Some years ago I took a workshop with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he pointed out – referencing criticisms of his books for being too expository – that one of the things a novel does is give you room to put all those details in.
Short stories are best when they leave out everything that isn’t essential. Flash fiction is the most extreme version of this. But novels can be expansive.
In keeping with this, I remember a concept that I believe I first heard from Vonda N. McIntyre: there are rules for writing a novel but no one knows what they are.
Of course, Vonda didn’t ever write the same book twice. Neither, by the way, does Karen Joy Fowler, but I’m thinking about Vonda today because her last book, The Curve of the World, just came out from Aqueduct Press.
It’s a fabulous book, but it doesn’t fit easily into people’s preconceptions about what a novel ought to be.
Vonda always described herself as a science fiction writer, even when some people persisted in calling The Moon and the Sun “fantasy.” In the chat on the online launch of The Curve of the World last Saturday, John Berry observed that Vonda didn’t consider the book to be alternative history.
I’d call it speculative history, but I’m pretty sure Vonda thought of it as science fiction set in the past – speculation about what those cultures and lives might be.
As someone who has read David Graeber and David Wengrew’s The Dawn of Everything, I think Vonda’s speculation about the past is, at its core, as true to what might have happened as it can be for a time about which we have little information. Things could have happened the way Vonda imagined them. Continue reading “What Novels Can Be”…