Antipathy to the genre, or to futtock-shroudery?
Over the weekend I came across a twitter-thread going off on somebody for complaining that the world-building in some fantasy series was exhausting to to get to grips with -
And at first I thought, sigh, here was a person of the kind described by EM Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927), who will not pay that additional sixpence of suspension of disbelief demanded by the fantastical/science-fictional -
(And I thought, tangentially, that maybe those genres were not such a thing at that date, and then I thought, Wells!, and massive numbers of spooky stories, and annual performances of Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends and so on, as well as your more serious dystopian lit. There would have been a fair amount of it about.)
- and then I thought, was this actually a genre-specific plaint, even if it was being directed, in this instance, against some work of fantasy?
Because last week or so I was reading a review of a critically-well-received cop series on TV which indicated that the viewer in question would possibly have enjoyed it a bit more, or at least found parts of it rather more comprehensible, had the cops in question not communicated almost entirely in arcane acronyms at critical junctures of the plot.
This is a bit, showing off having done the research (cop show)/amount of thought and effort put into world-building (fantasy series) and maybe it does not have to be flourished thus but a bit less obvious? Does it really convey a sense of authenticity rather than ticking off boxes?
I am rather with Ursula Le Guin (as quoted in this interview): All that sailing is complete fakery. It’s amazing what you can fake. I’ve never sailed anything in my life except a nine-foot catboat, and that was in the Berkeley basin in about three feet of water. And we managed to sink it. The sail got wet and it went down while we sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” We had to wade to shore, and go back to the place we’d rented it and tell them. They couldn’t believe it. “You did what?” You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.
On another paw, maybe for that to really work you have to be Le Guin...
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