Excellent commentary on reading SF.

[pdurrant]

A simply splendid article by Jo Walton:

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=...=blog&id=58637

Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience. It’s a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.


Because SF can’t take the world for granted, it’s had to develop techniques for doing it. There’s the simple infodump, which Neal Stephenson has raised to an artform in its own right. There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk about worldbuilding as something the writer does, but it’s also something the reader does, building the world from the clues. When you read that the clocks were striking thirteen, you think at first that something is terribly wrong before you work out that this is a world with twenty-four hour time—and something terribly wrong. Orwell economically sends a double signal with that.

[Fledchen]

Thank you for sharing this!

[ac4lt]

That's an interesting read! It rings true for me.

[David Derrico]

That's actually quite a fascinating read -- I got a lot out of it. It explains why some people just "don't get" sci-fi, and even gives me some things to think about as a science fiction author.

[Penforhire]

Good essay! I hate infodumps, whether Stephenson or Crichton. Give me the subtlety of the earlier books in Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" series.