{"id":752,"date":"2002-12-08T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2002-12-09T02:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/12\/08\/752.html"},"modified":"2002-12-08T18:43:00","modified_gmt":"2002-12-09T02:43:00","slug":"weirdness-turns-out-to-be-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/12\/08\/weirdness-turns-out-to-be-true\/","title":{"rendered":"Weirdness turns out to be true; film at 11"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It's practically a genre convention that in a speculative fiction story, if\n  someone says something weird or unbelievable is true, they turn out to be right.<\/p>\n<p>In the old days, the surprise twist ending &quot;the aliens are actually real!&quot;\n  or &quot;he really <em>can<\/em> do magic!&quot; was sufficient to make a story. These days, that's\n  not a surprise; it's what most sophisticated sf readers will expect.<\/p>\n<p>So \"He's not crazy, he really <em>can<\/em> see ghosts\" is an insufficient premise for a story these days.  You gotta do more than that.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the obvious reverse twist (\"He really is crazy after all!\") is hardly better.  Complexify.<\/p>\n<p>In general, I feel that a story should be about more than just messing with reader expectations.  Which is a lot of why surprise twist endings in general are just not my cup of tea these days.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s practically a genre convention that in a speculative fiction story, if someone says something weird or unbelievable is true,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}