Do you guys need an outlet for your need for the mysterious when cold hard rational thought gets too much, or something? Anyway, rationalist fiction does not have to be a rationalist fantasy or a rationalist science fiction. No magic, no vampires, no space aliens, no friendly pink immortal horses, imagine that.
Plenty of fan fiction possibilities, too. 50 shades of rationality, fighting pride and prejudice, crime and punishment: tales of a buggy mind, war and peace: System 1 vs System 2...
Do you guys need an outlet for your need for the mysterious when cold hard rational thought gets too much, or something?
For many of us, I don’t think rational thought feels cold and hard at all. To me, the appeal of fantasy isn’t that it conveys a sense of the mysterious (it usually doesn’t,) but that if it’s done well, it provides both novelty and an effective way to create narratives which are high-stakes in a way that it’s hard to pull off in realistic fiction without coming off as implausible.
Of course, as you consume more works, it becomes harder to find novelty, so I don’t read nearly as much fantasy these days as I used to.
Of course, as you consume more works, it becomes harder to find novelty, so I don’t read nearly as much fantasy these days as I used to.
I’m probably more familiar with contemporary fantasy than any other genre, but recently I’ve largely stopped reading it in favor of historical genre works and Earthfic. I don’t think a lack of novelty is why I’ve been slowing down, though.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
I think this is a serious obstacle to writing rational fantasy that’s recognizable as such. MoR seems to a large extent to have been written around the problem, which is one of the reasons it works, but I wouldn’t be interested in retreading that ground exactly.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
Well, working this out properly would probably take a top-level post.
To oversimplify, though, most of the common fantasy plot devices are, or at some point were, intended to be understood not only as entertainment but as statements about ethics: you can’t make your protagonist a Chosen One, for example, without implying that there’s someone or something doing the choosing, and that this is in some sense how things are supposed to work. Because of the history of the genre or plot needs or romantic attitudes toward fantasy settings, these implications can end up being rather odd.
This isn’t a new complaint, of course; every time you hear someone complaining about how (for example) orcs in Lord of the Rings can plausibly be read as stand-ins for Zulu hordes out of the British colonial zeitgeist, you’re hearing a variation on it. But readings like that are really the least of my worries. I’m more concerned with what fantasy says about agency: what interests you can ethically pursue, and how and under what circumstances you can ethically pursue them. Suffice it to say that your options within your average fantasy universe are very limited.
It’s hard to get away from this problem within the conventions of modern fantasy, although some modern writers have started playing with it in various ways. Older fantasy doesn’t always work the same way, though; Fritz Leiber’s books, for example, seem to inherit more from picaresque than fairytale conventions.
Good idea… especially given that the fact that the readers usually aren’t an immortal vampire / pony / wizard makes it relatively complicated to emulate the protagonists.
Not to speak of the fact that much of the fictional rationalist awesomeness comes from applying existing stuff (common sense / science) in a setting where it’s not expected to be applied. (See Harry’s Gringotts money pump or Missy’s sciencey superpowers). It’s hard to extrapolate that to our world...
Counterexample: Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother & Homeland. Although not really rationalist, they are full of things you can actually do in the real world (from programming and plausible deniability crypto to Burning Man).
Or Bella’s notebooks. (anyone else here who actually started text files with “what do I want” and having felt at least marginally more awesome as a consequence?)
Well, for starters, Austen was mainly concerned with making good decisions about whom to marry, which for women of her time, place and class was by far the most important thing to worry about ever—their husbands all but owned them, and divorce was punishable by shunning. If there was an 80,000 Hours for young ladies in Regency England, it would have been called “400,000 hours” or maybe “Literally the Rest of your Life or Until the Bastard Dies,” and Jane Austen would have been its founder. People who think Austen wrote romance novels are badly misreading her: in Sense and Sensibility she mercilessly punishes Marianne for following her heart when her heart was stupid, and in Persuasion she vindicates Anne’s hard choice to turn down a poor man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend. These books are about winning.
But more than identifying the right problem, Austen actually is quite a keen observer of cognitive biases. She didn’t call them that, of course, since they technically hadn’t been named yet, but Emma is basically about confirmation bias—“She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it,”—and the central conflict in Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth’s need to change her mind about Darcy at the cost of appearing inconsistent to her friends and family. Austen isn’t interested in stupid or wicked characters, but in intelligent, well-meaning people who make bad decisions for predictable, preventable reasons. There are more examples (I seem to recall a nice planning fallacy in S&S) but I don’t want to spend too much time digging up quotes right now.
Would you write a Sequence for Main on “Jane Austen: Rationalist”? Sure sounds better than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. Say, a series of 6 posts analyzing her classic novels the way you did in this comment, in more detail, with quotes, links and references?
I can see a world of good that could do:
Show historical context of some of the ideas of instrumental rationality
Break the stereotype that the majority of LWers are loser geeks who only read SF/F, and mostly fanfic, to begin with
Draw attention of the forum that some classic “earthfic” can be a worthwhile reading
Introduce the rationalist ideas to the new and mostly female crowd of Jane Austen afictionados
Contrast it with the false rationality of the straw vulcan trope
If anyone else wants me to I’ll probably have time to put something together next month (I’d need to reread the books). I’m not sure there’s enough material for a whole sequence though. I don’t remember Mansfield Park as very promising, and once you’ve said “generalizing from fictional evidence” you’re probably pretty much done with Northanger Abbey.
I certainly hope so. At least mine did. At 15 I was mostly interested in hard scifi. If it had spaceships and time-travel, I was sold. Maybe an occasional WWII novel. Though I recall liking short humorous stories, not overtaxing my attention span. I did not like fantasy at all. Tolkien did nothing for me. These days I’m very choosy about hard scifi (maybe because of the slow and painful deterioration of the Honor Harrington series), I no longer read war sagas, I actually like fantasy (that started with The Song of Ice and Fire), and I sometimes enjoy the girly touchy-feely fiction.
I assume that as people grow up and mature, their reading preferences follow suit. If you enjoy the exact same stuff at 30 as you did at 15, you ought to have a good look at your social and emotional development issues.
Sorry, perhaps I should rephrase that: do you actually think people’s preferences change away from speculative fiction with age?
You mention liking fantasy now, and disliking it when you were fifteen; since magic, vampires, and friendly pink immortal horses (but not space aliens) are solidly in the fantasy department, aren’t you a counterexample to your own claim? Or have I completely misparsed your comments?
do you actually think people’s preferences change away from speculative fiction with age
I imagine that it depends on the person in question and can go either way. Clearly many people who like fairy tales as children do not enjoy them as much as adults. Some of them may switch to a more adult-oriented speculative fiction, while others stick with “earthfic”.
I didn’t know that Earthfic was a thing. Apparently neither does Google, since the top hit is to the Alicorn’s story of the same name. The top hit for “earth fic” is not very helpful, either.
It’s not any more derogatory than ‘fanfic’. Which is to say, it’s a bit derogatory if you think it’s lazy of the author not to have bothered to create his own universe to write a story in.
Hell, it’s not even just non-nerdish fiction. This “cluster of brains” has a pretty narrow definition of “nerdish fiction” as well.
The thin slice of nerd culture that’s actually observed and celebrated here has some serious issues with subtlety, context and communication not on their terms. It’s funny; there are lots of nerd-friendly, genre-obsessed literary circles but I never see mystery or horror fans give themselves these sorts of airs, except for that thin slice for whom only Lovecraft and perhaps his closest contemporaries are of any interest in an otherwise SF/F-dominated palate.
(And it’s not like the author of that piece is a genre/fandom outsider confident in her own superiority over the anoraks—look at the descriptions of some of her books; those premises are inherently fantastical, with as much weird interesting fanciful shit as anything popular here, and they’re explored in detail with lots of layers of both direct and subtle exploration—and she can actually fucking write.)
Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will be along to chastise us about opportunity cost, or other wordy rationalizations for why they don’t care which basically boil down to “I d’wanna.”
I would rather claim that contemporary Earthfic is a literary wasteland. Even shminux seems to implicitly agree, notice that the only one of his examples from the last 100 years started out as fanfiction to a fantasy novel.
This is not due to any inherent limitations of Earthfic but due to certain political/cultural trends (the same ones responsible for the ugliness of modern art) over the past century.
I was at a science fiction convention today where the following exchange (paraphrased) took place:
“In the future, as humanity expands out into the stars, there will be all these different areas and domains with different social norms, so when a person goes from one to another they will have to learn what is allowed there.”
″… you know, we have that now, it’s called nations.”
Sometimes fans forget just how much alienness there is to be had on Earth.
(And in any event, Sturgeon’s Law can be expected to apply to earthfic just as much as to sf.)
Do you guys need an outlet for your need for the mysterious when cold hard rational thought gets too much, or something? Anyway, rationalist fiction does not have to be a rationalist fantasy or a rationalist science fiction. No magic, no vampires, no space aliens, no friendly pink immortal horses, imagine that.
Plenty of fan fiction possibilities, too. 50 shades of rationality, fighting pride and prejudice, crime and punishment: tales of a buggy mind, war and peace: System 1 vs System 2...
Sure, for a real challenge, try rationalist fanfic of Ulysses, Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Things Fall Apart.
For many of us, I don’t think rational thought feels cold and hard at all. To me, the appeal of fantasy isn’t that it conveys a sense of the mysterious (it usually doesn’t,) but that if it’s done well, it provides both novelty and an effective way to create narratives which are high-stakes in a way that it’s hard to pull off in realistic fiction without coming off as implausible.
Of course, as you consume more works, it becomes harder to find novelty, so I don’t read nearly as much fantasy these days as I used to.
I’m probably more familiar with contemporary fantasy than any other genre, but recently I’ve largely stopped reading it in favor of historical genre works and Earthfic. I don’t think a lack of novelty is why I’ve been slowing down, though.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
I think this is a serious obstacle to writing rational fantasy that’s recognizable as such. MoR seems to a large extent to have been written around the problem, which is one of the reasons it works, but I wouldn’t be interested in retreading that ground exactly.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.
Care to elaborate on that?
Well, working this out properly would probably take a top-level post.
To oversimplify, though, most of the common fantasy plot devices are, or at some point were, intended to be understood not only as entertainment but as statements about ethics: you can’t make your protagonist a Chosen One, for example, without implying that there’s someone or something doing the choosing, and that this is in some sense how things are supposed to work. Because of the history of the genre or plot needs or romantic attitudes toward fantasy settings, these implications can end up being rather odd.
This isn’t a new complaint, of course; every time you hear someone complaining about how (for example) orcs in Lord of the Rings can plausibly be read as stand-ins for Zulu hordes out of the British colonial zeitgeist, you’re hearing a variation on it. But readings like that are really the least of my worries. I’m more concerned with what fantasy says about agency: what interests you can ethically pursue, and how and under what circumstances you can ethically pursue them. Suffice it to say that your options within your average fantasy universe are very limited.
It’s hard to get away from this problem within the conventions of modern fantasy, although some modern writers have started playing with it in various ways. Older fantasy doesn’t always work the same way, though; Fritz Leiber’s books, for example, seem to inherit more from picaresque than fairytale conventions.
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That’s compressed aggressively enough that I’m not sure I’m parsing it right. Would you mind rephrasing in more than 144 characters?
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No ponies or friendship? Hard to imagine, indeed. :|
Good idea… especially given that the fact that the readers usually aren’t an immortal vampire / pony / wizard makes it relatively complicated to emulate the protagonists.
Not to speak of the fact that much of the fictional rationalist awesomeness comes from applying existing stuff (common sense / science) in a setting where it’s not expected to be applied. (See Harry’s Gringotts money pump or Missy’s sciencey superpowers). It’s hard to extrapolate that to our world...
Counterexample: Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother & Homeland. Although not really rationalist, they are full of things you can actually do in the real world (from programming and plausible deniability crypto to Burning Man).
Or Bella’s notebooks. (anyone else here who actually started text files with “what do I want” and having felt at least marginally more awesome as a consequence?)
Jane Austen is kind of already “rationalist fiction”.
Feel free to elaborate.
Well, for starters, Austen was mainly concerned with making good decisions about whom to marry, which for women of her time, place and class was by far the most important thing to worry about ever—their husbands all but owned them, and divorce was punishable by shunning. If there was an 80,000 Hours for young ladies in Regency England, it would have been called “400,000 hours” or maybe “Literally the Rest of your Life or Until the Bastard Dies,” and Jane Austen would have been its founder. People who think Austen wrote romance novels are badly misreading her: in Sense and Sensibility she mercilessly punishes Marianne for following her heart when her heart was stupid, and in Persuasion she vindicates Anne’s hard choice to turn down a poor man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend. These books are about winning.
But more than identifying the right problem, Austen actually is quite a keen observer of cognitive biases. She didn’t call them that, of course, since they technically hadn’t been named yet, but Emma is basically about confirmation bias—“She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it,”—and the central conflict in Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth’s need to change her mind about Darcy at the cost of appearing inconsistent to her friends and family. Austen isn’t interested in stupid or wicked characters, but in intelligent, well-meaning people who make bad decisions for predictable, preventable reasons. There are more examples (I seem to recall a nice planning fallacy in S&S) but I don’t want to spend too much time digging up quotes right now.
Wow, I never thought of it like this!
Would you write a Sequence for Main on “Jane Austen: Rationalist”? Sure sounds better than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. Say, a series of 6 posts analyzing her classic novels the way you did in this comment, in more detail, with quotes, links and references?
I can see a world of good that could do:
Show historical context of some of the ideas of instrumental rationality
Break the stereotype that the majority of LWers are loser geeks who only read SF/F, and mostly fanfic, to begin with
Draw attention of the forum that some classic “earthfic” can be a worthwhile reading
Introduce the rationalist ideas to the new and mostly female crowd of Jane Austen afictionados
Contrast it with the false rationality of the straw vulcan trope
If anyone else wants me to I’ll probably have time to put something together next month (I’d need to reread the books). I’m not sure there’s enough material for a whole sequence though. I don’t remember Mansfield Park as very promising, and once you’ve said “generalizing from fictional evidence” you’re probably pretty much done with Northanger Abbey.
Maybe a single Discussion post then, on the book of your choice, to gauge interest?
Sounds dull.
I thought so, too, when I was 15.
Having trouble parsing your comment. Do you actually think this sort of preference changes with age?
I certainly hope so. At least mine did. At 15 I was mostly interested in hard scifi. If it had spaceships and time-travel, I was sold. Maybe an occasional WWII novel. Though I recall liking short humorous stories, not overtaxing my attention span. I did not like fantasy at all. Tolkien did nothing for me. These days I’m very choosy about hard scifi (maybe because of the slow and painful deterioration of the Honor Harrington series), I no longer read war sagas, I actually like fantasy (that started with The Song of Ice and Fire), and I sometimes enjoy the girly touchy-feely fiction.
I assume that as people grow up and mature, their reading preferences follow suit. If you enjoy the exact same stuff at 30 as you did at 15, you ought to have a good look at your social and emotional development issues.
Sorry, perhaps I should rephrase that: do you actually think people’s preferences change away from speculative fiction with age?
You mention liking fantasy now, and disliking it when you were fifteen; since magic, vampires, and friendly pink immortal horses (but not space aliens) are solidly in the fantasy department, aren’t you a counterexample to your own claim? Or have I completely misparsed your comments?
I imagine that it depends on the person in question and can go either way. Clearly many people who like fairy tales as children do not enjoy them as much as adults. Some of them may switch to a more adult-oriented speculative fiction, while others stick with “earthfic”.
Ah, I get you.
I don’t read Earthfic, it’s a literary wasteland.
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Elves.
I didn’t know that Earthfic was a thing. Apparently neither does Google, since the top hit is to the Alicorn’s story of the same name. The top hit for “earth fic” is not very helpful, either.
He’s casting aspersions on all literature that is not to his taste. “Earthfic” as a derogatory term for non-SF/F stuff.
It’s not any more derogatory than ‘fanfic’. Which is to say, it’s a bit derogatory if you think it’s lazy of the author not to have bothered to create his own universe to write a story in.
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Hell, it’s not even just non-nerdish fiction. This “cluster of brains” has a pretty narrow definition of “nerdish fiction” as well.
The thin slice of nerd culture that’s actually observed and celebrated here has some serious issues with subtlety, context and communication not on their terms. It’s funny; there are lots of nerd-friendly, genre-obsessed literary circles but I never see mystery or horror fans give themselves these sorts of airs, except for that thin slice for whom only Lovecraft and perhaps his closest contemporaries are of any interest in an otherwise SF/F-dominated palate.
(And it’s not like the author of that piece is a genre/fandom outsider confident in her own superiority over the anoraks—look at the descriptions of some of her books; those premises are inherently fantastical, with as much weird interesting fanciful shit as anything popular here, and they’re explored in detail with lots of layers of both direct and subtle exploration—and she can actually fucking write.)
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Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will be along to chastise us about opportunity cost, or other wordy rationalizations for why they don’t care which basically boil down to “I d’wanna.”
I’m only going to point out that you really managed to put on some airs while criticizing others for putting on airs.
It’s obviously Alicorn’s term in that very story that Eliezer is referring to...
I would rather claim that contemporary Earthfic is a literary wasteland. Even shminux seems to implicitly agree, notice that the only one of his examples from the last 100 years started out as fanfiction to a fantasy novel.
This is not due to any inherent limitations of Earthfic but due to certain political/cultural trends (the same ones responsible for the ugliness of modern art) over the past century.
I was at a science fiction convention today where the following exchange (paraphrased) took place:
Sometimes fans forget just how much alienness there is to be had on Earth.
(And in any event, Sturgeon’s Law can be expected to apply to earthfic just as much as to sf.)
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