high-context SF?

[kate_nepveu]

At the Readercon talk on dealing with diversity (panel notes), the speaker brought up the idea of cultures having either high or low contexts, judged by the amount that people within the culture can take for granted in talking to each other. She went on to say that you can have SF about high-context cultures, but you can't have high-context SF, because you need a way in to the society.

Being a contrary sort, I immediately tried to think of examples of high-context SF. The first that came to mind was Doctorow and Rosenbaum's Hugo-nominated novella "True Names", which struck me as self-consciously SF 301 or even higher, that is, assuming a whole lot of prior knowledge of the field and making no concessions to catch you up.

What do you all think? Am I not understanding the terms properly? What about high-context fantasy, is there anything different there?

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

A long running series (sf or fantasy but not mystery) can often be high-context. Try starting the Wheel of Time at book ten...

That may not be what they mean.

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

I think I must be misunderstanding what high-context means (the wikipedia page seemed to drift off onto related topics and was not particularly helpful). To me, one of the archetypal sf short story forms is "The author describes something in a non-standard way, and gradually you realize the story is about two bugs in a jar of tang" -- isn't that high-context?

Maybe it doesn't count because the in-group 'culture' there is only one person, the author.

[tablesaw]

"Love Is the Plan and the Plan is Death" perhaps? It's been a while since I read it, and Syfy has wiped it from Sci-Fi's memory.

But I'm really confused by how you and Abrahams are using it, as "high-context culture" doesn't seem to apply to "SF" (SF works? SF concepts? SF analysis? SF visual art? SF games?) very well. My undestanding of "high-context-culture SF" from reading your notes of the speech is "a work of speculative fiction that is written as though it were entirely a [fictional] high-context culture, with the narrator telling the story from within that culture to a presumed audience also within that culture." I put "fictional" in brackets because I think it's an important distinction, but one which would need to be (yet wasn't) addressed directly.

Specifically, if we remove "fictional" from that definition, then there assertion that there can be no "high-context-culture SF" means that there can be no SF in high-context cultures. Depending on how wide your scale is, Japan seems to often be considered a high-context culture. And they seem to be making SF just fine.

The scale of high-context to low-context cultures makes things awkward too. A high-context culture can't be completely opaque, otherwise children within the culture would also lack "a way in." (See Tenser Said the Tensor's linguistic analysis of "Darmok.") So a work fictionally placed in a high-context culture can still be presented in a way to make an audience outside that culture understand (or mostly understand) without causing it to be without the culture.

And the whole "has to be a way in" clause seems to relate to SF itself as it does to the saleability of SF, which makes some big assumptions about what "SF" is.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series is much cooler if you are familiar with the standard fantasy and SF tropes. Would that be an example of high context?

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

I'd nominate The Dragon Waiting and To Say Nothing of the Dog. They're both accessible at a purely fun level, if one likes those sorts of things, but provide ramifying complexity as you dig in. I'd guess that a rough-and-ready test would be to look for Marmite texts - love-'em-or-hate-'em, rarely meh.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

What about an extended in-joke like alt.shrugged (http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/alt_shrugged.html)? I imagine that's pretty opaque to anyone who wasn't part of that community around that time.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Gilman's Moonwise is high context fantasy, I think. Or is it just difficult, with the references to other fantasy being more like ornament?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The fantasy reference I can think of is "What has it got in its pocalypses?", which is a fine pun, but doesn't, afaik, illuminate the story.

I've managed to get through it once, and keep trying to work up enough steam to get through it again. There did seem to be constant references to poetry, folk song, and genre fantasy.

I think I understood some of it (the winter goddess decides to freeze everything so that she can keep track of it, the tramp is stuck with skipping forward through time) and while I was reading it, the A and O stuff seemed to make sense, but if I just read for the language, I could probably finish reading it again.

[od-mind.livejournal.com]

I think (as tablesaw mentioned) that you need to distinguish between SF within a culture as SF as a culture (of fans). If you classify (say) Inuit as a high-context culture, and consider SF written within that culture, then the questions are:

1. Does it work for Inuit readers?
2. Does it work in translation for readers from outside that culture?

If the answers are "yes" and "no", there arises the third question

3. Does it work in translation for SF fans with enough awareness of the conventions of the genre to extract clues that general readers won't see?

The misunderstandings that arise when outsiders meet a high-context culture is a standard trope of SF. Indeed, novels like Lee & Miller's Conflict of Honors pile that on top of the romance novel plot that is based on a key misunderstanding of motive/intent, usually class-based.

Typos, we hates them

[od-mind.livejournal.com]

Grr. That should say "between SF within a culture AND SF as a culture..."

Re: Typos, we hates them

[od-mind.livejournal.com]

...and Local Custom is a better example of what I meant than Conflict of Honors. Sheesh. I clearly need an editor.

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

If Gene Wolfe is not high context, nothing is.

Also, any fantasy that depends heavily on mythology will be high context in that sense.

I find the high-context/low-context distinction more useful in terms of politics, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, if I understand "high context" correctly, Erikson's Malazan books come to mind here.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

Hmm, are we talking about SF as a culture, the author's other works, a series or an individual book? I am not sure SF really is a culture, it is more like a galaxy with a dense core and lots of outrunners.

On the other hand there are books where even the expositions don't make sense until you have already been through the book once. Or even the next book. Gene Wolfe's "The Knight" comes to mind, although I would say already Tolkien has a hair of it.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Trying to think of something not overtly based upon mythology--Wendy Walker's The Secret Service?

Novels set in M. A. R. Barker's Tekumel (Empire of the Petal Throne) rely heavily upon the reader's familiarity with Barker's EPT materials, which include enough worldbuilding for several languages, the customs across thousands of years of several distinct cultures (at least two of them non-human), etc. They are not particularly great novels, but I think they might qualify, insofar as the ones I've skimmed have been written primarily for a readership presumed familiar with EPT, without much translating backfill/incluing.

[(Anonymous)]

If I'm understanding the terms correctly, Accelerando is awfully high-context; I can't imagine what a reader unfamiliar with stfnal or tech-related ideas would make of its narration, let alone the actual plot.