the lowercase

lbgale:

I think if someone asked me what a “typical” SF/fantasy novel would look like, I’d answer that it would be a narrative of linear events told by an unobtrusive third person.  Something with the narrative simplicity of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  I don’t think I’d be alone in providing such an answer.  We tend to associate the most basic storytelling with third person narration, no matter what the genre.  Or, if not third person, at least a first person narration told from the point of view of the main character, like The Hunger Games.

But historically, that is not necessarily the norm.  Many of the SF/fantasy classics on which the genres owe their roots followed more complicated narrative styles.  Perhaps the best example is Stoker’s Dracula, where the story emerges from bits and pieces of different characters’ journals, letters, newspaper clippings, and memos.  That kind of narrative removal is seen as well in Wells’ Time Machine, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Haggard’s She.  This is similar to today’s “found footage” film genre.

In each of those three novels the reader is introduced to a character who starts off as the first person narrator, then our narrator meets someone with a story to tell, and from that point out the bulk of the story is our first person’s account of the storyteller’s retelling of his adventure.   So basically, they make use of the “frame story” structure of a story within a story.  She differs from The Time Machine and Frankenstein only in that the story within the story is not told by another person, but is actually written into a narrative that our first person narrative only needed to edit here and there.

Part of the reason we see this pattern in form in these classic SF/fantasy novels is certainly due to literary fads and conventions of the nineteenth century, but it would be lame to write off the trend as merely symptomatic of what was popular at the time without looking deeper into why it worked so well and helped immortalize these particular classics.  Why a frame story?  Why a narrative removal through different mediums and different storytellers?  Why didn’t Wells, Shelley, Stoker, and Haggard just give the narrative burden to the person who ends up sharing his tale within a tale instead of to the nobodies we meet in the frame sections?

Though we’ll never know the definitive answer, it’s definitively true that part of the success of each of these SF/fantasy classics is a due to how their narrative styles help absorb readers’ moments of disbelief.  When dealing with the fantastic, SF/fantasy writers are always asking their readers to suspend reality.  Having an outsider as a narrator to share his perspective on the tale after being convinced of its authenticity helps make the lack of realism seem more believable.

Haggard’s She deals with this especially well through the frame story device.  Not only do we have the outsider as narrator in the frame section of the novel introduce the events to give us a release valve for our skepticism, but once this narrator offers us a look into the manuscript of the actual adventure story written by someone else we immediately get another story folded within that story of the origins of the adventure itself.  It is there, in that extra level of removal that bypasses the original narrator and the narrator of the manuscript to a third narrator, that the reader learns the most unrealistic essentials of the story’s background.  And that makes it an easier to accept the fantasy elements because Haggard gets the chance to show the second narrator’s skepticism to what he’s just heard.  Read the passage below and note how the list of the things the narrator has been asked to believe get incrementally more ridiculous:

“The whole story, on reflection, seemed to me utterly incredible….Was it likely that a man would have a son five years of age whom he had never seen since he was a tiny infant?  No.  Was it likely that he could foretell his own death so accurately?  No.  Was it likely that he could trace his pedigree for more than three centuries before Christ, or that he would suddenly confide the absolute guardianship of his child, and leave half his fortune, to a college friend?  Most certainly not.”

Yet somehow the speaker comes to accept it, and we, as the reader, are encouraged by his example to do the same.

The pattern of classic SF/fantasy novels incorporating various forms of media - diary entries, newspaper articles, unpublished manuscripts, etc. - to tell parts of the story has a similar effect.  The multiplicity of sources works like having an exhaustive bibliography.  Who’s going to doubt you, when you have twenty sources to back you up?

It also works to make the final work a bit more mysterious.  Stoker’s Dracula, with all its shifts in mediums, gives readers’ a sense that there is no narrator.  The story is bigger than a narrator.  It can only be comprehended by patching together multiple narrators, as if you can only approach the tale obliquely, like how Marion and Indy have to shield their eyes from the seeing the arc of the covenant lest it burn their brains out.  That indirect gaze we are forced to follow helps keep out of our direct line of sight some of cheesy or implausible aspects of the Dracula story.

Although these classic storytelling techniques might seem outdated and overly complicated to modern readers and writers, it’s useful to reflect on how much formal experimentation has always been at the heart of the SF/fantasy genres.  At what point did we decide that straight third person narration or protagonist-centric first person was the golden standard?

When Wells, Stoker, Shelley, and Haggard were writing, they were essentially creating a new genre, whether they knew it or not.  They had to do the work of trying to convince readers that something fantastical was worth suspending your sense of realism over.  If they just wrote the fantasy/SF tale at the heart of their novels without these stylistic layers they would simply be creating new fairy tales - a cute little bit of whimsy to amuse children.  Instead, they built up a sophisticated readership interested in stories that were completely unreal, yet somehow completely believable, which is good fantasy and science fiction at its heart.

Maybe one can argue that the genres have simply gotten more sophisticated; that they don’t need to depend on narrative and structural tricks and can dive right into strict third person/first person narratives right away.  But it seems more likely that the evolution from these classic novels’ formal trends to modern novels’ formal trends has less to do with the writers getting more sophisticated and more to do with the genres becoming more established.  By now, the fantasy and science fiction genres are literary fixtures with their own conventions and reader expectations.  Stephanie Meyer didn’t need to include a frame story to Twilight to allay reader skepticism over the realism of Edward’s sparkly vampire nature because readers of fantasy and SF know what they are getting into.  They know they need to suspend their sense of realism before even picking up a book.  Wells, Haggard, Stoker, and Shelley had to deal with all kinds of anxiety over believability that us modern SF/fantasy writers don’t even have to worry about…thanks to the genre-building work of Wells, Haggard, Stoker, and Shelley themselves!

Original Article

Don’t worry, we had to look it up, too. If you’re just getting into sci-fi, dabbling your toes in the proverbial waters, you might not even know what you don’t know. And there’s a lot to know, because we once didn’t know either. Does that make any sense?

Anyway, here’s our (ever-)growing list of books for the sci-fi newbie… or just old-hats who want look (and learn something) new. If you read just one, start with Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction.

Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions): Learn the basics.

Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination: What does the future hold, and why do we think it’s all bad? Or do we?

Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television: The final frontier?

The Secret History of Science Fiction: More than you ever thought you needed to know.

Want to know the first things we look for in our writers? Check it out.