The pleasure of reading is one of the most intense and long lasting delights. When you read a book, you enter a concrete world that engages you actively in a collaboration between you, the author, the set of characters, and the created world, all magnified by plot, informed by ideas, and illuminated by style. I can't imagine being bored if I have even a halfway good book. I once returned from a business trip from Stuttgart, Germany to New York. It was normally a 10 hour trip, but due to airport and other delays I spent 23 hours mostly sitting around in uncomfortable chairs. I had hardly realized the delay was so long until I reached the end of the last of the eight books I had brought on the trip. When I had nothing more to read, I began to panic--fortunately that was as we were landing in the New York airport, and I survived.
My only regret is I read too fast and need too many books to feed my voracious appetite. And the problem is I have less patience with bad books the older I get. There was a time when I not only read everything, but read each book to completion. I remember the first book I didn't finish. I was 30, and the book was so bad that I literally threw it across the room (it was a cheap paperback and unharmed--this was a symbolic gesture).
Thus this web site. The quest for a good book is not merely to provide a charming experience or fend off a few idle hours, but, as with all good art, to help us go on living. Even on 24-hour trips.
Science fiction in general is held to the same standards as any good literature, but has one major additional burden: it must build a believable world. Now all novels build worlds; that is why we call it fiction. But realistic modern novels have a major advantage: they presume on the part of the reader a whole avalanche of context is brought into play by merely mentioning a small fact. If you say, "Irene glared at the crushed coke can in the cobbled street gutter before answering." a rather complex situation, time and place are set up for free. This means the author can be rather lazy. You merely have to drop a few such context setting facts, assume the reader will presume a setting and environment, and then you can get right into the fun business of plot, style, ideas, and character.
World builders have to set scenes, create believable context, and generate situations congruent with that context. While even modern novelists do this so some extent, the world builder has a much more difficult time, and can create a much more intense delight in this building of worlds that is lacking in a modern novel. Today, it is difficult to read Dante without notes, although he created a very great world. It may be impossible to care much about Hemmingway without notes a few hundred years from now. Tolkien can always be read without notes (although it may be argued his books are one long footnote on philology) because he carefully explains his world as he goes along.
Thus I give my highest rating for SF to the differentiating element of "world building". This is not to neglect other elements--but I can find delight in other facets of a novel in other genres.
Characters should be full of ambiguity. You should feel that the author knows, and probably loves or hates the character. For example, it really riles me when the author drops into the old "fanatical priests" scheming and screaming and rushing to their death, which they do all the time, apparently, because they are fanatical priests. This destroys a world for me, because I stop to ask, "Why would they do this?" I know some priests. They rush to fine wines. They rarely carry swords to hack you to death, though they may talk you to death. Even when strongly believing in something, they like to argue with people holding competitive ideas. They make their way through life with their additional burden, and sometimes additional grace, like the rest of us, failing and succeeding in part.
Perhaps I'm alone in this. Maybe there are dozens of fanatical priests I haven't met. Maybe all but the ones I've met are fanatical. But if they are fanatical, why, how did they get that way, what propels them, what ameliorates them?
Without ambiguity there is no depth to characters. They are not human. They becomes stick figures, not characters; they become scarecrow figures nailed to a pre-scripted plot. The best characters have not just one side, or even two sides, but many. Show us them all. I'm greedy, I know, but I want to understand, love, regard, and forgive even the villains, and I need complexity to believe in the human story as embodied in a character.
If SF authors have it harder for character building, they have it easier for plots. Once you set up a great world, you can steal any plot you like, and as long are you are good, make it work. Some of my favorite SF have used rehashed plots. There is nothing wrong in this. Most plots are based on deep myths and truths, and literature is constantly retelling the same story. Problems only occur when the plot drags in an unbelievable character, or the character drags the plot into wrong directions. If a plot is a myth told in a new context, make sure you chose the myth to match the world; then let it rip. I suspect that SF has a higher percentage of "page turners" than any other genre.
While most of us distinguish between "hard science fiction" and soft (I suppose because hard science fiction has a couple of paragraphs of pseudo-science which is "hard" to read), I think it is true that all art aspires to present an idea. An idea is an abstraction that compels belief. And if we are to create a believable world, we must present ideas composed out of the world building ideas. Ideas are often the best way to propel belief, but they can't be too conventional, or insipid: they must combine the grand abstraction with the gritty incarnation in the world. Any book that doesn't take religion not only seriously, but deeply, is facile. Any book that invents magical kingdoms but doesn't promote cooking and working and living and lore and art and other day-to-day activities, is thin.
SF often neglects this delightful gift to human existence. Most writing (95%?) is of a conventional style. When the odd author reaches for style, they often try for poetry. The worst poetry ever written is found in SF books. All poetry written is SF books is unbelievably bad, or at best, really bad.
This death-of-style is probably a phenomena of the mass market trade publication of SF--like TV, volume creates a lowest common denominator which creates trash. However, in the early days of SF there were many great or unique stylists. Because they were inventing something new, they had to discover and write in a new style. Great books require styles that express the personal style of the author, and are tuned to the story of the created world as well. Style, when seemlessly woven into the world is a positive a pleasure. Along with good characters, good ideas, or good plots, I really enjoy a thumping good style.
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