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The Big and the Little
Dec. 9th, 2005 10:23 pmSo, they're currently testing the fire alarm. At 10:00 p.m. Because they're dumb.
I didn't go to sleep until after 9:30 this morning. Because I'm dumb.
Anyway, these two events are quasi-related in my head, because I was awoken from my blissful daylight rest by a fucking inconsiderate moron banging on the door of the room next to mine, yelling "Kendra! Dasha! Wake up, the fire alarm's going off!". Repeatedly. Banging all the while.
This freaked me right out, because I know that when the fire alarms went off for real a couple months ago, they didn't go off in all the rooms. And then I shook off the godawful disorientation and looked at the damn thing. Light on = alarm works.
The light was on. And shortly thereafter, my beautiful and absolutely gorgeously wonderful RA came and yelled at the fucking moron for the false alarm. And I went back to sleep.
Anyway. Today has had a theme, and that theme is "fire alarms".
But anyway, on to what I actually wanted to talk about.
For the most part, it's hard to get me to dislike a story, or a poem, or a novel, or whatever (unless it's SGA fic, because my standards for that fandom are completely out of whack, because the ratio is: 15 brilliant fics: 5 good fics: 1 bad fic, as opposed to BtVS, where it's: 312 bad: 40 readable: 10 good: 1 brilliant). I have an abiding fondness for the written word, in all its forms. And you have to screw it up big for me to dislike it because...I value the big things and the little things equally.
If you get one of those right, I will love your story like a small child loves candy.
The big things are things like an interesting plot, or the ability to construct an internally consistent universe (or follow the rules of a pre-existing universe), or...maintain a consistent style. That kind of the thing.
The little things are the small touches, the things that make a universe more than two-dimensional. The little throwaway lines and the implicit relationships and the tone of a character's narrative voice.
Take James Alan Gardner's Vigilant (which you should all read right now). I could really care less about the plot. It's interesting and all that, but it's not why I love that book. It's the feel of things. Faye seems like a real character, and I spent a large part of that book desperately rooting for Festina to marry her and her spouses and live happily ever after.
Or Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price. That book is relentlessly sexist. And it's supposed to be! But it's not the kind of sexist you're thinking. It's a society ruled by women, where men are basically chattel. It's a fascinating 'verse, but more, it's believable. The rampant rabid feminist has often pointed out how much our language is that of a traditional patriarchy, with things like "mankind", "the age of man", the use of "he" as English's default pronoun, etc. The language of this book is relentlessly skewed toward the feminine. It's a small thing that would have won me over utterly even if the book itself had been merely mediocre. It's not, but that doesn't matter to me; I was doomed to adore it regardless.
Or, oh, Jennifer Wingert's Grasp the Stars. It's insanely hard to come up with something in science-fiction that's even a little original without going completely avant-garde. But I've never seen this before, and it's brilliant, and I love it. It posits that there a lot of alien races (wildly different from humans, ultimately incomprehensible, blah blah blah), but there's one thing only humans can do. Play catch. Humans are the only race that can carry basic hand-eye coordination over into long-distance application. Everything else, for example, requires targeting scopes for even close-distance shooting. It's a small thing and I don't remember it actually being that important to the plot, but it made me happy. It was a brilliant way to show that commonplace human things can be alien, too. I mean, usually it's a whole big thing where the aliens don't grok a concept like love or compassion or mercy or something big and socially important like that. But this is something humans can do practically from the cradle and it freaks the aliens right out, because they can't do it. There're other cultural barriers in the book, and some of them actually do inform the plot, but this one's my favorite.
And with poetry, if a poem gives me three good phrases, I'll whip out the highlighter and mark it for re-reading. And then there's fic. I stuck through a horrible series for a million stories because one of the author's big things was cool to me. And I'm predisposed to like any SGA story that mentions the inevitable still, whether or not Zelenka's running it.
It's the big things and the little.
Fucking spell check. How can this thing know that Dasha is a correctly spelled name, yet remain unable to recognize "one's" as the contraction of "one is"?
I didn't go to sleep until after 9:30 this morning. Because I'm dumb.
Anyway, these two events are quasi-related in my head, because I was awoken from my blissful daylight rest by a fucking inconsiderate moron banging on the door of the room next to mine, yelling "Kendra! Dasha! Wake up, the fire alarm's going off!". Repeatedly. Banging all the while.
This freaked me right out, because I know that when the fire alarms went off for real a couple months ago, they didn't go off in all the rooms. And then I shook off the godawful disorientation and looked at the damn thing. Light on = alarm works.
The light was on. And shortly thereafter, my beautiful and absolutely gorgeously wonderful RA came and yelled at the fucking moron for the false alarm. And I went back to sleep.
Anyway. Today has had a theme, and that theme is "fire alarms".
But anyway, on to what I actually wanted to talk about.
For the most part, it's hard to get me to dislike a story, or a poem, or a novel, or whatever (unless it's SGA fic, because my standards for that fandom are completely out of whack, because the ratio is: 15 brilliant fics: 5 good fics: 1 bad fic, as opposed to BtVS, where it's: 312 bad: 40 readable: 10 good: 1 brilliant). I have an abiding fondness for the written word, in all its forms. And you have to screw it up big for me to dislike it because...I value the big things and the little things equally.
If you get one of those right, I will love your story like a small child loves candy.
The big things are things like an interesting plot, or the ability to construct an internally consistent universe (or follow the rules of a pre-existing universe), or...maintain a consistent style. That kind of the thing.
The little things are the small touches, the things that make a universe more than two-dimensional. The little throwaway lines and the implicit relationships and the tone of a character's narrative voice.
Take James Alan Gardner's Vigilant (which you should all read right now). I could really care less about the plot. It's interesting and all that, but it's not why I love that book. It's the feel of things. Faye seems like a real character, and I spent a large part of that book desperately rooting for Festina to marry her and her spouses and live happily ever after.
Or Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price. That book is relentlessly sexist. And it's supposed to be! But it's not the kind of sexist you're thinking. It's a society ruled by women, where men are basically chattel. It's a fascinating 'verse, but more, it's believable. The rampant rabid feminist has often pointed out how much our language is that of a traditional patriarchy, with things like "mankind", "the age of man", the use of "he" as English's default pronoun, etc. The language of this book is relentlessly skewed toward the feminine. It's a small thing that would have won me over utterly even if the book itself had been merely mediocre. It's not, but that doesn't matter to me; I was doomed to adore it regardless.
Or, oh, Jennifer Wingert's Grasp the Stars. It's insanely hard to come up with something in science-fiction that's even a little original without going completely avant-garde. But I've never seen this before, and it's brilliant, and I love it. It posits that there a lot of alien races (wildly different from humans, ultimately incomprehensible, blah blah blah), but there's one thing only humans can do. Play catch. Humans are the only race that can carry basic hand-eye coordination over into long-distance application. Everything else, for example, requires targeting scopes for even close-distance shooting. It's a small thing and I don't remember it actually being that important to the plot, but it made me happy. It was a brilliant way to show that commonplace human things can be alien, too. I mean, usually it's a whole big thing where the aliens don't grok a concept like love or compassion or mercy or something big and socially important like that. But this is something humans can do practically from the cradle and it freaks the aliens right out, because they can't do it. There're other cultural barriers in the book, and some of them actually do inform the plot, but this one's my favorite.
And with poetry, if a poem gives me three good phrases, I'll whip out the highlighter and mark it for re-reading. And then there's fic. I stuck through a horrible series for a million stories because one of the author's big things was cool to me. And I'm predisposed to like any SGA story that mentions the inevitable still, whether or not Zelenka's running it.
It's the big things and the little.
Fucking spell check. How can this thing know that Dasha is a correctly spelled name, yet remain unable to recognize "one's" as the contraction of "one is"?
