You reminded me of a point I thought of some time ago, and should maybe post on myself at some point. There was a panel at Minicon some years ago - IIRC, the title was something like "Science Fiction and Fantasy: Instatiating the Metaphor". Someone (maybe one of the panelists?) raised an interesting point - a number of things that are exclusively metaphorical in mainstream fiction can easily be literal truths in SF&F. (For example, my wife described a character as a silk-dressed cobra - the first question asked about the passage was 'is she a snake or a human?') Since there is that problem, the metaphors, similes, and similar constructs in SF&F are either absent, or much larger or more subtle. From what I can tell, this drives the academic nuts - part of their world-view is that they provide the explanation of what the author was saying by pointing out all these constructs, and explaining what they mean. And in SF&F it's (mostly) just not there! The whole story (or big blocks of it) may have meaning or illumination outside the story proper, but it's not there at the nit-picky detail level that academics love. As a side note - it's really terrible to put an academic and an author in the same room - the academic finds all this hidden meaning in the author's writing, that the author says he never put there. As near as I can tell, that's why the author's opinion of what he meant to say is not considered valid source material in academia.
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Date: 2007-05-13 02:03 pm (UTC)There was a panel at Minicon some years ago - IIRC, the title was something like "Science Fiction and Fantasy: Instatiating the Metaphor". Someone (maybe one of the panelists?) raised an interesting point - a number of things that are exclusively metaphorical in mainstream fiction can easily be literal truths in SF&F. (For example, my wife described a character as a silk-dressed cobra - the first question asked about the passage was 'is she a snake or a human?')
Since there is that problem, the metaphors, similes, and similar constructs in SF&F are either absent, or much larger or more subtle. From what I can tell, this drives the academic nuts - part of their world-view is that they provide the explanation of what the author was saying by pointing out all these constructs, and explaining what they mean. And in SF&F it's (mostly) just not there! The whole story (or big blocks of it) may have meaning or illumination outside the story proper, but it's not there at the nit-picky detail level that academics love.
As a side note - it's really terrible to put an academic and an author in the same room - the academic finds all this hidden meaning in the author's writing, that the author says he never put there. As near as I can tell, that's why the author's opinion of what he meant to say is not considered valid source material in academia.