Silliness and Science Fiction...

...do they weaken a message?

This blog post mostly consists of me musing and asking you all for answers. Just warning you.

Today in class we questioned whether Vonnegut can tackle issues like war and and the meaning of life while including flying saucers, toilet plungers, and two-bit sci-fi writers. Does the silliness detract from the seriousness?

Just to get that out of the way, I'll just say that I am of the belief that if you can't take a joke about something, you can't take it seriously, either. Vonnegut's writing style panders perfectly to me. This blog post will not focus on the use of humor to discuss serious topics.

Instead, I'm musing about the inclusion of science fiction, or rather why that might set off some peoples' alarm bells for anti-seriousness.

Maybe it's just because I've been raised in a pro-sci-fi household, but I've never really understood why it's sometimes not considered a "serious" genre (example: while researching education issues and methods for a paper sophomore year, I found out that many educators discourage children from reading adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi). I've often found science fiction to be a much more approachable way to tackle tough philosophical issues than through "literary fiction" (poorly defined term... refers to fiction which has nothing outstanding to identify it by except the fact that it is written?) Vonnegut's characters' use of science fiction for reinventing themselves and their world is something I see as entirely valid: science fiction can look at a potential future to try to make sense of the present.

Most of the time, I'm not complaining about sci-fi not being serious--instead, I'm complaining about certain incredibly-non-serious-and-non-sci-fi things being labeled as sci-fi and thus giving it a bad image (John Carter of Mars, James Cameron's Avatar, The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey, The Host by Stephanie Meyer... the list goes on and on). Are these kinds of works the reason for people disregarding the genre? Too much sex, explosions, Pocahontas, and White Man's Burden in Space obscuring the public's view? I suppose the definition of sci-fi is up for grabs. Here's the one I'll provide: works of fiction that focus on the impact of scientific discoveries and technological developments on society and the human condition. This can be anything from the invention of time travel to newfound political relations with aliens.

Is "real" sci-fi just too weird to appeal to a broader audience? Do the more extrapolated or fantastical elements distance the story too much from the real world? Is it a matter of, "Well, that's someone's imagined future, and they're probably wrong about a bunch of stuff"?

If anyone would like to comment with some reasons why sci-fi is unrelatable or lessens the seriousness of a work's central message, I'd love to hear them. And I promise that I won't give you terrifyingly rabid backlash. I'll give you mild-mannered, constructive backlash.

The Novel as a Museum Exhibit

Ishmael Reed's Ragtime has an unusual variety of footnotes, images, definitions, citations, newspaper clippings, and other such non-narrative bits thrown in with the somewhat jumbled story. This certainly throws some readers off, and some may find this format to be objectionable, but I actually like the way Reed tells the story. It seems almost like an exhibit at a history museum, where artifacts are displayed next to descriptions of the world they were part of and there is an occasional helpful little placard explaining what the heck some of these things are.

I can think of a few other novels that could be construed as having this layout. One is 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which takes advantage of its miscellaneous extra documents to explain some of the technologies and cultural norms present in its science-fiction setting (such as a section from a do-it-yourself book on how to colonize an asteroid).

The other novel, which many more of you have likely heard of, is The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This one is somewhat more structured in its use of extra documentation than 2312, but still: every once in awhile, we get a break from the usual adventures so we can read a section of the eponymous encyclopedia that tells us the wonders of towels, dolphins, mice, the Infinite Improbability Drive, species that are mostly harmless, and Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters.

I happen to like the story + supporting documents approach enough that I've considered using it for one of my own long-term writing projects.

And when I say long-term, I mean long-term.

In sixth grade or so I created a set of characters who I just kept on thinking up stories for (Note "thinking up," not "writing." There are very few finished stories). Thing is, as I got older, my writing style and writing tastes changed, and I kept reimagining not only plotlines but also the themes and setting these characters existed in. If you placed the original characters in a room with their more recent incarnations, they wouldn't recognize each other. Or be able to breathe the same atmosphere, for that matter.

Here's the short explanation of the premise: The current rendition (unfinished, as always) features two sentient alien species living in a major political mess on a large moon orbiting a gas giant in a distant solar system. Then one day, a human spaceship discovers their civilization, and the political mess just gets worse. Some characters are trying to use humanity's new diplomatic influence to bring peace to the moon. Others are trying to use humanity's superior technology to bring peace in an entirely different way. And of course, humanity is busy with its own war against a fourth sentient species, and would greatly appreciate any help from its new acquaintances.

Anyway, since I prefer to write in the first person, the problem is: who do I use as a narrator?

The original alien character who's stuck with the story for six years?
The human journalist?
Or one of the other characters involved?

The answer is Yes.

It's potentially confusing (Mumbo Jumbo certainly is), but ideally I'd throw in a couple of historical documents and narrator's notes into the story. The original alien character would be primary narrator; after all, he's sort of the center of attention. The journalist can be passed off as the document's translator, adding her own notes to explain certain aspects of alien society and even filling in accounts of events she was present at but the alien character wasn't. And to give human readers the full story, she'll include a number of historical documents from the time.

Gimmicky? Sort of. But does it accomplish what I'm looking for? Yes.

That's probably similar to what went through Ishmael Reed's head when he was deciding what "extras" to add into Mumbo Jumbo.*


*which, I must point out, I have found to be far less confusing than Mr. Mitchell's warnings suggested it would be.

Doctorow, Mieville, Oblivion, and the art of Homagiarism

Homagiarism (ɒmɨdʒərɪzɨm) - n. The act of ripping off someone else for your own creative purposes.

In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow took the name and basic story arc for Coalhouse Walker, Jr. from a novel written a century and a half earlier by German author Heinrich von Kleist. Is that even legal?

Well, yes.

But is it okay? Is there something wrong with Ragtime because it uses someone else's plot? I understand that there are those of you who say that there are no original ideas in fiction, and postmodernists can probably barf up some stuff along the lines of "does it really matter that someone else wrote it first?", but still: Doctorow used someone else's material. This is something that can be great in some circumstances, and terrible in others. Let's view this dichotomy through two examples.

RAILSEA

This young-adult novel by China Mieville takes cues from a very recognizable source: Moby-Dick. The most obvious reference is that there's a captain who lost an appendage and gained a vendetta in a harpoon battle with a large white animal. At first, the book seems to be a rewrite of Herman Melville's (note Melville, not Mieville; I'll call them CM and HM so you don't get confused) novel set in a thoroughly weird universe of endless expanses of railroads and overgrown subterranean mammals. This is not exactly a striking new concept in the world of fiction; anything that was ever famous spawned remakes (or at least sales pitches) as "xyz IN SPACE!" or "xyz AT A MODERN HIGH SCHOOL!" or "xyz UNDER THE SEA!" or "xyz ON AN AIRPLANE!" (or in the case of Airport '77, on an airplane under the sea).
Some people evidently like to reread the same plot over and over again. Some people evidently think that transpositions are the best way to get kids to read/watch fuddy-duddy old works of fiction like Shakespeare. I am not one of those people.
However, CM gets away with his use of HM's premise because 1) he throws in plenty of his own stuff on top of it, and 2) he puts a clever twist on the end of the Ahab vs Moby plotline (I can't explain it without spoiling a great part of the book... but it's clever). In fact, with pirates, monsters, weird technology, and a search for the edge of the earth, good old Moby-Dick gets so deeply buried that you don't notice it's there.
CM homagiarized correctly by taking a premise and plot as things to modify and build off of. Now we look at an example of how homagiarism can go very, very badly.

OBLIVION

I watched this movie without knowing that it was meant to homage just about everything, so my initial reaction was that it had no original content whatsoever. Even now that I know that all of the ripped-off scenes were entirely intentional, it seems like a dumb idea. Here's a list of all the works I noticed were referenced (all were caught on my first time viewing the film; they aren't buried too deeply.)
The Phantom Menace, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Dune, Planet of the Apes, Tron, 2012, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Portal, Gattaca, Independence Day, Wall-E, Top Gun, The Matrix, Logan's Run.
I HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN ALL OF THOSE FILMS (or played that video game), AND I STILL CAUGHT THE REFERENCES! Oblivion takes the most iconic scenes/ideas/props/sets/voices from these works and jams them together into one big, sad excuse for science fiction. The problem is that there is very little (if any) original content to pad the references, and all of the homagarized bits are taken almost exactly in their original forms--no clever twists here.
Granted, there was one reference that I actually thought was clever: the slanted Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes. This was okay for two reasons: 1) it is probably the most recognizable post-apocalyptic image of all, and 2) it shows up for just a moment--they fly past it during a chase scene.

RAGTIME

So does Doctorow get away with it? Does he have a good example of homagiarism? His transposition of von Kleists' story is pretty straightforward, but it's intertwined with other stories in the novel. In the end, the thing that makes Doctorow's homagiarism acceptable is that the source he takes "influence" from is not widely known. For one thing, it doesn't automatically trigger something in our brain that says, "Hey, wait a minute! They already did that in (insert fiction here)!". But it also makes it clear that Doctorow is not just using the homagiarized story to try and jump on a bandwagon; it's not, "This was popular, so let's remake it" (ahem*Michael Bay*ahem), it's "Hm. This is an interesting story. I bet I could use it somehow...". It seems like a more genuine form of reuse... though maybe Doctorow could have at least mentioned in a preface or end note that he used von Kleist's story?

Didn't his highschool librarian tell him to always cite his sources?

PS: Interestingly enough, both Railsea and Oblivion are metafiction! The narrator of Railsea occasionally interjects to comment on the progress of the story, and Oblivion's innumerous references ensure that the viewer is constantly reminded: "Hey, I saw that in a sci-fi film once--OH WAIT: THIS IS A SCI-FI* FILM! OMG LOL." (or something like that). Additionally, the inclusion of Tom Cruise's sunglasses from Top Gun remind the viewer that the character onscreen is really just Tom Cruise putting on a persona.

*I do not endorse the labeling of Oblivion as science fiction.

The Wrong Bird, and What is Allowed to be Fictional

So there I am, reading chapter 10, when all of a sudden Doctorow starts talking about the Eskimos eating auks and fulmars. Then he mentions auklets. My bird brain immediately starts nitpicking.

There are no, and never have been, auklets on the East Coast.

In fact, there are only two birds that could be called "auks" in the Atlantic Ocean, and one of them (the razorbill) can't really be described as "small and inoffensive", leaving us with only one possibility for what Doctorow is referring to: the dovekie (Alle alle), which is technically neither an auk nor an auklet. Sure enough, there is an Inuit dish that involves packing hundreds of dovekies into sealskins and letting them ferment, as mentioned in Ragtime.

But who calls the dovekie an auklet?

Near as I can tell, one source. From 1919, which based on ngrams is about the time that the word "auklet" really caught on in literature. This particular source only uses the word "auklet" once, while the rest of the time it uses the term dovekie. The autobiography of Peary's assistant, Donald Baxter MacMillan, uses the terms little auk, dovekie, ice bird, rotch, and bullbird, but not auklet.

So take that, E.L. Doctorow! You used the wrong name for the bird!

...but why the heck am I more hung up about the word auklet (putting my obvious ornithological obsessions aside), than, say, the fact that Freud and Jung take a boat together through the Tunnel of Love? What if E.L. Doctorow actually had his taxonomy straight and meant to have west coast seabirds getting eaten by Eskimos in Greenland? Is that more implausible than anything else in the book?

Well, not really. But it would definitely seem to be more fictional, since it doesn't appear intentional.

If Doctorow has a historical figure do something we have no proof they ever did, it's part of the story. He's in full control of the characters' actions. The places they go actually exist. The cars the ride in are the kind of cars people would have ridden in (fun fact: electric cars were actually pretty common before gasoline engines got quiet and efficient enough to be practical). There's plenty of real history (Stanford White's murder, Evelyn Nesbit having a connection to anarchists, views on unions, etc) thrown in to fit the story we know--Ragtime could have happened, it's just in between the parts of history that got written down.

Auklets (real auklets, not dovekies) on the east coast would be perfectly fine if this were surrealist or alternate history. But since everything else is (reasonably) tightly conforming to the real world, it would just seem out of place. With historical figures, Doctorow can say "Yeah, I'm making this stuff up, but it could have happened," but auklets on the east coast would be "Oh, and by the way--I'm disregarding some aspects of nature, just 'cause."

This might just be my science fiction brain talking, but it seems that the author can make up anything that truly matters to the story, while passing details have to stick closer to fact. The line between fiction and BS lies in whether or not the made-up stuff is gratuitous.

I apologize to anyone who is a fan of surrealism.

-----------------
Miscellany:

• Taxonomy tip: Fulmars look like gulls, but aren't actually related to them. Alcids (auks, auklets, murres, guillemots, puffins, etc) look nothing like gulls, but are pretty closely related to them.
• Don't look up pictures of dovekies. If you do, you will never be able to forgive Peary, Father, and the Eskimos for being heartless killers.
• The described way of killing "auks" is probably accurate. I mean, you'd die too if a giant hand wrapped around you and stopped your heart from beating. It's like the five point palm exploding heart technique for birds.
• The Eskimo dish involving pickled "auk" is called kiviaq.

The Split

Posts older than this one pertain to the 20th Century Novel. Posts more recent than this one pertain to History as Fiction. Just so you know.

Choose Your Own Absurdity

When first contemplating what to do for my open genre assignment, my mind jumped to a creative project I'd already started: writing parodies of Billy Joel songs about the books we've read in class (After all, one of his songs is titled "The Stranger"). I decided, however, that I wouldn't really have time to record all the songs, and I really wanted to do a parody to go with Song of Solomon, so those will have to wait until winter break. It's one of those "I'll finish it eventually" projects.

Instead, I opted for something more interactive: a choose-your-own-adventure story! I did one for Creative Writing last year, featuring a damaged spaceship and potentially hostile encounters with aliens. It was a lot of fun to write. So why not make another?

I chose to make a choosable-path (the proper, non-trademarked word for choose-your-own-adventure) version of The Stranger because Meursault has very little choice in his actions, and even when he does, his choices have little impact on the future. "I realized in that moment you could either shoot or not shoot." "To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing." etc.

In order to keep the length down, I only transformed part 1 of Camus' novel. But there are plenty of choices to make even in just part 1. Do you go to the funeral or not? Do you cry? Do you tell Marie you love her? Do you write the letter for Raymond?

The best part of writing the alternative plot developments was figuring out how many ways there are for Meursault to accidentally kill other characters. Every good choosable-path adventure has tons of ways to end the story. The one I did for Creative Writing had only one "correct" (optimal) ending, but five ways to abandon your responsibilities, six ways to get your companions killed, and five ways to wind up dead yourself. Hey, it's all fun and games until nobody gets hurt.

One big change from my previous interactive story was that this time around, instead of printing out a bunch of pages and an index to flip through, I formatted the story as a set of hyperlinked slides in a Google Docs presentation. It ends up working very nicely as a way to make choosable-path stories available digitally (and has a much better user interface than a paper version...).

Anyway, the interactive version of The Stranger is available on this blog for your enjoyment! So without further ado, click on the tab at the top of this page that says "CYOA" and see if you have what it takes to fight the Absurd and win!

(Probably not)

Song of Solomon, Literary Criticism, Essays, Blog Posts, and the Problem of Continuous Thinking (Part 2)

Literary criticism. Ugh.

For a long time I thought that teen vampire romance novels were the most vacuous genre of writing ever invented. Then I discovered academic literary criticism.

When I read a piece of "Lit Crit," my default expectation is that I'm going to disagree with what the author is trying to argue. Sometimes I come to accept the interpretation presented as somewhat valid. Most of the time I don't. In fact, my rate of disliking literary criticism is higher than my rate of disliking literature.

I blame it on being a writer myself. When I write, I know exactly what I want to say and what I want the reader to get out of it. Sure, the reader's personal experience might make them have different reactions to some things than I would, but the message of the book, character motivations, and symbolism (or lack thereof) of plot points and imagery should not radically change. Certain readers may be more attracted to certain types of characters than others (see Part 1). The reader can also certainly decide whether or not the writing succeeds in delivering its message or soliciting the reactions and sympathy the writer intended, but anyone who argues that Gregor Samsa subconsciously turns into a bug so he doesn't have to go to work or that Meursault's murder of the Arab is a "symptom of his homosexual sadomasochistic fantasies" (Ben Stolzfus' description of Julian L. Stamm's analysis) is off their rocker.

In short, I think the "Death of the Author" is a load of crap.

Anyway, my default reaction to literary criticism is to disregard it. I don't oppose the criticism part--I love to criticize books, if you haven't noticed yet--and the literary part is kind of unavoidable. The problem, frankly, is the format. The essay format. The college thesis format. It forces the writer to be like Hugh Whitbread (a pompous ass, in case you've forgotten) and write as if their interpretation is the only right interpretation and is a completely logical and loophole-less interpretation. There's no room for equivocation or taking into account other peoples' ideas, opinions, and feelings.

If you do that in kindergarten, someone will tell on you.

Argumentative essays are always the hardest for me to write because I always feel like I'm turning into one of the aforementioned critics and throwing the rest of the literary community from the train. I distrust literary criticism for the same reason I trust psychology less than neuroscience (Psychologists treat theories like toothbrushes--no self-respecting person would ever use anyone else's [apologies to anyone who is considering studying psychology or whose parents are psychologists--I have nothing against the people, it's just that the system is messed up]). Literary criticism just seems generally unscientific. Rather than forming a theory around the facts, a lot of times it feels like the author is cherrypicking facts to support their theory. Sometimes the authors cite previous works, but it's usually just a tidbit or two from each that they use to spin a whole new interpretation out of. Maybe they could... uh... ask the original author of the book about some things? At least if the author is still living? Or if they're dead, just go with the interpretation the original author wrote about their own book?

End rant. If anyone wants to challenge me in the comments, go ahead. I'll try to be open-minded about your responses, unlike most literary critics.

...which leads us into Part 3, which is about writing my own lit crit essay. I probably could have done this all as one big post, but I didn't want it to look intimidating.