Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 340

Cool spaceships

Okay, first, here at Bookriot is a suggested list of four extra-cool spaceships in SF novels. Just four! I’m sure there are a million cool spaceships out there, but I must agree that the spaceship that apparently is a major feature in Anathem by Neal Stephenson sounds extra-cool.

The Daban Urnud is a massive habitat ship shaped like a polyhedron with 20 faces. It contains 16 spheres, each half-filled with water, which spin around the center to create gravity. The population lives in these orbs, in houseboats with gardens on them.

Really? Because . . . wow. I have never been smack dab in the middle of Stephenson’s target audience . . . I barely finished Snowcrash . . . but I’m almost tempted to look up Anathem based just on what A.J. O’Connell says about the ship in this post.

Second! The first thing I stumbled on when I googled “cool spaceships in sf” was this amazing, amazing graphic: almost every spaceship from Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc, in one massive chart. If you click through and then click on the picture, you can get a blown-up version that is *almost* not painful to read, though the text is still small. I had to blow it up and then scan it carefully to locate the Enterprise type of ship, which for me is an important point of reference since that’s definitely the SF ship I’m most familiar with. All the really impressive ships seem to be from something called Eve. Is that a game or a movie or what? Wow, those are some ships.

My favorite ship . . . eh, I have no idea. My LEAST favorite SF ships are all the biological ones. That is such a cliche. How to make an alien ship look alien: paint it with goo and declare it is a living organism. Because that is so different and innovative!

I am actually working . . . now and then . . . on a SF adventure kind of novel. Got about 70 pp or so and a basic, basic notion of where it might be going. Sociological SF, that’s what I like! But with enough stuff blowing up to make it interesting and fun. My agent really wants me to prioritize that, write it quick before I work on the third Black Dog book. Because hey, maybe the sudden Ann-Leckie-produced-window for sociological SF will close in a month. Or maybe it’ll still be open in three years, who knows? Well, we’ll see. I want *both* a third Black Dog book AND this SF novel finished by the end of 2016, at least, and then we’ll see. It’d be good if THE WHITE ROAD turns out to be quick to write, one month instead of three months. Hard to judge until I get back into it.

Anyway, in my SF novel, we do in fact start off on the bridge of a spaceship. No goo! And yet it is not supposed to look like the bridge of the Enterprise either. I think I pulled it off. Hopefully you’ll all get to take a look at it in the not-too-tremendously-distant future.

Why the Big Five will never catch on in pop culture

So, everybody’s heard of the Myers-Briggs personality test, right? (Right?) Everybody’s either taken it for fun or because their employer or guidance counselor wanted them to, right?

You know, it’s not supposed to be all that accurate, really. The one which is supposed to be more accurate is the Big Five Personality Traits test, which breaks down personality along five axes:

Openness

Conscientiousness

Extroversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

And you know what? Only a bunch of connotation-blind people could come up with those labels and then expect their test to take off and unseat the Myers-Briggs test as king of the hill. What, are you going to tell people they are close-minded, disagreeable and neurotic? Who wants to hear that? (Even if it is true.) (Especially if it is true.)

Besides that, the designers of the Big Five type of test did not come up with any way to encapsulate the results in a memorable letter code of delineated “Types”. That’s a dealbreaker right there, but even worse, because they did not designate types, they could not come up with horoscope-like descriptions of types. You do the Big Five test and it tells you . . . what, exactly? Not much that you can actually use, and nothing at all that you can have fun with.

I mean, the Myers-Briggs test lends itself to fun. Here’s the one which tells you which superhero you are according to your Myers-Briggs type. I get, let’s see, Mr Fantastic and Emma Frost. They have multiple choices for each type. Oh, yeah, I see, one for guys and one for ladies. Well, I don’t know much about Mr Fantastic and I don’t remember ever even hearing of Emma Frost, so that doesn’t tell me all that much.

And here’s the one which tells you who you are in The Lord of the Rings. This time I get Elrond. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Elrond — I’d rather be Aragorn — but hey, whatever. The way Elrond is described in this post, I’m happy to be him.

Okay, and here’s my favorite, the one that tells you what kind of evil genius you are. The descriptions are longer, funny, and right on target:

INTJ: The outside contractor

INTJs are solid, competent personalities who may seem aloof and even arrogant, but who are typically highly skilled in any field which interests them. INTJs are confident in their skills and knowledge, self-assured, and imaginative; their exceptional problem-solving skills make them ideal architects, auto mechanics, and tools of the evil empire. While it requires the driving will to conquer of an ENTJ to imagine the Death Star and the evil genius of an ENTP to invent its devastating weapons systems, the skill and technical prowess of the INTJ is what makes the whole thing work.

The INTJ sees life as a problem to be solved. For that reason, the INTJ is the person a company brings in from the outside to streamline production processes and identify redundant assets for termination. The INTJ’s combination of analyticial problem-solving skills and complete and utter disregard for the morality or consequences of his actions also make him ideal for the job of hatchet man, CIA operative, and helpdesk operator.

RECREATION: INTJs are often baffled by the strange and incomprehensible recreational rituals of other people, such as going to parties, watching television, and having sex. Instead, they prefer to spend their leisure time installing twin missile launchers in their cars to deter tailgaters and playing chess with megalomaniac CEOs of the Tyrell corporation.

COMPATIBILITY: Silly person, INTJs don’t have relationships! They may, however build their own friends.

See? Somebody did a really good job putting that one together.

Now, who could do that with the Big Five? Say you score this way:

Openness: high

Concientiousness: very high

Extroversion: medium low

Agreeableness: medium

Neuroticism: low

What does that actually tell you? And how would you summarize it as a “type”? You can’t, of course. There’s no way, not when you have five different axes all broken into very low, low, medium low, medium, medium high, high, and very high scores. I mean . . . how many different combinations is that? I don’t plan to work it out, but at a rough estimate, lots and lots.

Also, although the Big Five is supposed to be more reliable than Myers-Briggs, I have to say that: a) I always, always score INTJ on any version of the Myers-Briggs type of test. For years now. Before that I was INTP. And, b) my scores on the Big Five are not strikingly consistent. The scores I gave above are kind of rough averages for me, because while thinking about personality tests and then writing this post, I took six different online versions of the Big Five test, scattered over several weeks, and I scored like this:

Openness: high, medium-high, very high, very high, medium, medium

Conscientiousness: very high, medium high, very high, very high, very high, high

Extroversion: medium low, medium, medium, medium, medium, low, medium low

Agreeableness: very low, medium, medium, medium, medium, medium

Neuroticism: low, medium low, very low, very low, low, low

As you see, while there is some consistency, several axes are surprisingly variable. Some are more believable than others. I bet no one who is not high or very high in Conscientiousness has ever finished writing a novel, for example.

Now, if it were me and I wanted to unseat Myers-Briggs as the favorite go-to personality test, I would get somebody who’s good with language and words and has a sense of humor, and I’d say: Give every axis a nice-sounding name, nothing like Openness versus Close-Mindedness and for heaven’s sake don’t call anything “Neuroticism”. Divide each of these dimensions into High versus Low and give everything a letter. Then organize all these axes into “types” and write a horoscope for each “type.” Make it sound positive and friendly! Tie it into practical advice! Explain what kinds of jobs each “type” might prefer and specify what other “types” would make the best marriage partners and friends. Figure out which celebrities and famous historical people illustrate each type. Make it fun!

Because unless you’re a psychiatrist, it probably doesn’t matter if the Big Five is in some sense truer than the Myers-Briggs types. What matters is what you can *do* with it and especially how easy it is to ask: According to the Big Five, what kind of evil genius are you?

Top ten list: authors I would like to meet

I saw this idea for a top ten list at Random Musings. It’s flattering — I’m on it — and I agree: this is what Twitter is for. Besides random kitten pictures and sharing amusing pop-culture phenomena (The Dress!), it’s for letting people “meet” when otherwise they just wouldn’t, or at least not for the casual-chat kind of thing.

My list would actually be for bloggers-and-authors-I-have-met-or-would-like-to-meet, and it’d be partly parallel with Brandy’s list because we follow a lot of the same people. I think I’ll break it into fives because that’s easier:

Five authors I am always happy to bump into:

Sarah Prineas — she gave me really useful feedback about Black Dog and Pure Magic, and I can tell you, her advice is killer when it comes to characterization.

Deb Coates — Deb has dogs and does tracking, so we’ve always had stuff to talk on the rare occasions when we’ve met in person. Plus I loved her first trilogy.

Merrie Haskell — you all know how much I have loved her first three books. I am THERE for whatever she writes next.

Greg van Eekhout — he is great at the snappy one-liners to which Twitter is so well suited. Plus his dog is cute. If I knew I was going to be meeting him again this year, though, I would have to instantly read California Bones because I haven’t yet.

Sharon Shinn — she lives in St Louis, so we do sometimes meet. She’s a wonderful person and I’m sorry she isn’t active on-line, but we are occasional-email friends.

Five authors I have met once or not at all and would really like to go out for “coffee” with. Gosh, it’s hard to narrow this down to five. But here goes:

Martha Wells — we were on a panel together once. At the Worldcon in Chicago a few years ago, maybe? I remember that the other panelists talked about “world bibles” and the nuts and bolts of worldbuilding and Martha and I were like, What? Why not just write the book and let the world build itself?

Tamora Pierce, because hey. I have hardly ever been more flattered in my life as I was when she told me how much she loves my books.

Sarah Monette

Lois McMaster Bujold

Megan Whelan Turner. I would really like to chat with her about how she handles pov in her Queen’s Thief series. Her handling of that issue is unique in my experience and I would be really interested to know how much of that kind of thing she decides on analytically and how much she does by feel.

Five authors I have “met” on Twitter, but it would be snazzy to meet in person:

Andrea K Höst

Laura Florand

Sage Blackwood

Stephanie Burgis

Theresa Romain

Five bloggers I have “met” on Twitter, but it would be snazzy to meet in person:

Brandy at Random Musings

Maureen at By Singing Light

Chachic at Chachic’s Book Nook

Charlotte at Charlotte’s Library

Heidi at Bunbury in the Stacks. Heidi is not very active online right now (her life got cluttered with real life things, but in a good way). But she’s definitely on my list.

Incidentally, I’m as shy as the next person about approaching people I don’t know, so I understand that hesitation. If any of you (on this list or otherwise) happen to see me at a convention, say Worldcon in 2016, I would love to meet you.

Finished! Again.

So, I’ve finished the first revision of the first draft of DOOR INTO LIGHT, the sequel to HOUSE OF SHADOWS. Of it goes to Caitlin! I’m sure she will have suggestions, I’m sure they will be more extensive suggestions than I would really prefer, and I’m sure they will be pretty much on target.

But for the next month or two, I’ll be thinking about other projects. For example, the whole plot of another Black Dog short story suddenly worked itself out for me, so I will probably write that over the next couple of days. Then, of course, I had better get back into THE WHITE ROAD, which is (in case you are keeping track) due in September.

Meanwhile, though, I thought you all might like to see the first ten or so pages of DOOR INTO LIGHT. So, here. Warning: it’s kind of a teaser.

-1-

Three weeks before the spring solstice, a new door appeared in the long hallway at the front of the house.

That alone was not particularly surprising. Such things happened in this house, which long ago a mage had built as much of magic as of the stone of the surrounding mountains. It had been made to contain doorways visible and invisible, as Taudde had certainly known when he agreed to reside in it. Even after more than two months living in and studying this house, it still seemed to him that the house was not so much unpredictable as possessed of a strong sense of whimsy. Doors appeared and disappeared; or hallways that yesterday had led to the library now unexpectedly opened out directly onto the shale beach below the Laodd; or stairways that had always turned right suddenly turned left and led one to an entire floor whose existence one had not suspected. Taudde certainly would not claim to understand this house. It stood, he was suspected, beneath the shadow of more than one mountain, just as its doors opened to more than one country.

Nevertheless, he had more than half expected this particular new door to appear. He had almost been waiting for it. Despite this, he still found himself surprised when it arrived, or when the house revealed it. Taudde had anticipated the appearance of this door and dreaded it, both at once. But he had tended to look for it to appear on some day safely tucked into the future. Not now. Not today. Not this precise moment.

And now it was here, as solid and obvious as though it had been built right into this hallway from the beginning.

Nemienne had been the first to notice it, but fortunately she had been wise enough to stop with a mere glance through this newest whimsy of the house. She had not set foot on the other side of the door, but instead had run to find Taudde. Taudde was glad of her caution. He had not quite known whether he was pleased at the news or not, but he knew with clear certainty he did not want Nemienne stepping through this particular doorway to explore the land beyond. She was too obviously a girl of Lonne, and he knew where this door must lead, at least broadly, which was . . . not to any place near Lonne.

Nemienne had been plainly fascinated by the new door, but she had also obviously been torn – she had been on her way to visit her sister when she had found it. Taudde had sent her on, with a message for Leilis. He would have no choice but to venture this door soon, for the solstice loomed ahead of them all. He dared not delay very long, but he rather hoped Leilis might be willing to accompany him when he did.

The new door was not quite in line with any of the ones that were already there. It stood nearly across from the door that led to the beech wood, offset from the door that led into the dark beneath the mountains. Yesterday that whole expanse of polished wooden paneling had held nothing more interesting than a hook for a lantern. An empty hook; a lantern had not even hung there. Now there was this entirely new door between dawn and noon, tight-closed but fraught with the possibility that it might open.

It stood between two high, narrow windows. Brilliant sunlight blazed through the nearer of the two; silver moonlight glimmered through the other. Between day and dark stood this door: solid, weathered, and ordinary, exactly as though it was a normal door and had always waited there for a hand to fling it wide. Though it did not match any other door in the house, somehow it did not look out of place. Its frame had been hewn roughly out of granite. The door itself was of common pine, the wood neither stained nor painted nor carved with any decorative figures nor even planed entirely smooth. If Taudde opened that door . . . if he opened it, he knew exactly the wind, fragrant with pine forests and woodsmoke and the cold, clean scent of the winter lingering in the heights, that would skirl out of the distant mountains and into this house.

“Well? Will you open it, or do you merely mean to admire it as it stands?” inquired a light, quick voice at his shoulder. It was a voice that, to Taudde, was unmistakably underlain with an echo of the dragon’s voice. When ordinary men called Prince Tepres the Dragon’s heir, they were generally thinking merely of the king, Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes, the infamous Dragon of Lirionne. But ordinary men neither knew of the true dragon beneath the mountain nor possessed Taudde’s trained ear.

Taudde glanced back. He had, in gazing at the new door, almost forgotten that he was not alone in this house. Now he began to answer, but hesitated.

Prince Tepres stepped past him, closer to the door, glancing sidelong at Taudde as he moved. “It is very plain,” the prince observed. “Stark, perhaps. Very like the mountains of Kalches, perhaps. I do not give you leave to step through, mind,” he added. “But you surely wish to look. Or I might lay my hand to it, if you are not inclined to open it.”

Behind Taudde, Jeres Geliadde, the prince’s companion and bodyguard, cleared his throat.

“Or, then, perhaps not,” Prince Tepres conceded, tilting a straw-pale eyebrow at Jeres. He did not touch the door, but half turned to give his bodyguard an ironic look. The prince’s thin, arrogant mouth seemed made for irony. He said drily, “I am aware that some doors are not meant to be opened.”

“Not by you, at least, eminence,” murmured Jeres. “Nor by Chontas Taudde ser Omientes ken Lariodde – or assuredly not without your father’s leave.”

Taudde said nothing, feeling considerably more off balance than he had expected.

The prince gave him a sharp look and said more gently, “Of course I, or my father, shall give you leave to go. But in a day, perhaps. Or two, if you will delay so long. There is time. The solstice is close, yes, but it is not yet. You may surely take a day to . . .” he paused.

“Prepare for the journey? Consider how I will greet my grandfather?” Taudde steadied himself with an effort of will and gave the prince an ironic look of his own. “I am prepared now. I have hardly considered any other matter this past spring, I assure you.” Though he had never yet seized a moment to ask Leilis if she might be willing to accompany him, which perhaps revealed a lack of enthusiasm for the proposed journey. He longed to return to Kalches, land of music and sorcery and the high winds that both cut like knives and sang like harps . . . his home. But he dreaded his return, too. Though he did look forward to introducing Leilis to his grandfather; he wanted to watch the old man try the edge of his tongue against her wit and unshakable composure.

But he had not asked her. He knew this was because he had not been certain how she would answer. Suddenly Taudde felt profoundly underprepared.

“Then perhaps you will take one last day to consider how you will take your leave of my father,” Prince Tepres said, still almost gently. And added, at Taudde’s slight, involuntary flinch, “He will assuredly give you leave to go. Surely you do not doubt it?”

“No,” said Taudde. He did not, generally, except occasionally late at night when he could not sleep and found all possible worries for the future crowding into his mind, until he didn’t know which he should fear or which he might reasonably dismiss. There were so many, and so many hinged on the solstice. He took a slow breath, but let it out again without speaking.

“No,” repeated the prince. “Indeed. He will be sorry to lose you, but glad to see you go. Indeed, you have left it rather late. I think we may all be confident that he should be glad to give you leave now.”

Taudde began to answer, but was startled by a sudden hammering on the door – not the new one; that would have been far beyond startling, but the ordinary door that simply opened out onto the Lane of Shadows. All through Lonne’s spring and early summer, he had found that door always in the same place, and always opened it to find nothing but the expected city street. And he had had these months to become accustomed to people of Lonne coming and going from this house: young mages, who came to study bardic sorcery; or the occasional tradesman unafraid to venture the Lane of Shadows. Prince Tepres, of course, or one or another of the young men who were his companions. Now and again, on a few memorable occasions, the king himself.

None of them had a knock quite of this sort. There was a disconcerting violence in it. Jeres Geliadde, the prince’s bodyguard, did not knock like that. Nor did the guardsmen who accompanied the king. Some of the mages were angry to be set to studying bardic sorcery . . . angrier, sometimes, to be commanded to teach a bardic sorcerer their magecraft in return. But that offended pride was not what he heard in this knock.

Prince Tepres, quirking a pale eyebrow at the intrusion, stepped forward to answer that hammering. It was not his place to do so, but he might have meant to reprimand whomever was there for so rude a summons. Certainly whoever pounded roughly on the door would be embarrassed to find he had summoned not a mere foreigner but the Dragon’s own heir.

Taudde, moved by an alarm he did not entirely understand, said sharply, “Wait!” just as the prince reached the door.

The prince, startled, turned his head, to look back at Taudde.

Jeres Geliadde, responding perhaps to the alarm in Taudde’s voice, strode suddenly forward, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword.

The prince’s hand fell on the latch. The latch dropped and turned under the pressure of that touch.

The door slammed open.

For a heartbeat, that was all. There were men there, poised on the weathered gray stone of the porch, a crowd of men: a few in the black of the King’s Own and a handful in the flat red and gray of the army; two men in the black and white robes of mages, and, most fraught of all, two men in black and slate and sapphire, but with those darker colors touched with the saffron-gold that no one in Lonne but those of royal blood had any right to wear. The one in the forefront was a man nearing middle years, heavyset and hard-featured, powerful and angry. The man a step behind was younger and more elegant, with a narrow mouth and small chin; his angular eyes cold with bitter triumph.

Taudde had never met either man, but he knew at once who they must be: the younger must be Prince Telis, whom the folk of Lonne called Sa-Telis, the serpent, even to his face. He had a serpent’s look to him: a cold look. He was said to be mage-gifted and clever and dangerous to cross.

And the one in front had to be Prince Sehonnes, eldest of the king’s left-hand sons, but keiso-born and thus not his father’s heir.

Not the king’s heir so long as Prince Tepres lived.

For a long, reverberating moment, not one man in that crowd moved or spoke. There were drawn swords in all their hands, but not one man moved to strike at Prince Tepres. Taudde did not know what held them. He did not imagine it would hold them long. His flute, recently carved of driftwood he had gathered himself from the broken shore below the Laodd, was in his hand. It had come there as automatically as Jeres Geliadde had drawn his own sword. But it was not the same as his old flute, which Taudde missed suddenly and acutely.

Jeres would have leaped forward, he had his hand on his prince’s arm, ready to snatch him back from danger. But Prince Tepres flung up a hand to check him and by that seemed to check them all; he did not move, and no one else moved, and so the moment drew out, tension singing in the air until it became all but audible.

Prince Sehonnes, too, held up his hand. He, as Tepres, might have meant to restrain his men. But there was something else in the gesture. Something ostentatious, something that was meant for display: Look at me, like a vain boy showing off a new and expensive bauble to his friends.

Prince Tepres was staring at Sehonnes, at his hand . . . at the ring he wore: a heavy iron ring in the shape of a dragon, with twin rubies for eyes. Their father’s ring. The ring of the Dragon of Lirionne.

Tepres had paled. His thin mouth set hard and stern, and he put his shoulders back and stood very straight. He looked, in that moment, very like his father.

“Brother,” said Prince Sehonnes, grimly, and Sa-Telis added, sharp and urgent, “I want the sorcerer alive!”

Tepres tried to swing the door closed. The heavy gauntleted hand of one of the soldiers caught it, a booted foot came down to brace it open, a sword went up . . . Jeres jerked his prince back and caught that descending blade with his own shorter blade, closing with the other man to counteract the advantage of reach the longer sword gave the soldier, shoving the man back out onto the porch with his weight and the sheer force of his will. But Jeres was only one man, and the door was still open.

Tepres, unarmed, reached after a sword he did not have.

Taudde lifted his flute, meaning to get those men off his porch and sweep the left-hand princes after them – perhaps he would fling them all into the dark under the mountain; he thought he could and was frightened and angry enough to try. But the mages blocked him, Sa-Telis stepping to the side to get a clear view of Taudde. Of course the mage-prince and his allies had known Taudde would be here. Both those mages had actually studied with him – he recognized them now – they knew very little sorcery and pretended to scorn what little they knew, but they knew him a little, and they had plainly come prepared to counter his sorcery.

And Taudde, who had devoted considerable thought during the past winter to ways in which a bardic sorcerer might avoid being caught in a magecrafted net of silence, found himself, in the moment in which it mattered, unprepared to meet them. He had more or less trusted the Dragon of Lirionne; he had not expected the door of this house to open onto enemies and sudden battle.

So he was not quick enough to answer the attack when the mageworking set itself against him, binding him into silence so that his flute uttered no sound, so that his shout of frustration fell into silence and was utterly lost. Taudde found himself unable to unravel that mageworking as fast and as powerfully as the two mages set it.

Out on the porch men struggled, but Taudde, caught by a web of magecrafted silence, could not hear them. Jeres had killed one man. Another of his attackers, slashed across the belly, folded slowly down over his terrible wound. The man’s mouth was open, but if he was screaming, Taudde could not hear him, either. Prince Sehonnes’ mouth was open as well, but he seemed to be shouting rather than screaming. He was pressing straight forward through the melee, toward Prince Tepres. One soldier had gotten around Jeres – there were too many men, far too many, they were getting in each other’s way, but that wouldn’t last and anyone could see how this particular battle must end. But Tepres, unarmed save for a short belt knife, was actually stepping forward to face his attackers. Taudde started forward, meaning to grab his arm and haul him bodily back farther into the house, which after all was not an ordinary house – there was no need, even now, for heroic last stands, but with the silence on him he could not even say so.

Jeres Geliadde faced two more armed men, but another man, behind him, kicked him behind the knee, and Jeres collapsed to one knee. The man drew back his sword for a killing thrust . . . and Jeres, his face blank, lunged upward and sideways and whirled his sword around in a short, vicious arc. Prince Sehonnes’ hand leaped up away from his arm, seemingly of its own accord, blood spraying across the gray stone. The left-hand prince staggered, his expression one of disbelief and anger rather than pain. At the same time, the man behind Jeres completed his thrust, and Jeres, his body fully extended in his own smooth attack, could not even attempt to counter that blow. He did not counter it, and the sword slid into him, stabbing from back to front so that several inches of the blade emerged from his chest.

Despite that terrible blow, Jeres, in a smooth continuation of his own movements, as though stepping through the choreographed movements of a dance, caught Sehonnes’ amputated hand as it descended and flung it with deadly accuracy past half a dozen startled soldiers and through the door of the house. Where Prince Tepres, as though the move had been practiced in advance, put up his own hand and caught it.

For a moment that seemed caught out of time, everyone stopped. Prince Sehonnes, face twisted, clutched at his arm. Even the serpent-prince hesitated, his dark eyes narrowed, to all appearances unmoved, but his attention momentarily fixed on his stricken brother.

Taudde, feeling as though he had been somehow caught in a play, was seized now by a wild desire to laugh. He seized Tepres’ arm in a hard grip and pulled him, resist though he would, back down the hall, and the pause shattered. In perfect silence their enemies came after them, rushing forward – too many and too well armed and nothing to laugh at, so that Prince Tepres yielded at last and backed up willingly, but too late, anyone could see they would not be able to get clear.

In that instant, without thought, Taudde seized the knob he found ready under his hand, flung open the door, and snatched Prince Tepres sideways out of the house and out of Lonne entirely, into sudden dazzling cold.

Must be spring, cause there goes the internet

So, yesterday it was still possible to get my computer to tether to my phone and join The Great Collective. This morning, no.

I could have gone out on the deck and tried it, but it was raining.

Well, there we go. From the middle of May to the middle of November, no internet for me. From home, I mean. And yes even I can still get email via my phone, though generally hours after it was sent, unless I’m outside.

Ah, the dark ages!

In a practical sense, this just means that I will not be posting on weekends (unless I happen to take my laptop with me when I drive to town for some other reason.) Also, if you leave a comment, I may not be able to even look at it, much less answer it, till the next workday. So if I seem to leave comments hanging for a day or two, that will be why.

THE PROS: Well, it’s easy not to get distracted by the internet if you basically lack access. And I guess it’s a good thing to focus less on social media and more on actual people who are physically present?

THE CONS: Wow, it is so annoying not to be able to look up the weight of a sword or the gestation period of an elephant or a map of downtown St. Louis without getting up and going outside. Twitter is now strictly an outdoor thing, too. Also, though I haven’t exactly spent the winter streaming videos on my laptop, now I’m going to wonder why I let the chance go since I won’t be able to do it again till Fall.

Every spring for the past couple of years I’ve thought of maybe getting one of those gadgets that is supposed to boost cell signal. I never have bothered so far, but I have to say, it’s tempting. Have any of you used one of those? Are they easy to install and do they work?

Writing advice from Jane Austen — really

Oh, here’s a neat post by Sherwood Smith about Jane Austen’s advice to those of her relatives (several, evidently) who were also writers. It was a highly literary family, I gather, and a smallish handful of letters back and forth from Jane survive.

Jane on language in a critique letter to her niece Anna, on her first novel-in-progress:

…Devereux Forester’s being ruined by his Vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would not let him plunge into a ‘Vortex of Dissipation.’ I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the expression—it is such thorough novel slang—and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.

And so on. A Votex of Dissipation, really? I’m pretty sure I have never encountered the term personally, but at the time apparently it was a terrible cliché.

Here is a list, from Writer’s Digest, of 12 clichés that may be among the most common today:

1. Avoid it like the plague

2. Dead as a doornail

3. Take the tiger by the tail

4. Low hanging fruit

5. If only walls could talk

6. The pot calling the kettle black

7. Think outside the box

8. Thick as thieves

9. But at the end of the day

10. Plenty of fish in the sea

11. Every dog has its day

12. Like a kid in a candy store

Let me see. Actually I think it’s not quite correct to call “The pot calling the kettle black” a cliché. It is an aphorism. I think there’s a very substantial difference between picking the right pithy aphorism and falling into a lazy cliché.

The rest of them strike me as lazy clichés, though, I agree.

Anyway, good post. Austen certainly seems just as sharp in her personal letters as in her novels.

Felix Salten’s BAMBI

At tor.com, a surprising (at least, I was surprised) post by Mari Ness about Felix Salten’s BAMBI.

I totally loved that book as a kid. It has a lot of substance to it, far more than a cute Disney movie could possibly convey.

Mari Ness says: “But more than any of this, Bambi is a study, not of death and violence precisely, but the response to that death and violence.”

This is exactly right. Did I mention this is not a light-hearted romp of a story? Ness also takes a good look at Salten himself, his history and how it influenced the way he put the book together, which is not something I ever thought about. It explains the way he treated dogs and other domestic animals in BAMBI, which is the only detail that really bothered me when I read the book — even though I did not have dogs until I was an adult, I knew that this was not an accurate picture of how dogs actually feel. I like that passage with the dogs and the fox better when it is cast as an allegory, as Ness asserts it should be.

Anyway, if you, too, loved Salten’s book, you may want to click through and read this post.

And if you are solely familiar with Disney’s cute film, then let me say that the original book is an entirely different kind of story and — especially if you like MG / YA stories — very much worth reading.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

So, I’ve been thinking about a brief discussion that came up on Twitter the other day. I mean, all conversations on Twitter are brief, what with the inherent limitations of the form. Too limited for big topics, like:

Is it possible to write a utopia?

Is it possible to imagine a utopia?

The thing is, whenever you use the word utopia — I have seen this at convention panels before, too — everyone assumes that you mean a utopia where Everyone Is Forced To Be Happy. Then they get into how all the methods by which you might Force People To Be Happy are kind of not okay and how the society is actually repressive and . . . they are not talking about a utopia at all. They are talking about a dystopia, and they don’t seem able to tell they’ve changed the subject.

You know what you get when you do a google search for “utopia SF”? You get dystopias. I see Lowry’s THE GIVER is listed here, along with UGLIES by Westerfield. I mean . . . really? Why not just take the word “utopia” out of the dictionary if you are going to define it to equal “dystopia”?

Okay, so. Has anybody ever actually written a book set in a utopia? I suspect the answer is No.

Could a utopian setting be devised and could an interesting story be set in it? I suspect the answer is Yes.

1. A utopia is not about forcing people to be happy. Do I even need to say this? If so, why? Let’s all agree that the definition of a utopia excludes horrible repressive governmental systems that crush individual choice and autonomy. THOSE ARE DYSTOPIAS. Just stop with the utopia = dystopia thing.

2. There is always going to be conflict. Yes, in a utopia, too.

For one thing, people are never going to live the lives their parents’ want them to. They are going to insist on wanting to do their own thing. Poof, personal low-stakes conflict.

Besides, people are always going to have legitimate goals and aspirations that are mutually exclusive with the goals and aspirations of those close to them. In fact, people are always going to have legitimate goals and aspirations that are mutually exclusive with other goals and aspirations they also have. You can’t do everything. Even perfect material wealth doesn’t create more seconds in the day.

Besides, there is always potential for conflict from outside. This is science fiction, after all. Aliens! Poof, broad, high-stakes conflict.

3. Material wealth and a life of ease do not create happiness. I mean, sure, terrible, crushing poverty and a life of slavery prevent happiness (to a pretty large degree, anyway). But still. Isn’t it obvious by now that for happiness, what you really need is: a sense that you are a useful, productive person; a sense that you are supporting yourself and your family; a sense that you are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. In a real utopia, you won’t just feel that way; it will all be true. Then on top of that, but by no means more important than the above: you need material abundance sufficient not to be afraid for yourself or your family.

I think any utopia will fail where it doesn’t take actual human nature into account. And people want to feel like they are in charge of their own lives. By and large, they hate to feel dependent and resent the need to accept charity, and REALLY resent being expected to feel grateful for charity. They hate to feel that they have no choices. They have to have actual accomplishments so that they can feel legitimately proud of themselves. They need to feel positively connected to other people. They need to see the people they love be happy. They also need to not feel bitter because other people are happy, which is something else. They want to have something to strive for, and they want to achieve the things they’re striving for, but not too easily.

Am I missing anything huge? I think that’s most of the essentials. Oh, they need to be in decent health.

People often think they want, or we are told that people think they want, a life of pure leisure. I think that’s clearly not true. Does anyone actually believe it? It seems obviously much more important to your happiness to feel productive and useful than to have empty days filled with nothing in particular, even if your material needs are being met. That’s why long-term unemployment is so psychologically destructive.

Therefore,

4. The hard part about writing a utopian society would be coming up with a way to have excellent material abundance plus good health, AND YET to set up society to allow people to feel like they are — no, to actually BE — productive, useful, and responsible for their own lives and happiness. Getting rid of clinical depression and other emotional disorders would be a necessary step to allow everyone to be capable of happiness, but in a real utopia, perfect universal permanent happiness would not exist. That is not possible without changing human nature, it is not even faintly desirable, and it is not part of the definition.

Has anybody actually written a utopia, that you know of? Or even come close? Iain Banks’ THE PLAYER OF GAMES might be something that attempts to do this — has anybody read it? I’ve just read a description. But even there, the protagonist is apparently bored and jaded — and the utopia has a horribly repressive neighboring empire filled with miserable people. What true utopia would tolerate a neighbor like that?

Anyway. I insist on reclaiming the concept of a utopia, as distinct from a dystopia.

Should you read middle-grade books?

A handy flowchart from BookRiot.

Click to blow it up.

I really like the choices stemming from the box: Were you once between the ages of eight and twelve? Hah hah hah!

Now, I like flowcharts, and I like SOME middle-grade books, but there are plenty of MG books that simply read too young for me. Also, as it happens, I haven’t read a single title on that flowchart. Oh, wait, yes I have. I read THE LIGHTNING THIEF. I didn’t like it. I was like, “You’re supposed to be the daughter of the goddess of wisdom? Because you seem ridiculously slow to me.” (I don’t remember what was happening in the plot that made me feel that way; I just remember the reaction.)

Also, there are very few titles listed on this flowchart.

I know that some MG strikes me as reading older and being way more fun for adults (or at least me). Like DWJ middle-grade titles, or the JINX series by Sage Blackwood, or I think Merrie Haskell’s books are technically MG. Wait, hey, you know, THE FLOATING ISLANDS was listed as MG in some locations.

Anyway, those are some of the titles that I’d be putting into a flowchart like this. Not sure what else, but I am sure I would separate MG-that-kids-might-like from MG-that-everyone-might-like.

How about classics like Narnia, wouldn’t those work?

I know some of you read a lot more MG titles than I do. Any titles on this flowchart jump out at you as just great books for everyone? Any other titles that you would definitely put on a flowchart like this?

A topic I always appreciate: older women in SFF

Specifically in Urban Fantasy. This is certainly an appropriate place for pointed commentary, because UF is definitely not where you go to find women over . . . what, thirty?

Anyway, here is a post at tor.com from Liz Bourke about that. Liz says forty. Maybe, maybe, but even over thirty seems pretty unusual to me. Across all of fantasy, of course, but certainly in UF. Hard to be your standard kickass sexbomb protagonist if you’re middle-aged, I suppose.

Not that I am actually widely read in UF. But still.

Liz is actually leading into a review of a new title:

…Which makes it downright refreshing to come across a novel whose main character is fifty-five years old and deeply unwilling to take anyone’s shit. E.E. Richardson’s Disturbed Earth is a breath of clean air in a landscape that shies away from putting women over forty front-and-centre. . . . In terms of pacing, Disturbed Earth is a little on the uneven side. And until I realised that there’s a prequel novella, the e-only Under the Skin, my impression of meeting a series in full swing didn’t quite make sense. But I really enjoyed it: it’s cracking fun. And Pierce is an excellent character, with great voice, in the grand tradition of cranky middle-aged detectives.

From Liz’s description, this sounds like very much a crime novel. With necromancers and stuff.

Pacing issues are the single thing that bothers me least (most of the time). I think I will pick up the novella and see if it grabs me.