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.