Busy on new story, plus some new reviews

July 31st 2007 at 4:41 pm

I have a deadline of today for a story for a themed anthology that I’m trying to wrap up. I’m not convinced I think the story is 100%, so I tore it back down this morning after working out and spent an hour on the couch with a notepad, and then nothing particularly “OMG this is so cool” came hitting me, so I took a long nap.

I think I have the tack for the rewrite now but I need to hurry up here.

In the meantime, Kate Macleod talks about Ragamuffin here:

I quite enjoyed Crystal Rain, and this is a sort of sequel (although it introduces all new characters and only picks up the old ones when the story is well underway, a structure I quite liked). Ragamuffin is even better than Crystal Rain. There are lots of cool ideas in it, the story is fast-paced, and the character of Nashara is very well done, especially when you find out who she is. As you can tell from the cover, she kicks ass, but she goes deeper than that too. You know, I’ve often been bugged by the scene in the movie The Matrix when Neo and Trinity blow away all the security guards in the lobby before going up to save Morpheus. These are security guards, not agents, so they’re human beings who are stuck in the Matrix and have no idea of what’s really going on. Do Neo and Trinity have to kill them to get to Morpheus in time? Almost certainly yes. But does it really have to be such a rah-rah moment? Or am I the only one thinking, you know those are really innocent victims if you think about it. No one is offering them the pills. Which is all to say a similar situation faces Nashara at one point, and she sees it like it I would. She does what she has to, but there is no rah-rah about it. Of course that moment is sort of a footnote to a scene that just happened to stand out in my mind. The whole book is both cool and fun (you know, there’s just not enough fun around these days. The fun quotient is really what divides the two Stars Wars trilogies in my mind. I like to go to dark places as much as the next person, but having fun has real value too), and I would recommend this book just for the names the ragamuffins give their ships.

Also forwarded to me today was Brutal Woman’s reactions to Ragamuffin, which are almost opposite to Kate’s:

See, so far this is a nice action-packed little dialogue-and-fight-scenes book, and there was this big rolicking chunk of it that I really enjoyed before this current lull (I’m over halfway done now), but… there’s seriously something missing for me. It’s got the kick ass female protagonist, and the interesting worlds and characters who are actually not white! and not Christian! Which is great!

But.

It’s falling into the same trap that I see a lot of SF books get accused of falling into, which is the: gee gosh bang wow look at all these neat ideas!

Oh, yeah, and there are these cool machine-people-superheros, but they don’t really care about anyone or themselves, because they are mechanically enhanced and have very little angst.

Mmm. The ‘trap of gee gosh bang wow’ is almost 100% the reason I read and enjoy SF, and ‘gee gosh bang wow with minority characters’ is as close to a mission statement as you can get. I embrace the love of pulp and genre entirely. The world is tough, depressing place, the more sense of wonder I can find the happier I am.

Thankfully both these reviews that basically say the opposite thing popped up today and cancelled each other out in my head.

Also up on the bat is a WOTmania review of Crystal Rain:

Crystal Rain is the debut novel of Tobias Buckell. The books tells an interesting scifi story, and it does it that all too unusual way… in under 400 pages. All in all, this is a very strong debut and a fun read.

At first, it’s difficult to say just where this story might be taking place, or even when. It’s a testament to Buckell’s skill as a writer that he manages to instantly invoke a sense of place and history. What might have been a nearly contemporary Caribbean setting, turns out to be a far future Caribbean settlement on another world, long cut off from the rest of the universe, and even from any real technology. This sense of place and culture is deepened by Buckell’s skilled use of character accent and jargon.

In case you are wondering why I would point out a tough review, I’ll point you to David Louis Edelman’s comments about that:

I always thought this behavior was kind of peculiar. We’re all aware that no single book will please everybody. I’ve eagerly pressed copies of Dune and Neuromancer into the hands of intelligent, well-read, open-minded people who later told me these were lousy books. So obviously, even if your novel emits white light and a heavenly choir chants every time you crack it open, there are going to be people who think it sucks big time. Why emphasize the negative?

I think I’ve discovered now why authors do that.

Imagine you’re sitting in the Coliseum in ancient Rome and two gladiators come out of the pen. One of them’s slick and unblemished with hardly a mark on him. The other guy’s got scars all over his arms and he’s missing a few teeth. Which one are you gonna bet on? I’m betting on the guy with the scars. Why? Because a scar is evidence of a tough fight that you came out of alive. It’s a mark of experience. And when we see the clean and unmarked gladiator, we just don’t believe that this guy has gone through fight after fight without making a single mistake. We figure that he’s just too young and green to have earned his scars yet.

It’s the same thing with being a novelist. If you haven’t had people dislike your novel, either a) you’ve accomplished something that nobody on this Earth has yet accomplished, or b) not enough people have read your book yet.

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