Love this post! I think about the screaming / necessity / waistcoats problem a lot when considering what kinds of fiction sticks with me vs. does not over time. Game of Thrones (books) is a good example for me: I vaguely remember that there are a lot of betrayals, people being jerks to one another, cringey sex scenes. But I don't remember what the Starks like to eat for breakfast or what the Lannisters do in my spare time. The story sticks in my mind like a giant bundle of screaming without much context to it.
Contrast with something like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which tells an epic story while still making room for Alistair's fashion choices or the drug habits of 24th-century Berliners. The epic bits of Shadowrun: Dragonfall hit especially hard for me, just as you write, because I know wha the characters are like outside of their epic lives.
Breath of the Wild is another example (can you tell I've been gaming a lot during the pandemic ;)) -- it is a gigantic world with an epic story, as every Zelda game; but the thing that makes it stick so clearly in my mind are the tiny, heartfelt details you get when you come to a stables or talk to a random NPC. The flashbacks in the game balance this very nicely as well -- you get a sense of the Epic Backstory but also the very personal tale of Link and Zelda literally just hanging out in meadows and awkwardly flirting with each other.
I love hearing about the Athena Club device and should check it out! I for one would be happy to see a revival of the more "slow" kind of 19th century literature that the series seems to echo. I feel the best story is like a labyrinth, or at least a hint of a labyrinth, in a Borges-sense: yes, to capture the reader's attention, you want the focus on the High Octane Action / Feelings / Drama as much of the time as possible, but the reader (or player, etc.) should come away with a feeling that the High Octane stuff is just one of many branching paths, and that others are similarly fascinating. And in order for the paths to be fascinating, they should also be believable: the audience should feel that they could just end down one of them if they were running late for breakfast and accidentally took a wrong turn, or finally got up the courage to talk to that handsome merchant at the weekend market they've seen week after week.
My favorite Breath of the Wild memory is of Link and Zelda having a wistful little conversation after a slow pan over a battlefield of, if I remember correctly, dead Lynels. That marriage of epic context to tight emotional work really speaks to me--no part of the world is disconnected from the rest.
I like your notion of book-as-labyrinth... I forget, have you ever read Pynchon? I haven't read much--Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Cool, which feels almost like a Stephenson or Gibson novel--but both have this mazelike quality. There's a tension though: Pynchon seems to believe that the walls of the maze go all the way up, that we'll never be able to see the whole. I'm not sure that he's wrong, but I love stories where you do have that glimpse, even if it's as brief as a grace note. I just finished reading Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy and I think that's what it's all about--wandering the labyrinth, looking for that brief moment when you comprehend the magnitude.
Oh I love that image from the Blue Ant trilogy! I have to read Gibson at some point.
Yes, I believe I read part of Gravity's rainbow, or maybe V, for that Detective Fiction and Metafiction class we were both in? Maybe I'm misremembering, it's been a while :)
Have you really never read Gibson? I think he'd be a home run for your general proclivities. Neuromancer is definitely the place to start--so much of it has become core genre by this point that it's important to remember, as you read the book, that it came out at a time when the mouse was still a new and exciting computer peripheral.
After that, I'd aim for either Pattern Recognition or The Peripheral.
Thank you! Yeah, I wanted to pick him up around the time I read Snowcrash, but I think there was this general feeling that what he was describing was outdated. I'll give him a read for sure!
Neuromancer really doesn't feel dated IMO--more in geopolitics and gender than anything else, but not in a bad way, just in a "oh, this is what 1983 thought the future was" way. Gibson's interested less in accurate prognostication than in... projection, analysis, the strangeness of the moment. And in language. His books age like good denim.
Love this post! I think about the screaming / necessity / waistcoats problem a lot when considering what kinds of fiction sticks with me vs. does not over time. Game of Thrones (books) is a good example for me: I vaguely remember that there are a lot of betrayals, people being jerks to one another, cringey sex scenes. But I don't remember what the Starks like to eat for breakfast or what the Lannisters do in my spare time. The story sticks in my mind like a giant bundle of screaming without much context to it.
Contrast with something like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which tells an epic story while still making room for Alistair's fashion choices or the drug habits of 24th-century Berliners. The epic bits of Shadowrun: Dragonfall hit especially hard for me, just as you write, because I know wha the characters are like outside of their epic lives.
Breath of the Wild is another example (can you tell I've been gaming a lot during the pandemic ;)) -- it is a gigantic world with an epic story, as every Zelda game; but the thing that makes it stick so clearly in my mind are the tiny, heartfelt details you get when you come to a stables or talk to a random NPC. The flashbacks in the game balance this very nicely as well -- you get a sense of the Epic Backstory but also the very personal tale of Link and Zelda literally just hanging out in meadows and awkwardly flirting with each other.
I love hearing about the Athena Club device and should check it out! I for one would be happy to see a revival of the more "slow" kind of 19th century literature that the series seems to echo. I feel the best story is like a labyrinth, or at least a hint of a labyrinth, in a Borges-sense: yes, to capture the reader's attention, you want the focus on the High Octane Action / Feelings / Drama as much of the time as possible, but the reader (or player, etc.) should come away with a feeling that the High Octane stuff is just one of many branching paths, and that others are similarly fascinating. And in order for the paths to be fascinating, they should also be believable: the audience should feel that they could just end down one of them if they were running late for breakfast and accidentally took a wrong turn, or finally got up the courage to talk to that handsome merchant at the weekend market they've seen week after week.
My favorite Breath of the Wild memory is of Link and Zelda having a wistful little conversation after a slow pan over a battlefield of, if I remember correctly, dead Lynels. That marriage of epic context to tight emotional work really speaks to me--no part of the world is disconnected from the rest.
I like your notion of book-as-labyrinth... I forget, have you ever read Pynchon? I haven't read much--Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Cool, which feels almost like a Stephenson or Gibson novel--but both have this mazelike quality. There's a tension though: Pynchon seems to believe that the walls of the maze go all the way up, that we'll never be able to see the whole. I'm not sure that he's wrong, but I love stories where you do have that glimpse, even if it's as brief as a grace note. I just finished reading Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy and I think that's what it's all about--wandering the labyrinth, looking for that brief moment when you comprehend the magnitude.
Oh I love that image from the Blue Ant trilogy! I have to read Gibson at some point.
Yes, I believe I read part of Gravity's rainbow, or maybe V, for that Detective Fiction and Metafiction class we were both in? Maybe I'm misremembering, it's been a while :)
Have you really never read Gibson? I think he'd be a home run for your general proclivities. Neuromancer is definitely the place to start--so much of it has become core genre by this point that it's important to remember, as you read the book, that it came out at a time when the mouse was still a new and exciting computer peripheral.
After that, I'd aim for either Pattern Recognition or The Peripheral.
Thank you! Yeah, I wanted to pick him up around the time I read Snowcrash, but I think there was this general feeling that what he was describing was outdated. I'll give him a read for sure!
Neuromancer really doesn't feel dated IMO--more in geopolitics and gender than anything else, but not in a bad way, just in a "oh, this is what 1983 thought the future was" way. Gibson's interested less in accurate prognostication than in... projection, analysis, the strangeness of the moment. And in language. His books age like good denim.