[LINK] "Science-fictional shibboleths"

[rfmcdonald]

Science fiction writer Charlie Stross wrote about the problems with written science-fiction, particularly the science-related ones.

There is a term of art that developed early on in the field of SF criticism: willing suspension of disbelief. When we read a work of fiction we are taking, as a given, statements that build upon one another to construct a cunningly plausible lie. We suspend our natural disbelief in things we know to be untrue, for dramatic effect cannot withstand the scorn reserved for falsehood. However, there is a limit (different for everyone) to the number of lies we can stack Jenga-style atop one another before our disbelief can no longer be held in abeyance: on reaching this point, the willing suspension of disbelief fails and the tower of implausibility totters and collapses in our minds.

Disbelief can be shattered easily by authorial mistakes—one of the commonest is to have a protagonist positioned as a sympathetic viewpoint character for the reader behave in a manner that is not only unsympathetic but inconsistent with the protagonist's parameters. But there are plenty of other ways to do it.

Certain patterns are guaranteed to make me throw a book at the wall these days (or they would, if I wasn't doing almost all my reading these days on an iPad), or at least stop reading on the spot. One such pattern is sometimes described as "the seven deadly words"; when you can say of a story "I am not interested in these people," the author has failed to hook you on the human content of their drama, and unless they're compellingly brilliant on another, inhuman, level—for example, the works of Olaf Stapledon or (some of) the works of Greg Egan—then that's it, game over. Another pattern is "this is pointless and tedious" (although it's even harder to define than "lack's human engagement"), and a third might be "this makes no sense" (on any level, including deliberate surrealism).

But then we get to more specific matters: specific shibboleths of the science fictional or fantastic literary toolbox that give my book-holding hand that impossible-to-ignore twitch reflex.