Yeah, put like this it does indeed look like a trend. (Needs some quantitative data, though -- maybe one for Nicola Griffith's genre award monitoring project?)
Oh, and it's possible to write second-person. Multi-viewpoint second-person, even. (Hey, it's a thing I've done :)
Second person was beyond the scope of this analysis. It's so rarely used that it doesn't make a difference to trends of this sort. I have a vague plan for a post someday about 2nd person writing (I think of it as a tactic to distance the narrator from himself), but I need to read a lot more of it first.
My biggest question of this trend is that chicken-and-egg thing. And of course this is limited to my particular quirks of recommendations and tastes (note it's more heavily F than SF).
I think of it as a tactic to distance the narrator from himself
I call it "first person omniscient". Because that's what it's good for: giving a series of over-the-shoulder views from the POV of different characters that function like first person but have the ability to cut away and examine things the narrative viewpoint shouldn't be aware of.
Wait, possible terminology confusion here.... To me "second person" narration is use of "you" for the character. Bright Lights, Big City being the traditional exemplar. Within SF/F, the opening of Karin Lowachee's Warchild is written this way.
What I call "first person omniscient" is like Neal Stephenson's The Big U, where the narrator covers lots of things that happened that he wasn't present for.
Yes, we are using the same terminology for second person v. first person.
A narrator covering lots of things they weren't present for is do-able in first person if they're aware of those things. In second person, you can cut away from the character viewpoint to rant at the reader directly (Chris Brookmyre does this brilliantly in his thrillers, although often from inside the head of a first-person narrator who is monologuing). The advantage to a pure second-person viewpoint is you can drop the pretence of an interior monologue and go straight to omniscience: "... you are currently unaware of the fact that when you withdrew £50 from the hole in the wall, your card slid through the treacherous fascia of a skimming machine, and even now your current account is being drained by Gyorgi, a 22 year old Bulgarian youth with catastrophic acne with a bad habit of anxiously glancing over his shoulder every time he shoves the smartcard he's using as a clone of your own into the mouth of another machine
( ... )
Oh, and it's possible to write second-person. Multi-viewpoint second-person, even. (Hey, it's a thing I've done :)
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My biggest question of this trend is that chicken-and-egg thing. And of course this is limited to my particular quirks of recommendations and tastes (note it's more heavily F than SF).
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I call it "first person omniscient". Because that's what it's good for: giving a series of over-the-shoulder views from the POV of different characters that function like first person but have the ability to cut away and examine things the narrative viewpoint shouldn't be aware of.
Reply
What I call "first person omniscient" is like Neal Stephenson's The Big U, where the narrator covers lots of things that happened that he wasn't present for.
Reply
A narrator covering lots of things they weren't present for is do-able in first person if they're aware of those things. In second person, you can cut away from the character viewpoint to rant at the reader directly (Chris Brookmyre does this brilliantly in his thrillers, although often from inside the head of a first-person narrator who is monologuing). The advantage to a pure second-person viewpoint is you can drop the pretence of an interior monologue and go straight to omniscience: "... you are currently unaware of the fact that when you withdrew £50 from the hole in the wall, your card slid through the treacherous fascia of a skimming machine, and even now your current account is being drained by Gyorgi, a 22 year old Bulgarian youth with catastrophic acne with a bad habit of anxiously glancing over his shoulder every time he shoves the smartcard he's using as a clone of your own into the mouth of another machine ( ... )
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