[caption id="attachment_808" align="alignright" width="152"]
photo c. Grizelda Holderness.[/caption]
By Nimue Brown
If a book is just facts, it’s not a novel. But, imagine a novel that didn’t have any facts in it. Nothing real. It’s not an easy thing to envisage and I’m prepared to bet such a book would be totally unreadable. There are things we depend on – causality being key to every story. Things happen and cause other things to happen. People feel things and cause things to happen as a consequence. Plots are lines of causality, falling like dominos once the action is set off.
Of course in speculative fiction, some facts as we know them are suspended. That might mean physics -efying acts of magic and wonder. Faster than light travel, glorious impossible monsters, slightly different rules about how the world works, slightly different trajectories from the one history took. We can ask ‘what if...?’ and so long as there are a few recognisable points of reference, it all works out.
Zork the spling nagassed his ptaser at the onk. They jottled.
Somewhere, a line is crossed and with too many fictional ideas in the mix, a story becomes unreadable. Somehow, Lewis Carroll seems to have been able to write effectively from the other side of the line, but perhaps he’s the exception.
We need something recognisable to latch onto. For me, the most important thing is having some characters I can empathise with. If I can feel my way through a story, I can probably get to grips with all manner of strange things. If I can’t empathise, I struggle. This isn’t just a fantasy issue. The excess of irony and cynicism in Vanity Fair meant I didn’t engage with any of the characters in this classic novel, and did not enjoy reading it at all, for example.
In genres where it’s all about the plot and the pace, we don’t see much of the character’s inner workings. It’s not emotional plausibility that holds the book together, but the integrity of the narrative, the coherence of the plot.
It’s an ongoing balance – familiarity and surprise, originality and the reassuringly familiar, plausible and happily implausible. No two authors strike their balance in quite the same way, and I suspect no two readers yearn for quite the same balances, either.
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