Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jeff_Brown | Hacker News Reader

The crucial ideas in a piece of fiction, I find I generally can absorb much faster in some other format. It's true that the flavor of the world and the human interactions is lost. But I have an actual world to provide those.

I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience.

And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do.

Damn, I should write a novel.

View on HN

This comment reads as someone who doesn’t read much fiction. Your misconception is that fiction is merely a capsule for the delivery of ideas rather than being a multifaceted work. It is like someone who proclaims that cuisine is not the best delivery of nutrients, that it’s much easier to blend ingredients, and then, impressed with his assessment, proclaims that he should make his own smoothie.

The "should write a novel" bit was a joke.

To your broader point, it depends what you want out of the novel. If you want world-building and dialog -- as I pointed out -- you won't get those from the Cliff notes.

I think that's fine, as I don't want them. Or rather, I don't want them as much as I want other things I can spend my time on.

And you're right, I don't read much fiction. The only piece I remember reading all year was The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, a short story by Hemmingway. It was fine.

This is funny, thank you.

Reminds me of my father, who claims there's no better wine than Carlo Rossi, and no good movie since Dr Zhivago.

> And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do.

This very much depends on both the author and the genre of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is very often written as good vs evil kind of stories (though not universally, just very common). Other genres or other writers within that genre are often more interesting.

You're right, evil is not a universal plot driver. But at least one of exceptional evil or exceptionally high stakes drive the majority of fantasy, sci-fi, crime, horror, and political novels.

And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give you that. But I don't think they often do much to usefully inform a person about anything.

> They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life.

Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by making you feel close to the characters or by connecting the high stakes situation to universal themes, although not always successfully. More interestingly, many good novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and The Bell Jar are great examples.

I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't), but I think this is an interesting distinction to make about "high stakes."

[0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them yet.

Often you must lie in order to tell the truth.

After all, language is a poor simulacrum of life, but, then, we use it else "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" and forced to use shadow puppets deep in Plato's cave.

You seem to be entirely overlooking the existence of books that have very limited stakes and don't even feature "bad guys" in the first place, like Andy Weir's The Martian.

Fighting to survive alone on an alien planet seems pretty high stakes to me.

But you're right, there do exist such books. I said "almost entirely". I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.

Also I admit it omits children's lit and romance novels, which are two huge omissions.

If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?

> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.

You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com