Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 62

Fun with sentence diagramming

This week, we seem to have fallen into a theme that might be called “fun with grammar” or “fun with words,” so I’m going to lean into that with something I personally think is fun:

This is from this site right here.

You see how this particular English teacher is cheating just a bit — or not cheating exactly — I mean compensating in a clever way for the existence of implied words. That’s the “x,” with this instructor is interpreting as the preposition “on,” which makes sense.

Here’s another I especially like:

I think I belong to the last generation that learned to diagram sentences, and I think they were much simpler, more boring sentences. I liked the exercise, though. I would like to see sentence diagramming brought back, so that I could stop saying, “The grammatical subject is not necessarily the first noun you encounter in the sentence” and “the subject is the thing verbing the direct object” and so on. Students would do a lot better sorting out their often awkward sentences if they actually knew what “subject” and “object” meant, not to mention “preposition.”

Many more lovely sentences diagrammed at the linked post — not just Shakespeare either, but Queen Elizabeth and Machiavelli and click through and enjoy them!

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At Book View Cafe, this very impressive volume

Check this out:

Nice cover!

This is the final book of the entire Sartorias-deles series. Honestly, that’s hard to wrap my mind around.

The last book in the long series that began with Inda, continued through the Rise of the Alliance, Crown Duel, and The Norsunder War, comes at last to a resonant, deeply satisfying conclusion in Antiphony.

Here’s the full set of novels in this long, long series of interconnected stories. My goodness, wow, looks like Sherwood wrote A Stranger to Command when she was a kid. It does not read like that at all. Nor does it read like MG or young YA. It reads like it’s right at the top of the age range for YA or like an adult novel — that’s the slow pace and lack of adventure. It’s one of my favorite books of hers. It might be right at the top.

HISTORICAL ARC
“Lily and Crown”
Inda
The Fox
King’s Shield
Treason’s Shore

Time of Daughters (two volumes)

Banner of the Damned

MODERN ERA

CHILDREN’S STORIES, (written when Sherwood Smith was a kid) which introduce many of the characters central to later arcs.

CJ Notebooks
Senrid
Spy Princess
Sartor
Fleeing Peace
A Stranger to Command

ROMANTIC STORIES, which mostly stand alone:

Crown Duel
The Trouble with Kings
Sasharia En Garde

RISE OF THE ALLIANCE

A Sword Named Truth
The Blood Mage Texts
The Hunters and the Hunted
Nightside of the Sun

The Wicked Skill

THE NORSUNDER WAR arc

Ship Without Sails
Marend of Marloven Hess
Seek to Hold the Wind
All Things Betray
A Chain of Braided Silver

The POST-WAR books and stories:

Let the Torrent Dance Thee Down
Antiphony
“Beauty” [published in Remalna Stores
“Court Ship” [published in Remalna Stores
“The Art of Masks” [Published]

A lot of these, I haven’t read, especially the others listed under “children’s books.” That means when I started beta reading this series, I didn’t know who most of the characters were. I rapidly developed my favorites (mostly Detlev’s boys, and Detlev) and later got more invested in the overall story.

Earlier this year, I beta-read Antiphony. Here’s my essential take on this long last book:

Everything is over. The good guys won. Now they’re all putting their lives in order and getting set to live happily ever after. The end.

I absolutely loved this book, which is basically a very long epilogue. I just love stories in which characters I already know and like sort out their lives. That’s what this story does. That’s what it’s for. I might eventually go back and read the early stories, particularly since I’ve never read the final versions and I’d be interested to do that. Knowing this volume is coming would lend a deep satisfaction to the other books for me, since I would already be confident in the various happy endings.

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First sentences: And the winner is —

Not that we were actually having a contest, but reading through all these sentences and short paragraphs, this is the one that caught my eye the most. Heather contributed:

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless colour of sea foam but rather the colour of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

Which I bet we all instantly recognized, yes? That’s from The Last Unicorn. It’s two sentences, of course, but why be a stickler? This is my favorite of all the sentences provided. I’d forgotten how utterly lovely the prose is in this short novel. Or at least, I hadn’t remembered the specific beauty of this opening. It’s just unbeatable.

However, the other sentences and short paragraphs are also noteworthy, so let’s take a look!

You know, I did like the opening of The Book Thief ">The Book Thief, but I honestly could not get into the actual book and it was a fast DNF for me. I’m not sure why. Now that I look at this opening again —

First the colours.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or, at least, how I try.

Here is a small fact:
You are going to die.

I think maybe it strikes me as annoyingly arrogant with a side of cutesy. I’m kind of having a reaction like, Wow, we’re going to die? What a revelation. Tell me more, oh wise one. This is not a response calculated to make me want to go on with the story. I guess I would say that this opening seems clever, but also a little off-putting. That’s just me, obviously. I know a lot of people loved this book.

Heather also contributed this one:

I know I’m not an ordinary ten-year-old kid. I mean, sure, I do ordinary things. I eat ice cream. I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an Xbox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary. I guess. And I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. I know ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go…[]… My name is August, by the way. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.

This is Wonder by R.J. Palacio. In this case, I’ve never heard of the book, and that’s a neat beginning. At the end of the description at Amazon, it says this: R.J. Palacio has called her debut novel “a meditation on kindness” —indeed, every reader will come away with a greater appreciation for the simple courage of friendship. 

Fine, I’m picking up a sample.

Okay, from EC:

There is only one Beginning. There is only one place and one moment where the world, life, and time itself began. There is only one Story. It began in the dark. It has many middles and many ends. You and I could chase it for lifetimes and only make it longer by our living. It is too sprawling for these pages and too big for this mouth. We begin in a middle. We trace a smaller arc.

Very nice! This is from the second book of the Ashtown Burials series. Here’s the series description:

For two years, Cyrus and Antigone Smith have run a sagging roadside motel with their older brother, Daniel. Nothing ever seems to happen. Then a strange old man with bone tattoos arrives, demanding a specific room.

Less than 24 hours later, the old man is dead. The motel has burned, and Daniel is missing. And Cyrus and Antigone are kneeling in a crowded hall, swearing an oath to an order of explorers who have long served as caretakers of the world’s secrets, keepers of powerful relics from lost civilizations, and jailers to unkillable criminals who have terrorized the world for millennia.

Sounds neat! Another sample.

From OtterB:

In the early days, the wall of thorns had been distressingly obvious.

This is from Thornhedge by T Kingfisher. You know, I just cannot keep up with Kingfisher/Vernon. She keeps writing more books! Super fast! This one came out this past August, looks like. Great cover!

Simple, elegant, evocative, eye catching, and a great tagline.

There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story. Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right? But nothing with fairies is ever simple.

Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…

I’m struggling with “Toadling” as a name. Sorry, but I have real trouble with silly names no matter how good the book is. Corporal Carrot, ugh. Peachy, ugh. Pug, ugh. Those stupid names in Rose Daughter, ugh. I really, really wish authors would not do this even if they have a good rationale for these names. I don’t care what their rationale is. This feature alone makes me reluctant to read the book. It honestly does not seem sensible to set obvious roadblocks in the way of readers when those roadblocks are so very easy to avoid, which this one is. Just give the characters non-silly names! Is that really too much to ask?

Okay, moving on. Here’s another one from OtterB:

The call came at night.
Esther fumbled for the phone lying on the side table. Still barely conscious, she stuck it to her ear.
“Hello!” What time was it?
Static hissed and whistled.
Then:
“Mom, I need your help.”

I don’t actually find this opening, from Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott, all that interesting. On the other hand, this bit of description is really intriguing:

Kate Elliott’s action-packed The Keeper’s Six features a world-hopping, bad-ass, spell-slinging mother who sets out to rescue her kidnapped adult son from a dragon lord with everything to lose.

Is this part of a series? It looks like a standalone. Great! Picking up another sample.

Now, it’s the other way around with the opening Alison offers:

I am dangling, and it is only my father’s blood-slicked grip around my wrist that stops me from falling.

This is from The Will of the Many by Islington, another one I’ve never heard of. Alison says the rest of the book is better than the opening, but I really like this opening!

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus—what they call Will—to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do. I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart. And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

Grim! Nevertheless, I’m picking up a sample.

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Word Crimes

Whoa, how did I not know about this until now?

Click through and enjoy this YouTube video, which is both funny and accurate. If I were teaching grammar or a comp class or something, I’d absolutely show this video and then show it again, pausing it to discuss the many egregious grammar mistakes it points out.

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First sentences

Here’s an (old) post on Medium by Anna Paradox: What I learned from studying first sentences

I thought I knew a lot about first sentences. It turns out that they are still surprising me.

At her blog:

Of these works, the first sentence that interested me most came from A Closed and Common Orbit, book two of the Wayfarers series:

“Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up in it.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. We have a character, Lovelace. She has a problem – something feels very wrong. Character plus problem is a first sentence formula that can fit any genre. 

Lovelace’s specific problem, however, takes up the rest of the sentence, and shows us that the world is not our own. 

Scroll down from there to read Anna’s commentary about this and many other first sentences, including the first sentence of Tuyo.

Now that I’m once again thinking of first sentences, and therefore novel openings, as sporadically happens, here’s the opening of a book I haven’t read for a long time: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” 

That’s just about the most atmospheric opening imaginable. Also, you couldn’t pay me enough to go into that house. Or, I mean, you could, but it would have to be a pretty significant sum.

Speaking of houses:

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years. The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, riding into the distant heights.

Lovely! Happy to visit, wouldn’t want to be stuck there.

Here’s the first opening of the book I’m reading now: Hild, which I’m re-reading very slowly in anticipation of finally getting to read Menewood, which just dropped today.

The child’s world changed late one afternoon, though she didn’t know it. Sh lay at the edge of hte hazel coppice, one cheek pressed ot the moss that smelt of worm cast and the last of the sun, listening: to the wind in the elms, rushing away from the day, to the jackdaws changing their calls from “Outward! Outward!” to “Home now! Home!,” to the rustle of the last frightened shrews scuttling under the layers of leaf fall before the owls began their hunt.

If you’ve read a particularly great novel recently, what was the first sentence? Did it offer promise that the book fulfilled?

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Update: Archon, mostly

So, as I mentioned Friday, the early part of last week was Just one thing after another. I kept firmly telling myself, “Yes, but Morgan’s fine, so this other thing is just a minor annoyance.” And I really believed that, but even so, I’m telling you. I stomped home in a real temper Tuesday afternoon, glowered at the laptop, and read The Egypt Game by Zelpha Keatley Snyder instead. I should post comments about that pretty soon, but I will say now that I enjoyed it.

The rest of the week was better. It could hardly have continued to present so many minor annoyances. Essentially no writing progress, however, because Archon took up pretty much the entire weekend.

Tiring weekend! The Friday panel on religion in SFF kind of slid toward the movie/tv show branch of media, which was fine, but of course I personally would have preferred to emphasize books since I know more about those. But it was good. Quite a few people came, considering it was rather early on Friday and Archon is a small convention.

I sure realized all over again that Archon is ground zero for fabulous costuming. I didn’t attend the masquerade (alas!) but tons of the hall costumes were super impressive.

All my Saturday panels were craft-oriented. I got a sudden request to take someone’s place on her 3:00 panel, so I had panels at eleven, two, three, four, and five, and that was tiring, but I can’t say I really minded because I do like panels. Especially craft panels. Let me see … writing series, writing what you know, worldbuilding, rewrite-revise-edit, avoiding the Mary Sue. The Worldbuilding one got added at the last minute. Fine topic, I always like that topic, though at some point you have to quit worrying about worldbuilding and just write the novel.

Then on Sunday, the panel on genetically engineered pets.

Comments, let me see … okay, most panels were pretty well attended given that the convention itself was very small. I think there were fewer attendees than I’ve seen in prior years. Huge costumer presence, as I said, which was a great pleasure for the rest of us, or at least for me. I didn’t take any pictures, but I did pause to gaze in admiration at quite a few people. One of my favorites was a simple outfit involving a black dress and iridescent black feathers, combined with a simple headpiece of pheasant feathers and red hair that exactly matched the color of the pheasant feathers. It was just nicely put together.

Other comments:

So, I hadn’t realized Glenn Stewart was going to be the author guest of honor! What can I say, I’ve been busy and didn’t pay any attention. So I got to the convention, picked up my registration materials, found a table, and sat down to see what all was going on besides my panels. Then somebody asked if they could share my table, I said sure without paying much attention, and it turned out to be Glenn Stewart and his wife or partner. They were very nice and we had a good conversation; then I sat in on part of Glenn’s first panel; then we were both on a different panel — it was the Write What You Know panel — and then we had another good conversation at the tag end of the convention. I said I’d read first book of the Dakotan Confederacy and liked it, and he asked — of course — how did that work as the starting point, because it’s associated with a longer series. I would have asked exactly the same thing. I said it was a perfectly good entry, and how interesting to see that the large empire that’s plunged into chaos is definitely the bad guy in the story, and that was the springboard for the conversation.

So I picked up second book of the Dakotan Confederacy this morning because now I’m thinking about that again. I don’t particularly aspire to get to the point in my writing career that Glenn has achieved — did you know he employs people to do stuff? It sounds like more trouble than I would really want to go to. Though I’d be happy to hire people to do specific things for me. In fact, I do; I’m not the person who keeps this website in decent shape. Maybe that’s not too different.

Let me see. Oh, my personal favorite craft-related panel was the one on rewrite-revise-edit. What can I say; I like topics like that, and wow, I’ve certainly done plenty of all those things. Let me see …

Okay, I cut the last 200 pages or so of the Death’s Lady trilogy twice and rewrote that section from scratch before I finally nailed it. That’s before broader revision. Oh, I remember that I cut chapter 5 of The Floating Islands twice and rewrote that from scratch before settling on the final version. And oh yes, I got 100 pages into the back half of Invictus a bunch of times and kept deleting that and starting over. That’s rewriting: cutting something and writing that section from scratch. The other panelist said some authors do that from the top: rewrite the whole thing. Wow. I’m glad I’ve never felt compelled to do that.

Revision can be imo “heavy” or “ordinary” or “light.” Heavy revision is things like cutting one protagonist and replacing him with a different character, revising the plot to fit this huge change. Ordinary is things like tweaking events so that two countries are actually embroiled in a war rather on the verge of going to war. Light includes things like combining two minor characters. (If they’re major characters, that’s ordinary revision rather than light revision.

Editing includes allllllll the rest of the tweaking, from cutting 30,000 words at the sentence level to fixing continuity errors to the endless, endless rounds of proofing, which expand to take up all the time available. I mean: I’m still proofing Invictus Part II. Because I can, so I guess I feel I ought to. Actually, I just caught a moment when one character is in two different places at the same time, so aargh, and I’m glad I’m proofing it one more time.

Anyway, that’s the kind of panel I like best, I suppose, and we (the panelists) wound up saying emphatically to one attendee, “Get those books out of your closet and put them out there immediately.” So that was also an important component of the panel: When do you stop? Because you have to stop eventually and put your book(s) out there.

The genetically modified pets panel was very fun for the panelists and I hope for the attendees. It was a well-attended panel. We really slid heavily into real-world things, with occasional nods to fiction. I did mention the cat/tribble/purring blanket from the Vorkosigan series, and thank you whoever mentioned it, because it turned out to be a perfect fit for this panel, as people kept mentioning tribbles at odd moments.

So, good convention, though tiring, I’m glad I’ve got nothing much in the way this week … except that Haydee’s older brother is coming to stay with us for two weeks! That will be great fun for Haydee. I’m going to be pleased to see that boy myself. He’s Tiny Boy Four. I’ll probably always think of him that way even though he caught up to the bigger boys in that litter long ago.

Oh, yes, also, the newsletter went out! I hope you enjoy the story included there!

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End of September reminders!

A) Just reminding anyone who might have missed it that I’ll be dropping short stories set in the Tuyo world into my newsletter, probably each and every newsletter moving forward because it’s not like there’s a shortage of appropriate stories that can be written. The first will appear in the October newsletter, which I’ve scheduled to go out this coming Monday, October 2nd. If you’d like these stories, then sign up for the newsletter!

I want to get in the habit of sending a newsletter at the beginning of each month no matter what’s going on. There’s not much in this particular newsletter except for a mention of Invictus and then the story. It’s about 6000 words, so a pretty decent length. I hope you enjoy it!

B) Invictus: Crisis is releasing in two weeks! I’m sure I don’t actually need to remind you about that.

I’m anxious about that because I can’t help it. Dropping the back half of a book is just intrinsically nerve-wracking. This is true even though people who have read the final draft are giving it a thumbs up, which does help. I’ve loaded the hopefully final version and, just in case, ordered one more proofing copy. But it should be good to go right this minute, whew!

C) Archon is this weekend.

I had a remarkably irritating week this past week, nothing super important, just a pile of annoying and/or inconvenient things that all piled up. The back half of this week has been peachy in comparison, but I can definitely use a break. I plan to set everything aside and not make the slightest effort to get any work done on anything this weekend. If I have time to work on anything whatsoever, maybe it’ll be First Scenes of Books I Would Like to Write, purely for the pleasure of it.

I hope you all have a great weekend with very few annoyances and many nice things!

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Recent Reading: The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

So, given that I like bodyguards and was in the mood for contemporary romances, I picked up The Bodyguard as soon as someone here recommended it.

The basic idea is: extremely famous hot male movie star (Jack Stapleton) needs to stay in this town in Texas for some time because his mother has cancer and she wants him close by, so although he is seriously estranged from his brother, he’s got to be there. The producers for his upcoming movie insist that he hire a protection service. The bodyguard who gets the assignment is a young woman (Hannah) who is very closed-off emotionally. Although he’s required to have a bodyguard, the movie star doesn’t want to worry his parents, so she’s going to pretend to be his girlfriend. On we go from there; as you can imagine, many situations ensue.

So, this is actually not intrinsically super-light in terms of the plot elements. The estrangement is pretty believable and the mother’s desire to force her sons to make peace with each other is one hundred percent believable and sympathetic. I loved both of Jack’s parents, who had small roles but were beautifully drawn and just a pleasure to spend time with. Hannah’s little speech to the parents when the awful truth comes out is genuinely touching.

I liked Jack too, and for that matter Hannah. Both of these characters were believable as well, which is pretty amazing given the character types are kind of over the top.

To me, Hannah seemed to keep getting into fixes that verged on too silly. The thing with the cows, come on. She also kept crying. Yes, fine, this and that would be upsetting; I realize thus and so would be upsetting as well; but she just did not seem consistently competent. At the end, when she briefly thought she was being rejected in a humiliating way, she believed that for about … hmm … it took her maybe five minutes to figure out what was going on. This was approximately four minutes forty seconds longer than it should have taken.

On the other hand, she grew on me, largely because I really liked all the surrounding characters, including her boss, whom I strongly suspect deliberately pushed Hannah into a position where she might be shoved out of her emotionally guarded shell. Also, she did show her competence at other moments.

Things that were clever:

You know what works really well in a Rom-Com? Making the exceedingly handsome and dreamy male lead into a famous movie star. That way, the female lead has every reason to think, “He’s just acting; he doesn’t really like me.” This continual self-doubt usually doesn’t work for me, but here it made perfect sense and was fine.

Katherine Center then does an excellent job making it believable that an incredibly famous, handsome, rich movie star would fall in love with a young woman of average looks and prospects. She really does. This is hard to pull off – well, it’s hard for an author to pull this off for me. I’m bored by extremely handsome / super rich male leads in romance novels. I read a good handful of contemporary romances with leads exactly like this when I was just starting to read romances, and not only that, I’d been reading the Anita Blake series at the time – you know, the paranormal series that turns from adventure into erotica, and where every single important male character is more incredibly, unbelievably handsome than the last. I am just a hard sell when it comes to super handsome, super rich male leads in romance novels. But here we are, this time it was fine. I think the fangirling around the edges was funny enough to help with that, but mostly I think it was just that I really liked the movie star and had no trouble believing in him as a real person, and believing in the relationship. Plus I really liked his parents.

His estranged brother, not so much, and here I would have liked more depth. This is the single relationship where I would have focused more attention if I were writing the story. This kind of estrangement-reconciliation relationship matters to me – you may have noticed I’m not a romance author – and I would have spent more time there, especially at the end. Big revelation, instant reconciliation, I was like No no! Slow down! Show us more depth here! I’d like to have seen the brother be more complicated and the reconciliation be more difficult to achieve and therefore more powerful when they finally got there. I immediately knew just how I would have done this if I’d been writing the story. If you see an estrangement-reconciliation plotline in one of my books anytime in the next decade, you may remember I said this and surmise I wanted to do that because I thought Katherine Center didn’t pull that relationship into the foreground as much as she should; ie, as much as I would personally have liked.

Other things I appreciated:

Center is one of the few romance authors I’ve read who doesn’t feel it’s necessary to open the bedroom door and show the reader a play-by-play sex scene. Thank you, romance author, for not making me feel like a voyeur. It’s not that this never, ever works for me, but not very often. Actually, I don’t think there was even a closed-door sex scene, which is pretty amazing in a modern romance novel and definitely fine with me.

The thing with the beaded safety pin. That’s a nice touch, and it’s used perfectly to tie the story together.

Things I did not appreciate:

The female movie star who makes such a scene. I know she deserves what she gets, but I would have liked her not to deserve that and not to get it. I felt sorry for her. She’s really sad. Certainly a vivid contrast with Hannah.

Overall:

I liked this story quite a bit, I’m still amazed in retrospect that Katherine Center could make me like an incredibly handsome, rich, famous male lead, and I’d be happy to read something else she’s written. Oh, looks like there are tons of books to choose from. Anybody who’s read more by her, got another recommendation?

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SF Subgenres: Venn Diagram (2)

Okay, second attempt to create a simple-ish Venn diagram showing the major SF subgenres! This one might be closer to accurate!

As you will see, I expanded the “Adventure” circle tremendously and overlapped everything else into that specific circle — but as you can also see, I decided that some SF novels are actually outside that circle for multiple subgenres. Now that I’ve copied this diagram and dropped it into this post, I can immediately see some things I might have done differently, BUT, look! I have nudged Space Opera so that a bit of the circle lies outside Adventure SF! I didn’t realize I was going to do that because I usually think of Space Opera as necessarily emphasizing adventure (and high stakes and so on), but creating these diagrams has made me see that I don’t really think that. Because I do think Long Way is space opera, and it can just barely be called Adventure; and where exactly would you put Nathan Lowell’s Quartershare? It’s totally adventure-free! There are basically no stakes whatsoever! But then where would you put it? It doesn’t fit anywhere else! I finally chose to drop it into the Space Opera circle, but outside the Adventure circle.

I put Sharon Shinn’s Archangel outside the Adventure circle too. Sure, stuff happens; yes, some of that stuff involves action and excitement, but it’s basically a romance story. Excitement and adventure are not the point. The romance is the point. It’s not an adventure story! Not sure I should have placed Pern in the same location; maybe that is actually more of an adventure story? But maybe not, maybe it’s in the right place.

Cyteen isn’t really Adventure, but the sequel, Regenesis, is DEFINITELY not adventure. It’s like a tiny, tiny bit of excitement got added as a sort of nod to reader expectations, but it’s not at all about that. It’s about everyone getting their lives in order. I really liked it! So I dropped Cyteen on one side of the Adventure line, Regenesis on the other, but if someone wanted to put Cyteen outside the Adventure circle as well, I wouldn’t argue.

I tried hard to get Near Future, Far Future, and Cyberpunk to all overlap with Sociological SF, but I just couldn’t get them all to fit and finally decided that when you’ve gone that far into the future, you’re not likely to be handling sociology at all realistically, so I let that one shift away from Sociological SF. I dropped Psionics as a circle and put Psion in the SF Fantasy circle, because I do think psionics should by all rights be considered fantasy. This element just often comes with SF trappings, like time travel.

I decided I agree that No Foreign Sky isn’t Military SF and moved it out of that circle, but put it in the Space Opera circle. I kept Invictus outside the Space Opera circle. Both wound up in the Sociological SF circle. To make a more clear distinction between various novels that are all Military SF, I dropped A Small Colonial War into a different section of the Military SF circle than Honor Harrington. That one, Quartershare, and Regenesis are the ones that are new to this version of the Venn diagram. I really liked both A Small Colonial War (Robert Frezza) and Quartershare (Nathan Lowell), by the way. The former isn’t available in ebook form. None of Frezza’s books are available as ebooks. Who published them? Oh, Del Rey. Well, it’s a real shame Del Rey hasn’t seen fit to make its backlist books available as ebooks. I like this whole trilogy a lot. I like Lowell’s series a lot too, and Quartershare in particular is certainly one of the lowest-stress novels you can possibly read.

I hardly think this diagram is definitive, but I’m kind of happy with it! On the other hand, now once again I don’t know what I think Space Opera actually is! I still disagree with the “Westerns in space” idea — that fails to capture The Long Way, Quartershare, Chanur — I just think it misses a lot of books that to me seem to belong in this category. Maybe I should throw up my hands and declare that the term is useless and I know it when I see it?

Which elements do you all think are largely, if not entirely, universal for Space Opera?

Set in space, aboard spaceshipsSF elements not particularly “hard” — handwavy SF elements are fineAdventure is a central component of the storyHigh stakes that keep risingBattles, maybe an ongoing warFast paceTone not grittyTone actually heroic, cheerful, or positive in some other wayIf there’s conflict, the good guys winSome characters may belong to military organizations, but the story does not involve details about daily life in the military

Before all this discussion, I would probably have voted for ALL of these characteristics. Now I’m not sure! I think the above list is characteristic of A LOT OF Space Opera, but maybe not all of it? Or should Quartershare be placed somewhere else? If it should, where? Am I missing a whole circle?

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Dinosaur world

A fantastic site showing dinosaur-based art, hat tip to Donna Ferstrom on Quora:

Dinosaur-derived intelligent species, complete with Stone Age hunters and shamans, sketches of hunts and daily life, plus cave paintings and just a lot of very cool artwork, at this site right here.

I don’t want to copy a picture from that website, so here, have a modern maniraptoran dinosaur via Pixabay:

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