tadhg.com » science-fiction

“Let’s Enhance”

Tadhg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:29:16 +0000

A particularly inane trope:

In case the point isn’t crystal clear: you can’t do that. There are no image enhancement programs that let you know what the data missing at the point of capture is.

There appear to be plenty of people who think this kind of thing isn’t just possible but trivial (people who have “chosen to be smart at other things”, perhaps), at least judging by the amount of times it comes up on Clients From Hell.

I’m prepared to cut Star Trek and Blade Runner, and to a lesser extent Battlestar Galactica, some slack given that they’re science fiction, and we don’t actually know what the software capabilities or the capture format was. In Blade Runner, my interpretation of that scene is that what Deckard has his computer system analyze isn’t a simple photo, but rather some kind of hologram with a much larger amount of stored information than is apparent.

The other clips, however, deserve nothing but scorn and have no excuse. The fact that it’s doing the impossible is one thing, and then there’s also the fact that it’s a completely tired idea that exemplifies bad, lazy writing.

Put aside the first consideration for a moment and assume that this kind of technology is commonplace—you wouldn’t have characters reacting the way they do in these scenes. Either the person responsible for the analysis would simply do it themselves, or, nobody would be impressed at all by the fact that it’s possible. Instead, here you get a mixture, as if the technology exists but somehow the character is a total genius for thinking of using it.

Note that some forms of enhancement are possible; if you get a blurry shot of a license plate, it’s theoretically possible to use probabilistic analysis to get the letters or numbers, because you know in advance what the possible answers are. But that’s very different from what’s shown in those clips.

Also note: this post is not meant to imply that any other aspects of the shows referenced above are necessarily more realistic in any way.

Tags: humor, science-fiction, technology, television, video, writing

Gizmodo on Space Battle Physics

Tadhg — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:06:48 +0000

This article is an excellent overview of how near-future space combat might actually work, and also points out plenty of things that depictions of far-future space combat have gotten very wrong.

I was sad to see no mention of Babylon 5 in it, since that show made an effort to depict realistic ships and combat.

It is still questionable as to whether small, highly maneuverable fighter craft make any sense; I think it depends on how maneuverable the larger craft are. If they’re not particularly agile, then simply sending lots of firepower in a straight line will be much more cost-effective.

The comments for the article are worth reading through as well… how space combat would really be is still unclear, but the discussion there has some great food for thought.

Tags: science-fiction, tech, war

Doomsday Book Review

Tadhg — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:53:24 +0000

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book won the Nebula award in 1992 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1993. I would describe it as a time travel plague thriller academic farce, and of all the triple crown winners it is my least favorite. Some of its ideas were good, and some of its passages powerful, but overall I found it disjointed and less than gripping.

That it centers around time travel is something I hold against it—I generally don’t like time travel stories. There are exceptions, but my tolerance for it is quite low. Willis doesn’t screw around with it, which is good, but there’s a vagueness around how it works that I dislike. This vagueness bleeds into the next aspect of the story I don’t like, which is the somewhat farcically poor preparedness on the part of the time travellers and their organization. This reminded me somewhat of The Sparrow, which also featured characters being entirely too blasé about entering dangerous and unknown situations. Unlike with The Sparrow, here Willis uses the lack of competence as part of the farce aspect of the novel, but I didn’t think that worked too well.

It didn’t help that Doomsday Book also prominently features a trope I can’t stand: that of having a character with completely critical information fall ill and then mumble incoherent fragments that hint at but cannot be used to discern the knowledge the other characters need. This is a huge part of Doomsday Book, and I really couldn’t stand it.

I didn’t find the comic aspects of the book particularly comic. Instead of the farce providing comic relief, for me it underscored the incompetence of the people running the time travel operation in a frustrating rather than amusing way.

The idea of academics getting ahold of time travel capabilities and getting into tight situations while using it for research isn’t a bad one, but I don’t like its execution in Doomsday Book. It’s possible that it requires a certain type of suspension of disbelief that wasn’t forthcoming; I found myself thinking “that’s just ridiculous” too often, and not at the points where I think Willis wanted the reader to react that way.

Something about the text’s “Englishness” also threw me off, and I suspect that this was due to the fact that it’s set in Oxford, with primarily British characters, but is written by an American (I noted the awkwardness before I found out that Willis is American).

Overall I can’t recommend it, although I know at least one person who liked it, and it’s quite likely that it just happened to push all the wrong buttons for me.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Speaker for the Dead Review

Tadhg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:52:36 +0000

Speaker for the Dead is the second novel in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. It won the Nebula award in 1986 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1987. Its predecessor, Ender’s Game, is revered as a science fiction and geek cult classic that still has resonance in geek culture. I liked Ender’s Game when I first read it years ago, and when I re-read it recently (prior to Speaker for the Dead), I enjoyed it and thought it held up quite well.

Ender’s Game is quite a tightly-packed tale, one that carries the reader along with plot and character development that gel well with the gradual revelations about the larger setting. Speaker for the Dead feels much less convincing on a number of levels. It’s not as compact—we’re not following Ender as he grows older, the plot in synch with his development. Furthermore, while Ender’s Game seemed plausible in terms of characterization in its limited environment (I felt the weakest characters were Ender’s siblings, and the others outside of the military), Speaker for the Dead relies quite heavily on Card’s depiction of a broader range of people in far less restricted environments. I don’t think he succeeds with them, and the idea that Ender would be able to perceive them so clearly just rang false for me throughout.

I also felt that the concept that Ender and his friends and family were essentially the most important people in the universe wore thin. Again, that made sense in Ender’s Game, but works far less well in the sequel.

Overall I found it enjoyable, and thought it had some fairly interesting ideas, but it wasn’t a classic the same way Ender’s Game was, and it didn’t really feel like a deserving winner of the award trio.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Startide Rising Review

Tadhg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Startide Rising is the second novel in David Brin’s Uplift Universe series, and it won the Nebula in 1983 and the Hugo and Locus in 1984. I read its predecessor Sundiver first, and it nearly stopped me from going on to Startide Rising. I didn’t like the writing style at all, and it felt unpolished. It must be said that its ideas and setting were interesting: it’s “big universe” science fiction, with a multitude of alien races. The unique concept Brin came up with was that every alien race was raised to technological advancement (or even sentience) by some other race acting as “patron”—except for humanity, which reached a high degree of advancement, and raised dolphins and chimpanzees to higher-level sentience, without a patron.

Startide Rising concerns a dolphin-/human-/chimpanzee-crewed starship that comes across a significant secret, one that causes them to be pursued by many hostile (and competing) alien races in pursuit of it. Much of the novel focuses on the internal politics (both inter- and intra-species) on the Earth ship, and the conflicts between the alien species, with the thread of Earth’s place in the universe and the fairness (or lack thereof) of the political system in place for galactic civilization.

Brin handles all of that far better than he did in Sundiver, and it’s a far more accomplished novel. That being said, it still didn’t really work for me, particularly in terms of characterization. I thought that the sentient dolphins and chimp were handled quite well, but found the humans less convincing. The immediate plot, e.g. that of how the protagonists would extricate themselves from their predicament, wasn’t particularly compelling. The most interesting thing about it was the background plot, which concerned the larger milieu.

This larger milieu is why I think that Startide Rising won the triple crown. For all that I wasn’t convinced by the plot or characterization, and despite my not being that fond of the writing style, Brin nevertheless had me believing in his universe.

This is a phenomenon mostly confined to fantasy and science fiction works, the creation of a world (or more) that entrances the audience despite other flaws in the writing. For science fiction of this style, it’s critically important. The “big universe” has to be believable.

Note, however, the “believable” and “realistic” are very different things. I’m not at all convinced that Brin’s universe is realistic. The same applies to other fictional universes that I’m much more fond of, like Iain M. Banks’ Culture universe, Niven’s Ringworld universe, or the “Zones of Thought” setting of Vernor Vinge. It’s not that they’re realistic, necessarily, it’s that they somehow make sense to me (and lots of other readers). Even while reading Brin and thinking that individual pieces were unrealistic, I had already accepted the larger framework, and was analyzing the plot in its context.

I think this may be one of the most important skills of the “big universe” science fiction author: creating a setting that the reader, regardless of how realistic it is, accepts as making sense, accepts as a perfectly plausible way for the universe of the future to turn out to be. Brin got that right, and it was enough to snag him the triple crown despite what he got wrong.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Rendezvous with Rama Review

Tadhg — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:55:54 +0000

Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama won the Nebula in 1973, and the Hugo and Locus in 1974 (as well as the 1973 BSFA award and the 1974 Jupiter and John W. Campbell awards). After I read it I described it as “old school”, which still seems accurate.

It’s a tale of first contact, in which a gigantic starship enters the solar system and humans mount an exploration expedition to it. It’s very much “hard” science fiction, in which the technical aspects of getting to and exploring a massive spaceship take center stage. The impressive feat of authorship here isn’t characterization or plotting, but imagining in detail how such a scenario would play out in reality. Clarke does this extremely well, and Rendezvous with Rama definitely adds to his reputation as a pre-eminent hard SF author.

I enjoyed it, and appreciated it as an intellectual exercise, but it’s not my favorite style of science fiction. It deserves its reputation as a classic, but it’s a classic in a subgenre that’s not as interesting to me as other strains of science fiction.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Dreamsnake Review

Tadhg — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:02:02 +0000

Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake won the 1978 Nebula and the 1979 Locus and Hugo awards. I’m having trouble figuring out why. This is not to say it’s bad—it’s quite good, and I’ve definitely encountered worse award winners. But it won all three while seeming to me like a good but unremarkable novel, and my expectation is that the “triple crown” winners would be remarkable in some way.

Dreamsnake does stand out in some respects from the previous winners. It’s entirely planetbound, with no characters at any time leaving Earth. It’s postapocalyptic, depicting a world ravaged at some earlier date by nuclear war and containing communities with vastly different technological levels. (It’s not a “postapocalyptic novel” in the traditional sense, however, as it takes place long after humanity has recovered to a functional state.)

I mostly liked the writing style, thought that McIntyre had some good ideas about how societies might evolve in the future, and thought there were excellent pieces of characterization in it, although some of it was less convincing. Like the two winners before it, Dreamsnake contains some musings on how human sexuality might change over time, and I thought that was handled pretty well.

What makes it short of remarkable is that the plot and the world aren’t quite compelling enough. The plot, is is the usual approach, uncovers the world as it progresses, but about two-thirds of the way through it veers off and leaves quite a few questions unanswered. It’s a relatively simple quest plot, with the lead character, a female healer called Snake, searching for a replacement for her dreamsnake (an alien snake that grants visions and that healers use to ease the pain, and sometimes the passing, of their patients). It has a romance subplot tied into it also, which I found less than convincing.

I thought it was worth reading, and I suspect that other triple crown winners will strike me as less deserving, but there was something ultimately slight about Dreamsnake that made me surprised that it won—I woud have been less surprised by a terribly-written winner that had some kind of (purportedly) “big idea” at its heart. Dreamsnake is definitely better than that, and perhaps my own focus on plot is what makes me underestimate it.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Ringworld Review

Tadhg — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:03:20 +0000

Larry Niven’s Ringworld, written in 1970, is considered a classic work of science fiction and is the first book to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards (and was also the first recipient of the Locus). I read it as part of my plan to read all of the eleven “triple crown” winners this year.

It’s a space opera, “big science” work, with plotlines including the galaxy becoming uninhabitable, major wars between different species, the development of various forms of faster-than-light travel, effective longevity treatments, genetic manipulation, civilizational collapse, and how to deal with massive-scale population expansion.

At heart, it’s a travel/adventure story, with four main protagonists whose backgrounds, characters, and interactions are examined. The main protagonist is Louis Wu, a far-future human who has a history of exploration and self-reliance (and who is 200 years old at the outset of the novel, but still youthful thanks to the anagathic substance boosterspice). He is approached by Nessus, an alien of the race known as “puppeteers”, who wants to recruit Louis and two others on an expedition.

The two others are Speaker-To-Animals, of the race known as “kzin”, combative feline-like aliens who fought a number of unsuccessful wars with humans but rae now attempting peace, and Teela Brown, a young human woman that Nessus insists on bringing because he is convinced that she is “lucky”.

Ringworld’s primary strength is in the universe it takes place in. One gets the impression that it is extremely large, and ancient, with all kinds of mysterious alien races running around out there as well as the primary races encountered in the novel. At the same time, the impression from the book is that it all fits together, which is quite an achievement when dealing with so much material. This is also impressive given the amount of technical innovations that Niven fits in, from stasis fields to the “tasp”, a weapon that works by activating the pleasure centers of the target’s brain.

Another strength is the ringworld itself, a habitable artificial construct that has a diameter of approximately Earth’s orbit around the sun, and which has a surface area (meaning the inner side of the ring that faces its sun) of about three million times Earth’s. This concept is a rather interesting one (to some, at least) and I think it’s significant that the bulk of the Wikipedia entry about Ringworld is taken up by technical notes on the ringworld.

Its characterization is probably its primary weakness. It’s not awful, but it’s not all that great. I never got a real sense of what Louis was actually like as a person, somehow. The main aliens are fine, although they don’t strike me as particularly deep portrayals of them, and Speaker-to-Animals comes across as a kind of Klingon/fantasy barbarian mix. Teela is definitely problematic, as she seems like a cipher or a “token female” for a lot of it—however, this also makes sense because of who and what she actually is, so in a sense by giving her the worst characterization of the four main protagonists, Niven may actually have made hers the most realistic and profound. I have no idea to what extent this is intentional.

Overall, I think it deserves its classic status, particularly because of the sheer breadth of the universe Niven created. When I first read it as a teen, I was intrigued by the ideas, but the story and characters didn’t stick much, and this time around my reaction was more or less the same.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Science Fiction Movies of This Decade

Tadhg — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:45:38 +0000

Why have there been so few good ones? I noticed this a while back, and having discussed the matter with some friends, it appears to be the case that the first decade of this millennium is really bad for cinematic science fiction.

I saw Children of Men last night, enjoyed it a lot and found it eerily plausible, and it is now at the top of my list of sf movies in the last eight years—but it doesn’t face much competition at all.

The only other movie I can think of that would compete with it is Code 46, which was quite good if low-key. But where are the instant classics?

The 80s had Alien, Blade Runner, The Empire Strikes Back, The Terminator, Aliens, and RoboCop, to name just those that spring to mind offhand. The 90s had Total Recall (unless you want to call 1990 the tenth year of the 80s…), Gattaca, Starship Troopers, and The Matrix, and doubtless more that I’m forgetting.

Those are all easy to come up with, but this decade? The Star Wars and Matrix movies released during it were awful. Serenity, while good, is very dependent on its parent series and wouldn’t be a classic on its own. There have been many terrible sf movies, from I, Robot to Transformers.

The comic-book adaptations might improve the picture a little bit, if one were to consider the X-Men movies, and possibly V For Vendetta as science fiction, but even then, they’re not really in the same league as the movies mentioned from previous decades.

I don’t know why this is the case, although Hollywood dynamics and economics doubtless play a large part. I hope it’s not a trend that will continue. Am I forgetting any major films that would prove me wrong about this decade? Or will they all be released in the next two years?

Tags: culture, film, morning-pages, science-fiction

Alternate History Versus Science Fiction

Tadhg — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:36:03 +0000

I finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today. I liked it, although I think it overdid it perhaps a little with its sheer Jewishness—it takes place in an entirely Jewish state, one whose inhabitants are all highly aware of their Jewishness in ways I’ve never encountered in real life. It’s not quite caricature, and it’s definitely a loving portrait in many ways, but it felt like Chabon figured out how to convey “a Jewish atmosphere”, and conveys it, and then hires a trucking company to keep on conveying it from his mind to yours, while you’re trying to follow the plot. I suddenly wonder if At Swim-Two-Birds strikes the non-Irish in a similar way, given that it’s steeped (very steeped) in Irishness. In any case, Chabon’s novel is a good one, and a good read, but my question is: is it science fiction?

I ask this because it won the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Nebula is a science fiction award. It’s also been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel; the Hugo is also a science fiction award. But The Yiddish Policemen’s Union really doesn’t strike me as science fiction.

This statement, of course, immediately demands a definition of what science fiction is. I think the canonical science fiction question is “what does it mean to be human?”, but I also think this question is explored in science fiction in relation to phenomena that overtly raise it. In other words, one could argue that all literature deals with the question of what it means to be human, but science fiction is the genre that contains things making the question explicitly necessary: aliens, artificial intelligences, replicants. Or it deals with what humanity will be like in the future, a prism through which it looks at what humanity’s like today.

Another way in which science fiction explicitly raises this question is by exploring the nature of reality itself, often in relation to the idea of multiple dimensions, so that the question is raised as “what does it mean to be human in the face of this revelation about reality?”

Obviously it’s a huge genre, and covers a great deal of space (ha ha), but I think that every book I’ve read that I’ve thought of as science-fictional covers the ground I just outlined.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union doesn’t seem to me to cover that ground.

So, okay, smart guy, if you say that, why’d it win a Nebula—awarded, presumably, by people who might know what science fiction is?

There’s this genre (or sub-genre, depending on where your view on the boundaries align) called “alternate history” (some might call it “alternative history”, but that brings up a different sent of boundaries), and it’s either in or next to the science fiction territory. The awarders might prefer to expand that territory (they might think of it as their territory), to claim more of literature for their own, and hence extend their honors to Michael Chabon… or they might have already assimilated all alternate history tales into their idea of what science fiction is.

That latter, I think, is the key point, and the reason for the title of this post. I certainly think some alternate history belongs in the science fiction genre (I’m not objecting to the 1963 Hugo for The Man in the High Castle), but all of it?

Many people now prefer the term “speculative fiction” to “science fiction”. In principle, I do too—a focus on scientific discovery simply isn’t necessary to the genre or its key question(s). They go together well, which is why the term arose in the first place, but at this point it seems unwieldy. Nevertheless, I can’t seem to stop using it, because somehow “speculative fiction” seems wrong—in the first place, isn’t all fiction speculative? If not, is it fiction? I sometimes use “sf” or “SF” instead, which in my mind is a handy stand-in for some combination of “science fiction” and “speculative fiction” that sounds right, isn’t redundant, isn’t overly restrictive, and covers just what I want it to cover.

In writing this post, I discovered another feature of “speculative fiction”—to my mind, it doesn’t have the same key questions, partly because it does include alternate history. If alternate history stories aren’t speculative, what is?

“Speculative fiction”, then is a subtly-different superset of “science fiction”.

I should note that the Nebula Awards info page doesn’t address any of these questions at all.

Why is The Man in the High Castle unproblematically sf to me while The Yiddish Policemen’s Union isn’t? Primarily because in the Dick novel, the possibility of other worlds with different historical outcomes is explicitly encountered by the characters. Dick is definitely suggesting that other worlds are possible, that the reality experienced by the characters might not be the only reality. This questioning of the nature of reality is definitely an sf trait. There isn’t any of that in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, as I noted above.

It is, however, very definitely a detective/crime/mystery novel; it even has the classic segment where the protagonist gets drugged by a dodgy doctor and imprisoned in a mental-hospital-like institution.

I like it, it was enjoyable, it deserves awards, but before and after this little exploration, it doesn’t fit as sf. It’s welcome to the Sidewise and the Edgar, however.

(I feel like it’s a shame I feel this way, too, since I oddly want to be happier at/for the first author to win a Pulitzer and Nebula for novels.)

Tags: books, criticism, genre, reading, science-fiction

Bad Trailers

Tadhg — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:57:20 +0000

When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)

The trailers for both were awful. Both selected what seemed to be carefully chosen bad dialogue from their respective movies. There was more of that to choose from in Robocop. Both trailers managed to make their films appear stilted and choppy. My impression while watching was to think that somehow decent trailer technology hadn’t been invented until the late 80s…

This is the version of the Robocop trailer I saw tonight:

Somehow it doesn’t seem as bad on a small screen. I think this is mainly because the music isn’t as noticeable. In the theater, the music really made it seem hokey.

The Terminator trailer is worse in terms of comparison with the movie itself:

I get the impression from this that the producers decided audiences would be much more interested in the idea of the future war, as much of the trailer is clips from that, despite the fact that those are very small parts of the film itself.

I really like both of these films, and think that The Terminator especially is a classic. That makes it all the more painful to see both represented by what look like slapped-together action clips.

One note, however, is that both trailers are relatively good at not giving away too much. Robocop’s trailer is clearly better, thankfully not referencing OCP’s connection to the criminal enterprises in the city. I get the feeling that modern trailers, at least in the US, are a lot worse about spoilers. The Terminator’s original trailer could have been a little better—really, it shouldn’t give away the fact that Kyle Reese is there to save Sarah, although that does become clearly early on.

Tags: culture, film, science-fiction

Future Shock

Tadhg — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:55:10 +0000

‘Shock’ might be too strong a word, but over the last year or so I’ve really had this “the future has arrived’ feeling. Some trends have been slowly taking shape over years—like the Blade Runner-style huge video billboards. (Of course, all of the technological trends have been taking shape for years, but for some the development has been mostly hidden until they reach a critical point of functionality.)

Video phone capabilities, brought to the mainstream mostly by Skype, were one of the things that triggered this feeling, earlier this year, when I realized that video phoning (something I have no interest in, really) had already taken off among a certain set of users, primarily parents who wanted their kids to see them while they’re travelling. Makes perfect sense, and that demographic also establishes that the technology has definitely arrived. (Amusing that it came as part of the personal computer and the internet, and not as part of the phone per se.)

Last night’s experience wasn’t so positive. I was filling the gas tank of a Zipcar at a Chevron station and the pump had an LCD screen and speakers. Video and audio of someone greeting me played when I started, and video and audio of them saying goodbye played when I finished. In between, weather reports, ads for local news, ads for the gas pump television service itself, and content selected from NBC played on the thing. Apparently NBC has some deal where they repurpose some of their content for these pumps. The ’station’ had a name, ‘NBC at the Pump’, and even a jingle, NBC’s three notes redone as car horn noises.

Somebody had to come up with all that stuff. The technology, the edited content, the jingle(!), all of it. Somebody had to decide that video as an advertising medium at gas pumps was a good idea.

I’m probably imagining this, but I really, really felt like this pump was pumping gas more slowly than pumps (without the video) that I’d used previously.

The content was pretty bad, of course. I would have loved to have been able to turn it off. I didn’t see that option, although it might have been there somewhere. It just seemed so bizarre. The ubiquity of advertising is hardly news, but still, is every opportunity to hit a captive audience going to be taken?

It felt very like the media/technology future from the first Robocop.

On the way back, Seth and I talked about the phenomenon of feeling like the “future” has arrived. There are other instances, like the fact that we can watch video on devices that are smaller than a pack of cigarettes. There’s shorter-term stuff, for example I used to say years back that I wasn’t going to get a cellphone until a decent device came along that combined PDA, phone, and music player tech—and now one has, although I won’t buy it. Sure, it was obvious that such a device would come along, but the fact that it has somehow marks a mini tech-epoch in my mind.

The other thing is that I used to pay a lot more attention to technological innovation, keeping up with chip speeds and device improvements and so on. I don’t do that anymore, but the advances keep coming, even when one doesn’t pay attention, and suddenly it’s commonplace to watch video on the train or look up Google Maps directions while walking around.

After coming home, I watched a clip that was highlighted on Penny Arcade, and it blew me away and gave me a different kind of future shock, the kind where I’m blown away by how cool a technology is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw. Crazy. Not totally new, but you just know that somebody’s going to get it completely right, soon, and then it’ll be everywhere.

Tags: consumerism, personal, science-fiction, tech

Some Notes on Editing the Second Draft

Tadhg — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:46:49 +0000

I finished the second draft nine days behind schedule, which in the overall scheme of things isn’t that bad a slip. It turned out to be extremely difficult to maintain a steady approach to the editing, unlike either the micronovel version or the first 35 episodes of AFBH, two projects of similar duration that I completed successfully (and on time) last year.

AFBH was a similar commitment in terms of time-per-day. What made that easier in comparison to the editing was that it was extremely predictable: doing it consisted of watching the episode, reading the appropriate section of the book, taking notes, and writing up each well-defined section.

The editing, however, varied from session to session, so that some days I had to cut heavily (at about a five-to-one ratio), other days I had to significantly fatten sections that I had merely sketched out, and sometimes I had to write entirely new material. Switching between those things was quite difficult. Most difficult of all was writing new material that I hadn’t planned out. Despite having worked on the thing for so long, significant chunks remained unplanned, and doing the task of working things into the plot while trying to stick to the daily routine was extremely tough for me.

I finally got unstuck with the remaining parts of the last two chapters when I divided them into five-hundred word chunks and came up with what each chunk should contain. That sounds obvious, but writing isn’t always like that for me, and often flows without that kind of planning. I might not need that kind of detailed plan all the time, but I apparently do need it to fall back on when struggling.

I’m not going to touch that novel for quite some time. Editing it was quite a stressful experience, and I need to let it go for a while. Going over deadline, and struggling to finish it while failing to do so, was not a pleasant experience.

I did find the daily public status reports to be a useful motivational tool. I really, really hated writing that I hadn’t made any progress, and so would often be forced by that to work on the editing, which tended to get easier once I started it. It didn’t always get easier, however, which accounts for a number of those “no progress” updates. The downside is the same as the upside—I couldn’t stand writing those posts stating that I didn’t make any progress. On the days where, for whatever reason, I knew I simply wouldn’t be able to get editing done, it was very unpleasant to put out an update.

Those updates probably shouldn’t be entire posts on the main page of my site, either. Thanks to my readers, as usual, and to everyone who gave me encouragement.

I’m extremely happy to have finished that second draft. Happy and relieved, and optimistic about future projects.

Tags: fiction, novel, personal, science-fiction, writing

SF Novel Second Draft Done

Tadhg — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:48:41 +0000

Yes, done

It’s been quite a struggle. that’s not too surprising, given that I’ve been wrestling with this draft for almost five years, the novel for almost six.

And now the second draft is done, and I’m going to leave it alone for a long time.

The truth is taht I’m not that happy with it. I knew that I wouldn’t be that happy with it when I started this latest attempt to get the second draft done. I found the editing extremely hard, and I also just didn’t feel that I knew how to solve a number of deep problems with the novel. I still don’t.

I suspect that people who read it are going to say, “You spent five years on this?” I imagine that after that, they’ll pointedly say, “Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in three weeks, you know.”

But it’s done. The first draft was unreadable, a colossal mess of almost 200,000 words. This version, while it might be a bad novel, at least passes as something that counts as a novel. So now I have a screenplay I’m proud of, a bad novel, and a number of short stories (some of them good) under my belt.

The next novel (which I intend to start early next year) will be better.

I appear to have lost seventy-four words along the way somewhere, but given the late-night nature of a lot of my posts, that might be an addition problem rather than being actually short in the word count.

Word count: 79926

Tags: fiction, novel, science-fiction, writing

SF Novel Second Draft Update C14 Stalled Once More

Tadhg — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 07:47:56 +0000

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Tags: fiction, novel, science-fiction, writing

SF Novel Second Draft Update C14 Still Stalled

Tadhg — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:55:37 +0000

I’ll do my best to finish over the next two days.

Tags: fiction, novel, science-fiction, writing

SF Novel Second Draft Update C14 Stalled

Tadhg — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:55:31 +0000

No progress. I’m stalled again. It’s unbelievabley frustrating to be stalled so close to the end. Hopefully I’ll get over it soon. One long burst of activity would finish the damn thing.

Tags: fiction, novel, science-fiction, writing

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