Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Take the
XF Character Test by
gillyholia.

I can’t just rewrite Colony; I need some sort of structural
obsession attached to the act. I believe there are ninety-seven stanzas to
Locksley
Hall - maybe I’ll aim for ninety-seven scenes to
go with them. I didn’t use the whole poem last time because of the depressing
Amy content (and because 35,000 words doesn’t add up to 97 scenes), but this
time…I need a challenge to make this editorial purgatory more interesting.

I enjoyed Ethan of Athos, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting much of my last unread LMB novel and one I knew all along had little to do with Miles. The beginning drew me in; I had no clue about Athos until it was made obvious, and I do love a good alien culture. I liked Ethan, especially his prejudices and his conflicted relationship with Quinn. Of course he was no Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, but who is?

I realized back in the second half of The Vor Game that I don’t particularly like the space-opera side of space-opera, and when Ethan of Athos turned into the usual hide-and-seek in spaceship/spacestation corridors, with arrests, escapes, thugs, interrogations and the whole nine meters, I was ready to write the novel off. It reclaimed my interest at the end, though, first with Quinn’s final contribution, then with the trick ending. I love a good trick ending. But then, I never claimed to have taste.

The latest Analog was good all around. I’d skipped the first part of the current serial until I ran out of the rest of the magazine to read, thinking of my bad experience with “Hominid“, which the letters section wouldn’t let me forget. When I started “Survival Instinct” by Ed Lerner, though, I thought immediately that it was a perfect piece of writing. I’m still not sure why, but that’s my recommendation for the month of October. (Sci-fi - it’s the future in more ways than one.)

First off, I must confess I’ve been mainlining LMB for a couple of weeks now, ever since Diplomatic Immunity. To get over my mild disappointment with the latest, I started over from Shards of Honor. There’s just something about Cordelia.

I stopped by the library for The Vor Game and hit unexpected paydirt - Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, the latest two-volume edition, and the last two novels I hadn’t read. I found Cetaganda a bit too much like Diplomatic Immunity - Miles running around knowing too much about the Star Creche and trying to keep his accidental discovery from touching off yet another war with the Cetagandans. A novel all about things not happening can hardly compare to a novella where they do happen, such as the weatherman half of The Vor Game, but I’m not complaining. The Cetagandans were interesting, if
something of a still-life, and I’ve always had a soft spot for that-idiot-Ivan. I suppose that’s one of the perils of having started with A Civil Campaign.

I found the truth about .gif
on the same site as Lori’s Lego link. I’m thinking covetous, copyright-violating thoughts
about his navbar, too. I wonder if I can do that with CSS…

Most people cheat on the questions - I cheat on the HTML code. If you take
the quiz, it won’t come out that pretty, but feel free to snag my code and
paste your own results in there.

That quiz was made with an ASP script, by the way. (Boo! Windows! Ick!)
I’ll stick to my Perl script, but the idea
of faking an image with cool style or font-size tricks is worth remembering. I
should be rewriting Colony, but I’m way behind on that quiz I promised.
Time to multitask…

As usual, I’m late linking the latest
zendom article, on lovin’ fluff.

Jungle Kitty said
something on-list about fanfic shortcuts that I just can’t get out of my mind.
She was kind enough to quote a whole article:
It’s
Like a Movie, But It’s Not, which otherwise you have to log into the NYTimes
page to read. In it, Neal Gabler claims that movies today skip all the work of
entertaining and expression, replacing it with cues that the audience knows -
so that you get the outline of a movie, rather than an actual movie.

So yes, sometimes you have the outline of a fanfic - formulas that
substitute for a story of a more traditional form. This is where I lost track of the
conversation, though. I’m still not sure what a formula is or how to know one
when I see one. Does shortcut mean that anything classifiable under the
Borg Plot Classification is a formulaic
story? Do you have to write a new plot to avoid formula, or is it enough to
write a certain way?

I gave as an example the
tried-and-true J/C formula of Janeway finally realizing after an unspecified
number of years that she can’t live without Chakotay any longer. I think
those who said that formulas no longer satisfy them would dislike
such a story because of the formula itself. My only criticism of the
Sudden Realization formula story is that the Sudden Realization itself is rarely
justified. If someone makes me believe that Janeway can’t live
without Chakotay any longer, then I consider it a good story, however
popular the plot.

On the other hand, you can fail to motivate an original plot - it’s not only
formulas that get sent out into the ether without sufficient verisimilitude. I’m
rewriting Colony because it’s the outline of a novel, rather than the novella
I wanted it to be. Yet some people liked it - sci-fi fans more than others, I
suspect, because sf is a genre where originality vs. formula has long been more
important than showing vs. telling. You can, in other words, tell
all you want as long as the story you’re telling is new - Foundation,
a novella-long set of dialogues, is a good example of just what you could
get away with once upon a time.

Well, that was a roundabout and oxymoronic way of saying I can’t blog
right now because I’m busy rewriting Colony.

Content eludes me today, so how about a few links?
Plumb the depths of 404 at the
404 Research Lab. Read a
Jim Wright-style review of the classic TOS episode “Mirror Mirror” at
Television Without Pity.
Find that elusive C/7 masterpiece at
Perfection, home of the C/7 Story
Index.

The date inflation at Analog never ceases to amaze me. I’m over a month behind on this one, but the date on the cover is September 2002. Anyway, my favorite story this time was “Protocol” by Timothy Zahn. It’s listed as a novelette; I would have called it a short story. The aliens were appropriately alien.

Promised Land was an experiment for me, and one that failed. If I had to guess, I’d say Connie Willis was the co- and Cynthia Felice was the author of this sci-fi/romance crossover. The romance side won. Nothing significant would be changed by transporting all the characters and plot events to the Wild West: the city girl returning to the family farm, the quiet but dependable cowpoke boy, the devilish rake, the flirt with a heart of gold, etc. Down to details of canning fruit, sewing sleeves and prairie fires, it’s a Western, not a sci-fi novel. The natives are fire-monkeys rather than Apaches; only the city girl’s alien pet is necessary to the plot, and you can see that resolution coming from three territories away.

Yes, I was warned by the back cover, but when I think of “an all-new novel that is not just sweeping science fiction, but an engaging romantic story as well” I think Shards of Honor. I don’t think Harlequin Romances set in space. There are genres and there are genres. Romance is one that drops anvils on your head every chapter or so. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch! The plot turns on the heroine’s slow, explicit, and stereotypical realization that the hero is her One True Love and not the neanderthal she thought. On the side, her guilt for flirting with the local Lothario dawns upon her - and I never even noticed she was flirting with him.

I don’t object to romance conventions per se, not even ones like the flirting issue that I just don’t grok. I firmly believe in a woman’s right to write off her education and spend the rest of her life on a farm pickling vegetables, baking compotes and reproducing. But that’s not science fiction. The genre is more than a sprinkling of spaceships and cute alien pets - there is a kind of story that is a sci-fi story and Promised Land isn’t that kind.

On the other hand, “K19: The Widowmaker” had a sci-fi plot, even though it was set in the past. I couldn’t help thinking of Spock in “The Wrath of Khan” when the sailors braved the reactor chamber. I’m not saying K19 was a great movie (Liam Neeson aside), but it was about the science. You could transport all the characters and plot events to a spaceship, and nothing significant would be changed.

What if you had to put together a list of Chakotay fic? It would be hard,
wouldn’t it? Translate it into Japanese and you get
Club Tattoo.
(I’m dying to know what they’re saying about me.)

I’d be interested to know just how much Trek fanfic has resulted from
dares and challenges issued by Seema. Here’s the latest entry in the rolls of
Seema-incited fic, a post-Endgame comedy of obscure pairings:
Than Fade Away. I thought the
muse was dead, but it turns out she’s just been busy baking.

Also new on-site is Jade’s latest J/C fic,
Layered Logic.