Sagar Nattuvetty: "Dear Carmen Maria Machado: The Golden Ratio of Speculative Fiction"

Carmen Maria Machado: The Golden Ratio of Speculative Fiction

By Sagar Nattuvetty

            Ever since I was young, I read books for a single purpose. To live another life. I’m never going to slay dragons, save the queen, or master arcane spells in an Illinois suburb. Books let me escape to a dimension of imagination by the manipulation of others. However, that being said, I am not safe from a disappointment that accompanies some novels that pique my interest. Over the years, I’ve gained a good sense of the type of adventures I like to go on, but the disappointment comes mainly from how the author is able to balance the plot action and the plot development.

            To be completely honest, I used to be a huge sucker for judging a book by its cover. It was a naive mistake I made in my earlier years, and it led me to a very narrow. I realized my wrong when I was recommended A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, a book with a simple cover and an intricate tale. After finishing that, I realized the number of well-crafted stories I would be missing out on from grazing over an unappealing illustration. After this experience, I started refining my selection process. I eventually became conscious of a question that I repeatedly asked people when getting book recommendations. “Does the adventure get to you?” When you’re reading, it’s easy to categorize the adventure into two different sections; one where you simply observe a chain of events, and one where you get caught up experiencing the events. I generally get a good sense of how a book is going to be based on the character development that occurs in the first few chapters, and how invested I get in them. If I get hooked during that phase of a book, it’s extremely hard to push me to the point of putting the book down. However, the book is never 100% safe because it has happened before.

            There is a certain balance between action and development that makes a book readable. Almost all science fiction and fantasy authors have a strong grasp on how to maintain a reasonable ratio, but the balance tolerance is different for every reader. In my case, I am very lenient with this, but have been victim to loss of interest. The most apparent example in my reading life thus far is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It comes as a surprise to many people that although I have a wide range of SF interests, I was unable to finish the Harry Potter book series. And there have been many instance where I picked it up again and was unable to get through the part that made me put it down in the first place. There had come a point in the book where I got very bored of the world building that was happening, and made me lose my previous investment in the story. When the author has already given me a taste of the heat of the battle, but keeps me waiting for a tad too long, I get lost. I realized once I made the decision to stop, my imagination was literally incapable of giving the book another chance because it kept associating the loss of interest feeling with that specific part.

            At the beginning of my Speculative Fictions Studies class, my teacher asked the class what kind of SF reader we classified ourselves as a daydream believer. I aim to escape. I want to get sucked in one hundred percent, and lose all sense of my surroundings. As long as the author is able to avoid the disappointment by keeping that ratio in range, I’ll be in it until the end.