Good times bad times

[altariel]

A brief discussion elsewhere about writing dystopia had me musing about happy-world stories and sad-world stories, what you lot preferred, and why.

Here is the ever-quotable Le Guin on the subject: "It is sad that so many stories that might offer a true vision settle for patriotic or religious platitude, technological miracle working, or wishful thinking, the writers not trying to imagine truth. The fashionably noir dystopia merely reverses the platitudes and uses acid instead of saccharine, while still evading engagement with human suffering and with genuine possibility" (2004: 219).

Are happy-world tales escapism? Do sad-world stories back out on the possibility for action and change? What do you like to read? Why?

[Poll #614661]

Le Guin, U. (2004) A War Without End. In: Le Guin, U., The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. London: Shambhala Publications.

Comments

[genarti]

I answered bittersweet, but really it depends on my mood in some ways. I like happy escapism; I reread the books I loved as a fourteen-year-old girl, many of which are the Mercedes Lackey variety of cotton-candy fluff. A bit of a guilty pleasure, but everybody needs a few of those.

But the ones that stay with me -- the ones that ring true, the ones I quote and push at people crying "You must read this!" in allcaps -- those are nearly always the bittersweet ones, the sharp-edged and lyrical works that offer hope and mercy but ask a price for each bit of it. Someplace To Be Flying, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower series (although that is bitter-bittersweet, perhaps), the Dark Is Rising series, Diane Duane's books... I like choices and consequences, and loss to make the joy the sweeter.

But books that are unremittingly sad mostly just annoy me. I am an optimist at heart, and there's only so long I can take an emo story before I want to start flicking dried peas at all the characters.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

there's only so long I can take an emo story before I want to start flicking dried peas at all the characters

Heh, I do like that!