Silly Exapno, Skald is the reason so little is known of Etruscan culture.
To the OP, science fiction is defined in terms other than its characterization, and it’s one of very few genres where it’s possible to have a good story with no characterization (or occasionally, even no characters) whatsoever. But I can’t translate that into characterization, in and of itself, ever being a bad thing. Sure, bad characterization is bad, but that gets into what Ebert said about movies being “too long”: A good movie is never too long, and a bad movie is never short enough.
Well, I *did *read C&P in high school, and was therefore unequipped emotionally and maturityly to understand the appeal homicide could have to the unbalanced mind.
Can you name a good science fiction story without characterization or characters?
The Rhymer rule forbidding the asking of rhetorical question is still in affect, by the way. If I had meant "It is impossible for a good story to lack characterization and/or characters,: I would have written that.
It disturbs me that you were shooting at me, not only because you were shooting at me but because you obviously missed. It’s like I held all those gun handling classes for nothing.
Robin Hobb comes immediately to mind: she tends to have 100 pages of a rollicking good tale surrounded by 400 pages of characters angsting about their relationships past present and future or about their unwillingness to do the things they know they should do. If an editor took out every bit of internal monologue in her stories, I would adore them and would cope just fine with understanding the characters through their actions and spoken words; as it is, I muddle through the “Leigh thought back to when Biff was her husband and blah blah blah for another three pages blah blah blah” so I can get to the awesome parts.
I am thinking about Books Four and Five of *The Song of Fire And Ice *aka The Game of Thrones. This is a problem of *too many characters *and also too many pages spent on characters I personally don’t care about.
I think the George Martin needs to put more plot and less character into the next couple.
Most stories have characters. Many do not have characterization. Even the Etruscans knew that.
I’d say that Hitchhiker is a well-known book with essentially no characterization at all, although the characters are lots of fun and the filler in between is great.
The closest I can think of is if the characterization keeps harping in the character at the expense of the plot. I recently finished a story whose main flaw was that the author spent too much time describing his friends and what they did and where they came from while the actual story sat in the background tapping its foot.
Oh, gods…it gets worse? I’m halfway through the first one and slogging. Way too many characters, and nothing’s *happened *'cept for the kid out the window!
SF is first and foremost a literature of ideas – the writer should never lose sight of the idea the story is about and never let characterization, or even plotting, overwhelm it.
The only way I can think of to have too much characterization is a case in which an author consistently produces characters you find unlikable, and which only grow more so the more you learn about them.
Take The Wheel of Time, one of the few series I’ve ever actually given up on. I waded through five books, during which a seemingly endless horde of characters were introduced, and I would be hard-pressed to name one that I didn’t detest to some degree. Perhaps if the author had left more of the characters as ciphers, or allowed their motives and backgrounds to remain teasingly mysterious, I would not have come to regard his world as a hell for justifiably damned souls, the destruction of which I found eminently desirable.
I’m not saying that less characterization would necessarily have redeemed the series in my eyes, only that it might have reduced the level of froth in my frothing hatred.
And thus have you avenged my theft of your “Gentlemen, be seated” thunder.
Unless–and this is an important exception–they want me to enjoy the book.
Sure, old-school SF is all about the ideas uber alles (try finding an interesting character in Foundation, I dare you). But plenty of great modern SF authors, including Mme Le Guin, are perfectly comfortable with characters and plot.
SF can do many things well. The field is big enough for everything.
What LHoD said. As Marion Zimmer Bradley once told me while explaining my incompetence as a writer, “Stories aren’t about ideas, they’re about people.”
The “literature of ideas” concept was really just a defensive maneuver in the 40s and 50s against the criticism that SF wasn’t literature.
While there are many examples where the idea is the thing, they usually only apply to short stories (and SF was a primarily short story medium into the 1960s). Once you start to create a novel, you need more than just an idea.
Nowadays, it’s very rare to find an SF story that pure idea, mostly because it’s hard to make the pure presentation of an idea work. It’s the characters and plots that make the ideas memorable. At the same time, you can write a damn good book or story using a well-worn SF idea; Connie Willis has won a couple of Nebulas using the same concept of time travel in both (“Fire Watch” and Blackout/All Clear are both about time travelers in World War II).
And Le Guin told me that her stories always start with a character. Took me a long time to understand that doing so means far more than throwing a name onto the page; a character starts walking around and interacting with others in ways that are unique to that character and force the plot and action to conform, not the other way around.
That’s not enough, certainly. The situations and complexities and interactions also have to be of interest. It works both ways. Characterization without story is at most a vignette. Story without characterization is a popcorn read. Characterization with story is literature. Literature can be high or low and it offers a variety of rewards to the variety of readers out there. I won’t read something just because it’s literature. But when everything clicks, it can’t be beat.
Thanks, RealityChuck and Maggie. I knew I remembered the existence of SF stories without characters, but I couldn’t come up with any specifics. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is an excellent example.
