I'm going to begin this blog by saying that fiction is not well suited to serious thought as such. I can think of very few exceptions to this observation, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he inserts a brilliant essay on architecture, culture, and technology in media res being one of them. He manages to do this with style and success, but as far as I am concerned the exceptions prove the rule. I tried to include thoughtful digressions in my novella, 'Chances', with notably poor results.
While it is possible to have reservations about nonfiction, historians spinning facts, theory laden volumes of science, fiction is just fiction. It is a vignette frozen in time of a specific state of imagination and not a vehicle for polemics. My working definition is that legitimate fiction is a valuable vision of the possible which entertains. It is an examination and hypothesis of human conditions of existence but it should not be approached with grandiose personal narratives of the genius of the author as thinker. Genius in fiction lies in elegant, evocative sentences that say something worth saying about human beings. Fiction is, after all, the most humane of written works.
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