Status Updates From Trace Elements: Conversatio...

'There comes a point in writing, and it's a spear-point, it's very small and sharp but because it's backed by the length and weight of a whole spear and a whole strong person pushing it, it's a point that goes in a long way. ... When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane.'

'Narrative variety broadens thinking. Every time translations give us access to new cultural traditions, the thrill of “The ghost did what?!” is also a window on what is formulaic in the media we’re used to, where so often Fortune favors the plucky and the pure.'

People often express surprise at the idea of a historian like Ada writing science fiction, as if the past and the future are opposites. But there is nothing more like the future than the past: long spans of time with events happening, societies changing, technologies arriving and disrupting; both are spaces where history happens, and both hinge on the present.

Romance was the first part of the book market whose readers enthusiastically embraced the e-reader, making it the sphere that made publishers and electronics manufacturers take e-books seriously as a model. Romance readers were the perfect market, since they tend to read huge numbers of books fast and once.

Romance as a genre is concerned with the pressures of money, so the genre virtually always features it, just as fantasy basically always features magic, and science fiction virtually always features questions of physics or biology.

And, before we start thinking that it's a sign of a bad writer to struggle with writing the scene after the kingdom is saved, talk to anyone who's been involved in a production of Henry V and they'll tell you how hard it is, after the exciting victory at Agincourt is over, to get the audience to engage with the peacemaking and wooing-the-princess sequence at the end.

When the US split from England in the late eighteenth century, in addition to being separate nations, the two became rival centers of English-language publishing, and developed rival distribution networks, which evolved over time into why today North American rights and UK/Commonwealth rights tend to be sold separately.

Old SF works sometimes look very clunky, as if they're inventing the wheel--because they are inventing the wheel, explaining common SF concepts like telepathy or time dilation in plodding detail because they're writing for audiences who (unlike current ones) hadn't met these ideas before. Modern SF assumes we know the basics.

One big difference between genre fantasy and magical realism is that the genre fantasy contract promises that the consequences of the fantastic element will be deep and significant, consistent through the world, while in magical realism the fantastic element will not affect the larger world and serves mainly as an allegory to help character(s) undergo character development.

We might compare such novels to gymnastics, in which the mystery with a deeply original structure is like a uniquely choreographed floor routine, while the formulaic mystery is like the athlete doing a specific vault, fun because we are watching a master of the art perform a set of formulaic motions with outstanding excellence.

'By 1700 in Europe the saturation of printing presses reached the point that in big cities (e.g. Paris) authors could live on sales without a patron on separate salary for the first time. Result? Giant burst of philosophical novels packed with Persian princes, romantic intrigues, porn, and all that good Enlightenment jazz.'

'Learning to read books with world-building and incluing [scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture] is difficult for adults who aren't used to it. Most imprint SF&F readers learned to do it when we were kids because that's how kids read everything ... Rivendell or Ecuador, kids' days are filled with terms we don't yet know.'

'Genre is a conversation. Romance novels are in conversation with other genre romance, science fiction with other science fiction, and so on.'

Authors that don't normally read SF&F may write novels that have a surface resemblance, but are missing many expected genre elements and the insider conversation with its history. They often don't realize their clever story has been done many times before.

The first essay looks at the author-reader contract, which generally cannot be violated without burning the reader. The mystery must be solved. Someone must die in a tragedy. Then there's Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, (1765-80) which violates basic story expectations left and right, but with so much humor it's both irksome and deeply enjoyable.