Let me take a few of your items point by point to clarify.

Art to me is always evocative. While I enjoy reading popcorn fiction, I don’t always find it particularly evocative. I also find that I gravitate toward work that strikes a chord on the melancholy side of the spectrum. That’s just the way my personality is wired.

It has been my experience throughout my education and my reading “career” that the literary works most often labeled as art are those that are the darkest. Very rarely are comedies included in a broad survey of the subject. Of course, this is a generalization. The great thing about art is that is subject to interpretation. My definition may not necessarily agree with yours, and yet both of us are right. There is some truth to the notion that art is in the eye of the beholder.

So why should the emotions that Watts evokes in Blindsight be more valuable than say, Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy when being considered for art? The simplest answer is that they shouldn’t be…if you don’t think so.

I’m not trying to dodge the question. I’m trying to amplify my opinion on art and its impact on people. In short, it’s an individual experience that will always lack complete commonality with another.

But art, to be considered such in my own frame of reference, needs to provide some sort of enhancement to my life experience. I stare at Salvador Dali paintings because I find them thought provoking; I barely glance at Picasso because I find the content of his work distrubing at some level that I can’t quite touch. In the first case, my life was enhanced by an object of beauty that requires thought. In the other, the imagery just seems purposely chaotic.

By the same token, many of the genre fiction books on the market today do nothing to enhance my life experience as such. They are a simple diversion, akin to a video game. It is a rare book indeed that I find myself so immersed in the charactesr/setting/story that I tune out my surroundings for hours at a time. I really look for those moment of literary chrysalis. I like for the things I read to challenge my preconceptions or to stretch my imagination. I want to be able to point to a line of thinking or an outlook and say: “This is now different because of what I’ve read.” That’s what I mean by enhancing our lives with the things we read.

Lastly, the “big discourse” was a term used by a college composition professor that I had. He had always defined it as the exchange of information and ideas that happens at the level of mass consciousness. This isn’t casual conversation about what the neighbors are doing; the big discourse embodies the crucial issues of our time. My favorite example of a novel that does this is Frank Herbert’s Dune. The scarcity of water on Arrakis (Dune) was an interesting prophecy about our own planet’s future, while the spice could be interpreted as a metaphor for oil.

So there you have it. For my personal definition of art, a novel must be evocative, it must provide a catalyst for change, and it must speak to/reflect the larger ideas of our time.

I’m not clear what you mean by saying that art should “enhance our lives.” (In some way beyond the pleasure taken from the work itself, since mindless mayhem and escapism does enhance many readers’ lives in that sense.) I’m also curious as to what you mean by the “big discourse of society.” Could you expand on that?

If action sequences are peppered with bits of character development and plot progression, then I think there’s the potential for truly memorable moments. The same goes the other way around. Dramatic, non-combat scenes can have very intense interpersonal action. Action and drama are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, actually.

All to say, writing military sci-fi is a delicate balance. Battles and combat are part of the game, but they can’t -be- the game. No one wants to read a first-person shooter. The challenging part is not writing one.

On the flip side, sometimes an author can overdo character development. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been cured of insomnia by reading a chapter in the Wheel of Time.

When the action is intense it seems to limit the character development to the top few in the story line and as much as I liked some of the characters I wanted to know more about them.

“Old Man’s War” is also faster paced than I would like, but a good fun read.