As a writer of fiction, I am uninterested in disease, languages and weapons of mass-destruction.
DISEASE: A hero can fight monsters… but he is either immune to a contagion or not. He is not heroic for being vaccinated.
LANGUAGES: Groups are more important that individuals when personalities are secondary to cultures. Dialog is not a battle of wits if literally gibberish.
WEAPONS OF MASS-DESTRUCTION: Everything bad about war is all there is if courage and prowess are rendered irrelevant.
Our reality is never the setting of my fiction. Disease is unheard of, speech was never cofounded into languages and weapons of mass-destruction are obsolete. I never mention these particulars in the stories. It is all taken for granted.
Well, I do show humans trying to nuke extraterrestrial races, only to be confused by the impotence of the weapons.
Many people whine about my preferences. They claim that disease, languages and weapons of mass-destruction make our world more interesting… even though everyone who makes this claim whines about the world as it is. I guess their idea of “interesting” is “frustrating” because if you are frustrated you are not… bored, maybe.
Stephen King wrote The Stand and it is about a plague that sweeps across the world. The story ends with a blast from a nuclear weapon. J.R.R. Tolkien created Elven languages and wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Frank Herbert wrote Dune and incorporated atomic weapons into its universe.
I have read Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert. I bear witness that they have earned their fame. Their works are genuine classics.
Still…
My novel The Wayward School for Girls is much shorter but much deeper than The Stand. The elves of my novel Agents of the Eye and Ear are more exotic than they are in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. The war in my book Empires of a Strange Galaxy is more imaginative than the one in Dune, and just as believable.
I have proven, by my own hand, that my disinterest in
disease, languages and weapons of mass-destruction is justified. I can make the
world interesting without them. I make it more interesting, actually.
There is like a line that you have to dance around on that separates something cool and interesting from things that are real and relatable. If you go to far to one side, everything is kinda sad and reminds us of the boring stuff that happens in reality. If you go to far to the other end... you're a Japanese anime.
ReplyDeleteYes. It is all a matter of flow AND balance. The flow without balance is ridiculous but the balance without flow is boring.
DeleteThose who see beyond the pale have no interest in such things. They pollute what could otherwise be enjoyed. Disease is depressing, languages are confusing, and weapons of mass destruction turn what should be exciting into a miserable mess.
ReplyDeleteEXACTLY! Funny that those who disagree with me languish in the very failed reality they tout. They complain about it more than I do.
Delete