Comments on: Shades of preference in storytelling

By: ackbark

ackbark — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:10:07 +0000

It’s not wish fulfillment, it’s rehearsal.

Reading fiction, like other art experience, is a rehearsal of your interest and motivations, but a rehearsal will only get you so far.

And as you get older you need less of it and you need more in the way of material fact as you come to have something to do with it.

By: juan

juan — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:13:45 +0000

I think scifi as a genre is largely wish fulfillment for smart young boys.

We like reading about the govt assembling the team of experts to unlock the secrets of the alien artifact because we imagine having that high-status world’s leading expert on X position when we grow up.

As adults we lose interest in scifi because
a) we realize most of scifi is only slightly more plausible than a world with dragons and wizards – and
b) we realize that even if the govt assembles that team of experts — they won’t be calling us.

So a young boy reading about super-genius heroes saving the world from aliens and killer robots is pretty much the same thing as a young girl reading stories about the prettiest girl in the land becoming a princess.

It’s fun, as a child, to imagine growing up to be extremely high status.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:16:54 +0000

Like Esposito, I also found myself reading less fiction. I used to have a bunch of abandonware games on my computer but then came to see completing them as a chore and gave up. When I was very young I looked down on non-fiction as boring, and now it’s all I read. Since I’m still in my early twenties I don’t know how much more growing up there is to do in this area.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:24:10 +0000

#2, if your measure of science fiction is ‘hard science fiction’ then they are barely science fiction. the issue is that the science fiction authors which the mainstream extols as literary virtuosos are non-representative authors in terms of their preferences, concerns, and narratives. it’s probably true that these authors create more three dimensional characters, but it’s also true that there’s little working out of a scientific superstructure in these works. the latter doesn’t count against them. why? well, because people are bored by “technical specs.”

By: Polynices

Polynices — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:51:24 +0000

I have to link http://xkcd.com/904/ for anyone who doesn’t read xkcd. Very relevant to your sports comments.

I want to make a comment about Atwood and Le Guin barely being science fiction at all, but that would probably just mark me as an SF snob without really contributing anything. Even Stephenson, though a wonderful writer, doesn’t fit very comfortably into “science fiction”.

By: S.J. Esposito

S.J. Esposito — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:21:46 +0000

I think you hit the nail on the head. I know that for me, personally, this has been an issue with which I’ve had to grapple with. I always loved things like video games, science fiction and, most of all, comic books; however, now, I can’t enjoy sitting down and playing a video game for more than 10 minutes and when I have the time to read fiction — which is not all that much — I tend to read much darker and more cerebral types of stories. Over the past year or so, I’ve had to deal with this as I felt melancholy about what I thought was me losing interest in a lot of things that I once loved to do, but I came to the realization that it was simply a maturation of my preferences and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I realized that as my interest in fiction went down — in terms of the number of books or graphic novels I was reading per month — my interest in non-fiction was rising exponentially. So, I guess there’s got to be some sort of balance, and in the end, it’s all relative and very personal.

It’s funny that you mentioned sports news. I can’t speak for the sports pages, because I don’t care for any sports, but I am growing increasingly tired of getting a “story” when I read the news. Most of the time I want a quick, pithy update about what’s going on in the world, and to that end, I’m becoming a little disenchanted by trudging through long stories that don’t seem to really “grab” me. It could be that I find it extremely difficult to find a general news website that I like, or it could be me being curmudgeonly; even more likely is that it has a lot to do with the fast-paced time we are all living in and my acclimation to it. Everything today is done with a text or a tweet, and I think I’m starting to crave that shortness psychological for things that I don’t view as totally important. So, aside from it all being very personal, there’s an obvious generational divide and I can’t help but feel — nay, I know — that the “social media” driven world we’re living in now is driving us toward a swifter and more informal tomorrow.