Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
>>where Chip Delany pointed out that a story will always feel
slightly unreal if your main characters have no visible means of
support. Ding! A light went on in my head. That really works for
me, and now I almost always try to figure out the economics that
allow my protagonists (whatever their gender) to exist, even though
the specific details don't always make their way into the story.
Yes, yes, yes!! As an editor (assistant, anyway), I read so many
manuscripts and published books, in both the fantasy and SF genres,
where the writer came up with a lovely original conceit , but could
only come up with a world where no one or no society could support
themselves. It drives me bonkers! One of the current World Fantasy
Award nominees is in this category. I'm not saying that every short
story or even every novel has to go into exhaustive detail about
economics, but if you're going to postulate a world where it is
winter all the time, I'm going to wonder what people eat!
Debra Euler
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:46 PDT