The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by sturgeonslawyer:

Ms Walton: I question very much whether calimac's problems are related to the "tiffany problem." I am aware of the problem (though I'd never heard it called by this elegant name, nor heard this particular example, before), but, yes, there is this tension between real historical accuracy and accuracy to the received version of history. (Quinn Yarbro plays with this very nicely, at times, looking for modern-seeming details of historical venues and featuring them in her St-Germain novels.)

Anyway, there's a fairly good reason to doubt that this is the issue here: Calimac is a historian. A librarian by profession, but he majored in history in college, and still reads copious amounts of history, particularly British and American.

I've known him for ... well, for slightly longer than he's been in fandom. Time measured in decades rather than years. And I've discovered two things about him.

First, when he's convinced of his rightness, he will not back down; he has a kind of recklessness about this that I've never been sure whether it was a failure to perceive that he's costing himself, or simple refusal to count the cost (which is one definition of "courage").

The other is that when he's convinced of his rightness in a matter of facts, he generally is. In multiple decades I can count on one hand the times I've caught him in an error when he's made a flat statement of fact.

I've not read F&N and for all I know it may be a very good book indeed. Nonetheless, I suggest that Calimac's reasons for disliking it so much that he could not even finish reading it are probably factually valid ... whether or not they would be reasons for anyone else is another question, one of taste.

So ... does this discussion of "reader contract" and "reader expectations" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sartorias/34198.html)
have any relevancy to anything anyone is saying here...?

My bad. I read the decision too rapidly, and it wasn't a stay, it was a void.

Which is a damn shame, because there's plenty of precedent for a stay; when various states were moving away from miscegenation laws, exactly analogous situations occurred in several of them, and again and again, the courts in question decided that the local official had no authority but stayed the marriages, rather than voiding them, pending the decision on the issue of racial marriage barriers.

Fooey. Fooey fooey fooey.

Mitch Wagner writes: Calimac, you consistently fall back on the argument that "Freedom & Necessity" is implausible, therefore it's bad. But there is no requirement that works of sf and fantasy be plausible.

Now, not having read F&N I'm arguing general principles here - but - this is nonsense. Any given work of SF or fantasy needs to be plausible in the context of the universe[s]-of-discourse in which the story is set. Otherwise disbelief is not, as I once heard Gardner Dozois put it, suspended, but hanged by the neck until dead.

In the case of a historical fantasy, which I gather F&N is, there are two basic "families" - the "open" historical fantasy, in which the story takes place in a world which is clearly divergent from ours; and the "secret" historical fantasy, in which the fantastic element is part of a "secret history," which, if true, would not change our history books because the historians wouldn't know about it.

Again, not having read F&N I don't know which class it falls into. But if it's the latter, then historical plausibility becomes part of the larger universe-of-discourse plausibility. If it's the former, then it is held to the lower standard of internal plausibility...

Ummm, you guys have missed something kinda important. The marriages have not been "annulled," nor, despite the usual misleading headlines, have they been "voided." Rather, they have been stayed - placed in a kind of judicial limbo until a decision is rendered in a separate case, as to whether the law forbidding them is constitutional.

The decision yesterday was not about the legality of gay marriage, nor about whether forbidding it was a violation of the CA State Constitution; it was on the issue of whether executives of a local jurisdiction have the right to decide that a law is unconstitutional and act on it, absent any stare decis on the subject. Half a second's thought about the checks'n'balances they taught you in Civics class will show that they clearly don't.

The Court gave a better example than the assault-weapons one: there's recent law in CA that grants "domestic partnership" a great deal of parity with marriages. Now, suppose some local official, possibly in a district where "gay rights" were unpopular, decided on his own authority that this was immoral or in violation of the State Constitution, and refused to abide by it...?



(It's anyone's guess what will happen to these marriages if the Court decides that it is unconstitutional. Since they were performed without due authority the Court could decide that they had to be done over; or it could grandfather them; or ... I don't know what ...)

Alex Cohen writes: It's actually a vitally important part of Soldier of the Mist that it was "originally" written in Latin by a native speaker of Latin trying to understand Greek.

Which is true, and my memory flubbed that. But it's also irrelevant to the point; I'm just as happy that it isn't actually written in Latin as I am that it isn't in Koiné.

That it is translated into English is a convention. Wolfe plays with the convention, as he does with so many conventions in his work, but it's still a convention.

Mary Kay -

While I'm not sure that an epistolary historic novel needs to be held to a "higher" standard, it does need to be held to a fairly specific standard - one of style.

For the letters to remain plausible, the thoughts expressed, and the words and styles used to express them, need to be thoughts, words and styles that persons living in the time and place in question might reasonably have had/used. (This is true of dialogue in historic novels anyway; it's jsut that making the novel epistolary makes the whole thing, in a sense, dialogue.)

This doesn't mean that they have to speak in the dialects of their time. I would not be particularly entertained if, say, Wolfe's Soldier in the Mist, which is essentially epistolary, ere written in Koiné Greek. There's a kind of convention that allows us to assume that the work has been "translated" into modern English.

But it does mean that if the thoughts, words, or style become anachronistic in a way that can't be attributed to this sort of "translation," then I find myself snorting, going, "Yeah, right," and making another dent in the far wall of my office with the book's spine. It jolts me out of the fictional dream, snaps my suspenders of disbelief, however you want to metaphorize it.

To take a gross example, in a novel set in the 18th century, the character whose diary the book was started talking a bunch of mid-twentieth-century existentialism about the burden of freedom and so on, and I found myself unable to continue believing in the character, or the story.

I understand that some people may not be bothered by this sort of thing. But then, some people aren't bothered by Piers Anthony's alleged writing style, either.

With all due respect I think that there is a fundamental error in defining genres as if they were nouns; they aren't, they're adjectives. It is incorrect to say a book IS "science fiction" or "fantasy" or "mystery" or "romance." It has characteristics of SF or F or M or R, and the characteristics of many genres can be present in a single book (I remember a novel from the late '70s whose cover described it as a "science fiction western motorcycle grail quest epic," and, by gum, it was).

It also helps to think of genre definitions as fuzzy in the logical sense (and so not so much definitions as descriptions). You can list a bunch of characteristics and say that the more of these characteristics the book has, the more likely it is that a reader will call the book "fantasy" (or SF or R or M or whathaveya), but there is no single characteristic or set of characteristics that are required for to call it "fantasy" (or etc.) I have known people who thought if it didn't have space travel, or didn't take place in the future, it wasn't SF. I know people today who think if it doesn't have magic in it it isn't fantasy. A LOT of people think that if it doesn't have a murder and a detective, it isn't a mystery. Etc. And, of course, all these people are wrong ... except, of course, that they're right, because (the definitions being fuzzy) they mean what each person means when that person uses them.

Cheers.

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