Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 322

Writing in the second person: variations on the theme

A nice post by Tina Jens at Black Gate, about how different 2nd person narratives can be, depending on exactly how the author handles it.

Of course any variant of 2nd person is a specialized narrative device and obviously it is tough to use well, but I am thinking of clicking through to the Kij Johnson story which Jens refers.

Kij Johnson gives us another successful twist on 2nd Person in her story, “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary” (Clarksworld 100). You can read it online here. But here’s a [quick excerpt] to show you how she plays with this POV.

Your grandmother told you, “It’s good luck to have a begitte in the house,” and they are generally pretty great to have. It’s written into your lease, like renter’s insurance and no waterbeds, that a begitte is okay. Your begitte, which you got from a buddy when he moved in with his girlfriend, is a spotted one with crazy long white whiskers.

Sounds fascinating and wonderful. Except that Johnson has written several stories or vignettes that I LOATHED (“Mantis Wives,” anyone?) and so I am hesitant.

Superhero alphabet

Check it out! All the letters of the alphabet, re-envisioned with superhero themes. A is for Captain America, obviously, and B is for Batman . . . I have always been a Batman fan, and I like this B a lot:

Some letters must have been pretty tricky, either because no one obvious begins with that letter or because two many superheros begin with that letter.

The G may be my favorite.

Many of these letters are obvious. But many are mysterious to me because I’m not a world authority on superheros. Who is K? Looks alligator-ish. And who is M? I really like N, which looks quite demonic, but what superhero (or villain) starts with N? T, V and Y also baffle me. Still, if I can get 20 out of 26, that’s not bad for a total non-expert like me.

I got the link from tor.com, and they also provide a link if you happen to feel like picking up a print.

Cavaliers are a *terribly dangerous* breed! Check this out —

Sixteen reasons Cavaliers are the worst choice for a pet

All the pictures are adorable, but the funniest caption may be: They block doors, causing fire hazards.

Though this post misses how utterly perilous Cavaliers are because you can trip over them and kill yourself. I came VERY CLOSE to death this morning, walking a five-month-old puppy who’s staying with me for a few days.

I’ve heard of decorating your house for Halloween, but wow

Check out THIS HOUSE.

Quick, would YOU have the nerve to go trick-or-treating at this house? Would you have, when you were ten or so?

You can click through and follow the links to the artist’s photo album if you like. She shows a little about the process by which she turned her house into a monster.

Recent “cooking:” Croquembouche

So, a little while ago I spotted this post at Book View Cafe, about how to make a croquembouche the easy way.

Now, a croquembouche is this thing you make by piling up miniature cream puffs into a pyramid, and obviously when you are going to cheat, you start by buying a lot of little frozen cream puffs, which by the way are very good and you may become addicted to them if you try them.

In the BVC post, Brenda Clough suggested making your own caramel, and I want you to know that I totally would have done that IF MY STOVE TOP WERE FIXED, which it still is not, after many weeks (ten or eleven weeks so far) and three visits from Sears technicians, and the whole thing is too complicated to go into but yes I am completely disgusted.

ANYWAY. I was determined to make a croquembouche and I did, by double cheating. Here’s how to make the very easiest croquembouche in the world, without using your oven at all:

Croquembouche

A bunch of little miniature cream puffs. They come about 36 to a box and I used all of one box and half a dozen or so cream puffs from another.

About 30 caramels, peeled, in a deeeep microwavable bowl.

Peel all the caramels. I timed it and this took me about 10 minutes, which was tedious, but the caramels were particularly annoying to peel, it seemed to me. Anyway, heat them in the microwave until they are melted, a minute or so. If the caramel starts boiling, it may zoom up the sides of the bowl, which is why you use a deep bowl.

Dip each (frozen) cream puff in the caramel and arrange about nine or so in a circle on a plate. Then arrange a row of seven or eight on top of the original circle, then just keep going until you have a Christmas-tree type of shape on your platter, all the cream puffs glued together with caramel. Reheat the caramel for a few seconds if it starts to harden too much.

Optional: melt about three ounces of chocolate and pipe up and down the sides of the croquembouche. The easiest casual way to pipe chocolate is to double over a sheet of plastic wrap, poke a hole in the plastic, spoon the melted chocolate over the hole, gather up the plastic, and squeeze gently.

Keep in fridge until serving.

Anyway, my croquembouche turned out pretty well for a first try:

And it was a hit at the Cavalier party at my house yesterday:

SF tropes that are really fantasy

So, the differing points of view a couple of posts back about whether Anne McCaffery’s Pern is an SF setting or a fantasy setting got me thinking.

Mike commented: Psi doesn’t really belong in SF (though I think it was legitimately more of an open scientific question at mid-century). But JWC jammed it in there by main force, and the subsequent development of the genre, especially in popular media, suggests it’s not going away.

After a startlingly long period of musing to realize that JWC is John W Campbell, I agreed on all points. I will totally treat psionics as an SF trope if the rest of the setting looks like an SF setting; or as a fantasy trope if the setting looks like a fantasy setting. But I do not and never have accepted psionics as suitable for “hard” SF because it is plainly magic.

As it happens, there are several tropes that are often used in SF that are actually ridiculously nonscientific and should be seen as magic. Yet some strike me as obviously magic and others “feel like” SF even if they are equally unscientific. Here are a handful of standard SF tropes that seem particularly magical to me:

1. Psionics, all sorts.

2. Group minds, hive minds. This particular offshoot of telepathy is SO RIDICULOUS. Except for how Verner Vinge did it in A Fire Upon the Deep. The Tines are the sole example of a group mind that is handled in a scientific rather than a magical way. (I think this came up before and someone had another example of a realistic group mind, but I forget the details, so if you have a contender, drop it in the comments, please.)

Not only do hive minds basically strike me as ridiculous and magical, they also seem to me to be vastly overdone. At this point, really, I just loathe group minds and hive minds.

3. Time travel. Honestly, time travel? There is no other SF trope that is more purely and obviously magic than this. Of course that’s why we also see time travel as a fantasy thing as well, not to mention that sometimes time travel as used as a device in a basically mainstream literary work.

4. FTL spaceships. However, I’m not such a stickler that I actually care whether FTL travel is consistent with real-world physics. I am totally putting FTL in my own SF work, using a variant on the standard wormhole workaround. Weird magic physics usually doesn’t bother me nearly as much as weird magic biology. Speaking of which:

5. Special magic evolution. Shoot, I wish I could remember the name of the novel where I actually made little comments in pencil all down the margins. It was a kind of thriller type of story taking place mainly in a museum, I think, and somebody got contaminated by the Special Magic Evolution Artifact and turned into a monster. This was all explained in technical terms that were completely wrong in *particularly* wrong ways that brought me to a screaming halt. Ugh.

If that sounds familiar, please remind me. It was some well-known author writing an installment in a popular series, but I guess I’ve blocked the details.

Some writers do a great job with evolutionary theory and develop really good species, obviously. Eric Flint’s Mother of Demons. Obviously James Cambias’ A Darkling Sea.

6. Related to the above, three sexes. I know that SF writers seem to feel that Earth species mostly wound up with two sexes as just one of those arbitrary things. This is not the case. There are sound reasons why two sexes arise rather than three or four or some other arbitrary numbers. If you’re actually interested in the theory behind this, you could do worse than take a look at Malte Andersson’s book on sexual selection. It’s mostly about, as you might guess, sexual selection, but I’m almost sure there is also a good discussion of how and why sexual reproduction arises in the first place.

Asexual species bother me less; so do species that change sex as they age, though actually I can’t remember ever seeing an SF species that did that. If a writer uses some weird reproductive pattern, though, I would appreciate it if he or she has some reasonable understanding of how and why those types of reproductive systems arose and why they are maintained in the species.

7. Giant arthropods. I was once reading a (pretty good) book featuring giant spiders and insects, and I had to stop in the middle and make a list of All The Reasons arthropods can’t be giant-sized before I could go on with the book. It’s more than just the exoskeleton getting too heavy. It’s things like, their respiratory system isn’t designed to move large volumes of air long distances and just on and on. To be fair, I was taking comparative animal physiology at the time and that would be why I was particularly sensitive to magic physiology. I doubt giant bugs would bother me so much now.

Only three more to get to a top ten list of magic tropes that are common (or common-ish) in SF. What am I forgetting?

Straddling the divide

For some reason, Janet Reid is picking up a bunch of questions in a row that kind of address the same issue from different directions.

1. I decided #1 is urban fantasy / paranormal romance. There are hints that some people are not from our world in the first book, but it all takes place in a very ordinary town. At the end of the book, the main character is taken to another world . . . and the story takes place in a city with a castle and royalty… more of a sci-fi / epic fantasy with still that paranormal romance as another main story line.

2. I like my mix but I don’t know, do readers fall too cleanly on each side of this? What about agents, do I need to just go for those who rep both literary and crime genre or either or what exactly? Might one genre ‘trump’ another here, the crime drive incidental to the character-drive or the retrospective parts just icing on the plot? Will I just end up too slow and preachy for the crime market but not intellectual enough for the literary market?

3. Is it okay to write a novel in past and present tense? I’m talking about changing tenses in different chapters. I’ve written a crime novel which is narrated in first person/past tense by the criminal and the detective who is trying to catch him. I thinking about changing the criminal’s part so that it remains in first person, but in presence tense while the part of the detective remains in past tense. I wonder if this ok with agents and publishers.

In all three cases, Janet’s advice is, as you might expect: You can do it if it works. If it works, your agent will figure out what genre to call it.

It’s good advice, as always. If you happen to be an aspiring writer, you really should be dropping by Janet’s site frequently.

A couple personal comments:

1. I am suspicious of a writer who can’t tell whether he/she is writing SF or epic fantasy.

Having said that, I can think of epic-ish science fantasy that I suppose would blur the boundaries. Pern, say. Or the Warlock books by Christopher Stasheff.

2. I liked Janet’s comparison of literary crime vs commercial thriller, and let me add that I LOVED Patrick Lee’s first trilogy, starting with THE BREACH. Which, incidentally, also probably counts as a science fantasy triller if you’d like to categorize it that way.

3. Sounds interesting. Also potentially confusing. Janet says “there are lots of good novels written in two tenses” but right now I can’t think of ANY that alternate past and present in the way described here. Can any of you? Did you find it distracting or did it work for you?

Creepy book art

From Book Riot: Book art suitable for Halloween.

I’m not sure what I think of cutting books up and making art of them. On the one hand, why not? There are no real limits on the number of other copies available to read. On the other hand, I feel kind of weird about it.

“The Raven” is undeniably keen, though. And “Extruding Bodies” is an intriguing piece that is a bit creepy, but in a good way, and also was not made by destroying a book.

If you have a moment, click through and see what you think.

Back to the Future Day

So, as you may remember (or very likely have been reminded via social media), in the movie, the Marty of 1989 went to October 21, 2015, and got a look at the future of flying cars and roboticized dog walkers. What did the movie get right, and what else did it get wrong, about 2015?

If you haven’t already seen a post of this kind, then here’s a good one at The Guardian.

The future he finds is one which has captured the imagination of millions – and one which has proved remarkably prescient. Save for a few key oversights (the internet, mobile phones) and a couple of over-hopeful punts in the dark (flying cars, hoverboards), the world dreamt up by writer Bob Gale and then brought to the screen by director Robert Zemeckis resembles our own in strange and uncanny ways. Here’s an A-Z guide to the gaps between that fictional world and our own, in the hope that inventors will spend the next 10 months wisely.

The single coolest thing I most wish we had today . . . oh, I suppose I’ll be practical and opt for the medical advances referred to in the film. Flying cars would be neat and I would like one, but I would like an (affordable) self-driving car even more. Soon, I hope.

The single coolest thing we DO have today that the movie missed . . . clearly smartphones. And the whole internet, but basically smartphones.

Writing back cover copy —

Always an interesting exercise for the author. And editor, and whoever else gets sucked into the process.

It’s most interesting, of course, if you have to write the back cover copy before you write the book, which happened to me once (It was Law of the Broken Earth, and that’s why the back cover has so little resemblance to what actually happens in the book. Oops. I did try to write a back cover that anticipated where I would actually go with the story, but guessed wrong.)

Anyway, Navah just asked for a first attempt at back cover copy for The Mountain of Kept Memory. I thought you might like to see what I came up with, so here:

***

They were talking about her.

Oressa Madalin, princess of Carastind, whose secret avocation involves getting into places she isn’t allowed, overhears horrifying news while eavesdropping on her father’s conversation with his closest advisors.

War is coming.

And Oressa is determined to save Carastind, even if it means defying her father. Her brother Gulien is her ally, but to succeed, they must win the aid of the enigmatic Kieba. And no one intrudes on the Kieba or her unfathomable mountain.

The invasion is already underway.

But the invaders want more than conquest. They want control of the Kieba and her terrifying magic. And they have no understanding that if they defeat the Kieba, they may also destroy the world.

In a world beset by the shattered power of a thousand dead gods, one woman holds the key to ancient technology. But she is more vulnerable than she seems. And neither Oressa nor Gulien can see a way to save both the Kieba and their own country, and the world . . .

***

What do you think? Does that sound intriguing enough to make you open the book and read the first couple of pages?

I would say that this back cover is a tiny bit misleading, but maybe close enough not to feel like I’m really lying to the reader.

Now we’ll just see what Navah thinks of this! The back cover could change completely and will probably change at least *some.*