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CTGttW Question 10: Writing
What did you think of the writing? Did anything in particular stand out? Did the three viewpoint characters have distinct voices?
A couple of things I noticed were that the book was told in the present tense, and the chapters got shorter as the book progressed and the action intensified. Did these elements help or hinder?
Comments
Generally speaking, I quite liked the prose. I didn’t find myself remarking too often on turns of phrases, but I did like it quite a bit. I noted the author was a Clarion* writing workshop alumnus which put her in illustrious company.
*One of those Prisoners of Gravity episodes I previously mentioned deals with the Clarion workshops, and they interview Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis, and many more. Many people commented on how brutal some of the critiques would feel - basically all they do it write and critique each other’s works. The key takeaway seemed to be that the whole point of Clarion was to hone your skills at critiquing the work of others, until you were able to critique your own work.
I noticed the writing, which is not usually a good sign. It wasn't bad writing, but I think it worked against the premise of the book. About 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through I thought about the kind of text a LLM would produce, and felt this book was in that vicinity. What I mean is that the writing was very, even too, smooth, and so I had no feeling of a speaker struggling to say something truly new. Likewise, complicated sentence structures convey complexity, and there weren't so many of those, I suppose in part because of the emphasis in 1st person narrative. Anyway, the result was that I felt the Wastelands were given short shrift: I think they should have been more alien than the book conveyed. No sense of real danger there expressed by 1st person voice. I'm comparing with say Dick, Lem, etc., who really were masters at conveying the subtleties of confusion, incertitude, and perplexity.
However, when writing genre you want the reader to be comfortable rather than challenged, so I think it's an understandable choice.
I felt the writing was competent rather than classy or poetic, and like @BarnerCobblewood felt it fitted the intention of the book insofar as I knew what that was.
I suppose Elena should have been the voice of the Wastelands, and maybe became that progressively as the book came to its conclusion. But maybe she could have been more strikingly weird from the outset - one of the things we are told several times about the Wastelands is that they tend to invade and take over rational thought, especially if people are not attentive to their own thinking. But I didn't get that sense from Elena - she was great at hiding but not so great at being startlingly different, not until right at the end.
I also regretted that in the end she kind of faded out - I suppose the idea was that she became kind of universal rather than personal, but that then meant that the Wastelands lost whatever actual voice they had.
So I found this book quite frustrating. There are many excellent ideas here, too many, and they are limited by the books adherence to the idea of progress being good. This is why I don't see it as much use for gaming. From THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK under the title, "Afterthought by the Author."
What is this story about? I can't say. But it's almost about so many things. It reminds me of Babel. I had the same sense of frustration - a great idea, but ... finally it's about characters, not the idea. Contrast with say the Foundation Series, which is not about any character, but the idea of psycho-history, no matter how mad that idea seems to be.
For me this is related to role-playing games because while there is a ton of material (systems, supplements, modules, maps, atlases, etc.) being produced, most of them are not what the game is about. And I guess I think that a good TTRPG should be something where we can say "Did you play the game about ... ?"
That's an interesting quote and thanks for copying it here. And (for me at least) it raises a lot of questions about writing form. I do certainly agree that a (short) story has to have a strong focus, whereas a novel does not need every part to have such a focus. But the example of Virginia Wolfe is very suitable to bring in, and for PKD to say that she "wound up writing about nothing at all" kind of misses the point that there are different forms of writing - or at very least this comment shows a highly concrete approach to storytelling.
Wolfe increasingly wanted to write about inner states, especially of women, often in a kind of stream-of-consciousness manner. Yes, the external events are often secondary or unimportant, but that kind of doesn't matter - she's not writing that kind of story! There's also a kind of story (which emerges both in historical and science fiction) where the writer is really addressing the question "what is it like to live in such an age / society / place / time / culture?". Again, external events are kind of unimportant except insofar as they reveal options or consequences that the character has to consider and (maybe) act on - the main point is the immersion in a different setting than the normal one.
Now, I totally agree that not all such novels work for all readers - but then neither do the concrete "what's the story about" type novels.
Does that apply to this novel? Well, maybe. Weiwei is through the circumstance of her birth and upbringing quite alienated from "ordinary life". But in fact most of the characters are also alienated, whether by death of a spouse, rejection of life's work, assumption of a false identity, development of frowned-upon technology, rank, and so on. What happens when a group of separate people are thrown together in a situation where in fact they have to work together? Can they develop a community of their own, however different from the ones they have left behind, or do they try to cling on to what the outside world considers normal? What happens when another previously unknown alien appears in their midst? I kind of think those are interesting questions regardless of whether the train made commercial sense (which I think we've agreed it does not) or other such concrete considerations.
Now I do think you're absolutely right to ask "if the author wanted to write such a novel, how on earth can it reach a conclusion?" What might be a satisfying end to the journey? Sarah Brooks elected to have "the journey never ends" as the conclusion, and then had to write some closing paragraphs to convey that. She set herself a difficult task, I think, and maybe didn't succeed in the ways she hoped. But I do think she wasn't locked in to PKD's model "in the novel you've got to follow him from the day he was born to the day he dies (or nearly so)" - she is not interested in going on to Weiwei's death, nor to the ultimate victory of either Wasteland or Normal Earth. It's a snippet from the middle of life, not a whole biography.
@RichardAbbott Of course, PKD is being provocative when he talks about Virginia Woolf, and if he is saying that Virginia Woolf is a poor writer, he also is clearly wrong. But is he saying that? Or is his point to use Virginia Woolf, or is to point out a difference between a novel and story - stories simply fail when there is no external "about" to them, whereas novels can be "about" internal states without being about external things? That stories cannot only have the protagonist as these about, but necessarily must also be about some other thing, whereas as say Mrs Dalloway is simply and only about a fictional (non-existent) Mrs Dalloway in the author's present (existent) world. In that sense it is about "nothing."
Is this a defensible interpretation of Virginia Woolf? I don't know. But I think it's a defensible interpretation of what PKD is saying in this short snippet. Which of these two interpretations (VW is a poor story-teller vs VW writes novels exclusively about internals things) is the right one? Well, he is not around to ask, so we cannot tell, but in any case I as a reader, due to my particular education, training, and personal experience, don't care much about the author's intention. And even if an author says some text is about this or that, that is not the "answer" to question of what the text is "about."
Anthony Burgess writing in the Encyclopedia Brittanica https://www.britannica.com/art/novel has this to say:
What is a plot? Again from Encyclopedia Brittanica https://www.britannica.com/art/plot
Is The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wasteland a novel whose plot is is desultory? No it is not. So I think it is reasonable to ask what it is about, and then critique it because the plot is confused. I found this book quite frustrating because I think Brook's idea of the Wasteland and the society that it produces could be quite thick, thick enough maybe for a whole career as a writer, but it isn't. For thick, I got it through Clifford Geertz, but you can read about Ryle's originating take on it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080410232658/http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/CSACSIA/Vol11/Papers/ryle_1.html
This reminded me of a T-shirt I once saw that said:
"I may not look like I'm doing much, but on a cellular level I'm really quite busy."
One major failing with the technical part of the writing. I share @Apocryphal 's opinion that the characters weren't clearly distinguished on the page. The characters were all different people (to me), but the voice in the chapters wasn't distinct. Some mannerisms, some turns of phrase, something would have been helpful to make the characters stand out easily to the reader.
As for the primacy of the idea in writing... that's PKD's idea. Just because he said it, doesn't mean it's true. I'm happy to accept that @BarnerCobblewood prefers stories to have one clear, over-riding idea to them. But that doesn't mean that preference is universal.
Getting back to this book, I actually mostly agree with the criticism that it's over-ambitious, probably over-ambitious for the skill of the author. I think it's possible to bring together all (or at least, most) of the different strands and ideas into a more coherent book than this manages. But I think that achievement is beyond Brooks at the moment.
@NeilNjae Of course you're right about PKD. I'm not saying it's gospel. It helps me think through whether something is SF. And I do think he is right that a story must have a narrative where the characters interact with something outside them, that provides them a focus, whereas a novel does not have that requirement. Some novels have stories in them. My disappointment with the novel is that I thought the Wastelands were a great external focus, but finally weren't really important to the story, which seems to me to be about people on a train who are overly self-absorbed and see their own situation as the only situation. So I think there could have been a good story, but there wasn't.
I was seduced by the concept and bitterly disappointed by the execution. It was full of magical thinking, not just magical effects. The writing was competent enough that I continued to read the book thinking she would pull it together, but that never happened.