Friday, November 30th, 2007

Time	Event
9:41a	Thud: Our Sea Words: 2251 Total words: (still not consecutive, and actually not all the written words either -- this is chapters 1, 2, 5 & 6, and I also have parts of chapters 3 and um, 9, but this isn't writing out of order, goodness me no, and you can tell the difference because it's different threads): 10692 Tea: Jasmine Music: No music, people asleep Files: 6. (Thud, writing-in file, plan, whole-thing file, Carthaginian name file, and newly created Cards file. I have not mentioned the cards yet in the text, yet I have figured out the four suits and the eight cards in each suit and what they are, because I'm using them for chapter titles and doing all sorts of clever things with them which will never be apparent to anyone except me. It's possible nobody in this entire book will ever mention the cards -- though I think they will -- but there you go. Anyway, the good news is that this novel now has a structure, and I know what it's about, which is a good thing.) RSI: It's such a good thing I have this line here. Do exercises! Reason for stopping: About to starve to death, and end of chapter. It's a long time since I did that thing where you know something and you do something about that and suddenly there's a whole character, a life and an inevitable death, all coming out of that. The thing I knew was that Elitha, my first person POV character, who is a Phoenix (Carthaginian, human) and a priest in the temple of Melkart, would be naked and part way through scraping herself off with a strigil after a quarterstaff match when interrupted with an urgent summons. The implication of this is an opponent, also there and scraping. At first, this opponent didn't deserve a name, because hey, you can't name everyone, it confuses readers, and I tend to only bother to name people I expect the reader to re-encounter. Then he gave Elitha his robe, because it was dirtier than hers and she was going to mess up whatever she put on if she didn't have time to finish getting clean. Whereupon he had acquired a characteristic, kind and thoughtful, and an attitude towards Elitha, liking her and wanting to help, and therefore deserved a name, which turned out to be Kanmi. Having a name, he got a two line description -- not a physical description, (which would be "Dark eyed and Carthaginian looking and fit enough to be practicing with a quarterstaff, though now you mention it relatively physically slight but well muscled, like a dancer") but an encapsulation, he was one of the priests who had been given to the temple as a baby and knew nothing of life outside it, and he had been kind to Elitha since she first came and everything was strange to her. And the next thing you know he has acquired an ambition -- to have an adventure -- and hence a strong desire to go with Elitha on her adventure, and there they are by the end of the chapter setting off together. And sooner or later he's going to be killed, I just know it, though I don't know where or when or why, and if I'd just left him alone he'd have lived out his life contentedly in the temple of Melkart in Karth Tyr, except that he wouldn't, because he wouldn't exist. Writing is a very odd thing, sometimes, really it is. Happy birthday malkingrey! (15 Comments | Comment on this)
2:42p	SF and the human condition janni was talking this morning about how when you read a mainstream book sometimes you want to say "Get over it and go and save the world instead", and other times the real world problems of the mainstream book are sufficiently interesting that you don't wish the place would suddenly be infested with a plague of dragons. (I am reminded of perkinwarbeck2's review of Mill on the Floss that suggested it would be a much better book with an added alien invasion plot.) This connects up with something I was thinking. When one reads something, anything, the characters have problems. Maybe the problems are boring and have been seen before -- and this applies just as much to the space cadet who keeps getting bullied because he's the only human in the starship school -- but in SF there's always the interesting possibility of the world surprising you. Even when it doesn't, even if the answers all turn out to be predictable, the SF reader has still had a good experience because there was always the possibility of being surprised... and if the worst comes to the worst, at least they saved the world. Everything, really, is about the human condition. SF lets you talk about the human condition more widely and from different angles by contrasting it with the alien condition and the AI condition and the android condition, but really, the readers and writers are human. In SF, you get books like Spin and Cyteen where new and interesting problems (aliens speeding up the rotation of the Earth, cloning and life extension tech) ask new and interesting questions about the human condition. Most of the things mainstream books hbave to say about it have been said before, and even encountered before in real life. They havve limited options to examine. In mainstream to get new questions that haven't been asked before about the human condition you have to get masterpieces like Ian McEwan's Atonement, but SF gives you constant new angles for getting at things. But the problem with recommending SF to the non-SF reader is that they have no filters. If you give them Spin and they are knocked over by it, they're likely to grab Into the Slave Nebula (a book I'm actually very fond of) and they're not going to have the experience an SF reader has of expecting to be surprised, they're going to conclude it's crap and likely dismiss the whole genre. Or they're going to think you mean that SF predicts tomorrows problems and try to read it as futurology, where SF is terrible at that considered individually, but not bad considered as an experience. But that's why they latch onto SF by non-SF writers, I think, the ideas are genuinely new, and the style is OK, and the pacing isn't scary, (SF pacing is a rant for another day) and the book is by damn saying something new about the human condition. Shikasta is a truly terrible book in all sorts of ways, but even so. Yesterday, when I had no brain, I entered the first 108 books on my shelf (alpha by author) into LibraryThing. I wasn't surprised that of that first 108 books, the one most other people owned was Pride and Prejudice. I was surprised that the one that came second, above all the other Austen (I have all of Austen, worse luck), above everything I own starting with A, was The Handmaid's Tale. I own all Atwood's novels and some of her short story collections (some of her poetry too, but that's on a different shelf) and none of them were anywhere near The Handmaid's Tale. The Handmaid's Tale is a good book. I like it. I don't think it's brilliantly original, but then when I read it I'd read Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue and Sherri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and various other things within SF that were playing with feminism and dystopia. It isn't clunky the way a lot of SF written by non SF-readers is, largely because utopic/dystopic is a mode that arose outside SF and isn't so challenging to write, and also because Atwood's a pretty good SF writer. (I'd have nominated Oryx and Crake for the John W. Campbell Memorial Hard SF or Solidly SF Anyway, Really We Mean It Award.) But in any case, among people who have entered their A books into Library Thing, it is outstandingly more popular than all her other books, and that may be because it was made into a film, but I think it's because it's saying something about the human condition they can't say because they're confining themselves to quotidian and thus limiting their options, and they need an alien invasion, or to go out and save the world. (23 Comments | Comment on this)

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