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

Jeff Wilson · 01 May 2011, 04:38 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 23:38:11 -0500
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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On 4/30/2011 11:11 PM, James Wynn wrote:
>
>>> 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.

That's awfully kind of you; I would say it's a persuasive essay on the 
supremacy of patriotic duty dramatized as a war 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".

You're doing the bogus details as part of the dismissive character, right?



-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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