Precious and An Education were the last two movies I saw on a big screen, and both seemed to me to support the idea that movies are basically believable detail intended to be processed in near mode, combined with an overall story arc intended to be processed in far mode. Both movies get high marks for believable environment and actor micro-expression detail, and a lot of relatively realistic setting and character features. But the overall story arcs are rather predictable and not especially believable – they affirm standard morals and myths of modern viewers. While in real life believable near detail adds evidential support to related far claims, the “detached detail” of fiction breaks this connection. As I said for science fiction:
Grand historical arcs must be described in the story, but since they are processed by readers mostly in far mode, readers are not very critical about how plausible are those arcs. The near details of the lives of the major characters, in contrast, are processed more in near mode, so SF writers must make those seem more realistic. (Of course we don’t process even these in as near a mode as details of our own lives now – it is still fiction after all.) This all supports my detached detail warning: don’t assume that because the character lives described are compelling, the historical arcs are as plausible.
William Napier was born in 1940 and got his Ph.D. three years after his B.S., in 1966. After a career as a professional astronomer, he published his first book of fiction in 1998, at the age of 58, and published three more over the next five years.
But I still would not have heard of Napier had I not read his two brilliant 2007 Astrobiology papers, published when he was 67. The first argued comets were a likely origin of life:
A single comet of radius 10 km … contains [about] as much clay … as … early Earth. … Our Solar System is surrounded by about 1011 comets … A cometary interior provides a stable, aqueous, organic-rich environment for around 106 years.
The second showed that life could spread across a galaxy when via giant molecular clouds reliably collecting life from the stars they drift near, and then passing that life on to a few of the thousands of new stars they create. I now honor Napier by quoting lots of his detail: Continue Reading "All Hail William Napier" »
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In their recent Science article reviewing near-far findings (which I discussed here), Liberman and Trope illustrated their concepts with Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:
[An] intriguing mixture of high-level, abstract features, and low-level, concrete features. … In this painting, the ploughman witnesses the fall of Icarus. However, as he is immersed in the details of his immediate chore, he is oblivious to the significance of the event.
Like many others I enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, even if I don’t especially respect myself for that, and recently just rewatched Star Wars episodes II,III. And the most compelling visuals and scenes in those movies were similar, in that they combined familiar and emotionally-true foregrounds with dramatic symbolically-meaningful backgrounds which often made little sense if you thought much about them. For example, in Star Trek isolated crowded shipyards are shown scattered in simple farmland, wildly violating economies of agglomeration:
Continue Reading "Near Far In Science Fiction" »
I've blogged before on theories of the functions of fiction in our lives, and celebrated this seminal analysis of the personality and motives of Victorian novel characters. After browsing the TV Tropes website, it occurs to me that these tropes might be a great data source for studying fiction's functions.
A possible research plan:
- Identify tropes that describe common patterns of fiction which seem to deviate from patterns of reality. Code these tropes by their degree of deviation, and by how confident we feel that this deviation is real.
- Code these tropes according to a wide range of other possibly relevant parameters.
- Look for patterns among the tropes as so coded, and when possible check those patterns via formal statistical tests.
- Compare theories of fiction's functions to these trope patterns, seeing which theories best account for the set of observed patterns.
Any student in search of a research project, take note! 
HT to Doug.
Battlestar Galactica is the most celebrated science fiction of film or TV over the last few years. And it does indeed have unprecedented quality in acting, characters, and character interactions. The setting and plot mostly do a good job of setting off these characters and their interactions. However: this setting and plot make very little sense. Nowhere was this clearer than in tonight's series finale. – it doesn't even make sense in a "God works in mysterious ways" sort of way. It might be true to the emotional core of many characters and their interactions, but that hardly makes it a plausible overall outcome for a civilization.
Even though science fiction as a genre pays an unusual degree of attention to the larger settings of its stories, I in fact expect most BSG fans hardly noticed this key fact, and if they noticed hardly cared. You could hardly ask for clearer evidence that the near "detached detail" fiction uses to fill in its far setting does not much discipline that setting. You can tell pretty much any crazy far story and still fill it in with emotionally compelling near detail.
Added: I was recently flown to LA to personally advise a director of several famous (and good) SF movies, and his scriptwriter, on a new movie based on a famous SF book. Even I was surprised by how little understood the story's basic technical premises, and how little they cared about its basic emotional core.
