Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 293

Recent Reading: Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Every now and then I discover that an author whose work I enjoy has a book out that I hadn’t known about (or had forgotten about or hadn’t gotten around to looking up or whatever). Such was the case when Brandy at Random Musings of a Bibliophile recently made some reference on Twitter to Attachments as her favorite of Rowell’s books. Now, I really loved Fangirl and then to my surprise I quite liked Carry On too, and my response to her comment was to say, Oh right, Rowell, and look up Attachments.

Here’s the situation: Lincoln’s a guy in his mid or late twenties who’s kinda drifted into a job where he’s supposed to read the emails of everybody at this one newspaper and warn people to quit sending personal emails at work. Except given what they write to each other, he likes Beth and Jennifer, so he doesn’t want to issue them that warning even when their emails get flagged. Then he falls for Beth on the basis of her email exchanges with Jennifer. Awkward situation, you can see.

Now, this is an interesting story in a lot of ways. First, as far as I can tell, it’s unusual to tell a romance mostly from the guy’s pov. Second, about a third of the book is epistolary – emails, right? – and the rest is from Lincoln’s third-person pov. Not sure when I’ve ever seen a book with that kind of structure. Third, this may be the only romance I’ve ever read or even heard of where the two principals don’t actually meet as such until way late, practically at the end of the story. Lincoln knows Beth only through her emails to Jennifer; he doesn’t even know what she looks like for a really long time. Beth has seen him around but doesn’t know his name or job (Of course, or she would hardly be sending emails so freely). She thinks he’s cute but she’s too shy to talk to him. She and Jennifer refer to him as Beth’s Cute Guy in their emails.

How does all this work? Really well, actually. Besides his awful job, Lincoln’s surrounded by complicated relationships with family and friends. Jennifer is married to a great guy we never see in person. Beth is enmeshed with a boyfriend anybody can see is iffy. The story is one of those where everybody gets their lives more in order as events unfold. Also, Lincoln is totally believable as a guy who is introspective, a bit shy, somewhat awkward, and just an overall really nice guy. Jennifer’s description of the flat tire incident is wonderful, especially the bit with the french fries.

In real life, if a guy had been reading your personal emails for months and then confessed this, I expect that would be rather a bar to a future relationship. It is here, too, briefly. Rowell has to kind of deus ex this. But by the end I was so rooting for Lincoln and Beth that it worked for me.

My favorite of Rowell’s books? No, that’s still Fangirl, which now I want to re-read. But Attachments is delightful. Also, now that I think of it, I do want to try Eleanor and Park, about which I heard many good things back when it was published. Nothing about its description makes me think it’s the kind of story I’d love (“Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.”) But by this time, I’m pretty sure that I can’t go wrong with a book by Rowell.

On learning to write dialogue

Here’s a post by Joe Berkowitz: Legendary Screenwriting Guru Robert McKee On Creating Incredible Dialogue.

Evidently Berkowitz wrote a book about writing for the screen, Story; and now has written on on dialogue: Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action For The Page, Stage, and Screen.

Here’s his advice — in boiled-down form; click through to read the whole thing, of course:

1. If you think you can’t write dialogue, try switching media — from screen to print or the other way around.

McKee says, “If you’re writing for the screen especially, having a great poetic touch helps. If you’re writing a novel, you can write without any explicit quotable dialogue. The whole thing could be implicit. But if you’re writing for the screen, it’s amazing how far you can get with a mastery of technique.”

Hmm. I would like to see McKee identify a scene in a novel that involves dialogue but not “explicit quotable dialogue.” What does he mean by that, I wonder?

2. Be a listener. That seems self-explanatory. Not that you ever copy the way someone speaks. Just the feel for how it seems they speak.

3. Study bad dialogue

This is the one where I was like: YES. McKee suggests re-writing bad dialogue to make it good. I have never done writing exercises as such, but that sounds like it might be useful or fun or both.

4. Write dialogue with subtext.

McKee says: “The hallmark of beautiful dialogue is transparency, you see characters saying whatever they say, and you go right through those words to what they’re thinking and feeling, even down to the subconscious level … Bad dialogue is opaque, bad dialogue stops the eye of the audience at the screen, stage, or page, and explains outwardly, blatantly, and falsely what the character’s thinking or feeling.”

That’s very interesting. I’m going to have to think about that the next time I see what I think is bad dialogue. For me, “bad dialogue” usually means predictable, boring, clunky, or dialogue that doesn’t sound like something people would really say. I do notice that dialogue more — but would I say that it “explains falsely what the character is thinking or feeling?” I’m not sure about that.

5. Write from the character’s pov, not from your own. A trifle on the obvious side. This reminds me of Marie Brennen commenting about how much of a stretch it was for her to write an extroverted character.

6. Identify the key words in each character’s speech.

I didn’t understand what was meant by “key words,” so here is an explanation: [A]sk yourself, ‘What is the key word in that line? What word completes the meaning?'” McKee says. “Generally speaking, that word or phrase should end the sentence, because there’s an actor who has to respond to that line once they understand the meaning. If the meaning comes first, and there are words after that meaning, the other actor has to artificially delay a reaction.

I think that is very interesting. Key words, end on the word that complete’s the meaning … hmm. Another feature I want to look at in good dialogue.

Lois McMaster Bujold has great dialogue. Maybe I will pull one of her books off the shelf and take a look at it with this in mind.

Or Sunshine by McKinley. That’s another one with particularly great dialogue.

Changes to the Hugo Awards process

For those of you following the Hugo Awards soap opera for the past couple years, Linda S. did a fabulous thing: she attended all the business meetings at MidWestConII and issued a report. I kind of wanted to go to the business meetings, but of course I didn’t (not a surprise; there’s always something I’d rather do than go to meetings). I hear none of the votes were close enough that my attendance mattered, which is good, as otherwise I would feel guilty for skipping those meetings.

So, then, here’s a summary of what happened on the business side of WorldCon. Statements about what happened are from Linda; opinions are mine.

The following item was ratified at Chicon 7 in 2012 and had to be re-ratified by MidAmeriCon II in 2016 in order to remain part of the Worldcon Constitution.

A.1 Short Title: Best Fancast.

The Best Fancast Hugo was added to the WSFS constitution with a sunset clause requiring it to be re-ratified in 2016. This passed, so there will continue to be a Best Fancast Hugo.

That’s fine with me. I basically never listen to fancasts and therefore this category doesn’t matter to me, but you could say the same for Dramatic Presentation Short Form and many other items. If there are a lot of people who want a fancast category, great, I’m glad they have one.

The following Constitutional Amendments were approved at Sasquan in 2015 and passed on to MidAmeriCon II for ratification. If ratified, they would become part of the Constitution at the conclusion of MidAmeriCon II.

A.2 Short Title: The Five Percent Solution.

The 5% rule is no more. Woo hoo! This gets rid of the stupid requirement that a work needs at least 5% of the vote total for the category in order to appear on the ballot. This has been a real problem for the Short Story category, where there are a lot of stories and not many nominations and therefore quite a risk of seeing only three or so stories on the ballot. I’d far, far rather have a full set of stories to vote on.

A.3 Short Title: Multiple Nominations

This clarifies that the same work can’t be eligible in multiple categories. It passed and will be in effect next year.

That seems like a bookkeeping detail, but sure, let’s dot those i’s and cross those t’s.

A.4 Short Title: Nominee Diversity

This amendment says that only two works by the same author or episodes of the same series can be finalists in a single category.

It passed and will be in effect next year. That’s fine but as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t go NEARLY far enough. You all know how much I detested seeing Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire get, what, five nominations one year? And then John C Wright get five or six or whatever. It seemed obvious to me that no author should ever accept that many nominations. It is just ridiculous to say that one author EVER writes one-fifth of all the award-worthy stories in a year. I wouldn’t just say one (not two) per category maximum — I would be fine saying ONE or at most TWO nominations PER YEAR, inclusive of all categories.

A.5 Short Title: Electronic Signatures

This allows the use of electronic signatures for the site selection voting. It passed. I have no opinion about this.

A.7 Short Title: E Pluribus Hugo

That’s the complicated new scoring method that’s supposed to counter bloc voting. Linda S. reports that someone asked Dave McCarty, a Hugo administrator, whether he thought EPH was a good idea and he said No. He said it adds complexity, decreases transparency, and manufactures additional data cleaning duties for the admins for not much in the way of gains against either slating or trolling. He also said it would have made changes in the 2014 ballot, before there was any official slating going on, including kicking off the ultimate winner for best pro artist. Hmm.

Well, it passed, but it has a sunset clause, and not only that, but an amendment was added that allows administrators between 2017 and 2021 to suppress the use of EPH for the next year. Since it passed, we’ll see what it does next year. I’m quite curious. A non-binding resolution was passed asking the 2017 admins to release a list showing which works would have been finalists without EPH. I’m sure they will.

A.6 Short Title: 4 and 6

This was amended to 5 and 6, since Jameson Quinn (a voting systems guy) said EPH would potentially work better with more (non-slate) works per ballot. It passed, so next year there will be 6 ballot slots in each category, but individuals will only be able to nominate up to 5 works. I was definitely in favor of this measure, which may or may not be effective in preventing blocs from taking over categories, but is definitely simple and transparent. Plus I just like having more ballot slots in each category. Although, sigh, I guess that will mean even more reading if I plan to vote.

New Business Submitted to MidAmeriCon II (Anything that passed here will have to be ratified by the Helsinki Worldcon before it goes into effect.)

B.2.1 Short Title: Best Series

After a lot of back-and-forth, this passed. GOOD. I have been waiting and waiting for a series Hugo, and I wanted it to be in place in time to nominate and vote for the Foreigner series. Even that series must end someday, so I was feeling pretty impatient about it. Linda says she thinks the final version said that once a series won the award, it would no longer be eligible. Fine. Losing finalists would be eligible again after some number of additional books (2?) and words (250,000?). Again, fine.

I get that a series Hugo may be complicated and tricky in practice. I don’t care. Of course it has to be ratified next year to take effect. I hope it is. Once the category is in place, problems can be smoothed out over the next five years or so.

B.2.2 Short Title: December is Good Enough

People who were not members of the last Worldcon will need to buy their membership to the current Worldcon by the end of December rather than the end of January in order to be eligible to nominate for the Hugos. This is just an attempt to make things a little easier for the Hugo admins, and it passed easily. Fine; I don’t care about this.

B.2.3 Short Title: Two Years are Good Enough

In an attempt to broaden the pool of Hugo nominators, an amendment was passed a few years ago to make members of Worldcon N+1 eligible to nominate for the Hugos, in addition to N and N-1. In practice, this hasn’t substantially broadened the pool of eligible nominators (100-200 at most), but it’s created lots of administrative hassles. This also passed pretty easily, though there was some argument against. Again, I don’t personally care about this.

B.2.3.1 This Year’s Awards, This Year’s Nominations (amendment by substitution)

This was an attempt to restrict nominations to members of the current Worldcon only. It was voted down.

B.2.4 Short Title: Three Stage Voting (3SV), Or “The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play”

This passed. It’s an attempt to thwart Vox and other trolls and griefers by essentially moving the No Award vote to a stage before the final vote. After the nomination stage, a list of the top 15 works in each category would be made public. The membership would be asked to vote to reject any work they thought didn’t belong on the ballot. The bar for throwing out a work is set pretty high: the original version read: (1) the number of “Reject” votes is at least 60% of the combined total of “Accept” and “Reject” votes; (2) the number of “Reject” votes is at least the higher of 600 or 20% of the number of eligible voters.

To me this sounds complicated and weird. Also, I gather that people actually were voting for joke entries, notably “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”. If they’re not going to remove things like that, what *are* they going to remove? Well, if it gets ratified and put into practice and then turns into a huge mess, this item has a sunset clause and a yearly re-ratification requirement. That seems wise.

B.2.5 Short Title: Additional Finalists

This would have allowed the Hugo admins to add up to 2 additional finalists to each category if they thought anything was fishy about the category. This was “postponed indefinitely” on Thursday.

Linda says, “As I understand it, the person who proposed it (Lisa Hayes, Kevin Standlee’s wife) didn’t actually expect it to pass. She and Standlee have clearly been deeply annoyed by constant calls for a Strong Administrator to take Strong Measures against the Puppies. Now she can point to the swift defeat of this fairly mild measure to show that the WSFS isn’t going to allow the kind of Strong Administrator they want.”

Yes, quite a soap opera, I gather. Although I sort of like this idea, it does seem like if you want a juried award, you should do that; and if you want a fan award, you should do that; and this proposal was kind of a bastard child of the two. So probably dropping it is just as well.

B.2.6 Short Title: EPH+

A measure changing the divisors for EPH to supposedly make it more strongly anti-slate. It passed.

B.2.7 Short Title: Defining North America

Apparently the question of when a Worldcon counts as “not in North America” and triggers a NASFiC has been somewhat up in the air since a change in the constitution a few years ago. The amendment defines North America based on the old zones, so it includes Hawaii, Central America, and the Caribbean. It passed.

B.2.8 Short Title: Restrospective Improvement

Several changes were proposed for the Retro Hugos. One was voted down; the other two changes passed.

B.2.9 Short Title: Universal Suffrage

Requires that any memberships sold (excluding day memberships and some child memberships) include Hugo voting rights. This passed.

B.2.10 Short Title: Non-transferability of Voting Rights

This would have split Worldcon membership into a supporting membership (which carries voting rights and can’t be transferred) and an attending supplement, which can be transferred. The consensus seemed to be that the problems it was attempting to solve were minor or non-existent, and it failed.

B.2.11 Short Title: Young Adult Award

This one was interesting to me! As you may know, there have been attempts to create a YA Hugo for decades, and they’ve all run aground on questions of the definition of YA, the problem of a work potentially being eligible for both Best Novel and Best YA, and many other issues. The current committee working on this came up with a compromise—a WSFS YA award that isn’t technically a Hugo.

Evidently there was some feeling that this might ghettoize YA. I doubt this, personally. Look around and you will notice that YA is at this point HUGE and EXTREMELY WELL ESTABLISHED — it would be more liable to overshadow adult SFF than be ghettoized, imo.

Anyway, this new non-Hugo YA Award passed, which I prefer. As far as I’m concerned, if the Norton can be separate-but-associated with the Nebula, there’s no reason why a new YA award can’t be separate-but-associated with the Hugo.

So there you go. Now we can all feel virtuously aware of the current state of proposals and amendments even if we didn’t attend a single minute of the business meetings at MidWestConII. Thanks, Linda!

Story Openings: How not to

I see that agents Kristen Nelson and Angie Hodapp have been writing a series of posts about how not to open your novel. I presume these are types of openings that they find many aspiring writers seeking representation don’t quite pull off. I’m sure there are examples of all these kinds of story openings that work beautifully. In fact, they begin the series of posts by saying:

If a writer has mastered craft, he or she can get away with any type of opening and make it work—even one of the nine types we are going to suggest that you avoid! So much depends on a writer’s mastery of voice, style, and scene craft.

Indeed, this is obvious. But they go on to add: We read hundreds of sample pages every month, and the nine types of openings we’re going to share with you here don’t work simply because we see them so often that they’re no longer fresh or original.

Which implies that these types of openings may work better for readers than agents; readers almost by definition do not see the sheer number of story openings that agents see, nor (generally) as many potential novels that haven’t been through some sort of gatekeeper process.

Here is their first post on this topic.

Here is the second.

Here is the third.

Here are the types of ineffective openings, briefly; for the full comments, obviously, click through.

#1) Your novel opens with your main character alone somewhere thinking.

I can think of one that works great! The Breach by Patrick Lee is my go-to novel for a beginning that breaks this advice. Naturally this depends on the writer’s skill.

#2) Your novel opens with White Room Syndrome.

This one is a definite problem for me as a reader. One of the workshop entries at WorldCon struck me as opening in a setting so undetailed and undescribed that it was practically nonexistent. Nor is that the first time I’ve seen this particular issue at a workshop. For me, one brilliant opening that places the protagonist in the setting right off is Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane.

I should add that other workshop participants did not seem to have as much trouble with this opening as I did.

Nelson and Hodapp have a lot more about this issue, and the types of beginnings that imply your protagonist may be in a white room rather than a real setting. They also discuss creating atmosphere with the setting, which makes me think of that opening of Silence by Michelle Sagara. Wow, was that the epitome of atmospheric or what?

#3) Your novel opens with what we call the “mindless task” or the “everyday normal.”

This is the protagonist-waking-up type of beginning. Nelson and Hodapp argue that beginnings such as “Monday started like any normal day…[followed by pages of details about Monday morning]” probably are not going to work for them. This type of beginning postpones the revelation of the initial conflict (“the good stuff”) and asks the reader to wait for a while before getting interested. I agree that sounds like a pretty risky storytelling strategy.

I bet there are some good examples of this type of opening that work really well, but in fact I can’t think of one right this minute. Maybe one could argue that the opening of the first book of The Sharing Knife series starts kind of this way? The interesting part of Fawn’s life doesn’t start till later. Of course the initial conflict Fawn faces is clear right up front, so that’s a bit different than revealing the problem in chapter two.

I also wonder whether this kind of opening isn’t more likely to work in SFF, because the mundane world is unfamiliar and therefore less likely to be boring to the reader. Even so, I can’t think of really good examples of successful openings like this.

Lots of good stuff at the links, and this is a series in progress, with six more iffy types of novel openings coming up.

Books that linger on the TBR pile

Brandy at Random Musings has a post up about books she’s had on her TBR pile since before she starting blogging. What an fun (if mildly depressing) idea for a blog post! It’s from The Broke and the Bookish; here is the overall list of blog posts on this topic.

Brandy’s list is interesting. You know what’s on there? The Curse of Chalion. Wow. If I could choose one book I could MAKE people read, that would be a possibility. Also Inda by Sherwood Smith. Well, I know a long five-book epic fantasy series is kind of a commitment. Still.

Mind you, my life would be fine if I’d never read American Gods.

Also, I note that I also have Mistborn on my TBR shelves. I don’t think it’s been there more than a year or two, but it is there.

Anyway, it is an interesting topic and although I don’t remember when I started blogging, I can easily pick ten of the books that have lingered the longest on my TBR shelves. Which is entirely the physical shelves; after all, those were there a long time before I got a Kindle. So I went downstairs and gazed at the shelves and here are some contenders for Longest Inhabitants of the TBR Shelves, in no order because those shelves are not alphabetized:

The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss. I know, right? I was delaying until the whole trilogy was out. Now I’m delaying for no good reason. Well, busyness and the fact that I want to read other things more, I guess.

Red Thunder by Varley. I have loved other work by Varley, but near-future sociopolitical stories are really not my thing. Someday I will at least read the first chapter and who knows, maybe this will be really great and I will be sorry I put it off so long.

A Thread of Grace by Russell. I have admired other books of hers, but they can be so unbelievably brutal. I’m scared to read this, frankly. Yet I still kind of want to. Hence its long tenure on the TBR shelves.

Havemercy by Jones and Bennett. Frankly, I would probably have read this already if the dragons were real dragons instead of mechanical dragons.

The Demon King by Chima. I KNOW. I keep meaning to read this!

The Children of the Sky by Vinge. I really liked the first book! Parts of the first book, at least. I was much more engaged with the smaller-scale story with the tines than the bigger story happening offplanet. That may be why I have never quite opened this book.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Howe. This was recommended to me by someone or other and I do keep meaning to try it. Goodreads says: “A fresh present-day story infused with an original take on popular history. Forget broomsticks and pointy hats; here are witches that could well be walking among us today. This debut novel flows with poetic charm and eloquence that achieves high literary merit while concocting a gripping supernatural puzzler.” Poetic charm, I have to say, it does sound like the kind of thing I might like.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Pears. It sounds very literary and erudite and frankly I have to be in just the right mood for that kind of thing.

This is Shyness by Hall. I have been on the very edge of reading this any number of times. Yet somehow I haven’t quite.

The Goddess Abides by Pearl Buck. I have liked all the books I’ve read by Pearl Buck. But again, I have to be in just the right mood and not distracted by some newly published title that I’m dying to read.

There, I think that’s ten. Incidentally, in case you’re curious, I have 92 books on my physical TBR shelves right now.

How about you? Anybody got a particular book they own and keep meaning to read but somehow just never seem to get to?

Ugly emotions

Here’s a post by Mindy Klasky at Book View Cafe: U is for Ugly

There are some ugly truths about writing, things no one wants to talk about, no one wants to admit. I’m talking about the emotions we all try to hide away.

I’m not sure “hide away” is quite right. How about “acknowledge and set aside”?

Mindy singles out anxiety, despair, guilt, jealousy (and envy), and sorrow. The one that to me seems out of place on that list is sorrow. There is nothing ugly about sorrow. When a loved one dies and therefore never sees your much-anticipated book on the shelf (an example used in the post), that is legitimately sad. You would be right to grieve for that person — for everything they are missing, including a book you might have dedicated to them.

The ones that are ugliest, imo, are jealousy and envy.

Jealousy (and its fraternal twin, Envy): Many (Most? All?) authors are envious of more successful authors; we want to have their success in creating a number of books or selling those books to a wider audience or making a bestseller list or any other marker of success in this crazy field. We may also feel jealous, fearing that another author is going to supplant us in sales rankings, or that a new author might lure away our readers with a shiny new book in our genre.

I think “all” is right, to a near approximation. I think it’s inevitable that practically every writer will envy . . . not necessarily more successful authors, actually, but authors who *look* more successful right at that moment, in a particular way that the writer wants for herself.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need to hide this feeling from yourself, but certainly no need to give it free rein. It’s not shameful to feel envy or jealousy. That’s just natural. It *is* shameful to let it go on. Here is the take-home message from Mindy’s post:

[Rational writers] consciously shut down the whispering cycle of ugly thoughts and turn back to writing again, and again, and again.

I think this is exactly right. I think envy is a feeling that can eat you alive if you let it. I think it should be stomped underfoot and ground into the dirt and left writhing behind you … is this metaphor getting strained? Consciously rejected, then, and consciously replaced by a deliberate “Good for them!”, as sincerely felt as possible. That way you can go back to enjoying your own successes, and write without bitterness contaminating your work.

WorldCon additions to the TBR pile

Of course you know it’s impossible to go to an SFF convention and not come home with books. There are all the book dealers, with new and tempting titles or with $2 used paperbacks in good condition or with rare editions or whatever. Not to mention the free book table where every morning, briefly, you can browse through a dozen or so titles and pick up a couple that look interesting. Yep, impossible not to acquire a handful of new books. More like a generous double-handful.

And in my case, earrings. Fancy earrings are almost equally irresistible.

But back to books. I kinda went on a nostalgia kick because a particular book dealer had a lot of the Heinlein juveniles. I never did have copies of my own; I guess we read those from the library. Honestly, some of the juveniles probably represent Heinlein’s best work. It’s been decades since I read them, so I picked up a good many of them. Let me see . . . okay, these:

Citizen of the Galaxy

Podkayne of Mars

The Star Beast

Farmer in the Sky

Have Space Suit Will Travel

That’s not all the juveniles, but it includes my favorites. I don’t know if I’ll read them again right away, but I know that seeing them on my shelves will make me happy.

And once I got those, when I spotted more children’s books, I let myself be tempted. So I also picked up copies of:

Bedknobs and Broomsticks by Mary Norton

The Phoenix and the Carpet by E Nesbit

The Shadow Guests by Joan Aiken; I’ve never read it, so I’m looking forward to it.

The String in the Harp by Bond

Coraline by Gaiman

and

The Chronicles of Narnia. Somehow I’d lost my copies. Now I have this big omnibus edition, so that’s one problem solved. Plus some time ago I read this interesting book arguing that CS Lewis worked this planetary myth stuff into those books and that is such a cool idea, I want to re-read them and just consider that notion.

However, I didn’t manage to limit myself to nothing but children’s books, mostly because of the free book table but also because I saw a copy of Little, Big by Crowley and that’s been on my radar for such a long time I couldn’t resist.

I thought I’d share the openings of just the books I picked up from the free-book table, though. A couple you will recognize, but some may be new to you. Four of the authors I’ve never heard of; three I definitely have heard of but they’re still new (or relatively new) to me. I will add that my brother picked up entirely different books, including one I thought looked really good: A Clash of Eagles by Alan Smale, in which the Romans discover America and there is conflict between the Romans and the inhabitants of Cahokia. That’s a wonderful setup and I am hoping for a thumb’s up from my brother. I expect to get both a thumbs-up and a copy of the book, probably, because (full disclosure) the author is a client of my agent and hey, if Caitlin loved that book, I bet I will too.

Now, in alphabetical order by author, here we go:

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightinggale

This is an ARC. Looks like the actual book is coming out next January. Pretty cover. It says “a novel” on the front cover, so I surmise it’s being aimed at the mainstream literary market at least as much as SFF readers. It looks like it is a Russian fairy tale or like it draws on a fairy tale tone or background (that’s what caught my attention).

It was late winter in northern Rus’, the air sullen with wet that was neither rain nor snow. The brilliant February landscape had given way to the dreary gray of March, and the household of Pyotr Vladimirovich were all sniffling from the damp and thin from six weeks’ fasting on black bread and fermented cabbage. But no one was thinking of chilblains or runny noses, or even, wistfully, of porridge and roast meats, for Dunya was telling a story.

That’s a nice beginning, isn’t it? Gloomily evocative. Instantly draws you into the setting and shows you the world and the narrator’s feeling about the world.. I like it, even though the phrase “fasting on” makes me pause.

Nancy Baker, Cold Hillside

Looks like this one came out a couple years ago. “…[A] new novel about the price of safety, and the cost of power” it says on the back. “Studded with passages of dark lustre,” it says on the front. It looks like it involves the Fey, not a surprise with that reference to the cold hillside, eh? You presume someone winds up palely loitering or whatever the phrase is. The tag line on the back cover is: “With them, there are no happy endings.” I bet this story is more than a touch dark. Still, it does sound like it might be good, and I can hope that thing about no happy endings is a bit of an exaggeration. Anyway, here’s the first bit:

Tonight, I woke and did not know where I was.

Or rather I knew and was wrong.

When I opened my eyes and lay in the darkness, the sounds I heard were the rush of the water beneath my family’s hut, the air was warm and still, and I could smell sweat and dust and the heavy sweetness of jessamine.

Then the water was nothing but the wind probing the shutters, the warmth of the air was only my breath beneath the blankets, and the perfume was the thin smoke from the braziers that burned on either side of the bed.

I knew where I was then, at home in my bed, in my mountaintop house in Lushan and not in far off Deshiniva. At the realization I wanted to weep – though I still do not know if it was from relief, or homesickness, or merely an old woman’s emotional fragility.

Hmm. I sort of hope the whole story isn’t suffused with regret and sorrow. If it is, I expect it’ll be a DNF for me, unless the prose is just irresistibly gorgeous. Okay, moving on:

Dave Bara, Impulse

And now for something completely different. This is obviously a space opera. Space ships all over the cover. This is book one of a series, I see. This one came out in 2015, so I bet the series is not complete. It may have something of a YA plotline, it looks like, because the protagonist is clearly a young guy just starting out in his career. And then disaster intervenes and so on. Let’s take a look:

The long walk down the hallway to my father’s office at the Admiralty had never seemed so endless. The only other time I had been here was three years ago, when I’d been told the news that my older brother Derrick had been killed in action. It was not a pleasant memory.

I pulled myself together one last time, hoping I looked presentable in my Quantar Royal Navy uniform. I hadn’t even taken the time to shave. My father’s message, when it had come, had been short and to the point: Get here. Now.

Yep, shaving notwithstanding, this sure looks like it’s going to have something of a YA feel to it. Pulling himself together! This is a kid, all right. I imagine he’s going to get bad news again, but either way, I’m sure excitement and adventure are in store. I don’t think the writing particularly stands out, but sure, I’d go on a bit and see how the story develops.

Pierce Brown, Red Rising

I know, I know, this is one party to which I’m very late indeed. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this series. Here’s the opening – skipping the one-page prologue, this is chapter one:

The first thing you should know about me is I am my father’s son. And when they came for him, I did as he asked. I did not cry. Not when the Society televised the arrest. Not when the Golds tried him. Not when the Greys hanged him. Mother hit me for that. My brother Kieran was supposed to be the stoic one. He was the elder, I the younger. I was supposed to cry. Instead, Kieran bawled like a girl when Little Eo tucked a haemanthus into Father’s left workboot and ran back to her own father’s table. My sister Leanna murmured a lament beside me. I just watched and thought it a shame that he died dancing but without his dancing shoes.

On Mars there is not much gravity. So you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.

Well, that’s quite a start. I sure see why this one took off. Who could resist turning the page after that? I mean, as long as you’re not too tired of horrible brutal dystopian settings, which this clearly is.

Check out those short sentences. Did you notice that? Interesting technique here, as Brown demonstrates how to establish a distinctive voice right up front. It’s almost like a hardboiled kind of voice. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it recently. Yes, I can see why this trilogy’s gotten so much attention.

All right, next is:

Daniel A Rabuzzi, The Indigo Pheasant

What a great title! Unfortunately, there is no indigo pheasant on the cover, which actually shows hippocampi in earth tones. This strikes me as strange.

Also, I note that this is book two of a series. That’s unfortunate, and I can say from experience it’ll push this book down my TBR pile. Sorry, but look, publishers and authors, if you’re going to put a book on the free table, the first book of a series is a much, much better choice than the second.

The first book was The Choir Boats, incidentally.

Anyway, here is the first bit of The Indigo Pheasant

“Blood,” said Maggie. “I can see no other way, Mama – it needs blood to make it work properly.”

Maggie emptied the afternoon ashes in the bin at the bottom of the garden behind the Sedgewick’s house on Archer Street by Pineapple Court. She listened to the bells tolling the end of the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes on a chilly day in May of 1816.

“Mama,” she said to the growing shadows on the wall. For over a year, ever since the great singing with the white girl and the brown girl that brought the ship out of Silence, Maggie had been designing a machine in her head.

“I wish there was another way, I do,” she thought. “Why blood? I fear it, I don’t want it so. But I can taste it in my mind. Aceldama in the busic, blood on the tonal fields.”

In some ways I like this. In some ways I want to quibble with the stylistic choices of the author. I want to know something about the setting, yes, but all that “on Archer Street by Pineapple Court” and “May of 1816” seems a little heavy-handed. And I have other quibbles. Still, this girl is designing machines in her head. That is super-cool and I may give this book a try sooner rather than later.

Okay, last one, and the only one where I’ve read other books by the author:

Michelle Sagara (West), Silence

I know Michelle Saraga West has written lots of books. I sort of liked a couple of hers I read, but not enough to immediately start picking up her backlist, though I have several of her books on my radar because some of you here keep recommending them. So when I saw her name on a free book, I grabbed it, particularly because it’s book one of a series. Seriously, that’s way better than book two. Plus there’s a dog on the cover! That’s definitely a plus.

Here’s how it starts:

Everything happens at night.

The world changes, the shadows grow, there’s secrecy and privacy in dark places. First kiss, at night, by the monkey bars and the old swings that the children and their parents have vacated; second, longer kiss by bike stands, swirl of dust around feet in the dry summer air. Awkward words, like secrets just waiting to be broken, the struggle to find the right ones, the heady fear of exposure – what if, what if – the joy when the words are returned. Love, in the parkette, while the moon waxes and the clouds pass.

Promises, at night. Not first promise – those are so old they can’t be remembered – but new promises, sharp and biting; they almost hurt to say, but it’s a good hurt. Dreams, at night, before sleep, and dreams during sleep.

Everything, always, happens at night.

Oh, now, I like this a lot. So hauntingly atmospheric. Angsty romance is so not for me, and yet I really find this a compelling beginning. In fact, I like this way too much to venture further into the book right now, with the rest of one revision waiting and a short story to finish and then another revision before I can take a significant break.

Did I mention my agent got comments back to me about my space opera superfast so we could talk about it when we got together during WorldCon? Well, she did, and thus I have another moderately urgent revision waiting as soon as I’ve finished the truly urgent revision, because she really wants to send that out. Which is great, but the point is, no compelling hauntingly atmospheric books just yet, even if they do have dogs on the cover. I don’t dare go on with Red Rising either. Those MG and YA books I just picked up may actually be juuust about right.

Can animals tell us anything about how speciation might work for humans?

I think the answer to this question is Yes and No (as is generally the case for complicated questions, I suppose).

What we see in animals is relevant to questions about human speciation … unless you consider genetic engineering, in which case the limitations of natural selection or drift are not important. So in the real world, I don’t think natural processes have much to do with what might happen with humans in the future. Still, here are some interesting notes, most of which I didn’t get a chance to share at the speciation panel at WorldCon:

1. Sometimes speciation can happen surprisingly fast. The cichlids of Lake Malawi and Lake Victoria and so on speciated VERY VERY FAST. We know this because the lakes themselves are not very old.

In something like 10,000 years, these lakes filled up with thousands of distinct species. Why did cichlids radiate so fast in these lakes? The answer appears to be twofold:

a) Extremely intense feeding competition drove niche partitioning and rapid changes in jaw morphology. This all got a boost because of the structure of the lake edges, which are broken up into lots of fairly separate bays, so there were a lot of chances for more-or-less allopatric (separate) populations.

b) Lineages which are sexually dichromatic speciated like crazy. Species where the males and females basically look alike didn’t. This shows the importance of sexual selection in driving rapid bursts of speciation. In cichlids, apparently female preferences shifted and diverged rapidly, driving very quick speciation in parapatric (abutting) populations.

2. However, you can and do get speciation in highly mobile, sympatric (occupying the same area) populations. Both African elephants and orcas have speciated (or are in the process of doing so) even though their populations ought to be able to mingle very easily, and even though to an outside observer the populations don’t look all that morphologically distinct.

Orcas seem to be undergoing speciation based on reproductive isolation of populations that follow learned feeding preferences. (Do you eat seals? Us fish-eating orcas will never associate with you.)

Savannah and forest elephants are not actually as similar as it seems to a quick human glance. Savannah elephants are about twice as big as forest elephants, and they look distinct enough that you can learn to tell them apart at a glance. But it was still a surprise to find out they are as genetically distinct as Asian elephants are from mammoths. Behaviorally, the two species of African elephants are pretty different. It’s the savannah elephants that live in larger families and congregate into what we might call clans.

3. Sometimes closely related species interbreed surprisingly freely, but they are still distinctive species. Savannah baboons (to my mind, all one species, whether they’re called olive baboons, yellow baboons, or chacma baboons) have a continual influx of hamadryas baboon genes where the two species are found together. This is because young male hamadryas baboons are excluded from the one-male-plus-harem type of group that is customary in their species. But they can get accepted into a multi-male-multi-female savannah baboon group, and once there, they sometimes breed, especially once they learn to quit chasing and biting the females. Female hamadryas baboons respond to that kind of treatment by following the males and sticking close to them, but savannah baboon females don’t respond that way at all — they run away from their attacker, often to their males friends for protection.

So when they mature, male hamadryas baboons put their energy into acquiring a harem of hamadryas baboon females, but in the meantime, there is that continual low-level mixing. Yet though the two species have probably been trading genes like that for a good long time, they are still distinctive species. Though who knows; the hybrid zone is a dynamic thing and it’s not clear exactly what’s going to happen in the future.

But I do think this is all interesting — that speciation can be fairly fast, that a low-level influx of foreign genes doesn’t necessarily prevent the formation and maintenance of distinct species, that being highly mobile and even sympatric doesn’t necessarily prevent speciation; that apparently learned behavior can be a potent reproductive isolation mechanism. You can sure see how even aside from genetic engineering, if you scatter humanity across the galaxy, all these factors could be highly relevant.

This would be a really fun topic to play with if designing a far-future SF universe. I must admit, I haven’t decided whether to go this way in my current space opera universe, but I think not. Ignoring the potential for speciation has a long and honorable tradition in space opera, just as much as FTL wormholes. Still, it’s interesting to think about.

Hugo Winners!

I didn’t actually attend the Hugo Award ceremony — my tolerance for speeches, even happy speeches, being quite low. My brother and I went out to dinner instead. But of course I was curious about the winners, so this morning I checked the website and here they are — some surprises, plenty of predictable results —

BEST NOVEL — The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

This was the real surprise for me! I truly thought Uprooted was the shoo-in for this one. Well, even though I didn’t get through it, I did think Jemisin’s book had an unusual and fascinating structure and was very well written. Chaos Horizon is already musing about this win, which is fast work!

BEST NOVELLA — Binti by Nnedi Okorafor — I didn’t like this one, but since it won the Nebula, I wasn’t surprised it won the Hugo, too.

BEST NOVELETTE — “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu — ditto; I mean, I knew it had a lot of fans and the setting was so unusual and original that I kind of expected it to win, even though I didn’t care for it personally.

BEST SHORT STORY — “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer — such a charming story, and I do look forward to trying the novel of Kritzer’s I have on my TBR pile.

BEST RELATED WORK — No Award — no surprise there

BEST GRAPHIC STORY — The Sandman: Overture written by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III — definitely no surprise; anything else would have been truly astonishing.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM — The Martian — of course, although the Star Wars movie was so popular I guess that one might have won.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM — Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile” — I didn’t know anything about any of these entries.

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM — Ellen Datlow

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM — Sheila E. Gilbert

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST — Abigail Larson

BEST SEMIPROZINE — Uncanny Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky

BEST FANZINE — File 770 edited by Mike Glyer — of course.

BEST FANCAST — No Award

BEST FAN WRITER — Mike Glyer

BEST FAN ARTIST — Steve Stiles

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer — Andy Weir — again, of course. And I hear he got an astronaut to accept the award for him; very cool.

Interesting times for the Hugo Award; I’ll be following the next few years with some attention even if I don’t have time to read enough current works to nominate or vote, which is starting to look likely with my deadlines!

Speciation panel

So, the panel on human speciation went well, I thought! Whew. This was a little bit of an intimidating panel to moderate because all the other panelists were older than me (although frankly I am getting old enough that doesn’t feel like it matters so much) and one of the other panelists was Elizabeth Moon, whose books I’ve been reading since I was in high school. (Also G David Nordley, who among other things is an astronautical engineer; and Frederick Turner, who has written SF epic poetry (!).

It was an interesting panel because I think we all basically agreed with one another about a lot of things, including (a) it’s hard to define what a species is because lots of organisms are obviously distinct species regardless of whether they can interbreed with each other or not (my example for this was grizzly bears and polar bears); and (b) humans don’t speciate very readily; ie, tens of thousands of years of reproductive isolation has in the past not produced true species, because not only can we still interbreed when we get back together, we do so pretty readily even when morphological differences are fairly significant.

So many unknown factors would make a big difference for whether humans speciate or not after spreading out into space:

Do we find a way to manage FTL? Without that, population separation matters. With it, not so much.

Do we use extensive genetic engineering? Without that, speciation would be slow. With it, not so much.

And in my case, I declared that humans have two distinct competing instincts and it really matters which wins out in a particular situation:

Humans are very tribal …… humans will have sex with practically anybody

Behavioral reproductive isolation matters so much in the natural world. Do black bears breed with brown bears? No. Or not enough to blur the species lines in general. Do red wolves interbreed with coyotes? Yes, very freely, and thus conservation efforts for red wolves (which do appear to have started off as a distinct species) are doomed.

So far, behavioral isolation has not mattered much for humans. Not enough to promote speciation, for sure.

Elizabeth Moon made the point that the physical demands of a low-gravity environment and the metabolic demands of any radically different environment would tend probably to select for sharp divergence in important biochemistry, thus possibly producing postzygotic reproductive isolation. In other worlds, people might be willing to interbreed, but hybrid offspring might be betwixt and between, at a substantial fitness disadvantage. This would by definition cause speciation.

G David Nordley commented about epigenetics and how peculiar that is and how it could affect humans under weird environmental conditions, for some unknown number of generations. Really epigenetics is not at all well understood yet. Very cool branch of genetics, though.

I wound up the panel by mentioning a small number of SFF titles that arguably humans that have already speciated, some more obvious than others. Here they are, in no particular order — add others in the comments if any occur to you.

This Alien Shore by CS Friedman

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

The Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin

The Integral Trees and Ringworld by Nivan

Ethan of Athos (telepathy!) and Cetaganda by Bujold

Seveneves by Stephenson

And some of the far, far future SF, such as The Golden Age trilogy by John C Wright, often present truly extreme levels of human speciation. I mean, wow, do they ever.