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

Jeff Wilson · 01 May 2011, 16:47 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 01 May 2011 11:47:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <4DBCEB65.9050707 at gmail.com>
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Message-ID: <4DBD8EAD.4030802 at io.com>

On 5/1/2011 12:11 AM, James Wynn wrote:
>
>>>
>>> "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.
>
> Okay. But starting from Wolfe's view of Realism vs SF, was there actual
> value in telling it as a SF story?

Sure, the war with aliens lets you isolate variables. Out actual wars 
have concerns about divided loyalties, inhumane treatment, atrocities 
and war crimes, etc.

>>> 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?
>
> I'm not planting a flag. I'm just exploring Wolfe's argument.
> Personally, I've never read anything on Oprah's list, so if a publisher
> wanted to get me to read that sort of story, he'd package it as a
> different genre.

Oh, I got that you were doing a dismissive person rather than speaking 
for yourself, but when you include bogus trivia it can seem like you 
actually didn't bother to read or see the original source; there are no 
lasers in ST because they weren't quite invented yet when RAH wrote it, 
and Wes Craven was not involved with that particular slasher movie 
franchise.

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

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