find myself totally distant from the characters. But if the characters are very finely drawn, that's what I'll remember from the book.
I thought LOTR the movie had better characterization than the book, but not an awful lot. For all that, I'm surprised I reread the book several times, and that my saddest moment is still Arwen and Elrond's goodbyes (a scene that's dealt with in three lines of summary), when you can't say we have seen much of those two. It's possibly because I'm projecting character traits on them after reading "The Silmarillion".
posted
"Slipstick" is really old slang for "slide rule." The thrust of my not-very-original argument came up before calculators were commonplace. Calculators came along in my adolesence, and though I own a couple of slide rules, I never really got the hang of using 'em.
As for Tolkien---though I've enjoyed several of the "rip-offs" / "homages," and often thought of writing one myself, I really don't think anybody's done it better. Even the movies, which were fine, weren't as good as the book. I'd point out a few details, but, hey, we've hashed and rehashed that all over the place, haven't we?
But that's not to say there aren't other forms of fantasy and other fantasy writers. Ever read James Branch Cabell? Fritz Leiber? Lord Dunsany? Mervyn Peake? Kenneth Grahame?
[Had to edit. In the above paragraph, I said "are" for "aren't"---making it look like I was denying the existence of other fantasy writers]
[Would you believe I had to reedit one more time? The phrasing in the first paragraph made it look like I never got the hang of calculators---it's slide rules I never got the hang of.]
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited March 27, 2006).]
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited March 27, 2006).]
posted
The issue with Tolkien is that he isn't concentrating on the personification and characterization of his obvious characters. He's looking at the characterization of his narrator and fictional audience (which stands in for the real audience). It's a complex work, and if you don't understand what I just said, you're better off just enjoying it for what it is than trying to analyze it. If you do understand what I said, then you have to admit that it's a masterpiece of characterization, one of the best "people oriented" stories that's ever been written.
To put it simply, and somewhat more bafflingly, The Lord of the Rings isn't actually about any of the characters named in the book.
posted
I don't think I ever thought about it quite like that but you're absolutely right, Survivor.
As for Frodo, Samwise, and Gandelf...I'm not sure how they were better characterized in the movies than in the book. Maybe some of those who believe this is true can expand on this for me?
posted
Oops, I wasn't thinking about Frodo, Samwise and Gandalf when I said "better characters in the movies". I was more thinking of Aragorn and Arwen (especially Arwen, who gets ten times more screentime than she got appearances in the book), who steal the show.
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posted
As for Frodo, Samwise, and Gandelf...I'm not sure how they were better characterized in the movies than in the book. Maybe some of those who believe this is true can expand on this for me?
I think they were slightly better characterized in the movies, because it's easier to show facial expressions than it is to describe facial expressions. Thus, when we see on the screen Frodo's fear of the Ringwraiths, or his falling into the power of the ring, it does something that a book cannot do. On the other hand, I think a huge part of what makes books preferable to movies--for me anyway--is that the reader's own imagination can jump in and fill in those gaps.
posted
Well, since there's been more discussion of Tolkien topics in this thread, I think I will throw out one example of the difference between the movies and the books that caught my eye---hopefully without yesterday's extreme editing.
In the books, Tolkien makes it quite clear that "towns" like Minas Tirith and Edoras are surrounded by acres and acres of farmland. (Not Tolkien's terms, but illustrative of my point.) The movie's imaging of these same setting have them in the middle of rather barren-looking land---mostly for the sake of a good-looking picture, I think. Population centers have to be fed. This is something any fantasy writer should keep in mind when creating a town or city for his characters to live in. (I doubt Edoras, the movie version, would even have a decent water supply.)
Tolkien had an attention to detail that, by all accounts, seemed extreme...but produced a world that had a consistent internal logic of its own.
posted
I'm not sure I can agree. Vast areas of Middle-Earth were just ciphers. Vast populations appeared to exist, for instance, in Rhun and Harad, but only so they could be bad guys in the service of Mordor. Other areas seemed to be completely lacking in population, which as I've pointed out, just doesn't work in temperate climes - humans fill to expand the space available (check the map, and wonder what might exist south of the Shire and north of Rohan... Tharbad is marked, but IIRC never even mentioned in the text). The swathe of lands south of the White Mountains were clearly indicated as being fertile and well-populated, but I never got the impression that anyone actually farmed in Rohan - they just all seemed to ride around. There was no sign of trade, no sign of industry, and certainly nothing to feed the vast populations of Orcs in Mordor or the goblins in the Misty Mountains.
Tolkein was not writing fantasy. He was creating his own mythology (a good example is the fact that there's no sign of religion in his works, in any meaningful sense - nobody prays, there are no churches or temples), but as part of that he created certain aspects that supported his aims (like languages and history). Mundane, everyday things that didn't support his narrative were utterly ignored.
posted
Weren't the LOTR characters illustrated by their deeds?
I recall Finding Forrester somewhat. I guess looking back it was impressive that the youngster is as memorable as Sean Connery in that film.
Characterization has almost a negative connotation to me, as I think of Flannery O'Connor or Dickens where everyone is dripping with local color. To be fair, I haven't read Dickens. But my understanding is that his characterizations are a little more florid than, say, Tolstoy's.
quote:Oh yeah...my favorite science fiction story (written or acted) is Babylon 5 for a lot of reasons...one of them is the incredible way the characters grow and change in the five years the story went on. (You have to watch a few episodes before you start to see this.)
Ditto this. Maybe I'm biased because I spent so much time on GEnie listening to Joe describe the characters and his creative process, but he did an outstanding job making characters subtly shift roles as the story unfolded. Villains would become heroes, aggressors would turn out to be victims and even supposedly secondary characters rose to prominence. Great stuff.
As far as Tolkien and LOTR go, I've never been able to make it past The Two Towers, and I've tried reading it several times. I don't mind reading epic series, but LOTR just moved WAY too slow for me to enjoy.
Also, I did read an introduction that Tolkien himself wrote for one of the paperback reprints. In it, he said there was absolutely no hidden meanings or allegory to LOTR. He was just writing a story he wanted to tell. Like virtually any writer, his philosophies and beliefs crept in here and there, but the story wasn't written to espouse them for any particular reason.
posted
Reply to tchernabyelo: There are lots of mentions of farms and farming. There's Farmer Maggot and his famous mushrooms. There's cultivated pipeweed in the South Farthing, some of which is exported to Isengard. Theoden King mensions how the area around Helm's Deep was a "rach vale and had many homesteads." Gandalf and Pippin ride through the fields of the Pelennor on the way to Minas Tirith, "fair and fertile townlands." Even Sauron had to provision his army with supplies from Lake Nurnen and parts south and east. There's a good deal of farming and trade and industry, but, not being central to the conflict between good and evil, it's part of the background of the story---not noticeable unless attention is drawn to it.
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posted
The "realism" of Tolkien's work isn't the kind that we expect from modern literature, because Tolkien wasn't following a modern literary model. While Tolkien can say that he wasn't deliberately setting out to moralize or anything like that, what nobody can claim is that he didn't consciously model his work on the mythic literature he'd made his life's study.
If you attempt to criticize Tolkien, you must understand this fundamental point about his work. He wasn't trying to immerse us in an alternate present, he created an alternate past mythology for his own culture.
SF is a genre of setting, not of story. There are no specifically SF stories, not really. First man on the ______ --!!! Is an adventure story. It could be set in the Antarctic or South America or China just as well as the moon or Mars or Tau Ceti V. Same with all other stories. There are only four genres of story -- romance; mystery/thriller; adventure; and social fiction (coming of age, slice of life, self realization, etc.).
So, no matter what the neat idea is, where you set it, how far away in time/space the action happens, nor what tech is invented....none of that matters beyond composing the setting. The story always comes down to those same ones we've had all along. Man vs. man (or, alien or intelligent entity). Man vs. nature. Man vs. himself. Man vs. the gods. That’s the list if you prefer the very basic stories or , for a more specific story list -- (I quote from my favorite list, Ronald B. Tobias's in his book, 20 Master Plots) Quest; Adventure; Pursuit; Rescue; Escape; Revenge; The Riddle; Rivalry; Underdog; Temptation; Metamorphosis; Love; Forbidden Love; Sacrifice; Discovery; Wretched Excess; Ascension; Descension.
WAR OF THE WORLDS is just an escape story with the broad setting including aliens instead of Huns or Romans or Arabs (in Middle Ages France and Spain) or Russians or Chinese or (fill in the blank ).
War stories are just stories (romance, adventure, mystery/thriller, social fiction) set against the backdrop of a war using war props and war type characters. In their own details so are westerns (western props with cowboys, rustlers, sheepherders, plucky women ranchers, etc.) and so too, historical fiction. And horror – the physical setting can be any place or time but the horror element part of the setting is the force or protagonist. The story still is escape or revenge or descension or temptation or one of those others. Martial arts stories (a favorite there is the revenge story) don’t have any specifically martial arts story. Can you think of any genre other than the four I mentioned above that has a real story that is not at its root one of the big four?
So, I agree that SF focuses on the techie stuff to the detriment of story a lot of the time. You may get a great, unique idea like fighting a war in space without any ftl drive but you still have to find a human/character story to use the idea in. The better you are at making the human level story interesting, the better the novel/short story will read to a human audience. Which is all we have at the moment.
[This message has been edited by arriki (edited March 29, 2006).]
posted
I remember one commentary somewhere mentioning E. E. "Doc" Smith's works. For those of you who don't know him, Smith was one of the "founding fathers," coming up with some of the dazzling commonplaces of today's SF. Great battles of opposing forces of good-and-not-so-good, flinging fighting spaceships, even planets and suns, at each other.
Somebody---I forget who, but it might have been Harry Harrison---mentioned wondering what it would be like to write about the guy who fired the big planet-destroying gun. Or to write about the guy the gun is fired at.
"War of the Worlds," H. G. Wells's book, failed for me when I noticed---on first reading, at an age when I was considerably less savvy than I am now, way before I thought to pick stories apart to see how they were built---that the Martians didn't land anywhere but Britain. Not China or Russia or America, not even Ireland. By the latter-day standards of science fiction, this was awfully good shooting at planetary range. (I read it before I saw any movies of it, but I think after hearing the Orson Welles radio dramatization---for some reason my parents had an album of it.)
posted
Isn't it more that the period didn't allow for instant communications overseas? I mean, this was before they laid telegraph wires across the Channel, let alone across the Urals and the Atlantic. I certainly don't recall the story including any breaking reports of the Martians not landing anywhere but Britain. So it could be your own cultural myopia (the assumption that news can travel instantly from any point on Earth to any news organization) that got in the way, not Wells' assumption that only Britain would be worth invading.
quote:The men in these silos know what it means to turn the key, and some of them just aren't up to it! It's that simple! -Wargames
posted
Around 1900 there were two transatlantic cables carrying messages. I believe that predates Wells' novel.
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posted
I know that by 1898, date at which the novel was first published, there were 4 cables linking the US to the UK. Messages still took 24h to arrive, and it cost a fortune to send them. In many books of the period, they make very little mention of intercontinental communication other than its being very cumbersome and a last resort.
I think Wells was more making a point about what the Brits did in Tanzania: the idea was to make them see that it could happen to them as well. Realism was not high on his agenda.
posted
Yeah, they did have intercontinental telegraphs by then, but I'll stick with my interpretation that these wouldn't have been sufficient to transmit significant news to the narrator of the story. He spent a lot of the story out of communication anyway.
I think that the whole blood transfusion thing would have been a stickier point for most people.
posted
The first Atlantic cable was completed in 1858., but (I believe) failed fairly quickly. Another, more successful cable was laid down in 1866. (I say "I believe" because my World Almanac lists both dates in two different places; my faulty memory provides some details (the '66 cable was laid by the pioneer liner the "Great Eastern," I think) but not everything.)
But it wasn't communications that made me think only Britain was attacked by Wells's Martians. Seemed that, once the crisis was over and the Martians had died (by the way, a hell of a bad way to bring matters to a conclusion---by normal and modern standards), a bunch of aid poured in---apparently nothing landed across the channel in Europe, not even over in Ireland. Surely if the Martians had landed there, too, they wouldn't have been in decent enough shape to pump massive aid into Britain...
posted
Well, I think that the point of War of the Worlds, whether or not it is about specific offenses by the British Empire, was certainly taking aim at the idea that the English were somehow intrinsically superior to the rest of the world.
I think that it's a stretch to say that nobody else could have weathered an alien invasion better than the English. And saying it shows exactly the attitude Wells is targeting. I can think of any number of reasons that areas with different terrain, climates, and economies would have been better able to recover from the Martian attack. They don't have to be intrinsic virtues of other nations, and Wells doesn't try to make any such point.
Wells' works don't usually hold up scientifically, but I think that you're straining at a gnat here. Whether the Martians chose to invade England particularly (and there are several plausible reasons for this, relative isolation, high concentration of population, and most of all it's the nerve center of the most powerful terrestrial military of that time--standard decap strike) or attacked population centers generally and the English ended up worse off than some of their neighbors, it's not an implausible notion either way.
Martians sucking human blood and being killed by common Earth microbes is a bit less believable, in my never humble opinion. But both are critical parts of the story. Sure, it's a bit preachy, and the moral is one of the insignificance of technological might in the face of nature and moral issues, which isn't going to go down smoothly for most modern readers, but you can't claim that as a flaw in the execution.
posted
Seems to me, from what the Martians did in England, that any part of the populated land mass of Earth would have suited them. Landing only in England implies (1) incredibly good shooting at interplanetary range---Earth's surface is three fourths water (roughly) and England is only a tiny fraction of that land, and (2) the Martians had advanced knowledge of Earth's political structure and divisions---but how?
Of course Wells worked allegorical overtones into his "scientific romances." It's part-and-parcel with, say, Kipling's "Recessional"---works written at the height of the British Empire, by citizens of the British Empire, warning that all may not last forever, that all might be gone very quickly---as proved to be true.
(I've read most of Wells's proto-science-fiction---they're the source of so many basic SF blueprints. My favorite? Probably "The War in the Air," a pre-World-War-One take on what was coming. There's also the short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles.")
posted
Well, what they ultimately did was die of disease, so falling haplessly into the sea would have suited them just as well (with the benefit of not being humiliated in front of the Earthlings, if you count something like that).
Once you start quibbling that the narrator doesn't know how the Martians were doing what they were doing, you've left behind all concerns about realistic narrative anyway. We can land at a particular point on Mars, after all, and we don't even have manned missions (we don't use a giant gun either, even though that would be a pretty good idea for the initial escape velocity). We also have a lot of detailed information about the surface. Of course the first thing we do on a new planet is checking for microbes, but that's because we've all read War of the Worlds, one cannot reasonably expect the Martians in that book to have done the same.
Look, you noticed what you imagined to be a flaw back when you were far less savvy. But it's the kind of flaw a much less savvy person would imagine in the work, not one that is actually there. Most of the science in the story falls apart in the light of later knowledge (including the notion that there are blood-thirsty Martians at all), but it isn't implausible that the Martians would single out England for special attention nor is it implausible that England would suffer much more than some other places even if it hadn't been singled out. You had, at that time in your life, an ingrained assumption that ethnocentrism was a grevious crime commited by dead white males, and so you brought the assumption with you to your reading of War of the Worlds, one of several books that really isn't guilty of this particular "crime". You had been taught that this crime was so disgusting that any thinking person should immediately reject any western work showing signs of it. Well, enough, but the text simply doesn't support such a charge.
I would be happier if it did because then we could argue over the validity of charging western culture with a heinious crime in every case where it doesn't revile itself, but War of the Worlds is innocent of what you imputed.
posted
I'd prefer the simplest, Ockham's Razor kind of explanation. For that, I think that Wells, in his desire to write an allegorical take on conquest and its transitory nature---a simplistic picture of the book, I freely admit---that he overlooked the flawed logic in the events he portrayed and erred by having the Martians land only on English soil. I think that makes more sense than an elaborate outside-the-book justification of this. There's certainly a lot to impress a reader in this book, even allowing for its being written over a century ago and surpassed by events---but I can't see this as anything other than a lapse of logic on Wells's part.
I must have been eleven or twelve when I first read "The War of the Worlds." (I'd heard the Orson Welles radio version at some point before that.) I don't think I'd even run across the word "ethnocentrism" until my late teens, maybe my early twenties.
I did reread it, oh, about a year and a half or so ago. (I picked up a new edition---unconnected with the recent movie---while on vacation and reread it while working my way home.) Somehow the error still stood out for me. Also it helps me be sure of my ground, having relatively recent memories of the book.
[edited for a misspelling---I hope the only one.]
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited April 03, 2006).]
posted
Certainly, it doesn't make the mistake of overexamining the science at the expense of the fiction
Wells wrote the story using an Englishman because he was an Englishman writing to an audience of Englishmen. It's a very simple rule that more writers should obey, write what you know, combined with another, know your audience.
The narrator didn't find out what was happening in other lands because it was less important to his own character and because he had little opportunity to witness any of it. This follows another important rule of fiction which can be stated variously. You might call it maintaining POV, or means of perception, or narrative frame, or whatever you like. Having the narrator fuss about what was going on outside his own circle of aquaintence and recieve intelligence about it by various unlikely means would be a cheap trick and wouldn't do much to advance the core story.
And if you imagine that, simply because you didn't know the meaning of the word "ethnocentrism", you weren't afflicted with the dogma that western ethnocentrism was evil, then you've quite a ways to go before we can even discuss the subject.
posted
I have to point out a very interesting turn of conversational events.
Originally, the topic started as kind of a
"Characters vs Technology"
assesment. The implication being that technology plays much too huge a part of SF for the thread author's liking.
According to every "How to Write SF" book- they stress character over and over again. Story must be character driven. All the best stuff is.
Now, somewhere along the way... we end up discussing "where humans would live in Middle Earth" and "why did they only land in Britain" and ..... and yes, we are now talking about technical details.
I believe the strongest SF has both.
----------------
The Ring was a "Macguffin". LOTR was about each main character's personal battles to follow it.
Frodo wanted to go home.
Aragorn lacked self confidence.
Gollum spent the whole tale trying to avoid the Ring, but couldn't.
Boromir was overconfidant.
Gandalf was indecisive.
By the end of the story, every character either overcame their intial flaws- or died. Flat or not, it was still a character driven story.
"War of the Worlds" was a conceit that played on subconsicous fears of Communism. I can't even remember if there were characters.
posted
A character driven story where technology/science is essential to the plot is Sci-fic. A character driven story where technology/science is NOT essential to the plot in NOT sci-fic.
Or so many Sci-fic afficianadoes claim.
How 'hard' the sci-fic is, is immaterial. Soft sci-fic (for want of an alternative word) that meets the above criteria is Sci-Fic. Hard sci-fic that does not meet the criteria is NOT Sci-Fic. Otherwise the fundamentals of the story could happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone and the sci-fic setting serves merely as decoration.
Can the same be said of fantasy. Can we be so bold?
A character driven story where magic/the-fantastic is essential to the plot is Fantasy. A character driven story where magic/the-fantastic is NOT essential to the plot is NOT Fantasy.
How 'hard' the fantasy story is, is immaterial. Soft fanatsy (for want of an alternative word) that meets the above criteria is fantasy. Hard fantasy that does not meet the criteria is NOT Fantasy.
Otherwise the fundamentals of the story could happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone and the fantasy setting serves merely as decoration.
Are those statements true? What is the definition of fantasy? It can't be so flimsy as to say "any story written in a fantasy setting", can it?
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 05, 2006).]
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I think a lot of interesting points have been brought up. Unfortunately, things seem to be at an impasse. A recent article in The Onion could shed some light on the matter:
"Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched"
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I dug out my (relatively recent-purchace) copy of "The War of the Worlds" to check a few points before I posted.
POV issues---in several chapters, Wells diverts from the POV of "I" and tells the story of what happened to "my brother." And if Wells could tell what "my brother" saw, he could have shared what others, further afield, saw.
In fact, on a browse-through, I spot many paragraphs loaded with information the narrator did not know at the time. Sometimes Wells makes mention of this, sometimes not.
In fact, on even closer (but casual) examination, it seems that the Martians landed not only on England, but possibly only in and around London. I may be mistaken in this---you can pick up only so much on a quick skimming---but Wells's focus may have been more narrow than I originally perceived.
Though Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds" intended for the English, it doesn't excuse the improbabilities he introduced into his narrative.
As for "ethnocentrism," and the notion that the Western variety is evil, I can truthfully say that though I have often been afflicted by it, I have never been afflicted with it.
*****
On Snowden's comments about "The Lord of the Rings"---Aragorn's lack of self-confidence played into the plot of the movie, but isn't present in the book, where Aragorn was supremely self-confident but willing to sacrifice his specific goal (becoming King of Arnor and Gondor combined and marrying Arwen) for the greater good goal (keeping Sauron occupied while Frodo and Sam tried to get to Mount Doom to destroy the Ring and Sauron.) The "lack of self-confidence" works in the movie version, though.
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I noticed that he only mentioned the radio broadcast version of War of the Worlds, which wasn't being discussed here.
Wells maintains the conciet of a narrator who is composing, after the conflict, his journal of predominantly personal events during the invasion. The narration is intensly personal, some sections of the text even purport to have been written before the end of the invasion, when the narrator had no way to be certain that he or humanity would survive.
He doesn't care about what's happening in other parts of the world, though he did worry about his brother. So he includes scenes from his brother's adventures. It's perfectly natural, you can easily see this character as a real person who'd gone through a real invasion rather than an invention of an author.
The other element is related, the narrator apparently doesn't know very many foriegners on a personal basis. Thus he only has access to the same accounts of what happened elsewhere that would already be available to his pretended audience (remember, he's writing to other people who life in his reality, not ours).
Yes, it was Wells'choice to set the story in England, use an Englishman for the narrator character, and not give this man a great deal of information about or interest in events overseas. The reasons for that are related to the fact that he was himself an Englishman writing to an English audience. I don't gainsay his decision because it was the right choice as a writer.
Let me make this point clear, if any of you are writing a story like War of the Worlds, a narrative that purportedly relates the struggle of an individual in the face of a sweeping catastrophe, and you bend POV to insert all kinds of reminders that this is happening "worldwide" (whatever that means), I will flag it as an error. Not just a plausibility error (though if it is an error it will be that as well), but a character and narrative error.
posted
Don't forget that when Orson Welles did his radio broadcast, he made it localised to New Jersey. He even began with a local weather broadcast. Why?
He saw an approach in the original that worked and was convincing. So he used it. In the broadcast, the events were happening in places familiar to the listener . If he had not borrowed HG Wells approach he would not have inspired the reaction he did. If he kept interjecting with statements about what was happening in other parts of the world, it would only work against the objectives of the story. The listeners couldn't have cared less about what was happening in Krakow when they thought Martians were at the end of their street.
The big difference is that in 1938, many household had a new device called a radio. Something the houses of 1898 did not. Orson Welles capitalised on the sense of immediacy the new technology afforded; a technique not available to HG Wells.
quote:On Snowden's comments about "The Lord of the Rings"---Aragorn's lack of self-confidence played into the plot of the movie, but isn't present in the book, where Aragorn was supremely self-confident but willing to sacrifice his specific goal (becoming King of Arnor and Gondor combined and marrying Arwen) for the greater good goal (keeping Sauron occupied while Frodo and Sam tried to get to Mount Doom to destroy the Ring and Sauron.) The "lack of self-confidence" works in the movie version, though.
I don't know if I'd agree that Aragorn was "supremely self-confident" in the book. He did agonize over his choice to go after the uruk-hai which had kidnapped Merry and Pippin instead of following Frodo and helping him get the ring to Mordor.
The fact that they made Aragorn so lacking in self-confidence for the movie may have helped him be more interesting, but it made it necessary for Faramir to be less noble than he was in the books, and that was frustrating--for this viewer, at least, even though I understood that they probably did it because he couldn't be better than Aragorn. The way they chose to get him to resist the ring (by having him see Frodo almost give it to the Nazgul) didn't work for me, mainly because the Nazgul wouldn't have turned away after being so close. (Oh, well.)
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Yeah, that's one of the big problems I had with the movie: a Nazgul wouldn't have have left so easily. It destroyed the Nazgul for me, though PJ recovered somewhat in RotK.
I also wish they had put the scenes between Boromir, Faramir, and their father in the actual film instead of keeping it for the extended version. Without those scenes, I didn't have nearly as much sympathy for Faramir or suspense. When I saw Faramir's reasons for wanting the ring went beyond simple greed, not only did the scene with Frodo make sense, but the resolution of that conflict made sense as well.
And seeing Faramir clearly also helped increase the suspense, even though I'd already seen the movie before and knew how things worked out.
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Oh, I've listened to the Orson Welles radio version, and I've seen the 1950s movie version. I haven't seen, and don't really plan to, see the relatively recent Tom Cruise version, though I might look at it if I land on it while flipping through channels.
I don't remember when so-called "modern" notions of point-of-view had come along when H. G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds"---they may have been emerging around that time, I think, but not everybody would necessarily have caught up with it, or even took to it right away. It may even have had to wait for the movies to come along---they were in their infancy then. But it's a more modern convention.
Nineteenth-century novels are loaded with characters seeing things they couldn't possibly have seen, on the order of, say, describing in detail how a character "I" met actually looked, even though, say, it was pitch-dark and "I" couldn't have seen anything.
Though nowadays there would be numerous sources of information not available to a narrator in 1898 (when "The War of the Worlds" was first published), there were still many sources available then. The narrator (and his brother) read the London newspapers (at least before the Martians overwhelmed the area), and talked to a number of people in the course of his (their) adventures. Some of what he (they) learned in this manner was certainly incorporated in the narrative.
*****
On to "The Lord of the Rings."
Aragorn was with the Fellowship of the Ring because he chose to be. His purpose might have been better served by going south, but not with the Fellowship. His route and their lay together for a ways, but, when it came time to go either to Mordor or Minas Tirith, he wanted to go to the latter with Boromir, but was still willing to guide Frodo to Mordor.
Besides, if he had gone to Minas Tirith and played no further role in getting Frodo and the Ring south or east---what kind of king would he have been?
Yeah, the "Nazgul in Osgiliath" scene didn't work for me either. Since the movie, like the book, established that the Ringwraiths sensed the Ring's presence, why would they leave when it was so blatantly right before them?
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A very few of them have taken the groundwork of Tokien and IMPROVED upon it through things like better characterization. (Although most are still D&D hacks.) I feel that literature can piggy back on older inventions the same way science does...had to discover electricity before you could invent the light bulb. Anyway, this is why I likED (past tense) Robert Jordan's stuff. Before he started writing the epic that would not end, I found that I enjoyed the interesting and diverse characters that gew and changed as the series moved on.
