2010/02/07

Just Because You Are a Character...

...doesn't mean you can write characters. But just go back in there, chill them writers out, and wait for the advice that should be coming directly. And if my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions.

Ahh, a string of Pulp Fiction references. That's the stuff, man.

Anyway. Ever notice that, in SF, the characterization sucks? "Oh," all these people say, "but SF is written according to different rules, and the characters aren't as important as the ideas and setting."

It's cute that they say that, thereby revealing themselves as ignorant of literature as the beasts of the field.

See, the way it really works is, SF, with the exception of New Wave and its ilk, is not actually novels, it's romances—an entirely different literary form, as different as drama from comedy. Other than New Wave, SF's not a psychological character study, it's a story where things happen.

But, or rather BUT, that doesn't mean you can get away with the kind of characters SF usually tries to fob off on us. Consider the best romances in English—Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stephenson. Is Long John Silver not a character? There're characters in Ivanhoe, aren't there (though Scott was lousy at writing women)? Hell, for that matter, Chesterton largely wrote romances, not novels, and I dare you to find better characters than Evan MacIan and James Turnbull.

Meanwhile the characters in Heinlein or Niven make Ayn Rand look like Charles Dickens. They're very largely vehicles for exposition; at best, they're automated blow-up dolls for the sex scenes. Yes, C.J. Cherryh is a bit better—Pyanfar and company certainly have personalities, heck some of the kif are a hell of an attempt at really alien characters, but on the whole, SF that even bothers with science is an embarrassment, characterization-wise.

I frankly think the weakness is due to bad philosophy—specifically, pseudo-scientific reductivism. You really get the impression that Heinlein, and especially Niven, aren't writing about people, they're writing about anthropoids. The best characters Niven ever wrote were in some of the earlier Known Space stories—World of Ptavvs' characters are actually downright good—but he lost the ability completely by the time of Ringworld, with the occasional exception of a Gil Hamilton story.

Unfortunately, humans can't be reduced to a model—that's why sociology and psychology are either soft sciences, or complete nonsense. Often immoral nonsense, e.g. B. F. Skinner. While it's perfectly fine to have some event in a story determined by some scientific theory (economic and games-theory theories are popular choices), a character can only be created according to the same rules as characters in the rest of fiction.

My advice, to rectify this weakness of SF, is emphatically not to read or copy "mainstream" fiction, nor those kinds of SF where the S stands for Speculative rather than Science because they're not about science, just about future/alternative conditions. See, mainstream fiction, and most non-science speculative fiction, are not romances. They're novels—a completely different kind of fiction. No, to write better SF, you've got to turn to other kinds of romance. Good Westerns—Zane Grey, for instance—can be useful models for how to handle characterization in a romance, as can the classics, like the aforementioned Scott, Stephenson, and Chesterton; Dickens too, come to think of it. Spy fiction and mysteries suffer from the same problem as SF, since the need to construct intrigues or crimes tends to interfere with characterization. They sometimes escape by having the same character over time (Jim Chee, anyone?), but even that doesn't save most spy fiction—who the hell is James Bond, really?

PS. It occurs to me, considering what "Ptavv" means in Thrint, that World of Ptavvs and Land of the Blindfolded have the same title.

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