Re: When SFnal readings backfire

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:17:52 -0500, Michael Stemper wrote:

Sentences are often parsed differently when reading SF than they would
be when reading other forms of fiction, as shown by Delany's example of
"her world exploded". [1]

I had this backfire on me last night. I was reading "The Hounds of
Tindalos", by Frank Bellknap Long,

_Old_ but nasty story. Excellent addition to "the Mythos". Is it in
print anywhere?

when I encountered the sentence
"He had extruded all of his furniture." [2] My immediate interpretation
of this was that he'd activated some control in his room and caused
all of his furniture to come out of the walls, floor, or wherever.
Since this story was set in the 1920s, this interpretation didn't make
much sense.

After re-reading the entire paragraph about three times, it finally
clicked that the meaning was "he had pushed all of his furniture out
of the room."

This is one case where the SFnal reading (at least post-1980 or so)
of a phrase back-fired in reading an older SF story.

I think I wouldn't've been bothered, simply because the bulk of the
"Cthulhu Mythos" stories are so old that the newer meaning simply
wouldn't've occurred to me in that context (I'd be more surprised to find
he _had_ actually, well, "extruded" his furniture somehow, in the
plastics- technology squishing-out sense . . . ).

[1] <http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/explode.htm>
[2] Approximately; from memory

--

Insert ten adjectives here in memory of HPL.

.

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