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So we jumped up on the table and shouted anarchy
I would love to know what I was thinking when I left myself a half-finished note on James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977). I'd have to re-read the novel to see if it's still true, but it used to fall firmly into the category of books I love although they are possibly not any good. I was thirteen when I read it for the first time, staying with my brother's godparents and their house-spanning, university-grade library of genre fiction. It's a puzzle-book, the scientific equivalent of a police procedural. A twenty-first-century lunar exploration discovers a dead man on the moon, in a spacesuit; this would not be so unusual except that he's been dead for 50,000 years. You keep reading in anticipation of an explanation for this apparent paradox, and somewhat secondarily to find out how the protagonists will handle the knowledge once they have it, but nobody in it has any characterization past the necessities of their place in the plot. I remember always liking Christian Danchekker, the lanky, pedantic, abrasive evolutionary biologist who serves as an intellectual antagonist for the first two-thirds of the book, but he's no more three-dimensional than the rest of the cast; his particular stereotypes were just more interesting to me than well-adjusted engineering. I think I picked up several early favorite characters that way. To be honest, it still works. The right kind of character will catch my attention over anyone else in the narrative even if they're two-dimensional or onscreen for five minutes. Some years ago I realized that the paucity of women on the list of favorite characters I've been keeping for the last fifteen years has nothing to do with a constitutional inability to empathize with female characters: it's the fact that the traits that most reliably interest me in a character are traditionally assigned to men.1 Write more widely varied and weirder female characters and I fall for them just as instantly as their male counterparts.2 It's one of the reasons I am looking forward to the Ghostbusters reboot. With that many women taking center stage, at least one of them should be strange enough for me. I bet that was not what I left myself the note to talk about, but it's true. More eccentrics of all genders and I'll be happy.
1. It has also never helped that romance is not one of my main attractors and the most conventional way to include a woman in a narrative is as a love interest; the most conventional way to make a woman the protagonist is to write a love story. If there's one lady in the plot and her primary effect on it is through her affections, unless we're talking Elsa Lanchester's Bride, I'm out of luck. I display about as little interest in male characters who are romantic heroes unless they have some other notable quality. There's a related conversation here about secondary characters versus protagonists, but it belongs to another post or at least footnote.
2. I tested this hypothesis originally with Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle (1986), Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest (1978–1996 as far as I followed the series), and Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000). Later evidence included The Awakening (2011), The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), Agent Carter (2015–), the fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Gemma Files, and pre-Code Hollywood. Film noir, too.
1. It has also never helped that romance is not one of my main attractors and the most conventional way to include a woman in a narrative is as a love interest; the most conventional way to make a woman the protagonist is to write a love story. If there's one lady in the plot and her primary effect on it is through her affections, unless we're talking Elsa Lanchester's Bride, I'm out of luck. I display about as little interest in male characters who are romantic heroes unless they have some other notable quality. There's a related conversation here about secondary characters versus protagonists, but it belongs to another post or at least footnote.
2. I tested this hypothesis originally with Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle (1986), Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest (1978–1996 as far as I followed the series), and Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000). Later evidence included The Awakening (2011), The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), Agent Carter (2015–), the fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Gemma Files, and pre-Code Hollywood. Film noir, too.
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I never did! Talk to me about it?
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