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ckdThe Saturday 1100 panel:
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
The first panelist comment was Cox pointing out that we were having the panel on Heinlein's 100th. [ckd: Nicely scheduled.]
Dern: What was RAH's influence on SF storytelling?
Lerner: He internalized a technique first used by someone else; John W. Campbell pointed to Kipling's With the Night Mail [ckd: also note the sequel As Easy As A.B.C., both helpfully made available online by Marcus Rowland], which was printed in the magazine as if it were in a 2001 publication, complete with advertisements and other material. Campbell said this was the first use (that he was aware of) by a writer of extraneous details that build a larger picture in the reader's mind. Heinlein put the details in the story itself, rather than in "external" material, and did it so well that it's now the way science fiction is written.
Cambias: The premise of the panel is a "smoke and mirrors" game Heinlein played. [ckd: as opposed to a game with just mirrors, as in the short story RAH wrote as "Simon York"] He used infodumps anyway; see Have Space Suit Will Travel, which has a five page examination, in detail, of the space suit. He does it in the character's voice, so you're not bounced out of the story.
Purdom: "The Roads Must Roll" is the classic example of using a technological advance as the basis for a story setting. The passage explaining how the roads developed is one of his best passages, even though it goes for two pages or so. RAH uses "The Guy from Brooklyn" as a character who needs explanations. In Destination Moon it's an actual guy from Brooklyn; in "The Roads Must Roll" it's the visitor from Australia. RAH does it so beautifully, though, that you don't think of him as "that guy who needs infodumps". Even RAH's listing of the "standard plots" includes "the man who learned better", which is really "The Guy from Brooklyn" as the protagonist.
Cox: The "Guy from Brooklyn" technique goes back to H.G. Wells and The Sleeper Wakes. Other utopian narratives also use the same technique. RAH had an advantage in that he was older with more life experience when he started writing, so he could use that more cosmopolitan knowledge. He'd run for office, speculated in real estate, and so on, so he knew how various things worked and could more easily integrate those aspects into his future societies. He often infodumps the hardware.
Cambias: Not just the hardware; note the "how to rig an election" infodumps he used.
Lerner: Exposition in SF is often unfairly maligned. A lot of genre fiction depends on exposition; the difference is in how well it's done. Dick Francis manages to get the necessary horse racing information across in his novels without interrupting the narrative flow. In mysteries, Westerns, or any other setting where there's a technology or social structure different from ours that must be communicated to the reader. The debt we owe to RAH is that he demonstrated how to do it so effectively.
Dern: Heinlein omitted the exposition we didn't need. I was reading a mainstream murder mystery set at a poker tournament, and that one needed exposition. James Swain writes fascinating one paragraph explanations of things.
Cambias: It's not that it matters how the door dilates, but that it does so at all.
Dern: Heinlein left out the non-interesting parts, tightened his prose style and shortened the exposition and broke into the slicks.
Lerner: He also set the "slicks" stories in the near future, on Earth or in near space (out to the Moon). It was "science fiction light" for readers that didn't know they were susceptible.
Dern: The plots usually centered around love and marriage, or death; things that happen in real life today.
Purdom: I'm not sure it's as "near future" to the Saturday Evening Post reader of the time. Notice that in "The Green Hills of Earth" the narrator is speaking to the audience directly, but you're never told who he is. In this way, Heinlein could introduce the world.
Lerner: The narrator technique recalls Kipling's short stories, where the narrator tells the story "as he heard it" but with details added. I wondered how much Heinlein was influenced by Kipling, but when I asked him he said that Wells was a larger influence.
Audience: If you're supposed to be writing as if in a future magazine, then what magazine? One reason RAH has dated for me is that it seems like it was written for 2050 but in a magazine from the 1940s or 1950s. [ckd: which goes back to Clute's idea of the "real year", even though I missed that session on Thursday]
Cox: Barry Malzberg said in an essay that Heinlein understood how this country ran before World War II better than anyone, but that having that baseline limited his perspective.
Audience: Starship Troopers claims to be from the far future, but doesn't read like it.
Purdom: RAH was writing as if for the Saturday Evening Post of 2050, but had to work within the limitations of the Post of 1948. He had some idea of how the world was going to change in the future; today's women's magazine covers with things like "how to have great sex" would have been very much at home in an RAH story. But then there are details like drugstores that still serve lunch; those are long gone!
Cambias: When you understand the world, it gives you an advantage in projecting the future, but not a tremendous advantage. Some of the things Heinlein thought of as universal human experiences were really epiphenomena of the mid-20th century.
Cox: Stranger in a Strange Land had brief exposition at the start of each chapter, like a CNN crawl; just enough detail to give the reader a sense of what is going on. If you have to have an expository passage, just do it.
Audience: I read SF for the exposition, looking for "what can I learn from this?" Heinlein was constantly writing 101-level material that you didn't need a degree in SF to engage with it. Contemporary SF doesn't have that, which is why fantasy is more popular these days.
Cambias: He makes the reader feel like they already know this stuff.
Cox: The impulse for exposition isn't limited to genre fiction: look at James Michener's novels. I agree with the "desire to learn" aspect of reading exposition.
Audience: We credit Heinlein, but often his followers have gone astray. The "door dilated" detail is used too often, and in more recent SF they are trying to have no exposition, which leaves the reader struggling to figure out what is going on. Some people love the puzzle, but it loses the entertainment value RAH's writing had.
Purdom: I came on this panel wanting to emphasize that Heinlein did have exposition. "Infodump" is a pejorative term, I don't like it. Exposition done right is good. Charles Stross does it well. Writers should look at that and see how they can do it. Pohl brings in exposition as part of the story of somebody; the background is shown in flashbacks, giving us miniature biographies of the characters. We are losing readers because writers aren't doing this well.
Audience: The beginning of The Space Merchants is a great example of this. The telling detail is when the protagonist opens the tap and gets a trickle of brown water.
Lerner: Or in Asimov's The Martian Way, where a character brings his own water when visiting another. Now we understand that we're in a time of constant change, but back then we didn't. SF writers have adjusted to this fact.
Cox: I agree. Heinlein understood that "it's not always going to be this way", and made us feel that he understood what was going on, so we would too. Both Heinlein and Sturgeon wrote about the way things work, or could work.
Audience: Part of the appeal of Heinlein, or the genre overall, is recognizing infodumps as part of the fun.
Audience: Reading Heinlein books from my elementary school library, I saw references to things that seemed real, but that I didn't know what they were. Now, I realize that they refer to things that seemed real to Heinlein in the 1940s. I didn't bother looking them up but they grabbed me as a reader anyway.
Cox: Stephen King inserts real brand names, giving "K-mart realism". This can backfire if brands don't last; look at the movie 2001 with Pan Am. [ckd: or the Bell System sign over the picturephone booth]
Cambias: It's a balancing act, one that RAH did very well. You want to convey information but not patronize or lecture. The writer has to understand the level of the audience; if your writing is too obtuse, nobody will understand, but if you're too pedantic, the readers will be drumming their fingers.
Lerner: One technique is to convince the reader that as he is reading it's like a relationship with someone from whom he is willing to learn (a friend, for example).
Audience: Heinlein wrote as if he was imparting knowledge that you "already knew", that he was wiser than you were but trusted you to use the information he was giving you properly.
Purdom: The question of the audience for a work is very important. The definition of genre is "a type of art with a specific subject or style"; people read SF because they have an interest in certain things. When you write SF, you assume that the reader wants this stuff, and you assume that they have a certain level of intelligence and knowledge. Because of this, you won't always be able to reach a general audience.
Cox: Heinlein repeatedly said that his writing was competing for the reader's beer money.
Dern: [ckd: I think; this was a very quick interjection, so I'm not certain of the speaker] But you can't borrow beer from the library.
Purdom: Heinlein wrote to make money. What we like is storytelling, but then Heinlein discovered the "Ayn Rand" market for "conversation novels" of people talking to [ckd: or "at"] each other. These books sold better, so why write "real" SF?
Lerner: Compare the first paragraph of Stranger in a Strange Land in the original and uncut editions. Earlier Heinlein had to conform to editors' demands (Campbell, Alice Dalgliesh, etc.). Once he slipped that leash, bloat occurred.
Cox: In defense of the later works, Heinlein was ill. I Will Fear No Evil was pre-surgery; Friday was much more like the earlier books.
Lerner: Later worlds have the exposition folded in.
Cambias: There's a big difference between someone 10 years out of the Navy and someone who has been a pro writer living on a mountain for 40 years; Heinlein wasn't keeping up his "life experience" at the same level.
Lerner: But he did have a network of experts in various fields who were happy to share their knowledge.
Audience: The problem with the conversational/ideological novel is that if you don't believe the world works that way, it won't work for you.
Cox: People change; RAH was no longer the Roosevelt Democrat he had been.
Purdom: But you must note that the conversational novels made more money; there was clearly a big audience for that.
Dern: Time for final thoughts.
Cambias: I keep coming back to the writer's understanding of the world and the people he is writing for. Heinlein wrote as someone who could convince us that he knew what the future world would look like.
Lerner: Heinlein, like most SF authors, detective story writers, or Kipling, was writing about the work of the world and the people who do it. To tell a story about the work of the world and the people who do it, you have to have exposition. Heinlein did that very well.
Dern: Early SF's prose style is "badly written". Heinlein's middle work is smoothly written and can be re-read over and over even if you don't see anything new, though Have Space Suit Will Travel changes significantly when read with a parent's perspective.
Purdom: Even beyond technique, Heinlein made the future seem exhilarating and glamorous. This is a great thing when you are a young reader.
Cox: Heinlein was good at technique because he cared about writing. The Campbell-era novellas are a touchstone for a lot of what came later in modern SF. Those are his most enduring legacy.
This was an interesting panel for me because Heinlein, particularly the juveniles, has always been a comfort read for me. (At one point during my college years, I was sick and very lethargic, and re-read Starman Jones because it was one of the few Heinlein juveniles I could get from the campus library, which was much easier to get to than the Boston Public Library.) I find Heinlein's technique so smooth as to be un-noticed, which seems like one of those things that's incredibly hard to make it look so easy. The panelists made understanding it look so easy....
"The Door Dilated," Needless Exposition Contracted: Heinlein as Narrative Innovator.Since this was on Saturday morning, it was exactly on RAH's 100th birthday. (That weekend being Readercon and CONvergence andthe Heinlein Centennial...making one wish for trilocation.) As one of the many folks who grew up reading Heinlein (library shelves, rocket ship stickers on the spines, the whole bit) I thought it'd be interesting to delve into the ways he made his writing so unobtrusive, almost a style of having no apparent style.
James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Daniel P. Dern (L), Fred Lerner, Tom Purdom
Robert A. Heinlein was the first sf author to regularly write about the future as though the reader already lived there. From our current perspective it may be hard to imagine just how radical an innovation this was. We celebrate the centenary of his birth by examining the profound influence he's had on the art of sf storytelling.
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
The first panelist comment was Cox pointing out that we were having the panel on Heinlein's 100th. [ckd: Nicely scheduled.]
Dern: What was RAH's influence on SF storytelling?
Lerner: He internalized a technique first used by someone else; John W. Campbell pointed to Kipling's With the Night Mail [ckd: also note the sequel As Easy As A.B.C., both helpfully made available online by Marcus Rowland], which was printed in the magazine as if it were in a 2001 publication, complete with advertisements and other material. Campbell said this was the first use (that he was aware of) by a writer of extraneous details that build a larger picture in the reader's mind. Heinlein put the details in the story itself, rather than in "external" material, and did it so well that it's now the way science fiction is written.
Cambias: The premise of the panel is a "smoke and mirrors" game Heinlein played. [ckd: as opposed to a game with just mirrors, as in the short story RAH wrote as "Simon York"] He used infodumps anyway; see Have Space Suit Will Travel, which has a five page examination, in detail, of the space suit. He does it in the character's voice, so you're not bounced out of the story.
Purdom: "The Roads Must Roll" is the classic example of using a technological advance as the basis for a story setting. The passage explaining how the roads developed is one of his best passages, even though it goes for two pages or so. RAH uses "The Guy from Brooklyn" as a character who needs explanations. In Destination Moon it's an actual guy from Brooklyn; in "The Roads Must Roll" it's the visitor from Australia. RAH does it so beautifully, though, that you don't think of him as "that guy who needs infodumps". Even RAH's listing of the "standard plots" includes "the man who learned better", which is really "The Guy from Brooklyn" as the protagonist.
Cox: The "Guy from Brooklyn" technique goes back to H.G. Wells and The Sleeper Wakes. Other utopian narratives also use the same technique. RAH had an advantage in that he was older with more life experience when he started writing, so he could use that more cosmopolitan knowledge. He'd run for office, speculated in real estate, and so on, so he knew how various things worked and could more easily integrate those aspects into his future societies. He often infodumps the hardware.
Cambias: Not just the hardware; note the "how to rig an election" infodumps he used.
Lerner: Exposition in SF is often unfairly maligned. A lot of genre fiction depends on exposition; the difference is in how well it's done. Dick Francis manages to get the necessary horse racing information across in his novels without interrupting the narrative flow. In mysteries, Westerns, or any other setting where there's a technology or social structure different from ours that must be communicated to the reader. The debt we owe to RAH is that he demonstrated how to do it so effectively.
Dern: Heinlein omitted the exposition we didn't need. I was reading a mainstream murder mystery set at a poker tournament, and that one needed exposition. James Swain writes fascinating one paragraph explanations of things.
Cambias: It's not that it matters how the door dilates, but that it does so at all.
Dern: Heinlein left out the non-interesting parts, tightened his prose style and shortened the exposition and broke into the slicks.
Lerner: He also set the "slicks" stories in the near future, on Earth or in near space (out to the Moon). It was "science fiction light" for readers that didn't know they were susceptible.
Dern: The plots usually centered around love and marriage, or death; things that happen in real life today.
Purdom: I'm not sure it's as "near future" to the Saturday Evening Post reader of the time. Notice that in "The Green Hills of Earth" the narrator is speaking to the audience directly, but you're never told who he is. In this way, Heinlein could introduce the world.
Lerner: The narrator technique recalls Kipling's short stories, where the narrator tells the story "as he heard it" but with details added. I wondered how much Heinlein was influenced by Kipling, but when I asked him he said that Wells was a larger influence.
Audience: If you're supposed to be writing as if in a future magazine, then what magazine? One reason RAH has dated for me is that it seems like it was written for 2050 but in a magazine from the 1940s or 1950s. [ckd: which goes back to Clute's idea of the "real year", even though I missed that session on Thursday]
Cox: Barry Malzberg said in an essay that Heinlein understood how this country ran before World War II better than anyone, but that having that baseline limited his perspective.
Audience: Starship Troopers claims to be from the far future, but doesn't read like it.
Purdom: RAH was writing as if for the Saturday Evening Post of 2050, but had to work within the limitations of the Post of 1948. He had some idea of how the world was going to change in the future; today's women's magazine covers with things like "how to have great sex" would have been very much at home in an RAH story. But then there are details like drugstores that still serve lunch; those are long gone!
Cambias: When you understand the world, it gives you an advantage in projecting the future, but not a tremendous advantage. Some of the things Heinlein thought of as universal human experiences were really epiphenomena of the mid-20th century.
Cox: Stranger in a Strange Land had brief exposition at the start of each chapter, like a CNN crawl; just enough detail to give the reader a sense of what is going on. If you have to have an expository passage, just do it.
Audience: I read SF for the exposition, looking for "what can I learn from this?" Heinlein was constantly writing 101-level material that you didn't need a degree in SF to engage with it. Contemporary SF doesn't have that, which is why fantasy is more popular these days.
Cambias: He makes the reader feel like they already know this stuff.
Cox: The impulse for exposition isn't limited to genre fiction: look at James Michener's novels. I agree with the "desire to learn" aspect of reading exposition.
Audience: We credit Heinlein, but often his followers have gone astray. The "door dilated" detail is used too often, and in more recent SF they are trying to have no exposition, which leaves the reader struggling to figure out what is going on. Some people love the puzzle, but it loses the entertainment value RAH's writing had.
Purdom: I came on this panel wanting to emphasize that Heinlein did have exposition. "Infodump" is a pejorative term, I don't like it. Exposition done right is good. Charles Stross does it well. Writers should look at that and see how they can do it. Pohl brings in exposition as part of the story of somebody; the background is shown in flashbacks, giving us miniature biographies of the characters. We are losing readers because writers aren't doing this well.
Audience: The beginning of The Space Merchants is a great example of this. The telling detail is when the protagonist opens the tap and gets a trickle of brown water.
Lerner: Or in Asimov's The Martian Way, where a character brings his own water when visiting another. Now we understand that we're in a time of constant change, but back then we didn't. SF writers have adjusted to this fact.
Cox: I agree. Heinlein understood that "it's not always going to be this way", and made us feel that he understood what was going on, so we would too. Both Heinlein and Sturgeon wrote about the way things work, or could work.
Audience: Part of the appeal of Heinlein, or the genre overall, is recognizing infodumps as part of the fun.
Audience: Reading Heinlein books from my elementary school library, I saw references to things that seemed real, but that I didn't know what they were. Now, I realize that they refer to things that seemed real to Heinlein in the 1940s. I didn't bother looking them up but they grabbed me as a reader anyway.
Cox: Stephen King inserts real brand names, giving "K-mart realism". This can backfire if brands don't last; look at the movie 2001 with Pan Am. [ckd: or the Bell System sign over the picturephone booth]
Cambias: It's a balancing act, one that RAH did very well. You want to convey information but not patronize or lecture. The writer has to understand the level of the audience; if your writing is too obtuse, nobody will understand, but if you're too pedantic, the readers will be drumming their fingers.
Lerner: One technique is to convince the reader that as he is reading it's like a relationship with someone from whom he is willing to learn (a friend, for example).
Audience: Heinlein wrote as if he was imparting knowledge that you "already knew", that he was wiser than you were but trusted you to use the information he was giving you properly.
Purdom: The question of the audience for a work is very important. The definition of genre is "a type of art with a specific subject or style"; people read SF because they have an interest in certain things. When you write SF, you assume that the reader wants this stuff, and you assume that they have a certain level of intelligence and knowledge. Because of this, you won't always be able to reach a general audience.
Cox: Heinlein repeatedly said that his writing was competing for the reader's beer money.
Dern: [ckd: I think; this was a very quick interjection, so I'm not certain of the speaker] But you can't borrow beer from the library.
Purdom: Heinlein wrote to make money. What we like is storytelling, but then Heinlein discovered the "Ayn Rand" market for "conversation novels" of people talking to [ckd: or "at"] each other. These books sold better, so why write "real" SF?
Lerner: Compare the first paragraph of Stranger in a Strange Land in the original and uncut editions. Earlier Heinlein had to conform to editors' demands (Campbell, Alice Dalgliesh, etc.). Once he slipped that leash, bloat occurred.
Cox: In defense of the later works, Heinlein was ill. I Will Fear No Evil was pre-surgery; Friday was much more like the earlier books.
Lerner: Later worlds have the exposition folded in.
Cambias: There's a big difference between someone 10 years out of the Navy and someone who has been a pro writer living on a mountain for 40 years; Heinlein wasn't keeping up his "life experience" at the same level.
Lerner: But he did have a network of experts in various fields who were happy to share their knowledge.
Audience: The problem with the conversational/ideological novel is that if you don't believe the world works that way, it won't work for you.
Cox: People change; RAH was no longer the Roosevelt Democrat he had been.
Purdom: But you must note that the conversational novels made more money; there was clearly a big audience for that.
Dern: Time for final thoughts.
Cambias: I keep coming back to the writer's understanding of the world and the people he is writing for. Heinlein wrote as someone who could convince us that he knew what the future world would look like.
Lerner: Heinlein, like most SF authors, detective story writers, or Kipling, was writing about the work of the world and the people who do it. To tell a story about the work of the world and the people who do it, you have to have exposition. Heinlein did that very well.
Dern: Early SF's prose style is "badly written". Heinlein's middle work is smoothly written and can be re-read over and over even if you don't see anything new, though Have Space Suit Will Travel changes significantly when read with a parent's perspective.
Purdom: Even beyond technique, Heinlein made the future seem exhilarating and glamorous. This is a great thing when you are a young reader.
Cox: Heinlein was good at technique because he cared about writing. The Campbell-era novellas are a touchstone for a lot of what came later in modern SF. Those are his most enduring legacy.
This was an interesting panel for me because Heinlein, particularly the juveniles, has always been a comfort read for me. (At one point during my college years, I was sick and very lethargic, and re-read Starman Jones because it was one of the few Heinlein juveniles I could get from the campus library, which was much easier to get to than the Boston Public Library.) I find Heinlein's technique so smooth as to be un-noticed, which seems like one of those things that's incredibly hard to make it look so easy. The panelists made understanding it look so easy....
