regarding genre, Pattern Recognition

what's that John Updike story? you know, the one with the middle aged guy, who has an affair?

Sometimes, I just wish that the dragon flying the spaceship would crash through the roof: it might be tacky, but it'd liven things up a bit.

That bit above is from one of my lab mates, and came from a discussion I had with him. The other day redredshoes pointed me to a rant about genre that (despite its raging misogyny) provoked some interesting questions about whether "science fiction" should be even trying to maintain itself as a separate genre. One of the main points (I can't summarize them all) is that there's plenty of good material that calls itself SF, and plenty of bad material that calls itself SF, and that the criteria for distinguishing them aren't so different from the criteria we might use to determine good vs. bad mainstream ("realist"?) fiction.

William Blake is plenty fantastical, but considered mainstream, Catch-22 doesn't get shelved with war fiction. That's because it's not "war fiction", goes the core of the argument. The really good stuff transcends the genre, and genre fans shouldn't be even trying to defend the genre. Recognize that good writing -- good art crosses boundaries anyway, and circling the wagons to pretend that Death of Superman is somehow worthy of the praise that Love and Rockets garners, because they're both comics, for goodness' sake drags L&R down into the muck with underpants on the outside. Never mind that L&R uses superheroes, robots and rocketships occasionally, or fantasy, crime, sex and violence occasionally -- it's still not the same as cheapshot crime fiction, factory-grade pornography, or "I could never marry someone so stupid".

One example of good, genre-crossing fiction I came across recently might be "Spacetime for Springers" which seems to me to be fundamentally a short story by any measure, and essentially free from genre, despite being written by Fritz Leiber.

I've started reading Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, which is set in the present (roughly) in a similar genre-ignoring way, and avoids the pitfalls and traps of trying to predict the future, which (as above labmate above commented) always seems to turn out as a period piece of the time of writing.

My favorite example of this is actually from Gibson's classic, Neuromancer, when I read it back in the 80s, where Case escapes black ice hack-protection software by hitting the Escape key.

Oh, it can't be an accident that the main character of Pattern is named "Cayce"; Gibson even goes out of his way to have her explain to an obsolete-hardware otaku that it would ordinarily be pronounced "kay see" but here it's definitely "case". Hm.

tools to provoke apophenia and other creative techniques

In a conversation that included chr0me_kitten earlier today, she brought up apophenia*. [Edit: Also, earlier this week, imtboo and blackwingedboy have both been talking about Mercury in retrograde, which, initially, frustrated the heck out of me. But imtboo and I talked about it. Now bear with me, here, 'cause I'm coming back to that thought.]

An old professor of mine [at least, I think it was him! it was about the same time I was reading Daniel Dennett for the first time, and it mighta been him] used to rant about how the apparent inner voice of consciousness, and indeed the useful mental processing that goes on as a cognitive tool, is "merely" a short-circuit to the mouth-ear loop. He didn't go into much detail, but I've adopted the idea fairly firmly as I continue to study language, computation and communication.
( self-speech as a pack/unpack approximator... )

My point, if it wasn't already clear [i'm getting to it, I promise!]

analysis of the world into any arbitrary system is itself a creative act. Sometimes, the truth is in the data, and sometimes the truth is in the learner. When we have mental "ruts", we often need to reorganize what we already know and look at it all from a new perspective. Have you ever packed a suitcase only to find that not everything fit, and then found that if you unpack it all and start over, it all fits without trouble? That sort of "serialize, then restore" seems to be useful.

( other discussion )

( notes along the way )