I didn't read Homer Price until I was an adult. J.L. Bell's post on the book at Oz and Ends reminded me that at the time I read it I thought that a Homer Price-type book set on a space station or an Earth colony on another planet would be a cool idea.
And that's as far as I got with that.
Huh. A big part of the appeal of Homer Price for me is how grounded in "ordinary" American life it seems, making its tall tales stand taller. (Of course, it's not an American life I ever experienced, being a generation younger.) I'm not sure I could find that quality off-world.
ReplyDeleteWell, my thought was that an off-world world would be ordinary in an off-world sort of way. The extraordinary should be ordinary for the citizens of an extraordinary world.
ReplyDeleteI’m just thinking it would be hard for Earth-bound readers to spot the line between ordinary life in space and the cockeyed exaggerations that appear in most Homer Price stories. Maybe that's how all doughnut machines work in zero gravity, for example. An interesting storytelling challenge.
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