The Primacy of Ideas

[jeff_duntemann]

One of my SF teachers, a brilliant man whom I respect very highly, said something once that I still don't understand: "In the end, what people will remember about your fiction are the characters." This was in the context of an intense discussion about character creation, but it seems extreme to me. In some sorts of fiction, sure. What I remember

Comments

[baron_waste]

I never knew “Beep” was expanded into a novel.

What you're saying is not wrong, but it's a matter of penduluims swinging. The notion that ideas are paramount produced the science fiction of the 1930s - yet the SF authors best remembered from that time are those who surpassed this and began writing about believable, flesh-and-blood people amidst these gosh-wow concepts. The result might not be mature literature, but it was better than what, say, John Campbell was writing - which were amazing ideas, but devoid of any but cardboard dialogue-faucets.

So today you have authors trained to write characters, who don't have strong ideas but who try SF because it's hip. Their efforts will be as forgotten in due course as any table of contents of Air Wonder Stories.

[jeff_duntemann]

It took Blish literally twenty years to do it, but it was published as a paperback original in 1973, when I was a junior in college.

My rant is about that modern twitch of turning characterization into an unexamined fetish, especially by people who aren't (yet) good at it.

There's this whole 'nother business of writing fiction by turning a crank, which I'll take up at some point.

[baron_waste]

Vernor Vinge's book Marooned in Realtime represents a wonderful intersection of the two axes. The story is based on his idea for “bobbles,” bubbles of perfect time stasis, the implications of which he explores in various stories. *

Yet the main character is equally memorable - he was a criminal investigator who got trapped in such a stasis bubble by a perp. “Posthumously” his own son wrote heavily-dramatized 'penny dreadfuls' about his exploits, built him up as the Sherlock Holmes of the 21st century… so now, re-emerged in the present day, he is confronted by his own reputation as an unbeatable sleuth, and presented with one hell of a murder investigation that he alone can solve - right? Aw, hell…

This is a character whom you could imagine operating in other settings than the story - and that, to my mind, is a mark of quality. Arguably, this is the breakthrough Gene Roddenberry achieved with the original Star Trek - while other SF shows were anthologies or one-shots, he applied the 'on-going character' concept to the Idea Story,

[jeff_duntemann]

Vinge is one of the best hard SF guys ever, and he's a perfect example of what hard SF writers should be reaching for.

An idea's implications are part of the idea; like the difference between writing a program (the Idea) and executing it (the implications.) My Big Idea is the Drumlins World, and I've barely scratched the surface. I need to pick up the pace, as I'm now 61 and don't have infinite time to do it, as I thought I did when I was a clueless thirty-year-old.

BTW, you have an open invitation from me to write stories in the Drumlins world if you're ever so moved. Contact me privately and I can send you the current state of the backgrounder.

what about a law as a rivet?

[ext_1749925]

Hey, Jeff

[etfb]

Damn - I'd read that. I'd watch that! If you feel like quitting your dayjob, writing the book, having it optioned by one of the big studios and turned into a blockbuster, I promise I'll go see it instead of bittorrenting it years after it was popular. Can't say fairer than that!

[tlunquist]

Characters become memorable because of the context they are in. Everybody is ordinary until their circumstances make them extraordinary. Some people create extraordinary circumstances for themselves -- those characters become the protagonists of motivational business books. Some people are thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and they become the protagonists of fiction books

[jeff_duntemann]

Your example is bang-on. I bought Red Mars and forced my way through it. I bought Green Mars and put it down a hundred-odd pages in. All context, and so much of it that the epic context swamped what little there was in the line of characters. The trilogy was actually a single book padded out to terminal boredom, and more an essay on terraforming than a story.

I'll temper this criticism by admitting that I'm biased. I had been tinkering my own Mars terraforming novel for years when Red Mars came out, and it pretty much drove a nail through the skull of Oxidation. My "what-if" was this: What if you turn an automated terraforming system loose on Mars and then can't shut it off? What if you have to fight the robots doing the terraforming to keep them from making Mars uninhabitable? What if the robots are an evolving hive mind that develops its own intelligence, culture, and--egad--religion? The concept had (and still has) merit, but Robinson pretty much shut the door on Mars terraforming stories. I wrote The Cunning Blood instead.