Potlatch: Saturday

[calimac]

Crime & Fantasy: When Genres Collide. Consisted mostly of recommendations of a) SF books that are also crime stories; b) crime stories that would appeal to SF readers, usually for the detail of their world-building.
In my comment from the audience, I used one of my favorite SF stories to raise a question about why mysteries often don't appeal to me. The story was "The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance, the plot of which is technically a murder mystery. The amateur detective has to identify which of three men is the disguised murderer. The thing is, while it matters greatly within the fictive universe which man it is, because he has to arrest the right one, it matters not one whit to the story. In fact, though I've read the story many times, I can never remember which one it is. All that matters is how the protagonist figures it out, which I do remember, and above all the exotic culture which raises the difficulty in the first place: that, not the plot, is the story's real subject.
So "The Moon Moth" is a nominal mystery: it uses the format, but the reader can ignore the mystery part of the plot. The problem is, I have the same difficulty with genre mysteries. I can't work up any interest in identifying the criminal, and I only enjoy such stories when, as with "The Moon Moth", that's the least important part of the book. That's why I enjoy most of Dorothy Sayers, but not Agatha Christie. Someone in the audience had just recommended The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King. I loved the first half of that novel: sprightly young woman meets elderly Sherlock Holmes. But then they get involved in solving some mystery, and my interest rapidly plummeted. I never finished the book.
So my question was: what is my problem, since so many others obviously don't have it? The panel gave a collective shrug, but a couple other audience members came up to me afterwards with comments which, if this had happened online and I reported it, would be derided as "The lurkers support me in e-mail."

Book of Honor: The City & the City. John D. Berry, from the audience, raised an aesthetic problem with this novel, which I endorsed. He didn't like the way the setting was non-specific generic Eastern Europe: an imaginary city in a location not specified but somewhere around there, made of bits of Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and other cultures all mushed together. Such amalgams are common in that setting, and it often indicates an author not knowing or caring about the culture being used, though surely Miéville is not that crude. You don't see this sort of mush in American settings, John said. From the master book-designer in the SF world, such an aesthetic critique must be taken seriously, yet the rest of the audience proceeded to respond in a massive display of Not Getting It. They said there's plenty of "generic Midwest" in fiction. But that's not presented as an amalgam of different cultures. Contrary to some claims, the US Midwest is nowhere near as diverse as Eastern Europe - anyone who claims it is knows nothing of either - and stories set there don't consciously try to mush together the diversity that does exist. lisa_marli cited Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. But not only is Kansas hardly that diverse, but Baum is not trying to mix together Kansas City, the Flint Hills, and the High Plains into one setting. If it's nonspecific within Kansas (which it isn't - Baum specifies the prairies), it's through lack of detail, not through accumulation of contradictory detail.

Books of Honorable Mention. Moderator: "Our next book is, um, how do I pronounce this foreign title? Has anyone read this? Anyone have any comments? Anyone? Well, let's go on to the next one." (Actually, it wasn't that bad at all. It just seemed that way.)

Science Fiction/Science Fact. I wrote down two lines from this one. Ellen Klages: "We are now recommending books which, if you ignore the plot and the writing, are pretty nice objects." Gerald Nordley: "If you don't understand it, don't explain it."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It's exactly the same for me. As soon as the characters stop doing interesting things and start blabbing about clues, etc, I want to skim. (And if they are propelled along by finding the bodies of murdered women, I am utterly gone.)

I have yet to finish an Agatha Christie. I thought it was because I have no math mind, poor logical perception, and am made both bored and anxious by puzzles.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But I do have a good math mind and logical perception. In my case, I'm not bored by puzzles so much as by puzzles in which I have no emotional investment in the puzzle, or by puzzles in which it doesn't matter what the answer is.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes, that makes sense, too.

Pressed send instead of enter. I mean, I assumed that my not liking mysteries was due to my having no math mind or interest in puzzles. Seeing you express the same feeling about mysteries, knowing how different our thought processes are, surprised me.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There have been experimental studies of people's ability to do logic that have shown that people commonly are very bad at drawing the correct logical conclusion—but get significantly better if you embed it in a puzzle about human beings.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

When I was in 6th grade, I think, I took an aptitude test which ranked me at 9th grade level in math problems, but 12th grade level in math word problems. From which I deduce that I had a natural aptitude for math which was turbocharged by embedding it in puzzles about human beings.

Unfortunately, when I actually got to high school, the rarification of the math involved overwhelmed my continued natural aptitude. I got good grades when I applied myself, but I was terminally bored.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I actually took my BA in math, but UCSD's curriculum totally emphasized abstract theorem-proving math, which didn't much appeal to me. In fact it convinced me that I'm not a mathematician, which is kind of a major case of learning the hard way. I mostly like my math tied to the physical or social world (for example, a year or so I worked out a proof of Ricardo's Law of Association using very simple convex bodies theory, which was really cool, and much easier for me to make sense of than the usual algebraic proofs).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

With me also, applied math is the most interesting part, though my applications tend more towards the sociological and scientific than the economic. These days my aptitude for math mostly shows up in an understanding of Boolean logic and Venn diagrams, which a lot of people seem to have trouble with. Boolean logic is, of course, very important in database searching, which is what I've spent much of my professional time as a librarian at.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I've heard that there's a small movement to teach only practical sorts of applied math in high school, instead of the college-prep-algebra-geometry-trig path. Applied math can be easier to learn, never mind useful, especially in terms of life and job skills. Unfortunately, US higher ed apparently prefers the kind that keeps their theories (and theoretical selves) foremost.

I must say, learning tons of theorem-based stuff in high school didn't do much for me until I got to calculus in college. And I didn't ever have anything to apply calculus TO. Kind of like finding my high school Latin useful mainly for studying Chaucer in college: a lot of work to prepare for a very small event, comparatively.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm going to think about why I don't find the clues and solution part of mysteries especially interesting, though I've heard that a lot of mystery fans don't, either-- they read for the atmosphere or the voice or whatever.

Did anyone mention You've Got Murder by Donna Andrews? It was marketed as mystery, but that was a hard choice, since it could have been marketed as science fiction.

It's from the point of view of the first sentient computer program whose maker has mysteriously disappeared.

The gender binary is extreme (viewpoint character is a human relations program, she falls in love with a chess program), but it's good otherwise.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

No one gave the specific title, but Donna Andrews' mysteries with the AI were referenced. (I think there are several now. I don't like them anywhere near as much as the Meg Langslow series, which I love.)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Actually, your feelings about murder mysteries are very much like mine. I have almost no ability to do the "puzzle" aspect of mysteries, and I've hardly ever been able to figure it out as I read or watched anything. I read the occasional mystery for the sake of the characters and their interaction, and like you, I favor Sayers (above all) for that aspect; I consider Gaudy Night, in particular, one of the major novels of the twentieth century. I took a lot more pleasure in Jo Walton's Farthing and Ha'Penny (not so much Half a Crown, whose climax seemed a bit of a deus ex cathedra) than I have in any actual cozy mysteries, largely for their larger theme of the morally corrupting impact of authoritarian government.

I don't see this as a lack so much as a difference. But, well—in roleplaying games, there is talk of the "game," "narrative," and "simulation" aspects of games. There is a lot of high-altitude theorizing about this, which I mostly can't follow, but at a very basic level, interest in this sort of game can come from interest in its imagined setting and the desire to explore it and try acting on it; interest in the characters and their relationships; or interest in the tests and contests and the formal rules by which they succeed and fail, which is almost the essence of more traditional games such as chess or bridge or poker. And it occurred to me that there are fictional forms that have a worldbuilding aspect (Tolkien's linguistics or Hal Clement's planetary physics), and less obviously, fictional forms that have a game aspect—scientific and technical puzzle stories like Larry Niven's "Neutron Star," but more prototypically murder mysteries where the reader is invited to match wits with the detective. And that's probably the least interesting aspects of rpgs to me; I occasionally play a conventional game for casual entertainment, but I can't imagine investing substantial amounts of time in a challenging game.

So how do you feel about games of that sort?

(In a peculiar parallel, I really like Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, a novel about the early life of the world's—fictional—first woman Grandmaster in chess; but it's on account of the characterization. Tevis does not actually recount any game move by move, so the reader has no way to "play the game" against the hero.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I like puzzle stories, and would certainly include "Neutron Star" in this, when the puzzle is the plot. But it's not a game: either a game between a detective and a criminal, or between the writer and the reader (as in, can the reader figure it out before the ending). I do like cat-and-mouse stories, which are games between characters, but I prefer them when the reader is sitting in an omniscient perspective and knows what both characters are doing.

What this relates to are my preference in games. I'm not much of a game-player, and I almost never play competitive games between players. In particular, I find understanding and, even more, internalizing (so that one knows them without having to think it out) the rules of card games to be of almost unscaleable difficulty. Everything of the little I know about poker, for instance, comes from reading Donald Westlake novels, and since real-life poker these days is mostly hold 'em, a variety unknown to Westlake characters, I am again at a total loss.

The only games I really like are single-player computer games: Klondike solitaire, Tetris, and Minesweeper, which I play in a challenging variant which involves not marking the mines when you find them, but clicking around them and letting the game flash them all on at once when you finish. (I can win 90% of my games this way; it's still challenging but more satisfying than solitaire, of which I win only about 15%, or Tetris, which you can only lose, sooner or later.) The point is, I'm not up against another person.

But that's only part of the problem with mysteries. The problem with "The Moon Moth" as a mystery is that, to maintain the suspense, any of the three suspects could be the murderer, so there's no contingent investment in knowing which one it is. In <*I>Gaudy Night, I can remember who the criminal is and what the motive is, because it is contingent: it's tied into, and invested in, the rest of the plot, the non-mystery part.

There are also mysteries in which the murder is an irrelevant distraction. Charles Williams's War in Heaven begins as a murder mystery, but even the identity of the victim, let alone of the murderer or the reason, quickly becomes so irrelevant I can never remember it. Or take Watchmen, which also begins as a murder mystery, but by the time we learn who the murderer is, the whole murder has become nothing more than a distracting pendant to what's really going on. (Which is why the culprit confesses offhandedly.) Stories like this I like emphatically despite their being murder mysteries, not because of it.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

This doesn't seem to be so difficult to understand - you apparently are interested in mysteries only if they involve the actual protagonists of the book and not strangers with no relationship to them because you don't identify enough with the victims or perpetrators to care about them.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Isn't it one of the assumptions of the genre that the reader/viewer shouldn't actually regret the death of the victim all that much? If we cared about them it wouldn't be a murder mystery but a tragedy.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think this is a universal assumption: while in some mysteries the murder is indeed just a puzzle, in others, you care about getting justice for the victim. In any case, I was trying to identify a possible cause for kalimac's disinterest, not defining the genre as a whole.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You may be on to something there, though I wouldn't describe what's lacking as a sense of identification so much as a reason to give a hoot. I can be attracted by a puzzle, especially in a short story, if it's an intriguing narrative hook: in other words, a reason to care. A lot of the "someone walks into 221B and says ..." Sherlock Holmes stories have that quality.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Back to A Tale of Two Cities er, The City and the City, I thought David Levine had outlined the problems with it nicely.

Like Karen Schaffer, I was expecting aliens with all the talk of ancient artifacts and the omniscient Breach, which seems to know what you are thinking since they can tell where you are looking. I did not like what was essentially a bait and switch. When we truly encounter the Breach, it's an ordinary human being who had once breached himself and been assimilated into what is basically a conspiracy.

There are ancient artifacts of unknown origin yet it seems to be set in the present time and there are American characters who pop up. It felt like either the author had forgotten (or no longer cared about) the artifacts or perhaps it was a giant hoax and his characters were too stupid to figure it out. I found it difficult to care about the characters and I thought it would not work in reality - too many people would be screaming "F*ck this!" and purposely breach. If enough did that, it would destroy their economy. And it failed the Bechdel test big time.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As I didn't finish the book, I didn't want to comment on the Breach, but the further I got into the book the more nervous I got about it. It's a bad sign when the focus on a complex subject turns steadily towards edge conditions, exceptions, and complications, which is what was happening here. And the separation of the cities is supposed to have existed for centuries! That's not possible: what's depicted in the novel is far too unstable a situation.