Weighting the Dice
'...But if you think something is bullshit, the answer is not more bullshit.'
--Amanda Mannen
All fiction, to some degree, is message fiction. Our beliefs inform which values, actions, and outcomes we see as positive or negative or ambiguous, and these views become an integral part of our plot, setting, and characters.
Some fiction, however, explicitly engages issues instead of folding them into the background. Because fiction is such a wonderful medium for prompting discussion, I tend to think this is a good thing. Fiction-- particularly speculative fiction-- allows us to look at real-life problems with a fresh perspective, and to give us the safety of distance to formulate our thoughts without the baggage of past and current events. And a speculative fiction world can often allow us to explore the implications of an idea more fully or more clearly than we can when writing about real life.
That said, there is a difference between creating an area where you can run your thought experiment, and creating a world in which all of your ideas are unequivocally true so that they can be proven via a rigged plot setup; the first asks a question, the second is all about answering one. For example, it's one thing to write a novel (or make a film) about aliens immigrating to Earth and struggling over resources and culture with humans, and quite another to write the same story in which every single one of the aliens is irredeemably evil.
I'd also like to make a special note here for the revisionist historians. It's one thing to fill in the gaps in our historical knowledge with educated guesses, but quite another to make things up to serve your agenda, or worse, edit known facts to better suit your views. As I've said before, how we present history is important, and we have a level of responsibility when presenting anything as fact.
I think message fiction is most powerful when it allows readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than rigging the whole thing by ensuring there is an objectively 'right' answer.
--Amanda Mannen
All fiction, to some degree, is message fiction. Our beliefs inform which values, actions, and outcomes we see as positive or negative or ambiguous, and these views become an integral part of our plot, setting, and characters.
Some fiction, however, explicitly engages issues instead of folding them into the background. Because fiction is such a wonderful medium for prompting discussion, I tend to think this is a good thing. Fiction-- particularly speculative fiction-- allows us to look at real-life problems with a fresh perspective, and to give us the safety of distance to formulate our thoughts without the baggage of past and current events. And a speculative fiction world can often allow us to explore the implications of an idea more fully or more clearly than we can when writing about real life.
That said, there is a difference between creating an area where you can run your thought experiment, and creating a world in which all of your ideas are unequivocally true so that they can be proven via a rigged plot setup; the first asks a question, the second is all about answering one. For example, it's one thing to write a novel (or make a film) about aliens immigrating to Earth and struggling over resources and culture with humans, and quite another to write the same story in which every single one of the aliens is irredeemably evil.
I'd also like to make a special note here for the revisionist historians. It's one thing to fill in the gaps in our historical knowledge with educated guesses, but quite another to make things up to serve your agenda, or worse, edit known facts to better suit your views. As I've said before, how we present history is important, and we have a level of responsibility when presenting anything as fact.
I think message fiction is most powerful when it allows readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than rigging the whole thing by ensuring there is an objectively 'right' answer.
No comments have been added yet.
