Re: Prose

I just finished reading Stephen King's Cell. Damned fine book. Everything I wanted it to be. Halfway through, it became what I call "unputdownable". Meaning I was reading on it just about every moment I could be, including holding it in one hand while I brushed my teeth with the other. He dedicates it to George Romero (he of Night of the Living Dead) and Richard Matheson (he of... well, read about him. You've probably seen this, or maybe this, or perhaps this.), and the dedication couldn't be more apt; the novel is like taking a cup of Matheson, a cup of Romero, adding just a pinch of Shirley Jackson, and putting it in the Stephen King blender. Now that's a smoothie. In any case, having finished that, I'm now reading Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves. And I must say, the contrast in style between these two authors couldn't be more striking. King is known, and oft-maligned within the "literary elite", for his folksy, casual prose. Most of his books read like Steve himself is sitting there spinning the yarn for you. He often rambles into the details and minutia of his characters, and I think that's a huge part of his charm, and the reason you end up caring so much about the characters. Just stop and think about the people in The Shawshank Redemption for a minute. Those men were all hardened criminals, people who we wouldn't normally take the time to spit on. And yet, you cared about them, didn't you? You cared about Red and Andy and Brooks, didn't you? Admit it! And why wouldn't you? You lived with them. You went through what they went through right along with them. You knew them. King does it so well, and Frank Darabont made it into the best book-to-movie translation to date. Asimov, on the other hand, is... not that way. Asimov has incredible ideas. Don't get me wrong, he deserves every piece of praise that is heaped upon him. Certainly he and Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein were the Big Three of Sci-Fi. Asimov came up with the Three Laws of Robotics - which are going to be something we're actually going to have to deal with in the next couple of decades. He has an asteroid, a magazine, and two awards named after him. But his prose is lousy. Not immature, not underdeveloped, just perfunctory, bordering on lame. He makes people say things that real people wouldn't say, or wouldn't say that way. I always end up picturing every man delivering dialogue in an Asimov story as someone doing an impression of James Cagney. "Myah, we gotta stop the Positron Pump, see? That's the way it's gotta be, see? Myah." I think he gets caught up in Captain Exposition-land a lot, and I'll grant that it's gotta be tough for him, because unlike most authors, Asimov's main goal was to get the idea across to you so you could think about it. Someone like Stephen King has cool ideas and premises, but the reason you keep coming back for more is his characters. Their interaction is what keeps the pages flipping, and they *do* talk like real people, and when they don't, it jumps out at you like a kangaroo on Red Bull. Whereas Asmiov's dialogue is more like a visual effect... it serves the story, it's necessary, but kind of a pain in the ass. He's gotta make you understand what's going on, and either he can just tell you, or he can have a character tell another character. Whichever you choose, it's going to be tough to be happy with the result. And, too, he was charting new territory in his work. It wasn't like he had decades of sci-fi authors from whose works he could draw. He was bleeding-edge. And so, we end up with prose that's more like a play, where people talk about what they're doing. "Say, Johnny, I was thinking about refugulating the alpaclameric reesensphere." "Say, is that the alpaclameric reesensphere that blophenates the precnoid ficlia?" "The same!" I spent like 10 minutes coming up with all those fake words. That is not easy.