erosenfield

I feel like the only thing I get out of LJ anymore is near-daily emails about spam comments on old posts.

Number of story rejections in 2011: 22 23
Number of acceptances: 0

1920s - Mack the Knife - Kurt Weill
1930s - Summertime - George Gershwin
1940s - Sixteen Tons - Merle Travis
1950s - Lucille - Little Richard
1960s - Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones
1970s - 20th Century Boy - T Rex
1980s - How Soon is Now? - The Smiths
1990s - Exit Music (For a Film) - Radiohead

Can't find any songs I really like from the 1900s or 1910s.

""Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure. What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn. It will be these changes?those imposed extrinsically by force?which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to).

Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives. When the aliens debark from their craft to deal with the colonization assignment, the saved and the unsaved, adulterous and chaste, psychoanalyzed and decompensated will be caught in their terrible tracer beams and absorb the common fate. When the last layer of protective ozone is burned out by International Terror & Trade, discussion leaders, the born again and the members of the American Psychological Association will all go together.

This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today. Because this vision is inimical to the middle class (which has been taught that increased self-realization is increased control), because it tends to trivialize if not actually mock the vision of the modern novel and drama (the shaping of experience is its explanation), genre science fiction has been in trouble in America from the outset. It has been perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of the culture. Science fiction has had a hearing from those who control access to the broad reading audience at only a few points in its history (I suggest 1946, 1957, and 1972) and in every case has been swiftly repudiated. The successful media science fiction of the seventies (most, though not all of it, debased adventure stories with crude science-fictional props) has forced literary science fiction into juxtaposition with the culture. The increase in readership funneled in by Star Trekand Star Wars has indicated that publishers will not permit it this time to go away . . . but science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago.

It is my assumption that it never will be. Science fiction is too threatening.

At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature. It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance. As the technology becomes more sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up?this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither?despite the hostility of the culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of most of its readers?neither will science fiction. It, if no given writer, will persist; will run, with the engines, the full disastrous course."
--Barry Malzberg
Breakfast in the Ruins

There are three kinds of conflict: extrapersonal, personal and internal.

Adventure fiction in its purest form is all extrapersonal conflict, and usually requires the hero to travel to exotic locals in order to find more external conflict to be confronted with. (eg. James Bond.)

Soap opera in its purest form is all personal conflict, and often takes place in one town or even a single mansion or castle (eg Radcliffe gothic) in order that the characters may be in a proper crucible to force them to conflict with each other.

Stream-of-consciousness in its purest form is all personal conflict, and doesn't require the main character to move at all. It can take place in a single room. (eg. Against the Grain).

Most works mix together at least two, if not all three types.

Extrapersonal conflict is about a movement between an ideal of large-scale stability and large-scale chaos, and can be used to address BIG IDEAS that affect large numbers of people. The ideal in question, that the hero fights for, gives meaning to the plot and essence to the character. CF. Bond as right wing, Robin Hood as left wing, as each embodies a kind of ideal, on the one hand governmental order, on the other populist power.

Personal conflict is conflict between different people's ideals of their relationships. Personal conflict happens when different people have different ideas about what given relationships should be, whether romantic, personal, business, etc.

Internal conflict is conflict between a person's ideas of themselves, usually between some kind of imagined nature and a true nature (though it's important to be aware that even "true nature" is in some sense constructed). Internal conflict is where character depth and dimension come from; a character can have all the backstory, ticks, quirks etc you can think of, but without internal conflict they will not have depth.

"She felt slow and confused. She had spent her night off in a C-Street tank farm. There, a hundred per cent immersed in the role of housewife in the moderne world of 1956AD, she had mopped a floor; gone for a spin on a fairground ride called the Meteorite; then, in an inexplicable third episode, discovered herself posing in front of a wardrobe mirror dressed only in loose transparent satin briefs. Her breasts were heavy, with big brown aureoles; the rest of her body, by the standards of her own day, soft and running to fat. After a little while, she pushed one hand deftly down the front of the briefs and began to practice saying, 'Oh Robert, it's so nice to have you in there. Are you going to fuck me, Robert? Are you fucking me?" until quite suddenly she came, with a sharp blue line of light cracking across her vision, and felt exhausted. As a night off it was different, but less fun than she expected. It was an 'art' experience. In the end she had preferred the Meteorite, which consisted of a wheel like a huge flat openwork drum, mounted on a bright red steel arm which levered it seventy or eighty degrees from the horizontal. You entered, the Meteorite began to spin, faster and faster. You were pinned against the wall by simple but implacable physical forces."

-- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

"Above it, the Kefahuchi Tract had stretched itself across the yielding black sky like the generative principle of some old cosmology."

--Nova Swing, M. John Harrison

A bolt of light led from gun to sky; the aircraft burst smoke, and veered away on a helix of debris, crashing somewhere down-canyon in a scream that became thunder, echoes rolling back from all over the city.

—Iain M Banks, The Use Of Weapons

Worlds are too big to build, or to know, or even, almost, to live in. A world is going to be compelling at least as much by what it doesn't say as what it does. Nothing is more drably undermining of the awe at hugeness that living in a world should provoke than the dutiful ticking off of features on a map. 'World-Building', at its worst and most compulsive inexorably means the banalising of an imaginary totality. How fucking depressing is that? Surely we want culture shock, which is about not understanding, rather than understanding. And we can get culture shock at home, too. Hence the greatest moment in world-creation ever, that opens M John Harrison's The Pastel City. "Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them". That refusal to speak of them is one of the most awesome and confident moments of scare-quotes world-building scare-quotes ever.

In fact, while we're on a Harrison tip, I think one of the most productive things anyone interested in World-Building can do is to go straight to his now notorious, and magnificent, diss of the whole project, here, and read and reread it and be troubled by it. Not that you have to agree with it, of course. (though you can.) But I think that rather than starting with a kind of chippy denunciation with which that passage was greeted by many when it emerged, it would do us all good - especially those of us fortunate enough to look down and see the targets on our shirts, and look up and see one of the most important, savage and intelligent (anti-)fantasists of recent times aiming down the barrel of his scorn-gun at us - to start from the presumption not that he's wrong, but to try to figure out how and why he might be right. Why does the 'internal consistency' of a world matter to us? What does that even mean? How can we map every corner of a non-existent place? Why do we want to? Why are we so anxious when writers contradict their canon statements? What is going on? What kind of urges are these? Again, none of this presumes that the only honourable path is to throw up the project, necessarily - but it can only be bracing to force us to think about it, whatever our ultimate direction, because it'll make us think about what it is we're doing, or should be doing. Which is fiction, which is, we should probably hope, literature.

--China Mieville
From SF Signal

"A woman comes out of the shop and takes his arm. His wife. She is quite young, despite her pocked skin. She can stroll along the Rue Tournebride as much as she likes, no one will mistake her for a lady; she is betrayed by the cynical sparkle of her eyes, by her sophisticated look. Real ladies do not know the price of things, they like adorable follies; their eyes are like beautiful, hothouse flowers."

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
Trans. Lloyd Alexander