The thing I find really neat about this book is that it is literally a subgenre of SF I have never seen anything else do: science we could have done, but did not. There's a lot of SF about science we can't do yet (set in the future or the past), and a lot about science we probably can't do ever, and there are counterfactuals (what if x experiment had turned out differently, or what if x theory were different).
But this is the only book I know where there was, in fact, a very definite time frame during which this particular experiment could well have been approved, when that was the sort of thing people were doing. And that time is over, and this particular experiment could not and would not be approved nowadays. It was totally plausible. We just never went there. And it's not as though we got the exact same results in some other way-- we got different results about different things that made us not want to run the experiment, but we do not actually know how the experiment would have turned out.
The other thing I think is really interesting about this book, which is related to the first thing, is that it wasn't marketed as SF. If you know Fowler as an SF writer, you expect that of her, but a lot of people only know her from The Jane Austen Book Club. So I have literally met people who assumed the cover art and front quote were setting up metaphors the way they would be in mainstream literary fiction, because that is where this book was shelved when it came out. And when they get to the spoiler? They don't read it as SF! It's so fascinating, every one of these people that I've talked to about this has assumed it was based on a real case, like back in the seventies or something, they assume it was a real case that happened that Fowler has fictionalized. Because if it were mainstream litfic, that would probably be true, that's a classical way that litfic writers work.
So when I read this book, I find myself critiquing the worldbuilding, as SF-- it's very good worldbuilding, I really find a lot of the ways the family interacts believable, the one real caveat I have is that I don't quite buy the narrator having so much trouble with human body language in later life but as I said we don't have the data-- but when the litfic people read the book, they critique the animal stuff as metaphor, as symbolism for the undercurrents of the underlying character conflicts the way it would be in, oh, Margaret Drabble. And the amazing thing is that each side thinks of it as about the same quality of book, it works equally well from either direction.
As a piece of genrefuck, it's one of the finest I've ever run across.
no subject
But this is the only book I know where there was, in fact, a very definite time frame during which this particular experiment could well have been approved, when that was the sort of thing people were doing. And that time is over, and this particular experiment could not and would not be approved nowadays. It was totally plausible. We just never went there. And it's not as though we got the exact same results in some other way-- we got different results about different things that made us not want to run the experiment, but we do not actually know how the experiment would have turned out.
The other thing I think is really interesting about this book, which is related to the first thing, is that it wasn't marketed as SF. If you know Fowler as an SF writer, you expect that of her, but a lot of people only know her from The Jane Austen Book Club. So I have literally met people who assumed the cover art and front quote were setting up metaphors the way they would be in mainstream literary fiction, because that is where this book was shelved when it came out. And when they get to the spoiler? They don't read it as SF! It's so fascinating, every one of these people that I've talked to about this has assumed it was based on a real case, like back in the seventies or something, they assume it was a real case that happened that Fowler has fictionalized. Because if it were mainstream litfic, that would probably be true, that's a classical way that litfic writers work.
So when I read this book, I find myself critiquing the worldbuilding, as SF-- it's very good worldbuilding, I really find a lot of the ways the family interacts believable, the one real caveat I have is that I don't quite buy the narrator having so much trouble with human body language in later life but as I said we don't have the data-- but when the litfic people read the book, they critique the animal stuff as metaphor, as symbolism for the undercurrents of the underlying character conflicts the way it would be in, oh, Margaret Drabble. And the amazing thing is that each side thinks of it as about the same quality of book, it works equally well from either direction.
As a piece of genrefuck, it's one of the finest I've ever run across.