I was just reading Neil Gaiman’s blog (always a delight), and he was talking about how he’s making progress on his new novel, “Anansi Boys”. And then he said:
The weirdest thing about the book is that it begins as a comedy, then slowly shades into something a bit like horror, and I realised a couple of days ago that the rules of fiction mean you have to tread slightly warily as you go, if you’re going to do something like this. In a comedy, part of the underlying agreement is that good people and bad people will get what they deserve, and that happy endings will be earned, and the universe rewards nice people and sensible ones. In horror the underlying agreement is that there is no justice and that good people may be fed to the lions at authorial whim. Which realisation induced a moment or two of panic, and then I shrugged and figured it would all come out in the wash.
And it struck me how well that describes many of the engineering projects I’ve been involved in recently….