Is everything fiction?
Nothing is what it seems
When a writer in one of my groups asserted that all non-fiction becomes historical fiction I took umbrage. My umb had never been so raged.
Perhaps she meant the newspapers. I recall my school in Cheltenham setting us a week’s homework whereby each of us in the class asked our families to take a different daily newspaper. We were shown how to detect the difference between pure factual reporting, opinion, advertising (often disguised to look like news) and how to measure the column inches. Even the sceptics among us were astonished how little in newspapers was straight information. Perhaps 10%. The Financial Times came out best with 30% factual reporting. We thought it would be heavily biased toward the right-wing politicians but the paper caters for hard-headed business people who rely on facts and balanced opinion for their investments. This was back in the 1960s. I’ve read papers with a jaundiced eye ever since and reckon the percentages of pure news hasn’t changed. If anything some of it has worsened, often by presenting facts, but biasing opinion within them by not reporting contributing information.
Also, it could be that the group member was referring to a more philosophical position such as that taken by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940). He argues that there is no such thing as Truth, as we know it. Ie that Truth isn’t an unassailable entity like a rock – although even rocks change over time. What is generally supposed to be Truth is really the ‘latest acceptable consensus’. This is a scientific maxim in that you never hear a good scientist refer to Truth but to hypotheses. They know that many so-called constants are very tricky to measure unambiguously and some ‘constants’ appear to change over time and space.
Bertrand Russell
I’ve just realized that Russell wasn’t the only person I’ve talked to face-to-face who was born in Victorian days. It feels like two centuries ago – 1800s and now 2000s! He used to attend the Cheltenham Fabian Society in which I was its youngest member as a young teen in the 1960s.
My umb was raged partly because whereas I am mainly known, if known at all, for my fiction: 100 short stories of mine have been published and 6 novels with another novel coming out this summer. However, my first published piece was a non-fiction article for a college magazine in 1968 and my first two books were on climate. I’ve also written a dozen articles for cycling and weather magazines. Just this year I’ve updated Chester’s Climate: past and present and released it as an ebook at https://payhip.com/b/62pM
It isn’t fiction but it contains stories: the word used by journalist to describe an event usually involving people. For example pirates were blown onto the coast hundreds of years ago and were interred in Chester Castle. Not fiction, but fact.
So, is my umbrage justified? Yes. There are some facts that aren’t fiction even if they are just the latest acceptable hypothesis and best interpretation.
In Other News
On April 12th my short science fiction story, Locked Out, was published by Perihelion SF magazine and you can read it for FREE at http://www.perihelionsf.com/1704/fiction_4.htm
On May 1st was the release of the summer magazine of The Horror Zine within which lies my fantasy, Girl in a Wandering Wood. I’d mis-overheard a phrase ‘wandering wood’ – probably wander in a wood, but my brain concocted a story in which a young botanist investigating unusual trees discovered they were closing in on her! You can buy the Kindle for less than a meal deal or the paperback for a bit more at
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Horror-Zine-Magazine-Summer-2017/dp/1626479992/
My newest published book is The Chaos of Mokii published by Solstice Publishing. It is an experimental scifi and takes only half an hour to read. Summed up with: Olga sits in a train but her mind is in Mokii, a city populated entirely by the consciousness of its inhabitants. Once she’s tricked her way past the figment bouncer she finds fun but also danger. 99 pence http://mybook.to/ChaosOM
Other books of mine including anthologies are at amzn.to/zrC6J6
The post Is everything fiction? appeared first on Geoff Nelder - Science Fiction Writer.
