Generic Considerations

Craig Brewer · 24 Apr 2003, 18:15 · from urth-v0304.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Generic Considerations
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 11:15:34 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0304-3310 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0304/3310.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

More musings: If you've never read it, I highly
suggest Samuel R. Delany's "The Jewel Hinged Jaw." I
don't know if it's still in print or not, but he has a
fascinating discussion of what makes even a single
sentence "science fictioned" rather than
"mainstreamed." He has a wonderful reading of the
single sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low" in
which he explains how sf forces the reader the create
his image of the world of the story, not necessarily
from the ground up, by taking the stock of meanings
and expectations we normally have and rearranging them
in new and unexpected ways.

We could argue about whether such a method is distinct
to sf (I doubt that it is), but it's always been a
helpful discussion for me to think of sf as a
rearrangement of expectations/meanings which, real or
not, I've just become used to. The idea that each word
corrects my previous image has always been compelling.
Delany puts it this way: "A 60,000 word novel is one
picture corrected 59,999 times." A catchy phrase.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net