I haven't been much for posting lately, mostly due to busy-ness (work, my novel, my new writing class). But I have been reading on line. And I've noticed a trend lately of dissing e-books in comparison to paper books.

I guess it's the inevitable backlash new technology always brings. In this case, the primary argument I've seen is the Rupert-Giles-esque claim that the visceral experience of holding a book, touching it, smelling it, turning pages, etc, provides a sensory context that allows for greater comprehension and retention of what one reads than with eBooks.

This may be so, I can't say without seeing the scientific evidence. But here's what I know:

(1) For a long time after I got my PhD, I wasn't much interesting in reading recreationally. "Reading burnout" was my excuse for a long time, until I realized it'd been years since I graduated. Then I had to face up to the fact that I just wasn't reading as much anymore. I felt guilty about that. Unintellectual.

My recreational reading has increased dramatically since I started reading eBooks. It's just more convenient. You can take all your books with you anywhere, and have a book on hand to read in the doctor's waiting room, or at work (while looking busy staring intently at the computer screen).

(2) I like being able to "un-highlight." Does this ever happen to anyone else: you're reading, you find a passage you want to remember, you highlight it, and on the next page, the author says the same thing even better, or in more detail, and you highlight that, too? Pretty soon, you're over-highlighted. It's good to be able to just have the parts you really want to return to marked. This goes for bookmarks, too (especially in recipe books).

And who knows? Maybe more precise highlighting leads to greater comprehension and retention.

(3) Reading paper books has become physically challenging for me. With a book-book, you usually are holding it in your lap, or on your knees, or on a table, and looking down. For extended periods of time. This hurts my neck something fierce. Or alternatively, you have to hold the book at or above your line of sight. Ditto, strain on the arms. I have looked into inventions that will hold a book up in your line of sight for you that don't hold the pages so tight you can't change them every minute or so, but such inventions don't work as well as devices that hold computers and tablets up in your line of sight.

I believe the physical ability to read a paper book is something that should be fought for with physical therapy and gumption. But in the meantime, my difficulties is what they is.


Sometimes, I don't have a choice but to read a paper book. Not everything is available in eBook format (like my current class textbook!) And certainly, I worry if I will still "have" my eBooks twenty years from now the way I have my old books from my younger years. What happens when the technology changes, as it will?

Today, though, I'm reading.

What I just got done reading: I have an assignment in my writing class to read ten short stories in publications and/or the genre I want to write in. I will probably post story reviews after I turn in the assignment, but publications/online venues I've been looking at include Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, 365tomorrows, Daily Science Fiction, Encounters Magazine, Escape Pod, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, International Speculative Fiction, Jupiter, Lightspeed, Luna Station Quarterly, Nature, Pantheon Magazine, Perihelion Science Fiction, Quantum Muse, and Robot and Raygun.


What I'm reading now: Fluency, by Jennifer Foehner Wells. Still. I am crawling through this book, mostly via five-minutes-a-night-right-before-sleep. At this point, I am reading it because I bought it and so I'm going to finish it (GoshDurnIt). Apparently, it is part of a series, but I'm getting the impression from where the story seems headed at 85% finished that I won't read the other books.


What I'll likely be reading next: Who knows? I'm developing a list. Some of the sci-fi has aliens, but as best as I can tell, the aliens are the end result of human exploration, rather than "they suddenly appeared, hovering over Earth menacingly," or "In the future, Earth is part of a galactic Federation...," both premises which, at the moment, make me hit the back button.

Exploration science fiction:

Titan, by Stephen Baxter
Proxima, by Stephen Baxter
Endeavour, by Ralph Kern, J Scott-Marryat
Blue Remembered Earth, by Alastair Reynolds
Crater, by Homer Hickam
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

Edge of Infinity (anthology), by various authors
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox, by various authors


Other sci-fi:

Influx, by Daniel Suarez



Science:

Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission, by Marc Kaufman


Other:

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes, Joe Layden, Rob Reiner
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel, by Joshua Ferris
Reconstructing Amelia: A Novel, by Kimberly McCreight
Deception Point, by Dan Brown
Digital Fortress, by Dan Brown

Been meaning to do this meme for a while.






What I just got done reading: I've been searching for books to fill my "realistic solar system exploration" story kink, and there aren't a lot of them. I read James SA Corey's Expanse series, of course, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. Alas, searching book lists for novels featuring specifically what I'm looking for invariably returns noise: interstellar travel or aliens hovering over Earth. So I returned to the classics, and read all of Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series.

The first and most well known, 2001 (1968), was written simultaneously in the mid-sixties with the movie script, but actually veers from the script in that the big climactic stuff takes place at Saturn, and its moon, Iapetus. Kubrick, who was collaborating with Clarke, presented a monolith orbiting Jupiter instead.

Interestingly, Clarke ret-conned himself in the sequel, 2010, by relating that the events of nine years earlier took place as they did in the movie. It was the early 80's by the time 2010 came out, and the Voyager probes had shown us how complex the Jovian moon system was, so Clarke wanted to stage the events around Jupiter's moon, Europa, which remains the best chance of life in the solar system beyond Earth even to this day. And also interestingly, the book differs from the film version of 2010 because, although it depicts a still-intact Soviet Union, there is no use of Cold War hostilities as a subplot to push the action forward as there is in the film.

2061 is a great third book in the trilogy, and Clarke ret-cons himself yet again just so he can refer to actual space exploration history he had to invent in earlier books. Only downside to this book is he sets up a necessity for a fourth book, 3001, he didn't need. Frankly, I found the events of 3001 hard to follow. Which might have something to do with the fact that I read it mostly right before bed each night. I think 3001 only existed so Clarke could start a new interstellar series featuring the monolith aliens.

Amusingly, though, more re-con: Soviet Russia gets written right out of Earth's 21st century, as if Clarke had never featured it in his earlier books. He is refreshingly honest about his ret-cons in his numerous late-1990's forwards.


What I'm reading now: Fluency, by Jennifer Foehner Wells. Not sure it's totally what I'm looking for, but it's good so far.


What I'll likely be reading next: K.S. Robinson's 2312 is still on the back burner, as I'm a bit burnt out on Robinson. And I have a gazillion short stories to read for my fiction writing class. So must get on that.

I've done a few posts about James SA Corey's Expanse novel series, which is being turned into a 10-episode series on Syfy.

http://masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com/976832.html
http://masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com/974218.html
http://masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com/973691.html

New news about the team they've pulled together for the TV showso far. People who have worked on everything from Breaking Bad To Cosmos to Doctor Who to Star Trek to Farscape.

http://www.danielabraham.com/2014/07/15/long-promised-news-on-the-tv-show/

Spoiler warning: Skin Game (The Dresden Files)

A while back, I posted an angst about point of view and the pacing of information reveals in my novel. My novel is, at its core, a mystery. The answers to the mystery gradually unfold for the reader as the protagonists investigate and make discoveries. In the first draft, I set a major "reveal" towards the end of the novel. The challenge was setting the stage for that reveal without giving it away.

The novel uses rotating third person subjective points of view. This created a problem for my reveal, because there was more than one character whose point of view I wrote through who knew a lot more about what was going on than my putative protagonists. It seemed rather contrived to me that we could be in the head of a character who knows important information about the events unfolding around them, and they would fail to think about those events using the knowledge they had. It would be one thing if the novel's point of view was the omniscient narrator, dancing around from head to head. But this is the subjective third person, where the narrator just is the character.

In the second draft, I moved the big reveal to a few chapters in from the beginning, and took the point of view of characters who knew too much out of rotation until I was ready to reveal what they knew. Better to have them remain enigmatic then let the reader enter their heads and have them somehow just not think things that would give the mystery away.

As a result of my struggle with this, I now have a low tolerance for published authors who hide the "big twist" at the climax of their novels by having characters who are already aware of this twist conveniently not think of it.

This is something Dan Brown has done flagrantly in his past couple novels. In both Inferno and The Lost Symbol, he reveals facts about particular characters towards the end designed to change the reader's whole perception of the events of the novel. But he does this by taking us into their heads throughout the book and just not showing them thinking of things that are no doubt on their minds, like, "How am I going to pull blah-blah-blah off without giving myself away?" That would really be foremost in their minds, I would think. Sometimes, Brown has characters think of events in their lives that are later revealed to never to have happened. Were they rehearsing their fake backstories to help pull off the con?

It just seems to me a simple fact of psychology that, if the stakes are high, and you are a character deliberately withholding information from other characters, you would think about what you knew. Because people? Don't control their thoughts. We think what we think.

In retrospect, you can see the clues Brown scatters for you throughout his books that reveal the twist, which a twisty story should do, but you also see the cheating attempts at misdirection.

I'm not surprised by this sort of clumsiness from Brown, who knows oodles about history and archeology, but much less about writing. But it is also a reason I was less than fond of the latest Dresden Files novel, Skin Game. There's a "big twist" towards the end of the novel in which Harry is in dire straights and an unexpected alliance is revealed that comes as a surprise to the double-crossing head of the expedition Harry is on, and to the reader.

Hiding that information from the reader is even clumsier in Skin Game than it is in Dan Brown novels, because Butcher's readers spend the entire book in Harry Dresden’s head (indeed, it is written in the first person), and if anyone is an up-front guy, narrating his every thought and bit of reasoning (so much so it breaks up action sequences awkwardly), it's Harry Dresden.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about writing in the head of a character and not revealing highly relevant things s/he knows. Heck, if bestselling authors get away with it, why shouldn’t I?

Just finished: Every durned book in James S. A. Corey's Expanse series, to wit:

Leviathan Wakes (Expanse, #1)
The Butcher of Anderson Station (Expanse, #0.5)
Caliban's War (Expanse, #2)
Gods of Risk (Expanse, #2.5)
Abaddon's Gate (Expanse, #3)
The Churn (Expanse, #3.5)

The integer-numbered books above are the novels, the decimal-numbered books are short stories or novellas. All in all, I prefer the novels, which follow the futuristic outer space drama. The novellas are planet-bound and more about the state of human culture 150 years from now. Which means they are, in short, all about showing how humankind has not progressed morally or politically in that time, and so they lack the sense of wonder that is part of the novels. Other than a few gee-whiz technological gizmos, the world depicted in the novellas could be the here and now.

The characters are compelling and well-drawn in the series as a whole, and the world building as I have mentioned before is well-done, so these books are a good read I managed to whip through in no time.

Which is kind of amazing to me. One of the things I've been grumbling about in this LJ/DW since... its inception is that I don't read recreationally as much as I used to. I could no longer blame it on "grad school burnout" fifteen years (going on twenty) since graduation. I could only fuss and throw up my hands about why watching teevee was so much easier than cracking open a book, and in many cases, equally rewarding.

There is definitely extra effort required in reading--the effort of taking in and understanding chicken scratches rather than passively absorbing sounds and images, the effort of the imagination to fill in the "you are there" sensory modalities handed to you on a television or movie screen.

And for me, I've framed this problem around "finding the time." Which is the wrong frame, I think. It's not that I don't have the time, I'm simply that I'm the sort of person who will fill up all the available time with writing (at home) and work duties (at work) if I don't stop to think about it and create new habits for myself.

Reading can also be a chore if you pick the wrong book. The science fiction short stories I've reviewed have become that for me because I'm doing it for educational purposes, not pleasure.

The solution has been switching to eBooks, especially cloud reading on my computer when I'm at work. This has actually been helpful at my job because wandering over to the novel I'm reading for a few minutes helps me relax in the middle of the day. And then during my off hours, reading for a few minutes at bedtime helps put me to sleep.

Reading now:

While waiting for the next installment in the Expanse series coming out next month, I have scratched my itch to read solar system exploration stories by returning to a series I started ten years ago and then drifted away from without finishing it, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. I am re-reading Red Mars. I was enthralled reading this book, which is about the first settlers on Mars. I remember becoming more disenchanted in the middle of the sequel, Green Mars, because they were remaking Mars in Earth's image, and science and exploration was giving way to politics-as-usual in the plot line. But you can say that of the Expanse series as well, which somehow manages nevertheless to hang on to its sense of wonder. So I am giving the Mars series another shot.

What's next:

Skin Game, Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files)

Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey (The Expanse)

January talking meme, Jan 29. From harsens_rob: Choose 2 Joss-verse characters who've died. One that you believe was handled very well and one that you think... wasn't.... How were they handled differently and why do you feel one worked and the other just didn't?


As usual, giving thought to this put it beyond two characters.


It's said one of the hallmarks of urban fantasy (this also obviously applies to contemporary horror) is that all characters are Fair Game. The potential death of any character, no matter how central to the narrative, ups the stakes and lets the reader/viewer know the characters are playing for keeps.

Joss Whedon, of course, isn't just an example of this, he's the King.

Joss sets the tone for his attitude towards character death in the very first episode of BtVS with the death of Jesse. It's well-known that Joss wanted to put Jesse in the main credits of Welcome to the Hellmouth just so he could stun the audience by killing him off. And behind-the-camera troubles aside, I'm pretty convinced that's (the writers' reason) for the death of Doyle in Season 1 of Angel. Both deaths were, IMO, non-gratuitous. Jesse's death occurred to instruct both viewers and the characters (in particular, Xander and Willow) that This Is Serious, Folks. Doyle, on the other hand, chose to die for a noble cause. It was no less shocking than Jesse's death, though, and you can imagine Joss' glee at finally being able to kill off a credits character.

Characters die for all sorts of reasons on BtVS and AtS, but one of the main reasons they die is to signal a change in the character who killed them. For Joss, this is usually a character we've come to trust, but sometimes, it's the rise of the bad guy (or both). Showing a character murder someone is Joss' signal that "something's changed." Examples abound: Jenny Calendar (Angel(us), Deputy mayor Allan Finch (Faith), Maggie Walsh (Adam), Katrina (The Trio), Warren (Willow), the wine cellar W&H lawyers (which Angel allows through inaction), Lilah (Beast-Master!Cordelia). The problem isn't that Joss does this. The problem is, he does this A LOT.

There are lots of other ways you can signal a change in a character and a change in the direction of a season. Wesley's betrayal of Angel in Season 3 was an effective way to change the stakes mid-season and resulted in interesting developments for both characters, without anyone having to die during the act of betrayal.

Joss' over-reliance on this trope lead to a lot of "the devil made me do it" story lines in which trusted friends (e.g., Angel, Cordelia, Spike [season 7 *oy*] must be robbed of their agency in order to make them kill somebody.

The other thing Joss overdid was Beloved Character Has to Die to Enact Change in the Hero or Season. Now, this can be an extremely powerful plot development. The first episode Joss did this in, Passion (Jenny Calendar's death), remains one of my favorites.

But there is a tipping point in keeping the stakes high where you start to lose a viewer or reader's investment, where it becomes so common for characters to die, viewers are no longer willing to invest emotionally in the characters. When a viewer reaches this point, they can either take a more flippant attitude towards the show, or stop watching it all together. I doubt either of these outcomes is something show-runners want.

I think the tipping point for me was Tara in Season 6 of BtVS. I could deal with Joyce dying in Season 5 to mark the transition of Buffy into adulthood. But Tara's death taxed me. Follow up that up with Cordelia's slow fade in AtS, and Fred's gratuitous assault in Season 5 of AtS, and I pretty much held my "giving a shit"-edness together only by sheer force of will to the end of AtS season 5. My issue with each of these deaths went beyond "too much is too much." They were also each out-and-out slaughters. None of these characters had a chance against their killers (Cordelia was effectively killed by Jasmine in Inside Out, despite her coma and brief return in Season 5). They were ruthlessly slaughtered by a Baddie just to shake things up.

For me, when it comes to major characters, the best deaths (1) show a victim dying against their killer after a valiant defense and because no other, alternative plot developments can effectively accomplish what their death can in the story (hence why Jenny Calendar's death works better than Tara's or Fred's); or (2) someone (directly or indirectly) causing their own death because their actions, or deliberate inaction, either heroic or villainous, resulted in it. When this happens to a villain, it's poetic justice. When it happens to a hero, you get Doyle, or Buffy (but she always comes back), or Darla in Lullaby (although there is a Madonna/Whore element to her death that annoys me a little).

Depending on who you ask, the "Golden Age of Science Fiction," is either "undisputedly," or just "widely recognized" as the 1940's (and possibly 50's). Of course, one person's Golden Age is another person's capital-E Establishment, but historically, the 40's and 50's are the era when a younger generation of very talented writers weaned on the pulps and unafraid of speculative-fiction-that-incorporated-science took up pen or typewriter. Among them: Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov.

It is interesting that of the three biggies I review here (Clarke, Bradbury, and Asimov), Asimov was always my favorite, but (perhaps due to story choices?) this time around, I was much more impressed with Bradbury.

All of these writers are masters of creating fully-realized portraits of everyday life in the future, or on space stations, or the Moon, in very few words.


( Isaac Asimov )


( Ray Bradbury )


( Arthur C. Clarke )


( Tom Godwin )

( Robert Heinlein )

Not sure how I feel about this. OTOH, I loved the Millennium trilogy and the character of Lisbeth. OTOH, the author is deceased, and I don't know if any ghost writer "gets" Lisbeth like her creator does. OTTH, I get to use my Lisbeth icon!


Originally posted by abebooksblog at Lisbeth Salander to return in Millennium Trilogy sequel