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MULTIPLY_HUNG

                                            March 6, 2004

Van Vogt had an unusually fine-grained
theory of fiction which works down on      THE_SECRET_MASTERS_OF_DESTINY
the level of sentences.

In the Romance genre, one must put emotion into
every sentence.  A flat statement of fact "She
lived in a small apartment." should instead be
"Tears came to her eyes as she thought of her
small apartment."

And in the Science Fiction genre, Van Vogt
claimed that every sentence should contain
a "hang-up", something puzzling that needs
to be resolved.


Similarly, Samuel R. Delany also
tried to study Science Fiction at
a very fine-grained level, and         So Delany takes the not-
for him the thing about science        unusual view that science
fiction was that the wider             fiction is about developing a
context of a hypothetical world        skill at making inferences,
increased the available meanings       at building up the structure
for words:                             of an imagined universe from
                                       small hints and explicit
   "Her world exploded."               discourse...
   "He turned on his left side."

                                                    TELL_ME_TRUE


        When you come down to it,
        Van Vogts's "hang-ups" and
        Delany's multiplicities of
        meaning are not so far
        away from each other...

           But then, I guess
           that's why Charles
           Platt put their                   Okay, so original
           interviews                        insight may not
           back-to-back in                   be my strong point.
           his "Dream Makers"


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