Friday Afternoon Interlude
I just caught this Neal Stephenson lecture, via BoingBoing, about SciFi-Fantasy as a literary genre, in which he discusses genres generally, talks about geeking out and vegging out, and relates the story of how an otherwise unflappable professional waiter in a New York restaurant transformed into a fanboy at the mention of Lucy Lawless.
I do love this part:
It’s fun to imagine a comedy sketch, with Robert Heinlein in a writer’s workshop, having the first draft of Starship Troopers evaluated by a circle of earnest young post-structuralists. I don’t imagine that there is anything like out-and-out censorship, but I do suspect that people who write about relationships, who write autobiographical introspective fiction from a subjective point of view are going to have an easier time of it in this environment from those who write SF.
On the science fiction side of SF, writers are working with abstract ideas from science, and scientists who believe, and who can prove, that they’re right are notoriously at odds with post-structuralists who are always looking for ways to bring science into the realm of what is called criticizability.
On the fantasy side, writers are creating entire worlds inside of their brains and populating them with species and civilizations and histories, an undertaking that seems fantastically arrogant from a post-structuralist standpoint.
The characteristics I spoke of earlier that lead SF fans to want to see intelligence at work in the faces of movie characters, when rolled over into literature, mean they want ideas. They want to learn something, or join with the author in speculating about a future, or about a fantastical otherworld. Naturally, they will see the aliens as dangerous predatory creatures that have to be killed, while literary theorists will say that perhaps the real reason we’re afraid of the alien other is because it represents the eruption into our discourse of heretofore subjugated knowledges.
Post-structuralist critics, assuming they have the courage of their convictions, would say to the young Heinlein, “I see that you are intelligent, that you know a lot, that you’ve worked hard, that you’ve put a lot of ingenuity into this book. But the whole thing is pre-theoretical, and therefore naive, and as such simply of lesser intellectual stature than something that was written taking into account the intellectual trends of the last half-century.”
Yeah, blow it out your ass, Roland Barthe! You’re going to know all about the “death of the author” when the goddam Arachnids of Klendathu rain death from the stars! Ahem. Anyway, good lecture. Bless the internet for letting me attend while writing a regression test script on a Friday afternoon.
What else is the internet good for? Let’s see. How about… zombies and Jim Carroll?
Yeah, that’ll do. Have a great weekend.
Tags: Entertaining Interludes
