https://doctorow.medium.com/a-half-built-garden-11b83512570b
"
A Half-Built Garden (published today) is Ruthanna Emrys’s new novel, a
spectacular first-contact novel about complicated utopias and networked
conflict — it’s a wild ride, and a perfect example of one of the smartest
structural analyses of science fiction I ever heard:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210982/ahalfbuiltgarden
I got this analysis from my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, nearly 20 years ago,
when he was giving me his editorial notes on my debut novel
Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom, and it’s shaped everything I’ve written since. Patrick
explained to me that an sf novel is like a piece of clockwork with two gears:
there’s a small, quickly spinning, high-torque gear (the protagonist), and a
huge, slow-moving gear that it propels (the world).
The protagonist is a microcosm for the world, and their job is to spin around
and around, until they propel the world through a single full revolution,
giving us a complete, 360° view of the social speculation embodied by the
world."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
