Comprehensible Is the New Black

John Scalzi is being railroaded into heading a new movement in SF: The New Comprehensible. He disdains manifestoes ("people who issue literary manifestos should be thrown into jet engines"), but does offer a set of precepts for people seeking to write in the New Comprehensible:

1. Think of an actual person you know, of reasonable intelligence, who likes to read but does not read science fiction.

2. Write with that person in mind.

He goes on to note that these same rules apply to other genres of fiction. He does not, however, make the point that this is also excellent advice for non-fiction writing. It's a trans-genre, all-encompassing literary gestalt! Or something.

Anyway, if you'd like to write non-fiction about science belonging to the New Comprehensible, a simple modification of Step 1 will do the trick:

1. Think of an actual person you know, of reasonable intelligence, who is curious about your area of science, but hasn't taken a science class since high school.

Step Two is unchanged, and you're on your way.

Really, that's all there is to it. If your explanation requires people to understand group theory, or biochemistry, you're doing it wrong. If your explanation doesn't use any words you wouldn't expect the average high-school senior to know, or at least includes a definition of new words in terms that an average high-school senior would know, then you're on your way.

It's harder than it looks, though...

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That is why John Scalzi is consciously tring to be a New Heinlein. No narrative chunks. No insider references. Just tell the story straight, for a wide audience, without talking down to them.

The appearance of no style is, in fact, one of the hardest styles toi master. Heinlein and Asimov did it. Neither -- they boasted -- ever took a course in Writing. Both had poliotical points of view, rather strongly. Yet the books are not didactic in pushing those opinions.

Asimov insisted that the human race was going somewhere, and that rational suasion and battles on the plane of ideas were more interesting than shoot-em-up violence.

Asimov insisted that the human race was going somewhere, and that was out into the cosmos, and that There Will Be War. But other things go on between and within the wars.

You know about the Taxicab Compact between Asimov and Clarke, as to who was the world's greatest science fiction writer and who was the world's best science writer, yes?

I've read (and I think heard in an interview) that this is precisely the method that Richard Dawkins uses when writing his books. He thinks of various family members and the viewpoint from which they would be reading from, and revises his work this way a couple of times until he gets it right.

I remember a Sam Delaney novel which showed partical differential equations to describe how a game worked. I had no problems with it, i'm sure someone who has never seen a diffy eq before would have been just as impressed by the cool vearibles it had.
best regards,
pete

By Peter J Stolos (not verified) on 22 Feb 2007 #permalink

Jonathan Vos Post,
Your Asimov #2 was meant to be Robert Heinlein, no?

By Antiquated Tory (not verified) on 05 Mar 2007 #permalink