Matt Cheney draws inspiration from a brief GalleyCat post on science fiction's philosophical grappling with the world and comes up with a long, thoughtful essay on what he calls "the scarecrow-in-the-desert effect." The visual image is a metaphor for what Cheney dislikes about a certain kind of writing that feels "open and thin" to him:

"It's not that the paragraphs are too short or long—they can be any length, although the effect most often presents itself in short paragraphs—but that they don't contain enough of certain types of matter, or they contain too much of another. The matter they lack is sensual or intellectual—the accumulated paragraphs feel like a wide-angle lens's view of everything—and the matter that overfills them is unwelcome or unnecessary information."

I see what Cheney's getting at, although I don't think I entirely agree with him; one novel I recently enjoyed, Adam Langer's Ellington Boulevard, contains large chunks of backstory explaining how these characters got to this place in their lives at this narrative moment that might, I suspect, frustrate Cheney no end. Or maybe not; as he writes later on, "[Roberto] Bolaño, [Jorge Luis] Borges, and [Cordwainer] Smith all fill their sentences and paragraphs with stuff, but there is something about all the stuff they throw in that makes it feel, to me at least, like something other than filler—purposeful, deliberate, specific, vivid."

(And if you've never heard of, let alone read, Cordwainer Smith, boy are you in for a treat... you might start with "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" and "Scanners Live in Vain," and then if you're hooked, track down the novel Norstrilia...)