Wait you're supposed to take everything literally???????????????? what how do I books
The technology isn't symbolic? It's just... technology? I mean I get that it's meant to be real in the world of the text (at least usually --- I didn't think the kaleidoscope was meant to actually work in any scientific way), I've read that much science fiction. :P But I usually expect its role to me-the-reader to be symbolic, or if not symbolic, a sort of stand-in for something else I can imagine that isn't that technology. The smoking alien plant stuff, for example, I took as "okay sure we're post-scarcity here because of handwavey magical sustenance goop," as a tool for removing the need for food from the narrative, a way to imagine a society that didn't have to partake in complicated agriculture or hunting if it didn't want to. Some effort goes into the harvest, of course, but not nearly as much effort as I would expect a society with that level of tech to be spending on having food. That's interesting and useful in letting Crowley tell the story he wants to tell, but I didn't find it convincing as something that could happen from where we are now without magic, which I take it I was supposed to? I can accept that I didn't buy it and still interact with the text on the grounds you described. Is that just genre literacy?
I don't really like the idea that I could be "reading it wrong" but I know that some books rely on having read other books and having certain expectations in order to get the text as intended. (Would hypothetical only-literate-in-SF people read the Circe chapter of Ulysses and think it's happening literally?)
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The technology isn't symbolic? It's just... technology? I mean I get that it's meant to be real in the world of the text (at least usually --- I didn't think the kaleidoscope was meant to actually work in any scientific way), I've read that much science fiction. :P But I usually expect its role to me-the-reader to be symbolic, or if not symbolic, a sort of stand-in for something else I can imagine that isn't that technology. The smoking alien plant stuff, for example, I took as "okay sure we're post-scarcity here because of handwavey magical sustenance goop," as a tool for removing the need for food from the narrative, a way to imagine a society that didn't have to partake in complicated agriculture or hunting if it didn't want to. Some effort goes into the harvest, of course, but not nearly as much effort as I would expect a society with that level of tech to be spending on having food. That's interesting and useful in letting Crowley tell the story he wants to tell, but I didn't find it convincing as something that could happen from where we are now without magic, which I take it I was supposed to? I can accept that I didn't buy it and still interact with the text on the grounds you described. Is that just genre literacy?
I don't really like the idea that I could be "reading it wrong" but I know that some books rely on having read other books and having certain expectations in order to get the text as intended. (Would hypothetical only-literate-in-SF people read the Circe chapter of Ulysses and think it's happening literally?)