(urth) Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Sat Apr 14 11:40:42 PDT 2007


don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com> writes:

> --- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 4/13/07, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> > "Stuff happened" is almost everything. "Someone
>> made
>> > stuff happen" is usually laid over it by people
>> trying
>> > to make sense of that "stuff". Christians hardly
>> have
>> > a lock on interesting fiction, nor are athiests
>> > excluded from it.
>> 
>> The last point is certainly true; the first has some
>> truth to it -- but,
>> really, in terms of narrative (and we are creatures
>> of our narrativity),
>> intentional actions are far more interesting than
>> agentless actions.
>> 
>> One of the most impressive narrative tours-de-forces
>> I have ever
>> read was _Fire_, by George R. Stewart (author of the
>> SF classic
>> _Earth Abides_), which took a firestorm as its
>> more-or-less
>> protagonist, and managed to give it agency without
>> personializing
>> it. He did the same thing, less successfully, for a
>> storm in a book
>> called (of all things) _Storm_.
>> 
>
> After I sent that letter, it occured to me that all
> fiction  by nature is theistic, since the writer is
> nothing if not God over the page. Perhaps even
> polytheistic if there are editors involved. I have a
> copy of Earth Abides, but somehow it has fallen into
> my backlog and I don't know when I'll get to it.
>
> Don

But what about aleatory literature? 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatory#Literature

Or does God really play dice? 

-- 
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.



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