Today's Writing Quote

"The rereading of one's own works in usually a dismal matter; and when she had completed her task she felt thoroughly jaded and displeased with herself."

-Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

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Metaphor in Speculative Fiction

I've been thinking about metaphor in speculative fiction.

In particular, I've been thinking about how bad we in the spec fic community are in writing and reading metaphor. I'm not talking about sentence metaphors. I'm talking about whole story metaphors.

In greater particular, I've been thinking about one of the metaphors in one of my stories, The Western Front, which was published in the Spring 2005 issue of The Third Alternative. In that story, the protagonist, a young lieutenant newly arrived at Ypres loses a rose given to him by his wife. Later, he is willing to give his life to protect a rose he finds in no man's land.

In his review of the story in IROSF, Bluejack said,

"But if there is a causal connection between this rose [the one lost at the beginning] and the ending, I am afraid I cannot find it."

That, of course, should be no surprise, because there is no causal relationship between the rose lost at the beginning of the story and that which Lieutenant Richard Stark protects at the end. The connection is metaphorical.

If I was to leave home and, leaving, turn to see the last rose on a bush dying in autumn, and if I later I was to step off a plane in another country and some stranger was to give me a rose, there would be no causal connection. Yet pretty much anyone could see the metaphor if that was a story. In literary or mainstream fiction, no one would blink at such a metaphor.

Yet in spec fic, the rather obvious and heavy-handed metaphor above can be missed by a respected reviewer. Why?

Spec fic is still an extremely literalist genre, science fiction perhaps more so than fantasy, but the difference isn't so great. Traditionally, stories have followed A - B - C. The story structure is linear, causal and literal.
This, of course, has produced some remarkable works of fiction. But it means we miss out on deeper layers. If there are overarching metaphors in traditional spec fic, they are often unsubtle and are more on the level of a one-to-one analogy.

No doubt part of this comes from our education as spec fic writers. In writing books, at workshops and in critique groups we are so often told to 'explain'. Explain why this happens. Explain how that happens. It's a nonsense to demand this in all stories, but there can be few beginning writers who haven't had someone try to drum this 'rule' into them early in their career, and who haven't had an otherwise good story ruined by attempting to explain that which should be left unexplained.

Now, I'm not suggesting that story should be replaced by metaphor. In some lit'ry fiction, metaphor can be almost all that you get, and it would be a shame to see spec fic be reduced to that. But it is also a shame that we as writers and readers of spec fic so often find ourselves missing out on stories that reach beyond what we have traditionally done well.

That said, I think there are increasing numbers of writers who work far subtler and more profound metaphors into their stories than the one I used. But we lag behind.