Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

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I've yet to have the chance to read any of his work, mostly because I'm working on my own things now and don't have a lot of time for pleasure, which would be the point of reading these first and foremost.

That noted, I'm happy to see people take an interest in reading fiction again. It was nice with Harry Potter. It's nice with Ted Chiang. My hope is that the accessibility and popularity inspire additional interest in fiction reading, and I'm sure it happens as with music. There's a catch though.

The unfortunate part is that both JK Rowling and Ted Chiang are, practically and reasonably speaking, genre authors and that can be limiting to growth as a reader. I love genre works of quality, because, just being real here, the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent. It's like finding a great "Metal" proximity band like Tool, checking out all their work, and wanting more, going back into the category and finding...definitely not more Tool.

I'm very happy for him and hope he enjoys the success, fiscal rewards, and, best of all, freedom to write!

Take careful note, all would-be writers:

>In 1989, he attended the Clarion Workshop, a kind of Bread Loaf for sci-fi and fantasy writers...

Sure, he's a hobbyist but that's a hobby that's been going for almost 30 years. Practice makes better. He's no overnight sensation...y'all just finally found him.

>“But what makes any human being a good, reliable worker?” he asked me. “A hundred thousand hours of good parenting, of unpaid emotional labor. That’s the kind of investment on which the business world places no value; it’s an investment made by people who do it out of love.”

This is an absolutely wonderful perspective, and can truly be applied to creative endeavors as well.

What an amazingly snobby reply to an article about someone writing good fiction.

I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.

Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]

> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.

> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.

On Serious Literature. [2]

> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?

1. https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-mic...

2. http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html

If you're working on your own work, reading high-quality works can really tell you how to do things.

Among other things, Ted Chiang is excellent at non-linear storytelling, and at communicating complex and nuanced ideas through narrative.

The actual definition of a genre is based on sales demographics ("do people who buy SciFi buy this book?" - why Vonnegut is in Literature, and LeGuin is in fantasy), but if I had to pick... SciFi is about consequences (what happens when....) Fantasy is about narrative (a story about a boy....) Literature is about a message that cannot be communicated any other way than the story that is told.

I have no idea how to tell you what Arrival was about without retelling the story.

> the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent

Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap

re: overnight success, Ted Chiang got a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990) which was his first published work when he was 23. He wasn't writing for extremely long before he was recognized for his talent.

1990 to 20XX is a long path. I perhaps mis-spoke in the sense that "people didn't invest in his work and bring it to a wide audience by way of a film adaptation until recently" which I intend to mean the concept of 'crossing over.' Recognition outstide of one's genre is an appreciation of talent and craft in ways that might be hard to understand, and I don't mean to be insulting. There are conventions, and rising above them is worth appreciation.

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