plots, victims and heroes

[Kevin Crosby]

>This past weekend a friend told me that he found the
characters of COL49
>"cardboard," and after mulling it over, I couldn't help but agree
with
>him.  While I did get a multidimensional feel for the heroine of
the novel,
>any other characters were so two dimensional that I quickly
forgot them.

But doesn't TRP say, in the intro to _Slow Learner_, that the main
fault of his early stories was the attempt to base a story on an
idea (is this the same as plot?) rather than on empathetic
characters?  From what I remember, the basic theme of the intro
essay was that stories have to be based on characters with
depth, rather than interesting ideas.  So why do the characters in
the Slow Learner stories have more depth than those in Lot49?

KevinC
kcrosby at wppost.depaul.edu