Human Complexity

I've been talking about science for some time now. I'm going to wander off of this into fiction for a bit. Specifically, one constellation of reasons why fiction, specifically genre fiction, often fails.

For my purposes here I'm going to define genre fiction as fiction that takes place within a metaphorical setting that functions in a similar way as a character does. This metaphorical setting can be an SF construct, a fantasy environment, a historical locale or a stylistic conceit. The point is, the characters must interact with the metaphorical setting in a similar way as they would any other character.

The examples of this are fairly obvious. In Lord of the Rings, the fantasy construction of having to achieve a quest affects the world. In World War II/Nazi fiction, the events that are shaped by the character affect the outcome of the war. (Take the recent Captain America, for example. I interpret it as more of a WW II/Nazi film than a superhero film.)

The overhead of a genre story is immense. The author not only has to present all of the complexities of character and plot but has to explain the workings of the world as well. The efficiency that this is done often determines whether or not the story works at all. One of my favorite novels, Blood Sport by Robert F Jones, executes a beautiful judo fiction move in the first line:

The Hassayampa River, a burly stream with its share of trout, rises in northern China, meanders through an Indian reservation in central Wisconsin, and empties finally into Croton Lake not a mile from where I live in southern New York State.

What Jones did was rip the floor of the metaphorical setting out from under you. From then on the book was the equivalent to a zen koan: the purpose of the fiction was to take you where fiction couldn't. Doing it in that first line was brilliant. Of course, it was intended to explain by showing that any explanation was unnecessary. One could say it was cheating.

Some of us take exactly the opposite tack of Jones and make nearly the entire work expository-- Stross' Accelerando and some of Peter Watt's work come to mind. This is not a criticism, mind you. It's the same sort of judo done on the left hand instead of the right. By making most of the work expository it shows that the other components of fiction, character, plot, etc., are either superfluous or a luxury. Both approaches are dependent on the reader understanding enough of the structure to intuit what isn't there.

In between these extremes, the rest of us need explanatory lumps or mouthpiece characters or some other sort of handwaving to get the structure of the world in the mind of the readers. And we have to do it without shorting character or plot or anything else.

So we short complexity.