The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

I'm all for talking mystery and related. Ellroy is my favorite author there. I keep meaning to get around to reading Perfidia before This Storm shows up.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 22:02

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 16:24

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

FactsAreUseless posted:

Entertainment isn't a metric of anything. What people find entertaining is shaped by culture and familiarity. It is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable. It is less measurable than anything else you could possibly talk about regarding writing.

Agents and buyers everywhere would disagree, I imagine.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 00:55

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

They are in the business of quantifying and predicting what will be found entertaining, with enough success that it isn't viable to dismiss their methods as pure voodoo. If it is possible to do this for profit motives it is also possible for criticism to be in informed by those methods.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 01:15

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

No it isnt.

You havent clarified why we should accept commercial value informs artistic value

I was responding to a claim that entertainment was unquantifiable.

But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 01:32

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Because commercial success is a representation of the text's success as a product, not as an experience. It is taking art and rendering it Pepsi.

Besides that, even as a product, the measurement is false. The idea that the "appeal" (as ambiguous a measurement as one could ever assume to ask for) can be determined through popular success is the same that suggesting Coke is better than Pepsi on an objective level because it sells more worldwide. And that is something as superficial as a soda flavor. Imagine taking that same broken logic and trying to extrapolate it into art.

Measuring the success of a product only speaks to its qualities as a product. You cannot measure to the artistic merit of something through the lens of product and consumption. The idea that we can is part of the cultural brainwashing of capitalism.

Most art forms originated in popular entertainment, including all or nearly all of the storytelling arts. (The remainder originated as entertainment or status-signaling for cultural elites.) A criticism that lacks any language or interest in discussing what makes such a work succeed as entertainment has lost something fundamental and important, whether out of pure hipsterism or foolish Marxism.

The difference between the popularity of Coke and Pepsi may come down to marketing, but the difference between the popularity of both of those over carrot juice can be attributed to something real about popular taste and the neurochemical effects of caffeine and processed sugars.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 19:13

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Patronage is not the same as commodification

People have been buying books and theater tickets for centuries as well. It almost makes more sense to talk of the art-ification of commodity in the case of the narrative arts rather than the other way 'round.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 23:48

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Ok, let's start with a simple question

Have you read Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?

Just now, so likely not as deep a reading as one might want. But initial impressions: The author seems to be focused tightly on the visual arts, broadly, and far less about the narrative arts, only touching on film versus theater in relation to the differences between photography and presence.

Likely because he wouldn't have a leg to stand on; the idea that only the people who heard the tale straight from Homer's lips had the authentic experience of the epics is facially absurd.

Also, far more talk of auras and authenticity than one would expect from someone operating in a materialist tradition.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 00:38

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I still want to know what this means. How many other people can buy a book before I have to stop saying it's trash? If I love a book that nobody's heard of, do I need to qualify my appreciation of it in some way?

I'm not saying a thing can't both be trash and have popular appeal, just there are components to popular appeal intrinsic to the text (ie not just marketing and luck) that can be understood and studied, retrospectively and, with less certainty, predictively. With enough predictively value that people can successfully make careers of it.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 01:42

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

You literally said that it's "intolerably elitist" to not factor sales figures into an assessment of artistic value.

No, to talk about fiction while not having, while actively abjuring a vocabulary and toolset for discussing entertainment value.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 01:52

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I am not interested in convincing you, I am interested in presenting the historical and rhetorical basis for modern criticism.

Whether you choose to acknowledge it is up to you.

There is no point in convincing you the great thinkers of the last century are right, because they have already been proven right. My goal is to show you what their arguments and perspectives are. You have to walk that path yourself.

I would ask for evidence of their having been proven right, but first I would have to know what the heck 'proven right' even means in this context.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 07:41

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I mean, Thranguy was trying to discount Walter Benjamin on the strength of a wiki summary.

gently caress you, I read the entire essay.

And be assured that my response was almost entirely directed at you rather than Benjamin. When he lists the only methods of reproducing art available to the Greeks and does not include memory and writing, I don't think he's forgotten prose and poetry or is trying to steal bases, I think he isn't talking about those forms at all and you are erring in thinking he can support an argument about them. He is barely interested in the written word at all, apart from a brief aside to mention the democratization of authorship provided by letters to the editor.

An aside: I admit that I was often unable to disentangle Benjamin's opinions on every trend he mentions, that one included. The mixture of progressivism and romanticism makes it difficult to tell if he is disdaining or praising Dadaism by calling it barbaric. But this is no doubt on me, having not enough familiarity with his contemporaries.

Also, the academic tradition is a tree, not a chain.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 15:49

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Hahahahaha How is Death of the Author Not Real Just Read Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote Like Read The Library of Babel

I mean, to this reader the entire point of Pierre Menard is the absurdity of his project, so it probably makes the opposite point. Library is closer, but in a way that depends on the physical reality of the infinite (or at least impossibly large); might as well argue that all texts were present at the creation in the mind of God.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 23:07

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Antivehicular posted:

The absurdity and Quixotic nature of Menard's task is a big part of the point, but I would argue that reading that as "Menard is a fool" is as shallow a reading as "Don Quixote is just a big dumbo." The point of the story is to consider Menard's efforts both as an absurd task and as a legitimate artistic undertaking worth real consideration.

Fair enough, yes, but both of those rest on the impossibility of him doing it. So at most it's arguing that we perhaps should try to kill the author (at least in the specific case of Cervantes), we can never really succeed at it, but that should not stop us.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 23:37

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

More central critical doctrines should be based on puns.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 19:40

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Perhaps I'd be more appreciative of this "toolset" if you gave me examples of its tools and how they can be meaningfully put to use. I can't make head or tail of what you're arguing for here. "Entertainment value" is something that you say is inherent to a work, but as far as you've been discussing it, it seems functionally indistinguishable from commercial performance; assessing it is simply market analysis.

Thought I'd jump back and answer this, thread being slow right now. At the time I was thinking in terms of books on story and technique written by people in the professions I mentioned and by successful (in the popularity sense) writers, things like Syd Field, say.

But this week I've finally gotten around to starting to read Northrop Frye, and am halfway through The Secular Scripture (Thanks, thread, for the impetus to get around to that. I'm finding quite accessable, to reference that question), with the Anatomy queued up behind, and I'm going to say that Frye's approach is the sort of thing I'm talking about. He has better-articulated versions of the points I've been trying to make, like the continuity of the genres with much earlier romances. (His Romance/Realism divide is more fruitful than my Fantastical/not Fantastical one, to be sure.)

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 15:42

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Would it really be different if Rowling wrote, or in the near future decides to write Dumbledore and the Big Gay Adventure?

From a Death of the Author-y perspective we're not obligated to treat sequels differently from fanfic, are we? Talking Falstaff across Shakespeare isn't more legitimate than talking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern between Shakespeare and Stoppard or Yozarian between the younger Heller who wrote Catch-22 and the older Heller who wrote Closing Time...

# ¿ Apr 8, 2019 08:16

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Srice posted:

I was making a joke about the notion that better science = better writing.

Would Moby Dick still have been a great work of Melville had gotten fundamental aspects of the whaling experience dead wrong?

# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 20:19

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

I wasn't aware that abandoning all creativity while supposedly writing about the fantastical counted as a goal.

David Eddings' author bio said that he wrote the Belgariad to 'explore philosophical questions about the genre'. Those questions mostly concerned how much money he could get people to pay him and how little effort he could put into the task.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2019 06:22

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

There is a long tradition in SF/F of the simultaneously oppressed and objectively superior reader identification minority. (Usually an invisible minority, analogized to Jewishness but allowing the member characters to be as white as a reader might want them to be.) In the eighties it was usually telepaths, either with explicit mind control or sufficiently advanced mind reading and blackmail. Kurtz' Dernyi, say, or the Telepaths in Stasheff's Warlock series and prequelae.

Sometimes it even brings the subtext to the text; in Michael P. Kube-MacDowell's Emprise the dystopian world government is bothered to literally launch pogroms against science-fiction readers.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2019 07:00

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Antivehicular posted:

Right, but why does that matter? How does it make the story any different than it'd be if this were all new and fresh, aside from increasing the fatalism and tedium of it all (since we know how this goes and that nothing really changes)? This is cliche, clumsy set dressing that sounds like it doesn't add up to anything.

It's the central cosmology, a sort of funhouse mirror Buddhism in which not-Jesus is obligated to keep the wheel of suffering moving forever and oppose the attempts of not-Satan to break the cycle.

You can say it's dumb cause it is, but it's central to the series' thesis.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 23:54

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Alright. I'll bite. What is the series' thesis?

That oblivion is worse than any possible state of affairs, I mean, I wasn't trying to make it a mystery.

It's underlined by the vision of the future of the not-Fremen, where they are admonished against attempting to keep fighting the slaver not-nazis because they'll eventually lose and opt instead for instant moral compromise and some vague hope of attenuated, assimilated survival.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 00:15

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Lan is Lancelot.

Rand is a harem anime protagonist.

(And while the Guinivere character was his childhood sweetheart, she's not in the harem or really seriously on his mind once the story starts. Which sort of misses the point of him being Arthur...)

Edit: wait, Lan winds up with Nyneave, which is even weirder. It's basically name salad.

Thranguy fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Nov 20, 2019

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 05:25

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

There are opposing trends. For certain levels of popularity and writing speeds the revenue maximizer is episodic serieses of novella-sized installments each part sold at the same price as longer books.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2019 20:31

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 16:24

Thranguy: Apr 21, 2010; Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

anilEhilated posted:

You don't even need look that far. Take Ray Bradbury - I sincerely doubt there's a jot of "science" in his entire body of work. And yet he's considered one of the most influential sci-fi writers.
Genre-wise, alas, it seems that fantasy means "it has wizards", sci-fi "it has spaceships" and horror "it has monsters". Using "speculative fiction" as an umbrella term could help do away with this rather ridiculous categorization.

Basically yes. Along with (sometimes) horror and other adjacent genres like alt history (because splitting that into books where there's a time travel element and where there isn't is silly), all of which were sharing shelf space and awards categories, etc.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2020 03:35

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy