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blatherskiteAfter considerably more than a month of 60-hour work weeks, I'm rewarding myself with volume 4 of The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny. I've mentioned these books before, but basically they're an exhaustive collection of everything he wrote as fiction or poetry in short form, minus his collection of letters.
I've read most of these stories before, but there are occasional delightful discoveries of stuff I've missed. Better still, each story is accompanied by brief comments by Zelazny (pulled from his correspondence, previous story collections, and so on), and a list of notes about the details you might have missed. Many of these details are things I now notice (I'm reviewing short fiction semi-professionally these days, as a kind of avocation), but there are always surprises about just how densely allegorical or allusive his stories were. In some cases, the notes are almost as long as the story! It's giving me a much deeper appreciation of just how good a writer he was and many insights into the craft of fiction.
Today's blog entry was inspired by one of the standard rules of fiction writing: "show, don't tell". In defining his characters, Zelazny famously wrote (or at least thought through) far more things about them than he ever actually told us directly in the stories. As a result, we often see the shadow of events in their lives rather than the events themselves. He did this brilliantly for his characters, with the glaring exception of women. Zelazny was a man of his time, and strongly influenced by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, so women don't get nearly the same depth of treatment as his men. They're likeable and treated with the same respect he awards to his male characters, but in a very patriarchical (almost patronizing) way.
Where he followed the rule less effectively was in his technology. (Many people are surprised to learn just how scientifically and technically literate Zelazny was. I'm continuously amazed at his depth of knowledge.) My favorite example is how he wrote about "tapes" as storage devices for computers in most of his fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, tapes were the big thing for mass storage. Sure, there were hard disks, but they were insanely expensive and it wasn't clear they would become the next big thing. Optical storage? Forget about it. So, often, when Zelazny wanted to deal with the consequences of computer technology, he would casually drop in a mention about the tapes as a trope for just how much data would be available. Looking back from the 20-teens, when nobody but computer geeks and system administrators of large corporate systems has even seen a tape, that seems awfully naive, but it's actually a symptom of a common problem for SF writers.
To be realistic (i.e., credible in an unrealistic context), you try to do your homework and thoroughly understand the science or technology base that you'll be using as the starting point for your extrapolations. That's important because you need to come up with logical (or at least defensible) extrapolations and understand both the underpinnings and the consequences of those extrapolations. It's the only way to avoid howling errors of logic and major plot problems of the type that the Star Trek franchise exemplifies. For example, if you can store a human's pattern in a buffer long enough to transmit the person long distances or retrieve the person in a transporter accident (which happen with dismaying frequency), then you have a major consequence that can't be ignored: anyone with a teleporter and access to a large energy supply (e.g., a warp drive's power core) can easily create backups of themselves and use the backups to generate armies of clones. In effect, you have a "fab" (fabricator), something that Charles Stross and others have explored in much more detail and with much better logic than Star Trek.
The problem with doing your homework is that there's an overwhelming temptation to share what you know with your readers. This is probably the explanation for Zelazny's computer tapes. It's clear from his descriptions and plots that he understood computer technology and their consequences for humans very well indeed; in Home is the Hangman and related stories in that series, he predicts the Internet and its large-scale interconnected databases about everyone and everything, and builds upon then-primitive ideas about neural networks and artificial intelligence and telefactors to craft a haunting and powerful retelling of the Frankenstein story. If memory serves, he won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for that tale.
Where he dropped the ball was talking about tapes. This happens when you forget the "show, don't tell" rule out of excitement over what you've learned from your research or out of a desire to convince your most technical readers that you know whereat you speak. From the perspective of writing fiction, the purpose of the tapes and their only important relationship to the story is to convey the notion of huge amounts of data storage. And that's all that needs to be said: refer to massive data banks, and don't bother readers with the technological underpinnings. Those underpinnings have consequences you can't ignore (witness the Star Trek example), but the mechanics of those consequences are best confined to panel discussions about technology at SF conventions or author's notes in an appendix to the story, not your stories.
I've read most of these stories before, but there are occasional delightful discoveries of stuff I've missed. Better still, each story is accompanied by brief comments by Zelazny (pulled from his correspondence, previous story collections, and so on), and a list of notes about the details you might have missed. Many of these details are things I now notice (I'm reviewing short fiction semi-professionally these days, as a kind of avocation), but there are always surprises about just how densely allegorical or allusive his stories were. In some cases, the notes are almost as long as the story! It's giving me a much deeper appreciation of just how good a writer he was and many insights into the craft of fiction.
Today's blog entry was inspired by one of the standard rules of fiction writing: "show, don't tell". In defining his characters, Zelazny famously wrote (or at least thought through) far more things about them than he ever actually told us directly in the stories. As a result, we often see the shadow of events in their lives rather than the events themselves. He did this brilliantly for his characters, with the glaring exception of women. Zelazny was a man of his time, and strongly influenced by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, so women don't get nearly the same depth of treatment as his men. They're likeable and treated with the same respect he awards to his male characters, but in a very patriarchical (almost patronizing) way.
Where he followed the rule less effectively was in his technology. (Many people are surprised to learn just how scientifically and technically literate Zelazny was. I'm continuously amazed at his depth of knowledge.) My favorite example is how he wrote about "tapes" as storage devices for computers in most of his fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, tapes were the big thing for mass storage. Sure, there were hard disks, but they were insanely expensive and it wasn't clear they would become the next big thing. Optical storage? Forget about it. So, often, when Zelazny wanted to deal with the consequences of computer technology, he would casually drop in a mention about the tapes as a trope for just how much data would be available. Looking back from the 20-teens, when nobody but computer geeks and system administrators of large corporate systems has even seen a tape, that seems awfully naive, but it's actually a symptom of a common problem for SF writers.
To be realistic (i.e., credible in an unrealistic context), you try to do your homework and thoroughly understand the science or technology base that you'll be using as the starting point for your extrapolations. That's important because you need to come up with logical (or at least defensible) extrapolations and understand both the underpinnings and the consequences of those extrapolations. It's the only way to avoid howling errors of logic and major plot problems of the type that the Star Trek franchise exemplifies. For example, if you can store a human's pattern in a buffer long enough to transmit the person long distances or retrieve the person in a transporter accident (which happen with dismaying frequency), then you have a major consequence that can't be ignored: anyone with a teleporter and access to a large energy supply (e.g., a warp drive's power core) can easily create backups of themselves and use the backups to generate armies of clones. In effect, you have a "fab" (fabricator), something that Charles Stross and others have explored in much more detail and with much better logic than Star Trek.
The problem with doing your homework is that there's an overwhelming temptation to share what you know with your readers. This is probably the explanation for Zelazny's computer tapes. It's clear from his descriptions and plots that he understood computer technology and their consequences for humans very well indeed; in Home is the Hangman and related stories in that series, he predicts the Internet and its large-scale interconnected databases about everyone and everything, and builds upon then-primitive ideas about neural networks and artificial intelligence and telefactors to craft a haunting and powerful retelling of the Frankenstein story. If memory serves, he won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for that tale.
Where he dropped the ball was talking about tapes. This happens when you forget the "show, don't tell" rule out of excitement over what you've learned from your research or out of a desire to convince your most technical readers that you know whereat you speak. From the perspective of writing fiction, the purpose of the tapes and their only important relationship to the story is to convey the notion of huge amounts of data storage. And that's all that needs to be said: refer to massive data banks, and don't bother readers with the technological underpinnings. Those underpinnings have consequences you can't ignore (witness the Star Trek example), but the mechanics of those consequences are best confined to panel discussions about technology at SF conventions or author's notes in an appendix to the story, not your stories.