Would speculative fiction be better if authors and fans read more than just sci-fi and fantasy all the time?
>>45857104
>assumptions
>>45857287
Twas a question
>/lit/
>>45857308
>Going to /lit/ to discuss books read for the enjoyment of reading
>>45857104
The quality of a work is a result of an infinite number of immeasurable things. While there is a possibility that a more read author would produce better works by increasing their field of view, it is not obviously more likely than the possibility that more knowledge would only serve to stifle the imagination the author puts into an individual work.
No, I am not inclined to believe more reading would make anyone write better speculative fiction. A work is good because a work is good.
No. Go read the Years of Rice and Salt.
>>45857104
Reading outside your genre is one of the most common tips you get as a writer(well, at least in the German language scene).
So I would hope that other writers already do so.
>>45857439
>The quality of a work is a result of an infinite number of immeasurable things.
I disagree, as you judge a book by certain criteria (Is the plot good, is the setting good, is the writing style good?). We could quantify, score and weigh these criteria, and determine whether this is a good work.
Such as as writing style, which essentially boils down whether the author has a good understanding of rules and vocabulary of the language that work was written in.
One could score the number of grammatical mistakes per sentence, and have that as partial measure of the strength of the work. We could measure the different words used, and their respective frequencies, and get a feel of the vocabulary used by the author.
We judge a book by its plot, we could for example score the amount of checkov's guns. We mark the number of times that something earlier introduced becomes relevant later in the work (and divide it by the number of sentences for example).
I agree that is not the case "given you've more diverse, you've become a good speculative fiction writer",
but the case should be that "if you're a good writer, you will most likely be a better speculative fiction writer if you've read more diverse materials".
to put it in a formula
S(D) = W * (1 + D)
Where S is your skill in writing speculative fiction, W is your innate writing skill, and D is the amount of diverse materials you've read.
You could read "how not to write a novel" if you want to get a better understanding what makes a work good, its a book written by editors.
>>45857104
Certainly.
The best works of those genres were motivaved and inspired than things outside them.
What >>45857527 says works for all languages, and several writers also gave this advice.
>>45857439 is talking outta his ass. While each work and writer are certainly unique cases and highly idiosyncratic, reading a very wide range of subjects is a repeated advice for increasing one's creativity.
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/08/07/allergy-to-originality-drew-christie/
http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Fishing_from_the_same_stream
http://hollylisle.com/writing-integrity-why-everyone-shouldnt-like/
http://hollylisle.com/apples-bananas-the-writers-need-for-experience/
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5476983/neil-gaiman-michael-moorcock-and-elmore-leonards-indispensible-writing-advice
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/19/hemingway-on-writing/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/03/hedgehog-fox-italo-calvino-writers/
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/isaac-asimovs-newly-published-1959-paper-for-darpa-on-c-1648636240
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/22/bird-by-bird-anne-lamott/
http://eldritchdark.com/writings/nonfiction/20/fantasy-and-human-experience
http://eldritchdark.com/writings/nonfiction/23/on-fantasy
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5978762/what-it-means-when-someone-tries-to-tell-you-the-rules-of-good-writing
There's nothing wrong with scifi and fantasy in general, the problem is military scifi and medieval fantasy
>>45858585
Oh?
>>45858366
>A manifesto on how to make my opinions into objective facts by some fucking retard on 4chan
>>45858366
As someone who used to think like you do, that idea sounds reasonable but unfortunately it's not as helpful as it seems when you first get it:
1) Different people would ideally need a different set of your arbitrarily selected categories to judge something by, to represent their slightly-different angles of opinion, or interests-and-lack-there-of at the fringe of, or outside of, each category.
Example: One man's ideal "language use and grammar" category would heavily punish nonstandard language use, whereas others' might encourage it, or some might include a heavy emphasis on correct spelling whereas others feel such things are best left to computers, and care mainly about a natural-sounding flow, etc.
2) Even if you "force" people to navigate the same single set of "one size fits all" categories (at a loss of prediction accuracy and overall meaningfulness) different people would still weigh the results within each category differently - so differently, in fact, that a single aggregate score ends up being more meaningless than meaningful and thus ultimately not helpful whatsoever.
3) Using a particular set of categories informs and shapes the "market," which means people will begin writing to game the system and get good grades. But that means types of more "avant-garde" fiction that could potentially have existed, and would have changed people's minds about how they value various different things, would be less successful and less likely to influence the system. Thus, if widely used, your system would cause writing as a discipline to stagnate.
I could keep going.
>>45859021
Which is a better answer to the question "Why this book bad?"
>I don't know because "The quality of a work is a result of an infinite number of immeasurable things".
or
>Because it was full of hokey phrases and the plot was too reliant on coincidences.
So by summing up the factors that attract you in a book, you could definitely make some criteria, which is better than saying i dont know.
>>45859302
True, i think its best used on a personal level for each reader; formalizing/making clear what you experience in a book as positive.
"John likes staccato sentences.", "Betty doesn't mind her sentences to be a bit more florescent" (and they both are aware of this). And thus John and Betty might give different scores to the same, but at least they've used criteria, rather than just saying "this book was good"'/"this book is bad and i cannot know why." and ofcourse each person will give different weighs to each category.
>>45857104
You get better at writing both by doing a lot of writing and doing a lot of reading. As an artist, a writer's tastes and perceptions should always be evolving. Letting your vision stagnate is the best way to end up a garbage writer. You should learns something about your art from every work of media you consume. You can learn as much about writing from things you don't like or think are bad as you can from things you like or think are good (actually, you can end up learning more from bad things than from good things). I didn't like reading Ulysses, but I learned a lot about writing from reading it. Holes isn't a very good story, but I hold it as an example of well-paced story beats and how to distribute information to make every aspect of its setting and characters important to reaching the climax. All literature would be better if its writers were more broadly-read.
>>45859526
>>45859302
>>45858366
This is THE most autistic thing I've seen on 4chan in a long time.
Anon, art is always more than the sum of its parts. You can't judge a work by dissecting it like some sort of cadaver. You either take the work as a whole or not at all.
>>45857104
Yeah, definitely.
Most of the really good ones already do.
>An Architect writes and draws his futuristic sci fi manga
>>45858841
Not him, but a lot of the military sci-fi stuff starts blending together. Lone super soldier taking down some group by themselves yet angsting about something dumb the whole time.
Though I think it's mostly because of saturation. Someone checking out HFY threads for the first times might be impressed, but not so much when they just post the same screenshots like an oldies station playing the same songs.
>>45860141
>Anon, art is always more than the sum of its parts.
This is true, but that doesn't mean the parts themselves aren't important.
>You can't judge a work by dissecting it like some sort of cadaver.
But you can look at how the parts making up the work operate in concert. Context matters. A work that lovingly describes the details of every important character's shoes makes sense because because it establishes that the protagonist judges a person based on what they wear on their feet and knows a lot about footwear and how it's made. It gives the reader a peek into the world of that character. Different readers will have different opinions of how those elements work in concert, but they will at least agree that it serves a purpose.
But unless that detail means something, it just makes the narration bloated and messy.
>You either take the work as a whole or not at all.
This is wrong. You can like parts of something without liking all of it. You can think that a work has really good lyrical rhythm to its prose but also think that the story itself is garbage. You can think that the author put together a really interesting scenario but had it take place in a completely nonsensical location. You can, as I do with Sword Art Online, think that the author built a really interesting world filled with plenty of pretty interesting characters while also thinking that it's a shame that the story happened to be about the two most boring people on the planet.
How individual elements of a work are used is often just as important as looking at the work as a whole. Saying that a work is all or nothing is just encouraging people to turn their brains off. No one ever got better at anything by not thinking about how to do that thing.
OP to answer your question yes sometimes authors can bring knowledge they've collected in other fields to scifi or fantasy to give the world a sense of believability.
Tolkien for instance was a linguist and your opinions on LotR aside he fucking created multiple con-languages for his setting and that was one of the major reasons people were able to visualize that setting as a real world.
Theoretically if they had the creativity/writing chops I'm sure a Geologist could make a fascinating fantasy setting by exploring things like fantasy metals or minerals.
A zoologist could create a work that provides incredible details regarding how certain "monsters" function or how fantasy ecosystems operate.
An economist could create a world with an incredibly in-depth market for how two or three fantasy kingdoms and currencies interact with each other.
And of course a person from a culture unfamiliar to our own can bring a perspective or value that might be entirely new and unknown to us and fascinate us in ways that our usual staple of tropes and ideas never might.
Keep in mind none of these are absolutes (people can fail at their job) and just because you're good at describing and dissecting one thing doesn't mean you're gonna be able to do all of that with everything else (and you probably shouldn't). Just that people who only read scifi and fantasy stories only really know how to communicate through tropes and the subversion or enforcement of them. A person with knowledge outside of them will still probably do things that fall into tropes but will come to it through a different process which will probably make it feel more real.
>>45860141
>You can't judge a work by dissecting it like some sort of cadaver.
Where the fuck do you get off telling people how they are or are not allowed to look at art? When you make something, do you line up how people are allowed to look at it and immediately dismiss anyone who goes outside of that? Trying to control who is or is not a valid audience isn't art. It's masturbation. Suck a dick and die.
>>45860141
I'll agree with your implicit point that it's folly when manifesto-anon tries to make objective judgements about something that hinges on subjective experiences.
However, refusing out of hand to analyze something because it's fundamentally subjective is a lazy man's excuse to avoid introspection and empathy.
>>45857104
absolutely not.
The worst thing any creative can do is spend too much time around other creatives. It never works and it usually results in bad fanfiction.
>>45857104
I think the type of speculative fiction you are referring to is usually written by math and science nerds. Hard Sci fi is a slog because it's full of explaining how gravity on the space station works for chapters.
>>45860586
The guy who wrote Spice and Wolf is an economist
>>45860586
I read a novel by a geologist once. It was about the hypothetical scenario of a volcano erupting in Germany and blocking the Rhine. Pretty interesting, but it felt like the characters were lacking.
The most memorable part was when they discovered that spherical containment shell of a nuclear power plant has a lower density than water, and the fucking thing ripped itself free and started floating downriver.
>>45857104
>bump
