On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 11:54:17AM -0700, Quinn Tyler Jackson wrote:

[quoting somebody -- oh dear, either Barbara or Barb, I think]

> > This sounds like perfect material for a twentieth century Dickens!  It's A
> > Christmas Carol minus the happy ending.
> 
> It's also one of the reasons I don't write science fiction or fantasy.
> 
> The human condition is quite an interesting enough subject without
> conjecture.

You're quite right that the impetus behind some writing of sf or
fantasy is conjection, the what-if impulse.

That's not why I write fantasy, though; I'm not really very good
at conjecture.  I write fantasy because it best expresses what I
see in the human condition.  To tell the truth, I have to, as
Emily Dickenson said in another connection, tell it slant.  If I
wrote mainstream with no fantastical elements, it wouldn't be
true, not for me to write it.  Other people's mainstream is true
for them, and sometimes when I read it true for me too.  But the
way I construct the world has fantastical metaphor; it makes no
poetic sense otherwise.

-- 

Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet           (pddb{at}demesne.com)
"I will open my heart to a blank page
   and interview the witnesses."  John M. Ford, "Shared World"

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