EXTRA!! SENILITY CONFIRMED!!
Memo to self: not everything written by Teresa Nielsen Hayden can be found by typing a few words that appear in the piece and "site:nielsenhayden.com" into the Google search box...
Such a restriction misses, among other things, Subterranean #4: Special SF Cliche Issue Edited by John Scalzi.
Here is what I was looking for:
"In short stories, the cliché is the story itself: Adam
and Eve crash their spaceship on a planet that turns out
to be Earth. A deal with the Devil goes wrong. Humans
use wacky behavior to thwart a hugely powerful alien
invasion. A trinket purchased at an odd little curio shop
has unexpected powers. The ultimate supercomputer
decides it’s God. A guy gets his heart broken when it
turns out that the beautiful vampire/alien/robot/
virtual/clone/elf woman was only pretending to love
him. And so forth and so on: a score of stories that get
retold far oftener than anyone wants to hear them....
"This is not to say that there’s nothing to choose
between a well-made plot and a botch.... Plots are
important... what gives the
reader an incentive to read all of the pages in order. But
while an original plot is a wonderful thing, in a lot of
cases it’s not strictly necessary.
"Storytelling is an assertion of causality: This is how
the world works. You have to strip a narrative down
almost to the bare bones for its greatest pleasure to con-
sist of seeing how the story comes out. That’s the terri-
tory of jokes, fairy tales, and short stories.
"In longer works, the greater pleasure is seeing how
the book makes its way from here to there, from its
interesting beginning to its satisfactory if perhaps unsur-
prising end. You already know the detective is going to
figure out which guest at the cocktail party murdered
Edna Furbelow in the linen closet of her sumptuous Park
Avenue apartment. The bickering couple forced to keep
company with each other while having some mild
adventures will infallibly fall in love no later than the
second-to-last chapter. And the earnest young person
born under mysterious signs and portents will inherit the
Charm Bracelet of Doom, defeat the Dark One, and
bring peace and plenty to The Land—five or six books
from now.
"Clichés are only clichés if they bother us. When
we’re expecting something new and interesting in the
way of a narrative mechanism, but instead get the same
old same old, it feels like a cliché. If a novel employs a
narrative maneuver that’s just as well-used, but we aren’t
expecting novelty—hey looka, it’s yet another Regency
Romance that has a scene set at Almack’s—then it’s
not a problem. A book that starts from a bog-standard
plot but uses it with inventiveness and grace will read
fairly well—which means the bog-standard plot doesn’t
bother us, and therefore isn’t really a cliché.
"What does bother us are worn-out devices for setting
things up or moving the story along. Mark Twain nailed
James Fenimore Cooper for his habitual use of them....
"One twig is a fine device. A twig or two per book is
excusable if there’s enough other stuff happening; even
a battered old prop can look okay if it goes past you fast
enough. Too many twigs become irritating, and are there-
fore a cliché..."
@255: http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2008/04/sharing-knife-passage-by-lois-mcmaster.html
**Help Dealing with Approaching Senility:**
So I was reading Lois McMaster Bujold's account of her struggle trying to write a book that was *both* full fantasy and full romance. She was describing how in her latest supernovel she was attempting to do three things.
(1) To do a "new world" rather than an "old world" fantasy:
>: TSK began as a project to give myself pleasure in writing again at a time when I felt very dry.... I was doing several literary experiments at once.... [First,] playing with landscapes and social-scapes that were distinctly New World, not recycled European medievaloid...
(2) To do an anti-Manichean fantasy:
>[T]o see what would happen if I gave my characters a real grown-up problem to grapple with, one that defied easy, cathartic solutions like cutting off some bad guy’s head or toppling the Dark Tower du Jour...
(3) But most of all to do a fantasy that was also a romance, or perhaps a romance that was also a fantasy:
>But foremost I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel... after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?...
And it did not work:
>[W]ow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought.... The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important.... [I]t has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important†enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres.... [A]ttempts to make the tale about something, anything else – artistic endeavor, for instance – are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.) I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy†is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset)...
And that made me think that I wanted to reread something Teresa Nielsen Hayden had written about the role of cliche in genre fiction--something about how you turn it upside down and all of a sudden you are no longer falling victim to cliche but instead simply punching the time clock, and it's just the semi-obligatory scene set at Almack's that belongs in a regency romance...
But I cannot find this anywhere here, or elsewhere on the internet, no matter how I cast my google net.
Did I imagine this? Did I dream this? Does anybody else remember seeing this?
And after I find this I am going to go reread Hilzoy's famous and unfortunate:
female : romance :: male : *Hustler* centerfold
(If only she'd said "male: Botticelli's 'Nascita di Venere'" instead!...
I went to the dentist last week! And had a small cavity filled this week! And while he was filling the cavity, the dentist described watching a movie of another dentist performing a root canal... on an elephant's tusk.
I presume that's Walter Jon Williams, _Metropolitan_, the first book a series that suffers from the anti-Robert-Jordan problem--WJW's only written two books, and yet a huge amount happens in those two?
Can someone tell me why I thought "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was a duet between Meatloaf and Bonnie Tyler?
There is an interesting party going on in the comments section to Charlie Stross's post, at:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/08/genre_neuroses_101.html
Ah, I see: once again il polipo fascista ha cantato la relativa canzone di cygne...
Teresa--
I don't think David Finkel saw himself as writing a political story with http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648_pf.html. I think he set out to write a story whose subtext is this-is-a-strong-willed-woman-with-issues-who-is-a-few-hoppers-short-of-a-full-carload.
He's done this before, with a short-order cook in Utah as his "subject," last January 31:
>[Utah Town Has Question About President: 'What's Not to Like?'](http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/978549571.html?dids=978549571:978549571&FMT=FT&FMTS=ABS:FT&fmac=&date=Jan+31%2C+2006&author=David+Finkel&desc=Utah+Town+Has+Question+About+President%3A+%27What%27s+Not+to+Like%3F%27): Author: David Finkel Date: Jan 31, 2006 Start Page: A.01:To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt. "Patty melts! No one makes patty melts anymore," she is saying to the counterman, Ryan Louderman, who knew she wasn't local as soon as he heard the sound of a car being locked. "Can I get it without onions?" she says. "And can I get mustard? On the side? Dijon mustard?"...
>"No onions? With mustard?" says Orton, who voted for Bush in 2004 and 2000. "Oh, God, we get some weird ones" -- but she cooks it anyway, as requested, and passes the non-patty melt out to the woman, who takes a bite, declares it "fabulous" and wraps up the rest to go. She's on her way to a ski resort. She is going to be lifted by helicopter to the top of a mountain with untouched snow, and then she is going to ski down....
>"Dijon mustard," Louderman says as the woman drives away. "I don't know what Dijon mustard is. Don't care to find out, either."...
>In Randolph... where Bush received 95.6 percent... the mind-set is even more specific to a place that seems less a part of the modern United States than insulated from it. It isn't just mustard, but everything....
>Terrorist threats? That's anywhere but here. Iraq? That's somewhere over there.... [Orton] turns off the "open" sign and starts adding up the day's receipts. It isn't much. She netted $10,000 last year, if that. She has no savings. She has no retirement plan. She works seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Her last vacation was a quick trip last Thanksgiving to see her in-laws.... Somewhere out there are the sounds of chattering terrorists, and shivering homeless people, and helicopters ferrying soldiers, and a president rehearsing a vitally important speech. Here in 71.5 percent Utah, though, and 95.6 percent Randolph, and 100 percent Gator's, the only sound is of a believer explaining why, come Tuesday night, she doubts she will bother to listen.
>"I don't think there's anything he could say that would make me dislike him," she says.
Finkel, of course, says: "You can't tell anything about what I think from the article. You can't tell anything about me other than that I am male and write for the *Washington Post.*"
68F and sunny in Berkeley, CA...
Kevin Drum (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/007014.php) quotes Danny Franklin on "George Bush's... patronage-minded approach to staffing critical positions:" "The difficulties of coordination seem to indicate we've returned to the bad old days where the FEMA administrator position is given away on the basis of political favor, rather than hard experience. The whole story of FEMA's response to Katrina has yet to be written, but it has always troubled me that Bush has appointed, in succession, his 2000 campaign manager and an Oklahoma lawyer whose only emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA was as an assistant city manager..."
60F by the shores of San Francisco Bay at 11:00 AM--it's surely 5-10F colder at the Golden Gate. High of 81F today with plenty of wine in the Napa Valley...
Re: "Did Piers Anthony write anything after Macroscope and Cthon?"
Given that the character named "Brad" in _Macroscope_ was first turned into a drooling idiot by alien TV programs, then turned into a giant starfish by a failed attempt at medical intervention, and then died horribly, I have never read anything else by Piers Anthony.
Should I have?
Am I perhaps oversensitive?
Do I see a hands-free cordless headset phone in your future?
Now how many times are we supposed to fill out this survey? I mean, I did it once for TalkingPointsMemo already. Do I have to fill it again?
Should I admit this?
I was trying to think of the name of the author of the poem "This Is Just to Say...", and all my brain would return was "Walter Jon Williams". My internal brain pack has only one storage space for the piece of data [author: W[rest of first name] [middle name] Williams]. I needed to consult my external brain pack.
Is this a sign that my 44-year-old brain is dangerously close to full?
>Niw-Eforwice is that city that some here in Montreal think should be called Nouveau Eboraque.
"Nieuw Amsterdam"
or should it be:
"Neu Jorvik"
or:
"Novum Eboracum"
?
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