Reprint: And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side

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Christopher Priest, Harry Harrison, James Tiptree Jr, John Keats, kameron hurley, Theodore Sturgeon

Given the review of the Tiptree biography I reprinted a few days ago, it seems appropriate to link to this column on Tiptree’s story. The column first appeared in Vector 272, Spring 2013.

BSFA Short Fiction Award

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al robertson, China Mieville, David Mitchell, kameron hurley, nina allan, paul cornell, Robert Holdstock

Still trying to decide how I will vote in the BSFA Awards when I go to Eastercon tomorrow. I’ve made my mind up about the novels, but the short fiction category foxes me. I didn’t read a huge amount of new short fiction in 2011, but was it really such a poor year? My choice, I think, is going to come down to a matter of the least worst, which is not how I like to make award decisions.

Suspension of disbelief

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Christopher Priest, kameron hurley

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.