Engage

[threemonkeys]

Another short story collection. This time it was The Emperor of Gondwanaland by Paul Di Filippo. In deference to gillpolack, I shall make some sort of attempt to discuss it in terms of the way it engaged with me.

Di Filippo seems to work on the intellectual engagement level as distinct to the emotional. Like the Ted Chiang collection I read a few days ago, they're are really ideas (notions, jokes, theories, non-sequiturs whatever) woven into a story wrapper in order to convey them to the reader. Not a complaint, in many ways I prefer this kind of story although I like emotional engagement as well - both together is even better but rarer.

However I do have a complaint about this specific collection. In many of the stories, the engagement was not well done. There was simply too much explicit exposition. To do this type of story properly, the idea and the story have to be married together in an interdependent fashion. It is not satisfactory to just drop a bundle of explanation and then drive a result off it. I can't engage with a story like that. The ideas in this book are fine, but about half of the stories contained big chunks of exposition which were an impediment. It destroys the flow and in the short form there is no room to re-establish it.

The collection consists of 18 stories divided into 6 sections. Each section was for different styles of story. In terms of the above criticism, three sections worked, three didn't. I appreciate that Di Filippo likes to experiment but it seems some work better for him than others

I think I'm done with short stories for a week or two. Time to read a few novels.

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

That was interesting. What is particularly interesting is how precisely you were able to establish where the stories failed through using the lense of reader engagement.

I am having to rethink a lot of writerly assumptions as a result of all this discussion!