Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 161

Soft SF

Okay, so, given the previous post, I think I have now actually have seen no fewer than seven possible definitions proposed for “soft” SF. Many of them overlap, but I think each is distinctive. Here they are:

Sociological emphasis rather than an emphasis on technology Far future setting with handwavy technology or super-advanced magic technology.Science fantasyReally a different genre, like mystery, but with science fiction trappingsPoorly researched SF with handwavy, science-y stuff rather than actual science.SF where the author doesn’t make any attempt to explain the science behind the setting. I’m classing this as different from poorly researched background science.All SF where the author did not actually have to do math or physics calculations in order to write the story.

I’m with the rest of you: the term “soft” is useless when definitions are so wildly divergent. I mean, lots of the above definitions intergrade. Why does Pern seem like fantasy to so many people, including me? Because the science-y parts are silly and involve lots of handwaving. Those dragons can so fly! Time travel is totally plausible! To me, Pern is a great example, maybe the best example ever, of science fantasy rather than science fiction.

I wouldn’t say anything about Pern is poorly researched, which is why “handwavy” is not the same as “poorly researched.” Anne McCaffery didn’t do bad physics when she tossed her dragons into the air; she didn’t do physics at all. She did magic. She wanted dragons, so she wrote dragons. Her books are no more SF than the Temeraire series. They’re both fantasy, even though Pern has science-y trappings here and there. In fact, Temeraire is just as handwavy when it comes to science: Yeah, of COURSE there are enough cows in the UK to feed a lot of dragons. Absolutely! Oh, hey, actually, didn’t Naomi Novik put dragons in South America too? Yeah, no, the resource base for nearly the entire continent is dreadfully restricted because so much of the land area sits on top of either the Gayana shield or the Brazilian shield, which are extremely nutrient-poor rock formations. There’s no way you’d be able to support a lot of giant carnivores in Brazil. That’s definitely right out.

For years and years, when I mean “sociological science fiction,” I have said “sociological science fiction.” Even though “sociological” has six syllables and is not that easy to spit out in a hurry, there aren’t any other terms that distinguish this category of science fiction from everything else. As many commenters said, there’s nothing handwavy or soft about really solid sociological SF, such as Woman of the Iron People. There’s a ton of sociological SF, some of it great and some, of course, less well-researched or less good in other ways, so if you’re taking “hard” as thoroughly researched and carefully thought through and “soft” as poorly researched or badly understood, then this category definitely ranges from hard to soft.

But I don’t like to use “soft” as a derogatory term! I guess I don’t really like to use it at all because the term is often understood as derogatory, and I don’t approve of that usage. I’ve got no problem with well-done science fantasy! I like Pern, and Sharon Shinn’s Angel series. I don’t grumble about bad science when I read stories like that. Grumbles about the square-cube law miss the whole point of those stories.

My personal conclusion: If you mean sociological SF, say so. Use “hard” when you mean real-world physics is central to the setting or the plot and don’t use “soft” at all. We have plenty of subgenre terms that are much better! Time to let that one die.

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Great Novellas

So, of course the Murderbot novellas really hit it big, deservedly so, and tor.com gets a lot of credit for providing a place for novellas to be published other than in rare collections of authors’ shorter works. Of course Tor priced those novellas high, no question about that; there aren’t many novellas for which I’d pay $9.99, though granted these are long novellas. Still.

A collection of the Murderbot stories is due to come out shortly, by the way, and I’m interested to note that this collection — hardcover only available for preorder at this moment — does not offer ANY price break. $17 apiece, $70 total, for four novellas! Wow. That’s priced for the serious fan, that’s for sure.

But this post is actually not about the Murderbot novellas and the prices thereof.

This post is actually about three other novellas that are worth paying a little more for, if you can find them at all. All three are embedded in books, so you have to buy the whole book, and in these specific cases, I’d say that’s more than worth it whether or not you particularly want to read the other stories in the books.

So, three novellas. I’ll start with the one that you’re perhaps more likely to have read and move from there toward the more obscure novellas you might have missed.

1. The Gorgon in the Cupboard by Patricia McKillip, which is found in the collection Dreams of Distant Shores, published in 2016, which is essentially yesterday. There are six other stories in the collection, most shorter and one longer. Gorgon is 65 pages long. It starts like this:

Harry could not get the goat to stay still. His model, who was an aspiring actress, offered numerous practical suggestions as she crouched beside the animal. In fact, she rarely stopped talking. Harry didn’t like the look in the goat’s eye. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed to him arrogant beyond its age, and contemplating mischief.

This is a funny beginning, but Gorgon is not as lighthearted a story as this opening may make it seem. Let me skip forward a bit and find another scene … how about this …

She was walking with her husband on the other side of the street. He was speaking fervidly, gesturing, as was his wont, probably about something that had seized his imagination. It might have been anything, Harry knew: a poem, the style of an arch, a pattern of embroidery on a woman’s sleeve. She listened, her quiet face angled slightly toward him, her eyes downturned, intent, it seemed, on the man’s brilliance. He swept fingers through his dark, shaggy hair, his thick mustaches dancing, spit flying now and then in his exuberance. Neither of them saw Harry, who had stopped midstream in the busy street, willing her to look, terrified she might raise her dark, brooding eyes and see what was in his face. She only raised her long white fingers, gently clasped her husband’s flying arm, and tucked it down between them.

Then they passed, the great Alex McAlister and his wife, Aurora, oblivious to the man turned to stone by the sight of her.

This story is about … it’s about the women men don’t see, as the phrase goes; about the projected images they may see instead, and about learning to see the actual woman behind the obsession. It’s a very good story, goat and obsessions and all, and hey, it’s Patricia McKillip. I will say that the longest story in this collection is Something Rich and Strange, which for whatever reason is one of the few McKillip stories I never really liked, I don’t quite know why. You might feel differently, and anyway, Gorgon is a good enough story to justify picking up the collection, especially if you generally like McKillip, which surely you do.

Next:

2. Blood, by Sharon Shinn, in the collection Quatrain, published in 2009. As implied by the title of the collection, there are four novellas in this collection, each one longish, each one set in one or another of the worlds of her novels. They’re all perfectly fine stories, but Blood is actually one of the very best stories Sharon Shinn ever published, way up at the tippy top of her oeuvre. (She thinks so too, btw; we had a conversation about that once.) It’s 88 pages long, but the print is small, so it’s long for that page count. It starts like this:

Finally the train stopped. Kerk stared out the window, as he had for the last four days, but there was less to see here in the underground city terminal than there had been along their entire route through Geldricht. People waved and shouted, men pushed carts, women urged their children out of harm’s way, and all the purposeful chaos took place under high artificial lights insufficient to illuminate the cavernous interior of the station.

He kept staring anyway. So many of those people were blueskins. More than he had ever seen together in one place in his entire life. He had been told that the whole city was full of the indigo – far more blueskins than gulden like himself – but he had had a hard time making his mind form the images. He wondered how long it would be before he could stop staring at them.

“Kerk,” said a deep voice. He turned swiftly to see Brolt already on his feet, pulling luggage down from the wall racks, filling the small compartment with his height and bulk. “Watch the Tess and the children. Don’t let them stray.”

Reminded of a sense of duty, Kerk jumped up too.

This outstanding novella is about family. Although there are a zillion important relationships in the story and the ostensible focus is on the relationship between Kerk and an indigo woman, the best part is actually the relationship between Kerk and Brolt, so it’s good to see them both in this simple opening. The ending is first brutal and then, a breath later, redeemed. Both the crash and then the recovery are completely believable, arising naturally from the way the story is framed. Honestly, it’s a great story. The other three are okay too, but you should absolutely pick up the collection for this one.

And here’s the third:

3. The Scapegoat by CJC, published in a collection of three novellas called Alien Stars that came out in 1985. I’m still a little startled to realize that’s thirty-five years ago – a whole generation! The other two stories in this collection are by Joe Haldeman and Timothy Zahn, and I must admit I read those two only once and remember nothing about them. While not available in Kindle, this paperback is available on Amazon.

But The Scapegoat is the most powerful novella I’ve ever read, and one of Cherryh’s best works, even though it’s only 68 pages long. You can see her working with themes she developed in a lot more detail later, especially contact between humans and aliens and the disasters that can unfold because of deep misunderstandings at the level of instinct. It’s hard to pick out a sample. I’m going to give you some fragments from the beginning, including the first couple of paragraphs, with a little skipping around. I’ll add here that this story itself moves back and forth in time, not very far, but the situation starts almost at the end and then moves backward and forward. The story is set against a backdrop of a grinding war where humans have been far superior technologically from the beginning, but the enemy, the elves, will not stop fighting and the humans are unable to disengage, unable to end the war, deeply unwilling to commit genocide, and in a word the situation is just terrible.

DeFranco sits across the table from the elf and he dreams for a moment, not a good dream, but recent truth: all part of what surrounds him now, and true as any memory ever is – a bit greater and a bit less true than it was when it was happening, because it was gated in through human eyes and ears and a human notices much more and far less than what truly goes on in the world –

– the ground comes up with a bone-penetrating thump and dirt showers down like rain, over and over again; and deFranco wriggles up to his knees with the clods rattling off his armor. He may be moving to a place where a crater will be in a moment, and the place where he is may become one in that same moment. There is no time to think about it. There is only one way off that exposed hillside, which to go and keep going.

… and his second thought, hard on the heels of triumph, that there was too much noise in the world already, too much death to deal with, vastly too much, and he wanted to cry with the relief and the fear of being alive and moving. So the base scout found the damn firepoint, tripped a trap, and the whole damn airforce had to come pull him out of the fire with a damn million credits worth of shells laid down out there destroying ten billion credits worth of somebody else’s.

“You did us great damage then,” says the elf. “It was the last effort we could make and we knew you would take out our last weapons. We knew that you would do it quickly and that then you would stop. We had learned to trust your habits even if we didn’t understand them.”

“They sent me out there,” deFranco says to the elf, and the elf – a human might have nodded, but elves have no such habits – stares gravely as they sit opposite each other, hands on the table.

“You always say ‘they,’” says the elf. “We say ‘we’ decided. But you do things differently.”

“Maybe it is we,” deFranco says. “Maybe it is, at the bottom of things. We. Sometimes it doesn’t look that way.”

“I think even now you don’t really understand why we do what we do. I don’t really understand why you came here or why you listen to me, or why you stay now – but we won’t understand. I don’t think we two will. Others, maybe. You want what I want. That’s what I trust most.”

And the two of them work out a peace, and end the war, and it is absolutely devastating.

If any of you have read one or more of these novellas, what did you think? If you have a particularly favorite novella of your own, give it a call-out in the comments!

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Soft science fiction

Here’s a post at Book Riot: SOFT SCIENCE FICTION: 15 CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY MUST READ BOOKS

Which immediately inspires the question: so what do YOU mean by “soft” science fiction? What *I* think of first when I hear that term is sociological science fiction, but I could imagine this term being used to mean science fantasy, for example. No doubt we could come up with a top-ten list of possible meanings for the term “soft science fiction.” The only thing we can be sure of — can we be sure of this? — is that there won’t be appendices at the back of the novel explaining the math and/or physics underlying the plot. Appendices or not, there won’t be any books like Dragon’s Egg by Robert Forward on a list of “soft” science fiction.

Here, by the way, is a post that picks out some of what it calls great hard SF novels. I have my doubts about this post, which reminded me about Dragon’s Egg. That is a great example of hard SF, but also includes Ancillary Justice, which is hardly a book I’d personally tag that way. Oh, good heavens, they also include Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler! Wow, so THIS post is DEFINITELY including sociological science fiction as “hard” rather than “soft.” Lots of good examples on their list, thought, click through if you have a minute and then we’ll go on to the Book Riot post.

Okay, well, after checking out the above list, now I’m wondering even more what Book Riot will call “soft” science fiction. Since this is Book Riot, I am of course wondering if Watership Down might possibly be on their list. (No, they are never going to live that down. This blog will remember that Book Riot post forever.)

So here we go:

In general, hardsci-fi is closer to current science, whereas science fiction that gets further away from what is presently known is considered soft. 

Oh! Well, that is not a definition I had in mind personally. I don’t agree! I can easily think of many books that aren’t anywhere close to current science and technology but are definitely hard science fiction — Ringworld, for example — and others that take place practically tomorrow that *I* would call soft science fiction, such as Persona by Genevieve Valentine.

On the other hand, a paragraph or two later, we see that this post does indeed peg sociological SF as “soft.” Well, that is hardly the same thing as “close to current science!” I think this post is simultaneously using two quite different definitions that point in different directions.

But okay, let’s see what examples this Book Riot post picks out as “soft.”

Ah! Here again is Lilith’s Brood! That means this series is on BOTH the hard SF list I linked AND the soft SF post at Book Riot! Wow, that’s fantastic! I would absolutely have located these two posts on purpose to juxtapose these completely different takes on what is meant by “hard” and “soft,” but truly, this was pure happenstance. All I did was google “classic hard science fiction novels” to remind myself of some titles and now here we are.

Okay, back to the Book Riot post. Ah, honestly, I have to say, the author is not sticking to either of his own definitions very closely. Look at this:

THE LAST POLICEMAN BY BEN H. WINTERS

If you want to read detective fiction mixed with some end-is-nigh apocalypse action, then look no further than The Last Policeman. In Winters’s novel an asteroid is bearing down upon Earth, spelling certain doom for the planet. Society has fallen apart, but Detective Hank Palace is still trying to solve murder cases. Winters is good at infusing large philosophical questions into his soft sci-fi murder mystery. The Last Policeman is the first installment of a trilogy dealing with Earth before the asteroid apocalypse.

That’s near future AND it deals with ordinary science! Asteroid impacts! Those are hard! I’m thinking of Seveneves, here. That’s a great example of a hard SF novel! This one has a murder mystery, fine, but that doesn’t make it look like soft science fiction to me. It makes it look like a murder mystery with a science fiction setting. That’s not the same thing!

Well, I will say, this is a list that’s heavy on sociological science fiction. Then it’s got some oddball stuff on the list as well. I personally think the list would’ve been more coherent if the author had labeled it “Great sociological science fiction” and stuck to that.

Let’s end by asking, How do you define soft science fiction?

Sociological emphasisFar future and/or weird technologyScience fantasyReally a different genre, like mystery, but with science fiction trappingsOther
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Do you prefer novels with prologues?

At Writer Unboxed, this, by Vaughn Roycroft: Why I Actually Prefer Stories With Prologues

I don’t just love prologues. I actually prefer when stories begin with them. … In my opinion, all of these prologues are terrific at creating atmosphere. But prologues often do more. They can establish the story-world, set expectations, reveal broader or heightened stakes, lay out pertinent backstory, and provide enticing foreshadowing. … Good prologues can help to transport us to the story-world, and even put us in the proper mood to receive it. Simply put, they are an aid to immersion.

Many examples of prologues the author likes at the link, in both novels and movies.

Well, I can come down on both sides of this argument if I want, because out of my, let me see, seventeen novels currently (or nearly) on the shelf, I’ve got prologues in, hmm, just two. Well, two is enough to establish that I don’t automatically hate prologues. Which I don’t. I just usually hate prologues, because usually they’re not an aid to immersion. Usually they’re boring.

One of the examples Roycroft uses here is The Lord of the Rings, and in fact, I hate that prologue. I’m thinking of the one in the movie version. The warm description of hobbits that Tolkien called a prologue was fine. In the movies, the long infodump about the history of Sauron was not fine; it was boring. Personally, I’d have found that kind of infodump boring even if I hadn’t known the story already, because a long history lesson at the beginning of a fantasy story is ALWAYS BORING.

–Short prologues that tell a brief, immersive, complete story that is set before the main story begins = fine.That’s like my prologue in Winter of Ice and Iron.

–Short, clever prologues that are entertaining in and of themselves = fine, and here I’m thinking of Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. “A word from your sponsor: This book begins with a plane crash. We do not want you to worry about this.”

–Any length of prologue, but especially a long one, that delivers a history lesson to the reader, is unreadably boring and I, at least, will immediately DNF any book the moment I see that kind of prologue.

As far as I can tell, that type of prologue is BY FAR the most common in fantasy novels.

In contrast, mystery novels very often open with a short prologue in which the murder victim gets killed. I’m not crazy about that either, but it’s a short, immersive, complete-in-itself story plus entirely standard in the genre. So that’s fine.

But to anyone writing an SFF novel and reading the linked post: think twice before providing a history lesson to the reader. CJC can get by with it in her very long series (I still skip those prologues), but very few other authors can pull it off.

Please provide counterexamples in the comments if you can think of good ones.

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Posting may be light

So, this week I’m going to be distracted and busy. Just letting you know in case I semi-vanish for a week or so.

The problem is, Pippa’s prognosis is potentially very good, but right at the moment she is having a dreadful time. She has an eye injury that should get better, but it has been getting worse rather than healing, so she is now getting two different kinds of eyedrops, one for each eye, but at the moment she is basically blind.

Also, following an atypical seizure type of thing last week and a whoooooole lot of continual mini-seizures that followed, I started her on phenobarb, which flipped the seizures off like magic, but she is seriously uncoordinated and woozy as well as blind.

So if the eye starts to heal and she has time to adjust to the phenobarb, she will be back to normal in ten days or two weeks or at least something fairly close to a reasonable time period. But right now, not so great.

Classes are presumably starting next week and I’ve GOT to get stuff done for that too, so, well, posting here may be light. I do really appreciate your comments on the back cover copy, which I will seriously revise as soon as possible.

Pippa will hopefully be looking this alert and agile in another ten days or two weeks, but right now she can’t even walk in a straight line
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Back cover copy: still hard

So, I’m setting up the second book in the TUYO series, paperback and Kindle formats, and I have some observations here:

Setting up the paperback was SO ANNOYING. This is basically my fault. I scanned the whole thing fixing “widows and orphans” multiple times and THEN realized I had not right-justified the text. So I did that and of course that meant I had to scan through the whole thing fixing “widows and orphans” again. What a pain!You will never notice this, I bet, but the paperback winds up just a tiny bit different from the ebook version. This is because when fixing up widows and orphans, the easiest way I know of is to change paragraphing a little, sometimes by adding or removing a paragraph break, but also sometimes by adding or deleting a few words or even a complete sentence. This is almost always possible, but you do wind up accumulating a surprising number of tiny differences.You have to put a cover on a book in order to use the preview function, which means slapping a completely ridiculous cover on the thing just so you can do that. Pity they won’t let you load a blank cover, but no. You have to write back cover description and load that before you can move on to load the manuscript and use the previewer.

This means I threw words in the “description” box super fast just to get something in there, all the time swearing under my breath at how terrible a description I was writing. Here it is, for your amusement value.

For years, Ugaro and Lau have lived peacefully, near neighbors separated by the river that divides the winter country from the summer country. But an escalating series of offenses and mistakes now threatens to destroy that peace. One young Lau soldier, Nikoles Ianan, understands the Ugaro people better than most of his countrymen, but he can see no way to resolve the conflict. Until one of the king’s scepter-holders, Lord Aras Samaura, arrives to sort things out. But Lord Aras has only a limited time to resolve the problems in the borderlands. He’ll need all the help he can get — especially the help of a young man with a unique connection to the Ugaro people.

By the time I got halfway through that, I’d given up and was just scribbling. Well, the typing version of “scribbling.” The above does kind of give you an idea of what NIKOLES is about, sure, but I certainly need to improve it before I forget and accidentally leave that description in place. Let me just see here …

For generations, Lau and Ugaro have lived peacefully, near neighbors separated by the river that divides the winter country from the summer country. But in recent years, tension has increased between the two peoples, and now an accelerating series of offenses and mistakes threatens to plunge the borderlands into serious war.

Nikoles Ianan understands the Ugaro people better than most of his countrymen–he certainly understands them well enough to know how badly his own people are mishandling the situation. But he sees no way that one Lau soldier can prevent escalating tragedy . . . until the most famous scepter-holder of the summer country appears.

Lord Aras Samaura has urgent tasks waiting elsewhere and a limited time to forge a new peace between peoples who each consider themselves bitterly wronged. He’ll need all the help he can get — especially the help of a young man with a unique connection to the Ugaro people.

Okay! This is a lot like beating my head against a wall. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to write the above three paragraphs, which I don’t even like. You were all very helpful with the back cover description for TUYO; please tear this apart and/or make helpful suggestions if any occur to you.

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Ranking LMB’s Oeuvre

Given yesterday’s post asking how people tend to rank Bujold’s major series, an obvious thing to do today is lay out all the individual books. Always a tough and yet fun thing to do with a favorite prolific author!

Let me just take a stab at it. Let’s see. Hmm. Okay, from top to bottom, I would more or less put them like this. This order does reflect personal taste and, I realize, may tend to put books I read long ago higher than objective measures of quality might suggest. If I read them all for the first time this year, the order might be different.

Also, the top fifteen or so are all tightly compacted together in a “REALLY GOOD” category, while below that I’d tend to spread them out a lot more.

When I put two books in one spot, it’s because I feel that particular pair of books is essentially a complete duology and the individual books should be considered one story.

The Warrior’s ApprenticeMountains of MourningBorders of InfinityEthan of AthosCurse of ChalionKomarr / A Civil CampaignBrothers in ArmsPenric’s DemonSharing Knife Passage / HorizonMirror DanceMemoryPenric and the ShamenShards of HonorPaladin of SoulsPenric’s MissionBarrayarPrisoner of LimnosCaptain Vorpatril’s AllianceOrphans of RaspaySharing Knife: BeguilementKnife ChildrenFalling FreeThe Vor GameDiplomatic ImmunityPenric and the FoxCryoburnCetagandaLabyrinthSharing Knife: LegacyThe Spirit RingMyra’s Last DanceThe Hallowed HuntGentleman Jole and the Red QueenPhysicians of VilnocFlowers of Vashnoi

Okay, there! What would you all argue should be placed significantly higher or lower?

For me: plots that revolve closely around sexual issues lack interest. Bad family relationships move a book sharply downward because I just don’t like reading about those. If the whole story seems slow and/or rather pointless, it drops way down in the rankings — but if the story foregrounds positive family relationships, it may move higher even if nothing much happens, eg “Knife Children” appealed to me much, much more than SK: Legacy. And I just did not much like The Hallowed Hunt, even though none of those situations apply to that one.

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Sharing Knife series

Here’s a column by Liz Bourke at tor.com: Revisiting LMB’s Sharing Knife series.

Interesting! I have read this series quite a few times because it is a comfort read for me — something I will pick up if I have a cold or just feel under the weather, or if I want to read but not something new-to-me, or if I want something pleasant to read a few pages of before bed, or whatever. In general:

–I like the first book quite a bit

–I skip lightly across most of the part where Fawn is visiting Dag’s camp and family in the second book

–I like the third and fourth books much better than the first two

–And btw, Knife Children, the novella that is set after this series, is quite enjoyable and well worth picking up.

So what does Liz think?

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife tetralogy never, I think, equalled the popularity and recognition of her Miles Vorkosigan novels or her World of the Five Gods work (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, and the Penric and Desdemon novellas…) but it remains, for me, a revelation about the kinds of stories that it is possible to tell in fantasy, and the struggles it is possible to reflect.

Yes! This is a promising beginning to the post. I would say that the Sharing Knife stories are unusual in their emphasis on showing the daily life of ordinary people. Sure, sometimes there are giant bats, but mostly these are stories about daily life on a farm, in a camp, on a small riverboat. What we see are ordinary people living their lives while also dealing, generally in small ways, with the necessity of pushing gently for broad-scale societal change. Or that’s what I think. Let me read a little more …

Ah! Liz does mean that, in a sense, but she also has in mind the difference in handling a threat like a Dark Lord, something that is Big and Immediate and then Over, versus handling a threat that requires slow, grinding work generation after generation. That’s a good point too!

Click through and read the whole thing if you have a minute.

Meanwhile, what did you all think of the Sharing Knife series? How about compared to the Vorkosigan and Penric stories? I am not actually sure how I would rank these three series personally. I can see going V –> P –> SK, but I can also see shuffling those letters around into a different order. All the series include books that are somewhat uneven in quality.

But for warmth and settling down comfortably, it’s probably exactly the reverse: SK –> P –> V.

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Internal vs external conflict

Here’s a brief but good post at Pub Rants: Internal vs External Conflict

No matter what stage your manuscript is in, there are three questions you need to be able to answer:

What is your protagonist’s internal conflict?What is the manuscript’s major external conflict?How do those two conflicts work in harmony?

All too often, I see internal and external conflicts that don’t work together the way they need to. Here’s the secret: Your external conflict and internal conflict should be tightly woven together because the external conflict exists as a mechanism to force internal change and growth in your character.

The example given is one of the Harry Potter books. It’s a pretty good extended example.

Since it’s a brief post, here’s another, this one by an SF author, Gary Gibson, rather than an agent: USING INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CONFLICT IN GENRE WRITING

This post offers a rather different take on the topic:

Broadly speaking, the distinction between literary and commercial fiction is this: literary fiction deals in internalised conflict. That could be fear, jealousy, greed, desire for power or revenge, thwarted love and so on. …

Commercial fiction, on the other hand – and remember, we’re speaking broadly here – deals in externalised conflicts. It creates dramatic stories out of direct conflict with something ‘other’, other races, other religions, other cultures, classes or political orders, and so on.

Interesting take! I’m immediately leaning toward the Pub Rants interpretation — I think commercial fiction should, and does, have both, and it’s nice when the internal and external conflicts support each other.

Actually, something to note is that interfering with each other counts as support, in this sense, as nothing creates more tension than pitting two characters against each other via the external plot, while having them strongly drawn toward each other by internal desires but pushed apart by opposing loyalties. Here I am thinking of Joanna Bourn’s Spymaster romances, which are admittedly a little over the top in many ways, but she does a great job of setting up opposing internal and external conflicts and letting them rip through the story.

The linked post above actually does agree with me here, and with Pub Rants, because the author goes on to add:

Once I realised this distinction between internalised and externalised conflict, the defining quality of the very best sci-fi and fantasy became clear to me. It synthesises both approaches – and most often it does so by externalising what is otherwise an internal conflict.

There we go, we are definitely back to using the two basic types of conflict to support each other. Gibson uses The Lord of the Rings for his example. Again, it’s a good example. Gibson sums it up this way:

If your book isn’t coming together – if your characters feel lifeless, or lack motivation, or feel wooden and two-dimensional – provide them with an internal conflict to balance the external. It’s that conflict that, when handled properly, keeps readers glued to the pages. … conflict must be mirrored through your protagonists’ own thoughts and actions, and their own internalised moral dialogue.\

Both posts are worth a look if you have a minute.

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Covers that show action

Okay, so, I happened across this post over the weekend at Bones, Books, and Buffy:

The Friday Face-Off was created by Books by Proxy, where each week bloggers can showcase books with covers centered around a weekly theme. You can visit Lynn’s Books for a list of upcoming themes. Join in the fun each Friday by finding a book whose cover is based on the theme!

This week’s theme: A cover that depicts action of some sort.

And then three book covers depicting action, which you can click through to read if you wish. The person doing this post — Tammy — commented that it was surprising hard to find covers depicting action among the books she’s read recently.

Really? I said. So I went to Amazon and skimmed through the (many) books I’ve bought this year, and you know what? Hardly any of them depict action! Have you noticed that?

Of course for romances, you don’t get covers with action, as a rule. You get That Shirtless Dude or The Lady In A Regency Ballgown or whatever. But for everything else, it turns out, action is also just astoundingly rare on covers.

Here’s one that sort of might qualify? I mean, there is MOVEMENT, even if I’m not sure there is ACTION.

This is some sort of light paranormal mystery or something, I forget, the price was low and it looked like it might be fun, that’s all I remember. Yep, looking at it again, I see it’s free on Amazon.

I had to go 18 books down in my orders before I found one with even this much action. In 58 books that Amazon shows I’ve purchased this year, this is the closest I came to a book showing action on the cover.

That’s really kind of remarkable. There’s a woman on a motorcycle, but the motorcycle is at rest. There’s a soldier, but he’s floating quietly in space. Murderbot is walking, not running, across the top of some sort of space ship. A guy is walking, not running, down a tunnel of some kind on another cover. Here’s a spaceship, but like most spaceships, it could be sitting still, there’s no sense of motion involved in this cover.

Okay, moving farther back, last fall I got this one:

These people appear to be ABOUT to be active, at least. There’s certainly a sense of movement and urgency here.

Okay, here’s one:

There, at last, is incontrovertible action.

I had to scroll back a remarkably long way to find that. It looks to me like fewer than one novel in fifty shows action on the cover. I never would have guessed.

If you’re reading a novel right now that shows action on the cover, or you did recently, out of curiosity, what was the book?

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