A thought about SF&F and Academe

[sraun]

There was a panel at Minicon some years ago - IIRC, the title was
something like "Science Fiction and Fantasy: Instantiating the
Metaphor". Someone (maybe one of the panelists?) raised an interesting
point - a number of things that are exclusively metaphorical in
mainstream fiction can easily be literal truths in SF&F. (For example,
my wife described a character as a silk-dressed cobra - the first
question asked about the passage was 'is she a snake or a human?')

Since there is that problem, the metaphors, similes, and similar
constructs in SF&F are either absent, or much larger or more
subtle. From what I can tell, this drives the academic nuts - part of
their world-view is that they provide the explanation of what the
author was saying by pointing out all these constructs, and explaining
what they mean. And in SF&F it's (mostly) just not there! The
whole story (or big blocks of it) may have meaning or illumination
outside the story proper, but it's not there at the nit-picky detail
level that academics love.

Comments

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Hah. Point 'em at Chip Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw if you can find a copy. Chip does just that sort of analysis of the first sentence in Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon. You can just see the typical academic following Dr Delaney through the first two paragraphs of the deconstruction (I'm paraphrasing, mind, it's been twenty years since I've seen a copy):

"The" ... okay, definite article indicating that it is this object in front of us rather than some other object elsewhere, mumble, mumble ...

"The door" ... Right, obviously this is an object of the class door, since it's the subject of the sentence we're going to see it open or perhaps shut in some manner, mumble, mumble, this will be on the test, I'm so sure ...

"The door dilated." WTF???