What is “good art”? What are “good stories?” In Taste is Culturally Constructed and its subsequent posts, science fiction & fantasy author and editor Ann Leckie explores the cultural construction of our conceptual categories and the systemic biases that shape our definitions of art, in all forms.
Imagine that from infancy every time someone said “fruit” they showed you an apple. And every time you asked for fruit you got..yes, an apple. Say “fruit” and everyone knows you mean apple, apple is fruit and fruit is apple.
One day someone hands you an orange. “Ugh,” you say, “this isn’t fruit!” By which you mean, not an apple. And another time, you get a pear. Which, pears are very poor imitations of apples, aren’t they. “This,” you might say, “is very inferior fruit. I’d rather have real fruit.”
Of course, that pear might be the most amazing pear ever, but it’s going to taste like a really bad attempt at an apple, if that’s what you’re always comparing it to. Which, since apple is the default fruit, means your pear is shoddy fruit.
Notes: WisCon refers to the annual Wisconsin Science Fiction Convention. The reference to “ToC” throughout the inter-related posts is shorthand for Table of Contents and refers to the ongoing problem in science fiction and fantasy publications whereby anthologies and “Best Of” lists frequently feature a white male-heavy selection of authors in contrast to the actual demographics of writers and readers. “Subs” is short for writing submissions.
As pointed out in the comments, the first post in the series describes what is known in cognitive science as Prototype Theory.