How Good Fiction is Truer than Non-Fiction · 10:00pm May 25th
Drunkposting courtesy of Evan Williams' Honey Kentucky Bourbon.
The vastness of the subject could only be compressed into a lie.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
That line haunts me. It's how I feel about everything I write, fiction or non-fiction. No matter how long I ramble on–like the infamous 20-page afterword to "Alicorn Cider" in Worst of Bad Horse–I never can reach my arms all the way around a subject. It's like when you're re-painting a small spot, and the border between your repainting and the original paint is obvious, so you repaint the border, which creates a new border farther out... Everything I draw into my circle to explain and justify the other things already in that circle, need explanation and justification itself. Everything I write, taken by itself, is a lie.
This is what led post-modernists to claim that texts can never be about anything. I don't believe that. But the big things worth writing about are so interwoven with so many other things that I'd have to write something like Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences before I could explain why I don't like The Lord of the Rings.
This is an almost insoluble problem with non-fiction. Consider any Malcom Gladwell book, like Blink or Outliers. Each of his books has just one simple point to make, like "the average of the opinions of many people is more-reliable than the opinion of any one person"; and it takes an entire book to make it. Even then, it's still a lie. Anybody who reads a Malcolm Gladwell book immediately starts over-applying its One Thing in real life until they eventually realize that it isn't that simple. And to make an important claim about life on the object level, like (my current project) saying "this kind of art theory is bad because it reliably encourages dehumanization and mass-murder", I'd need to invoke dozens of Malcolm Gladwell books just to construct my argument.
A non-fiction book usually makes an argument: "Europe and Asia rather than Africa or the Americas came to dominate the world because Eurasia stretches east-west while the Americas and Africa stretch north-south (Guns, Germs, and Steel); or, "Emotions help intelligent abstract thought more than they hinder it" (Descartes' Error). This kind of thesis has something like a universal quantifier in it somewhere: Europe was destined to develop rapidly because of the many advantages of having a wide range of cultures all sharing the same latitude (in every possible history, Eurasia outstrips the Americas technologically). Emotion is quantitatively more beneficial than harmful to every person's reasoning.
In fiction, you don't have to make universal claims. A story says, "This thing might happen." That's important when it disproves a universal claim. For example, Sophocles' Antigone, which takes up the hypothesis "You must obey your state's leader, and you must honor and do good by your family", and shows by existence proof that this hypothesis can't always be true. Fiction can prove only the negation of a universal. Fiction, at least the kind I like best, just claims a particular thing could happen. And this is why fiction is inherently more-truthful than non-fiction.
Showing that a thing could happen can still be powerful! From the cautionary (it could happen here!), to the progressive (gays can be nice people and good neighbors, a thing not widely known before 1990), to the inspirational (dreams can come true).
But when the thing happens so regularly that it becomes inevitable, when "dragons can be slain" and "good people can find love" becomes "dragons are always slain" and "good people always find love", you have universals again, and get genre schlock, which I believe wrecks lives.
When fiction tries to prove a universal, it becomes propaganda, and all the strengths of fiction which are so beneficial in convincing people that a thing might happen, are abused to convince them that it must. Plato wrote that fiction is inherently harmful because he didn't even consider the possibility that fiction would be interpreted as saying a thing might be so. To him, only universal statements were worth contemplating. Saying a thing might happen was useless; the only things worth pondering were the necessary. Sartre depicted the nihilistic endpoint this thinking took 2300 years to arrive at in his novel Nausea, whose narrator is nauseated by life itself for being unnecessary.
Take Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which tries to convince you of the universal claim that the free market is superior to socialism. I'm sympathetic to this claim, yet Atlas Shrugged still makes me feel dirty. It only shows a dystopia that could happen. It bridges the gap between "could" and "must" by cheating, playing on our emotions, making the people on one side heroic, and the people on the other side petty and nasty. When someone who isn't already sympathetic to Rand's viewpoint reads this novel, they'll see through this, and it will only convince them further that the free market is a cheat and a scam. I suspect this kind of literature doesn't persuade as much as it polarizes. It is the kind of fiction which causes civil wars.
Don't give me stories about what must be or should be. Give me stories about what could be.
Anybody who reads a Malcolm Gladwell book immediately starts over-applying its One Thing in real life until they eventually realize that it isn't that simple.
I eventually realized what bugged me about Gladwell - he's a fox that writes hedgehog-books, and that is in its conception insincere. It's a carny act.
And I suspect that your point holds up better if you restrict it to 'negative truths in prose are an easier and more consistent sell than positive truths.' A positive truth is a proof, not a principle.
Also, flavored bourbons are an abomination unto Nuggan. Try Rittenhouse rye, it doesn't need flavoring.
5782901
What I'm trying to say is, negative truths are often true, while positive truths, or proofs, seldom are; and negative truths are more-acceptable in fiction than in non-fiction. No one is going to buy your book arguing that the Roman Empire didn't fall to the barbarians unless you defend some other claim about how it fell.
I don't think negative truths sell better in either non-fiction or fiction. People want positive truths. But they make bad fiction, IMHO.
Rittenhouse rye costs twice as much. You should try some of this chocolate garlic flavored bourbon!
5782921
No one is going to buy your book arguing that the Roman Empire didn't fall to the barbarians unless you defend some other claim about how it fell.
Rittenhouse rye costs twice as much. You should try some of this chocolate garlic flavored bourbon!
I'm pretty sure this site has enough shipfics to prove by exhaustion that all ponies find love.
This is very clever and very insightful. I would have never thought to use quantifiers to walk into common difference between fiction and nonfiction/propaganda. It's not a perfect fit, but I suspect that's only because of a limitation of words. Fictions transparently are constructed stories, and both nonfiction & propaganda try to give at least the impression of being derived. It's very difficult to convey the full context necessary to understand the limits of a derivation, so it's easy to misapply them.
If you ever want to have more fun with it:
I also don't agree with this sentiment. Though I'm not sure if it's for the same reasons.
But wrap your mind around this one:
Reading books is just staring at the tattoos of dead trees and having specific hallucinations designed by the book's creator to transfer their thoughts into your brain. And I'll be damned if that isn't goddamn magical.
Just as we can only see what is in front of us, and smell and hear what is near us, taste and touch only what we can reach, our perception of reality is so limited compared to the grand scale of it all. Like looking through a pinhole. And reading a book is like seeing a world though a pinhole within that one. But having a little, portable snapshot of an entire universe is still valuable unto itself, limited as it is. The world as the author saw it, imagined it, captured in that moment in history, colored by their culture and experience. That is equally magical.
When you're patching paint that way, there inevitably comes a point where you say "fuck it", and hit the surface with some sandpaper or a blending stick, to merge it with the surrounding coat.
I'm not sure for what this may be a metaphor, but I'm pretty certain we writers have to fudge the boundary at some point too, lest we try to incorporate the entire world into our stories about silly little ponies.
It's funny that you use Atlas Shrugged as an example, because it's so long and one note, but Fountainhead more so shows different rules and their exceptions. It's only in Shrugged that I realized "oh, Rand thinks this philosophy is not only good but without error and the only salvation of society".
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Proofs—deductive logic in general—are best used to beguile the diligent, to trick the straight-A students incapable of original thought. Reality is under no obligation to conform to words and their definitions. The “correct” response to someone who proved your conclusion incorrect with a deductive argument is to first check the argument for logical fallacies or other rhetorical malfeasance. Finding none, the conclusion is more likely to be that you, in fact, disagree with some premise (likely unspoken or too obvious to mention) of the argument than their conclusion is correct (your original conclusion may well have been proven wrong in the process, but that doesn’t mean the other conclusion is any better).
Any sufficiently trained monkey can carefully work through a problem of deductive reasoning. It takes the spark of human intuition (or a very lucky seed in the LLM) to perform the inductive reasoning necessary to define categories in the first place.
After we meat-eater apes murdered all the easy Pleistocene megafauna, we had to turn to agriculture to survive. This bound the surviving farmers to the plant hardiness zones favored by the grains and whatnot they were culturing. These zones are east-west, and crop plants do not do well if you try to plant them into different zones to the south or north. You get wheat in Iran, great! You can plant that all across the northern hemisphere. You get plantain bananas in Hondouras, well, tough luck growing that in Canada. So, populations with enough leisure time to build societies are going to happen where the food is, and that's going to be hardiness zones extensive enough to develop many crops. Those populations are going to share ideas and diversify.
As for fiction vs facts, fictions are distillations of simplified facts and fantasy. They are shorthand tools for making fast decisions. I suspect all animals create fictions, albeit not in the storytelling way we do it. 'Search image' hunting is one such fiction that both helps and hinders a predator. California kingsnakes come in a variety of patterns and this is to fool predators. A predator kills and eats one Cal king, remembers the pattern, and looks for snakes with that pattern while ignoring Cal king snakes with a different pattern. The search image simplifies finding food, but it is a fiction, not the whole truth. As long as the hunting is good, the fiction is truer than the non-fiction reality that there are perfectly edible Cal kings that are hiding in plain sight.
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Yes, I read the book. I think it's a good argument. I didn't meant to say it's a "lie". But it's not a proof, either. In historical times, plants and animals only travelled along this large east-west extent when there happened to be immense empires which made long-distance travel safe; so I could argue that the history of empire is more important. Also, we have many examples of plants and animals being moved to different latitudes, and also of empires which had transportation networks so that people didn't have to grow the plants locally. I could argue that north-south extent is more advantageous, since it provides a wider variety of environments, hence a wider variety of resources, which can be harvested and transported anywhere. There are too many competing hypotheses to say definitively that Diamond's hypothesis is "the" correct one, and made Eurasian dominance inevitable.
You're using a conception of fiction that is too abstract for my purpose, which is to write good stories people like that do more good than harm. I don't think of stories as heuristics, but I might think of them as case studies for case-based reasoning.
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I agree with much of that, but I will defend proofs. In the first place, proofs are useful in the standard way, which is to derive results within formal systems. The problem is that hardly anybody understands the distinction between reality and formal systems--even Newton didn't, and I have no evidence that Einsten did (tho those are unfair examples because physics research is similar to work with formal systems)--and most of those who do understand the difference, don't agree it's important, because they have some subconscious Platonist metaphysics telling them that the physical world really is a formal system. So they're careless about the mapping between reality and their formal system, which is where the problems with language that you mentioned creep in.
But also, being able to understand a geometric proof is the first step towards being able to understand a statistical proof, which is very useful in the real world. To a first approximation, statistical proofs at the 5% confidence level work maybe 60-70% of the time (IMHO), while dialectic leads to wrong conclusions almost all of the time.
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I remember a scene from a book about an early missionary to the natives in, I think, Michigan, in which a Native American refused to believe that words could be written down, and a missionary proved to him that they could by asking him to say something, then writing it on a leaf, and telling him to go give that leaf to someone else who could read, and ask him what it said. When this worked, the doubter said that wasn't fair, because the missionary was obviously a magician. Or something like that. I think it was a biography, but it may have been fiction.
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Writing really is an astonishing development, when you think about it. It's been called the original technological singularity, changing from a world where all communication is between people in the same place at the same time, to one where the speaker and the listener can be thousands of miles and generations apart.
Not to mention how it meant that all knowledge no longer resided inside human heads and had to be deliberately passed on. With written words, you could build up and store more knowledge than any single person could handle, and it could be (in theory if not in practice) available to anyone who could read.
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Your strength is a literary one, I am versed in ecology and biology. Hence our approach to fiction is different. I agree with the diversity in products that can be obtained via north/south trade, it's agronomic technology exchange that would be more constrained. Also, I think conquest is also a means by which ideas and technology spreads. My point was that the spread of numerous, diverse and compatible domesticated species within a large but narrow hardiness zone built up human populations after the eradication of the Pleistocene megafauna and thus the rise of empires. Also, despite trade (like the Silk Road), I think Empires tend to be insular and cling to their native fictions until forced to mix with people with a different world view, especially via conquest. Might makes right (fight, fight, fight!).
That said, the Americas and the African continent built up some pretty high density populations, stuff I rarely hear anything about. It's all Greek this, Roman that and oh yeah, there were Egyptians too. Like, nothing else happened anywhere else, ever. You know, more fiction, simplifying reality, just a means to an end.
5782922 Darnit, people. Will you stop writing deep and thoughtful stuff while I'm still struggling with finger painting on these cardboard cutouts! Sigh.
'Shrugged' has always seemed to me as a two-edged blade, a pair of 'What If' concepts stuffed into one story with certain difficult bits handwaved because of course we *don't* live in a world where this is happening. Thankfully. (and that's about as deep as I get. I'm a literary snorkeler)
The key to good fiction that sweeps you up and carries you into another world is *not* necessarily the precision of the word crafting, but the concept behind it that allows the reader to apply mental spackle and grout to the lumpy text until they have a beautiful 'thing' crafted in their mind. Admittedly, the poorer the wordcraft, the more mental plastering over of holes until it can interfere with the end result, as several stories I've read (and unfortunately written) can prove. But the flipside of that is no matter how fine the words are written, without appropriate concepts and emotions in the reader it is going to fall flat. Example: Trying to get a young kid to read Ulysses. Or me. Contrast that with the Harry Potter series which is clumsy at times, textually contradictive in places, has large plot holes that are liberally plastered over with convenient magic, but has proven so wildly popular that it bought the writer a castle.
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Steven Hawking via Pink Floyd.
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It’s all selection bias (Africa & the Americas) or it’s “they have their own deep histories, but we don’t have time to teach that” (China, Japan, & India).
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Exactly. Show me the numbers and I’ll easily change my mind. If we’re playing games of rhetoric, I’ll soon get bored and start trolling.
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Fun fact: The world's oldest structure is a burial mound on the grounds of Louisiana State U, dated (pretty narrowly, within 50 years IIRC) to about 9270 BC. Ref: BB Ellwood et al. 2022. The LSU campus mounds, with construction beginning at ∼11,000 BP, are the oldest known extant man-made structures in the Americas. American Journal of Science 322(6): 795-827. 9270 BC narrowly edges out the earliest structures in Asia Minor.
The Americas, and especially North America, had much larger cities before European contact than most people realize, because they were gone long before any Europeans saw them. Still, they seem to have been consistently "behind" the Old World in any demographic or technological pissing contest. They had some very bad dice rolls, but so did the Old World. But this could all be due to late colonization by humans. There definitely were humans in the Americas before the Clovis culture, but very few; and I think none before 20K BP.
I can grok Western history books not talking about Asia, but if I were looking for what put the West ahead in this pissing contest, I'd look to the neolithic in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe. There's a lot of dramatic archaeology there that should be better known. Maybe it's just too new. But it shows that other peoples weren't ignored just because of racism. The Vinca and the Cucuteni–Trypillia were European, but they don't show up in our histories.
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I agree that the Clovis Point cutoff date for humans in North America is definitely wrong. I think those lake bed footprints found recently in North America were from something like 20,000 years ago. Especially since humans were already arriving in Australia by boat like, 50,000 years ago? What I'd like to see more proof of is that of First Nation's horses that predate colonization.
What I've heard is that Europe was a sociological and economic backwater until a combination of slavery (working people to death, it ain't pretty), sugar cane plantations, the cotton gin and mechanized textile production made Europe great. Great, as in "scum also rises" great. Flush with cash and self importance.
Cory Doctorow was talking about the nature of fiction ("writing is lying") yesterday as a segue to a review of Mad Max: Furiosa. In short, fictions that don't reveal all the details encourage the reader to fill in lore as they imagine it must be. In other words, don't wrap your arms around the entire subject because, every time you get something wrong, you will have readers picking the nits and losing their suspension of disbelief. This is why I dropped Life of Pi like a hot rock after the first chapter or so. I was not going to read lies about shaping animal behaviour because I really don't want such a fiction poisoning my tool kit in real life. Fiction is my preferred choice in reading material, but usually the fiction I choose has no bearing on practical matters in my day to day life. That said, I'm miffed at Steinbeck: despite Of Mice and Men, George, you should not feed alfalfa to the rabbits. *shakes fist*
Anyone who claims flavored bourbons are bad is a post-modernist hack
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Skrewball is my favorite whiskey! (Except maybe for J&B JET, which hasn't been made for 30 years.)
And $30 a bottle. :(
Try mixing it with creme de mint, Kahlua, & creme. IIRC. I gotta start writing these things down.
5783628
I gotta disagree. There were several different things going on:
- The rise of European military power in the 17th century, having a lot to do with the technologies of shipbuilding, navigation, and gunnery. This pushed the Ottomans back, but only the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese made much use of it colonially at the time. You could make a better case for Spanish gold and silver stolen from the New World (16th century) being important to the rise of Europe, but I don't think Europe had enough extra-European trade back then for much of that gold to get out of Europe, so its main effect was to transfer European wealth from everyone else to Spain, which then squandered it on religious wars. Also, the countries which profited the most from slavery and colonialism before 1700 were Portugal, Holland, and especially Spain. None of them were great powers after 1700, so I don't think you can attribute the power of Europe to that phase of colonialism.
- Slavery made sugar cane cheap, but neither slavery nor sugar cane became economically important until the 18th century, by which time Europe had a decisive technological superiority over every area but Asia. The cotton gin & machine weaving were even later.
- European colonization of Africa, China, Japan in the 19th century. My minimal research into this hints that this wasn't actually profitable for Europe, but only for well-connected people in Europe. All that colonization was massively subsidized by government military spending, and was not a way for nations to get rich, but a way to transfer wealth from the national treasury into a small number of very well-connected families. I'm not confident of that, though.
- The industrial revolution. Steam engines, coal, textiles. If you were to argue that slavery was important in making Europe economically dominant, you'd have to show that the English and Scottish industrial revolution was funded primarily by profits from slavery. I haven't looked into that, but I do know that in the US, industrial production developed in the north and was not funded by profits from slavery, while slavery was economically important only in the South, which generated less wealth than the North by at latest 1800. But it is true that much of that production in the North used cotton made by slaves.
My guess is that at every stage, it was technology which gave Europe the military edge over other nations, and slavery didn't help technology. The areas that developed tech and industry, mainly Scotland and New England, had no slavery. Slavery seems to have inhibited technological development. Slavery and plantations were profitable, but not infinitely self-bootstrapping on an exponential curve like technology is.
5783628
Great point!
I don't think I read the book, but I'm pretty sure there was no actual tiger in the boat. Just an unreliable narrator. Or do you mean in the zoo?
Wait, why not? Everybody feeds rabbits alfalfa.
5783628
Is there any evidence of that? I haven't heard of any. We have pretty good evidence that horses were a new thing, such as the fact that teepees weren't invented until the introduction of European horses. (Humans can't drag the logs or even the skins around, so without horses, it was easier to make new bark huts after moving.)
5783663 Peanut butter and mint???
All the other ingredients minus the screwball remind me of a thin mint cocktail. If that's the vibe you're going for I wholeheartedly agree.
5783675
Does it sound better to you if you replace the Kahlua with a chocolate liquor? Or just chocolate cream (cream mixed with fine dark chocolate dust)?
Back in the 1970s, Reeses launched a massive TV campaign to convince people that peanut butter and chocolate could be good together. Now everybody takes that for granted. But it sounded strange in the 1970s.
Mint goes with chocolate, and chocolate goes with peanut butter. Can you think of a clear example where tastes going together are non-transitive: X goes with Y, and Y goes with Z, but X does not go with Z?
5783703 I'm a big fan of most things chocolate and peanut butter. My transitive taste bud take is that peanut butter goes with chocolate, and chocolate goes with mint, but peanut butter does not go with mint. Although if you enjoy it, ignore my cornflake pissing!
5783915
Is that a fact, or merely a hypothesis? Make the experiment and tell us how it goes!
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I never reached the boat in Life of Pi. I remember that the cultural situation in the first chapter was interesting but when tips on animal husbandry turned up, probably at the zoo, that's where I backed out. I'd rather read My Family and Other Animals by a professional animal collection specialist.
The vet at work told me that alfalfa hay is not good for rabbits. A quick web search suggests that the high calcium content of alfalfa is bad for adult rabbits and that it should not be offered as the main hay source for adult rabbits.
The indigenous people's horses might not have been as exciting as I'd imagined. It looks like they arrived with Europeans in the 1500's and spread faster than the subsequent colonists. At least I hope the Smithsonian has the straight dope, untainted with residual anti-indigenous bigotry. The way a historian on the radio was recounting how horses just hung around indigenous villages providing transport on demand, it sounded like it had always been thus.
I bow to your superior understanding of the rise of European technology and expansionism. I think mature systems of government in the far east were actively suppressing technology and I think Burke (Day the Universe Changed) claimed that the Moors were losing interest in staying in Spain and that it didn't take much of a push for them to leave.
Gotta run, a friend want to be sociable and play Scrabble here. Gotta wash a few dishes and clear a corner of the table...
The more I hear about this guy, the more I think he should have stuck to wrestling.
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I'm still bugged by the question of whether Britain had a net income from its colonies. It seems important.
I just asked Bing "Did the British Government pay to feed and supply British troops stationed in colonial India, or were the Indian people forced to pay for the troops?"
It returned 3 references, and I checked 2 of them.
The Armies of the East India Company - World History Encyclopedia says that the East India Company paid for both its own armies, and "also paid for the garrisoning of regular British Army regiments in India."
British Indian Army - Wikipedia says that the EIC paid for its armies, and the British government paid for the garrisoning of British Army units. However, in 1858 the Crown took over everything, and presumably began paying for the British troops from then until independence in 1947.
So there were 2 phases, in the first of which the British govt. may or may not have paid for British Army units in India, and after 1847, when it probably paid for all troops in India. In the first phase, many or all troops were paid out of the profits of the EIC. Some portion of those profits could probably be said to have been expropriated from the Indians, but it would be difficult to say how much. The Indian workers worked voluntarily, for hire; but the EIC may have reduced other work opportunities, say by renting the same land that the peasants had been renting.
There's a famous popular Indian movie called "Lagaan" whose plot hinges on a taxation system in which a local Indian ruler taxes the peasants, and uses that tax to pay the British garrison, ostensibly for protection from other local Indian rulers. But the two sources I read didn't mention any instances of that happening.
The World History Encyclopedia article notes that most of the soldiers of the occupying forces which kept India subjugated, even if only indirectly, to Britain, were themselves Indian volunteers. Officers in both the British army and the EIC army were (all? mostly?) British, but enlisted men in the EIC were (all? mostly?) Indian, and the EIC was larger than the BA by 1830.
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Just from a cost/benefit perspective, I would be surprised if you told me that Britain didn't have a profit motive driving the invasion of India, at least initially. India is so far away and if kings feel like playing with armies, there are surely more prestigious targets closer to home.
I still think that entrenched power dynasties protect their dominance by stifling innovation and that innovation is a push-back from marginalized people who use it as leverage to get ahead. Here the marginalized people would be merchants wriggling free of the church and state systems of education and values to exercise science and technology as a way to innovate, generate wealth and buy their way into the aristocracy, or at least elevate the "merchant class".
5784371
I think trade always begins with a profit motive for somebody. But once you get to the point where a government is sending armies, it becomes politics. Sending troops to India is in that way like any big government spending program: somebody is probably making money off it, but there's no guarantee that the nation gets it's money's worth from it.
I think that in the British case, at some point it stopped being making money, and started being empire-building, with the idea that the British Empire would be the next Rome.
One of the reasons I wonder whether the British Empire, esp., in its later stages, was profitable, is that a big part of why the western Roman Empire collapsed was that they conquered lots of lands that cost more to garrison, in money, goods, and lives, than they produced in taxes and slaves. The western Empire was usually losing money after ~300 CE. The emperors had no understanding of economics, and most of their interventions were the usual short-term solutions like debasing currency, fixing prices, taking land from farmers and giving it to soldiers instead of pay, selling offices, and forcing people to work in government jobs for low pay.
5784525
So I guess it's all a case of who has the political clout, who is pushing the levers of power, who is directing the public purse, and finally, what motivates them. If it's an entrenched aristocracy, empire building is a prestige thing. If it's the meritocracy, government funded military action would be a way to acquiring resources, opening trade routes and quelling rebellions. Ergo, freed capitalist interests would have usurped the aristocratic land lord model, scaled up production, steered European policy to protect their interests, innovated production processes, manpower, transport and firepower, and basically took over. The Nouveaux Riche, steering the ship and not suffering any consequences if the ship takes on water. That's what insurance policies and incorporated entities are for.
So, this brings me back to the fiction that Europe grew to dominance as a result of being at the same latitude as many tech and lore rich civilizations. I think Europe benefited from a weakening of the aristocracy, the rise of the meritocracy and the expansion to the New World where the locals very conveniently caught small pox and died. Sugar, cotton, slavery and industry just helped accelerate this change.
The victors write the histories. Who will be the next victors? Who will be next to reboot a Manifest Destiny narrative? I suspect it will be the Chinese. I don't see anything coherent coming out of India.
5784558
Will it be a geographically-bounded nation at all? Or maybe
5783176
I think this might also be the reason The Conversion Bureau universe grew so popular. 🤔
5784691 It's an angle on a "War of the Worlds" type story where the POV characters can't see the opposition directly or know exactly what they are thinking, but they see the end result and have to guess. Built-in suspense.
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Definitely, whether we like the original story more or less, it has created a template as good as the one you have described, from which very cool works have come out. We are lucky!
5784691
5783176
I like the kind of story Georg is talking about. But no matter how much I like it, there are still people who refuse to like what I like. It is hard to believe that people can think so differently, but there really are people who don't care about the emotions in a story. Witness a lot of hard science fiction and post-modernist fiction, as well as Finnegans Wake. Witness the emotionless literary criticism and production of Umberto Eco, Victor Shklovsky, and other autistic authors. Also witness how academic literary criticism today completely ignores the emotional component, instead asking what the story tells us about the author's society's racism, sexism, and colonialism. I'm tempted to say these people aren't studying literature at all, but then i'd have to draw the lines around "literature", which I think is better not to attempt.
There are also huge disagreements over what constitutes a beautiful thing. There are vast audiences to whom "beautiful" means "a narrative which completely agrees with my moral worldview", and another vast audience to whom it means "a narrative which challenges my moral worldview". There are audiences who secretly hate emotions as impure and irrational, and think a story is beautiful if it reduces the world to an abstract, bloodless schema. There are audiences who secretly hate reason, and think a story is beautiful if it makes no sense, or that the beauty of a fantasy story comes simply from its literal impossibility.
There are people who only like stories with happy endings, and people who only like stories with sad endings. There are people who like round characters, and people who like flat characters. There are people who like realism, and people who consider it crude and vulgar. There are people who like to see characters face real challenges and struggles, and people who really, genuinely like Mary Sues. None of them are wrong.
I think that this diversity of opinions comes from a "fact" (something I think is mostly correct) which is probably considered evil to acknowledge: Humans are so intelligent and complex that, if you pick two random humans H1 and H2, and two random dogs D1 and D2, and somehow measure the difference between their mentalities and opinions, both of the humans may be more-similar to both of the dogs than they are to the other human. (Which may explain why so many humans like dogs or cats better than they like humans.) I doubt that you could find two chimpanzees that interpreted the world using different metaphysical systems, but humans have many.
5785115
Well, I have to completely agree. I'm not yet sufficiently initiated into the world of literature to say that I've seen a reasonably large collection of cases that corroborate what you've said, but I've certainly seen it several times in the world of cinema. There are so many works, and so many reactions to each one. We can often find patterns and see that a film receives praise or vilification from most of its viewers, but this does not mean that the film is objectively good or bad. How many times have I seen the classic case of a veteran film critic who says "A Clockwork Orange is a perfect film that can withstand infinite viewings. You have to be fucking stupid to say it's bad", and another equally veteran who says "A Clockwork Orange is a vulgar and pretentious movie. You have to be fucking stupid to say it's good." Both aim to give a definitive and indisputable answer as to why A Clockwork Orange is a masterpiece or trash, and those who read their criticism may agree with one or another of their reasons, but ultimately the only thing we all have are opinions.
I've seen people love Spielberg and hate Kubrick, and vice versa. I've seen people say that the only true cinema is Kubrick's while Spielberg's is garbage, and vice versa. Some of their reasons seem good to me, but I personally love most of the films by these two directors. A film critic on YouTube named Jordi Maquiavello saw in the anime Attack on Titan a masterpiece that condemned war and Nazism and talked about the myth of eternal return, and Aragón saw in the manga that it adapts exactly the opposite of Jordi, and I think they both give very good reasons, but personally I saw in Attack on Titan an entertaining (although very overrated) fantasy anime with some interesting comments against fascism and about the violent and self-destructive nature of humanity, and although there are people who tries it, I can't simply discard the effect that a work has left on me and replace it with that of another person who I consider smarter or whichever seems to be the general and "right" reaction of the public, it doesn't work like that.
Some saw in Kusturika's Underground a masterpiece of black comedy, I saw three hours of filty characters being dumb assholes. Some saw Haneke's Love as a Nazi and propaganda film, I saw a brave and devastating drama. Some saw Ford's The Searchers as a masterpiece of adventure cinema, I saw a racist and sometimes very simplistic film. Some see Tarkovsky's Mirror as the most perfect example of poetic cinema, I saw a boring film that goes nowhere (imagine my disappointment, given that this same director directed Stalker, which is my favorite film). Some see in Marvel the destruction of cinema, I see simple burgers, which satisfy and are quickly forgotten and nothing more. Some saw in Lauzon's Léolo a bizarre and slow film with a passive character who bores, I saw a beautiful and tragic film with a passive character who never bores. Some praise Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! for being a communist film, I believe it is not and I certainly would not praise it for being communist or capitalist. Some think that filming movies without music or color filters diminishes them, I think the opposite. Some say donuts are better with cream, I say they are better with chocolate. And none of these examples say that I or the others are wrong, simply that everyone has their own conception of what good and bad works are according to their tastes and ideas; Everyone is right and no one is right, indeed.
More than a decade ago I made a list of nearly 1,500 films from yesterday and today that I decided to watch, among other reasons (such as general culture or, mainly, pleasure), to discover the perfect formula for making excellent films. I hadn't even seen the third part before I resolved that this formula doesn't exist. Today, as I am about to finish the list, I still think the same thing, and I am pretty sure that with the world of literature I will reach the same conclusion.
5784634
Yep! This is why I like science fiction, there are so many possibilities.