I try not to go off on rants about this, but the availability of knowledge today is way way off into lost-in-elfland. (There's more than one phone app that just labels the night sky you're pointing it at, at way under a degree of pointing accuracy. "show satellites" is a switch. This is not so much the hundred gramme encyclopaedia as "everyone have a helpful daemon". And that's one thing. And, somehow, bewilderingly, almost no one has noticed.)
OF COURSE modern writing expectations are different (= much higher) than historically; a lot of the kerfuffle in fandom comes down to the fanficcer intolerance of making shit up. (there's a material canon, and it's the same awkward conversation as all the other constructions of canon, you have to have a reason to disdain it.) Which is, well, I figure there's at least a couple PhDs in figuring out how that happened. (and a few more in a different field in pointing out what it does to writing when you've stopped going for the impression of verisimilitude and have started feeling obliged to put real verisimilitude into your text, and what that does to the construction of fantasy and how you get niche genres partitioned around permissible implausibility. Old-school SF was anything that made you feel that sensawunda and smart at the same time; the modern expectation is that you've got a very definite budget for the unreal. What kind, and how much, are something the reader expects to have labelled going into novel length works.)
You've got a thoroughly modern expectation that all the real stuff will be real real stuff. So, yay! internet and the facilitation of research.
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Date: 2020-08-09 02:57 am (UTC)Yay, Mo's appetite!
I try not to go off on rants about this, but the availability of knowledge today is way way off into lost-in-elfland. (There's more than one phone app that just labels the night sky you're pointing it at, at way under a degree of pointing accuracy. "show satellites" is a switch. This is not so much the hundred gramme encyclopaedia as "everyone have a helpful daemon". And that's one thing. And, somehow, bewilderingly, almost no one has noticed.)
OF COURSE modern writing expectations are different (= much higher) than historically; a lot of the kerfuffle in fandom comes down to the fanficcer intolerance of making shit up. (there's a material canon, and it's the same awkward conversation as all the other constructions of canon, you have to have a reason to disdain it.) Which is, well, I figure there's at least a couple PhDs in figuring out how that happened. (and a few more in a different field in pointing out what it does to writing when you've stopped going for the impression of verisimilitude and have started feeling obliged to put real verisimilitude into your text, and what that does to the construction of fantasy and how you get niche genres partitioned around permissible implausibility. Old-school SF was anything that made you feel that sensawunda and smart at the same time; the modern expectation is that you've got a very definite budget for the unreal. What kind, and how much, are something the reader expects to have labelled going into novel length works.)
You've got a thoroughly modern expectation that all the real stuff will be real real stuff. So, yay! internet and the facilitation of research.