The novels which hold my interest longest are about people or groups of people, But that doesn’t mean a novel about someone having an affair or dropping out of school for a semester holds my interest at all. Wasn’t it Hemingway who spoke of “grace under pressure?” The pressure too is a necessary part.

Jane Austen didn’t write about agreeable flirtations or marital tiffs. She wrote about courtship and marriage because this was the high stakes end of things where one could make irevocable mistakes. Her characters might have been as well drawn in such plots–they might even have been the same characters at other points in their lives–but I doubt the novels would have lived 200 years.

Fast forward a bit. For me, the best SF novel for decades in either direction is Lois McMaster Bujold’s SHARDS OF HONOR. It too is a courtship novel, as our main characters of very different cultures meet and try to find a place and way to be together. But it wouldn’t be as good a novel without politics, interstellar warfare, at least two madmen and a Great and Terrible Secret. When Bujold applies pressure, she’s serious about it. “Think of the worst thing you can do to your characters,” she wrote once, “and then do it to them.”

But I can find you a dozen novels which read like military histories of wars not yet fought. Those do NOT get shelf space. The pressure is there but not the people.

A good novel may have car chases and explosions. But it’s not about car chases and explosions. It is a fine thing that Thuvia of Helium be threatened, that she may show her love of John Carter and he of her and his ability to protect her as well. But when it happens again in another volume, then it’s about the swordfights. This is why a good series often has something of an anthology feel as viewpoints shift and different characters take center stage.

Television works great–well, CAN work great–for comedy, satire and social commentary, but a recurring drama in which nothing permanent will ever happen to the lead characters–they won’t be killed or crippled: they won’t even be married off–is difficult, and in some danger of being about the explosions. (A kind word here for Joss (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) Whedon who was perfectly ready to kill off anyone, and tried to end the series by killing off his main character. Way to maintain suspense!)

As for style, I am not quite so despairing. Word choice and phrasing are at the mercy of languages, of course. But the order in which material is presented, the detail focused upon and the things ommitted will remain, and these are part of style as well. Shakespeare in translation is still Shakespeare.

The kind of fiction which endures generally has many virtues, and appeals to different types of readers as a result–characters AND setting, plot AND style. But another has written of the need for balance:

“Fortunate indeed are those in which is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point.”

–Gahan of Gathol, CHESSMEN OF MARS