You may have seen old film footage of Harry Houdini in straightjacket hanging upside down from the top window-ledge of a multi-storey building, doing his escape-act. The interest aroused by some plots can be analogous to our interest in the escapologist's feat.
For example: how on earth can Frederick Forsyth make The Day of the Jackal interesting? After all, we know that de Gaulle did not get assassinated. And the whole book, almost, is written from the point of view of a man who is out to assassinate him. Well, Forsyth manages it, and the result is in a sense all the more worth while because of the difficulty which the author has surmounted in the plot.
Similarly there are a number of crime novels in which there is no doubt who is guilty of the crime; the interest then shifts to wondering how the criminal is to be brought to book. One great example of such a novel is Dorothy Sayers' Unnatural Death (1930). Francis Iles' Malice Aforethought (1937) is even more striking in that the novel is written entirely from the point of view of the criminal himself. And of course there are the later examples by James Cain such as Double Indemnity. The authors forego the mystery of whodunit and allow the reader the certainty that the main character is doomed - quite a load for a plot to bear.
To turn to science fiction and, specifically, to my own experience of writing it: I have deliberately given myself quite severe constraints in the Ooranye Project stories. This is because I have previously written (and published on the Web so as to be committed) the history of the planet Ooranye. All 91 eras of it. Thus, none of my stories are allowed to contradict the history. Admittedly, I have not mapped out the 92nd era, so I would be free to take any direction I liked with that; but the fact is, I like being constrained by history. I want, when writing tales of Ooranye, to feel that I am writing historical fiction (albeit about another world). Historical novelists are of course inventive but they must invent inside an existing, world-wide framework held in common by all who know anything about history, a framework in which most disagreements are about interpretation rather than about the basic facts.
|
