Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 34

4 Star Book Reviews: The Quantum Magician

The Quantum Magician by Derek Kunsken https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

I haven’t found a space opera that I liked in a long time, so I was very happy to find Kunsken’s big, frenetic, furious book. The beginning is a bit rocky. I got the impression that this was one of those projects that the author began back in high school, with an immense, complicated future history (Quebec colonizes Venus?) and the characters each with detailed back-stories. I felt like I was reading the second book in a series, but since I often skip the first book of serieses, I liked it.

The book is a heist novel, following a renegade genetically engineered quantum theoretician as he puts together a team to aid a rebel uprising. That plot gets a bit lost in its own ornamentation, but it’s saved by the recurring theme of revolt against the forces that made them. How do genetically engineered deal with their artificial instincts to fulfil their creators’ wishes? How do nations deal with their own histories? People and their mistakes? The only thing I felt the book was missing was children.

Also, I had a dream about this book while reading it, so it must be good.

The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41140983-the-quantum-magician was the first space opera I’ve been able to read in a long time. It’s a bit cluttered and unfocused, but it has some very interesting things to say about biological destiny. What if you’re a human engineered to live in deep, cold, high-pressure water? Or your desire to unlock quantum mysteries has been artificially extended past your desire to stay alive? Or you have a religious experience every time you smell the sweat of the master-race? What if you’re just a dumb ape that blasted itself into space, carrying all your dumb ape instincts with you? I had a dream about this book, but probably not the nightmare that Künsken would have wanted.

Interchange Alpha is done!

Back in the middle of December, I got a call from my agent, saying Flametree was interested in a sequel to Junction. Could I do it?

I said yes of course, and I spent the rest of the month arranging for Junction’s book launch, buying presents, and cooking, with these regular stabbing sensations in my chest. It was like somebody was prodding me in the heart with a plastic cake server. And as they prodded, they asked,  “…can you do it?”

I didn’t know. I continued not to know as I celebrated Christmas and New Year’s, launched Junction, wrote the outline for the sequel, learned a new way to write a book, wrote that book, and revised another book. Then it was time to begin writing Interchange.

So, I copied the outline over into a new document, took a valarian pill, meditated, turned on my playlist, and just sort of winged it. I wrote about a bear.

The bear made no further appearances, but I kept winging it, not worrying too much about accuracy, continuity, or much else. I just riffed off the outline for about 90 minutes every morning for a little less than three months. And now the Interchange alpha draft is done.

Mostly it’s the parts about aliens are done. I’ll deal with the humans and their squishy emotions in the next draft.

INTERCHANGE

Begun at 9:30am May 20th 2019 in my office on ul. Gurko.

First line: “Bamboo-grass crunched and the bear emerged from the mist.”

Finished at 11:30am July 12th 2019.

Last line: “Last Line: The Nightbow spun, filled with mountains.”

Length (alpha): 49,797 words

The next step is to let it rest. I’ll spend the rest of July fiddling with Centuries, then there’s WorldCon in August and also, like, my family or something. Then I’ll pick Interchange back up in September and start digging in and expanding! It’ll be at least 100K words by the time I’m done with it, and hopefully it’ll be ready for beta-readers.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, or if you just want more stories about how I cried in the car while my wife was talking to me, why not sign up for my newsletter (upper right corner of your screen) or join my facebook group?

The Fresh Air Hits Me

The fresh air hits me

I should open more windows

I should stay out here

4 Star Book Review: The Forest and Pale Green Dot

The Forest and Pale Green Dot by Justin Groot

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

This one gets me right where I live. In a mysterious and grand environment, monsters eat people. But the real monsters…are of the human psyche!

But seriously, this story is great. Rather than oceans, we have forests of monsterous trees that stretch from the sea floor to where the surface would be. People (“rangers”) put on body cameras and go into the forest, trying to avoid being eaten by the giant monsters that live there.

That’s pretty much it as far as worldbuilding goes. The monsters are just monsters – no speculative biology. And the author doesn’t even begin to deal with what having the oceans replaced with monster-forest would do to world history. That’s okay, though, this book isn’t science fiction or alternate history. It’s horror.

And as horror, it’s excellent, reminiscent of John Dies At The End. The Rangers are not normal people, and even if they don’t come to forest lugging traumatic emotional baggage, they sure as hell do when they leave.

My one problem is that the plot falters toward the end of The Forest, and the book ends aburuptly at what should be the 1/3 mark. That’s why I suggest reading The Forest and its sequel Pale Green Dot together and pretending they’re one book.

The Forest and Pale Green Dot by Justin Groot https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36566754-the-forest-pale-green-dot Did I talk about this one in my last newsletter? I can’t remember. You got your Earth, you replace the oceans with forests filled with very tall trees and kaijus. Don’t think to hard about the biology or alternate history, but the psychology is very good. The author ran out of ideas halfway through, but then he found some new ones.

Heaviness of Mind

Heaviness of mind

Without the strength to unload

Clouds through the ceiling

Orbital Aliens

Here’s a bad photo of some aliens I made.

I’m thinking a lot right now about aliens that live in orbit around an Earthlike planet. Their distant ancestors evolved in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized gas giant in the same star system, and they evolved ways to leave that atmosphere and travel between the giant’s moons, searching for resources. The nets of cycling nutrients they established now stretch across the system.

Upper left: These are the mountain-sized primary producers of energy, momentum, and biomass (think trees). Their six rocket motors allow them to migrate across interplanetary space (think whales). Loops of nonliving material are extruded and re-absorbed from their stony skin – the loops undergo a chemical reaction under light, which is extracted when they are re-absorbed. In this way, the mountain photosynthesizes without exposing any living structures to vacuum. Loops can also be extended to change the mountain’s center of mass and speed or slow its spin. Loops also act as nets to catch dust and small organisms.

Center left: Spinners extrude long threads of nonliving material from a single ring on their south poles. These threads have microscopic loops and hooks that connect to each other like the barbules of a feather, connecting them into a single disk-shaped umbra thousands of times wider than the spinner, itself. The threads also have microstructures along their upper and lower sides that change their reflectivity and electrical charge as well as (given enough time) the shape of the entire umbra. In some species, the umbra acts as a photosynthetic surface or a web to catch dust and prey. In others, the umbra is never-reabsorbed, and its only function is to control the orientation of the spinner relative to the elecromagnetic fields of the sun and planet. One field sets the spinner spinning against the other, and in these way, it generates an electrical current it can use to power its metabolism.

Lower left: Rocket animals use large, nonliving, featherlike structures to construct the bell of a rocket motor. (not much thought has gone into these ones…)

Upper right: Voxels are animals that build flexible, spherical shells covered with Velcro-like loops and hooks. When two voxels collide, they stick. Internal muscles pull on the plates of the shells, sending waves of motion through voxel colonies which allows the colony to change shape. The most common conformation is a sphere or a sphere-within-a-sphere, with air and other useful materials collected in the inner volume. The voxels can deform this sphere to stick out pseudopods and engulf other objects.

Center right: Momentum parasites shoot out columns of foam, which hardens in contact with vacuum and sticks to passing organisms. Some mere hitch a ride. Others aggressively fling victims toward the planet so they can climb into a higher orbit.

Lower right: Witch’s brooms only live in the upper atmospheres of planets, where there are enough gas molecules floating around for them to ionize. Air molecules enter at the head of the animal, where they are given an electric charge that attracts them to the tail of the animal. Molecules build up speed along the body of the animal before they exit, becoming exhaust that pushes the animal forward.

Critiques and advice much appreciated

For more information: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41427865-junction

Some aliens

Here’s a bad photo of some aliens I made.

An Enclosed Garden

An enclosed garden

Between the buildings, leaf-nets

Catch the angled light

4 Star Book Reviews: Against Empathy

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Ah what a breath of fresh air. This is a book about how to be good. Is empathy (that is, feeling the emotions of the person you’re trying to help) a good way to be more moral? Bloom makes the convincing case that it is not. There’s a lot of good data here, as well as thoughtful analysis, but thinking back the part I enjoyed most in the book was at the end, where the author talks about his own experiments with the environmental factors that affect our choices and perceptions. I’m not sure whether this book would convince someone who believes that the human mind is nothing but emotional responces and post-hoc rationalizations. Since I believe that people are sometimes rational, Bloom mostly just reinforces what I already know, for which I thank him.

4 Star Book Reviews: Perhelion Summer

Perhelion Summer by Greg Egan

This is probably the only climate change fiction I can manage. Egan side-steps the politics of the issue by talking about a cosmic accident that screws up Earth’s orbit and stresses the hell out of civilization. The main character is one of the people trying to find solutions to problems so big the very face of the moon changes.

I resonated with Egan’s treatment of violence and blame (they’re bad) and his descriptions of courage, kindness, and forethought. Egan continues to be one of the very few authors whose books I buy as soon as they come out, and this is why.