The current issue of Nature has an excellent supplement on art and science. There's not just the usual artists' representation of what science looks like to them (well, there is some of that, in which the sculpture especially is annoyingly stuck on accidental rather than inherent characteristics; never mind), but an elegant discussion of several ways in which art serves as evidence of and experiments on human perception. The essay on what wild inaccuracies painters can get away with was especially easy to follow, as it provided examples with captions and closeups pointing out what was wrong. (We really don't care where the illumination comes from, is what I remember from the article, although we will use it for some clues. Vermeer used that, didn't he? his scenes are sometimes painted as though his subjects are literally glowing, although the subjects themselves are not painted so?) There's also a nice long essay by which is mostly about how she used what science she could learn to structure and pattern the novel cycle that began with The Virgin in the Garden.
One of the ideas about novels, several times refigured, is that they are like psychological experiments. 'Experiments' is the word I remember, but it seems to me 'models' would be more appropriate; if you're a total genius, or , your gedankenexperiments (sp?) will be so accurate that the rest of us use them as experiments instead of models. Most of us make choices of what to assume away or make homogeneous or let-approach-to-infinity that are obvious or unconvincing or infuriatingly tendentious.
Here I arrive at Trading in Danger, and infuriatingly tendentious I find it, so much so that it almost convinces me that it's a parody despite its marketing. It combines several popular wish-fulfillment tropes. The first is basically Mary-Sue-ism, the heroine who is just perfect and always right and therefore unfairly attacked by the Bad characters and unfailingly supported by the Good ones. This is embarrassing, as visible wish-fulfillment, and also pretty dull. Moon's early books The Deed of Paksenarrion had less of each flaw even though the main character was a literal saint and the world an extension of Tolkien and his medieval characterizations.
Second annoying trope is that the perfect princess faces the difficult life burden of a rich and indulgent family. The terrible trauma, her eye-opening experience of reality, is to be thrown out of the military and promptly given private command of a trading vessel with an experienced and loyal crew. It took volumes and volumes of characterization, not to mention some actual history, for to make that seem painful for Jack Aubrey; on the whole I think most spiritual buccaneers would be chuffed from the outset, even if they did have to be bought a whole new fancy wardrobe to go with it, poor things.
Third annoying trope; Servants Love Their Masters. Okay, happens sometimes. I'll even hope that it's sometimes justified and returned. In this case, though, it's an extension of that unconvincing difficult life burden; when push comes to shove, someone else dies for our heroine. She does kill his killer. The most completely icky part of her repetitive self-justification is her private scorn for her father because he has never killed anyone. He was apparently too smart to need to, and smart enough to develop this crew that kept her alive long enough to fire, but that just makes him a useful chump.
Actually, in this ?moral? universe, maybe there are just chumps and killers. It's such a nasty society that I don't believe it could get as complicated as it is; it's mastered by unrestrained and violent commercial enterprise, and I don't believe they wouldn't have fallen already to faction, schism, nationalism, or sheer desperate opting-out. (Ma Bell/ICANN as the profit arm of a supraplanetary army is the most vivid case.)
In contrast, for instance, rides the range with aristocratic fantasies Two and Three, above, but she uses too much, oh, basic biology and game theory to write worlds in which those fantasies are accurate descriptions of the real world. I think her particular Barrayaran heroes and heroines have gotten away in velvet a lot longer than is likely and almost longer than is interesting, but then I remember Talleyrand, so she's within the realms of historical plausibility; and I think it's clear that the fantasy is a permanent burden on Barrayar, which may yet present the bill. I really hope she writes that novel.
To get back to the flawed model; it is a common experiment, in fiction, to think 'under what conditions would I/the character have to do this Most Awful Thing?' Crime and Punishment; Sophie's Choice; jokes about the Donner Party or plane crashes. There is a creepier version, which would be the same experiment if it were objective but is very different in psychology: the question is, 'under what conditions would I/the character have an excuse to do this Most Awful Thing?' And sometimes an author looks rather too hard for an excuse. That is properly the fatal flaw of characters, e.g. Raskolnikov, not of the author.
I think of this as the Cold Equations disease. That's a powerfully popular story, has been since it was published, in which the hero has to—has to, for moral reasons—kill a lovely innocent young girl who has to like it. It's porn in the worst sense. I find it so because the 'what conditions' are so feebly set up, given that the lethal excuse happens a lot; we are to believe that society expects ruthless armed killers where this story gives us a feckless maiden, but this (spacetravelling) society can't put together (say) a mass balance and oxygen monitor to exclude the killers and, incidentally, the maiden. I think it's extra odd that this story was considered so groundbreaking after the historical versions that abounded throughout, e.g., WWII; and can only conclude that the desired high was the pretense of righteousness over the joy in murder.
So wrote clew in SF&F. | TrackBack