Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1033

I know I’m a few years late for the clue train here, but I just now realized that there were never any angels on Buffy. There were a few good witches, painfully innocent monks, and evil misunderstood gypsies, but the good guys were never fully supernatural. Even the gods were bad guys.

It’s a malevolent view of the universe that identifies all supernatural power with evil and simultaneously restricts all goodness to humanity. (Oz, Angel and Spike are all partly human.) The constant supernatural malevolence makes Buffy a horror show, even though nothing is ever particularly scary.

The difference between horror and fantasy, then, is Elves - the good counterparts to misunderstood evil Orcs. Buffy could have used a few angels on her side; it would have saved her a lot of angst. But then, I get the feeling angst was the point - the only angel was the Angel of Angst.

Word count: 1018

That’s not even counting half a Voyager filk I wrote on the side. I think someone at Boston Common doubts my 1,000 word resolution. The other linked post there says some interesting things about creativity.

Norman Spinrad’s article on style at the end of the July Analog also got me thinking about originality. (The must-read story of the issue, by the way, was “The Empress of Mars.”) He criticizes the “transparent” prose tradition of sci-fi, saying, basically, that alien worlds require unusual styles to convey them. Unfortunately his sample excerpts are of dialogue - I think the issue of suitably original dialogue is less controversial than that of an opaque prose style. Spicing up the dialogue is certainly less work than changing your entire writing style. It’s not clear that the latter is wise, if it’s even possible.

I suspect some people have styles that are like accents. Either you can drop that Boston accent and pronounce your r’s, or you can’t.