Talk:Sense of wonder/Archive 1

Archive 1

And the word is.. ?

"This is not to say that the sense of wonder requires complete comprehension — indeed, the single most famous example of "sensawunda" in all of science fiction involves a word that not only had not appeared in the work in question prior to its mention at the end, but was, in fact, a neologism, and had not previously appeared in the English language before — the word in question appears in A.E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Makers, and is widely known in the science fiction community. (Clute & Nichols 1993, Moskowitz 1974)" ...... so.. what's the word?

Is this article being deliberately cryptic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.101.160.251 (talk • contribs)

The word is "sevagram". Yes, I think it's being deliberately cryptic. I'm not sure that's the best approach, but it seems that's the intent. Mike Christie (talk) 19:16, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

i'm quite sure it is not the best approach. i just read this article and got pissed off. i haven't read the weapon makers or feersum endjinn, so i can't fix things, but if anyone has (or has better examples to offer), please make this article less of a high-fiving nerd in-joke and more of a help to the curious. --dan (talk) 02:04, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

and as a sidenote, sevagram isn't even a neologism. apparently it's a village in india associated with ghandi. --dan (talk) 02:15, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree; I have both the books in question and don't find this an informative article. I hope to get to this one day, but in the meantime if someone else wants to clean it up it would be appreciated. Mike Christie (talk) 02:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup

I'm going to wait a week and if these examples in the articles aren't fully explained, I'm going to remove them. Wikipedia is about information. Examples are useless if only a few get the example. The Star Wars one just needs linked to Death Star. (as in the final line to Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn.) needs fully explained either here, or in that book's page. The entire last paragraph needs to explain the example. Yeah, this article is pretty much hopeless. I'm going to try to rewrite when I get around to it. Momo Hemo (talk) 14:59, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

As the original author of this post, which I wrote because of a poorly-written allusion to the concept in another article, I find the reaction to the two examples I have listed highly interesting, if not bewildering. Really; the point to the mention of Banks's book is not to reveal that, in a book that the reader may or may not have read, a character threw a switch and the entire solar system started moving in another direction - that has absolutely no relevance to the concept being discussed at that point in the article. The point is that a perceptual shift changed the reader's perception of the entire novel in the last sentence, not that the exact specifics of the plot were such-and-so.

Similarly, the point of the mentioning the "race that would rule the sevagram" was not to introduce people to the punch-line of the novel, but to illustrate that the perceptual shift (described in Hartwell's Age of Wonder as well as the Encyclopedia of SF) did not even require recognizable English to achieve; the exact specifics are nigh-irrelevant.

Perhaps I should have included more specifics, but I felt - and still feel - that the term can be discussed without them, and is actively harmed by doing so in many cases. Had I chosen the ending of Clement's Mission of Gravity as an example of a perceptual shift being brought into play at the end of a work, would it have been materially improved by saying "And then, even though the caterpillary aliens were in six hundred gees, the balloon they built still worked!"?

I don't think so; the fact that the sense of wonder is dependent on establishing a pattern through narrative or reader experience before the perceptual shift means that prematurely explaining it will sound silly, thus harming the encyclopedia reader's understanding of the concept. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.146.246.12 (talk) 20:55, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Undoubtedly, you have a great grasp of the concept of "sense of wonder", but a poor grasp of the concept of "encyclopedia." The purpose is to define the concept, not make readers experience it. I liken your article to one about "humor" wherein you provide the set up to a joke, then inform readers that the punchline (not provided) will be humorous.129.79.141.249 (talk) 14:23, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Essay

Im sorry this is written as an essay. I would like to include the article in the SF template i am working on improving, but this is just too far out there. I really wish people would Measure twice, cut once when writing here. a little foresight and prior education saves the rest of us a lot of redaction,Mercurywoodrose (talk) 05:27, 9 November 2011 (UTC)