variations on an idea
Aug. 25th, 2004 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zwolI read a whole lot of science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. I've just read Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg, and it's put me in mind of a story I made up, a mode of analysis to explain to my housemate the relationship between a completely different set of books.
SPOILERS follow for Kingdoms of the Wall, Moon-Flash, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Operation Chaos, Magic, Inc., The Call of the Wild, Heart of Darkness.
In discussing "vanilla" fiction one might talk about the theme of a book. Usually this is an observation on the human condition. For instance The Call of the Wild and Heart of Darkness theme is the thinness of the gap between civilization and savagery.
In speculative fiction, though, the point of the book is usually the idea, which different authors may ring variations on, just as they do a theme in plain fiction. For instance, Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, and Robert Heinlein's Magic, Inc. all begin with the basic idea of taking Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation (that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and turning it round. In these books, magic is real and us brainy humans have exploited it just as we exploit science in our own world, so that it becomes indistinguishable from technology. Being magic, it's got all the trappings thereof -- spirits, demons, a moral component, etc -- but the characters treat it like technology. This is the example I used with my housemate, who was reading Toxic Spell Dump; I wanted to explain to him why Operation Chaos was a better novel.
Now Kingdoms of the Wall also has a theme I've seen done before; I think I'll call it
"Pay no attention to the anthropologists behind the curtain." The viewpoint characters are from a pre-industrial culture. The world they know is small, circumscribed, and stable. They go on some sort of journey of exploration beyond its boundaries -- a religious pilgrimage up an enormous mountain, from which no one has returned in generations, except as madmen. The bulk of the book is picaresque, but when the characters get to the end they discover that the gods they're traveling to visit were human colonists from Earth, who once were happy to teach the indigenes writing and agriculture and other such things. Now, though, they've de-evolved into apes (for reasons which are not that well explained). No one has come back from the pilgrimage for generations because no one could bear to break the news to those below; they stay on the mountain, or they go mad.
Kingdoms is a good book, but a better book on the same idea is Patricia McKillip's Moon-Flash. Mainly it's better because it isn't weighed down with quite so much scene-setting. She leaves out all the heavy religious trappings, the infighting amongst the group of pilgrims, most of the picaresque (while still managing to paint us a good half-dozen different cultures with just a few paragraphs each). Her explorers are just two teenagers who want to know if there's something downriver of where the world ends. The presence of anthropologists from a much more technological culture is apparent from early on, and yet she still manages to pull off a pretty earth-shattering revelation at the end of the book.
The moral of this story is, um, I guess it's that sometimes books are better if you don't put quite so much stuff in them.
SPOILERS follow for Kingdoms of the Wall, Moon-Flash, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Operation Chaos, Magic, Inc., The Call of the Wild, Heart of Darkness.
In discussing "vanilla" fiction one might talk about the theme of a book. Usually this is an observation on the human condition. For instance The Call of the Wild and Heart of Darkness theme is the thinness of the gap between civilization and savagery.
In speculative fiction, though, the point of the book is usually the idea, which different authors may ring variations on, just as they do a theme in plain fiction. For instance, Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, and Robert Heinlein's Magic, Inc. all begin with the basic idea of taking Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation (that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and turning it round. In these books, magic is real and us brainy humans have exploited it just as we exploit science in our own world, so that it becomes indistinguishable from technology. Being magic, it's got all the trappings thereof -- spirits, demons, a moral component, etc -- but the characters treat it like technology. This is the example I used with my housemate, who was reading Toxic Spell Dump; I wanted to explain to him why Operation Chaos was a better novel.
Now Kingdoms of the Wall also has a theme I've seen done before; I think I'll call it
"Pay no attention to the anthropologists behind the curtain." The viewpoint characters are from a pre-industrial culture. The world they know is small, circumscribed, and stable. They go on some sort of journey of exploration beyond its boundaries -- a religious pilgrimage up an enormous mountain, from which no one has returned in generations, except as madmen. The bulk of the book is picaresque, but when the characters get to the end they discover that the gods they're traveling to visit were human colonists from Earth, who once were happy to teach the indigenes writing and agriculture and other such things. Now, though, they've de-evolved into apes (for reasons which are not that well explained). No one has come back from the pilgrimage for generations because no one could bear to break the news to those below; they stay on the mountain, or they go mad.
Kingdoms is a good book, but a better book on the same idea is Patricia McKillip's Moon-Flash. Mainly it's better because it isn't weighed down with quite so much scene-setting. She leaves out all the heavy religious trappings, the infighting amongst the group of pilgrims, most of the picaresque (while still managing to paint us a good half-dozen different cultures with just a few paragraphs each). Her explorers are just two teenagers who want to know if there's something downriver of where the world ends. The presence of anthropologists from a much more technological culture is apparent from early on, and yet she still manages to pull off a pretty earth-shattering revelation at the end of the book.
The moral of this story is, um, I guess it's that sometimes books are better if you don't put quite so much stuff in them.
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