|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Language and Vocabulary in Science Fiction
| Article
# : |
13306 |
|
|
Section : |
Modern Thought
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
6,358 Words |
| Author
: |
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones's novel Escape Plan was a runner-up for this
year's Arthur C. Clarke Best British Science Fiction Novel of
the Year award, and she is widely regarded as one of Britain's
most promising writers in this field. |
Imagine opening a volume with a plain cover so that the normal marketing signals of its genre offer no hints. If the first sentence is simply unintelligible, although it contains nothing but perfectly recognizable words in your mother tongue, there may be two possibilities: either your book was changed from the science fiction shelf or you have accidentally picked up a book of academic literary criticism.
If the first sentence reads, "The cat sat on the mat," read on and beware. You may have entered that copyeditor's nightmare, the rigorously imagined world. You think you know what a "cat" is, but you don't. It could be a foodstuff or the term for a particular esoteric degree of kinship in an imagined social structure. It could even be a typographical error, and it may actually have been a czryt that was sitting on the mat! We are now introduced to the problem of communication in science fiction and the challenge of writing in accord with Delany's Dictum.
Delany's Dictum states that the first sentence of any science fiction novel should instantly invoke the world of the narrative. This may sound like a simple truism that is exhibited in any kind of fiction. For example, the essence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is encased in the first sentence: "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion." We can assume that as long as Tolstoy is not cheating, his novel is going to be about broken homes. But in the case of SF, the task of invoking the world of the narrative is much more intense and obsessive. If the book is to be "about" a world in which schizophrenia is normal, or war is unknown, or everybody is immortal, it is a great challenge to write every sentence and construct every scrap of dialogue without going out of the bounds of the fictional world. Never by so much as an adjective can the writer comment on a "meta" level about the rules of the world he has created. This is SF "realism," and one of its particular charms of aficionados of the genre. But this task is not easy for either the writer or the reader.
"Never complain, never explain." This was Benjamin Disraeli's advice for anyone placed as he was, a Jewish social climber in the impenetrable jungle of England's political upper classes. But exactly the reverse applies to survival in the alien worlds of fiction in which the author strives, through his narrative, to demand social change. There is a mistaken impression that lingers on in some quarters that "once, long ago" science fiction did not trouble itself with social changes, and that at one time its subject matter was limited exclusively to rockets and stars, and boys' own
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
