recent but strange

[marycatelli]

One thing that happens with reading lots of primary sources and getting into worlds unlike your own is that it gives you bright ideas for story.

Then it gives you a conundrum on how to convince your readers of the idea.


Sage souls have said that the difficulty with a SF or fantasy mystery is that in the mystery you are looking for clues, things that are not as they should be, whereas in SF or fantasy, there is the little matter of conveying what they should be before you get to the clues that are not what they ought to be.  Which is merely a specific instance of the general problem.

It's not even a matter of distance.  Distance may even help.  People can guess that a world with dragons and unicorns might have other peculiarities.

American fiction in the early twentieth century, for instance, would depict a woman having spent a year at college.  This is treated in one story as a mark of extreme favoritism; all her sisters just got to go to the teachers' school for the summer.  In another story, children who thought little of their mother were tartly reminded by their aunt that she had gotten a year of college education, which makes the children look at her with renewed respect.

It's not universal, yet, but I don't think a year of college, by itself, would convey such impressions to any readers nowadays, even in a period piece except for the handful who would know how much college has grown since then.  So it would be a matter to convey this without letting the characters talk implausibly about something they know already, and fast enough for the reader to know before needing the knowledge.

The delights of a writer's life.

Comments

[john-j-enright.livejournal.com]

That's a good example. My mother had a year of college. She dropped out and went to art school instead, but I always thought of her as having gotten in, and found it wanting.

[marycatelli]

And that was not an era in which getting in -- somewhere -- could be taken for granted.