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shewhomustThere's a sense in which all fiction is speculative fiction: it all occurs in a world which is not quite this one (the world as it appears to me) but subtly other (the world as it appears to the author, or as the author needs it to appear in order for the story to happen as required, or...).
Which is a prelude to the confession that one of the big pleasures of SF for me is also one of the big pleasures of historical fiction. Perverse though it may be to look for the same thing in narratives deliberately set in the past and those deliberately set in the future, what they both offer is an extreme case of "What is it like to be someone else?"
If I don't get that, I feel cheated - which is why anachronisms irritate me so much.
I was set thinking about this recently, during a talk at Newcastle's Literary & Philosophical Society. The speaker demonstrated Ellis Peters' skill in world-building by reading the opening of the first Brother Cadfael novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones:
I'm willing to believe in Cadfael as a pious man whose greatest pleasure is to attend the various services of the monastic day, and I'm equally willing to believe in him as someone for whom the daily Mass (and the reading from the monastic rule which follows it) are the price you pay for the refuge of the church in your old age. But I won't believe in him as a twelfth centure monk who measures out his time in ten-minute chunks. He's more likely to think of the length of time I call "half an hour" as "the time it takes to read a chapter from the rule" - and that might equally well be forty minutes.
Is this trivial? Perhaps. But it indicates a failure of imagination: Cadfael is not a medieval monk, he's a modern man in fancy dress. And it breaks my mood, my suspension of disbelief, as surely as spotting that all the aliens in the SF movie are humanoid, so that they can be played by actors in costume.
Which is a prelude to the confession that one of the big pleasures of SF for me is also one of the big pleasures of historical fiction. Perverse though it may be to look for the same thing in narratives deliberately set in the past and those deliberately set in the future, what they both offer is an extreme case of "What is it like to be someone else?"
If I don't get that, I feel cheated - which is why anachronisms irritate me so much.
I was set thinking about this recently, during a talk at Newcastle's Literary & Philosophical Society. The speaker demonstrated Ellis Peters' skill in world-building by reading the opening of the first Brother Cadfael novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones:
On the fine, bright morning in early May when the whole sensational affair of the Gwytherin relics may properly be considered to have begun, Brother Cadfael had been up long before Prime, pricking out cabbage seedlings before the day was aired, and his thoughts were all on birth, growth and fertility, not at all on graves and reliquaries and violent deaths, whether of saints, sinners, or ordinary decent, fallible men like himself. Nothing troubled his peace but the necessity to take himself indoors for Mass, and the succeeding half-hour of chapter, which was always liable to stray over by an extra ten minutes.
I'm willing to believe in Cadfael as a pious man whose greatest pleasure is to attend the various services of the monastic day, and I'm equally willing to believe in him as someone for whom the daily Mass (and the reading from the monastic rule which follows it) are the price you pay for the refuge of the church in your old age. But I won't believe in him as a twelfth centure monk who measures out his time in ten-minute chunks. He's more likely to think of the length of time I call "half an hour" as "the time it takes to read a chapter from the rule" - and that might equally well be forty minutes.
Is this trivial? Perhaps. But it indicates a failure of imagination: Cadfael is not a medieval monk, he's a modern man in fancy dress. And it breaks my mood, my suspension of disbelief, as surely as spotting that all the aliens in the SF movie are humanoid, so that they can be played by actors in costume.
