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From: wfi@unc.UUCP (William F. Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE FICTION TODAY - PART I
Message-ID: <316@unc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-May-85 12:56:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.316
Posted: Mon May 27 12:56:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 30-May-85 00:32:27 EDT
References: <1088@druri.UUCP> <hyper.200>
Reply-To: wfi@unc.UUCP (William F. Ingogly)
Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 146
Summary: 

In his reply to Davis Tucker's posting, Steve Brust writes:

> self-indulgent was invented to describe him.  And Mailer
> doesn't even have Capote's occasional gift for turn of
> phrase.  I read SF because most (not all) of the best
> writers are working there.

While I agree with much of what you have to say in your response,
Steve, this particular comment is absolute nonsense. Without even
trying hard I've come up with a list of more-or-less active mainstream
fiction writers who at their worst are at least as good as the best SF
has to offer, and are CERTAINLY better than certain poseurs who are
sometimes cited as paragons of writerly virtue in this group. How many
of the following authors have you read, for example; Jorge Amado, John
Barth, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Thomas Berger, T. Coraghessan
Boyle, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Jose
Donoso, Stanley Elkins, Carlos Fuentes, William Gass, Gunter Grass,
Graham Greene, John Hawkes, Carol Hill, Russell Hoban, William
Kennedy, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, James Alan McPherson, V. S. Naipul (sp?), Walker
Percy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth, Ntozake Shange,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Peter Taylor, Paul Theroux, John Updike, Gore
Vidal, Peter De Vries, or Alice Walker to mention a few voices in
mainstream fiction that are hard to ignore (sorry if I've skipped
anyone's favorites or overemphasized someone whose faults I'm blind
to)? In what way are the best writers in SF more numerous or better
writers than these mainstream people? We're talking superior
craftsmanship here, things like real dialogue by real people, little
things I find infrequently in much SF.

People in this newsgroup have cited Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny,
for example, as examples of superior craftsmen of fiction. Harlan
Ellison covers a lack of talent by projecting a hip, wisecracking
persona that he apparently thinks will delude the unsophisticated into
thinking he has something important to say. And Roger Zelazny (or is
it Zelazney?) is even more of a fraud. His 'masterpieces' are poorly
told bad jokes that would be mildly amusing if they were five or ten
pages long, but Zelazny, like the crashing bore at the cocktail party
insists on overstaying his welcome by expanding these bad jokes into
full-length novels. The dialogue, characterization, and narrative in
Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness are amateurish;
consider the clumsy and stilted passages where Mahasamatman (sp? I
don't own the book any longer and haven't read it for some years)
'heroically' names himself for us mortals' benefit: "...Some call me
Sam, and most call me ham, but you can call me Jim, or you can call me
Slim..." Is this believable or well-done? These books are Bad with a
capital B because Zelazny doesn't really believe in these characters.
I challenge the best of you out there to care about a character and
bring him or her to life for your readers when you yourself have no
faith in your own characters or any real interest in them other than
as devices to carry the plot along!

Why do Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, and so many other SF authors
write such bad fiction? There was a novel of socialist realism that
experienced a certain popularity in England toward the end (as I
recall) of the 19th century. It's called The Ragged-Trousered
Philanthropists, and it's about the trials and tribulations of a group
of house painters who are abused by their employers. This is bad
writing for the same reasons that much of SF is bad writing:
unbelievable dialogue, cardboard characters, a linear and predictable
plot. The reason? The author cared more about getting a message about
the oppression of the working class across than he cared about his
characters, and it shows.  They're romanticized images of what he'd
LIKE workingmen to be rather than living, breathing believable
workingmen. The same thing's true of other 'message' fiction like
Uncle Tom's Cabin and (sadly) much of SF. Fiction that stresses
function at the expense of form is constantly in danger of
degenerating into bathos and melodrama.

Those of you who doubt this assessment of Steve's claims for the SF
genre's containing the best contemporary writers should try the 
following experiment. Buy or borrow a copy of V. S. Naipul's A Bend In
The River (your local library will have a copy) and a copy of Roger
Zelazny's Lord of Light (I use Lord of Light because it's been cited
in this group as an example of excellent writing). I think most of o
you will agree that accurate dialogue and realistic characterization 
(hence, believable characters) are two characteristics that distinguish 
well-written fiction from poorly-written fiction (yes, there are other 
characteristics as well).  You're going to examine each author's 
text and evaluate his treatment of dialogue and characterization. 
First, read each of the books to get a feel for the narrative. Next, 
go through each novel and write down ten or fifteen examples of dialogue 
from each. Compare the dialogue from each novel side by side; read it 
silently at first, then out loud (or better still, have someone else 
read it to you). Assign each sample of dialogue a numeric or letter 
grade based on its believability; dialogue that sounds like the 
character in question would really have uttered it and that tells you 
something about the character or his relationship to other characters
would get a good score. Dialogue that is stilted and unrealistic, that
exists to further the plot or the 'message' the author is trying to
get across would get a bad score. Try to be as objective as possible
when you're doing this. Look at the results; which book has
consistently higher scores? Finally, write down everything you know
about the protagonists in each novel. Which protagonist feels more
lifelike, is more believable? Go back through each novel and look for
passages that tell you something about the character. Compare these
passages side by side. Is the information presented in a manner that
makes complete sense in terms of the plot? Do you see why the author
is presenting the information at this point in the narrative, or does
it seem artificially grafted on top of the plot for extraneous
motives? Do you sense the presence of the author in what he's written,
or see the scaffolding that should be hidden from the reader (Note:
some authors have made a living out of playing these kind of games
with their readers' heads. Vladimir Nabokov is the foremost example.
Whether this is a good or bad strategy, it takes a conscious effort
and much skill to pull it off. I'm talking here about a lack of skill
that lets such scaffolding show unwittingly). Which book in your final
analysis seems to come out ahead in terms of the author's skill and
control over his material, and the realistic presentation of the
characters and events? I'm willing to bet you'll vote for the Naipul
novel.

The second and final stage in our experiment is more painful, because
it requires a certain investment in time and effort in reading non-SF
fiction that many of you may be reluctant to make. Take five to ten
novels by authors from the list I've given you, and five to ten novels
that you feel are the best SF has to offer. Repeat the comparative
process I've described with all of them. Rank all novels without
regard to genre in order of your assessment of the author's skill in
presenting dialogue and characterization. Again, try to be as
objective as possible. If two novels are too close to call, write
their names side by side. If Steve Brust's claim that most of the best
contemporary writers of fiction are working in the SF genre is
correct, then most of the entries in the top half of the list will be
novels from the SF genre. Are they? If they are, I apologize for my
poor judgement and I'll gladly eat my hat (but at least I've gotten a
few of you to read some fiction you might have otherwise passed by!).
I firmly believe, however, that most perceptive people who diligently
try this experiment will find that most writers on my list can create
believable characters and dialogue at least as skillfully as the best
and the brightest SF has to offer, and that some of them clearly
outclass even the best SF writers. I encourage you to extend this
experiment to consider other qualities of fiction like narrative and
imagery.

Lift your heads out of the SF ghetto, people; there are a LOT of
excellent craftsmen outside the SF genre writing first-rate fiction.
You may not know about them or care to read what they've written;
fine. Just don't make ridiculous claims about the scarcity of good
writers outside the narrow confines of SF unless you know what you're
talking about and you've read widely outside the genre. And if you're
going to make grandiose claims, at least provide some supporting
evidence or you're going to unknowingly support the arguments of those
who claim that SF is second-class literature.

                               -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly