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elfsI recently read "A Tranquil Star", a short story billed as "science fiction", written by Primo Levi in 1978 and published in The New Yorker, available in the online edition. Levi is best known for his fictional accounts of life during and after the Holocaust. He wrote SF fitfully, unsuccessfully and most of it has never been published in the United States.
"A Tranquil Star" reminds me of so much of what's wrong with writers who believe that you can get away with "science fiction as metaphor" without knowning enough, without reading enough, science fiction to appreciate the tropes. It becomes hard to sell to either market.
The story is very short; you could read the whole thing in ten minutes. After reading it through twice it becomes obvious what Levi is trying to do, making an analogy between a supernova destroying a solar system and one man's quiet desperation balancing the rough outlines of his family life and the clearer outlines of his career, and how the two intersect one day-- in one paragraph, in fact.
In the end, "A Tranquil Star" is neither SF nor pretentious bullshit; it's a high-literature meditation on our inability to speak clearly about things outside the human scale, and our equally poor capacity to work within that scale. As such stories go, it is not poorly done, although it has an awkward late 70's sensibility that just barely manages to dodge the ambience of new wave. It's problem is that it invokes that ambience in the first place. Billing it as science fiction weakens it by attracting the wrong audience and repelling the intended one, and the editors at The New Yorker ought to have known better.
"A Tranquil Star" reminds me of so much of what's wrong with writers who believe that you can get away with "science fiction as metaphor" without knowning enough, without reading enough, science fiction to appreciate the tropes. It becomes hard to sell to either market.
The story is very short; you could read the whole thing in ten minutes. After reading it through twice it becomes obvious what Levi is trying to do, making an analogy between a supernova destroying a solar system and one man's quiet desperation balancing the rough outlines of his family life and the clearer outlines of his career, and how the two intersect one day-- in one paragraph, in fact.
In the end, "A Tranquil Star" is neither SF nor pretentious bullshit; it's a high-literature meditation on our inability to speak clearly about things outside the human scale, and our equally poor capacity to work within that scale. As such stories go, it is not poorly done, although it has an awkward late 70's sensibility that just barely manages to dodge the ambience of new wave. It's problem is that it invokes that ambience in the first place. Billing it as science fiction weakens it by attracting the wrong audience and repelling the intended one, and the editors at The New Yorker ought to have known better.
