While I need a good, strong character, to really enjoy a book, I am a big fan of show, don’t tell. Don’t spend paras telling me about your char. Show me what he does, over time. Give it to me a little at a time. if you give it to me all at once I probably won’t believe it and may even get bored and leave.
But it really depends. Someone up-thread complained about Robin Hobb’s characterization. I love her characterization. Reading her makes me very aware of my own severe flaws as a writer. And yet I can’t put her down. I love her stuff.
I have the most trouble with characterization. I have the ideas, I know my characters, and I have my plot. But the intricacies of revealing those characters deftly, enhancing the story and the underlying ideas without intruding on them, is damned difficult. I think it’s because, even though I am one, human beings confuse the hell out of me.
Well, too much is too much. Depends on the quality. I recently re-read Rendezvous with Rama, a rollicking ravishing rationalist rondo in which superiffic spacemen palpitatingly penetrate a massive mysterious monolithic GREAT BIG EFFING SPACE EFFING THING START AGAIN ARGRAGR
Effing. Arthur C Clarke was infamously uninterested in characterisation, and Rendezvous with Rama takes this and elevates it to the nth power - “spacemen explore alien spaceship in excruciating detail, the end” - which has the paradoxical effect of making the few stabs at fleshing out his characters look even more rubbish than they would otherwise. Literally everyone is either a top professor or a gung-ho spaceperson and the dialogue appears to have been channelled from 12 to the Moon (1960). The main female character is the ship’s killjoy doctor. Her breasts are introduced before she is. The book takes place in one of those futures where every man has several wives who probably go around topless all the time. The menial work is done by super-intelligent but mute monkeys. The characterisation is in the style of a role playing game’s “character select” screen. E.g. character A is fearless, character B is tactiturn and fearless, character C has bouncy breasts and is a killjoy woman. The exploration is The Abyss, 2001, Aliens; the characterisation is from the first Star Trek pilot, the one with Jeffrey Hunter.
And so ultimately in my opinion the novel would be much better, and would have dated much less, if Arthur C Clarke had just abandoned all characterisation entirely. There was barely any in 2001 and I didn’t miss it. Heck, there was hardly any in Alien and did it matter? People are basically objects anyway, they smile and shake hands but their eyes don’t light up in the dark. Still, Clarke couldn’t do people. His attitudes were years out of date on account of him being an elderly man who lived in a very rarefied environment with limited social contact. Ultimately the book feels like American Psycho. The action bits are fantastic, haunting, especially the bit with the rat and the electric clippers, you know. The character bits are horrible. But whereas Bret Easton Ellis made the character bits deliberately horrible, Arthur C Clarke was doing it unconsciously.
Literally unconsciously - he used to knock himself out with a special rubber hammer, and that’s how he wrote the book, with a pencil taped to his hand. He’d wake up the following morning with a sheet of paper covered in a few pencil lines and some spots of blood, hand it to the subeditors, and that’s how Rendezvous with Rama was written.
Late Heinlein and most Dune books beyond the first trilogy feel to me like they are too much characterization for the action involved. Earlier stuff, tho (of both), absolutely needed characterization for the plots to make any sense.
I’m glad that Ashley Pomeroy mentioned Clarke, because the Rama series is a great demonstration of how characterization in sci-fi can be bad.
The original Rendesvous With Rama is, at its heart, a mysterty novel. Rama itself is the star of the show, and the astronauts are detectives whose characterization is minimal and doesn’t detract from the mystery - what is this ship? Where did it come from? Why is it here? Where is it going?
The ghostwritten sequel trilogy, on the other hand, is a character-driven mess. The main character is a Mary Sue (Olympic athlete turned scientist who had an affair with the Prince of Wales, marries the perfect man, has a fling with the second most perfect man on the side, founds a civilization with the help of her even more perfect daughter, and eventually becomes a Christ analogue), and the author spends so much time exploring the lives of minor characters and hammering in his “mankind is sinful and destroys everything beautiful, and also we shouldn’t be scared of people with space-AIDS” message that it turns into a Peyton Place-ish soap opera that just happens to be set on a giant starship.
Wait–you love the pages on end of characters thinking about their girlfriends or how so-and-so might be their girlfriend but maybe she’ll go with so-and-so instead, or the pages about how they know what they ought to do but just can’t do it because some mysterious force keeps them from doing it, just like that time two chapters ago when they knew what they ought to do but just couldn’t do it because some mysterious force kept them from doing it, and they suspect that soon they’ll know what they ought to do but just won’t be able to do it because some mysterious force will keep them from doing it?
Huh. I didn’t think folks liked it. If it works for some folks, my criticism may be misplaced. I just wish her characters would quit caviling and get on with the story.
