Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
But he's not saying most of it is bad. He's saying most of it will not appeal to the average non-SF reader. The thrust of the article is: this is a good book. However, I can't recommend it to people who don't normally read SF, not because the story isn't interesting, but because
What is missing from "Counting Heads" that Marusek's earlier stories had in abundance is what you humans call emotion — a reason to care about his characters, so that observations like the preceding one would carry the impact they deserve.
Instead of focusing on the characters, the author's busy with world-building. That's why he's comparing it to stereo instructions, and that's what he's saying is typical of SF. Most of fiction is bad, yes. But I don't think you can say "most fiction, good and bad, has this same flaw." Whereas it is extremely common even in good SF.
He's saying most of it will not appeal to the average non-SF reader.
I'm probably an average SF reader and I don't see the appeal of stereo manuals or bio textbooks.
Now, if he's saying most of
everything
is turgid, fine. But that's not how I parse that quote above, not even a little.
But as a SF reader, I would rather read a book that had good characters and emotion. Him suggesting that SF readers might enjoy things that are not good enough for other readers is a little insulting, I think.
ita, did you read the whole article? Because out of context, I can see it, but in the article what he's implying seems pretty clear to me. It's specifically about ignoring the human element in favor of "Looky at this world I made up, and the funny words I invented to describe it." Other genres have their own problems, but I think treating the characters as simply an excuse to talk about abstracts is pretty specific to SF.
Him suggesting that SF readers might enjoy things that are not good enough for other readers is a little insulting, I think.
It's a matter of different priorities. SF readers as a whole value the world-building, the ideas, the exploration, and will forgive flaws in the more fundamental aspects of storytelling. And those are the stated priorities, so that's fine, but you can't dismiss characterization and nuanced writing in favor of neat ideas, and then complain when the mainstream thinks a lot of SF consists of cliched characters running around speaking technobabble.
I did read the whole thing. But I can't read that quote any other way, and so it colours my interpretation of the rest of the article, rather than the other way around.
More to the point, the "stereo instructions" segment of SF is a
very small segment
in a very big, very diverse field. Personally, I can't stand hard SF, which is where the stereo instructions tend to reside these days.
I was a lot fairer to say of the whole genre that the characetrs were wooden 30, 40 years ago. Yeah, a lot of that stuff isn't actually good writing. But, New Wave, feminist revolution, niche marketry -- ? Does this guy actually
read
anywhere near the full breadth of his field?
(And doesn't he know that SF/fantasy crossover into romance is the Next Big Thing? If what he is saying were true anywhere near across the board, that cross-fertilization would be impossible.)
I can't read that quote any other way
Even when the lead-in is "I really enjoyed this book, I just can't recommend it to people who don't read SF"? I mean, if he's damning SF readers, he's pretty clearly damning himself, too.
I dunno. I suppose my bias is that I agree with him.
I don't care if he damns himself along with me. I think he's damning me (and a great many people) wrongly. He may enjoy bio textbooks and stereo manuals.
That doesn't make it a valid generalisation.
I don't think it's a valid generalization either, but I don't think it was intended as such. Is that really the sticking point?
He's not saying that SF readers enjoy reading things that are dull, but that they value content over esthetics. You read a stereo manual because you are interested in the information it contains, not because it is written in a way that is artistically pleasing.
The other way to take it is that SF readers aren't as superficial as mainstream readers. That's just as accurate.
I think both ways of phrasing that generalization are lame, though! SF readers are just as dumb, and just as aesthetically-oriented, as ordinary readers. (And just as smart and content-oriented.)
Hard SF, as a (very small) subgenre, is both smart and content-oriented, often to the detriment of the converse, but to generalize from that one subgenre to the whole field is as useless and misrepresentative as saying that all war novels are written by Jim Jones.
