It's not the height, it's the intensity
And I should be doing a recent reading post, but I'm still too exhausted and out-of-sync. But this irked me enough to generate a probably deceptive surge of energy to post with.
Making my way through the piles of accumulated mail, I came to Focus: the BSFA Magazine for Writers, Autumn 2007 no 51, which included an article on 'How do I stand out on the slushpile?' by Jetse de Vries. And some of this was all well and good, but I take issue with the following:
Raise the stakes, raise them higher and then add a few notches. For example, let the final confrontation between two old friends not only destroy their friendship, but also their conscience and the course of history. [I can get behind the idea of positing an advance in technology should have wide-ranging impact somewhat more happily.] If people find themselves in a strange world, make it ever stranger, weirder, crazier.... Don't think big: imagine vastitudes, create infinities.
I'm okay with the idea that you have to make your consequences complex rather than single and that the impacts of the events should resonate. But this demand for ratcheting up the importance of everything strikes me as somewhere between E E Smithsmanship - first we save the world, then the solar system, then the galaxy, then the universe, then the whole of past and future history - and the litfic trope of the Great [whatever] Novel... And it has an urgent, phallic, look, perhaps. And I've been bored rigid by enough books that thought that raising the stakes was going to generate narrative intensity all by itself. Because you have to care in the first place. Or that putting in more and more of The Strange was going to grab the imagination.
I'm thinking 'what about subtle, what about making your few inches of ivory reflect those changes, what about doing growing unease at what at first appear analogues or only slight differences...'*
Just me?
*Moving here towards theorising a new kind of SF (what a pity that Mundane has already been appropriated for a rather different vision) about refracting vast changes via a Barbara Pym style narrative.