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Comment by jerf

8 hours ago

"The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity."

This is one of the structural weaknesses in the entire SCP... motif, for lack of a better word. When a core part of the premise is "you can't understand it, not even in principle, if you think you understand it you're wrong", the premise does some fairly fundamental damage to what most people would consider the basic structure of a story. Generally we think that at least in hindsight, a story should "make sense", but SCPs by their nature have to be somewhat random and lack predictability or they aren't SCPs. You can try to wrap a more conventional story around that particular motif, but you've always got this fundamental structural weakness sitting right smack in the middle of it, and you can't remove it without leaving the sub-genre. The SCP structure fundamentally starts with a negation of this aspect of stories.

It is fun seeing what some people do with this limitation, and there are after all compensating benefits or nobody would write in the universe. But it is something that is going to be there in any story set in an SCP or SCP-like universe.

I think it was Larry Niven that observed that most stories are judged by something like character, plot, theme, etc., and that one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction is that you have to add the background to the list of things to look at. But only a vanishingly small set of works ever managed to have character, plot, theme, and the other characteristics firing on all cylinders as it was; asking for a work to have all that and also be 5 out of 5 on the new setting it establishes as well is way too much to ask of a work. With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that. This is less a "defense" than an explanation, that if you didn't particularly enjoy this, I'd suggest staying away from the entire subgenre because the entire SCP subgenre is structurally prone to these issues from the very foundation on up.

(To give another example, Greg Egan has a number of works in which he fiddles with the laws of physics, to do things like have two time dimensions and two spatial dimensions, then works out how that actually affects physics using math rather than intuition and write stories in the resulting universes. This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se. There just isn't the room. But you can't get that setting anywhere else.)

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jerf

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cousin_it  5 hours ago

I agree sci-fi is an outlier on this, but I also think all stories compete on setting to some extent. Fantasy most obviously (Tolkien, JK Rowling). But also for example the Jazz Age setting of The Great Gatsby contributed a lot to the novel's popularity and was a bit fictionalized, hard boiled detective writers like Hammett or Chandler wrote about a crime-filled world that was fictionalized for appeal, historical romances about lords and ladies are super fictionalized and so on. Writers try to put appeal into everything, that's why they're writers.

  • jerf  4 hours ago

    Larry Niven isn't referring to merely an "unusual" setting in his quote (which I've never managed to find referenced online, unfortunately), but to the way in science fiction you are creating the setting from scratch. Gatsby is set in the Jazz Age, and you can pick up some aspects of it from that, but it is still in the stock set of settings the author expected you to have some ideas about, so it doesn't explain how cars work or how doors open. And by that, I don't mean the sort of "explain" at an engineering level, but things like "how combadges work" in Star Trek, i.e., when they work, when they don't, what can be sent on them, what failures they are prone to, etc. Even something as fantastic as Tolkien is still generally set in a particular milieu and he is adding very skillful and numerous brush strokes to a genre that existed already.

    You've read many stories set in all the settings you mentioned. You have never read a story in which the fundamental shape of space-time is two time dimensions and two space dimensions before, unless you have also read Dichronauts. This is the supplementary material to the novel, which is mostly not in the novel and is not the story itself, just the background: https://gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/01/World.html You don't need that provided for something set in the Jazz Age, or a fantasy story explicitly based on myths that had been floating around for centuries, or a historical fantasy. Someone could write some equivalent, but you don't need it; it's already loaded into your head. That's the point.

pavel_lishin  4 hours ago

> This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se.

His characters do tend to be a little flat, but I think I almost always found them compelling. His books tend to be a physics or mathematics primer, wrapped in a pretty thin plot, but as soon as you poke at that plot-wrapper, most of the time some pretty good social commentary comes steaming out.

glenstein  2 hours ago

I think the SCP is great as a basically perfect infrastructure for playing in this space that makes room for community participation. But absorbing them as a whole into a story is tough. I think you put the basic bargain reasonably well int he following:

>With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that.

Where I would challenge that as it relates to TINAMD is I am not sure it fully succeeds even against this basic bargain. By contrast I would note Annihilation which is exactly as you describe, light on characters and plot and entirely about setting, and I think it sticks the landing on those terms in ways this book could have. But still, love its premise, love the traction its getting and I think the healthier way to engage with it is to cheer it on for its successes, which are significant.