Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 206

US vs UK book covers

Interesting post at the Literary Hub site, comparing covers. Wow, some of them are so different.

I should add, none of these are SFF covers. But they’re interesting!

My responses:

a) I would never in a zillion years have printed the words backward on a cover. Not only would I not have thought of that, I hate it. I literally couldn’t figure out the title Notes from the Fog without looking at the US cover. Plus I don’t like the cover image either. So for me, the UK cover is a big failure. I wouldn’t say I like the US cover either, though. Tiny, tiny print on an image of unidentifiable equipment doesn’t do it for me. If you click through and know what that equipment is, well, what?

b) For There There, the UK is the one I prefer, and I like it okay, though in a somewhat “well, whatever” kind of way.

c) Evenings in Paradise. Both are okay. I like the bright splash of yellow.

d) Killing Commendator. Hmm. Tough. Fine, okay, the one with the owl.

e) Asymmetry. The US cover. For a change, I agree with all the comments over at the post.

Okay …. glancing over the whole lineup, I see I prefer the US cover fairly strongly or very strongly to the UK cover on five out of sixteen covers. I prefer the UK cover fairly or very strongly for just one. In general, US audiences are expected to prefer US covers and vice versa, so that rule does hold here.

Out of all 32 covers, I find eight covers actually repellent, thus demonstrating, I guess, that I am not the target audience for literary book covers. For me, the worst, most repulsive cover is … no, hey, I don’t want to bias you. If you’ve got time, click through, scan through the covers, pick the ones you like most and least, and we’ll see if we all agree.

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Looking forward to the next book by MWT

Here’s a column by Natalie Zutter for Megan Whelan Turner’s next book, Return of the Thief, which is now looking at a release date in 2020 rather than this spring.

Anyone who has been astounded by the twists and revelations in the past five volumes would agree that Return of The Thief will be well worth the time it takes to craft. And in the meantime, we readers can craft our wishlists for the series conclusion twenty-plus years in the making!

We sure can. Let me see what Natalie Zutter would specifically like:

a) More emphasis on friendships.

Sure, yes. I am particularly in the relationship between Gen himself and Sophos, and between the two queens.

b) No Deus ex moments.

Well, I don’t know. I kind of like it when we have a very small deus ex moment in this series. I particularly liked it when the god of thieves caught Gen when he started to fall off the roof that time.

c) More visions.

Yeah, no, not me. I prefer fewer visions, really, even though the one of the mountain erupting is a super important plot point. I really dislike precognition-type tropes.

d) Please don’t kill my favorite characters

Hah, yes, I’m dead sure we can all agree on this. Last thing any reader wants to lose a favorite character.

Though it’s way worse if the author appears to throw in a gratuitous character death in order to jerk the reader around. Suzanne Collins, looking at you. Also Stephen King. I don’t really expect MWT to do this? I sure hope not.

Plus of course readers are going to disagree about which characters’ survival are most important. Mine: Irene. I don’t want anything dire to happen to Irene. Also Gen himself. Among other reasons, I would count that as something dire happening to Irene.

And I really have a soft spot for Sophos.

d) Fool me one more time.

Oh, I expect we can count on a surprising twist in there somewhere. Yeah, this I’m not remotely worried about.

What I most look forward to: MWT has done really amazing things with pov in this series. In the next one, I am dying to see how she uses pov to influence the reader’s emotional reactions to the characters and manipulate the reader’s understanding of what’s going on.

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It’s Friday, let’s have some good news —

Happened across some great stories this morning, browsing the internet during breakfast:

Florida woman suffering a stroke said she needed ‘help’, her dogs ran and got it

“I said, ‘Mommy needs help,’ and then they were gone,” the woman said.

A Florida woman is crediting her two Labradors for saving her life after she suffered a stroke in December.

Maureen Hatcher’s dogs, Sadie and Bella, were caught on video running for help after she fell down in her St Augustine home alone, according to  NBC-affiliate station WTLV  .

The dogs can been seen in footage from Hatcher’s front-door camera running out of the house just moments before a neighbor comes over, finds her and calls 911.

Sometimes dogs amaze even me. I also heard of a case where a dog, also a Lab, woke the family up during a house fire. One of the children was too dazed and confused to leave the house, and the parents were so distracted by rounding up the other children they didn’t immediately realize this girl was missing. The Lab went and got her, took her by the wrist, led her to the door, stood on his hind legs to hit the door knob, and took her outside.

That was supposed to be a true story. I think it’s plausible.

Don’t want Labs to get all the credit, so here’s another nice story about a Pit Bull.

Don’t want dogs to get all the credit, so here’s something nice that went the other way: Marathon competitor runs 19 miles carrying a PUPPY after finding it in the road during her race

Khemjira Klongsanun, 43, noticed the other athletes dodging the dog seven miles into the 26-mile marathon in Ratchaburi, western  Thailand .

She slowed down to kneel by the roadside and gently coax the trembling little Thai bangkaew breed dog over to her.

Thumbs down for all the athletes who bypassed the puppy, thumbs up for Klongsanun. Good for her, and she’s apparently adopting the puppy herself. Many heartwarming pictures at the link.

I suppose I shouldn’t focus solely on dogs here, and besides, this is the other really nice headline I noticed this morning. So for a completely different type of good news:

Novel Phage Therapy Saves Patient with Multidrug-Resistant Bacterial Infection

“When it became clear that every antibiotic had failed, that Tom could die, we sought an emergency investigational new drug application from the FDA to try bacteriophages,” ….

“To our knowledge, he is the first patient in the United States with an overwhelming, systemic infection to be treated with this approach using intravenous bacteriophages. From being in a coma near death, he’s recovered well enough to go back to work. Of course, this is just one patient, one case. We don’t yet fully understand the potential — and limitations — of clinical bacteriophage therapy, but it’s an unprecedented and remarkable story, and given the global health threat of multidrug-resistant organisms, one that we should pursue.”

Resistant bacteria have been a real concern for some time, as I’m sure you’re aware. Imagine a world where a parent has to risk dire infection if they choose to repair their child’s hare lip — that’s the kind of thing that could happen if every surgery carries the risk of terrible infections. I’ve had faith that we’d come up with something clever to avoid that problem. This is certainly looking promising.

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Sainthood in fantasy

Neat post by Jessica McAdams at tor.com: The high costs of fantasy sainthood

The defining feature of fantasy is the reality of the supernatural within the narrative—whether the supernatural element in a given story involves magic or gods or some other force-yet-to-be-defined. Yet in my favorite fantasy books, what fascinates me isn’t the magic, and it isn’t the gods. It’s the characters that I think of as the saints, not in the strictly religious or Christian sense, but those who dedicate themselves fully to a higher power—those crazy-dedicated, all-in, vision-haunted warriors and children and priests.

More than that, it’s the costliness of fantasy sainthood. In the most moving fantasies, those who choose to follow their god or goddess or magical deity end up paying a price for it. Sainthood doesn’t come free.

Yet even though the risk of losing everything is clear, these books also make it plain to the protagonist that this is only path truly worth taking. Sure, you might lose everything, but this is still the way to beauty and glory. The only thing to do is to put your life—your very self—on the line. Not that it’s the only sensible thing to do—it’s not sensible at all. Just that it’s the only thing there is to do—at least for someone like the protagonist, who has seen something of the divine, and now can never unsee it. Nothing else will satisfy. Nothing else will even come close.

I don’t know that I would conflate magic with the supernatural; I believe those two terms refer to quite distinctive phenomena. But leaving that aside, this is a good point. And McAdams provides great examples:

The Curse of Chalion, and obviously the Penric novellas absolutely qualify as well.

The King of Attolia, not such a perfect choice, but certainly arguable — click through and see what McAdams sees as the heart of the story. I’m not sure I agree, but maybe. I’ll have to think about it.

The Deed of Paksennarion. Yes indeed, another perfect choice.

Bright Smoke Cold Fire by Rosamund Hodge. This one I haven’t read. McAdams says:

Hodge’s world of Viyara is a bit different from the previous examples in that it might or might not have gods—the various groups of people still alive in the story’s one surviving post-apocalyptic city disagree on the subject of the gods’ reality.Our protagonist, Runajo, doesn’t believe in the gods, but she does believe in the power of blood, and of death, and of sacrifice. She has good reason for her beliefs, too: her city only survives because of the magic wall that surrounds it—a wall that is kept alive through the blood sacrifices of its people.

Hmm. I wonder how that unrolls — I mean, specifically, beyond the rest of McAdam’s comments. Right now I have a hard time seeing how this book qualifies for the list, as I would consider gods, or God, to be fundamental in sainthood.

Last, another one I haven’t read:

The Year of the Warrior by Lars Walker.

Though Walker’s book is the only one on this list that ostensibly takes place in the real world, it’s a story about a false priest. Aillil is an Irishman taken captive in a raid. To save his skin, he pretends to be a holy father. He lives out the rest of the book in a land far away from his home, carrying out his charade as best he can in a world that suddenly seems charged with the supernatural—for both good and ill.

Aillil is probably the least likable protagonist on this list—he’s certainly the least noble. He is a vice-ridden man, and even though some of the causes of his suffering aren’t his fault, a lot of them are. Yet even though he’s mostly comfortable in his sins, he isn’t allowed to stay the way he is—as he discovers the reality of the supernatural after his capture, his false profession of faith becomes terribly real, and the need for him to be a real priest in a land filled with demons and worse becomes terribly urgent.

Interesting!

I will add one more, that gets into this list although the sainthood part is not yet available:

Hild, by Nicola Griffith, a wonderful book about the woman who will eventually become Saint Hilda. Wonderful book, just wonderful; my favorite book of the year the year I read it, which was, let me see, 2015. Just a masterpiece. From Griffith’s blog, I note this tidbit from a recent post:

But my main focus of 2019 will be to finish Menewood, that is, the sequel to  Hild . This is one of the biggest, most challenging and thrilling things I’ve ever tackled (I have to keep a spreadsheet of characters; as of yesterday, there are over 200 names). Right now it’s going well.

Good!

Any other saints or saint-like figures you can think of in SFF?

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How do people think of these things?

I remember once reading someone’s blog, and this person said something like, “How does Neumeier come up with these things?” And I laughed because I have that exact reaction all the time toward other authors’ books.

Well, I happened across a book review at The Book Smugglers that made me have that reaction in spades.

Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories…

Well, THAT is a new mechanism to create a post-apocalyptic setting. Having read the review, I’m not sure I’ll read the book, but what an idea.

For post-apocalypse, I’m more accustomed to nuclear wars, super volcanoes, and weird, unexplained catastrophes involving the moon. (It blows up, it sudden assumes a much closer orbit to the Earth, whatever.)

Also zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

And plagues.

A sudden tendency for people to lose their shadows . . . and then their memories . . . and then for civilization to collapse, that’s new. Obviously magic rather than sciency. This is the most unusual reason for a sudden apocalypse that I’ve ever seen.

The more common magical explanation for an apocalypse is much simpler: magic returns, poof, apocalypse. Like in Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series, though there the apocalypse is long past and the world has reached a reasonable stability.

Another is Ariel by Boyett. Or similarly, tech just stops working, as in Dies the Fire by Stirling.  Neither of those is remotely as weird as disappearing shadows and memories.

Have I ever missed anything weirder? If you know of a stranger way to generate an apocalypse, drop it in the comments.

I like post-apocalyptic fiction, so long as it’s not too enormously grim. The adventure of the small, brave group of survivors, the rebuilding of civilization, or preferably both. Not the slow whittling down of the survivors en route to a dystopia, not that kind of post-apocalypse story. If I were trying to do a post-apocalypse story myself, I’d probably avoid realistic (huge earthquake involving the Cascadia fault, someone decides this would be a good time to take out North America and sets off an EMP weapon, poof, huge apocalypse) in favor of something magical or alien in nature. That would probably make it easier to do Apocalypse-Lite with a more optimistic feel to it.

But I never would have thought of making people’s shadows disappear.

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Unexpected!

Via File 770, this:

A New Robert A. Heinlein Book to be Published Based on Newly Recovered Manuscript.

Phoenix Pick  recently announced that, working with the  Heinlein Prize Trust , they have been able to reconstruct the complete text of an unpublished novel written by Robert A. Heinlein in the early eighties.

​Heinlein wrote this as an alternate text for “The Number of the Beast.” This text of approximately 185,000 words largely mirrors the first one-third of the published version, but then deviates completely with an entirely different story-line and ending.

Huh. Certainly didn’t see that coming. Now, as far as I’m concerned, The Number of the Beast pretty much dissolved into ridiculousness during the final, I don’t know, third? Maybe the entire back half? Great adventure story morphs into, well, something much less great.

I’m actually interested. I’ll go further and just declare, Yep, I will definitely read this new book. Evidently it’ll be released late this year with the title Six-Six-Six.

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Oh no, we live in a horror universe!

Just found out about an animal that I either (a) have never heard of before, or (b) heard of at some point but I blocked the memory.

Well, why should I be alone in my dismay at this animal? Here, you can all now know about this:

Cymothoa exigua

In the Gulf of California there actually exists a critter, Cymothoa exigua, that targets a fish by infiltrating its gills and latching onto its tongue. It proceeds to not only consume the organ, but will then replace it with its own body, providing the fish with a new fully functioning tongue it uses (probably a bit begrudgingly) to grind food against tiny teeth on the roof of its mouth.

Read the whole thing, if you are in the mood to learn about (yet another) horrifying parasite life cycle.

This would be impossible to put in fiction. No one would ever believe it.

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Reading in January

Okay, well, I couldn’t do a retrospective post about the books I read in 2018 because I read so few in the second half of the year that the whole idea just seemed pointless.

So rather than waiting for the end of 2019, I thought I’d review books read in January, quick while they’re still fresh in my mind.

Therefore:

1) Skye Object by Linda Nagata. Liked it quite a bit, despite feeling the giant squid things were a little over the top.

2) Tracking by David Palmer. I bet no one else here has read that, except for Craig, who’s the one who found it for me. It’s the sequel to Palmer’s Emergence, but Tracking was issued only as a three-part serial in Analog back in 2008. I hear Erik Flint’s Ring of Fire Press will be bringing it out, and if so, this year is a pretty good bet. Also if so, I really hope Palmer edits out 98% of the flashbacks and reprises and so on. Let people get the newly-re-issued Emergence and read that first. Then they won’t need all that tedious flashback material.

I should add, if you decide to read Emergence, it’s good, but go in expecting a superhuman, supercompetent, super-idealized girl as the main character. And if you eventually find a copy of Tracking, don’t expect anything different in that one — except in the latter, we also get a supercanine, supercompetent, super-idealized border collie.

3) Rondo Allegro by Sherwood Smith. I liked it a lot. Good choice if you’d like a slow-paced historical super-slow-burn romance.

4) Making Up by Lucy Parker. I liked it a lot. It’s a romance set in contemporary London. Parker does good romances. I don’t like them as well as Laura Florand, but I do like them quite a bit.

5) Terms of Enlistment and also Lines of Engagement by Marko Kloos. I liked these pretty well, but I’m on the fence about going on with the series. The main immediate problem (huge indestructible alien ship will kill us all) is dealt with at the end of the second book, but reviews seem to indicate that Our Heroes kind of forget about the method they used to snatch victory from the teeth of defeat when they find themselves faced with similar indestructible alien ships in the third book?

I can’t bear extreme protagonist stupidity. If that impression is correct, this would be a classic example. If anybody had read the full series, what do you think? Does Kloos pull it off when he forces his characters to forget how to solve this problem when the they get back to Earth and find lots of indestructible alien ships? Or is that as unbelievable as it seems?

6) Jennilee’s Light by HS Skinner. I liked it a lot.

7) Confidence Tricks by Tamara Morgan. I liked it quite a bit. It has just enough depth not to be too fluffy for me.

8) Securing Caite by Susan Stoker. Another romance. I liked it, even though it is not, perhaps, objectively all that good. It is an interesting exercise in taking a romance novel and stripping out everything but the romance parts.

Here’s what I mean by that:

At the beginning, Caite meets some Navy SEALS. Then those guys get into trouble and Caite is put in a situation where she needs to rescue them. This is actually somewhat believable! (I know, quite a trick!). But what is interesting is how the author: a) shows us the initial meeting; b) shows us Caite finding out the guys are in trouble; c) shows us Caite getting them out of their predicament; but d) skips extremely lightly over the guys getting into that trouble in the first place. A bit is from the male lead’s pov, but not the actual adventure part. That part, the reader is not shown. Very interesting authorial choice!

The greatest flaw with this story, though, is that anybody can see why Caite would be attracted to the SEAL. I mean, that is not in the least surprising. But this book offers an absolutely classic no-holds-barred instaromance, where the guy falls for Caite for no reason whatsoever. LATER she proves to be super brave and well worth falling in love with, but at first? There is just zero reason given for his immediate attraction. Huge flaw, since the story would have worked beautifully if he had hardly noticed her to begin with and then REALLY noticed her because she rescued him and his buddies.

All this aside, I admit I preordered the second book. This is because there’s a teaser at the end of the first one, and the very first thing that happens? A pit bull gets rescued. Awwwww. Not sure any other incident would have caused me to preorder the second book, but what can I say? I am a total softy for a tough guy who rescues a pit bull.

9) Knife Children by LMB. Obviously I liked it a lot, I just posted about that one a couple days ago. Good, solid novella. Hanneke pointed out that it’s great how a novella can show us a slice-of-life with characters we care about and no need for a huge terrible crisis. That’s so true. I mean, I love giant bats as much as the next person, but I definitely enjoyed just peeking in at Barr’s life and seeing him get things in order with Lily.

Okay, now, look how romance heavy this list is! Four, maybe five out of ten. That’s certainly unusual. And you know what happened at the end of the month? For the first time ever, I sort of thought maybe I might like to write a romance.

I believe this is probably due specifically to reading Securing Caite, the least-good story but the clearest, simplest romance in the bunch. The romance beats are super-obvious; the pared-down story makes the romance structure stand out with extreme clarity. All of a sudden I thought, you know, I might like to try this.

So yesterday, with nothing else urgent to do (just finished a revision and zapped that back to my agent; snow day so no work), I went ahead and wrote 7000 words, 22 pages, of a new book. Space opera romance, that is the plan. I have all these great scenes in mind, although halfway through I paint the protagonists into a dire corner and heaven knows how I will get them out again. I have no scenes in my head for that part of the book, yet. Still, getting to that point would probably clarify what happens next.

May turn out to be space-opera-with-romance rather than romance-with-space-opera. I do believe I can already detect a certain shift in that direction. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how long the story holds momentum and rolls on out, and what its main genre turns out to be.

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Secret meaning in details

Here’s a fun post from a writer I follow on Twitter:

SECRET MEANINGS BEHIND THINGS IN A THOUSAND PERFECT NOTES 

A Thousand Perfect Notes is her debut novel. Let me see, looks like a contemporary YA. Here’s what Amazon says about it:

Beck hates his life. He hates his violent mother. He hates his home. Most of all, he hates the piano that his mother forces him to play hour after hour, day after day. He will never play as she did before illness ended her career and left her bitter and broken. But Beck is too scared to stand up to his mother, and tell her his true passion, which is composing his own music – because the least suggestion of rebellion on his part ends in violence.

When Beck meets August, a girl full of life, energy and laughter, love begins to awaken within him and he glimpses a way to escape his painful existence. But dare he reach for it?

Ouch. Tough situation. Toxic families don’t always work for me in fiction (read: almost never). Amazon also says, “Thrilling and powerfully written, this is an explosive debut for YA readers which tackles the dark topic of domestic abuse in an ultimately hopeful tale.”

Well, if it’s YA, I sure hope its ultimately hopeful, yes. Plus that description certainly holds out the promise of ultimate hope. More than hope. From that description, I expect a certain degree of triumph, not merely hope. Anyway, this is a neat post — here, take a look:

1. There are stories behind all of their names!

Ok this one is somewhat sensible and I’m very proud of it! The whole story is actually a Beethoven x Cinderella retelling. I always wanted to do a bit of a modernised Beethoven “reimagined”…and this is it!

➸ “ Beck ” is short for Beethoven, aka after the famous Ludwig van Beethoven
➸ “ Keverich ” (his last name) is the maiden-last-name of the real Ludwig’s mother!
➸  Joey’s  name came from “Johann” (YES they’re pronounced differently, but this was just inspired) who was the real Ludwig van Beethoven’s father.
➸  August Frey  is named after August Rush, the movie! So so many people thought I was inspired by This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab….um very much no. I was SO devastated when TSS came out starring AUGUST FLYNN. Like c’mon, universe, that’s rude. But I wrote ATPN in 2015 and TSS didn’t even come out till 2016.

A Beethoven – Cinderella retelling. Well, that’s unexpected. Is Beck both Beethoven and Cindarella in this one? Sounds very possible given the description. … And sure, this tidbit does make me feel more interested in the story. Every now and then I do like a contemporary YA, and after all, this author writes lots of clever, funny posts on Twitter. Sure, all right — Amazon, send me a sample. There.

Meanwhile:

4. Beck’s monologue about hating glitter is author-self-insertion at its finest.

At that point I was doing copious amounts of craft with a 3-year-old niece. And UGH I LOVE HER, but sfshgoshr her obsession with glitter destroyed my fragile sanity.

I hate glitter. It doesn’t love you. It wants to see you dead.

See, this is the kind of thing that makes me follow the author on Twitter, because she’s always saying things like “Her obsession with glitter destroyed my fragile sanity.” Or, well, no, not really, but things with that kind of tone. Mostly she tweets lists, like:

REASONS TO WEAR CLOAKS

• more majestic when you storm off after an argument

• they’re like a cosy burrito hug at all times

• can use all the folds to hide the 12 books you got after you said you’d only get one

• all the wizards are wearing them

• it has pockets

Like that. Very random and energetic, with lots of books and libraries and castles and cake, though never glitter, so far as I recall at the moment. Anyway, moving on:

7. August’s beetroot cupcakes…

…look. Beck is right. Vegetables don’t belong in cakes like that, seriously, August. Get help.

I’m meant to tell you the hidden meaning behind it but it’s only that I have been subjected to this. And writing books is nothing if not working through past traumas.

Hah! I have a recipe for chocolate cake that uses beets. You get this great magenta frosting, it says. I must try it someday. I bet everyone loves it and not a single person is traumatized by the beets, but I must admit I have never actually made this cake or tried a piece, so I *could* be wrong, who knows?

This whole post is so interesting to me because I never do this. I can’t think of a single time a detail in any of my books was “meaningful” in this sense. I’ve never had a character declare undying opposition to glitter (or whatever annoyed me last week) or beets (although I would sympathize with a monologue against beets, actually).

I bet C. G. Drews enjoyed a little Oh Yeah, Still Neat moment every time she hit these details during the no-doubt long editing and copy-editing process, and startlingly enough, knowing about them actually does make me kind of want to read the book. So great job with this post.

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Headlines from our SF world

The ESA Is Taking Steps to Mine Moon Dust

The European Space Agency (ESA) has taken the first of many steps that would be needed to extract resources like oxygen and water from the moon. It’s signed a one-year contract with Europe’s largest launch services provider and former lunar XPRIZE competitor to study the feasibility of mining the moon.

The hypothetical mission would launch by 2025 and focus on lunar regolith, which is a fancy name for lunar soil. While lunar soil has no organic content, it does contain molecular oxygen and water. It also has helium-3, an isotope that has the potential to be a future energy source. The ESA’s  website says  that helium-3 “could provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, since it is not radioactive and would not produce dangerous waste products.”

Wow. Sometimes I wonder, but I guess we are indeed heading toward the future.

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