Jo Walton – Page 3 – Wis[s]e Words

Incluing is not good enough for Wikipedia now?

Published on April 25, 20092 Comments

Logged in to Wikipedia tonight to get a message that the article on incluing I wrote almost five years ago was considered for deletion:

Apparently a neologism, but I can’t find evidence of wide use. Google Scholar and News searches turn up nothing but misspellings of “including”. Only references currently are a newsgroup faq, and the livejournal of the (admittedly notable) author who coined it. Quote: “This is totally a word I made up when I was fifteen”.

If reliable sources can be found, there could possibly be something on the concept to salvage into Exposition (literary technique), but I very much doubt it.

It’s this bloody attitude that has increasingly soured me on Wikipedia over the years. Way back when I started getting involved with Wikipedia, around 2003-2004 or so the idea of an online encyclopedia that would hold everything and which you could write articles for yourself was intoxicating. It was easy too to whip up a quick article, just a stub and see it grow over the days and years. But those days are long gone, smothered by the ever growing self-important bureaucracy that has grown up around it.

Too many people seem to think that noticability means everything, that if a subject is obscure or too fannish or cultish it doesn’t deserve an entry, when it’s those very things that makes Wikipedia different from every other encyclopedia. Incluing is a useful term of literary criticism, especially within science fiction and is precisely the sort of semi-obscure concept that should have an entry at Wikipedia explaining it.

I just don’t understand the mindset of people who go around Wikipedia looking for articles to delete. Sure, there’s a certain amount of spam and such to get rid off, but I’ve seen so many examples now of editors and administrators who went out of their way to get rid of articles that are clearly not spam, but just obscure or fannish or not suited to the New Seriousness of Wikipedia. As if an entry like incluing demands Wikipedia by being there.

“It’s like hard SF where the science is literary history.”

Published on March 26, 2009

On the Tor website, Jo Walton talks about one of her favourite books, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.

Possession is an odd book, and I love it and re-read it frequently. It’s about scholars in 1987 trying to find out some precise events that happened in the late nineteenth century and which concern the relationship between two poets. But what it’s really about is the way we are what time has made of us, whether we know it or not, the way we exist in our time and place and circumstances and would be different in any other. The way it does this, the very precise way in which the theme is worked out in all the curlicues of the story, makes the experience of reading it more like reading SF than like a mainstream work.

Jo Walton was a science fiction reader and fan long before she became a published writer. What she’s doing for Tor now, back in the mid-nineties she did on rec.arts.sf.written and I can’t tell you how many books and writers I only discovered through them. Including Possession.

The Prize in the Game – Jo Walton

Published on March 21, 2008

Cover of The Prize in the Game

The Prize in the Game
Jo Walton
341 pages
published in 2002

I’ve known Jo Walton a long time, from before she became a succesful novelist, when she was “just” one of the most interesting posters in various Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and Rec.arts.sf.fandom. You could therefore say I wanted this novel to be good. Fortunately, having read one of her earlier novels, The King’s Peace, I knew it was very likely going to be. And I was right.

Which reminds me that The Prize in the Game is actually set in the same world as The King’s Peace and functions as a sort of prequel to it, showing the background story of some of the secondary characters. You don’t need to have read it to enjoy The Prize in the Game however; it completely stands on its own. The quickest way to describe The Prize in the Game is as a coming of age novel set in a fantasy version of Celtic Ireland, in which some of the viewpoint characters may not actually come of age. Be careful though to assume too much from this; the island of Tir Isarnagiri differs from the real or even mythological Ireland in important ways. No leprechauns here.

Can litfic ever measure up to fantasy or sf?

Published on January 18, 2008

Fantasy and science fiction writer and fan Jo Walton had an interesting post up today about whether mainstream, literary fiction can ever be as good as the best science fiction and fantasy novels:

In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it’s just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That’s my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can’t really compare to people who are juggling four.

Please do not think this is the usual reverse snobbery of a certain kind of science fiction fan denying that traditional literary values are worthless; what Jo is saying is much more interesting than that. She argues that all other things being equal, writing a good literay novel is easier than writing a sf/fantasy novel, because in the second case the writer has not just to invent the plot and characters and such, but the entire world in which their story takes place and make this world accesible to their readers. Mainstream authors on the other hand do not need to do so, as they can confidently assume their readers has a certain familiarity with the world in which their novels take place.

It’s an interesting, almost seductive theory, but I don’t think it’s right. For I start I think that Jo both underestimates the work mainstream authors have to do to make their settings convincing and overestimates how much science fiction writers need to do. Just like a mainstream author does not need to explain what a car or horse is, neither does a sf writer need to explain how a hyperdrive works or what a positronic brain is. We know already, because we’ve seen these concepts in movies and television series, in cartoons even, not to mention some eighty odd years of science fiction stories. Meanwhile any mainstream author who doesn’t set their story in a setting that is right here and right now will have readers to whom this setting is new, who may not stumble over things like horses and cars, but who will stumble over say the position of women in society.

Take Jane Austen for example, writing in a society in which women almost literally had no rights at all, where women had to marry or face starvation. This is a setting that is almost unimaginable to a modern audience, yet the genius of Austen lies in making clear this essential horror even to us, without writing for us. That is a feat few science fiction authors can emulate.

Mainstream writers also have another set of balls to juggle that sf/fantasy authors need not bother with: making sure that the settings they create “feel real” to their readers. Asimov could imagine Trantor anyway he wanted it to look, because Trantor is not real. But Ian Rankin needs to make sure the Edinburgh of his novels is simular enough to the real one to convince those readers who know it….

So no, I don’t think sf writers juggle more balls than mainstream writers. Just different balls, at times.