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.