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George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is the best critical work I've read in a while.
I was struck by the way he talks about "escalation," which is a concept SF/Fantasy writers talk about a lot (often as "raising the stakes"). Saunders uses it differently.
I was struck by the way he talks about "escalation," which is a concept SF/Fantasy writers talk about a lot (often as "raising the stakes"). Saunders uses it differently.
When SF writers escalate, it usually means the plot is escalating—events are becoming more dangerous/dramatic, or bigger; the characters discover that more is at risk than they thought.
Saunders talks about how stories like "In the Cart" or "Gooseberries" escalate—but by genre standards these stories don't have a lot of plot; i.e., the first is about a woman who rides home in a cart and experiences an unusually vivid memory.
In a Chekhov story, escalation means the story itself is moving to a new level. Themes vary, complicate, and are contradicted; characters reveal new sides or depths. The story becomes more surprising/ambiguous.
When I lose interest in a SF/Fantasy story it's often because the story escalated in a plot sense, but not in the way Saunders talks about. So there's more action, but it feels meaningless because the story isn't building to anything underneath.
