Month: April 2018

Categories
On writing Talking about things

Speculate 18

From the Dungeons & Development: Character Under Pressure panel
From left to right: Ben McKenzie (moderator) and dungeon master (and dragon), Jay Kristoff, Amie Kaufman, Andrew McDonald and Brooke Maggs.
I didn’t get a picture of the band, there were too many heads in the way. The band leader was Maize Wallin (maizewallin.com). Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the names of the band members, either. (I didn’t write anything, to be honest, but I took a photo of the intro slide, so at least I can name the speakers.) Music and effects were great.

Yesterday I went to the Speculate 18, which is a speculative writers’ festival, held here in Melbourne.

It was pretty good.

As festivals go, it was small. One stream, five sessions. But they were good sessions. Three in the morning, two in the afternoon.

The most fun session was the first one after lunch.  Dungeons & Development: Character Under Pressure where our four panel members and the moderator did a D&D role play live on stage, with a band to add sound effects on the side.

It was lots of fun, and the dynamic between everyone worked really well.

I couldn’t pick a standout session in the more serious topics.  They were all uniformly good, and I liked bits from all of them.

Two of my personal favourite bits were from Science Fiction: The Past, the Present, and What’s to Come.  One was Dirk Strasser’s summary of the current state of science fiction.  The most popular trends at present, he says, are climate fiction, generation ships, space opera, and gender themes.  Plus Laura Goodin’s point that back in the Victorian era, genre didn’t exist. Writers like Dickens happily wrote across genres.

The audience questions from this session led to some really thought-provoking answers, too.  One audience member asked whether the pace of scientific change would make science fiction irrelevant. No, Laura Goodin says, science fiction is a lens by which we see ourselves through fiction.

I have to agree with her.

A lot of people get this idea that science fiction is only about the science, and that somehow there’s no science left to discover.

I think most of us would agree that’s not true. Sure the mobile phones, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and other things dreamed about in the forties, fifties and sixties are finally here, or nearly here, and the rate of change of some of these things has increased almost exponentially, but what about genetics? What about climate control? What about massive ocean farms?

Plus, science fiction isn’t really about science. It’s about people.  As Laura said, it’s a way to see ourselves. Fahrenheit 451 is still just as relevant today as it was when Ray Bradbury wrote it, even if instead of burning books they’re burning data stores. The Handmaid’s Tale shows us a bleak, dystopian future.

Science fiction is still doing what it set out to do. Entertain us, but also make us think.

The audience questions on all panels were good. (Kudos, too, to how they kept the questioners on track. No statements, just questions.) A question on an earlier panel sparked a discussion about the things writers take out of their books.  (What Sherylyn and I call our pet words.) Sadly, that got cut off because we’d run out of time.

Now, we just have to go back to our own manuscript and check for ‘somehow’. Which is, as was pointed out, a lazy way of having something happen without the author having to explain it.

Sherylyn (who came along, too), pulled her notebook out at the start of the first session. She started writing, and kept writing through the whole of session one.

“You took some comprehensive notes there,” I said, while they set up for the next session.

“Not notes,” she said. “The first thing they said, about describing the woman walking down the street. This whole idea popped into my head. I had to write it down.”

All in all, it was a good day.  I was exhausted by the end, I admit. Five sessions were enough.

Categories
Book news

Japanese versions of Linesman

The Japanese versions of Linesman arrived in the mail the other day.

They’re so tiny and cute.  Smaller than a paperback and half as thick.

Look at the covers. If you put them together, as we have above, they combine to make one long picture.

With the help of Google translate and a helpful reader (thanks Elizabeth) we’ve worked out that the book is called Starship Eleven in Japanese, and we think that one version is less complex than the other. (Blue dot is simpler, possibly)

The cover illustration is by K. Kanehira. The cover design is also credited, but sorry, awesome cover design person/people, we can’t read your name, and we don’t know how to get the name from the book to screen.

Likewise, we’re not too sure who the translator is.  Google Translate gives us Triangular Kazuyo. Hmm. That might be right, but we think we’ll have to confirm this. More as we find out. If anyone knows, please let us know.

Update 25 April.  S.E. Jones mentioned that the book is in two parts, and told us the name of the translator.  (See comments, below.) Kayuzo Misumi.  Here are twitter posts from @kzyfizzy on 14 February, which was when the book was released.

I do like the way our name translates phonetically into Dance Tall.  It sounds so much better than it’s literal translation of the ‘brown stone’.

Thank you, S. E. Jones.

Categories
Book news Progress report

Progress report

I pulled a muscle in my back this morning while cleaning the bath.  I’d like to say it’s living proof that writers shouldn’t do housework, but unfortunately the reality is that this particular writer hasn’t been doing enough of anything active, housework included, to keep herself supple. Many writers are notoriously bad at keeping fit.

So while I wait for the Nurofen to kick in, let me tell you what’s been happening in our writing world lately.

We’re making good progress on the next batch of rewrites for Stars Book 2.  It has a current, tentative title of Stars Beyond.  We don’t know if that’s set in concrete.  We’re at that stage in writing where every change we’re making is a positive change. “This will sound better if we do this,” or “If we move that section down past here the timeline will flow better.”  Of course, some of those changes have flow-on effects, but that’s the way it is with rewrites.

We’re heading toward the deadline. We have to deliver the novel in six weeks.

Based on prior novels, there’ll probably a couple of obvious issues we discover really late.  It’s amazing how you can go over a book ten, twenty times and still not see something so obvious until the last minute.  Sometimes you can’t see it then, either, and your agent or your editor has to point it out to you.

Sigh.

In other news. The ARCs for Stars Uncharted have started going out to book bloggers and reviewers. The publisher has given some away on Goodreads. Keep an eye on the giveaways there if you want a copy, as we don’t always know about these when they happen so we don’t publicise them.

We’re busy putting the finishing touches to our April newsletter. This will include the first chapter of Stars Uncharted, so it’s going to be mammoth. Chapter one’s pretty long, so we’re trying to pare down the newsletter to a reasonable size.  We’re getting there. Slowly.

Categories
Books and movies

Tomb Raider was worth seeing

Image courtesy of the official Tomb Raider movie site. http://www.tombraidermovie.com

We went to see Tomb Raider on the weekend.  I have to say, I liked it.

I didn’t love it the way I loved, say, Wonder Woman, but I thought the movie was quite strong and I enjoyed it.  (I’m a supporting member of WorldCon this year and I already know which movie I’m going to vote for. Wonder Woman.)

The story line for Tomb Raider worked. It was solid, if a tad predictable. There were no massive plot holes where you thought what? How? Everything made sense.  I particularly liked the ending, where they solve the puzzle not by supernatural means but by science.

I preferred this version way more than the 2001 version.

Probably the silliest bits were those that obviously came from the computer game. The floor falling apart around them while they tried to solve the puzzle, or sliding under the massive metal grates just in the nick of time.  Don’t get me wrong, I love these things in computer games, but they don’t translate well to the screen. You really have to suspend disbelief to believe that someone will go to all that trouble to kill tomb robbers.

Alicia Vikander made an excellent Lara Croft.  A believable one, too.

It was rather like settling down with an author you know, who reliably always turns out books you enjoy.

They left it open for a sequel.  I’m looking forward to the next one.

 

Categories
Books and movies

If you don’t have a life-changing book, what do you remember reading?

I’ve been thinking the blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about how when you read a book at the wrong time it doesn’t appeal, but if you read it at another time, you love it.

I was a voracious reader, but I was never one of those people who as a teenager found a book that changed my life. I have friends who did, but my childhood reading was a blur.  It was a mix of the old books we had around the house—Enid Blyton, the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy boys when we were younger.

Later it was Ivan Southall, Claire Mallory, Mary Elwyn Patchett and Mary Grant Bruce.

A lot of these books were written before I was born.  I think I remember them because they were what we had on the bookshelves at home. Our whole family were voracious readers. I’m sure Mum and Dad scoured second-hand shops for us, for we had books from the early 1900s to those of the current day.  (I remember a most glorious early edition of Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, from about the 1920s. It was a beautiful book and we read it to bits.)

As for science fiction, I read it all.  Not counting the Simon Black books (which we had at home), most of these I got from the library.  I know I read the big names. Robert Heinlein, James Blish, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, but I don’t always remember their stories.

I remember pieces of them, like the start of Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, but sometimes I only remember the covers.  The brown triffid on Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, the yellow Gollancz hard covers from the school library.

Isaac Asimov was probably the one writer I remember well, and still re-read.  Who can forget Nightfall? Or Elijah Baley in Caves of Steel? Or even The Stars, Like Dust (but don’t get me started on the McGuffin they were chasing).

What surprises me is the early books that stay in mind are (mostly) those I read as an adult.  Not only that, there’s a high proportion of women writers among them.  Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, C. J. Cherryh, Joan D. Vinge.  (Norton I read earlier.)

I’d add Asimov and Charles Sheffield in there as the only male writers whose work I actively remember from my childhood/early adulthood.

I remember a lot more of the modern stories I read.