Right after I posted about my new insight on story, Ela Thier sent out a new article about something very similar, about knowing the difference between the story itself (in her metaphor, the fossil, or in one that also works well, a sculpure) and the dust & debris from excavating/carving it. The article is on her Story Writing page. The title is Story Structure, Dinosaurs, and Stephen King.
I had another insight about the difference between story and setting. A lot of my scifi ideas are essentially settings. The story is what happens in that setting. While reading a story called "Brain Raid" in the current F&SF, I thought it's really about a young man and his career angst in a troubled industry, which could occur in many settings. This one happened to be in a setting involving rogue AI's (artificial intelligence) and specialists who hunt them down. The scifi is in the setting more than the story. Analog's guidelines say something about how if you take the science out of the story there's no story as a guide to what they're looking for, but I think many successful scifi stories could be told in a different setting that is not scifi.
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but I think many successful scifi stories could be told in a different setting that is not scifi.
I agree. It might just come down to a matter of taste for us. I personally never liked stories that were so science-driven that it completely swallows the story.
The example given in the Analog guidelines is Frankenstein - if you take out the science there's no story. But I think the circumstances under which it was written have something to do with that. It wasn't a big expansive novel that took 2 years to write. It was more like a long weekend, & it was a competition with other writers (4 or 5?) So of course she wasn't going to take it on any side trips.
Anyway, I find all the quibbling about subgenres tiresome. In my recent submission of "A Singular Being" to Critters, I said I wanted advice on whether to send it back to Analog who had rejected an earlier version of it. People expressed several opinions about what is appropriate for Analog, which I have been reading faithfully every month for about a year and a half. I don't think editor Stan Schmidt's selection of stories is as narrow as some people seem to think. One Critter did mention "scientific plausability" which got me thinking about specifically what do I mean when I portray my aliens with a perception that transcends time and the death of the body? This was very helpful in today's revision session. I do mean for it to be plausible as a sense that we don't have but they do.
I agree that a good story should work in some form in any setting. Is Frankenstein really about the science or about ethics or about the horror of having what you created turn out to be something monstrous. I remember reading something in college where the author thought that Mary Shelley's themes in Frankenstein had come from having three miscarriages and a still birth in short succession, basically saying that creation was not necessarily all it was cracked up to be. Of course, we are talking about a chick that carried her husband's heart around in a pouch. On the other note, it is interesting that some very famous stories came out of some friends having a little writing competition.
I think the basic reason I write mysteries is that I can toss in just about any theme or circumstance in any time period and throw in about any element (sci-fi, magic, historical) and as long as a body turns up, it's a mystery.
Also,obviously, since it's subtitled "A Modern Prometheus", Frankenstein is also about mankind having too much power, too much knowledge and so much ego it believes itself to be God-like. So there's way more than science going on there.
Now that you mention it, I did think it odd that ANALOG used FRANKENSTEIN as an example, because it is about much more than the science, and while it certainly qualfies as science fiction, I had never thought of it that way before. It's funny how the story in its many forms and mutations is most often called horror, when in fact there's nothing supernatural going on, just a mad scientist and his creation.
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