The Sounds of Science

One of the fun things about this project, for me, is giving myself the opportunity to go back and pick up novels I missed the first time I was in high school. With most of the books I've read so far this summer, this hasn't been an issue; King Dork, Speak, and The Lovely Bones all came out after I'd graduated (1996, for those of you who are counting); but Ender's Game, published as a short story in 1977 and expanded as a novel in 1985, was one that, for years, had just skirted the edge of my interest.

In high school I shied away from the science fiction and fantasy genres because, lets face it, I didn't need to be seen as a bigger dork than I already was. I'd grown up reading the Chronicles of Narnia and had flirted with the sort of "sword and sorcery" brand of fantasy (beginning with my dad's dog-eared copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) in late elementary and early middle school, but had put those aside in favor of so-called "realistic fiction" by the time I was a freshman, and sci-fi and fantasy fans were all grouped together in one Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing, comic-book-buying untouchable lunch table. This was before the general public caught onto the literary merits of comic books, when collections like Frank Miller's Dark Knight and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' The Watchmen were just beginning to be called "graphic novels."

In short, in high school society and the world at large, science fiction was considered a few rungs below serious literature, and so I had little need for it. Ironically, by far my favorite author in high school and well after was one who dabbled in sci-fi conventions in almost everything he wrote: the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Somehow, despite his penchant for the fantastic and futuristic, Vonnegut was never labeled with the particularly sticky sci-fi tag. You will not find his books alongside the Saturn's rings and space station chrome of Isaac Asimov's or Robert A. Heinlein's work. I think a part of that had to do with the time when he was writing, when most "genre fiction" put a lot of its emphasis on form: westerns were about shootouts, fantasy was about magic, and sci-fi was about whirring and buzzing and blinking machinery, at the expense of fully realized characters with internal struggles and dynamic character arcs. Vonnegut's characters, ordinary human beings in extraordinary circumstances, were the focus.

Much of today's speculative fiction (a supergenre that includes both sci-fi and fantasy) seems to have taken a cue from Vonnegut in this department. And former literature snobs like me have embraced the shift. Witness my media consumption of late: high on my Netflix cue is the second season of Battlestar Galactica, a show that develops its characters better than almost anything on television; I spent Monday afternoon at a matinee of the Fresh Prince's refreshing and challenging Hancock, then stopped by a corporate bookstore to leaf through the first volume of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 (for my money, BtVS remains one of the top five best-written shows ever to appear on American television); and I finally got around to reading Orson Scott Card's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, Ender's Game.

But I've already gone on far too long today. I'll let you know how I think Ender's Game measures on the "characterometer" tomorrow. But tell me: am I right about this? In the battle between plot and character, which should take priority? Are so-called "novels of ideas" just as worthy of praise as character-driven novels? Also, I'm still fairly unschooled in the world of modern speculative fiction (though I do have a soft spot for Ursula K. Le Guin); does anyone have a good fantasy, sci-fi or graphic novel to recommend?