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As I get older, I find I am reading more and more non-fiction and less and less fiction. I had a curious epiphany about it. I novel has a beginning, middle, an
by skookumchuck 8y ago
As I get older, I find I am reading more and more non-fiction and less and less fiction. I had a curious epiphany about it.
I novel has a beginning, middle, and end. That's all there is to it. If you're a fan, there's nothing more. You can study it all you like, it's fruitless. You can see this with the Star Trek fans, all that interest and excitement pretty much goes nowhere. They wind up memorizing the scripts and doing cosplay.
With non-fiction, there's no beginning and no end. There is always more to the story. There are details omitted. There's a bias. It's like a fractal, the closer you get, the more detail there is. Thus if you find it interesting, you can satisfy that itch for more.
Caro's books are ones that satisfy the itchy person who wants to delve much deeper into a story than the usual insipid treatment. And if that isn't enough, Caro didn't include everything, there's always more for the next historian to unearth.
- spookybones 8y agoYeah Shakespeare and Homer’s works were one time reads. No depth! But let’s compare a non-fiction great work to genre fiction based on a TV show...
- skookumchuck 8y agoYou're never going to find out any more about Romeo or Juliet than the words in the play.
- qntty 8y agoIt's a mistake to think that Romeo and Juliet, or any fiction, is really just about the characters in the story. You might not learn more about Romeo or about Juliet but you can learn more about what people will do for love. You don't have to read fiction for this, you can learn it from psychological studies if you want.
- Retra 8y agoYes, I think that's the point. What fiction offers is less than what non-fiction offers.
- qntty 8y agoWhat I'm saying is that they basically offer the same thing, in different rhetorical modes.
- skookumchuck 8y ago> you can learn more about what people will do for love Not from reading R+J, you won't, any more than you will learn about how utopias work by watching Star Trek. If you want to learn about what people will actually do for love, read one of the many biographies of Henry VIII. (And there's always more to learn about him, if you're interested.) Or you could read about Cleopatra & Antony.
- qntty 8y agoA piece of literature is an argument. If it fails to convince you, then it must not be very good. I think Romeo and Juliet says interesting things about love and I think that Star Trek says interesting things about utopias.
- ctchocula 8y agoI think there is a lot of value in fiction. Reading some classics like the sibling commenter mentioned: Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy, etc. Even if the fiction is a lie, you learn a lot about how other people think through fiction. "Fiction is a lie that tells the truth" or so they say [1]. Even with Star Trek beyond TNG, the show fundamentally reflects Gene Roddenberry's ideas of what a post-scarcity society (symbolized by the replicator) looks like. Unlike our society that prizes money as what others judge you based on, in Star Trek, there is no money. People have the right not to work if they don't want to, but to gain prestige you need to contribute to society by joining Starfleet where values like morality and heroism are highly prized [2]. [1] http://edteck.peterpappas.com/rothberg/fictionisalie.htm http://edteck.peterpappas.com/rothberg/fictionisalie.htm [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27040338-trekonomics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27040338-trekonomics
- skookumchuck 8y agoOh, I still read fiction, and I enjoyed watching Star Trek TOS. But really, how many times can you rewatch them? I know about Roddenberry's ideas, too. Lots of people have ideas. Roddenberry's are not that sophisticated (compared with, say, Tolkien's). It doesn't take much text to explain his ideas. And then what? You have silly people attempting to create "canon" for their dreamworld? ST certainly is Roddenberry's vision of utopia. But consider that people have endlessly attempted to create utopias on earth. Isn't that more interesting? The Pilgrims tried to create one. The Amish tried. The Mormons tried. The Soviets tried. The Nazis tried. Kellogg tried. Jim Jones tried. What's different about ST is you can always make a fictional utopia work by just typing in "... and it works!" That makes it, to me, fundamentally uninteresting compared to real world attempts that are unable to adjust their scripts to reality.
- teddyh 8y agoThe problem with fiction is that it suffers from the “author fiat” problem a.k.a. “it works and has no problems because the author says so”. Real life has no such cheat, and real history and situations can be more usefully examined for problems. Fiction can be useful for brainstorming ideas, but as realistic target it is dangerous. Regarding Star Trek and post-scarcity, I can only say that not everybody is convinced by what it canonically presents itself to be: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html