Whitechapel - Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/ Lussumo Vanilla & Feed Publisher Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332595#Comment_332595 2012-05-26T06:04:25-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Vornaskotti http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=6665 I think there are two things that define Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. 1) It has the most awkward characters in ages and 2) It's the most intellectually stimulating trilogy of books I've read ...
http://blog.vornaskotti.com/2012/05/26/bad-characterization-in-scifi-of-big-ideas-who-gives-a-crap-really/

Thoughts, Whitechapel?]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332604#Comment_332604 2012-05-26T12:39:18-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 oddbill http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4272 I actually didn't find the characters to be bad. I've never understood why people think that. Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332605#Comment_332605 2012-05-26T12:59:31-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Morac http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=10266 This makes me think of something I saw over on Space-Daddy Warren's site not that long ago. SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?
SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332607#Comment_332607 2012-05-26T13:57:51-07:00 2012-05-26T13:58:23-07:00 Greasemonkey http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4625 The only good characterisation in the Mars trilogy is Mars itself. Kim Stanley Robinson puts your feet into the red dust of Mars and shows you its landscapes, but his writing style becomes drier and ... Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332614#Comment_332614 2012-05-26T18:41:06-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 256 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4827 Couldn't disagree more about Kim Stanley Robinson's characterization. Admittedly, he builds his characters in a very unhistrionic way, but it really works for me. The first person I lent the Mars ... over and having to let go of those characters.

Also, for my money, Robinson is fantastic at describing what you might call the lived experience of his characters; what it's like to see and feel the world from their perspective. I think that's a very subtle art. There's nothing in literature that makes me throw a book across a room sooner than a description of a character's way of looking at something that I can't believe has ever really gone through someone's mind.

To the broader point, I think science fiction is always going to be difficult because it has to serve two masters: It has to be good fiction, with all the demands that entails, and it has to bring in new, weird, interesting, challenging ideas. That's never been an easy proposition, but I don't think there's any particular evidence to say that it's becoming more difficult, or that fewer people are succeeding.

As the man said, 90% of everything is, was, and always will be, crap.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332745#Comment_332745 2012-05-29T00:12:08-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Kay Orchison http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=10078 I followed the link to Charlie's piece from Warren's blog, and my first thought was of KSR too. I read The Years of Rice and Salt, and most of the way through the Pacific Rim trilogy, but I couldn't ...
@256 - As to "unhistrionic" – well, yes, they are, but with KSR it extends almost to the point of sort of autism, and I say that from an informed position. My wife has Aspberger's, and KSR's books are like a universe populated by Aspies. I'm pretty far from neurotypical myself but even I can't spend too much time there.

I don't think the two positions need to be mutually exclusive. Sterling manages pretty well, for instance.

Either way, hard SF has an important social function whether or not many of us find it fun or entertaining. Art of any kind - stories, songs, paintings, anything - is a push from the aesthetic sense of one to that of many; it seeks to induce an experience. All animals from about the insect level of complexity up have an aesthetic sense - that's why sexual dimorphism works. We're a particularly social species with huge brains whose internal aesthetic experiences are often as vivid to us as our external experiences. We survive better when we cooperate. Aligning our internal experiences helps us cooperate by allowing fewer reasons to argue. Our brains contain a lot of mirror neurons that make us involuntarily imitate one another: think of how yawns or laughter are catching. Art evolved from pareidolia and related apophenias - false positives in our pattern recognition software - that propagate through this innate drive to be like each other. It has another effect, however: it improves our adaptability and therefore our resilience by allowing us to rehearse having strange experiences while in settings of relative safety. Art propagates memetically, so as long as hard SF is fully, immersively experienced by a few people who go on to reiterate the key ideas in other - perhaps more accessible - formats, then it has provided us with greater resilience. Ideas familiar from fiction can be responded to more effectively when they occur as fact. The ideas in hard SF are more likely to actually occur than the ideas in other forms of speculative fiction.

tl;dr - it doesn't matter that I kind of grew out of it and that loads of people don't "get" it at all. Hard SF is here to stay because it performs a vital modern permutation of an ancient evolutionary function.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332746#Comment_332746 2012-05-29T00:19:27-07:00 2012-05-29T00:20:59-07:00 REL http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=10796 Perhaps a greater focus on characterization would entice more people to read Science Fiction? Or perhaps that route would be revealed as the Twilight series... The best characters are those whose ... Twilight series...

The best characters are those whose motivations are revealed by their actions and, yes, I agree that on first read the characters of Red Mars drag on, but going over the book a second time reveals a wealth of humanity from all its filthy many-angled sides.

There's some research to indicate that people who speak with voices have an increased value of creativity, so perhaps those books with dull characters are written by people more entranced with reality or their own capabilities than stories which transport the reader to other worlds.

I think maybe "hard sci-fi" should be a genre and that "science fiction" should be a genre and never the two shall meet. Stranger in a Strange Land, Childhood's End, Rick Flagg, Heavy Liquid and Jack Kirby are all science fiction and each has elements of reality, yet would these works benefit from an Einsteinian reality? In each the world is filled with unique characters who surf the wave-forms of our thoughts, curling into reality, and Red Mars does so but in a different way, as it is a different genre of fiction than these others or even Neuromancer...


I'm sure a case could be argued that a greater literary component would infuse science fiction with new vitality but is it really what we want to read?]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332812#Comment_332812 2012-05-29T14:39:22-07:00 2012-05-29T14:40:43-07:00 Alan Tyson http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=1299 I think maybe "hard sci-fi" should be a genre and that "science fiction" should be a genre and never the two shall meet. I disagree, mostly because I disagree with the idea ... I think maybe "hard sci-fi" should be a genre and that "science fiction" should be a genre and never the two shall meet.

I disagree, mostly because I disagree with the idea that you have to be good at writing story, or good writing characters, or good at writing themes, and you can pick two but you have to leave the third behind and just live with that. That's entirely up to the writer and their skill at writing, nowhere in the laws of fiction that I know of does it saw you have to specialize.

The thing is, people are gonna have really different tastes for the characters they do and don't like. Just ask a bunch of Star Trek fans who their favorite bridge officer is, and you'll get a bunch of different answers. What makes an effective character, though, is if that character belongs in the story, if they have something to add to the story, whether that's a unique perspective on the story's events, the main driver of those events, or just plucky comic relief. To my mind, a bad character is someone who just takes up space in the text and never does anything.

Let's take the Star Trek thing and roll with it for a second. Star Trek is a really great example of shitty science, hackneyed plots, and more melodrama than you can shake a phaser at, but what keeps people coming back to it are its characters, characters which represent varied, and interesting, perspectives on exploration and science. Kirk is someone who uses science to his ends, and uses it well, even understands a lot of it, but is not a scientist himself. He acts on very unscientific instinct, and makes a point of the human element always needing to be present in science. Spock, on the other hand, represents the idea that science, reason, and a cool head will prevail against nearly any obstacle - he is the scientific principle given form. And then you have McCoy, who is far more of a scientist than Kirk (he's a doctor, perhaps the most practical kind of scientist there is), yet is also inherently suspicious of technology, and is even a bit of a luddite and an anachronist, though I don't think he doubts the scientific principle. McCoy is a very good stand-in for both old scientists and, I think, a lot of science fiction writers, particularly the way SF was starting to be written around the time Star Trek showed up.

Okay, so now let's take a story with good science. Red Mars gives us John Boone, the most John Glenn astronaut anyone could ever hope for, complete with political acumen; Frank Chalmers, who is kind of the opposite of John in that he's a politician first, but one who understands and uses science (a point - put John and Frank together, and you get Kirk); and Nadia Chernyeshevski, a scientist who tries to avoid politics as much as possible, wanting only to build and then keep building, but who gets swept up in the politics of science nevertheless - her decision to stay out of the conflict does not exempt her from it. Now, anyone who's read more than ten pages of Kim Stanley Robinson knows that the man has a huge fascination for how science and politics interact (heck, he wrote a whole trilogy on it, though I have to admit that I haven't read it yet). These characters being who and what they are is no mistake. They serve the story, and they serve the reader by making that story about people they can understand, even if they don't like them (for instance, I agree with everything Horiko does, but I never much liked her as a person, which is totally different from not liking her as a character).

I guess to put it another way: if someone doesn't like the characters in the Mars Trilogy, I'd say it's a good bet that they don't have a whole lot of friends who are scientists, engineers, theoreticians, mathematicians, or quibblers. For the exact same reason, if you don't really like the characters in, I dunno, Any Given Sunday, you probably don't watch a lot of football, and you certainly don't hang out with people who actually toss around a pigskin. Because the characters in the respective stories are exactly the kind of people needed to tell their stories, and tell them well.

The characters may not be all that interesting, they may not be incredibly deep or layered, but they have a place in the story, and the story would be missing something without them. They're not set pieces, they exist to say and do more than "well, Jane, as you know, according to Dr. Phlogiston's theories," and they have an outlook on the events of the story that no other character could possibly have (ideally, two characters are going to have opposing or complimentary outlooks on the same event - as most of the characters in both Star Trek and the Mars Trilogy do). That is what makes a good character.

A great example of this is the First-Contact-from-Hell novel Blindsight, by Peter Watts, which is fantastic (also, free in pdf form. Watts is a cool guy like that). It features characters who are cold, distant, prickly, damaged people. The most humane of all of them is so crammed full of technology that he hears cosmic radiation "like old jazz," one of them isn't human at all and never was, the other has possibly the most acute case of functioning PTSD ever heard of, and the main character, the only viewpoint character in fact (it's told in first person... mostly... sorta...) is missing half his brain, including the bit that allows him to empathize with other people. They are not fun people to spend a story with, there's a lot wrong with them, and don't actually know a whole lot about where they come from and who they started the story as (not even the main character). They sound like absolutely awful characters. Yet, Watts' skill as a writer is such that I was gripping the sides of my monitor when it looked like one of the character was about to die an absolutely awful, horrible death, and mouthing "shit shit SHIT SHIIIIT NO!" I cared about their well-being, I saw the story through their eyes as well as my own, and they each held up a mirror to my own preconceptions, prejudices, and assumptions. The story did this by itself as well, but the characters did most of the heavy lifting. It was great science fiction, and great characters. It was also great horror, and I'll maybe admit that, in a lot of ways, the characters were better "horror characters" than they were "science fiction characters," but since Blindsight is also a horror tale, that's pretty darn fitting.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332813#Comment_332813 2012-05-29T14:39:31-07:00 2012-05-29T14:50:06-07:00 Alan Tyson http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=1299 However. (You knew there was gonna be a however, didn't you?) One of the oldest rules in fiction is this: good characters can make a bad plot and a stinky theme enjoyable, but a great plot and ...
(You knew there was gonna be a however, didn't you?)

One of the oldest rules in fiction is this: good characters can make a bad plot and a stinky theme enjoyable, but a great plot and a soul-depth-churning theme just doesn't work if the characters are crap. Books like the latter are, to steal a simile from Patton Oswalt, like an absolutely delicious chocolate cupcake, within which is hidden a tiny, tiny nugget of dogshit.

What is a crap character? The exact opposite of what was presented above: someone who goes through the story with no insight, no observations, no effect on the story, and worst of all, the greatest sin imaginable for a writer of characters, no change. A bad character is someone who just has things happen to them as a result of the story, and even if they happen to be a central plot point of that story, they never make any conscious move to affect it, and is never really affected by it.

I wish I could give you some good examples of this phenomenon, but the fact of the matter is that these characters are pretty easy to spot early on (mostly because they tend to go on about how boring or sad their life is right from the page they are introduced on), and nothing makes me go "nope! I would rather re-read The BLDG BLOG BOOK for the eighth time than spend another second reading this crap," and then wipe the experience from my mental hard drive. In my life as a reader, I've seen these kinds of characters show up in fairy tales and morality plays a hell of a lot more often than they show up in science fiction, whether that SF is porous, squishy soft, or harder than tungsten and sharper than diamond nanotubes.

So, no, I don't think good science fiction has to have bad characters, or is even more inclined to have bad characters than any other genre. Science fiction has characters which are good at telling science fiction stories, which don't happen to be to everyone's taste. I don't particularly like the characters in Harlequin romances, but those characters must be able to plug into somebody's life experiences and be able to shed light on some story particularly well, or no one would buy the dang things, and since they are still outselling just about everything else between two covers, I'm hard pressed to instantly dismiss them all as "bad characters," just characters I don't like, probably exactly because they are characters which fit their genre, which I also don't like, so particularly well.

Maybe that's all it really comes down to: some people don't like science fiction characters. I'm willing to bet that those people who didn't like John, Frank, and Nadia, also weren't particularly fascinated by the idea of using spent fuel tanks as the building block for an interplanetary rocket, nor are they the kind of person who would put a book down in the middle of a chapter to think of the social and political consequences of genetically-engineered children. In short, they probably just don't like big idea, hard science fiction, and when asked why they don't, the characters are easy to pick on, because they don't want to look dumb by saying "I just didn't really care about how they lassoed comets in deteriorating orbits to make it rain on Mars." I'm putting a lot of words in people's mouths here, but I honestly do believe that's what's going on.

If you like SF, you're going to enjoy (and be more forgiving towards) SF's characters. As Michael Moorcock said: "learn to love and respect the genre." Of course, he also said "I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas," so maybe there's a lesson in that.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332818#Comment_332818 2012-05-29T15:39:44-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 James Cunningham http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=2925 I agree with Alan Tyson 100%. The ideas drive the story and the characters make it live. Good SF and Fantasy aren't just about the ideas, they're about how people live with them. Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332825#Comment_332825 2012-05-29T15:54:03-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Greasemonkey http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4625 I found the science in the Mars trilogy fascinating. The sequence where the first space elevator comes crashing down, the tiny thermal windmills infected with designer microbes, the soletta; I loved ... Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332843#Comment_332843 2012-05-29T17:11:55-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 256 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4827 @Alan - mega post! Going to re-read that in the morning, but I think there's a lot there that I can get behind. also hopefully by then the paint fumes in here will have dissipated and I'll be able to ...
@kay - on the aspergers thing - now that you mention it, I wonder if there's an exploration to be made of the way that we find affinity for characters who are more or less like ourselves?

@grease - interesting point about the characters not driving the plot - I think you're mostly correct in that assessment; it is, of course, Mars itself that really drives the plot. I think that's the only way you could have written a work of that scope. But I don't agree that it undermines the characters - actual people have character and real people are, after all, very often just bystanders to great events.

That might not actually make any sense. Sorry - the paint, the paint.

Also, in a sense, this comes down to a judgement that cannot be more objective than "I like it = good" and "I don't like it = bad".

ALSO, sort of an aside - if Mr Ellis were here I just know he'd be reminding us that (by their original coinage) "hard sci-fi" means "science fiction based on the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)" and "soft sci-fi" means "science fiction based on the soft sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, etc.)". This is distinct from the common usage (and the sense used mostly in this thread, I think) where "hard sci-fi" means sciency sci-fi, and everything else... is just sci-fi.

My question is: Do we have a non-colliding shorthand for these two distinctions?

Also, interestingly, by the first definition, the Mars Trilogy is very much both hard and soft sci-fi.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332845#Comment_332845 2012-05-29T17:29:45-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 oddbill http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4272 it is, of course, Mars itself that really drives the plot. The plot of all the Mars books is largely driven by the central conflict of Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne over whether to terraform Mars ... it is, of course, Mars itself that really drives the plot.

The plot of all the Mars books is largely driven by the central conflict of Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne over whether to terraform Mars or not. Every political and interpersonal conflict is driven in some way by this central character-based conflict. Mars is a landscape. The conflicts are over what we take with us as we move into the future, and what we lose by moving there. The whole three books are a dense web of character interactions. The plot is these character interactions.

Alan did a good job above noting the many very well drawn characters in these books. They are all, every single major character, scientists. And not just any scientists, but ones who survived a very difficult global competition for 100 seats to the first permanent Mars colony. The way they think, interact with each other and argue tenaciously over long spans of time with their work reads very, very true to me.

(As a side note - there is absolutely no point in getting into a discussion about what the terms Science Fiction, Sci Fi and Hard Sci Fi mean. That way lies madness.)]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332847#Comment_332847 2012-05-29T17:46:13-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Alan Tyson http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=1299 Reply to a side note: I'm a big fan of just roping science fiction (from Gattacca to Battlestar Galactica), fantasy (dark, high, realist hilarious, and everything in between), alternate history, ... Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=332852#Comment_332852 2012-05-29T18:30:18-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 D.J. http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=3196 Just a thought I'm going to leave here: Story has to be driven by characters, but events can come from anywhere. However, a series of events cannot constitute a story, because for stories you need ...
Story has to be driven by characters, but events can come from anywhere. However, a series of events cannot constitute a story, because for stories you need characters.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334114#Comment_334114 2012-06-12T05:03:18-07:00 2012-06-12T05:04:03-07:00 Vornaskotti http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=6665 @Alan Heh - most of my friends are scientists, researchers, IT-geeks or some such, and I myself am a computational linguist and I've done research for living at one point :) Also, amongst the ...
Heh - most of my friends are scientists, researchers, IT-geeks or some such, and I myself am a computational linguist and I've done research for living at one point :) Also, amongst the pals who've bitched about the Mars characters being one dimensional are... hmm, a mathematician, a biologist and if memory serves, a cosmologist :) So, at least here your bet went way off.

I thought that the characters in the Mars trilogy were pretty much "theoretical viewpoints on legs" and even in their character progression and change they were almost caricatures at times. The thing is, I didn't really mind it since the central character of the books was the Mars as a setting and a social environment, not the characters themselves who were just vehicles to nudge the story onward. That's really the whole point of the blog post I wrote - I got so tired of people bashing characterization in books where it's not really that relevant. A good hard sci-fi story doesn't need to have super deep and nuanced characters if the main point is to tell a story that's larger than humans, or present a great concept or a setting.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334195#Comment_334195 2012-06-13T06:50:14-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Foamhead http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=8779 @ Kay:and KSR's books are like a universe populated by Aspies.It's years since I read them but I think your point might be one of the main reasons I enjoyed the books as much as I did - not simply ... and KSR's books are like a universe populated by Aspies.It's years since I read them but I think your point might be one of the main reasons I enjoyed the books as much as I did - not simply because I'm aspie, too, but that you learn just enough to get an idea why-who-did-what and rarely at the expense of the story moving forward. Plus I'm a sucker for the endless scientific detail. Hate to admit it here but I'm definitely in the camp who prefer events over people; like the characters are essentially passive, albeit subjective, lenses we see their world through.

@256:
I wonder if there's an exploration to be made of the way that we find affinity for characters who are more or less like ourselves?
Definitely maybe. I've always felt that the majority of people are at the mercy of events which they have no interest in and little control over and it's how they react to/cope/deal with these things that's always interested me. Character development's all well and good, just so long as it has a point and contributes to moving the narrative along somehow. And I have a pretty low tolerance if I think emotional dialogue, thoughts, feelings or interactions drag on and, for me, needlessly distracts attention away from where it should be going. Additionally, I think sometimes over-indulgence in describing what a character's back-story or emotional state is can border on making the reader a bit lazy. As limited (or so-wrong-it's-out-of-the-ballpark) my interpretation of all that might be, trying to intuit their motivations and subsequent feelings is part of the mindscape I create for myself when I read.

So, to summarise: the reader is a passenger being carried by an unknowing mule who's travelling from A to B. Hopefully, the journey will include lots of original, breathtaking, mind-blowing ideas as well as a few twists, turns, ups, downs, highs and lows along the way. But if the mule starts braying too much, it spoils the trip. Yeah. I just likened the totality of human emotional expression to a noisy donkey. Sorry.

Anyway, you both made really good points which I've never realised or considered till now and it'll be interesting to go back and re-read them with those perspectives on board.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334344#Comment_334344 2012-06-15T09:27:38-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Finagle http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=5254 Some of my favorite works are those of Olaf Stapledon - /Last and First Men/, /Star Maker/. Characterization wasn't really the point, and in that context I don't care. But doing that sort of ...
It does seem as if the needle has swung almost entirely the other way in recent cinema - I'm thinking of the recent trend in movies like /Cloverfield/ or /Paranormal Events/ to only ever show the reactions of the characters, telling the whole story through their eyes without any god's eye narration or big reveals.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334616#Comment_334616 2012-06-19T13:23:19-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 johnjones http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=1052 It does seem as if the needle has swung almost entirely the other way in recent cinema - I'm thinking of the recent trend in movies like /Cloverfield/ or /Paranormal Events/ to only ever show the ...
It does seem as if the needle has swung almost entirely the other way in recent cinema - I'm thinking of the recent trend in movies like /Cloverfield/ or /Paranormal Events/ to only ever show the reactions of the characters, telling the whole story through their eyes without any god's eye narration or big reveals.

Which is one reason I really don't like the "found footage" genre. Honestly, Chronicle would've been so much better if the last act had been shot god's eye style.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334668#Comment_334668 2012-06-20T04:10:05-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Scrymgeour http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4141 interesting that in non genre-fiction the characterisation doesn't matter so much, on evelyn waugh "His first two novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, comically reflect a society of utter ... He always said that style and plot were more important than characterisation. and this "you can only leave God out [of fiction] by making your characters pure abstractions",]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=334766#Comment_334766 2012-06-21T07:57:31-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 city creed http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4530 Waugh was nonetheless a dab hand at characterisation by stealth. A whole Gothic world had come to grief … there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the ...
A whole Gothic world had come to grief … there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorn had fled.


-- The single, solitary glimpse into the protagonist's interior world offered in the entirety of /A Handful of Dust/. A head full of absent unicorns.
For the rest of the book, Tony Last's character is fleshed out only through his actions and interactions and the reported perceptions of others. The story is showing, not telling, how this person is in the context of their world. Showing in this way leaves an interiority vacuum that a reader fills with their own projections of the character's self. Tony Last could be almost anyone - Tony Last could be you. The fact that Waugh switches to telling us what's in his mind only once in the story, and does so to reveal Tony's failed, pitiful fantasy world, is no accident I think.

I loved /Red Mars/ a lot on first reading for all the spectacle-of-the-imagination type reasons given by others above. The scale of it, the attention to world-building detail, the earnest political intrigues, the epic science love. I do think it suffers a little from telling rather than showing when it comes to characterisation though. Particularly with Maya, who I never really felt at home with. There is a great deal of "it seemed to her that..." and "she found herself thinking..." and the like. I don't know, it works to keep the plot moving along but for me it's like the people are behind a pane of glass. It's the writer's voice as expositional deus ex machina and it gets in the way of real identification with the characters. I think Waugh understood how to negotiate this paradox better than Robinson does but that's in no way a slight on Robinson, whose stories I still totally dig - /The Years Of Rice And Salt/ is a doozy - just for different reasons.

The somewhat passive-aggressive suggestion by Alan above, that if you don't like the characters in the Mars Trilogy you are a cleverness-hating anti-intellectual with pigshit between your toes, a bloody pitchfork and ruinous dental health (admittedly, I'm paraphrasing) seems a little unfair. I have spent time with brain-using individuals I didn't afterwards lynch, I recognise the high-flying scientist personality traits in the Mars characters as realistic and apposite, even when they're being obnoxious. I just don't really care about any of them - the individuals I mean. Of course I'm rooting for the colony as a whole - the idea of a Mars colony and all its potentials. But I feel much more for Tony Last than any one of them even though it's pretty much impossible to like or respect him.

Despite his rank impotence, his embodiment of atavistic privilege, his desperate pretences and his spineless submissions, I'd got to know Tony and started to understand him just from the shape of the impressions he leaves in his world. The single glimpse into his mind quoted at top is almost superfluous in terms of characterisation. The tragedy of his existence is already evident. He's not realistic, in fact he's such a stylized cliche that a lot of his behaviour is "basically unbelievable". The thing is, it doesn't matter. His pain is believable, his misery is utterly real. The emotional core of the story is solid and I think I'd argue that's primarily because Waugh leaves the modelling of Last's interior world up to the reader rather than trying to spell it all out explicitly. One recent example of something similar being done very well is /Drive/ I reckon.

So to drag it back to topic; when your hypothetical interlocutor gives the Mars Trilogy as an example of sketchy characterisation in the SF of big ideas... she might be on to something. Robinson's Martians are a perfect collection of exquisitely painted models and, believability to one side for a moment, that makes them somehow less accessible to empathy. By contrast, near-blank slates like Tony Last or Gosling's Driver are free to command our identification, even in their worst moments.

It's not the whole story, there's lots of good writers who use interiority effectively for sympathetic characterisation.
It's just about showing, not telling.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=335566#Comment_335566 2012-07-02T05:17:19-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Foamhead http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=8779 Not so much about Bad Characterization but Ideas (or lack of them) in general... The Two Ways Science Fiction Is Slowly Destroying ItselfScience fiction is in trouble and it’s not a lack of ...
The Two Ways Science Fiction Is Slowly Destroying Itself
Science fiction is in trouble and it’s not a lack of presence. Science fiction fans complain endlessly about the lack of sci-fi on television, but the truth is that there’s plenty of science fiction on television. There’s plenty of science fiction everywhere. It’s just the wrong kind.

Here’s a list of the science fiction movies being released through the rest of this year. See if you can spot a pattern…
Battleship
Men in Black III
Chernobyl Diaries
Piranha 3DD
Prometheus
Safety Not Guaranteed
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World
Total Recall
Resident Evil: Retribution
Dredd
Looper
]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=335567#Comment_335567 2012-07-02T05:36:15-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Oxbrow http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=894 Prometheus has definitely received complaints about characterisation... Prometheus has definitely received complaints about characterisation...]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=339947#Comment_339947 2012-09-10T18:44:07-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 MartinSheen http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=9063 I agree that the characterisation in Red Mars was pretty bad... Tho I still did find the book extremely interesting and fun to read. However without decent characters it felt a lot more like I was ... However without decent characters it felt a lot more like I was reading an interesting textbook rather than a novel...

It didn't bother me too much because as far as I knew the genre of novel was 'future history'... which I thought of as fiction that was designed to read like non-fiction. As I was reading the book I could see how it fit what (I was coming to realise) this genre was all about.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=339951#Comment_339951 2012-09-10T19:36:23-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 snafu http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4347 It's tough to separate character from story. It happens all the time, especially is SF which is about ideas, but it shouldn't. The best kind of story rises from character. I've been in the story ...
Characters and characterization should reflect themes and elements of the story. That's serious writing. Say all you want about Twilight, but she new what she was doing. There's a reason why those books sold like they did. The more closely the characters are tied to the themes and events of the story, the more thoroughly they live them, the more intimate the experience is going to be for the reader. We live in that world, whether a completely imagined sic-fi world or the house down the street, through the characters. James Cameron's Avatar is crap sic-fi. The characters are incredibly relatable. We see an amazing world through their eyes. The result is the highest grossing film ever.

This is something that Robert Heinlien did better that anyone else and why his novels routinely crossed over. Amazing characters in fantastic situations that drove the story. It's something that's missing from a lot of Science fiction, especially hard sf. The old guard, Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, understood. They came up through the ranks of short story and learned how to build character and story from maximum impact in a short work. Much of the most recent science fiction i've seen lately has been about huge ideas at the expense of character or puffy melodrama, which account for most of everything anyway. I'd love to see great story and character wrapped up in a beautiful package of big ideas for a change.

Uncle Warren does this. It's one of the reasons I've followed his work for years.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=340109#Comment_340109 2012-09-13T14:54:45-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 MartinSheen http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=9063 other than the Mars trilogy and the Ringworld books, what are some good examples of HARD sci fi? Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=340145#Comment_340145 2012-09-13T19:57:18-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Greasemonkey http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4625 Pretty much everything by Stephen Baxter. Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=340150#Comment_340150 2012-09-13T21:08:59-07:00 2012-09-13T21:23:17-07:00 oddbill http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=4272 I will go to my grave defending the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars books as containing great characters. All I ever hear as far as the actual substance of complaints about the characters in those books is ...
I found them to be intreaguing, well written, speaking in different, well observed voices, having disparate opinions that grew out of their individual natures, acting on the world in which they are portrayed in a very realistic manner. What was the fault in their portrayal, why do people think they were sub-par?

I'll also come out swinging against Robert Heinlein. He wrote compelling stories, but really he only has 4 characters that he uses over and over again ad nauseum. 1) The practcal libertarian hero, 2) the practical heroine who is casual with sex, 3) the elderly sex obsessed libertarian curmudgeon, 4) anyone else, universally portrayed as an ignorant uptight yokel.

Name a Heinlein character that doesn't fit one of those molds. Name one who doesn't talk like a Heinlein ideological essay.

Maybe you'll say Podkayne, but I'd place her in the Practical Hero category just because she was too young for Heinlein to not feel squicky about making her casual about sex.

These are not characters, they are colorful, fun puppet mouthpieces.

Robinson writes real characters, with full lives, motivations, conflicting opinions (that often don't reflect the author's own, but are still well thought out) and differing degrees of competance at the tasks they set themselves.

Heinlien mostly writes adventures or polemics. Robinson writes novels.

EDITED TO ADD:

Arguing the definition of Hard SciFi is like parsing the theological legitimacy of all the protestant splinter sects. I have no problem with what anyone else defines as Hard Science Fiction. These are some books/authors that I feel fit the definition:

Verne Vinge: anything by him. Particularly liked A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.

Frank Herbert: you could argue, but I feel the sciences he was fictionalizing was sociology and politics, not physics or biology.

Gregory Benford: Anything by him.

Greg Bear: Anything by him. Forge of God and Anvil of Stars are pretty great.

John Ford: specifically the novel Growing Up Weightless, which is about role-playing teenagers on a moon colony.

Paolo Bacagalupi: The Windup Girl

Ian MacDonald: anything by him.

Neal Stephenson: Anathem. His other science fictiony books are more punk than hard, but they probably all sort of qualify.

Dan Simmons: The Hyperion Cantos

Michael Flynn: The Wreck of the River of Stars (one of my favorite books).

Thats a bunch I like. There are lots more. I'd argue you couldn't go wrong dipping into any of these.]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=340470#Comment_340470 2012-09-18T03:04:27-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 MartinSheen http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=9063 @Oddbill Oh the Hyperion Cantos is 'hard' sci-fi? I hadn't realised this. I ordered Hyperion last week it should be here soon. I think I'll order Ringworld too... from what I can gather from ...
Oh the Hyperion Cantos is 'hard' sci-fi?
I hadn't realised this. I ordered Hyperion last week it should be here soon.

I think I'll order Ringworld too... from what I can gather from skimming the net it seems this series fits into the genre well.

Hopefully these books don't feel like a chore to read]]> Bad Characterization in The Scifi of Big Ideas – Who Gives A Crap, Really? http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10680&Focus=340472#Comment_340472 2012-09-18T03:11:11-07:00 2013-05-23T08:37:28-07:00 Steve Toase http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=10253 How about the Ian M Banks books?