Strange Heritage: Thoughts from a Star Trek TOS Bingewatch!

My dad recently came to visit me, and one of the things I bought a while back but never actually went through was a Blu-Ray box set of Star Trek (the original series)! He's a big fan of the show, and so, when we weren't doing something else, we kicked back and watched some old Star Trek together.

We didn't watch the whole series, but my dad picked and chose episodes from the whole original run, starting with the pilot and going all the way through the end of the third season. All in all, we watched about 34 episodes, and then 6 more he watched while I was half-doing something else.

The original Star Trek series is a great example of a half-way point between older sci-fi pulps and modern pop sci-fi that focuses on longer plots and personal drama. It does a bit of both. It's very episodic, but there are a few little story elements that appear repeatedly and actually develop over the course of the show. Spock's character is a good example.

One thing I noticed was a strong degree of repetitiveness in the show (for better or worse). There were quite a few episodes that were pretty simple, along the lines of "monster hunts the crew," with a few of them fairly basic and one or two that were quite good. Lots of supercomputers running civilizations, usually with disastrous consequences. Plenty of plots about someone bad getting into Engineering (they need better locks or something!). Quite a few super-beings playing with the crew. Many ticking clocks where something must be done by some time or else the Enterprise must leave for some other mission. Also, a veritable greenhouse full of different plants that shoot gas, spores, or thorns. The Star Trek jelly lens for shots of women was a frequent guest in the episodes we watched, too.

I was surprised to find that two of the episodes we watched were originally written by Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch. I actually had to do a double-take and make sure it was the same Bloch who wrote horror pulp stories, but it was!

We watched quite a few of the "meme" episodes: The Man Trap with Kirk's "handsome woman" comment; The Naked Time with fencing shirtless Sulu; Shore Leave, with the Alice in Wonderland references; Arena with the infamous Kirk-Gorn slowfight; The City on the Edge of Forever, in which "Edith Keeler must die;" and The Omega Glory, with the pseudo-Constitution and pseudo-Pledge of Allegiance.

I was a little surprised by what my dad chose to skip, too: We watched exactly zero Klingon episodes, and skipped The Trouble with Tribbles and I, Mudd, too.

Kirk was often a bit of a superman, and it was also funny to see how the Blu-Ray clarity made stunt doubles very obvious.

It was a fun experience, and it was interesting to watch (and in some cases, re-watch) some of these old examples of pop sci-fi from the '60s, that has been so influential for so long. Some people dismiss TOS as a relic of a bygone era, but there's something to be learned from its simplicity and episodic nature, and its long-term popularity. It also made me put a new value on The Next Generation, which I watched much more frequently as a kid, and the contrast between the two of them is something worth considering deeply. It's been a long time since I've seen any TNG, so maybe I'll have to look back at some of that, eventually!

A Satisfying Conclusion... for now! Review of Raymond Feist's Magician: Master

It's going to be impossible to review Magician: Master without spoiling a little bit of Magician: Apprentice, so if you're sensitive to spoilers, you may want to check out my review of the first book, and figure out whether or not you want to read it, and then come back here.

With that warning in place, here we go!

Magician: Master is the second book in Raymond Feist's first four-book Riftwar Saga, and it's even more closely connected to Apprentice than the two that follow (those would be Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon).

Tense, Realistic Sci-Fi: The Andromeda Strain!

This was a blast from the past... I read a lot of Michael Crichton's works back when I was in high school, but I really haven't read any of his stuff since then... over 20 years!

I recently picked up a copy of The Andromeda Strain and read it again... I can't believe this book came out in 1969! It seems newer than that to me.

Pursuit of a Decent Title: Missteps and Fails!

Normally I write an extended post that kind of explains the video so that you can get most of the value out of reading it.

This time, I'm just going to say that my incredulous reading of some of my ideas as I worked on a title for Pursuit of the Heliotrope is something mere writing would be unlikely to capture.

After I finished the book, I spent about two days fumbling over a title (despite all the thinking I had done while writing) and some of the goofy things I came up with are worth hearing about.

You can check out the book here, if you'd like:

on Amazon: https://a.co/d/csZVOO0

or elsewhere: https://books2read.com/u/bWaQQM

Made in the Edits: Lessons from My First Novel, part 3

Sometimes you actually have to finish something before you really understand the process. My first novel was a great example of this principle.

Some background: I wrote what I thought was a detailed outline and character description before I started on the first draft of Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I finished the first draft, and it just barely reached 50,000 words. And, to be honest, by the time I was working on the last third of the book, I was feeling pretty tired of it and definitely wasn't doing my best at that point. And I wasn't even really crunching to finish it! I just found it hard to maintain interest in writing the same thing for such a long period.

Action-packed Pulpy Origins: The Skylark of Space!

The Lensman series was a lot of fun, so I decided to pick up E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series! This first book, Skylark of Space, was serialized all the way back in 1928, and, like many of the Lensman books, expanded later on for a standalone release in 1946.

Where Lensman started out as a pretty simple cops and robbers series, Skylark is even simpler:

Richard Seaton (our hero) discovers a new metal which enables rapid conversion of copper into energy and motion. While he's working with his wealthy friend Martin Crane (not the guy from Frasier) on this metal, rival amoral scientist DuQuesne is seeking to get rid of them and monopolize this miracle metal for himself.

After several failed plots to kill Seaton and Crane and steal the metal, DuQuesne ends up kidnapping Seaton's fiancée and running with her out into space.

The chase that ensues involves visiting several planets, the first of which is curiously reminiscent of what Smith would later call Eddore in the Lensman series, and the second of which forces Seaton and Crane to insert themselves into a war between two nations.

Thus, we get some minor intrigue and a hell of a lot of action.

As you probably expect, DuQuesne is thwarted in the end, but escapes to continue to be a thorn in our heroes' sides.

The book is a fun read, nothing too heavy. It's full of Smith's unique dialogue and slang, as well as a decent amount dedicated to his peculiar perspective on how to write romance. It's even pulpier than Triplanetary, which was pretty darn pulpy, and fun and engaging while not being deep. It doesn't ask a lot of questions.

The characters are relatively static with a mild to moderate case of superman syndrome, and the science aspects are fairly vague but occasionally interesting, such as Smith's detailing of different alien races and how they react to various wavelengths of light.

It's short and action-packed, and the sequel is, somewhat confusingly unless you've read this book, called Skylark Three. I'll have to give that one a look, sometime.

I read Skylark of Space here. You can also buy it on Amazon. 

A Gateway to Great Fantasy! Raymond E. Feist's Magician: Apprentice!

Gotta admit, I'm a pretty big fan of Raymond Feist. My first experience with his work was ironically something he was only partly involved in: the classic PC RPG Betrayal at Krondor. There was something fun and enjoyable about the world--fairly grounded, lots of little details, fun and funny characters, and lots of intrigue.

Imagine my surprise a few years later when I stumbled upon a book called Krondor: The Betrayal, which was his adaptation of the story used for the game that he wrote after the fact, as far as I understand. I grabbed it off the shelf and really enjoyed it. That got me interested in his earlier works, too.

So, this post is all about Feist's first novel, which was a massive tome called Magician in Europe, but for the U.S. market it got split into two volumes: Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master. I'll be talking about the first volume today.

This was Feist's first novel, and it was based on a world that he and his friends had created and fleshed out as a setting for their tabletop RPG sessions. Reviews at the time said its weakest point was its lack of originality, but I feel like that's missing the forest for the trees. Midkemia shares a lot of rough characteristics with classic sword and sorcery settings, but I think it offers a lot more.

For example, Feist's setting, especially in the earlier novels, is much lower-magic than most. This gives things a very grounded quality that makes even small stakes feel heavy. Feist's take on medieval-style politics is rich and nuanced and has a reasonable mixture of good and bad guys, with some nice philosophical hooks behind the good guys. The world has a believable mixture of light and dark, and practical and magical. We see large variations in culture, climate, and government over the course of just this book.

Magician: Apprentice tells the first part of the story of Pug, a young man who will become a very powerful force in later books. We get to see the first couple of years of the Riftwar, which I find fascinating. It's a hero's journey, but with enough unique bits that it feels fresh and alive.

Feist is great at juggling multiple story threads without rushing to get from one to another or to bring them together. Pug's story, that of a common-born orphan thrust by coincidence into the role of an unsuccessful apprentice, results in his eventual elevation to minor nobility by his Duke Borric and his entry into the war effort.

But his story, starting in Crydee, splits into three as you read further. We get a side story of Pug's foster brother, Tomas, and his interactions with the dwarves and the elves, and a fantastic tale full of intrigue as we follow Duke Borric's son Arutha on a series of political missions. These three threads split off from each other partway through the book and all of them develop in interesting ways.

There's a lot of mystery in this book.

Midkemian politics are one of my favorite aspects of the early Feist novels. He aims neither for an idealistic portrayal of a kingdom fighting an empire, nor a grim and pessimistic look at life under a noble caste. Borric has a strong sense of justice and obligation to the people, and so do his sons, sometimes to what many would call a fault. There are hints of a crisis looming on the horizon in this book, and the efforts of Arutha and his companions to cope with it are amazing to read.

There is no obvious "villain" on the Midkemian side, only some with different senses of where honor and allegiance should lie, and a king with an interesting, conflicting position.

There are several moving moments throughout the book. Without spoiling too much, we have the Choosing ceremony, a pledge of three friends, scenes that show the strangeness of war and honor, and more.

Feist has a good sense of comedic timing in this book, too. The three friends' pledge is a good example, but we have the dry humor of Martin and the elves, the bickering between Roland and Carline, and the humble irony of an old pirate captain.

Romance is present in the book but it is kept fairly tasteful and is not really the focus of the book.

All in all, this book was the beginning of the Riftwar Saga, a series of four books of which I've read three (really need to get a copy of Silverthorn one of these days), and enjoyed all of them. Feist organizes his books into "sagas" of usually four books, where each "saga" has a different set of main characters, with some overlap and appearances of characters from other books. I've probably read about ten or twelve of Feist's books at this point, and honestly my favorites are many of these older ones.

Later works have a tendency to raise the stakes in a way I find a little ridiculous, whereas these early books, sometimes the stakes are just one little frontier castle and a few hundred men, and I love how Feist handles these situations. Plus, the low-magic setting means that problem-solving is a thoughtful and detailed process, which I really enjoy.

Each Feist Saga has a different focus, too, so feel free to start at the beginning of any of them, but this is his first book and is an excellent starting point, no matter which of his "sagas" you end up liking best.

Grab a copy here, if you're interested:
https://a.co/d/bELGigK

The Joy of Low-Stakes Storytelling! Lessons from my First Novel, part 2!

One of the trends I've seen in a lot of modern fiction is the tendency toward the epic. Everybody wants to create this massive, complex, world with amazing, powerful characters engaged in a climactic struggle to save the universe from an unapologetic, existential evil that holds billions of lives in the balance.

God, I'm tired of those.

Detail, Dialect, and Sausage-Making: A Review of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Well, here we are: Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. You'd think, me being me, that I would have read this libertarian sci-fi classic a long time ago, but somehow that's not the case.

That said, let's get to it.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells the story of a revolution of the people of the Moon against the control of the Earth. The main/PoV character is Manuel, a guy who works on Luna's biggest supercomputer, and finds out that it's alive, or something close to it. That's not a spoiler; it happens in the first few pages of the book.

Manuel befriends this computer. He calls it Mike. Around the same time, Manuel gets pulled into some major civil unrest on Luna, and ends up leading a group working toward independence for the moon colony. The original inhabitants of Luna were criminals, but now that's not the whole population, plus many of the criminals have served their time, only to discover their bodies can no longer handle full Earth gravity.

Having a huge, self-aware supercomputer on their side turns out to be a big help to the independence movement.

To continue with minimal spoilers, what I can say is that the scenario Heinlein creates for the quest for independence is incredibly detailed, with a lot more ups and downs than many authors would bother to create, and more ups than you'd expect, thanks in big part to Mike's input. There are some very interesting hard choices to be made, and Heinlein doesn't skimp on consequences.

Because of the high level of detail, the pacing varies widely throughout the story. The "fun" parts are relatively quick, though expanded significantly through Heinlein's attention to detail, but the "boring" parts are not ignored. It feels like most authors who write about big societal upheavals love to ignore the busywork, but Heinlein doesn't let us pretend there isn't sausage being made.

The Lunar quest for independence kept me intrigued, though. I would frequently wonder, what problem will they face next? What tactics will they use? There were almost always multiple courses of action to take, and a decent amount of discussion and consideration of pros and cons and potential next moves.

The story is told from Manuel's first person perspective, which is consistent and usually unsure of what he'll do next or whether what he's doing is right. He's thrown into the driver's seat of history by accident, and his clear purpose and level-headedness pull him through.

There are lots of unique and interesting cultural details in the story: life on Luna, how cultural norms are enforced, the strange cultural norms that arise due to certain societal forces, tons of detail about the long-term health and physical traits of born and bred moonmen... I wonder how accurate Heinlein's perspective on the long-term effects of 1/6th gravity are on the human body. We know zero-g is really bad, but Heinlein proposes a lot of positive effects of long-term moon-level gravity.

One element that gets a lot of detail is Heinlein's description of the "line marriage" system prevalent on Luna. Part of me wonders how much of Manuel's praise for the "line marriage" is Manuel speaking, and how much is Heinlein. Clarke did something similar, too, in Rendezvous with Rama, but there was a lot less detail about it in Clarke's writing.

Another element that I found kind of... quaint? was the conception of how low the bar was to a computer being seen as "alive." In the modern day of AI production of everything from writing to memes to videos to jokes and beyond, once Manuel discovers Mike can talk and come up with jokes, he pretty much concludes Mike is a real boy.

The characters in the book are functional but not really layered or tricky. Everything is pretty straightforward, with nearly all of the intrigue coming from their complicated task. Heinlein tries doing something really weird with dialect in this book: he drops a lot of pronouns and connecting words, and throws in a lot of little foreign-language bits, which were almost always thankfully obvious in meaning. However, the dialect is somewhat inconsistent, leading to it being more difficult for the reader to "get used to."

The foreign language bits are frequently redundant, with several different words used for "yes," or so it seems, but on more careful consideration I realized that it may have been an attempt by Heinlein to highlight the spirit of independence and local pride of the people of Luna.

One final major criticism: The current e-book edition available on Amazon is abhorrently bad. It is a bad picture-to-text scan, with lots of messed-up letters and hyphenation. The formatting is awful, with missing line and page breaks. The last sentence of most chapters runs into the next chapter number, it's so badly done. There are even quite a few repeated sentences later in the book!

So, I'll link to an older edition here, and if you want a physical copy, go look for an old print edition or something on Ebay or whatever. I'm serious. As far as I can tell, the print editions that pop up first on Amazon are also based on this butchered eBook version.

Final thoughts: I enjoyed it, even though it was somewhat hard to read, partly due to Heinlein's inconsistent application of dialect, and partly due to the awful eBook version. However, if I look past those problems, I thought it was detailed, fought hard to stay plausible, and most of all, was hopeful. A good story for any freedom-loving sci-fi readers to check out.

Lessons from my First Novel 1: Five Planks for Character-Building

One of the things that bugs me about modern science fiction is the characters... Despite often being parts of supposedly military organizations, they pull rank at the slightest provocation. Their leaders give bad orders, and their subordinates disobey reasonable ones. The Peter Principle is everywhere on display.

We see characters who can do anything and everything well, who always succeed and have no sense of their own fallibility. Headstrongness has become almost a kind of plot armor.

We see characters who turn minor disagreements into massive splinters and nursed grudges. They rarely discuss their differences and come to some kind of middle ground, not even an agreement to disagree in too many cases.

We also see fiction where the PoV character almost always knows best.

We see never-before-observed phenomena and problems solved in five minutes with the science-fiction equivalent of chewing gum and gravel.

A part of my desire is to push against this trend, and while I was creating my debut novel, Pursuit of the Heliotrope, I came up with five planks to help create characters that are balanced--capable but flawed.

The five planks are:

1. Professionalism. Characters argue but attempt to reach consensus.
   For instance, in one of the discussions, Lew comes up with an idea that makes Orland Co. look a little bad, but the company rep looks at his arguments in good faith and attempts to provide additional info to help mitigate any situations that might arise if Lew is right.
   My characters maintain professional language and tone.
   For instance, the Orland company rep is not demanding or haughty. Iggy and Wyatt have a very professional back-and-forth as Iggy searches for traps on a ship. Criticisms are done in private, when necessary and possible.
   Ranks are respected but not worshipped.
   For instance, Aric makes a point to treat his hired contractors well, at his own expense. There are occasional direct orders given, but when they happen, they are usually for the clear benefit of the subordinate. Wyatt recognizes that he's getting older, and remembers the value of youthful agility.
   
   
2. Respectability. Subordinates respect superiors and superiors respect subordinates.
   For instance, Aric recognizes Lew's expertise on repairs, and puts significant trust into his evaluations. Iggy says to Aric that he "learned from the best," but he's careful to say this so that Wyatt and Max can't hear him.
   Superiors know the strengths and weaknesses of their subordinates and give them appropriate tasks.
   For instance, Wyatt assigns two solid engineers to help Lew work on the Heliotrope. Wyatt even knows that one of his people, Wil, is a good cook--even though that has nothing to do with Wil's official duties.
   Subordinates look up to their superiors, for good reason, and understand that they can learn from them.
   For instance, Wyatt's part-time engineers both look up to Lew as they see his expertise is the real deal.
   Disagreements happen but they are usually resolved calmly; criticisms are not seen as or used for personal attacks.
   For instance, at one point Wyatt neglects to mention a possible tactic, but for good reason, which a short conversation and some reasonable questions shows.
   
   
3. Specialization. Each character has strong and weak points.
   For instance, the different crew members are assigned to the tasks that they're best at. Lew is good at haggling for parts, but not for other goods, and he knows it.
   Characters aim at tasks that match their skills.
   For instance, the same people work with Lew multiple times on engineering tasks.
   Superiors point their subordinates in the directions that match their skills, and also the superiors recognize those skills.
   For instance, Wyatt's assignments to the Kingfisher for a particular maneuver.
   
   
4. Competence. People in certain positions are generally there for a reason.
   Everyone recognizes Wyatt's expertise in security work. Aric handles high-level planning way better than Lew or Bill. The captains of each ship command the respect of their crew because they are seen as competent, but not overcompetent.
   Problems are solved, but it takes time and materials. There are several briefings and planning sessions. Resources are finite and have limited flexibility. Sometimes things are jerry-rigged and sometimes there's a plan to get what they need. There is significant down-time when time-intensive tasks need to be completed.
   Simple ideas are thought up by multiple specialized characters. Bill and Max have a common idea at one point, and so do Aric and Lew.
   
   
5. Fallibility. This is the negative plank that ties everything together.
   Even characters with strong specializations can and do fail. There are a few examples of this in the book.
   Characters also recognize the possibility of failure and try to plan for contingencies. They check the final quality of their work, too.
   For instance, when Lew is fixing some thrusters, he not only takes time and materials and manpower to finish the repairs, but he talks about the tests he performed to ensure that the repairs are holding.
   

These are the five planks that I tried to incorporate into my character designs and interactions in order to get away from the tropes I mentioned at the beginning of this post. While these aren't a perfect silver bullet, I think they helped to make my story more fun and more believable, and give my characters more depth and reasonable interactions.

If you agree, you might want to give Pursuit of the Heliotrope a try.

You can grab a copy at Amazon.

Or at a variety of other eBook retailers.

Thus concludes Part 1 of the lessons I learned from writing my first novel. There will be more parts coming soon!

Light-Years Away, Both in Tone and Actual Distance: Foundation and Empire!

I really loved Foundation, so naturally I wanted to read the next book in the series, Foundation and Empire, fairly soon... What I found was a very different book from the first one, much more "concentrated," and with a very different tone!

In fact, one of the weak points of the book is going to affect the review, because Foundation and Empire's plot is littered with deliberate surprises, to the point that it's a hard book to review without major spoilers, but I'll try.

Tips and Thoughts on Jargon for Writers and Readers

After reading Dune, I spent a little time thinking about the use of jargon in writing--where it's necessary, where it isn't, how to handle it, how it can be used for nefarious purposes, etc.

So, in case you don't know the definition, let's start with What is Jargon? Jargon is technical terminology or high-level language compared to the expected audience of the piece. So, if I talked about Bragg diffraction to a group of physicists, that wouldn't be jargon, but if I put it into a story, it would. This could also include the use of made-up or foreign-language words in fiction, for instance, a random Romanian word in a book not targeted at Romanian speakers.

Sometimes jargon is necessary. We need it when we need a precise description of a thing, such as the cobalt bombs of On the Beach or the psychohistory of Foundation. We also need it when we are introducing unique or novel constructs in our fictional worlds, such as Dune's stillsuits and Feist's Lesser and Greater Path magicians.

It's worth noting that novel jargon can be made more accessible by making compound words like stillsuit; the definition is in the word.

Sometimes jargon is unnecessary but helps to add flavor to the story. Proper names are a good example of this, such as Epasotl in Doomsday Recon. We may also want to show off cultural artifacts or phenomena which are part of the story, such as Clanspeak in Battletech, or unique month and holiday names in the Elder Scrolls setting.

It's worth remembering that whenever jargon appears for a good reason in the story, the author needs to make a good faith effort to explain the jargon either explicitly or through context. Sometimes flavor jargon only appears once, but even then it helps if there is some context to guide the reader's understanding. For example, the fictional month names in the Elder Scrolls world are mostly veiled references to what time of year it is, with references to harvest times, etc.

All of these uses of jargon are valid and can be great boons to your worldbuilding. However, some authors like to use jargon in ways that can confuse the reader or damage immersion.

One example is extensive use of large quantities of jargon which require the reader to spend a lot of time reading and trying to remember the meaning. In The Widow's Son, there were frequent sentences in foreign languages (mostly Spanish) that were often long enough that someone unfamiliar with Spanish would have trouble understanding what was said. Some of the context clues for the meanings of those sentences were too vague or too far away or even missing.

Using jargon when perfectly reasonable English terms already exist is another bad use of jargon. Perhaps one of the silliest and most egregious examples is illustrated here:

Another bad use of jargon is to create an illusion of depth, or to force a particular theme. One poignant example of this is the naming conventions in the anime Evangelion. Throwing darts at a bible in order to name things is neither depth, nor true attention to theme.

As a writer, here are some things you can do to ensure your jargon is reasonable:

Ask yourself... 

• Is this jargon necessary?
• Is the reason behind it justified by the plot, characters, or setting?
• Is it organic and supported by context?
• How much am I asking the reader to memorize?
• Can I simplify it or make things easier to read somehow?

As a reader, you might ask yourself these questions instead:

• Is the jargon slowing me down?
• Do thematic elements of the jargon actually fit?
• What jargon do I actually need to remember, and which can I let slide by?

Jargon is a powerful tool, which can add precision, originality, and color to your writing. As a reader, you should also be open to being taught interesting, original, and useful things in your reading.

However, it can also be used to confuse or dupe the reader. Therefore, writers must be aware and respectful of the reader's time, and readers should distinguish between jargon that serves the story and jargon that confuses things, and actively avoid the latter.

Intricate Characters, Unique Worldbuilding, but so darn Depressing: Dune Review!

Before I start, I want to tell a little story. Back in the day when Borders had bookstores all over the place, I would often go to see what was on the shelves with friends. My friend Justin and I came up with a fun game to play with the later Dune sequels (the ones from after Frank Herbert died). We called it the "Dune check," and what we'd do was grab a Dune book off of a shelf, open it to a random page, and see if there was anything on that page that was written so weirdly that it was funny. I don't think we ever found a pair of pages that wasn't funny.

So, I was a bit skeptical going into Dune, and was pleasantly surprised to find that, while the writing is a bit clunky in places, it wasn't nearly as laughable as the later Brian Herbert books. As I've been leaning more into classic sci-fi, I thought it was worth giving Dune a real chance.

So Much Going On--Maybe Too Much! Children of the Lens Review!

Well, we've finally reached the end of this very fun series, and finally we get to see how the Lens works across generations. Children of the Lens is now the story of Kimball Kinnison, Clarissa, and his five kids, all of whom have seemingly inherited Lens powers, and to a greater degree than anyone seems to realize.

The Amazingly Unique Writing of the Soul Blazer Series

It's time to talk a bit about one of the most interesting and unique bits of video game writing that I've ever experienced. It lives outside the fairly standard "protagonists save the swords and sorcery fantasy world from antagonist" model that you see in a lot of games--a model that can be really good, too. See Final Fantasy 4 and 6.

No, today I'm talking about a fairly obscure little series that was produced by Enix back in the 1990s, before they merged with Squaresoft. Enix, the company most known for the Dragon Quest series, a series which fits fairly neatly in the aforementioned model 99% of the time. In the 1990s, Enix of Japan could basically print money by releasing a new Dragon Quest game, and they did something that most big game companies are terrified to do today:

More Lens Swashbuckling and Twists! Second Stage Lensmen Review

At first glance, Second Stage Lensmen seems like more of the same from Doc Smith, which isn't a bad thing: we get action, intrigue, grand strategy, disguises, and larger-than-life characters.

But it turns out that we actually get more: extended looks at the enemy and its operations; the appearance of the first female lensman; more details about space battles, from heavy cruisers down to individual dogfights; and direct mention of Eddore!

Five Editing Foci

As I finished up editing my first novel, I spent some time considering the different things I was looking for each time I went through a new draft. I came up with a list of five things to focus on during a particular editing stage, and thought this might be helpful for people who spend all their time looking for typos or feel like they're just doing the same thing over and over each time they edit.

A Modern, Pulpy Mashup: Doomsday Recon Review

After reading and reviewing Ryan Williamson's The Widow's Son, I decided to try out one of his later works. Doomsday Recon is the first book in a series of three, and has Jason Anspach also on as an author.

Compared to The Widow's Son, I found this book to be much more polished. One of the problems I had with The Widow's Son was the constant foreign-language bits, which are still present in this book, but are handled more skillfully and naturally.

Contrasting Gothic Horror: Dracula v. The Phantom of the Opera!

I've covered both Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera (the books, obv), with Justin Fraser on the Wordy Pair Podcast, but I thought it might be fun to contrast them with each other in a bit more detail, so that's what I'm gonna do here (and in the video above).

Both of these books are classics of the Gothic Horror genre, yet they are about as different as can be!

A Character Description Crash Course, Courtesy Rex Stout

I've recently read comments to the effect of "don't describe your characters," and was a little shocked to discover that there are actually people that promote this kind of nonsense.

Of course, it's possible to overdo it, but nothing at all is a bridge too... close?

In the video above, I look at character descriptions from a variety of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books, and try to glean some bits of wisdom from them.

How Not to Name Drop in Writing

I recently re-read Massacre of Mankind, an official sequel to H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds that was published in 2017, written by Stephen Baxter. It's a decent book, and Justin Fraser and I talk about it on this episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast.

Gray Lensman? More Like Great Lensman! Book Review!

Gray Lensman is the next book in E.E. "Doc" Smith's famous Lensman series! This one continues the adventures of the inimitable Kimball Kinnison, actually starting by retelling the ending of the previous book (which I noted was abrupt and not particularly good) with a bit more flair!

If you're looking for something drastically new, you won't find it here, but overall I enjoyed this book very much and if you've enjoyed any of the Lensman books already, you'll find more of it here.

When Reality Is Crazier than Bizarre Fiction!

A little silliness for you today...

How many bizarre and unlikely coincidences does it take to connect a new song to a video game that is several years old, and takes place over thirty years ago? I count at least six.

Asimov's Foundation: Better than Expected!

How is it possible that this is my first time reading Foundation? I enjoyed a bunch of Asimov's robot stuff when I was in high school, and I even think I read some of his non-fiction work. Yet somehow, Foundation always missed me. Whenever I would think of it, the library or bookstore I was in wouldn't have it. And so, many years have passed, and I'm finally reading it for the first time!

It's worth noting that Foundation, like a lot of the Lensman stuff, was originally published serially, even in the same magazine as some of it: Astounding Stories. But while the Lensman series is swashbuckling and practical, Foundation is much more cerebral and driven by clever plans with a lot more moral grayness floating around.

This first book in what would eventually become a series covers five specific points in time: the Founding, Founding+50 years, Founding+80 years, Founding+155 years, and one part that happens between 80-155 years later but is not exactly placed.

I found this book super interesting and very thought-inspiring. The five individual stories are loosely connected by the concept of "Seldon crises," which are major turning points in history.

Seldon is the great psychohistorian who anticipated the fall of the galactic empire, and the potential for a dark age of 30,000 years. His goal, described at the start of the book, is to reduce that dark age to a mere 1,000 years.

The book follows the movement of the Foundation from a twinkle in Seldon's eye, to a purely scientific endeavor, to a pseudo-religion, to a trading partner spreading good tech across the galaxy.

One interesting point of conflict is between the large-scale tech of the empire and the miniaturized tech of the Foundation. We see a fascinating example of economic warfare, as well as an expertly-planned intrigue that seeks to create control by limiting access to high-tech--less violent than the alternatives.

The most powerful scenes in the book involve one character outplanning another, yet the story still manages to avoid falling into the all-too-common pitfall of advocating centralized planning. I was honestly a bit worried Foundation would be a socialist disaster, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not.

Even Hari Seldon isn't really planning; he makes some good predictions and works hard to set up the right incentives early on, but he doesn't "plan" the actions of the Foundation in any meaningful way. He doesn't provide instructions but rather says each crisis leads to a constriction of choices, which I thought was an interesting take.

One point that made me laugh was Asimov poking fun at people playing science by simply reading and comparing old authorities, as opposed to doing their own experiments and research. In fact, there were quite a few humorous moments throughout the book.

I loved the point when some Foundation logicians broke down a politician's words during a meeting and determined that the whole thing was null content.

On the down side, I was a little disappointed to find there was almost no actual science in the book! Asimov mostly relies on minimizing detail on space travel and communication, throwing in the buzzword "atomic" here and there.

There were a few parts of the book that lapsed into very pulpy dialogue, reminiscent of Doc Smith's Lensman books. You may enjoy that or not, but it wasn't a significant chunk of the story.

To make one last contrast with Lensman, the action in Foundation is much less bombastic, punctuating important moments but not fatiguing the reader.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed my first look at Foundation. If you want to give it a try, check it out here. This is the version I got, a very nice hardcover containing the first three books.

Space Drama! Review of Colony Launch

Colony Launch is an okay novel. If you're looking for some reasonably interesting character drama, you might find it satisfying, but my final thoughts on it were unfortunately not great.

From a plotting perspective, Colony Launch is about four separate story threads that come together very slowly. It takes nearly half the book for three of them to stick together, and the fourth only joins up right at the end.

An Exercise or Method for Deeper Writing

Do you ever feel like your writing is a bit shallow in places? Whether you feel it's deficient in character, plot, worldbuilding, theme, or even for non-fiction where you feel the argument is lacking, today I'm going to talk a little bit about a technique I use sometimes to help deepen my writing.

You'll probably feel like it's pretty obvious once I say it, so here goes: Ask questions.

Fun with All Men Are Brothers!

The Water Margin Story, a famous Chinese novel that goes by several different names here in the West, is so freakin' crazy.

Writing Tip: Avoiding Late-Draft Tunnel Vision

Redrafting is obviously a big deal. You can add and polish enough in the later stages that you can turn a relatively weak story into something really great.

This video is from a few months ago when I was in the later stages of editing my novel, Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I found a couple of significant mistakes and managed to improve the flow of those chapters quite a bit.

The Lens Just Keeps Getting Crazier! Review of Galactic Patrol!

I've talked a bit about the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith already, and this time I've got a review of the first chronologically written Lensman book, Galactic Patrol. This book was serialized in Astounding Magazine in 1937 and 1938, then expanded and published as a stand-alone book soon after.

Reading: More Money than Brains

Just me reading one of my short stories. This one is More Money than Brains, a story about Aric, Bill, and Lew on a little job with a real jerk of an employer. I tried to be funny but ended up being mostly sarcastic. Still, I think the story has a few good moments.

Tutorial: Making a Paperback on Amazon!

This might be helpful to other writers! I do a video tutorial, producing a paperback version of my first novella!

Fantastic "Food for Thought" Sci-Fi: Roadside Picnic

Been meaning to read this one for a while, but I finally got around to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I've heard a lot of good things about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and this book is the basis for those, so I thought I'd give it a read.

My most basic top-level observation was the book's very dark, almost nihilistic tone... Roadside Picnic deals with a small number of characters, and those characters are very fragile... their numbers reduce significantly over the course of the story.

It's heralded as a great classic of Soviet science fiction, and I daresay it is packed with interesting ideas, from the merely mechanical ("empties" and "traps") to the philosophical ("the unlucky barber"). These ideas are presented in a range from obvious to subtle in the book, leaving potential rewards for repeated readings.

One great element of the story was its ambiguous ending. These can feel hollow or trite if done poorly, but I enjoyed it in this book.

Another thing that got me about this book was the tragic arc of the situation. The "zone" gets worse and worse, and so does the government's reaction to it. Eventually, people are forbidden from leaving, and those left behind suffer--the "zone" messes with them and especially their children. The area becomes more and more impoverished as people distance themselves from the "zone" and its inhabitants.

I also found it interesting how making the trade in "zone" artifacts illegal ensured that only the most unreliable people would offer payment for them. A lesson in bad economic incentives.

On the micro level, I found the descriptions of "zone" exploration vivid, creative, and tense. The characters were interesting and often surprisingly sympathetic. Even though mankind learned some useful things from the "zone," it was clear that, most of the time, what you got out of it was far less than you put in.

The Strange Freedom of Old Sci-Fi!

Reading older sci-fi has made me think a lot about how, as time goes on and scientific discoveries are made, the universe of "plausible" science fiction narrows. A century ago, there were so many things that we didn't understand, or where our only understanding came from mathematical models untested in the real world.

Einstein wrote his famous paper on special relativity in 1905, but it took decades for that theory to be backed up by significant experimental data. Hell, there was a man named Herbert Dingle who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 through 1953--not a crank or kook! In the late 1950s he managed to "un-convince" himself of special relativity and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he discovered (or thought he had discovered) was wrong with it.

It's worth noting that, just because a mathematical model is created to solve a particular problem (in this case, the apparent constancy of the speed of light), that doesn't mean that no other models exist that could also explain the same phenomenon and have different forms. Models with very little data to back them up should be met with some skepticism!

But think about all the discoveries that got data to support them over time (special relativity included)... each time that happened, some gap that science fiction authors could play with and still be "plausible" got closed up.

It's easy to forget that 50, 80, 100 years ago, authors were dealing with very different explanations about how the universe worked. One of the things that happens when you're writing in those olden days is that you could write a "hard" science fiction story hypothesizing a stable nucleus at high atomic number, or faster-than-light travel, or other things.

The video above contained some of my musings on the topic of how "not knowing" can sometimes open up paths for authors to write plausible works that we instinctively reject as impossible today. That means that works that could be seen as "hard" sci-fi 100 years ago might be classed as the softest of soft sci-fi today. Something to think about!

A Fun Little Lovecraftian Diversion

One day, I was looking through my old Lovecraft collection, looking for a short story that might be fun to read on YouTube, when I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole.

See, I was trying to figure out which of his stories were the oldest, and what I stumbled onto was something uncharacteristically... cute? For a Lovecraft.

It turns out that Lovecraft's earliest extant writing is a little piece of fiction that he wrote when he was five or six years old.

You can find the images here, in young Lovecraft's own handwriting: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:425207/

So, I thought it would be fun to read this little piece of history aloud, and talk a little about it, too. Unlike the works that made him famous, this one is playful and funny.

Finally Making my First Novella Presentable!

Honestly, I resisted doing this for a long time, but I figured that, as I was finishing up the first full-length novel in the series, that it made sense to finally get a real cover for my first novella, The Hyacinth Rescue.

Thinking About Brandon Sanderson's "Five Tips for Writing Your First Novel"

Well, I already kinda finished my first novel before I found this video, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to go back in retrospect and see how many of Sanderson's tips I found on my own, and what I thought of his tips in general.

(By the way, you can see his original video here.)

A Method to Help Break Bad Writing Habits: DEEP Cuts!

Have you ever found yourself "over-flowering" your writing? This could be in fiction, in copy, in essays, whatever. One temptation writers face is to write more--to create interesting little linguistic constructs that are flowery, clever, or even poetic.

However, this can sometimes develop into a bad habit of drawing things out and adding a lot of unnecessary words.

Thoughts on Continuity, Tone, and Beetlejuice

This video was inspired by an episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast where Justin told me about "Beetlejuice" and its sequel, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice."

Now, I've never seen either of those movies, so Justin ends up explaining how the fun, playful tone of the first movie was completely absent from the second movie. It's honestly kind of fun when I ask a basic question or put forward a rudimentary suggestion and Justin is like, "They didn't do that."

Anyway, based on this, I made a video talking about the importance of continuity (including continuity of tone), as well as thinking up some circumstances where you can get away with paying less attention to previous works.

Peak Rex Stout? A Look at The Doorbell Rang

I kind of shot this review from the hip after reading my favorite Nero Wolfe book, The Doorbell Rang.

So, I don't have a detailed written review to put here. Uh... just enjoy the video, I guess?

Here's what I can say: The Doorbell Rang is so much fun. It has one of the coolest plots of any of the Nero Wolfe books, with a lot of engaging twists and turns. It has colorful and interesting characters. It has a lot of wry humor. It also teaches you a couple of good ways to shake off a tail.

The murder is almost incidental to the story!

There are some great scenes (look for Archie "waving his legs around"), some great commentary from Archie, and an amazing scheme by Wolfe to ensure they can finish their job.

It has no illusions about law enforcement and it has a clever solution and famous ending. A lot of questions are left unanswered, yet the book is thoroughly satisfying.

It's basically Nero Wolfe vs. the FBI. As a Nero Wolfe fan who also happens to dislike government surveillance and overreach and corruption, it's like a... ...uh... a really amazing pizza in book form. I devour it whenever I get a chance, and you might like it too.

Disjointed by Design? Review of Slaughterhouse Five

Finally got around to reading some Kurt Vonnegut, and figured I'd start with the classic Slaughterhouse Five.

It's a weird book, to be honest. Not necessarily in a bad way, but as much as Vonnegut explicitly states it's an anti-war piece, the rest of the book that isn't explicitly stating its purpose... doesn't really serve that purpose very well.

Examining the Writing in the Ultima Series...

I did a series of videos looking at the writing of the famous old CRPG series, Ultima, created by Richard Garriot. I examine the overall quality, worldbuilding, characters, themes, and several great narrative tricks that help to pull the player in and improve immersion.

The Paradoxes of Adaptation

Adapting a work from one medium to another is a difficult and not-necessarily-straightforward task.

The Strange Addresses of Nero Wolfe's Brownstone...

The address of Nero Wolfe's famous brownstone is given several times in the books, and there are even a couple of different addresses attributed to the great old house.

A Reading of my Favorite Lovecraft Short: "Cool Air"

Trying to catch up my blog here with my YouTube shenanigans...

Just a reading of my favorite Lovecraft short, Cool Air. I love this story because, in contrast to a lot of Lovecraft's writings, there is no cosmic horror, no twisting dreamscape, and no ancient evil. That uniqueness is what really makes me love this story.