<snip>
I know others will argue otherwise. But consider how difficult and how rare it is to be able to conceive the religious, philosophical, and human archetypes of a society and cast them as living figures working their fates out through an unfolding narrative that is also the history of the society itself. There are just not that many writers for The Brothers Karamozov.
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Here's an audio interview (MP3) you might enjoy:
<http://trashotron.com/agony/audio/rudy_rucker_2007.mp3>
It's a recording of Rick Kleffel's January 2007 interview with Rudy Rucker. Kleffel is an author and editor of a literary site: "The Agony Column". Rucker is a Santa Cruz based computer scientist and science fiction writer.
One of the topics discussed is Rucker's idea of "transreal fiction". It's not an entirely new idea (someone will surely point out "magical realism" and similarly unconstrained techniques) but I think Rucker's interpretation is crafted from intriguingly unique elements.
An excerpt:
A Tranrealist Manifesto
Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that Transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.
The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which
life is embedded. The characters should be based on actual people.
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full at -
<http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/transrealistmanifesto.pdf>
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Someone once said, "twelve is the magical age for sci-fi" and I suppose it's true.
By twelve, I was reading works such as Asimov's "I Robot" and his Foundation Series. These books were decades old by the time I got a chance to enjoy them - venerable classics of the 'hard sci-fi' genre. Although pleased I was an avid reader, my teachers sternly informed me that, while these books were "fun", I had more serious reading to do: adulthood, that harshest of taskmasters, was fast approaching.
So, I was happily introduced to the words of Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, to Shakespeare and Moliere, Austin, Proust and Joyce, Dostoevsky, Richard Wright and so on. Too many to list: all hungrily absorbed. This was good, everyone applauded my literary maturity, but there was a whiff of decay in the air. There was an understanding - sometimes implied, sometimes spoken aloud: in coffee shops and at word-besotted parties and curling, like smoke, around and through the approving whispers of impressed girlfriends - that the old rocket men and their flashy children were, at best, pushers of a gateway drug: the love of reading. The real stuff was on a different floor at Borders.
It was only later, after a long time spent mimicking literati disdain for the 'unreal', that my old interests returned - via Kafka and Ballard, Lem and PKD and of course, William Gibson (who was brought to my attention, interestingly enough, by a Professor of Medieval studies: she experienced a 'shock of the new' moment when she first read "Neuromancer" and never looked back - "like Mephistopheles, marveling at Faust's engineering projects").
.d.