From the (e)Bookshelf: Prose Bowl
Back in high school, I found a box of old issues of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" from the late 1970s and early 1980s one day in the corner of a portable classroom. Out of the stories I read back then that have stuck in my mind ever since, I do seem to keep thinking back to one as standing out among that distinguished group. It was called "Prose Bowl," by Barry N. Malzberg (who before looking it up I supposed to be a "New Wave" science fiction author with a tendency of sardonic pessimism towards older SF themes such as space travel, but who I now know also did quite a bit of work with "metafiction") and Bill Pronzini (a prolific writer of mysteries and an editor of anthologies in multiple genres), and involved a showdown between two authors down on the field of a stadium filled with thousands of fans, each trying to finish typing a ten-thousand word story first. Just a little while ago, I started wondering if I could find any information about the story online, but a quick search turned up that it had been expanded into a full novel, which didn't seem to be in print any more but was readily available in electronic book stores. Curious, perhaps, as to how this would turn out, and equipped in just the last little while with some new ways of reading electronic books, I bought a copy.
The novel starts off in the semifinals before the "Prose Bowl" now, and where the short story had seemed to imply making a spectacle of "fast writing" would lead to "pulp" topics like "Futuristic Love-Adventure" and "Mid-Twentieth-Century Detective" crowding out any semblance of actual "literature," one of the semifinals included "Plotless Quality Lit" as a topic only to add a few barbs there too. There was a bit more "world-building" (the "Prose Bowl" changed from an intriguing enigma to a way to bring the literacy rate up), but also a subplot involving a scheme to fix the big competition. When the moments of action this brings about are narrated as if written in competition, though, this does begin to tie into an increased sense of "metafiction."
I spent a while reading the extended novel contemplating how often I would seem to brush off series of science fiction novels after their first books (even if this might have been a bit more an issue with series written back when the impression of a work first envisioned as complete in itself getting "added to" was stronger), a reproach perhaps to how often I seem to notice other people turning on "visual" works before the thought of that even happens to me. Thinking a "metafictional" attitude was now being taken helped, but it did still seem to counter the whole "what if?" question, with its mixture of fascination and dread, the original story might have carried for me.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/207353.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
The novel starts off in the semifinals before the "Prose Bowl" now, and where the short story had seemed to imply making a spectacle of "fast writing" would lead to "pulp" topics like "Futuristic Love-Adventure" and "Mid-Twentieth-Century Detective" crowding out any semblance of actual "literature," one of the semifinals included "Plotless Quality Lit" as a topic only to add a few barbs there too. There was a bit more "world-building" (the "Prose Bowl" changed from an intriguing enigma to a way to bring the literacy rate up), but also a subplot involving a scheme to fix the big competition. When the moments of action this brings about are narrated as if written in competition, though, this does begin to tie into an increased sense of "metafiction."
I spent a while reading the extended novel contemplating how often I would seem to brush off series of science fiction novels after their first books (even if this might have been a bit more an issue with series written back when the impression of a work first envisioned as complete in itself getting "added to" was stronger), a reproach perhaps to how often I seem to notice other people turning on "visual" works before the thought of that even happens to me. Thinking a "metafictional" attitude was now being taken helped, but it did still seem to counter the whole "what if?" question, with its mixture of fascination and dread, the original story might have carried for me.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/207353.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.