Re: Stephenie Mayer -- the next J. K. Rowling

Peter Knutsen wrote:
Sea Wasp wrote:
Kurt Busiek wrote:
<seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
The "mundanes" he talks about are what I'd say are "bad readers".

I wouldn't go that far, but I wouldn't call them "mundanes." Just people who have a hard time working from allusion and implication.

Not even that. They don't recognize when they might need to stop and find out the meanings of the words or phrases in question. If you don't understand what you're reading, ASK. My kids know this.

No, that's not the protocol.

The protocol is to *not* ask, but to instead *keep* *reading*, because you *trust* the author to answer the question, the one that just popped up in your head, at a *later* point in the text.

Science fiction authors do this *all* *the* *time*.

They introduce something odd on page 14, and then don't explain it before page 61. Or they introduce something on page 17, then explain it partially on page 33, and only complete the explanation on page 50.

Anyone who is protocol-savvy *knows* how this works, and can deal with it, cope with it, instinctively and effortlessly.

But someone who does not *know* the protocol - a mundane - can't. A mundane encountering something odd will either go into panic mode (and give up reading), or else dismiss the author as screamingly incompetent (and give up reading), or both.


First, you might get a better response if you stopped referring to people who don't read like you do as "mundanes". It's leading you into sloppy reasoning, since it allows you to assert that there is a protocol because there are people who don't use it, without ever proving that fact.

Secondly, I think back to my first experience reading _Kim_, an entirely non-SF book, and how lost I was in it when they started talking about horse pedigrees and the Great Game. Something which Kipling never bothers to describe in his book. I gave up on it the first time I read it. But it wasn't the application of any "protocol" that got me through it the second time, but simply that I had gotten old enough and learned more about the British empire that I could figure out what the Great Game was. And I have to say, I didn't go into either panic mode or think that the Kipling was incompetent when I couldn't figure the book out the first time. I was frustrated, but figured that the other 6 books I was reading made up for picking one I didn't like.

Rebecca
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