House Absolute

Craig Brewer · 05 Dec 2008, 03:10 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 19:10:59 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) House Absolute
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Delany's "reading protocol" has less to do with actual science than with a willingness to allow language to affect our imaginations in ways that break usual possibilities.

In some ways, it's the opposite of having a shared scientific background. It's more about readers being willing to allow their sense of "reality" (or, in this case, "scientific possibility") to be altered with a single word or phrase.

He's got an example of a hypothetical story that starts out with the sentence: "The red sun is high, the blue low." And he talks about how a science fiction audience reacts to this kind of sentence by constructing a kind of consistency (or "world") around the given data/words rather than expecting it to conform.

But that's from his early stuff. Later, he got all deconstruction-y.

----- Original Message ----
From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 4, 2008 7:40:11 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) House Absolute

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> There is a Delany list, but it doesn't get into theory discussions very often,
> alas...

Delany's  the champion of the SF reading protocols theory, right? I suppose I am advocating a weak version of that, in that serious science fiction writers ought to be informed about such science as is commonly found elsewhere in the genre, which can easilly be presumed to include the Guiness Book of Records and Asmiov's corpus of non-fictional work.

-- Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >
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