"Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe

James Wynn · 01 May 2011, 04:11 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 23:11:27 -0500
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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>> James Wynn:
>> I think Wolfe's problem with it was that there was no reason not to have
>> written the story in the Realistic genre. It was a Naturalism story with
>> SF scenery. Pointless. It didn't deal at all with all the "other stuff"
>> that Wolfe thinks Realistic fiction cannot address.
>>
>> Of course the same could be said of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" --
>> just War fiction with lasers.
>
> Jeff Wilson:
> Can you tell me what page the lasers appear on?

"Lasars" was only intended as a cipher for a SF. "ST" is at its core a 
fictionalized military service memoir.
Honestly, I was only attempting to consider SF literature from the POV 
of what I think were Wolfe's problems with 'The Dispossessed'. The 
counter-argument could be "Oh, then Wes Craven's 'Halloween' is just a 
Crime Thriller with a supernatural killer", or "Star Wars is just King 
Arthur with extra shiny swords".
But if one see SF (as Wolfe here is arguing it should be IMO) as an 
opportunity to put Reality on trial to better understand its limits, 
then "ST" falls short.

> Jerry Friedman:
> Both/The Dispossessed/  and/Starship Troopers/  had to be SF because they're
> about societies that have never existed.

Wolfe's comment was:

"It was about the college professor who's married to a college 
professor, only science fiction, and this planet is Russia and this 
planet is the United States."

Wolfe is saying that *really* the societies are *not* intended to be 
ones that have never existed. We're supposed to see that they are 
actually quite close.

J

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