Suspension of disbelief

It was, I think, Coleridge who coined the phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’. It stands for that contract the reader makes with the author when opening a work of fiction: in return for the entertainment provided by the work, we readers agree to suspend judgement on the absolute truth of what we are being told. We know that the fiction is, in some way, to some degree, a lie, but we willingly ignore the lie for the story.

But I don’t believe this is an absolute condition. We do not suspend disbelief in the face of absurdity, or laziness on the part of the author, or inconsistency, or the simply unbelievable. The job of the author is to do enough, to be convincing enough, that we feel suspending our disbelief is not too great a stretch. In other words, we suspend disbelief when we feel we are not too far from belief. We can accept the outrageous in a work when we feel that the world in which the outrageous occurs makes sense, or when we feel that those characters who seem closest to us respond to the outrageousness the way we might respond. But if there is something that triggers our disbelief, something in the condition of the story that does not make sense to us, then that contract is null and void. And it is null and void for the simple reason that we are unable in those circumstances to suspend our disbelief.

Review of 2011: Writing

The highlight of 2011 was, undoubtedly, receiving the BSFA Non-Fiction Award, which both surprised me and pleased me. I am incredibly proud of that award, though, perversely, it also highlights the fact that 2010 was a far better year for writing than 2011.

The contrast to the award was the fact that I went through something I hadn’t previously believed existed: a writer’s block. Heaven knows what caused it ­ it has been a year of many, many stresses and strains, mostly external to my writing though they do, inevitably, affect it; I even found being nominated for the award strangely disturbing. At its worst, I actually found opening a Word document was terrifying. I don’t know how or why the thing ended, somehow the dread just gradually lost its grip on me. Though it has had one lasting effect: I am far less confident of my writing now than I have ever been before, and even fairly simple short reviews can sometimes take days and days for me to get through them.

Nevertheless, I managed to write something over 63,000 words during the year, and that does not include any of the posts I made at Big Other, the all too few entries I wrote for the SF Encyclopedia, or the several thousand words of original material that have been going into the next book. So it has been a reasonably productive year, even if it feels like it has been against the odds the whole way.

Review of 2011: Reading

I managed to read 85 books in 2011, which is quite a few more than in any year I can remember since, probably, my late teens or early 20s. The list is behind the cut, of course, with those I particularly recommend in bold, and an asterisk (*) beside my top ten books of the year.

And the winner is

Shortly after reading Adam Roberts’s excellent post on awards, Maureen pointed out a passage in the current TLS. It is a review, by Keith Jeffery, of My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others edited by Tim Heald. Cobb was the chair of the Booker Prize in 1984, and, as Jeffery quotes him:

There he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.

My dilemma is that I am a great supporter of awards (given my history, you wouldn’t really expect much else), but I can’t help seeing problems with them.

Review of 2010: Reading

So I managed 74 books this year, a lot better than usual. And as usual the ones worth reading are in bold.

Mind and Matter

The machinations of business and the inventions of technology have at least one thing in common: they are essentially inhuman. Oh people aplenty are involved, as instigators, perpetrators, audience, but these are people as units, their individuality has nothing to do with the thing itself. Some cool piece of kit or breathtaking financial scam really doesn’t differ because of who is using it. You and I, therefore, are figures on a spreadsheet, not individuals.

And that, alas, is how we come across in too much science fiction. Load in the gosh-wow tech, fire up the mechanical twist, and who cares about people? Well, once upon a time, I didn’t. I remember the adolescent me first encountering big concept sf, and it was just a torrent of wonders. “It’s got this, and there’s this, and gosh there’s this, and wow just think it’s got that …” I would gush, and not really notice the expression of pained indulgence on my parents’ faces. Whenever the story slowed a moment to try, a little clumsily, to establish the fragile humanity of the characters, I would start to lose interest.

Books of 2009

I’ve seen a number of people listing things like their top ten books of the decade or their favourite films of the decade. I’m not going to do that for the simple reason that there is still a full year to go before the end of the decade. However, this is my list of the books I read this year, and, pleasingly, in the last few hours of the old year I managed to finish number 70. As ever, the ones I recommend are in bold:

Welcome to Avilion

Just back from the funeral service for Rob Holdstock. No, ‘funeral service’ is the wrong term; it was a memorial ceremony, a celebration. It was moving and hard to take and joyous all at the same time. It took place in a Unitarian Chapel, but it was the most unreligious ceremony you could imagine: the only ‘hymn’ we sang, right at the end, was Woody Guthrie’s ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You’.

An Answer

I interviewed Rob Holdstock several times over the years, enough so that we had a running joke going. He would accuse me of always asking the same question, so I replied if he’d just answer it one time I wouldn’t need to ask it again. But, of course, he didn’t answer it. I’m not altogether sure he could.

The question was: why did you give up science fiction for fantasy?

Amid among betwixt between

I’m currently reading the latest interstitial anthology, Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. It’s not a bad anthology. If no stories stand out as brilliant, there are no obvious clunkers either. Though for all the claims of innovation, most of the stories are fairly straightforward fantasy or (less commonly) science fiction. It’s quite remarkable how many of the contributions use the standard postmodern trick of foregrounding the fact that it is a story, making the characters aware they are within a fiction or directly addressing the reader. I keep seeing things I’ve seen rather too often elsewhere; in fact, reading it has made me realise why I feel so ambivalent about the whole interstitial enterprise.