association-list

It strikes me that in my last post, that I was some­what non-​​specific in my use of syn­the­sis. It could be that I’m miss­ing out, with regards to knowl­edge of the crit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, so I wanted to define my terms.

When I call an author an syn­the­sist, I’m mostly refer­ring to what I call their pri­mary mode of extrap­o­la­tion. By pri­mary, I mean the tech­niques that any one author gen­er­ally uses to drive the ideas behind their sto­ries. I’d say that there are at least three broad cat­e­gories here, and I’ll attempt to name them, offer a brief def­i­n­i­tion, and pro­vide some examples.

1. Com­pos­i­tive Sythe­sists: This is a cat­e­gory into which I slot Tidhar, Liz Williams, Wolfe, Delaney, Swan­wick, etc.
   Very few of the ideas are new, and occa­sion­ally things that would oth­er­wise flow nat­u­rally from the world build­ing are missed. Rather they’re used with vary­ing degrees of skill to evoke the set­tings and pre­con­di­tions for their character’s sto­ries to nat­u­rally unfold. Inter­est­ingly, I find that thsi cat­e­gory con­tains both some of the best and some of the worst SF dis­pro­por­tion­ately, going from the bottom, where the paint by num­bers crowd oper­ates, to the top, where some of the best artists of the genre pick and chose just the right ele­ments out of the exist­ing prop box to set the drama of their char­ac­ters and plots off to great­est effect. There are some people in the middle, but they seem to be thin­ner on the ground than in my other (self-​​defined) categories.

2. Con­junc­tive (or Inven­tive) Sythe­sists: These are authors who’re largely work­ing out of the box of stan­dard props and tropes, but they’re inter­ested enough in the ideas that they’re work­ing with that they gen­er­ally con­sider it incum­bent upon them to come up with some fas­ci­nat­ing and novel ideas and cre­ations that shake out nat­u­rally from the quriks of their world­build­ing and how they’re throw­ing their ideas together.
   I’d put Stross, Tricia Sul­li­van, Justina Robson, Bruce Ster­ling, and Richard Morgan here, amongst others.

3. Sub­ject Experts: These are your scientist-​​authors and your lay experts, who take their deep knowl­edge and research and use it to inform either their story ideas or their world­build­ing. They also draw from the common pool, but their unique bodies of knowl­edge lead to both insights and lacu­nae that other writ­ers with a dif­fer­ent speculative-​​extrapolative approach wouldn’t have come across.
   I’d include Ben­ford, Kim Stan­ley Robin­son, Nancy Kress, Vernor Vinge, and a number of others here.