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fiction. This is derived from the focus on plot and story (above character, theme, structure, stylistic polish) and of course setting. The novels of Jules Verne were complicated by the insertion of immense amounts of scientific and technological detail. There is substantial evidence that Verne's Victorian audience saw detail as edifying and pleasurable. That dense and almost preliterate classic of modern SF, Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ (1911), has almost nothing to it but its complications. Les del Rey described it in Science Fiction: 19261976 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1979, p. 33): |
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As fiction, it is simply dreadful . . .. The plot is mostly a series of events that help to move from one marvelous device to another. |
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But never mind that. It is one of the most important stories ever written in the science fiction vein. It is a constant parade of scientific wondersbut they are logically constructed wonders, with a lot of keen thought behind them. The novel forecasts more things that really came true than a hundred other pieces of science fiction could hope to achieve. There is television (which was named by Hugo Gernsback), microfilm, tape recording, fluorescent lighting, radarin fact most of the things that did eventually make up our future. |
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Obviously, Gernsback's book depends entirely on its extraliterary virtues. And Van Vogt most of all sums up and transmutes this part of the science fiction tradition and transmits it forward to a large and influential body of better stylists who come after him. |
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David G. Hartwell, Age of Wonders: Exploring the Worlds of Science Fiction (New York: Walker, 1984), pp. 13132 |
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The important figure for (Philip K.) Dick, as has long been recognized, is A. E. van Vogt, known for his confusingly intricate plots. But it is not the model of the plots themselves that we need to be aware of so much as the rule by which he generated them. Van Vogt advised young writers that in order to keep their readers' interest they should introduce a new idea every 800 words. For van Vogt this is not a "philosophical" rule, but simply a practical technique to make the story interesting, on the level with the rule which requires that the first paragraph of a story make mention of each of the five senses. In van Vogt's own work one is aware of a disorienting series of changes which may be exhilarating |
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