I’m probably thinking of stuff more in the science fantasy, or scifi/fantasy genre but for those that like sci fi can something ever be too surreal or just weird that it puts you off? Or just bizarre shit happens you just gotta roll with, don’t expect or ask for answers.
I remember a sci fi novel called Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town and the blurb on the back starts off something like “His mother was a washing machine and his father a mountain!” which told me already it was gonna be that kinda book and sure enough i didn’t like it.
Back in the 1970s, when there was so much of this that it practically was a genre to itself, I put forth Mapcase’s First Rule. “If you write a story in which anything can happen, whatever does happen better be pretty damn special.”
Art is hard. If you set yourself an extremely difficult goal in art, you are more than likely to fail. Story structure is an art that’s been perfected over centuries. Wander away from it and you need to create new pathways from scratch. That trick never works. Or very seldom, at any rate.
It doesn’t even regularly work for authors who do it well once. Michael Kandel’s Strange Invasion (1989) was a marvelously weird little novel. His next two, In Between Dragons (1990) and Captain Jack Zodiac (1991), got too weird to work. Arthur Byron Cover got it right in Autumn Angels (1975) but the four novelettes in The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists (1976) went progressively downhill. Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness was a huge letdown for me after the incredible humanity of Lord of Light, because the characters were chess pieces instead of living beings. Lots and lots of British New Wave science fiction was barely comprehensible, let alone readable. The American counterpart could be just as bad. I knew many of the writers Ellison was buying for the Last Dangerous Visions and I’m confident that their reputations would have suffered if the book ever got published. The works were the childish faux-psychedelia of early 1970s young hipsters, totally of their time and ridicule-worthy any other time or place. At the same time, some of the British New Wave and the Dangerous Visions pieces were good and a few were utterly brilliant.
It’s all art. But some of it is bad art. That’s the only distinction worth making.
For me, if all the weird doesn’t build up to something, then the writer was just masturbating. I do not require an in-story explanation for everything but I do want internal consistency. There must be a “there” there.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow isn’t a science fiction novel. There’s not even any pretense that it’s possible to make scientific sense of the ideas of the book. It’s a fantasy novel:
I haven’t read any of Doctorow’s works, but in weirdness he approaches the level of China Miéville. I’ve read Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun. Again, they’re fantasy and not science fiction. If you want to see how weird a novel can be, read them. In fact, Miéville is considered to be the most important writer of a genre called “the New Weird”:
Personally, I don’t use the word “sci-fi” (pronounced SyFy). I prefer SF; Speculative Fiction, including Science Fiction but also most Fantasy–& maybe even Magical Realism.
I love R A Lafferty. For his short stories & his most “famous” novels: Past Master and Fourth Mansions. Some of his stuff is more difficult; time to read Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine again. Of course it’s SF–the setting is his Institute for Impure Science & the lead character is a computer. Hoping that Lafferty’s more obscure works only published on small presses (or not published at all) will become available (again).
Also from the old days: Cordwainer Smith. Still writing: Gene Wolfe–whose work has complexities, too. And I’ve been getting into China Mieville…
I don’t need a work to be crystal clear at first reading but it’s been many years since I got credit for making it through the deadly dull. Wit and/or beauty will tempt me to keep going…
Plus, of course, you have Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth stories are the very definition of “out there” - and are considered classics of the genre, or of any genre.
As to the OP. No. It can’t ever be too ‘out there’. The further ‘out there’ the better as far as I’m concerned.
The only real test for any literature is that it has to be well written. What that means is the subject of much debate, but for me, it means that it has to be an internally consistent story, it has to be insightful, it has to be clever. It has to treat the reader with generosity, to know when we need explication and when we don’t.
There was a thread here in Cafe society about Clive Cussler recently. Not SF, I know, but he is an example of an author who is not generous to the reader. He needs to spell out things that are common sense and yet skims over the inexplicable. I’ve read maybe 3 or 4 of his novels, and they were all just popcorn. Enjoyable enough but easily forgotten.
SF has more ‘scope’ to it’s territory, so some authors get lost in the wilderness. Many years ago I routinely bought ‘best SF stories of [year]’ collections because I thought that it would be easier for someone else to sort out the chaff for me. There were always some gems - like Bumpy by, I think, a French author and I don’t recall his name. It was a ride into a potentially lethal video game, on drugs. Well written, completely not a story in the traditional sense, but generous to the reader. And something I’ve never forgotten. But if you asked me about any plot lines from a Clive Cussler novel, I’d be at a loss. What the hell, checkers sells more than chess.
I must second Isamu’s assertion. SF has a very wide realm of possibilities. Some writers get lost in the fog of probabilities, the always diverging paths that time and space can take. But, really good SF can take us out of our mundane worlds to imagine something else. To do so, it must first address the human equation. If it doesn’t, it loses its heart.
Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” resonates even now. 1967. Extraordinary.
I was 7 years old when I first read this.
I am this twisted relic now from such input.
Exapno cites several examples that are “out there” – and bad. I don’t think anyone would deny that it’s certainly possible (and easy) to be “far out” and bad, but I think the OP is asking if it’s possible to be too “far out” , even if you’re good. *
I think you can be. You have to have a story that’s relatable to its audience, and intelligible. It does no good if your target audience can’t penetrate your dense layer of alternative logic and strange values and different perception, and don’t understand your work. Or, worse, don’t read it. Who cares that you’ve written the Ultimate Morally Relative Story about a Being Living under a Liquid Metal Sea who Thinks in Metaphors and Has a Skewed Time Sense and Has Committed the Ultimate Crime (which is virtually unintelligible to us) But Isn’t Repentant? Especially if it never gets off the slush pile?
Joe Haldeman claimed that he got close to this with one of the stories that showed up in his collection Infinite Dreams, but brought it back from the brink because he realized that his readers had to understand and care about his protagonist. Frederick Pohl wrote a story about a Man of the Future whose actions and thoughts are pretty far removed from ours – but that was the point. I think it was a good idea that it was a short story. Also, notably, Terry Carr wrote The Dance of the Changer and the Three in which the mythology of an alien race is essentially unintelligible to us, and that was the point of it. Again – I think he would’ve taxed the reader if he made it longer. Stanislas Lem’s Solaris extends the same situation of unintelligible, really alien, aliens to book length. It got turned into a film twice, but I note that both times the book was significantly changed, and I suspect most moviegoers had no idea what they were seeing. I note that the book still hasn’t been completely translated into english (those copies you’ve seen are abridged) Even in all these cases, the stories are really about people being perplexed by the alien minds, not about the alien minds themselves.
So, if these had been pushed a little farther, I think they would indeed, have been Too Out There.
*Which raises the issue of whether a story that’s Too Out There can’t be good simply by virtue of being Too Out There, and not because it’s badly conceived and executed. I’m going to avoid that minefield, and advise propective authors to avoid stories written entirely in binary or such Arty pretensions.