I still love natural wine

Man, I read all those Larry Niven books as a teenager -- Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, Protector, World of Ptaavs, All the Myriad Ways, The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Neutron Star, there must have been others -- plus The Mote in God's Eye, co-written with Jerry Pournelle. Buttered my brainpan but good.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
I still don't understand why people say 'wish fulfillment' like it's a bad thing.
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There's nothing wrong with you fulfilling your wishes, Steven, but that doesn't mean that I want to read about them -- page after interminable page.

Mark Lipton
 
A hilarious example of the phenom can be seen in the current series "Bored to Death," where the short, fat, schlumpy Ray writes a comic called "Super Ray"; pitch-perfect parody.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by scottreiner:

anyone have any opinions on ringworld by niven. really more philosophy than sci-fi. i'm a huge fan...
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Larry Niven always struck more as a thinker than a writer, which is to say that most of his books trot out some intriguing ideas couched in fairly sloppy writing (wooden characters, simple plot lines, workmanlike prose). By the standards of genre fiction, most especially SF, he was a better-than-average writer who rarely indulged in the adolescent wish fulfillment that plagues the genre. I much preferred the short stories collected in "All the Myriad Ways" than any of his novels as they allowed him to explore those ideas without having to construct the elaborate edifice of a novel.

On Ringworld specifically: the idea for the world was a cool one, and he explores it fairly well, but the main characters (Louis Wu, Teela Brown, Nessus, Speaker) are fairly two dimensional and broadly painted. His characters and the plot always seem to be in service of his central conceit. On the plus side, the book reads fast and you get to learn about how you can generate a stationary eye in the sky on a ringworld, which was way cool to me.

Mark Lipton
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I like Niven and the Big Idea science fiction genre, but I always thought Iain M. Banks took what he did and produced better novels.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
I still don't understand why people say 'wish fulfillment' like it's a bad thing.
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There's nothing wrong with you fulfilling your wishes, Steven, but that doesn't mean that I want to read about them -- page after interminable page.

Mark Lipton
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Sure, that's a fine preference.

But, I have the other one - I enjoy and seek out reading materials which offer me characters with whom I identify doing things I would want to do if I could, of which there always have been and always will be very many.

Your preference is aesthetically acceptable in various refined quarters, while mine is not. I don't begrudge you yours at all - of course - but I have always been curious why mine makes me, in one respect at least, a second-class appreciator and evaluator of fiction.
 
I understand that some people have a preference for breaking ground. And, I understand why that preference might be privileged by, say, theorists of literature, although it is debatable the degree to which the contribution to the theory of x is also a contribution to x, for all x. I suppose it depends on the x.

But, that response is too pat, and also probably needs to be accompanied by the almost surely false claim that fiction that involves wish fulfillment in a significant way is for that very reason not ground-breaking. (Just for starters, there are formally ground-breaking works of fiction which stick to relatively formulaic wish-fulfillment formulas.)

I think 'wanting to be a superhero' is also an excessively narrow conception of wish fulfillment.

The definition of 'wish fulfillment' in play here needs to be considered as well. Most of the time when these claims are tossed off in casual conversations ('Mary Sue', e.g.) they conflate wish-fulfillment with poorly executed wish fulfillment. The latter is trivially not good, but the discovery that all bad x's are bad is not what one would wish for.

Of course as an empirical guideline for serious writers and readers the admonishment to avoid wish fulfillment can serve many useful functions, especially given the level of narcissism typical of our age. But the claim here is not that it is often or usually bad, but either that

(a) a work of fiction is necessarily bad if it contains a substantial wish-fulfillment component, or

(b) wish-fulfillment necessarily contributes to the badness of a work of fiction, even if it may sometimes be a component of a good work of fiction by way of compensating virtues.

The first actually virtually no-one holds, since there are numerous works driven in part by wish-fulfillment in the canon. The second is a more interesting claim and I suspect many people do hold it. But I don't see a principled argument for it.
 
I don't think there needs to be a more principled argument for it beyond "wow, I've read this one thousand times before." It just gets old, you know? There can be perfectly good books operating within some pretty tired genre-tropes that deal pretty heavily in wish fulfillment that are still pretty good (Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon comes to mind) but they are rare. Again, I blame Star Wars, which sucks.
 
Steven;

We're all limited to one either/or dichotomy per thread on this board, and we already had to pick between Thesis One or Thesis Two. My skull has fissures (work with me here, Politburo).

Wish fulfillment fiction is just romance without enough sexual tension. So I stick to non-fiction. I almost never find myself thinking, "how many times have I been here before?"
 
You know, Steven, I had a multi-page answer for a post you made a long while back, but it's so off-topic now that I'm going to let it be. It came down to: I think terroir exists whether or not anyone can tell, and I believe that I can demonstrate a proof of this. Maybe I'll post it to my blog some day.

Meanwhile, I like to muse on the possibility that Harlan Ellison writes wish-fulfillment fiction. (I'm already sure that some of his non-fiction is exactly that.)
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
I never read the book. I should. Have you?

Rewatching the film again recently, it was just so obvious that Tarkovsky is one of the greats of all (space and) time.

Of course a lot of people's greatest films were based on somebody else's book. Which isn't to say that Solaris is actually Tarkovsky's best, because it probably isn't.
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This was miles ago, but whatevs....

I'm unfit to report; I've not seen The Mirror yet, and I failed to make it through The Sacrifice on the first attempt. But what the hell. I love Tarkovsky and his long shots.

While I love Solaris, yes and the Lem novel as well, I've found Stalker to be the most compelling of Tarkovsky's films. Of the ones I've seen.

It's just a sequence of images, sounds, and ideas that I just can't get out my head, for months after a viewing. The uncanny Chernobyl presentience; the cast-off needles, orthodox imagery, and other objects lining the riverbeds; the philosphical quandary of the primary characters. And then there's those final few seconds which seem to change the interpretation of everything we've seen so far. I can never sleep after watching this film.
 
originally posted by slaton:
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
I never read the book. I should. Have you?

Rewatching the film again recently, it was just so obvious that Tarkovsky is one of the greats of all (space and) time.

Of course a lot of people's greatest films were based on somebody else's book. Which isn't to say that Solaris is actually Tarkovsky's best, because it probably isn't.
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This was miles ago, but whatevs....

I'm unfit to report; I've not seen The Mirror yet, and I failed to make it through The Sacrifice on the first attempt. But what the hell. I love Tarkovsky and his long shots.

While I love Solaris, yes and the Lem novel as well, I've found Stalker to be the most compelling of Tarkovsky's films. Of the ones I've seen.

It's just a sequence of images, sounds, and ideas that I just can't get out my head, for months after a viewing. The uncanny Chernobyl presentience; the cast-off needles, orthox imagery, and other objects lining the riverbeds; the philosphical quandary of the primary characters. And then there's those final few seconds which seem to change the interpretation of everything we've seen so far. I can never sleep after watching this film.
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For me it is Rublev or Stalker for top honors. I go back and forth from the Zone.
 
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