Oh we hit the sentence, "style is the material articulation of what the writer is trying to say" and I went OOOOOOO....this convo is exactly my jam.
06.03.2026 21:58
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Oh we hit the sentence, "style is the material articulation of what the writer is trying to say" and I went OOOOOOO....this convo is exactly my jam.
Some very good work on this list. And my book! locusmag.com/2026/03/2025...
Little English major nerds unite! Ha.
Don’t apologise, this sort of thing is where the podcast and I live! Thanks for sharing.
It’s weird, right? I mean, all stories happen in the language; but some especially so - dialectal ones included. If we restrict style, we restrict the stories that can be told. It’s not icing on a cake, right?
No - thank *you* for listening! Overlap between your thread and it really struck me, hope there’s something it for you.
Good thoughts here. @yukondawn.bsky.social says something similar in the latest Critical Friends: “anything that has a really distinctive style that’s so noticeable to the reader is polarizing, right? So readers will love it or hate it, but it’s a strong flavor.”
Closing out the week with Tina S. Zhu on The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu (@tinhouse.bsky.social).
"Many of Fu's stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other. The story here is not an exception to this trend in Fu’s work."
Purple background, white text, which says Indian feminist science fiction grapples with female foeticide, caste erasure, honour killings, sex-ratio crises - concerns that emerge from refusing to separate gender from caste, class, environment, geography. "Indian Feminist Science Fiction: A History (Part 1)" -- Amritesh Mukherjee
In this first of two essays, Amritesh Mukherjee gives an overview of Indian feminist SF - starting in 1905, with _Sultana's Dream_, then jumping to the 1980s, and following several themes over the next three decades...
Read now! It's free ! www.speculativeinsight.com
decided it’s my new mission to make Ducks, Newburyport a Mother’s Day staple gift, much like the egg of Easter
It occurs to me that @tansyg.bsky.social spoke, on the CF 'time-pass' ep, about contemporary streaming media: "off it like a greased pan, absolutely no imprint on the memory." There may be a link here between modes, something about light disposability married with affectless technique.
It’s @jampersand.bsky.social I’ve been discussing this with - I *think* they found what they were reading not only plain in that King-ish kind of way but sort of … almost gratingly artless? Which is itself an interesting subgeneric tic.
I mean, I’ll be waiting. But maybe I’ll get some snacks.
Do you mean the Sinykin and Winant book? Yes, can recommend!
There’s been a rash of recent interest in close reading, in fact (eg Kramnick as per a certain column), which I think might tell us *something*.
I enoyed this, on 'science fiction's difficult relationship with style', and SF reviewers tackling -- or avoiding -- the question of style. The 'plainness' that was a white, male, American voice (even when the writers weren't). Is talking about style as easy as ... what engages you, how you feel?
I *nearly* did a whole read from this essay as the episode’s coda, but then thought so much better of it. Ursula is not sending in letters of comment to a podcast, let’s be real.
So yes, give us this blog post, Sean!!
Pausing over this good/bad and successful/unsuccessful axes. I feel like there’s only one thing for it. And that’s some cloooooose reading.
Yes, cf the modernists, who obvs were also engaged in a sort of shared stylistic project.
By coincidence, elsewhere someone raised the very flat style in modern splatterpunk - which I noted felt at odds with the rather more theatrical style of Machen, Lovecraft etc. So lineages can also break.
Nothing makes me want to tear my hair out like reviews/criticism that boil down to plot discussion and nothing else.
*bangs on table*
ROMCOM PROTAGONISTS SHOULD BE A LITTLE BIT ASSHOLES
I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL
I hear this. OTOH, I love that Dawn’s final contribution in the ep makes it clear how easy writing about style can also be: “talk about how you felt and pinpoint some words that made you feel that way.” Trust your instincts!
Can everyone stop telling me to read this book, I got a lotta other books here.
I mean … Interesting!
Yes, exactly - even the SF authors who most loudly eschew style, or are held to have done so, in fact have a style. As Dawn says, everything does!
We do briefly discuss this! And emphasise the post-Modernism split. Again, I'm not sure that it's specifically SF reviewers who have turned away from style, but we do discuss that there have been SF *authors* who've purported to do so - and you're right, inevitably this will have affected reviewers.
There's a point in the pod where I say that I'm not sure the form/style balance is that different in SF than elsewhere, so if there *are* reasons for the imbalance which are specific to SF I'm not clear they're the only reasons. But I agree that mere difficulty can't be all there is to it, either!
This is a great discussion, and I'm not here to dispute the importance of considering how words are chosen and used and arranged, but to pick a small fight: the discussion considers the main reason this doesn't happen in SF reviewing as much as we'd like to be "it's hard" (it is), and I'm not sure.
Appreciate it! Query: is SF especially a literature of, and other literatures more rarely focused on, whats; and your key word is “also”, right? The issue as Paul notes is not that (SF) reviewing must focus only on style, but that it focuses disproportionately on content. Should we separate at all?
This is an excellent review. Who amongst the ranks of reviewers has not sometimes thought "Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good?" Few of us, however, have the courage to put this thought in a review, and for this (and many other delights) I salute Jenny and SH.
But were any of them romcomantasies?
