Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "credibility"
Credibility in Fantasy and Scifi
What makes you put down a mystery or fantasy? When something is incredible? When some detail changes mid-story? When a thesis is too incredible to swallow?
Does the professional protagonist or the expert over-react too often to obvious situations or to situations she has been trained to handle? Can someone commute to a river in the Amazon, coming home on weekends to the states? (I can't get from the Arizona to Indianapolis in less than 12 hours.) Lack of credibility means I put a book down and never finish it. And there's the rub--why are Harry Potter, Alice In Wonderland and the Oz books among my favorites? I love strange new worlds, but they lose my interest if their structure is not clear, or something is not credible. I wonder what.
While preparing the setting and backstory for THE WEBS OF VAROK, the soon-to-be-released sequel to A PLACE BEYOND MAN, I had to face the problem of making Varok credible as an undiscovered, inhabited planet in "our" solar system. No way. Every year NASA discovers more tiny moons of this or that planet. Even the larger rocks, Pluto's companions, in the Kuiper Belt are being named or photographed.
Okay--so inhabiting our solar system with quirky, challenging aliens will have to lean on flimsy evidence, and, as an author, I will have to lean on human imagination and acceptance of my unlikely premise that Varok was missed by the cameras of Pioneer and Voyager. Other than that, the details of Varok's astrogeology, biology and culture had better be credible,since I'm exploring real problems. Harry Potter's world of magic worked because the details were so rich, and there were rules that made it all work--just like complex systems everywhere. Varok has plenty of rules, and my aliens have their own set of quirks--though they share the features I see in all life, which is one of the themes I like to explore.
I remember Roger Zelazny, a delightful acquaintance, but I didn't read many of his books because Anything seemed possible in his stories. You never knew what might happen because anything could. There seemed to be no rules, no reliable structure to get lost in. A different example--Voldemort was scary to me, not because he could zap things better than anyone, but because you never knew when or where or how he would appear. I like suspense. Harry's triumph worked because even Voldemort had to follow weird rules. I've been called the type who is more frightened by reality than made up horror, but that reality has to have a reliable structure. What do you think? What makes a fantasy work? Or not?
Does the professional protagonist or the expert over-react too often to obvious situations or to situations she has been trained to handle? Can someone commute to a river in the Amazon, coming home on weekends to the states? (I can't get from the Arizona to Indianapolis in less than 12 hours.) Lack of credibility means I put a book down and never finish it. And there's the rub--why are Harry Potter, Alice In Wonderland and the Oz books among my favorites? I love strange new worlds, but they lose my interest if their structure is not clear, or something is not credible. I wonder what.
While preparing the setting and backstory for THE WEBS OF VAROK, the soon-to-be-released sequel to A PLACE BEYOND MAN, I had to face the problem of making Varok credible as an undiscovered, inhabited planet in "our" solar system. No way. Every year NASA discovers more tiny moons of this or that planet. Even the larger rocks, Pluto's companions, in the Kuiper Belt are being named or photographed.
Okay--so inhabiting our solar system with quirky, challenging aliens will have to lean on flimsy evidence, and, as an author, I will have to lean on human imagination and acceptance of my unlikely premise that Varok was missed by the cameras of Pioneer and Voyager. Other than that, the details of Varok's astrogeology, biology and culture had better be credible,since I'm exploring real problems. Harry Potter's world of magic worked because the details were so rich, and there were rules that made it all work--just like complex systems everywhere. Varok has plenty of rules, and my aliens have their own set of quirks--though they share the features I see in all life, which is one of the themes I like to explore.
I remember Roger Zelazny, a delightful acquaintance, but I didn't read many of his books because Anything seemed possible in his stories. You never knew what might happen because anything could. There seemed to be no rules, no reliable structure to get lost in. A different example--Voldemort was scary to me, not because he could zap things better than anyone, but because you never knew when or where or how he would appear. I like suspense. Harry's triumph worked because even Voldemort had to follow weird rules. I've been called the type who is more frightened by reality than made up horror, but that reality has to have a reliable structure. What do you think? What makes a fantasy work? Or not?
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