Expectations of malleability

September 26, 2024 1:09 PM

All of that is just scene-setting for my real concern: the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward. Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we're now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we're seeing the consequences. from They don't make readers like they used to by (MetaFilter's own) Charlie Stross
posted by chavenet (25 comments total)

is that all that's making the near future hard to write about?

🔮
posted by HearHere at 1:30 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

I approach predicting the future by satirizing the present. I think such an approach would predict a presidential candidate with brain worms dumping a bear in Central Park. (In fact, I see this strategy play out in Stross's books.)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:51 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this. Interesting to see the Death of the Author might extend to Death of the Text (that is, the text is no longer the authority on possible interpretations).
posted by joannemerriam at 2:04 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

So far as I can see, Stross is talking about two things. One is the participatory nature of fanfic and RPGs, and the massive number of hands involved in big franchises like Star Wars. That's certainly different from the author working alone in their study, but I'd note that it's not that different from premodern literature. E.g. the Song of Roland is reinterpreted by pseudo-Turpin, then bounced around by various French and Italian authors, culminating in the epics of Boiardo and Ariosto.

The other part seems to be a reaction to some rando's opinion that "I view worldbuilding as fairly fascist tbqh. Refusing to allow spaces for the reader's imagination to flourish." I can see that as being dismaying for an author. But surely that's an atypical opinion.

I write worldbuilding and conlanging books, and in my experience readers love worldbuildng... but only once they're invested in the work. Readers complain about "exposition dumps" and stumble over strange names; it's only after something in the story has grabbed them that they develop an insatiable appetite for arcane worldbuilding details (and more stories).
posted by zompist at 2:20 PM on September 26 [17 favorites]

It's amazing that we've already reached the point of having thinkpieces about bad skeets.
posted by mittens at 2:49 PM on September 26 [2 favorites]

Kids these days - everything's a Writing Prompt...
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:52 PM on September 26 [4 favorites]

I am somewhat amused that the next post is about the past and present of writers.
posted by zamboni at 2:56 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

Yeah, re: earlier literature, one of the neat things about 16th/17th C adaptations of classical Greek/Roman stuff is how fanfic-ish it was rather than "authentically" classical. Ringhieri had a sort of Venus & Cupid LARP. King James's wife Anne of Denmark basically cosplayed as the goddess Athena along with 11 other goddesses in an event associated with Twelfth Night. La Fontaine added fairies etc. to The Loves of Cupid & Psyche. Purcell added a sorceress and sea witches to an episode from the Aeneid. Cupid isn't just a reference point / allusion in 17th C. literary fairy tales but an actual character. Fénelon wrote an influential didactic novel expanding on the Odyssey. Sorel's collaborative storytelling game "Le Jeu du roman" had an example of play set in classical Crete and featuring sacrifices to the god Saturn, oracular divination, and other occasional mythological references. Louis XIV's Apollo costume was amazing and incidentally he played collaborative storytelling games too.

cstross sort of alludes to the mythological scope of superhero universes, and I think classical mythology is a commonly used analogy for explaining how superhero universes can be inconsistent yet fun. But 16th/17th C. fannishness about mythology seems like a closer analogy with what he's describing here. And from that perspective it's consistency in worldbuilding, e.g. Tolkien championing it vs. "Fairy-Stories," that is sort of the new kid on the block. That said, I don't think his point assumes fannishness didn't exist before consistency in worldbuilding, because there's obviously worlds and worlds of new context for it now--new demands for consistency, objections to consistency based on modern premises, etc., etc.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:57 PM on September 26 [10 favorites]

I feel that the very early mimeographed and printed fanfic stories about Kirk and Spock do kind of question the main premise here.
posted by corb at 3:16 PM on September 26 [3 favorites]

I don’t think readers have changed, per se—I think that the market has captured a different kind of person that would not previously have been reading or otherwise engaging heavily with stories. For some section of people storytelling is a social, not individual act. Indeed this is likely what was historically true for most people. The actual story itself is secondary to the act of engaging with it. And there are certain kinds of media that lend themselves better to this—or at least to easily accessible forms of engagement, as things like headcanons and fan theories about worldbuilding and lore take less background and training than does critical analysis—than others. Those media properties getting so large have pulled into the fiction-loving universe a whole swath of people who would not be reading works like those written by Charlie Stross. Now, sometimes this does lead to people expanding into other kinds of works, but I would suspect that the people reading his books have not much changed because they aren’t particularly designed for heavy fannish engagement. What he’s seeing is a new crop of fiction-lovers that would have previously been invisible because the way they engage with fiction wasn’t broadly available, but they wouldn’t have been engaging with his fiction anyway so functionally for him readers have not changed.
posted by brook horse at 3:19 PM on September 26 [7 favorites]

I mean, the title of the piece implies a sort of self-deprecating "old man shakes fist at cloud" approach, and he seems to be mainly concerned about how this affects his ability to produce work that connects with an audience and his bemusement that it doesn't get easier. But also that he's learned some tricks that still work. He seems pretty accepting of the changing landscape, really.
posted by rikschell at 3:24 PM on September 26 [4 favorites]

I like stross. He’s got a way with the words and many viewpoints that I really appreciate, although I’m definitely part of the target audience. I like his take on the evolution of the relationship between readers and writers, too.

I guess that’s all I have to say on the subject.
posted by ashbury at 3:31 PM on September 26 [4 favorites]

There was no equivalent of fanfiction.net, Archive of Our Own, or the other big aggregators for fanfic writing. Not even the shared universes amenable to self-insertion fantasies that kids take for granted these days--comic-reading nerds were weirdos back then.

There were communities making Zines and mailing then around (as raised above about Kirk/Spock), then there was Usenet.

I don't think of authors as having a full authority over their story being an issue. They've got their telling of this story and sometimes it helps to build a world that we as contemporary readers can recognise, but there will be other tellings of the story for other readers, using different cultural touchstones. It has to be recognisable for some readers today -- I call this The Terry Problem, for when you've got a magical world, a flat disc on the backs of four elephants that stand in a giant turtle swimming though space, but also need characters facing problems and leading lives your readers can understand and empathise with.

Getting that, take Neil and Terry's Good Omens, which eventually made it to TV with adaptation to match the contemporary world (the jokes about ansaphones and early nineties envirnmentalism wouldn't land). Sure, there's some authority to Neil's work shaping the TV series so it was still faithful to the pastiche and parody of the book, not to mention the love for the weird humans that both Crowley and Aziraphale have. But there's also a bunch of people helping form that televisual rendition.

Do people disagree with the world-building because it doesn't make sense or because they think their vision for the world and the characters is superior? If the latter, do you time at the keyboard and show us the best-sellers.
posted by k3ninho at 3:43 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

"Just because [author] writes it doesn't make it canon!" was a joke on Livejournal like twenty years ago. I guess there's a Rule 34 except for bad takes?
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:09 PM on September 26 [5 favorites]

zompist though you're not wrong I don't think it's really two things. It feels like having the expectation of interactivity or collaboration, whether that's short term (games) or long term (guiding the Star Wars franchise) has created a zeitgeist in which readers/viewers/players feel the vision of the creator is secondary to the interpretation of the consumer. Not the first time this has happened!! But it is an interesting new origin to it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:38 PM on September 26 [2 favorites]

Oh, you can have Good Omens back, please; here you go, thanks.

It's of course absurd that a reader would complain that there's nowhere for them to scribble in the margins of a book, but I think comics and Star Wars and the like are certainly why a reader would feel that way. Even before selling Star Wars to Disney, George Lucas worked with other writers and directors on the films, authorized novelists to produce Star Wars, etc. The work was intensely collaborative nearly from the beginning. The expectation that this is a place where everyone can play was set early on, even if some creators were allowed only to create acopryha (or, more likely, took it upon themselves to do so, and damn anybody else's permission).

Novels by an individual writer are a very different thing. For good or ill, most of today's readers' first encounter with fiction is more likely to be a derivative work based on IP owned by a huge company, and that sets the stage for them.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:49 PM on September 26 [2 favorites]

I don’t think readers have changed, per se—I think that the market has captured a different kind of person that would not previously have been reading or otherwise engaging heavily with stories

I think this is really true - the reason that there's more SFF out there is because the audience has grown, and not by cannibalizing the serious fiction crowd either.

Two thoughts:

1. I find it hard to truly believe that the author isn't authoritative when I see so goddamn much lore out there and know so many people who can be so boring about it. If the author isn't the authority, why do we have endless lore-related close-readings, wikis, etc?

2. Worldbuilding is fascist? Yes, and that's wonderful. I mean, I wouldn't say that worldbuilding is fascist exactly, but there is an authoritarianism of the artist, and I think that's great. I love fanfic, I have many headcannons, etc, but I think those can coexist with the idea that an artist creates something and there you go, that's what they did. I am not a composer; I don't want to try to choose my own adventure my way through music, I want the composer, songwriter, etc to write some music. I'm not that creative of a person; I want someone to come up with a world and a story something beyond "and the sky is green instead of blue, and then the king died tragically in a dragon attack". Maybe I'll have fun riffing on it or aguing with it, but I don't want to be left alone with my brain.
posted by Frowner at 5:17 PM on September 26 [10 favorites]

Maybe I'm wrong (and I wouldn't know where to start to try to pin down the numbers), but I'd assume that these hyper-engaged fan-fiction writing/reading readers still make up a really small percentage of novel readers overall, but probably a higher-than-representative percentage of people writing reviews? And certainly a higher-than-representative percentage of people writing about fiction at all (and certainly certainly by word count).

But I guess the real question might be what percentage of purchased fiction (including library borrowing?) is purchased/read by people in this highly participatory category. I'm sure they're punching above their weight there, too, but by how much?

(I guess I suspect they're not punching above their weight enough for this essay topic to be quite worth worrying too much about, but are their numbers growing? Or am I just too out of touch to recognize that their future is already here? Two comments up from this one is a "most of today's readers..." claim that I'd assume is totally off base, but I'm not sure how to assess my gut reaction there.)
posted by nobody at 9:30 PM on September 26 [2 favorites]

I find it hard to truly believe that the author isn't authoritative when I see so goddamn much lore out there and know so many people who can be so boring about it. If the author isn't the authority, why do we have endless lore-related close-readings, wikis, etc?

There's two related things that "canon" refers to.

1. What story is this movie/book/comic part of? What is the history of this place, of the relationships of these people? What things exist in this world? What is possible in this world? "Canon" is whatever background I need to best understand and enjoy this work. That might just mean remembering what happened in Chapter 2 when I get to chapter 13, or it might mean remembering a conversation two characters had in a different movie 10 years ago.

"What I need to best understand and enjoy this work" is incredibly subjective. Some people think Narnia is better if you start with the 6th book published; others think it's better if you start with the 1st. Some people think it's unimportant to know whether Mr. Spock had siblings, but tomorrow someone could write a scene that takes that detail from some previous TV show and uses it to make the scene great.

2. What story are we currently talking about? If I want to talk with you about the character of Luke Skywalker, are we talking about 3 movies? 6 movies? Years of novels and comic books? That fanfiction of yours I just read? There's no right answer; it's a decision we make (or an argument we have) about which parts of which "Luke Skywalker" stories we want to talk about. The Author's not dead if we decide we're more interested in the author's interpretation of the story than somebody else's.
posted by straight at 11:25 PM on September 26 [1 favorite]

Really enjoyed this piece, I need to read it again when I'm not meant to be concentrating on a Zoom call but just wantted to throw this into the mix...

In all the chat around this recently it's worth noting that the "bizzare opinion" that world building is essentially authoritarian in character is not new c.f. M John Harrison's very afraid (2007) (which Stross's essay seems to me to be in close conversation with)

"Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid."

then clarifying in the notes...

"It’s control-freakery on a scale that reminds you instantly of the other kind of worldbuilding–the political kind. That’s why I am “very afraid” of worldbuilders."

(Obviously Harrison has a few thousand words and a life time of thinking about this stuff in his own work to draw on rather than 140 characters or whatever it is people are working with these days but i think the gist is the same)
posted by tomp at 2:53 AM on September 27 [3 favorites]

Harrison always seems to have extremely mixed feelings about readers at all - it's time to rebuke those naughty readers' expectations, because they wickedly expect a fantasy world when it was London all along, or they for some politically inexcusable reason want to escape from constant confrontation with their circumstances, etc. If anything, saying NO YOU CANNOT ESCAPE IT IS LONDON is not the most anti-authoritarian approach either. He seems really ambivalent about fantasy for someone who has written so much of it, and that's fine, but at the same time not the best position for a really strong critic of readers.

The older I've grown, the less I agree with his criticism of SFF and the more authoritarian it seems, just on the culture snob side. I'd much rather have a writer say "this is what I created, this is what I meant, this is what I want it to do, your interpretation is wrong" than say "the whole way you enjoy reading is wrong, engage with texts only in the limited list of traditionally high-culture ways that I think are acceptable".

I mean, if I really truly had to pick - although I don't think that's the scenario we're facing - I'd pick Choose Your Own Adventure over YOU MUST HAVE A HIGH CULTURE AESTHETIC RESPONSE.

~~
I think it's difficult to write an essay which really ought to be "there is a new thing in the world and I think it means something" and not have it turn into "the world has undergone a sea-change, the new thing is everywhere". Partly because sometimes when one says, "there's this new thing and I think it means something" the response is "but that's just a few isolated people, how can it mean anything" rather than "yes, the world has, in some ways, changed".
posted by Frowner at 5:50 AM on September 27 [4 favorites]

I read this with the recent pieces about Chappell Roan in mind. While there has always been fan fiction, remixes, collaboration, etc. what we are seeing today is a greater sense of entitlement from fans. It's not enough to write fan fiction; you also get to demand that the author write what you want or there will be consequences. Stross is generally protected from serious repercussions because he's a white man, and I suspect his audience skews older. George R. R. Martin has surely received death threats for ASoIaF, but he seems to be doing ok. You can see how dark it can get though if you look at Star Wars and the way the actresses had to go into hiding because of nerd outrage. Stross gets the privilege (that he recognizes!) to consider how demanding fans affect his art and what he chooses to write. There are others, however, who will make the choice to write nothing rather than deal with the consequences.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:50 AM on September 27 [5 favorites]

Stross is also reasonably popular, but his fan base is large rather than huge, so that's another way he isn't receiving the worst of fan entitlement.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:09 AM on September 27 [3 favorites]

I know that my response to any kind of "writing and reading is like this" is basically "publishing has changed, mostly through consolidation in the nineties/early 2000s" but also, isn't this somewhat of an artifact of publishing?

Writers are able to market themselves and expected to market themselves much more intensely than in the past. It's not weird that when people have to have a twitter/Tik-Tok/Goodreads/Instagram presence, some readers develop way too much of a parasocial relationship with them. Writers become sort of half-people on the internet - real and individual enough for readers to develop opinions about them but not really real enough to be treated as full people who are complex, have flaws, may not be Just Like You, etc.

Funnily enough, one of the most useful things I ever read on this topic was a Harlan Ellison essay that touched on fans and fandom, and somewhere it said, "the writer is not the work", and wow is that true, for both good and bad. Harlan Ellison's essays made an enormous impression on me as a tween* and many is the time that I've found it useful to remind myself. Obviously - as with Ellison! - there are times when the writer does bad enough things that the work can't be read separately, but just on a "the writer may write about preux chevaliers, but he is mostly just a regular guy with flaws in private life" level, or even an "enjoy the work, leave the writer to her private life as much as possible" level, it has been very helpful.

But anyway. I remember when all the publishers were really consolidating in the nineties/early 2000s I read some kind of intense doom-saying essay in The Nation or The Progressive and got really worried, and then nothing appeared to happen and I dismissed it as mere gloom, but I was in my twenties and didn't realize how long it takes for things to happen. Publishing has changed a tremendous amount since I was in my twenties. The type of self-promotion that was once only expected for best-selling superstars (and was then engineered by agents and publishers) is now expected for all writers, especially genre writers, and has to be done by them on their own time/dime. When fans get told constantly that they have this personal access to writers, and writers are forced to be Stepford writers, it is not surprising that certain types of fan feel really free to overstep.




*I would probably have a totally different life without Harlan Ellison's essays - the anti-cop ones, the civil rights ones, the fictionalized abortion one, the one about misogyny in film, the one against little girl beauty pageants. They are not the very finest essays on these topics, perhaps, but they certainly were the most accessible ones in a conservative suburb in the late eighties. (I had a big book of All Of His Short Writing.) For this reason, I feel a certain gratitude toward him that wars with my other responses.
posted by Frowner at 6:29 AM on September 27 [7 favorites]

I was thinking about response novels and thinking that engagement, often critical, is how books go on living. There are an awful lot of pretty darn good novels out there and most of them get forgotten. Maybe the best or most unusual get revived, but most of them vanish utterly except for very occasional interest from specialists. Even things that get republished get forgotten - there are so many good Virago classics, NYRB classics, etc that get republished once and then they're out of print again basically forever. Many of these books you never even hear of! There are great books out there, maybe not towering classics but still great, that have been forgotten so deeply and so long ago that no one will ever mention them to you.

And of course, as times change and language and, god knows, education change, people lose the ability to read older books with any kind of ease or enjoyment. They can regain the ability - if they're interested enough. Reading older books is so essential, not only for the books themselves but to develop a broad understanding of what is being written now. It's not that you absolutely must read these five hundred classics of older SFF before you dare to pick up Gideon the Ninth, but if you're at all interested in science fiction as a genre, your experience will be enriched enormously if you read a sampling of older books.

(After a lifetime of basically only having read broadly in SFF, in these past six or seven years I've read much more broadly among English-language novels written between about 1875 and 1990 and having that background has made reading serious fiction so much more fun, satisfying and easy.)

My point being that while fannish engagement can undoubtedly be pushy and fucking annoying, and there is no reason to just put up with unacceptable behavior, it is this very care and engagement which will keep these stories alive. Your book won't just be one of a number of really quite good SFF novels that came out in, like, 2012, sold for a while and then fell off the radar - people will return to it, maybe hate it, maybe love it, maybe reassess it and stop hating it and find it interesting, see how it fits in the genre, etc.

The trouble with the immortality that the poet promised is that it is so rarely on one's own terms, but at least it is immortality of a kind. There are really quite a few good books that sink like stones.
posted by Frowner at 9:47 AM on September 27 [3 favorites]