Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 93

Would you turn the page?

Here’s one of those interesting “Flogging the Pro” posts at Writer Unboxed: Would you turn the page of this bestseller if you didn’t know the name of the author?

Here’s the the page:

U.S. Open September 1994

My entire life’s work rests on the outcome of this match.

My father, Javier, and I sit front row center at Flushing Meadows, the sidelines just out of reach. The linesmen stand with their arms behind their backs on either side of the court. Straight in front of us, the umpire presides over the crowd high in his chair. The ball girls crouch low, ready to sprint at a moment’s notice.

This is the third set. Nicki Chan took the first, and Ingrid Cortez squeaked out the second. This last one will determine the winner.

My father and I watch—along with the twenty thousand others in the stadium—as Nicki Chan approaches the baseline. She bends her knees and steadies herself. Then she rises onto her toes, tosses the ball in the air, and with a snap of her wrist sends a blistering serve at 126 miles per hour toward Ingrid Cortez’s backhand.

Cortez returns it with startling power. It falls just inside the line. Nicki isn’t able to get to it. Point Cortez.

I let my eyes close and exhale.

“Cuidado. The cameras are watching our reactions,” my father says through gritted teeth. He’s wearing one of his many panama hats, his curly silver hair creeping out the back.

What do you think? You can click through and vote, by the way.

My instant reaction: Oh, sports, not interested.

My second reaction: Well, for something involving sports, this author is doing a good job getting me to be interested.

It’s not the first sentence, though that’s a good first sentence. That alone isn’t enough to overcome my utter lack of interest in sports. I’m so disinterested that I’m not even sure what sport this is. Tennis? Maybe tennis. I don’t care. However, I start to be drawn in at “I let my eyes close and exhale.” This person’s reactions are starting to interest me. The father’s reprimand, “Cuidado. The cameras are watching” — that’s good. That’s starting to set up not only tension, but also the relationship between the protagonist and the father. I could care less about the game, but I’m at least somewhat interested in the people.

My conclusion: yes, I’d turn the page. Let me click through and vote … ah, I’m in the minority! Two-thirds of the votes are for not turning the page. Ray Ramey, the guy who does these posts, also votes no. That’s interesting! Why does he give this page a thumbs-down?

And then there’s one of my pet peeves, someone saying something with their teeth gritted. Have you ever tried to do that? It isn’t natural and is very difficult to do. Also, what about this sentence:

I let my eyes close and exhale.

Her eyes are exhaling?

Oh, that’s funny! I didn’t have a problem with either of those sentences. How about you? Is that a pet peeve for anyone else? I think you CAN speak with gritted teeth! I just tried it and it seemed to work for me. Also, it’s an expression that just doesn’t rub me the wrong way, whether it’s read literally or not. In the same category, I have no problem with “he hissed” even if there are no sibilants in the spoken sentence.

Also, I read that as “I [let my eyes close] and [exhale].” That’s fine, no comma needed, nothing wrong with the syntax, but I agree, now that Ramey criticized it, sure, I’d revise it. “I exhale, letting my eyes close” would be fine and avoid any risk that someone would read it as “I let my eyes [close and exhale].”

Ramey also critiques the tennis. Yes, okay, so it was tennis. I’m sure that was obvious. As far as I could tell, it could have been racquetball or maybe some other sport I have just forgotten about because I don’t care. As you can see, this is among the bottom ten of all things I would ever critique. Obviously I know so little about sports that the author can make any number of egregious errors having to do with sports and I’ll never notice.

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Sale: Tuyo series

The Tuyo series is on sale starting today.

You all probably already have all the books, but if not, this is a good time!

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Novel Openings: Romances

Okay, so, a little while ago, I picked up a bunch of samples and a couple full ebooks based on this post about gentle romances and related comments, so let’s take a look at how some of these romances begin and check out what kind of immediate impression they may make.

I should add, I’m not reading ANYTHING right now. I don’t have time. The second Gael and Keir book? I stalled out, not for any fault in the book at all, quite the reverse — because I hit a particularly engaging scene and thought, I don’t have time to read the whole thing right now, so I better stop.

Ditto for An Immense World, which I trust you are all enjoying. It’s really good! But I don’t have time to read it!

ALMOST ditto for Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. I’m at an exciting scene — various people summoned The Left Arm Demon, I’m not sure what that will turn out to be, but various apprentices are collapsing left and right, and Wei Wuxia leaps in to fill the breach, and … I don’t know! I haven’t had time to find out what happens next! (To be fair, I will read the rest of that particular scene tonight.)

But MOSTLY all that I’m reading now are the Murderbot novellas and bits of the second What If? book by Randall Monroe, which dropped yesterday, by the way, so if you didn’t preorder it, there you go, have a link. It’s just about perfect for reading one short essay and then putting down, so I’m delighted to have it. It couldn’t have hit the shelves at a better time.

I REALLY do not have time to read actual books because (obviously) Tasmakat, and (equally obviously) this dratted General Biology class are taking up my time. I particularly want to focus on Tasmakat and therefore I specifically do not want to get drawn into somebody else’s book.

However, I have no objections to expanding my already huge TBR pile and moving titles up and down the immense virtual stack, so, since I hadn’t yet looked at these romances, let’s look at just a few of them now.

In no order:

`1) When a Scot Ties the Knot by Tessa Dare

September 21, 1808

Dear Captain Logan MacKenzie,

There is but one consolation in writing this absurd letter. And that is that you, my dear delusion, do not exist to read it.

But I run ahead of myself. Introductions first. I am Madeline Eloise Gracechurch. the greatest ninny to every draw breath in England. This will come as a shock, I fear, but you fell deeply in love with me when we did not cross paths in Brighton. And now we are engaged.

I’m instantly drawn in. This is totally charming. also, historical, so that’s a plus. I enjoy epistolary formats. This book offers just snippets of the letters Madeline writes to her fictitious beau. Tessa Dare is very well known, of course. I expect her to be good, and this beginnings suggests that she is. The title is ridiculous. But setting that aside, I like this a lot.

2) Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle

I am up in the clouds now, drumming my fingernails on a countertop.

Outside the window, in an ever-swirling fog, there’s a pink neon sign that spins at an all-the-time-in-the-world tilt, which reads MAYBELL’s COFFEE SHOPE AU. Beneath, with one of the letters blinking out: Open 24 Hours.

My AU (alternate universe) café has taken years to build, the past three months being its busiest season yet. I’ve put up fairy lights and aqua tiles, floppy houseplants and red vinyl booths. A jukebox comes to life whenever I glance its way, spontaneously playing one of my favorite songs. Maybell’s Coffee Shop AU is the most beautiful place I can imagine, and I’ve imagined lots of places.

The fog breaks on cue. I glance up, on high alert, knowing what happens next because it’s happened before a hundred times. A story with a scripted beginning and boundless possibilities for how it might end.

I’m intrigued and baffled. Is this literally an alternate universe? Surely not? And yet? Let me go back to the description on Amazon and take a look …

Maybell Parish has always been a dreamer and a hopeless romantic. But living in her own world has long been preferable to dealing with the disappointments of real life. So when Maybell inherits a charming house in the Smokies from her Great-Aunt Violet, she seizes the opportunity to make a fresh start.

Okay, so she’s daydreaming! This is a fantasy of hers! Okay, good to know. I bet people who read only romance and not fantasy aren’t going to have that Could it be? reaction to the opening. It’s just such a concrete, detailed daydream! I really wasn’t sure.

3) The Best Man by Kristen Higgins

On a beautiful day in June, in front of literally half the town, wearing a wedding dress that made her look like Cindarella and holding a bouquet of perfect pink roses, Faith Elizabeth Holland was left at the altar.

We sure didn’t see that one coming.

Wow, I didn’t see that coming either! I think this is a good opening, but not necessarily inviting. This is a prologue, by the way. I didn’t flip ahead to look at Chapter 1. The prologue is long enough that I just thought fine, let’s start here.

Did you notice how the protagonist is buried in a first person plural “we”? When does that shift? I’m flipping ahead through the prologue and the whole thing is first person plural! For pages and pages of backstory! That’s certainly … daring. Does it work? I don’t know; I haven’t settled down to actually read it. Okay, I’ve flipped to the first chapter and it looks like Faith is indeed the third-person protagonist. I wonder what the point of starting with second person plural backstory was? Is the person thinking “we” and “our town” and so forth ever going to be identified? I have no idea.

4) Digging Up Love by Chandra Blumberg

Alisha’s car wouldn’t start — again. She growled and hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. Why was she surprised? Every penny she earned went straight to her bakery fund, not upkeep on her run-down ride. But she did not have time for this tonight, not when she needed every second to get ready to share her big news.

Before she could head back inside to ask for a jump, her phone lit up. FaceTime with her little sister could either brighten her mood or send it spiraling south — Simone did nothing by halves, and resisting her whirlwind was as futile as taking a stroll in a hurricane. But Alisha never dodged her sister’s, calls even on her busiest days.

This is … okay. It’s contemporary, while I somewhat prefer historicals. But besides that … it’s just okay. Let me think about why. Is that metaphor in the second paragraph not working for me? Maybe it’s not. “Nothing by halves” doesn’t really match the whirlwind metaphor. Come to think of it, “brighten” and “heading south” don’t really match either. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Not that I’d stop with just these two paragraphs. But I’m not instantly drawn in.

Okay, for this set of romances, I definitely go first for (1) When a Scot, and then (2) Twice Shy. For me, the beginning of (3) Best Man is interesting, but it’s making me think about the stylistic choices, not about the story. And (4) is the least immediately engaging.

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Speaking of Book Reviews, Here are Some To Check Out

For quite a while, maybe all year, Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten has been posting very long book reviews by other people.

This was a contest, with monetary prizes for the book reviews that won.

Here’s the post.

Here are the winners:

1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.2nd:  1587, A Year Of No Significance , reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain.3rd:  The Castrato , reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.3rd:  The Future Of Fusion Energy , reviewed by TheChaostician.3rd:  The Internationalists , reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance. 

So you see, a considerable variety of topics are represented. There are ten others that were finalists and about fifteen or so honorable mentions.

I haven’t read most of these reviews, and none of the books, almost all of which are nonfiction. (The God-Emperor of Dune is here, though! I read that one!)

The few reviews I have read have been really long, thoughtful, and fascinating, and now that links to the winners, finalists, and honorable mentions have all been gathered up into one post, I will probably read more of these reviews, and possibly some of the books. I thought some of you might also like to take a look.

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Writing Book Reviews

I’m so far behind in transferring reviews from this blog to Amazon and Goodreads, it’s not even funny. I promise I will make an attempt to do that soon. The problem is, I always have to edit reviews as I cross-post them, and that takes a certain amount of time and attention. And I have to do it from a real computer; I can’t do it from home. Still, I need to do it, and I will.

But this post isn’t actually about that. It’s about how readers sometimes write reviews.

This is a post from Book Riot: THE WORDS “I WANTED” DO NOT BELONG IN BOOK REVIEWS

And immediately, my reaction is, Yes, that’s probably true. I mean, we all know what this post is probably focused on, right? The kind of review that says, “I really wanted a coming-of-age story, and this isn’t that. I was very disappointed. One star.”

Or even, “This novel was well-written, but I wanted a happy ending. I hated this ending. Four stars, I guess, but I was really disappointed.”

On the other hand, now that I think about it, there’s a biiiiig gap between someone who says, “This isn’t what I wanted, one star” and someone who says, “This wasn’t what I wanted but it’s objectively good, four stars.” It seems to me that the former is an example of a bad review (I mean, a low quality review), while the latter might well be fine. It depends, I suppose. If the only criticism is “I expected something else,” then I think I agree with Book Riot. However, if the criticism includes “I expected something else” but also includes a thoughtful critique of why the book led the reader to expect something it doesn’t offer, that’s different. Or I believe it’s different.

Let me just take a look at the Book Riot post and see if this is the focus.

Scrolling back through my Goodreads reviews, I [the author of the post] eventually come across ones full of “I wanted” sentences. Some of them are vague, as in: I wanted more. Some are specific, as in: I wanted to know more about X character, but the book is about Y character. Or: I wanted the author to focus more on plot and less on description. Or: I wanted this book to be a love story, but all of this other stuff kept getting in the way. …

… there are two kinds of “I wanted” statements that appear in reviews, both of which I used to employ with some frequency. The first is the kind Alameddine is talking about, statements that have nothing to do with the book at all. These statements are usually about the reader. They’re not even about the reader’s experience of the book — they’re about the reader’s experience of the book they wish they’d read. …

The other kind of “I wanted” statements that I see all the time are actually valid criticisms or observations clouded in this vague “I wanted” language. These statements are even more infuriating to me because the vast majority of them could be rewritten into thoughtful reviews.

Oh, now, that’s interesting! This is an assertion that using the phrase “I wanted” is a signal that the review lacks thoughtfulness. Maybe it is!

But in a lot of cases, these “I wanted more” sentences are actually getting at something the author is or isn’t doing. Whether that thing is good or bad (or, more actually, whether it works for you and why) can help other readers figure out if that book is going to work for them. …

Years ago, I would have written a scathing review about how I wanted answers, closure, a tidy resolution, and rated it poorly because I didn’t get any of those things. Happily, I’ve gotten better at writing reviews and thinking critically about books. So instead of writing, “I wanted closure and there wasn’t any, this book sucks!” I wrote: “I loved the first half! But then my brain started doing that “explain! explain! please explain!” dance, and the lack of explanation was just too distracting. So, for readers like me, who crave explanations, maybe know that this is a book that explains nothing. If you prepare yourself for that, and can manage your expectations, it’s a beautiful story about grief and transformation.”

This is a really good point! The author of this post has done a great job of pulling me around to pretty much agreeing with her, when I don’t think I leaned that way at the beginning.

On the other hand, I do think the first version is perfectly fine as long as you leave off the final clause. I wanted closure and there wasn’t any is a perfectly fine sentence that ought to indicate to anyone who reads the review: and if you also want closure in your novels, you’ll probably hate this too. The trick is to leave off the concluding “This book sucks!”

I will just add, there are obviously possible exceptions. If a reviewer writes: “I wanted a book that was basically readable, that showed some degree of facility with the English language, that wasn’t chock-full of typos, and that had something resembling a plot, or at least coherent events that were somehow tied together. Unfortunately, this book lacked any of the above. One of the worst book-shaped objects I’ve ever wasted time reading.” then that seems pretty fair to me.

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Choose Your Own Adventure: Kingfisher and Wombat

Ursula Vernon is laying out a choose-your-own-adventure story on Twitter. It’s highly amusing

Okay, Twitter, I’m in the mood to run a Choose Your Own adventure. We’ll use the survey buttons, and I’ll try to set the interim short enough to keep things moving along. Let’s see where this goes!

— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) September 12, 2022

You stand, intrepid explorer, before the great concrete labyrinth so briefly described by the naturalist Eland the Younger, a place both unnatural and cryptic, where natural law, as you know it, is occasionally skewed. Broken gears litter the forest floor around you.

— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) September 12, 2022

Ahead is a crack in one of the concrete walls. Tree roots have forced it wider, leaving you space to slip inside. Inside is dim and quiet. Do you…

— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) September 12, 2022

This is a use of Twitter that I haven’t personally seen before and I hereby declare that it is The Ideal Use of Twitter.

The story is still ongoing at the time I type this. If you get down to the bottom, you can vote on what Our Hero ought to do next.

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Defining Positive Fantasy

All right, so, I went to a panel on “Hopepunk” fantasy at WorldCon, and this panel was somewhat disappointing to me because it included an (accidental) bait-and-switch. The panel description mentioned The Goblin Emperor, but the panelists had a very specific definition of “Hopepunk” that excluded The Goblin Emperor and any book like that one.

Their basic definition:

Hopepunk = fantasy with a gritty feel, in which the protagonist and the protagonist’s friends and/or community of outsiders push back against a repressive political system.

Really, the panelists seemed to limit the term to that very specific sub-sub-sub-genre. Now, in some ways, I agree. I think that “punk” in the term does indeed imply gritty, and I guess I’m okay with the rest of that definition, though I don’t think it’s necessarily part of what I think of when I think of cyperpunk, steampunk, hopepunk, silkpunk, or any other type of fantasy with “punk” in the name. But I do think that a gritty feel to the worldbuilding is implied, and that feel is almost (but not quite) absent from The Goblin Emperor. The panelists agreed. They were uninterested in The Goblin Emperor and books of that type.

Well, I’m interested in that sort of novel. I’m not keen on the kind of fantasy the panelists focused on. I can only tolerate so much grit. If the worldbuilding is gritty, then the book needs to be way better written or I won’t be able to tolerate it, and even then, it’s pushing uphill. That’s just not what I prefer. Plus as the political situation in the novel gets more repressive, I start to find it more claustrophobic. Plus that’s not the type of story I like best anyway.

So, then … if The Goblin Emperor is not hopepunk, what is it?

Other terms got tossed around during this panel. “Sweetweird” was one of those. I think the term practically defines itself, but I’d never heard it before. If you also haven’t heard it previously, here’s a post about it.

Coined by sci-fi and fantasy novelist Charlie Jane Anders, “sweetweird” describes a certain kind of media that centers the loving and nourishing power of friendship in a strange, bizarre, and difficult world. … “The core idea of sweetweird is: the world makes no sense, but we can be nurturing, frivolous and kind,” Anders writes in “The Sweetweird Manifesto.” “We don’t have to respond to the ludicrous illogic of the world around us by turning mean and nasty, or by expecting everyone else to be horrible. At the very least, we can carve out friendly, supportive spaces in the midst of chaotic nonsense, and maybe help each other survive.”

When we’re defining a type of fantasy by including “the world does not make sense,” that seems to me to put that in the realm of magical realism or maybe some types of supernatural horror. A world filled with or typified by chaotic weirdness does not seem very attractive to me, regardless of whether the characters are nice to one another. Although certainly I’d prefer that to a world of chaotic weirdness where the characters are mean and nasty to one another. Regardless, this is not, of course, a sub-sub-sub-genre that fits The Goblin Emperor or other works like that, whatever those other works might be.

Another new-to-me term introduced in this panel was “squeecore,” which, unlike “sweetweird,” is not a term that immediately conveys anything to me. Except, ugh, “squee,” really? This is not a modern slang term that I actually want to see turn into a real word. If it fades out of usage in the next decade, that’s fine with me. But, always interested in new terms for sub-sub-sub-sub-genres, so I immediately looked it up. Here is a post about this, actually a transcript of a podcast that apparently got people talking about the term.

What is squeecore? You’re soaking in it. Squeecore is the dominant literary movement in contemporary SFF; a movement so ubiquitous, it’s nearly invisible. … The essence of squee is wish fulfillment. Squeecore lives for the “hell yeah” moment; the “you go, girl” moment; the gushy feeling of victory by proxy. It’s aspirational; it’s escapism; it’s a dominant, and I would even say gentrified, form of SFF.

This podcast is defining this type of SFF as being written by and for people who haven’t ever had to struggle financially. That’s where the term “gentrified” is coming from. I’m pausing here, because I know for certain that this characterization is not correct for some of the authors specifically mentioned as writing this kind of SFF. I think this is therefore a perception by people who are pushing back against this tone in SFF, but also who are not necessarily correct in their perceptions.

Also, this transcript goes on:

 … these are stories that are congratulating you for reading them, without really challenging you. They’re telling you, you’re so special and good for reading this. And a major feature of squeecore is treating the act of making or consuming squeecore fiction as a heroic political act in and of itself.

And I’m kind of thinking, about the people doing the podcast, Wow, you’re reading a LOT of stuff into this type of fiction, and I think that’s probably mostly you. That’s how it seems when I skim through the whole transcript. I will add, I didn’t read through the whole thing carefully. That’s therefore my first reaction. I’m also probably biased against the opinions expressed here because those opinions are so negative, and guess what they’re negative about? Right: The Goblin Emperor is presented as an example of this self-conscious and self-congratulatory type of YA-adjacent, overly positive, Pollyanna-ish fantasy.

Obviously I don’t agree at all. So I’m rejecting all these terms. None of them apply to the kind of fantasy I most prefer, which is, let me see if I can make a list that is reasonably accurate. Okay, here:

Positive in toneNot grittyNot self-consciousHigh fantasy in style, or something in that ballparkEnds with the world in a better place

I realize #5 may be an extension of #1, but I think it’s a little different. The tone of the novel is obvious from the first pages. You don’t need to read to the end of, say, Troubled Waters or Chalice or The Cloud Roads to know that the story is going to be positive. You can tell that right away, immediately. They then go on to end with the characters in a better place, which is part of what the tone promises; but also, at least by the end of the series, with the world better off as well. If the characters solve their problems by essentially creating a pocket universe and crawling into it after giving up on getting the world to improve, that is not at all what I’m talking about here.

I can come up with a long list of novels that fit this sub-sub-sub genre, but we still don’t have a word for books that fit those criteria. Not hopepunk, not sweetweird, not (ugh) squeecore. The closest is therefore still …. noblebright. Which is a term that did not catch on, and no wonder. I don’t think anyone likes it much. I don’t. But the way the term is handled, it still comes much, much closer to defining the type of fantasy that includes The Goblin Emperor and other books like that than any other term I know of.

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Tasmakat Update: Let’s Not Use the Word “Momentum” just yet

Okay, so, I did take ten days or so, starting the WorldCon weekend, to cut rather than move forward. I actually enjoyed that — few hard decisions about cutting huge sections; it was almost all cutting at the sentence and occasionally paragraph level. Plus, I got to revisit the parts of the story I wrote really fast and barely remember. Occasionally I was literally saying to myself, “Oh, look at this! I remember this!” That’s kind of fun.

There are parts that are probably still too slow. On the other hand, some important foreshadowing takes place in those scenes. That’s why they’re in there in the first place. Dealing with that is most likely going to be annoying and difficult, but hey! It’s a job for later, not for now, so I don’t care.

I cut almost exactly 30,000 words, which is to say, about 100 pages, which was my goal. That makes the length of the in-progress manuscript seem insane, but not ABSOLUTELY insane, so I’m more comfortable moving forward. I’m hoping I can finish this book within another 300 pages (that’s 90,000 words, and YES, I am completely aware that that is the total length of many novels, there’s no need to point that out.) If I hope for 300 pages, I bet it’s more. But, well, whatever, I decline to worry about that now.

So, I finished cutting this past Saturday. I also paused and estimated that if I can manage 3000 words every Saturday and Sunday and 2000 words every workday, then I might about get this manuscript finished by the end of October. Yes, the Gen Bio class is definitely in the way. Definitely. But working out that calculation immediately made me feel better. That daily goal strikes me as (a) challenging, but (b) also reassuringly within reach. It makes me feel that this project is under control. I don’t have to hit that deadline, there’s not that kind of stress, but seeing “the end of October” pop out of this kind of calculation makes me feel that probably I’ll be typing THE END at least in November somewhere, not next January or anything dire like that.

Also, I wrote 5000 words on Sunday. And I know exactly what I’m doing next, which is even better! I don’t want to declare that I’ve recovered forward momentum, but I hope I have. Ryo had an intense conversation with Soretes that sorted out certain extremely important things and set up the next scenes. We haven’t left Avaras yet, but it’s now clear we’re going to be heading south almost at once.

I honestly thought Geras would be going with Aras and Ryo into the country of sand. It’s just now become clear that he won’t. He’s come all this way, for excellent and important reasons, but I’m sending him off in a different direction in the very next scene. I’m almost sure that’s what’s going to happen. It makes sense to do that, and, major perk, it cuts the character list down for the last third of the book. The middle third of the novel was quite difficult because of the immense character list. If I eventually do a major cut out of that portion of the book, I’ll probably lose some characters, and I know for certain that various readers would find that disappointing. Regardless, whittling down the character list will help simplify things for almost the entire rest of the story. Going into the country of fire: Aras, Ryo, Tasmakat, and just one other person. I almost typed that character’s name. I forget you all don’t know what’s happened so far, but I think I had better not include that name in this post, as that might constitute at least a minor spoiler.

Anyway: tonight, Ryo will have a couple more conversations, not as intense, and then I will most likely write the entire journey to the country of fire in about two paragraphs. Then he and Aras and the others will cross the bridge and head south. They have a distinct goal in mind. I’m not sure when that goal will get utterly derailed, but probably pretty soon. Probably not this coming chapter, but probably the one after that. I’m chuckling as I imagine reader reactions to the moment that happens. I’m going to get a real kick out of dropping that revelation on you all. I don’t think anybody will see it coming, although I’ve foreshadowed it.

It’s tempting to hint about it further, but I am heroically resisting the urge.

So: things are looking pretty good!

AND I have finally graded the five-page basic chemistry worksheets I created and assigned for students to do while I was gone last Thursday. I hope they didn’t find it as intensely boring to do that assignment as I did to grade it, because ugh, that was truly stultifyingly boring. A couple of them blew that off, but most of them did a decent job and some a quite good job. Overall, I’m quite pleased. I can see I need to go over a couple of terms, including what is meant by “valance electrons” if I want them to understand that. I’m a little uncertain about whether to bother. This isn’t Intro to Chemistry. In that class, the concept is really important. In General Bio, now that we’re out of the chemistry chapter, we aren’t going to mention that again.

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Recent Reading: An Immense World by Ed Yong

An Immense World is a great book about the sensory worlds of nonhuman animals.

This book was recommended to me by another panelist at the Philosophical SF workshop – the neurobiologist Ben Kinney,  unsurprisingly – and I’m so glad because it’s fascinating and just plain fun to read.

I hardly know what to say about it, except that the book is quite long and therefore the 10% sample is definitely extensive enough to show you whether you want to read the whole thing. I definitely did. I’m only about 20% of the way through, but I couldn’t wait to tell you about this book. Only then I couldn’t think how to describe it. So, fine, I’ll just provide a handful of paragraphs that particularly appealed to me. These are not in order from within the book, by the way. I started with a sentence that I especially liked and then took little fragments from here and there. Choosing which paragraphs to include here was … I started to say, not easy. But it would be more correct to say, practically random. This is just a delightful book!

So, here:

I am staring at a jumping spider, and even though its body is pointing away from me, it is staring back. Four pairs of eyes encircle its turret-like head, two pointing forward and two pointing sideways and backward. … Jumping spiders “are the only spiders that will turn and look at you routinely,” says Elizabeth Jakob, whose lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, I am currently visiting. … Humans are such a visual species that those of us with sight instinctively equate active eyes with an active intellect. In their flitting, darting movements, we see another curious mind investigating the world. In the case of jumping spiders, this is not unwarranted anthropomorphism. Despite their poppy-seed sized brains, they really are surprisingly smart. The Portia species are famed for planning out strategic routes when stalking prey or flexibly switching between sophisticated hunting tactics. …

This made me think of a praying mantis I encountered not that long ago. Talk about an arthropod that will turn and look at you! I love praying mantises.

Image from Pixabay

But back to the jumping spider:

These [the pair of central eyes] point straight ahead and are the largest of the four pairs. They are also the sharpest. Despite being just a few millimeters long, they can see as clearly as the eyes of pigeons, elephants, or small dogs. … The central pair may be sharp and mobile, but their field of view is very narrow. If they were all the spider had, its vision would be like two flashlights sweeping around a dark room. The secondary eyes on either side of the central pair compensate for this shortcoming with a much broader field of view. Though they are themselves immobile, they are highly sensitive to motion. If a fly buzzes in front of the spider, the secondary eyes spot it and tell the central eyes where to look. And here’s the truly bizarre part: if the secondary eyes are covered, the spider cannot track moving objects. … [To us,] these tasks – sharp vision and motion detection – feel inseparable. And yet jumping spiders have separated them so thoroughly that they exist within different sets of eyes. The central ones recognize patterns and shapes and see in color. The secondary ones track movements and redirect attention.

This is remarkable to think about, but we didn’t start with sight. We started with smell and taste, and then got into vision with a description of the weird way that vision almost count as a chemical-based sense. This made me think of Project Hail Mary, by the way, and what animals would look like if sight had never evolved, and what that might really be like.

But this tidbit about taste also caught my eye:

The most extensive sense of taste in nature surely belongs to catfish. These fish are swimming tongues. They have taste buds spread all over their scale-free bodies, from the tips of their whisker-like barbels to their tails. There’s hardly a place you can touch a catfish without brushing thousands of taste buds. … in the mid-1990s, when Caprio tested the marine hardhead catfish, he was shocked to learn that almost half its taste buds react to D-amino acids. [The D forms of amino acids are incredibly rare.] … He eventually learned that several marine worms and clams can flip L-amino acids into their mirrored D opposites.

This book isn’t exactly about weird senses. It’s about the different sensory worlds nonhuman animals live in, and about the exercise of imagination it takes to try to put ourselves into those worlds. Here’s how the book actually starts:

Imagine an elephant in a room. … Now imagine a mouse has scurried in too. A robin hops alongside it. An owl perches on an overhead beam. A bat hangs upside down from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers along the floor. A spider has spun a web in a corner. A mosquito buzzes through the air. A bumblebee sits upon a potted sunflower. Finally … add a human. Let’s call her Rebecca. …

The elephant raises its trunk like a periscope, the rattlesnake flicks out its tongue, and the mosquito cuts through the air with its antennae. All are smelling the space around them, taking in the floating scents. The elephant sniffs nothing of note. The rattlesnake detects the trail of the mouse and coils in ambush. The mosquito smells the alluring carbon dioxide of Rebecca’s breath and the aroma of her skin. It lands on her arm, ready for a meal, but before it can bite, she swats it away – and her slap disturbs the mouse. It squeaks in alarm, at a pitch that is audible to the bat but too high for the elephant to hear. The elephant unleashes a deep, thunderous rumble too low-pitched for the mouse’s ears or the bat’s, but felt by the vibration-sensitive belly of the rattlesnake. Rebecca, who is oblivious to both the ultrasonic mouse squeaks and the infrasonic elephant rumbles, listens instead to the robin, which is singing at frequencies better suited to her ears. But her hearing is too slow to pick out all the complexities that the bird encodes within its tune.

The robin’s chest looks red to Rebecca, but not to the elephant, whose eyes are limited to shades of blue and yellow. The bumblebee can’t see red either, but it is sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that form a bullseye at the heart of the sunflower, which grabs the attention of both the bird and the bee. The bullseye is invisible to Rebecca, who thinks the flower is only yellow. … The seven creatures share the same physical space, but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. …

But when we get to sight, we get back to this stuff about ultraviolet and different color perceptions. You’ve probably all encountered this before, but Yong writes about this with more verve than your typical biology textbook:

If bees were scientists, they might marvel at the color we know as red, which they cannot see, and which they might call “ultrayellow.”

[A] bird’s color vision is a pyramid, with four corners representing each of its four cones. Our entire color space is just one face of that pyramid, whose spacious interior represents colors inaccessible to most of us. If our red and blue cones are stimulated together, we see purple – a color that doesn’t exist in the rainbow and that can’t be represented by a single wavelength of light. These kinds of cocktail colors are called non-spectral. Hummingbirds, with their four cones, can see a LOT more of them, including UV-red, UV-green, UV-yellow, and probably UV-purple (which is red + blue + UV). At my wife’s suggestion … I’m going to call these rurple, grurple, yurple, and ultrapurple. … These non-spectral colors and their various shades account for roughly a third of those found on plants and feathers. To a bird, meadows and forests pulse with grurples and yurples. … Many supposedly “white” bird feathers reflect UV and wouldn’t look white to birds.

Apparently it turns out that for most bird species where we think the males and females have the same plumage? They don’t. They look very different – if you include ultraviolet. Ditto for butterflies that mimic each other. To us, the mimics look the same. But they don’t look the same to each other.

I could go on forever, even from the 20% of the book I’ve read so far. This is just a wonderful book, and I want to go back and suggest panel topics based on this for WorldCon and Archon and so forth. Too late for that this year, but maybe next year! In the meantime, I’m considering how to turn this into an out-of-class project for my biology students, if I turn out to need that kind of project. The sample is so extensive that it should be easy to design some sort of project that can be done on the basis of the sample alone. And probably just about everyone has a phone capable of getting the Kindle app? We’ll, we’ll see.

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Novel Openings: Two SF novels

Of the ebooks I picked up at WorldCon, two were hard SF. I think everything else was fantasy or romance or whatever, so these two make a set. I’ve also met both authors and I’ve liked their earlier books. Let’s look at both of these novels now, one right after the other.

So, first, let’s take a look at a new novel Alan Smale. He’s the guy who wrote The Clash of Eagles trilogy, which is, how shall I put this … okay, given a normal curve that goes from zero tension to ultimate tension, this trilogy is way the hell over on the right-hand side of that curve. So, if you’re into relaxing reads at the moment, this may not be exactly what you’re in the mood to pick up. But it’s really well written! And the ending is fine!

And it turns out Smale has a new book out, which I hadn’t realized. It’s an alternate history with the point of departure set in the recent past. Let me see … all right, here’s the description of the backstory: In Hot Moon, the Soviet Union beats the US to the Moon, landing a single cosmonaut on the lunar surface two months ahead of Armstrong and Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing in July 1969. … if chief designer Sergei Korolev had not died, the Soviets would have maintained their former development pace and beaten the US to the Moon. The survival of Korolev is the point of departure for the Hot Moon timeline.

This sounds like a thriller, possibly a technothriller. Given Smale’s previous trilogy, I’m guessing the story is probably pretty intense in places, though I can hardly imagine it’s as intense as the Clash of Eagles trilogy. From the overall description plus reviews, I’m guessing it’s a bit like Andy Weir’s work, with lots of technical detail. I enjoyed that very much in Weir’s books, so for me this is a plus, as long as the tech details are worked smoothly into the story. I picked up the full book, not a sample, because I know Smale can write. If I’m not in the mood for high-tension right now, I will be eventually, and here this one will be.

Let’s take a look at the opening:

1. Hot Moon by Alan Smale

In orbit around the Moon, ferocious bees assaulted a tin can.

Spacesuited, untethered, and in free fall, Vivian Carter struggled to focus her thoughts and make sense of the scene before her. Woozy from pain and shock, she heard no voices in her headset, nothing but the seething white-noise hiss of jammed S-band communication.

That can’t be right.

It was that empty hiss that freaked her out the most. She was alone in the void, between spacecraft, and as isolated as she had ever been. Comms were critical, and Vivian had none.

She’d been out of it for long, precious moments. Ever since the Soviet cosmonaut’s bullets smashed into her shoulder and raked her helmet and sent her tumbling slowly in space, sixty miles above the mares and uplands, the basins and craters of the Moon. Since the impact trauma, she’d been suspended in a stunned reverie.

*****

Okay, so that’s a fabulous first sentence. Also, we’re sure starting with a bang, or at least directly after a bang. Quite a situation! This is a great example of an opening that’s trying to hook the reader with the question And what happens next? How does she get out of this? Reading a little farther, I’m seeing that oh, yes, lots of technical details. Wow, my goodness, we end the chapter by ramping up from a rifle to a missile launcher. Actually, I really DO want to know how Vivian gets out of this.

But, tearing ourselves away from Hot Moon, let’s look at the opening of the other SF novel I picked up.

This one is by Jim Cambias. I’ve liked lots of things about his previous books, though not everything about any specific book. But I’m interested in anything he writes, and he too has a recent title that I hadn’t known about. It has a funny subtitle for Part 1, so I’ll start with that.

2) The Godel Operation by James Cambias

Part 1: The Imaginary Girlfriend Operation

Here’s how it all happened, or at least how I currently remember it. You might want to keep that in mind.

At the tag end of the Tenth Millenium, I lived in a habitat called Raba, in the Uranus Trailing Trojans. It was an old rock-and-ice asteroid, all honeycombed with tunnels, with a big rotating habitat cylinder stuck on for the meat people. I was living in a cheap little spider mech body at the time, and earned my honest living in the water mines, keeping the big stupid drill bots running despite their energetic efforts to wreck themselves. Nanotech refiners are all very well, but at some point you have to grind stuff up for them, and that means big stupid machines made of iron and graphene. Our three idiots were named Aban, Beka, and Ciadie.

My partner was a human named Zee, pretty clever for a lump of meat.

*****

Wow, is that different from #1! It’s different in practically every way! This is the total opposite of opening with action or opening in media res. This one is also high tech, but massively less familiar, much farther future. Also, Hot Moon was third person and this is first.

I like this, though! I like it a lot. The voice here has energy, which is one way (not the only way) to compensate for opening without action. Lots of worldbuilding is going to be required in the opening chapters here. That’s going to be demanding. But the voice immediately offers a sense of personality.

Of course I’m biased because I’ve liked previous books by both these authors, but I do like both these novel openings. I believe I prefer Cambias’ book at the moment. Near-past and near-future SF is not my favorite, as a rule. But I’ll certainly read both of these … eventually. That’s why I picked up full books and not just samples.

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