Christina’s Reviews > Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy > Status Update

'The Disney Princess and many hero stories are purity stories. Think of the messiah-hero who passes uncorrupted through temptations, Sir Lancelot whose invincible perfection is ended by the taint of his lust, Frodo who struggles to resist the ring and takes its aftereffects home with him like a scar, and the classic B horror movie where the girl who has sex is killed by the monster while the virgin survives.'

'Goldman's novel is a swashbuckling fairytale. I think Goldman wanted to write something like a children's book with the thrills of a children's book, but for adults. Many writers have an imaginary reader, and I think Goldman's imaginary reader for The Princess Bride was a cynic who normally reads John Updike, and a lot of what Goldman is doing in the way he wrote the book is trying to woo that reader.'

'That's something no one tells you when you're ten and you want to be an XXX when you grow up. Sometimes people say, "Go for it!" and sometimes people say, "You'll never be an XXX; you should be a computer science major so you have a secure job." But very rarely do people say, "That door is open, but it will close if you aren't careful, so let's sit down together and work out the steps to get you there."

'Dystopian fiction has made the public hyper-vigilant against censorship which resembles that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it has also made the public take less note of forms of censorship which do not resemble the world of Orwell's novel, which don't come from the inexorable state but rather emerge from the bottom up or from people who feel like the good guys.'

'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.'

'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.