“Well, really, you the reader are expected to do a bit of imagining on your own”
5 o'clock, August 30, 2006
Readers, recently, ask: What are these things “really” like?
Well, really, you the reader are expected to do a bit of imagining on your own; you see black marks on white paper, interpret them, and form an image. Part of the writer’s task is in judging whether you’re being given too much information or too little. As a reader of sf, I often felt I was being given too little, and that the writer probably wasn’t bothering to form that detailed an image in her own mind. Part of my initial urge to write sf grew out of a frustration with that, leading to what Bruce Sterling (I believe) deemed “the hyperspecificity of the cyberpunk style.”