Question of plausibility in Small Rain.

[John Bailey]

>From: William Zantzinger <williamzantzinger at yahoo.com>
>Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 15:09:15 -0800 (PST)
>
>It sure does read like Sci-Fi at times and why
>shouldn't it.
>  Fantasy, fairy tale, Romance, Gothic Romance  and
>science fiction have much in common. Think of Swift or
>Pynchon. Pynchon defends Sci-Fi in his Luddite essay.
>One of the complaints that critics of Pynchon are
>always bringing up is his failure to create human
>characters. We should note that this is a critique of
>Sci-Fi generally. Of course the excuse, if we want to
>insist that it is an excuse, is that the technological
>world of the sci-fi characters has de-humanized them.
>

Science fiction is a very humanist genre. It humanises technology, science, 
politics etc. It personifies abstract concepts and literalises ideas which 
can only be talked around in realist fiction. It is almost completely 
concerned with humanity and obsessively dissects what it means to be human. 
It just does this in a non-realist manner (it's more complicated than that, 
of course). If characters are 'de-humanised' in SF, the world they inhabit 
is made alive, animated, made human and transcendent at the same time. This 
is how I see P's works as related to science fiction.

I'm not that into science fiction writing, though, for these same reasons. A 
literature which is the opposite of humanism would be well worth reading, in 
my eyes. I guess concrete poetry might come close.

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