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Tolkien wrote a wonderful essay called "On Fairy Stories" in which he essentially rejected the notion of suspension of disbelief as an explanation of what is going on when a reader reads any kind o...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:49Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/22066 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T04:02:20Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/22066 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T04:02:20Z (over 4 years ago)
Tolkien wrote a wonderful essay called "On Fairy Stories" in which he essentially rejected the notion of suspension of disbelief as an explanation of what is going on when a reader reads any kind of fantasy (and science fiction is a branch of fantasy). Tolkien argued that a story is an act of sub-creation (under God's creation). The author creates a world and makes it believable. The reader enters into that world and believes it. There is no question of disbelief being suspended. It is all about belief in the sub-created world. If belief in the sub-created world ever wavers, it collapses entirely. The reader does not disbelieve and then suspend that disbelief. The reader enters into the sub-created world and either believes or does not believe. So if you can successfully create a world in which the laws of nature as such and such as you want them to be, and if you can make the reader believe this world, they will believe and the story will work. Some part of your readership will, of course, be Philistines for whom (to their great loss), entry into sub-created worlds is not possible. Nothing you can do for them, alas.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-05-20T12:25:19Z (almost 8 years ago)
Original score: 1