In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Paul Kincaid and Dawn Macdonald join Dan Hartland to discuss style: What is it, what does it do, how can we think about it? And why does SFF seem to have such a fraught relationship with it? Get ready for Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, verse and poetry ... and police raids.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 21: On Style

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by Paul Kincaid, a returning guest of the show and most recently author of the excellent review collection Colourfields, and by the poet and critic Dawn Macdonald, whose Northerny was published last year by the University of Alberta Press.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we tackle the question of style. What is it? How do we know it when we read it, and why does it have such a tense relationship with SFF authors? And reviewers. Dawn and Paul talked me through prose and poetry criticism and close reading, and together we poke around a bit at the thorny question of what style in science fiction and fantasy might mean and how those of us who write about SF might do so with more attention to the words themselves.

We began by trying to define our terms. When it comes to style, it turns out this ain’t easy.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thank you both for joining me for this conversation about style, and especially style in SFF—although we can discuss whether that’s even a separate topic of conversation.

One of the reasons I was really pleased that both of you have written about style recently for Strange Horizons is because it seems to me that so few do. I mean, we will now get so many letters of comment in telling me that, in fact, loads of people write about style and I’m just not reading the right reviews or whatever it is! But it feels to me that we write, in science fiction criticism especially, but elsewhere too, much more about content than we do about form.

So your two reviews coming so close to each other made me think, okay, this is probably the only opportunity I will get all year to do an episode on style. But it struck me. And, while we were talking just before we started, I know that you both agree that can be difficult even to know what style is.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah it is.

Dan Hartland: So I thought we might start with that. Paul, why don’t you kick us off? Because it was you that said most vociferously before we began that no one knows what style is. So why don’t you tell us?

Paul Kincaid: My take on style? Any work of fiction, poetry, drama, whatever has a lot going on in it. You know, you’ve got characterization, you’ve got setting, you’ve got the story itself. You’ve got meanings and references and all sorts of other things, but that’s all below the surface. The surface is style. Style is what takes you from the words on the page into what is going on within the story.

Dawn Macdonald: Everything has a style, but the style is not always calling attention to itself in a really obvious way. And so there’s an anecdote that I was thinking about on my way over to my office here. Isaac Asimov talks about somewhere a fan letter that he received where the gentleman said, “Dr. Asimov, I love your stories. I usually hate reading, but when I open one of your books, I don’t feel like I’m reading at all.” And Asimov thought this was an amazing, wonderful fan letter because really his goal was not to have the linguistic interface standing in the way of the story or calling attention to itself separate from story. So almost an anti-style.

But at the same time, when you read Asimov, it sounds like Asimov. Like, he has a voice, he has a style. You do have a sense of him as distinct even from other writers from that era, like Arthur C. Clarke, who are writing very plot driven, very transparent type of prose.

But each of them kind of has their unique way that they do it. But when we are talking about the works that that we reviewed recently—C. F. Ramuz that I reviewed and, Paul, the verse novel that you reviewed—I think those are works where style of the prose really calls attention to itself as a significant part of the experience of reading this text.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. You couldn’t discuss either of those books without talking about style because you are missing fifty percent or more of what is going on on the page. They are rare, though. It is all too easy not to mention style when you are reviewing books. So many books try to be transparent, which is itself a style, but there’s also, let’s face it, in science fiction so much absolute flat writing that could be an office memo as much of the story. I read so many of those.

Dan Hartland: I’d really like to get into science fiction’s relationship with style specifically, because feels to me to be the greatest push-pull of relationships. But let’s stick briefly to this idea of what style more generally is.

I’m really struck by what Dawn says, that everything has a style, right? But that some things are stylier than others! We talk about stylists sometimes, don’t we, by which we mean, I think, writers that, as Paul says, call attention to their style, that use their style in a very ostentatious or visible or clear way.

John Keene, the writer, has defined literary style as kind of the material articulation, I think he said, of whatever the author’s trying to say, right? So whatever the author is trying to write down, style becomes the kind of materiality of how they do that—their choice of diction, their syntax, all of this stuff.

And as Dawn says, some of these choices, some of these material articulations, are more kind of textured than others. Let’s dig in briefly, then to the reviews, to try and get a sense of what that means in practice. So, Dawn, talk to us about the Ramuz. I mean, your review of this book was itself a beautiful exercise in style, I thought it was so, so well written. But yeah: Let’s talk a little bit about why you were so attracted to the style of this book and so struck by how it behaved.

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s an interesting book because not only is it a work in translation—so we’re looking at how the translator dealt with the style of the original (and I did not read the original, I do read some French but not well enough to really make that comparison for myself and I don’t have it on hand), so we get the layers of how the translators worked with the style of the original, the style of the original, the style of the translator—we’ve also got the fact that it’s an older book.

So, it came out in the 1920s and I’m a big fan of writing from that era. There’s a lot of really cool stuff that went on in that era—a bit nascent for science fiction, but I felt like this book really situated itself within modernism, it had some aspects that related to other writers of the period, like Thomas Mann. It wasn’t Jocyean in exactly, but it had some of those elements of being a bit experimental in how it approached narrative. I felt like that was an aspect of what was going on, kind of as much as any story that it was telling.

And this was in particular a book where there was not really much of a plot. Like, the plot kind of happens on page one, right, where they give you the premise and then it’s just kind of the unfolding of that premise and you could probably predict everything that’s going to happen. So it’s more about situating the reader inside an experience of being a person who is in the last days of the Earth, where the end is inevitable, and facing mortality—facing not just your own mortality, but the mortality of the planet, of the species and what that might feel like. So it’s more experiential, I guess, as a book rather than story. It’s trying to put you inside and let you get into a mind-frame or almost a spiritual frame, and it’s doing that by kind of casting a spell.

Paul Kincaid: By coincidence, I’ve just read a book called Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank, which is … well, its subtitle is Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.

And it makes very interesting point about Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, that style of writing at that time—the 1920s, just post-First World War—where the emphasis was on the sentence rather than the whole thing. It sounds like that applies to your book, Dawn. In Frank’s book, he made the analogy that it’s like you are doing a painting and the artistry is in the brush strokes not in the finished picture.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And I would say that the emphasis is on the sentence and also the emphasis is on inhabiting a consciousness. So if we think about Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, right, where it’s stream of consciousness or Ulysses, where it’s stream of consciousness, I would not say that Into The Sun by CF Ramuz is exactly stream of consciousness. It isn’t that, but it is about situating you inside of a consciousness, a conscious experience, kind of inhabiting fragments of moments that piece together.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, it’s when you say that there is no real story in it. It’s trying to put an experience into words rather than trying to put a narrative into words, which is also what I felt was the case in the verse novel I reviewed, because I find that absolutely fascinating. But you can do things with words rather than just do a straight story. I’ve been writing something recently about the New Wave, and the big controversy when the New Wave was going in on the mid-sixties was: They were bringing in literary style. They were bringing elements from the novel, from the modernists and so on, and the traditionalists were saying, “We don’t want any of that. Science fiction is all about just the story. We don’t want any of this fancy stuff going around it. We just want the story.”

And actually, when you look at some of the things, the stories that they were extolling, they’re virtually unreadable now.

Dan Hartland: The modernism thing I think is really important to the reasons for and the ways in which science fiction began to have this kind of difficult relationship with style. And it’s partly because the modernists themselves aligned themselves against the so-called realists, the H. G. Wells and the Jules Vernes. And so the inheritors of that tradition were like, “Well, OK, we’ll do our thing and it will be different. It won’t have this style stuff.” And so there’s kind of a mutual chauvinism going on there.

Paul Kincaid: Yes.

Dan Hartland: Which I think persists, for all the improvements in the position, shall we say, since that time—the New Wave being being one of the big shifts—there remains, I think, a kind of skepticism of style.

Dawn Macdonald: But I do think anything that has a really distinctive style that’s so noticeable to the reader is polarizing, right? So readers will love it or hate it, but it’s a strong flavor. It can be like cilantro, where half the population loves it, half the population just genetically hates it.

Someone I know is a big reader of a kind of action-driven fantasy, and the way that she would characterize a good book is mostly about pacing. Right? That it pulls you in, that you stay with the story, that you enjoy it, you get to the end, you feel satisfied and good. Something that has a really pronounced kind of style might feel like it’s standing in between you and that experience that you’re looking for—like, it’s extraneous. It’s in the way, it’s unnecessary.

And I get that and I think that can be done poorly, where it really is extraneous and it really is standing in the way. But it can also be done as experimental literature. And I think that science fiction is such a capacious genre that it has space for a lot of experimentation on almost every level of … what even is a book, what even is a story?

It’s interesting you mentioned the New Wave. Like, I grew up in a bit of an isolated situation, and so kind of reading whatever I could get my hands on. And sometimes that was a box of mouldy paperbacks that someone had in their shed, right? And you’re like, “Hey, can I have those?” And so there was at least one of those boxes that was New Wave, but I didn’t know that it was. I didn’t know what that was! All I knew was that this was some weird, fourteen genders, every possible kind of thing that could happen socially from that. And some very interesting kind of styles of writing.

And in some ways I think that probably set me off towards longer term path towards experimental poetry and really seeing that range of what words can do.

Dan Hartland: Paul, your most recent review was not about a prose novel at all. It was about a verse novel. And you talk a little bit in there about how those two forms or mediums work differently. And of course, Dawn, you’re a poet, so I thought we’d be remiss not to talk a little bit about poetic style as well.

The book we’re talking about here is Syncopation by Whitney French. Talk to us a little bit about that, because we went back and forth a tiny bit on this review where I was like, “Yeah, but Paul”—and it’s similar, actually, Dawn, now I think about it, to what you’re talking about the Ramuz—which I was, I kept saying to Paul, “Yeah, but Paul, what’s this book about?” And he was like, “It’s about the language.” Right? “I can’t say anything else.”

So unpack that a bit for us, Paul.

Paul Kincaid: The title says it all: It is syncopation in the way that jazz music is syncopation. It’s rhythm, it’s slight jaggedness in the rhythm, so that you are never on a smooth edge, are bouncing from one thing to another. It’s not straightforward.

It’s not going to be a book for everyone. And the reason I wrote the review the way I did was I was aware I was writing it for people who probably wouldn’t get a lot of verse stuff from it because it is an unusual form for science fiction and it’s trying to get across this idea—that the words matter. Because they do far more than just tell a story, but the pattern of the words can be integral to how that story is told and what the story is. If you don’t get that element, if you don’t get that rhythm. You’re missing part of the story. A key part of it, I think.

So that’s what style is, actually. Style is what tells you how to read the story.

[Musical sting]

Dawn Macdonald: Something that struck me in your review, Paul—which I checked out before we met up today—is that Syncopation, which I’ve not read, but that Syncopation uses Caribbean dialect. And so when we’re talking about rhythm, we’re talking about rhythm in a variant English and Caribbean dialects.

I’m not sure which one is specifically being used in Syncopation, but Caribbean dialects tend to have less metrical stress in the way that words are delivered, and just a little bit of a different emphasis—a different rhythm, different flow. And so, as readers, when we’re reading this in standard Canadian accent, your English accent, we are reading it with our own kind of overlay of rhythm.

And that affects the experience of reading. How much do you need to understand the variant English that it’s referencing in order to get the full effect? How much can you kind of come from outside of that, not know it and get introduced to it in the work?

Paul Kincaid: I came from outside of it, I have no idea how much I got and how much I missed. I suppose you’ve got the same problem with translation: You don’t read the original, you don’t know how much you’ve picked up and how much you’ve missed. I think we all do that with everything we read. There’s always that gap. There are things that everybody can pick up from every book if they open themselves to the patterns of the book, if they open themselves to the rhythms of it.

Dan Hartland: You’re making a really great argument there for accessibility. Paul, so of course what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna bring in Mikhail Bakhtin and make it all inaccessible again! As you speak about that kind of gap between the style and the reader, there’s, gotta be a bridge there somewhere. And as Dawn says, sometimes that gap can be larger and sometimes it can be smaller. And he felt that that the best style included in itself elements of the alien that it was trying to reach, right? Which is a lovely image. And he uses the word alien, which I think is ideal for conversation about, about SF.

I mean, that idea of the bridge seems really interesting to me. And I wonder whether, again, science fiction—and science fiction reviewers, perhaps we could start talking about this a bit—have fallen into that gap too often. Any separation at all between themselves and the style and they’re a bit like, “Oh.” And the reviewers of science fiction—in my view, as I said at the beginning—tend to avoid talking about everything we’ve just been talking about.

So, for the last twenty minutes or so, we’ve been talking about all this stuff: What style is, how plot can happen in style. I wonder why then, given that we all agree—the three of us at least!—that style is so rich, why we think SF reviewers—I don’t wanna pick on SF reviewers, I think a lot of reviewers do this, I think, often ignore it in favor of content, but let’s stick to SF for now. Why do we think we ignore it? Is it just because it’s hard? Is it that simple?

Paul Kincaid: Yes!

Dan Hartland: It is. OK!

Dawn Macdonald: I think it can be hard to talk about.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, and it’s easy to talk about content. It’s easy to write a review which is basically a plot summary or something like that. Practically everybody starts writing that when they start writing reviews. Picking up on style, picking up on anything beyond the very basics of the story … it’s something that comes cumulatively. Presumably, also you need to be aware of style in your own writing in order to be able to spot it, recognize it in another piece of writing. It calls for a self-consciousness that I don’t think probably applies to every single SF reviewer.

Dan Hartland: So let me ask a question, then. If it can be hard, why do you guys do it? Why do you make … why are you making your life hard? I mean, obviously we’re picking two books here, Syncopation and the Ramuz, which make it so we don’t really have a choice. We have to talk about the style! But I know that both of you often do anyway, in books that don’t call so much attention to themselves.

So. Silly question, but since we’re saying it’s hard, let’s look at why you do that. Why do you make your life hard and talk about style?

Dawn Macdonald: I mean, I don’t know that it’s uniformly hard, but I think that to start talking about style, you need a vocabulary—as Paul said, an awareness of style.

Like, some writers, they talk about someone who is a writer’s writer, that other writers like reading their work because other writers will get something out of the work that someone who isn’t involved in that might not care about. So having that kind of writerly orientation, maybe having some background where you would have some apparatus for being able to recognize different traditions, different linguistic traditions, different things that might be happening, how it fits into like the New Wave or, comes from that lineage, how something fits in with modernism, how it fits in with experimental poetry or whatever: There’s a lot of assumed background here, and it takes a while to reach that point.

For myself, it’s just something that interests me. Even in like the last one that I reviewed for you, Dan, which didn’t have as obvious of a style, it was Inner Space, and it was written by someone who is a video game designer, and it had very much like game feel of, there’s kind of a mystery almost that’s unfolding within like a locked room. There’re the rules, which are the rules coming from mission control. So it had a gamified feel.

But as I was reading it, some of the things that interested me about it was both how well that was done, doing something that was within kind of a game space, and then also how choices that the author made about point of view and about narrative voice locked him into certain situations that he had to work his way out of.

And so I find that interesting. I guess just what were the technical things that the writer had to do to get themselves out of the spots that they put themself into by the choices that they made. It’s like a weird game, and I think it’s interesting.

Dan Hartland: And of course, that was another work in translation, right? Yeah, yeah. Paul, tell us why you slave at the mines of style when you could just be off talking about content.

Paul Kincaid: But why do it if it’s so easy? It gets boring if you’re just taking the easy route. Every time I need to keep myself interested in what I’m writing, I look at the things that interest me.

I don’t know if this is true of you, Dawn, as well, but when I’m writing something, I read it aloud. I read it aloud to myself to get … partly to check that it works, because if you read it loud, you spot mistakes and clumsinesses far more easily. But you also develop a rhythm, a pattern, in the way you put prose down on a page, and that’s made me very conscious of my own style when I’m writing.

So I’m aware of what it is, so I move on and look at what it is in other people. It is fun. It’s fun to challenge yourself, but it also … it is just … it feels to me like it’s a natural development. It’s not something you can avoid. The more you do this stuff, the more invested you are in what you are doing. The more, the more you start going down these route.

Dan Hartland: Does that suggest, Paul, that when you first started reviewing—and it’s the question for Dawn too—did you work up to talking about style? Did you start off in a place similar to the one we were talking about? About reviewers begin by talking about plot?

Paul Kincaid: I mean, look, we’re talking about what, nearly fifty years ago. When I first started reviewing, they were four hundred words. They were basically plot summaries with “buy this book” stuck on at the end or something like that. I got bored writing so I started expanding it, making them longer. The more space I had, the more things I could discuss. So my response to books became more complicated. Therefore, the writing about books became more complicated. I think in some ways style is possibly the last thing you come to. I wouldn’t swear to it, but suspect in many cases it is. But it is a natural development. It, it is a natural place to come to for your own sanity trying to do something more interesting.

Dan Hartland: Dawn, does that match for you or did you start with style?

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s different for me because I’m a poet. And I started reviewing poetry collections, which don’t have a plot usually—some exceptions may apply with the verse novel, but yeah. So poetry, I mean, it’s ridiculous to say what poetry is, but I’m gonna say that poetry is the application of a style to a subject in a way that enhances both.

You cannot talk about poetry without talking about what kind of poetry is this. And you might talk about some technical aspects of that. You might talk about form, you might talk about the feeling, you might talk about to what extent is this kind of cool and distant or is this getting in and right into your emotions, into your heart; or is it something that’s very abstract, very experimental, something that’s quite wild, something that draws from the beats? What’s going on with poetry is you’re fundamentally talking about style. And so I think in reviewing fiction or nonfiction, I just kind of can’t help but notice those things and bring it over.

But there is something else I wanted to pick up on from earlier in our conversation. It’s a couple of things. So, referencing what you said, Dan—about Bakhtin and kind of that gap between self and other or self and yourself and what you’re seeing on the page—and then talking about the book you reviewed, Paul, Syncopation and the use of Caribbean dialect, variant Englishes: I think it’s important to signpost that when we talk about sort of non-style, transparent writing—where we feel like it doesn’t have a style—that it does and that the style it has may be grounded in whiteness, may be grounded in a cultural framework that has a lineage and has a background. And that what feels like transparency is familiarity and that what feels like transparency to a speaker of Jamaican Patois is gonna sound different.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. Excellent point, actually. So many of the—I hate the phrase, but—the Golden Age science fiction had that white voice going through it, and actually narrower: White American voice.

Dawn Macdonald: And male.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, male, white American. Even if it was written by British woman, it would have a male, American, white voice. And it’s intentionally plain. It is intentionally unfussy. Also, a lot of them have got about as much interest as office memo, but still it’s style is what keeps you bloody interested in the thing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I completely agree with Dawn that what seems to be, or what is billed as, transparency is much more often hegemony, right? It’s just the thing that we’re used to seeing because we’re made to see it.

But the choices that are made within that hegemonic style, the ways in which that style is built, shut in and out things which that style can talk about or can talk to. When Paul says that the Golden Age SF was deliberately plain, that shuts out the … it has the effect of shutting out qualities of literature which at that time was seen as feminine, for example.

And this is why it’s so important actually to look at style—because style controls text. Dawn, you were talking earlier about Inner Space and being so interested in the tools, the stylistic tools, that the author employs to get out of the traps he’s set himself. But of course, style also traps. It’s not just a route out, it’s a kind of a locked door sometimes.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Do we think that the fact that a book is a science fiction book will necessarily have an impact on style? We started this conversation talking about how capacious SF is and that we should be interested in style. Do we think that there are certain styles, or that there are certain stylistic characteristics, which are natural to science fiction, which mean that the reviewers should think about style in a particular way when they read SF, or do we think that anything goes?

Dawn Macdonald: I think that they should be thinking about how the words are creating something that is alien. Not every SF story has aliens in it, right? But SF stories often put us into an alien setting, an alien situation, or a mind-space of someone who’s had some kind of mind-blowing experience that has changed their perception of reality or their perspective on things.

And to convey those kinds of things, to put you inside the mind of the alien, inside the mind of someone who has encountered the alien, we often have to take a step back from the way we ordinarily use words. And so I think that SF has an inextricable relationship to style in a way that maybe doesn’t apply as much to the other genres. Not every book is going to have this, but I think it’s fundamental to the genre in a very basic way.

Paul Kincaid: If you look at some of the best, well, what we tend to think of as the best writers, they often have a lot of style in what they’re doing: Joanna Russ or Samuel Delany or people like that, they put something into the way they describe the strange that makes it strange to us as readers.

And that is style. They use style. The ones who just write “the rocket ship came down on such and such a planet,” they’re not making that planet real. I think style is—it should be—a natural part of science fiction. That so many people say it is not is one of the great mysteries of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Paul, in your review of Syncopation, you invoke the dread word “estrangement.”

Paul Kincaid: Yes. I do, don’t I?

Dan Hartland: You do. Yeah. Which is …

Paul Kincaid: I love that word.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Which is what we’re talking about here, right? And of course, to achieve that estrangement—totally agree with Dawn—it’s all style.

The way in which you evoke the alien—invoke the alien, provoke the alien, whatever you want to do with it—you’re gonna do that most effectively through style. It was Darko Suvin who came up with this idea of cognitive estrangement as central to SF. But he also thought—and, Paul, at this point I will yield to you as resident historian of SF criticism—but I think he also said that key to science fiction is a sort of quote-unquote factual approach to the subject matter, by which he meant it wasn’t like fairy-tale or fantasy, which had very little interest in quote unquote reality because in fact, I think he says fantasy is kind of inimical to reality. It’s deliberately setting itself in opposition to, whereas science fiction at least wants to create the illusion that it is real.

And I wonder whether in that kind of interest in granularity—like, again, rocket ships and planets aren’t coming out well from this conversation, but—in this idea that we need to know how the rocket ship works, dilithium crystals or whatever it is, you start to get some of this anti-style thing. Is there an element in science fiction that, because it wants to pretend to be practical—you think about hard science fiction, right?—that it thinks, “Oh, well, I don’t want any of that style stuff because that gets in the way.” Do we think that is a reasonable thesis?

Paul Kincaid: An awful lot of classic science fiction aimed to be indistinguishable from a technical manual, right? Which is a style! It’s not necessarily a very attractive, readable, or approachable style. They did not see it as style when they were doing it; they were seeing it as being … not necessarily an anti-style, just non-style.

Dawn Macdonald: Right. But now I’m starting to wonder. OK, so when you said pretend to be practical, I’m starting to wonder if this technical style is a kind of prestidigitation, a kind of magician’s patter to smooth over and obfuscate the fact that what we’re talking about is totally impossible. It’s an extrapolation off of, we have reality and then we extrapolate off of that in some wild direction. And, it’s I supposed possible, but probably not the way it’s being described. And so we’re kind of shoving that under underneath, aren’t we?

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. They were hiding an awful lot.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And by doing it in that very matter-of-fact, plain way, you can almost fool the reader.

Dan Hartland: Which makes it remarkably conscious, stylistic choice, right?!

Paul Kincaid: Oh, yes, yes.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Paul’s already answered this question, but I did want to briefly, before we kind of start to wrap up, think about the great SFnal stylists. So, Paul’s talked about Le Guin and Delany. Are there others? So, I might throw in China Miéville from the fantasy side of things. Are there others? I mean, even books that we’ve read recently that really struck us as stylistically interesting, engaged, whatever we want to say.

Dawn Macdonald: Cordwainer Smith. I gotta throw Cordwainer Smith in there.

Dan Hartland: Great shout.

Paul Kincaid: I reread some Cordwainer Smith recently and I didn’t get on with it as well as I did when I first encountered it. So maybe it’s just me.

Dan Hartland: Was it the style, Paul?

Paul Kincaid: It was a bit. It was a bit forced. The other thing about style is that you can … style is necessary, but it can be used badly and there are a lot of bad stylists out there.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. Or not always bad, but just different people will vibe with it so differently. And so, Dan, I’m thinking, like … you asked me what I thought of Orbital. Which won the Booker, right? And because you’re like, “Dawn, you’re a poet, you probably loved Orbital!” and I did not love Orbital.

It was one where I kind of … I felt like it was sort of all style, nothing else going on for me. but I know people loved it. I know the Booker committee loved it, so it’s … I think it can just be so polarizing.

Paul Kincaid: I loved Orbital. I actually felt that it should have been on science fiction award lists, and it wasn’t. But I loved it precisely because it gave an appearance of plainness or a flat effect, but there was an awful lot more going on that wasn’t necessarily obvious. It was a very stylish piece of work.

Dan Hartland: I’d completely forgotten that Orbital conversation, Dawn. And you’re right, it’s such a good example of a book where it’s clearly doing a lot with style. Even two people that like style—much less all these other people that we’ve been talking about that can’t stand it—will disagree.

Yeah. And it’s almost the more pronounced the style becomes, as you say, the more likely it is for people to bounce off it. I was wondering, as we were talking … I was thinking about, as Paul said, plainness, and I was still thinking about which science fiction stylists, we should mention: Vonnegut! The remarkable paired-downness of his style, which I just couldn’t replicate if I tried. I don’t know how he did it really.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. But at the same time, you’ve got repetitions in Vonnegut that act like a sort of iambic pentameter, as it were: So it goes, so it goes, so it goes. And that puts you into a rhythm for reading him. So much of it is plain and flat and clear and simple, but you get these little breaking rhythms going around it which just lift it in a way that you don’t always notice you’re being lifted.

Dawn Macdonald: Vonnegut is so distinctive. Like, he has such a distinctive voice, you know it’s Vonnegut. There’s something that he’s doing that’s very deliberate. He does really experimental things like throwing artwork, very crude drawings, into the middle of his text. And, this is maybe separate from style, but he has an attitude. So when you’re reading Vonnegut, there’s like a view on the world, there’s an attitude that’s pretty consistent through his work.

Paul Kincaid: I think the only way to express an attitude is style.

Dan Hartland: So … [laughter] I would suggest that—and then this is a great example of what we’re talking about, which is that you need so many words to talk about this—I would suggest that what we’re talking about here, when we’re talking about the attitude that is created or applied to style, we’re talking about tone. And then the way that that tone and style make the reader feel is mood. And all of these kind of steps that we’re making, and words that we’re using, are so specialist in places.

And yet, I would note that, that my definition there is absolutely not set in stone. I know Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno wrote a book about tone recently where they said tone is atmosphere—which for me, like, we’re just swapping one word for another. But, they don’t agree with me that it’s about attitude, is my point.

So those are some of the good stylists. Do we wanna name names? Do we wanna say who the bad stylists are? We don’t have to, but if anyone wants to settle some scores, now’s the moment.

Dawn Macdonald: I don’t think I have a list. I mean, I think I just stop reading if I’m not into it, unless I’ve committed to a review and then I have to figure out something to say about it that’s reasonable.

Paul Kincaid: I actually read an academic book on John Wyndham recently, for review. It was so flat the whole way through. I got no sense of the author’s engagement with the text he was writing about there. There was actually, a lot of the time, a sense of being bored with it, or careless at least. So that was bad style. And I think Wyndham demands a bit more attention to style than this guy was giving it.

Dan Hartland: Academic prose in general, with some notable and laudable exceptions, is a good example of style that can be … yes, disappointing.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah.

This isn’t style exactly, but I will say that something that stops me from reading some book … so this is kind of a sad thing about science fiction, but I have a rule that if it’s a science fiction book and it’s by a male author, and if at any point in the text more than half of the female characters work in the sex industry or are victims of sexual assault as part of the plot, I stop reading. And this stops me from reading a lot of books.

So it’s not style exactly, but it’s attitude and tone toward female characters. And there’s a subtler version of like, how much physical description do you give your female characters versus your male characters? What’s the gaze? What’s the view? So not naming names, but it’s pretty prevalent in the genre.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And I bet that, although it’s not a strictly a style thing, I bet that those books have … certain stylistic aspects in common.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah, and I’m gonna call out William Gibson on this one.

Dan Hartland: And it’s so interesting that these canonical—quote-unquote—writers … we should call them out more. So I’m glad that we … I’m glad we picked a name. It is good! Yeah.

Dawn Macdonald: And it’s not that these things aren’t part of women’s lives, because they sure as hell are, but it’s using it for, like … that the majority of women in your book are defined by their sexuality. Or as victims in regard to their sexuality. That should not be the majority of women in your book, unless that really is what your book is about.

Paul Kincaid: Women as victims is far, far too prevalent and it’s one thing that stops me reading as well.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. So I gotta go back to Asimov, who I do love. But, and he talked about when he first started writing and he was a very young man, that he did not include women in his stories. He didn’t like reading stories that had women in them because all the women did was get in the way and scream! And he eventually figured out how to fix that.

Paul Kincaid: When I was living and working in Manchester, the local SF bookshop was also a porn shop, as they so often were in those days. It regularly got raided by the police and for some reason they always took away all the Isaac Asimov books. I remember us sitting around trying to work out why Asimov? Because there’s no women in them!

Dan Hartland: Is it just because he’s “A,” and it was like the easiest thing to take so they could go back?!

Dawn Macdonald: They just wanted to read them!

I’m not sure this is a part of the style conversation. It is certainly part of the feel of a book!

Dan Hartland: It is, yeah!

If we were gonna try and encourage more of our fellow reviewers to talk about style in their pieces—if we were going to be so presumptuous as to do such a thing, which I guess we are!—what would we say? How would we suggest people that would like to, but kind of, like haven’t before, begin to do so?

Dawn Macdonald: I guess I would say don’t worry if you don’t have it, don’t worry about the vocabulary and the critical apparatus. But talk about how you felt while you were reading and if you can pinpoint some lines and some words that made you feel that way.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, I was gonna say something very similar. Look for what makes you engage with a book. Why do you engage with a book? Because what is making you engage with it is very likely to be something to do with style.

You may not recognize it as such, you may not have the vocabulary for it, as we’ve demonstrated all to amply over the last hour or whatever it is. There is no vocabulary, no easy vocabulary, when we talk about it. But look for what engages you in the book, and that will lead you into thinking about how the book works as a piece of writing and that’s style.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Is there anything we’ve missed?

Paul Kincaid: We have missed huge amounts of things in everything.

Dan Hartland: Of course we have!

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, that’s what the topic is: It’s all stuff you can miss!

All: [laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts—listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last special episode, presented by Tristan Beiter and friends on the critical role of the book club, I reached out to that sage of contemporary fandom, John Coxon of the Octothorpe podcast, for his thoughts on the space for criticism within fandom.

Tristan’s group had not found many in-roads in fandom, and I wanted to find out if in John’s wide experience of its many corners this were true. Yes … but also no, he thinks.

“I found the deep dive on a specific book club as a tool for critical thought really interesting,” he says, “and it made me want to be in the club myself, which is I think a feeling that the best podcasts engender?” This is true, we are among the best of podcasts.

John is on board with all ideas around collaborative spaces making it safer to discuss ideas without feeling like they've got to be rigorously worked out. Providing a space to develop ideas is really valuable, he says, and for him not common on, for example, social media.

But, contrary to the group’s views, John thinks fan spaces are more friendly to criticism in general nowadays. This is a shift, he says. Traditionally, in his view, fanzines and fan writers tended to talk about the experience of being a fan rather than their experience with the works. But today the critical space occupies a much bigger piece of the fannish imagination than it used to, from Nerds of a Feather to the Coode Street Podcast. John urges us to read fan spaces broadly, and not confine ourselves to its particular expression on Bluesy, where microblogging can work against sustained critical discussion.

John thinks some fans do expect that you should have “done the homework” and should move past this: You don’t have to have engaged with every work in a franchise to engage with the franchise, and the same goes for notions of the canon. John likes the viewpoints from critics who are consciously choosing different lenses to look through. And, I hope, so do we.

Thanks to John, go and listen to Octothorpe, and ... see you next time!