egypturnash: (Default)
[personal profile] egypturnash
[The editor of Atlantic Monthly in the late 1800s] claimed that authors had gone astray by being imitators of one another rather than of nature. He proscribed writing about "interesting" characters--such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings—places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where "nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story." He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the "common man," just living an ordinary existence. Because Howells was the editor of the largest and most powerful magazine of the time (and because of its fabulous payment rates, a short story sale to that magazine could support a writer for a year or two), his views had a tremendous influence on American writers.


Well. Now I know why 'mainstream' fiction is so hostile to the fantastic.

Date: 2007-09-18 10:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coyoteseven.livejournal.com
How amazing. It looks like in the 100+ years since that guy bitched about fantasy writings being nothing but formula and having nothing to do with the real world, he spawned a dogmatic way of writing that, in time, itself became a formula without any bearing on reality.

I think if I'd stayed in college, I would have continued with a goal towards an engineering degree. 'Cause it certainly sounds like taking literature or writing as your main is a waste of time.

Date: 2007-09-18 11:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] paka.livejournal.com
I'm trying to remember what it was called - there was this official manifesto thing from some science fiction authors about how they were going to avoid cliches, like aliens or FTL drives or robots or whatever. It sounded a lot like the Howell thing.

Date: 2007-09-18 11:51 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
'Mundane' science fiction, I think?

Date: 2007-09-18 11:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
Basically, it sounds like anyone seeking to limit the range of writing is committing a number of errors, from pop-psyching the reasons for the popularity of those things to bitching about the popularity of things they don't like.

Anyhow, what're you left with when you excise aliens and FTL drives and robots from sci-fi? Well, cyberpunk, I suppose, and if that hasn't become a gloriously tangled mess of clichés then I don't know what has. Somehow, people keep coming up with new ideas within all of these....

Date: 2007-09-18 11:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coyoteseven.livejournal.com
Uh-oh. If everything that humans create eventually becomes tired and cliche, so that we turn around and embrace something "new" only for it too to become tired and cliche, does that mean that we as a race, a species, are really just tired of ourselves?

Date: 2007-09-18 11:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
Yes, but that's all right, because we contain within ourselves the potential to become more than we are now and expend our gamut, and thus give ourselves more room to create stuff that we're not tired of yet. We're not done with this existence, not by a long-shot. *grin*

Date: 2007-09-19 03:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bikerwalla.livejournal.com
We take pieces of everyone else's discarded thoughts and combine them into new ones. Other people complain when the pieces are large enough to be recognizable.

Date: 2007-09-19 01:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] eggshellhammer.livejournal.com
Ideally, you find new cliches. That's the whole goal of the exercise of avoiding cliche, ideally, that being to find new cliches to play with.

Date: 2007-09-19 06:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] paka.livejournal.com
Yeah, it seemed lame.

First off, because both Howell and the Mundane Science Fiction thing sound too much like people just slamming shit because it makes them feel big. You know the sort of person - oooh, the perfect way to prove they're all cool and rational and intellectual is to slam furries, or otherkin, or religious types, or childish wish-fulfillment in science fiction, or whatever.

Also, I'm pretty interested in social science fiction. I'm interested in how people work, and how people react to each other. So having FTL drives or aliens or whatever poses a what if question; what are people like, when their lives include all this stuff? Going the opposite direction, with fantasy, what are the people like when their lives are influenced by having dragons, magic, or soul-corrupting rings of power around? And you have these neat fantastic elements which are pretty cool in themselves and add to the story.

You get rid of all that stuff, and you've got the question of "what are people like if their lives include all the stuff you've got right here, right now?" Uh... I already get to observe that 24/7, what's the draw in reading fiction about that? At that rate I may as well read an actual psychology book and learn something.

Date: 2007-09-19 06:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kinkyturtle.livejournal.com
I agree with this comment.

And y'know, looking at it like that, an insistence on only writing stories about the common man set in the here and now could be thought of as a form of laziness. Don't like far-future settings or fantasy settings because the dialog and props come off as cheesy? Simple, just get rid of them! Don't bother trying to figure out how to write good uncheesy far-future or fantasy settings; just proclaim them worthless as literary territory!

Date: 2007-09-19 07:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
Precisely my point, especially about the social science fiction. Hell, look at where I spend my time. In City of Heroes, I'm not just running around beating the shit out of things and then posing with other hero types in some sort of testosterone-soaked polygonal orgy-of-ego. In a setting that has such powerful individuals, the questions of power and rights and authority are a constant presence, and I play with those all over the place. Anybody who writes it off as adolescent four-colour wankery, I explain it to once. If they keep brushing it off, then they become a future wall statistic for when the revolution comes. Writing about the future is how we prepare for it.

Date: 2007-09-19 01:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xinjinmeng.livejournal.com
Time Magazine has both Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia on its "100 Greatest Novels of All Time" list.

In 2002, a Dragonlance novel debuted on both the top ten of the Publisher's Weekly and the New York Times' best-seller lists.

Harry Potter is a world-wide phenomenon.

I simply can't agree that mainstream fiction is hostile to fantasy.

Date: 2007-09-19 03:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chipotle.livejournal.com
Mainstream audiences aren't particularly hostile to fantasy, but mainstream fiction -- by which I'm assuming Shatterstripes means the (non-fantasy) literary community, particularly editors -- has had a long-standing hostility toward non-mimetic work. There are signs this is thawing, and there have always been limited exceptions out there, like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Borges, but it's not mere happenstance that works by the fantastists who've snuck into the canon, or even just close enough to look over the wall, aren't generally considered sf/fantasy authors and certainly don't get shelved in the F/SF section of your local Borders. The presumption, usually (but not always) unspoken, is that work that's good enough to be "literature" is somehow no longer fantasy or sci-fi: it's transcended the genre's limitations, borrowed its tropes to tell a real story, or what have you. It's a particularly frustrating mindset because it's essentially self-sealing: you can't use the best of what the genre has to offer as proof that the best of it really is equal to the best of anything else, because if it really is that good, then presto! it's not really in the genre at all.

Having said, that though, it seems to me that Dave Wolverton, author of the linked article, is trying to place an awful lot of baggage at the estimable Mr. Howells' doorstep. Science fiction was barely even a proto-genre when the man was at the Atlantic (1866-1876); Jules Verne's most popular books were being published during that very period -- but not translated into English yet -- and H.G. Wells wouldn't start publishing until 1900. Wolverton glosses over a lot of change in the mainstream literary world in what's considered "acceptable," and ignores entirely the question of how much of the ghettoization of F/SF may just be its own damn fault. An honest analysis of how this came to pass would focus a little less on William Howells and a little more on Hugo Gernsback.

Date: 2007-09-19 08:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prickvixen.livejournal.com
A lot of the stuff I recognize him referencing is kind of crappy, but I think he's going too far in his exclusivity.

Date: 2007-09-19 03:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dustmeat.livejournal.com
Howells, what a guy! So much fun at parties, from the sound of it. I'd wager that the stories he liked were about bank executives...but no famous ones, by gum. Keep stories dull, that'll sell magazines!

Date: 2007-09-19 06:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coyoteseven.livejournal.com
Dude, in 1866? I guess there wasn't much for him to do back then.

If he was pining for a "real life", maybe he should have moved out west. Yeah, that was the thing to do back then, wasn't it? That's all they had, horses and guns and cows. Going to the moon? That'll never happen!

Profile

egypturnash: (Default)
Margaret Trauth

October 2020

S M T W T F S
    123
45678 910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 3rd, 2025 08:01 am