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MULTIPLY_HUNG

                                            March 6, 2004

Van Vogt had an unusually fine-grained
theory of fiction which works down on
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             ficiton is about developing a
context of a hypothetical world        skill at making inferences,  
increased the available meanings       at building up the structure 
for words.  "Her world exploded."      of an imagined universe from 
"He turned on his left side."          small hints and explicit     
                                       discourse...                 
                                                                    
                                                    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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