Re: Stephenie Mayer -- the next J. K. Rowling

Here, Andrew Wheeler <acwheele@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Peter Knutsen <peter@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
> > Andrew Wheeler wrote:
> > > Peter Knutsen <peter@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > 
> > Actual fantasy is that which requires the reader to utilize the
fantasy
> > genre reading protocl,
> 
> Achtung! Fantasy novel approaching, Fritz! Break out the Fantasy Novel
> Reading Protocol!
> 
> As others have said, here you're just asserting things that no one else
> agrees with.

I agree with him, to a degree, although nobody seems to have picked up
on that part of the thread.

"Protocol" is too rigid a term; I say "conventions", but I believe
there *is* a point beyond which if you don't know the conventions you
can't even make a dent in the book. And a lot of SF published today is
beyond that point.

> (The way one reads a secondary-world fantasy, most urban fantasy,
> alternate history, and most future-set SF is not all that different from
> the way one reads a mystery novel -- keep a close eye out for telling
> details, and try to figure out what those details imply.)

They're analogous skills, yes. But if you're expecting to apply those
skills to the plot, and the author expects you to apply them to the
protagonist's lifestyle and culture, you may be in for a train wreck.

Another element which is subject to strong genre conventions is *how
much* of the book is spent on this or that. SF and fantasy blow a lot
of words on setting, society, laws of physics/magic/psionics/whatever.
When it's done crudely we call it "infodumping" and when it's done
well we call it "inclueing", but that doesn't question the expectation
that the book should *do* that work.

Whereas this "paranormal romance" that a friend lent me a couple of
months ago was set in the near future, but did only a modest amount of
world-building. Enough to hold up the plot elements, but not enough to
make me believe in a working society back there. Instead, it spent a
whole lot of words on how attractive each of the protagonists found
each other. From my point of view, that was hammered in with the
subtlety of a big lead hammer, scene after scene. But what would a fan
of that book have thought of the endless Big Dumb Picaresque scenes in
Iain Banks's _Matter_?

Similarly, the Stephenie Meyer book which survives, zombie-like, in
the subject line of this thread. I haven't read it. I've read a lot of
energetic and entertaining skewering of it (see, e.g.,
<http://the-red-shoes.livejournal.com/tag/twilight_s****k>).
I gather
it spends *lots* of words, I mean buckets, on describing sparkly-
vampire-boy as sparkly, gorgeous, perfect, sparkly, obsessed with Girl
Hero like unto no other human being in history, and continually
(depending on the plot's coinflip) either tearing buildings apart to
save Girl Hero or teetering on the edge of doing something unspeakably
awful to her (but never quite doing it because he would *never*).
And Girl Hero is barely described at all -- just a vague impression of
somebody who never in a million years deserves wonderful-vampire-boy.

In short, I am told, we have a supersaturated solution of Bad Boy
poured into a Petri dish of Mary Sue, all aimed at the teenagers who
hold that as their ideal of romance but don't believe it will ever
happen to *them*.

That's a hook, not a protocol. (Just like the overlooked boy who turns
out to be awesomely powerful and im****tant is the hook of Harry
Potter.) But the book then caters to the hook with a tonal balance of
*all sparkle boy, all the time*; and desiring that or rolling your
eyes at it is something like a reading protocol.

--Z

-- 
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
*
Just because you vote for the Republicans, doesn't mean they let you be
one.