I'm an independent writer with a love for science fiction and cosmic horror! Check out all of my free works here, and if you like what I'm doing, I'd love it if you'd check out my longer works.
"Fascinating" really is the right word to describe this deceptively good short story by Lydia Schoch. It's not often that I finish a story, short or long, and immediately go back to the beginning for another helping. Tumble managed to do that, and that by itself is notable.
It works so well because the story's tone is a very smooth, almost imperceptible escalation from banality, to healthy curiosity, to benign but notable strangeness, and onward through a few more levels that I won't spoil. That smoothness was a major factor that got me to go back right after I finished it; I was left wondering whether I had missed a hint or two or a page somewhere.
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!
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.
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 Spacehere. You can also buy it on Amazon.
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.
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:
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 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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
Another dose of E.E. "Doc" Smith's fun (if a bit dated) pulp science fiction epic! First Lensman was published in 1950, after all of the other Lensman books, yet it sits as number two in chronological order of the story.
The book is about the first contact of mankind (and aliens allied with mankind) with the Arisians, and their receipt of the first Lenses.
Just some silliness for today. I've been trying to put up one video per day on YouTube, and only some of them are related to writing and fiction.
I'm a little bit behind, but I've got a couple of video book reviews that will soon be posted here. I've gone through First Lensman and On the Beach.
Anyway, today's video about "writing" is actually about the effect that (I think) Amazon print-on-demand is having on the book industry. The old-school 4" x 7" book size seems to be getting less popular, and newer, larger sizes are popping in.
At first, I thought maybe it was the market adjusting to people being more used to reading on screens, with their 9x16 aspect ratio (in portrait orientation), but maybe not, after looking at it more closely.
Trying to create a little topical content each day over on YouTube, and today's rant was relevant.
Talkin' about bad "localizers" and how they use a few difficult issues in Japanese to gaslight people... I'm a mediocre reader of Japanese, but I go through and cover the things that make Japanese a little tricky to translate and provide some references for you (if you want to get into the language yourself).
The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.
The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.
In the last week, I read through E.E. "Doc" Smith's book Triplanetary, which is a very weird book in a lot of ways. Most of it was written in 1934, but Smith added a bunch in 1947-1948 to link it up with his Lensman series.
Today, we have to read it with a healthy, thick grain of suspension of disbelief, but it's a pretty cool book with some fun ideas, especially considering it was written nearly a hundred years ago.
My friend Justin Fraser, author of The Good Guy and some other books, recommended this book to me because of its interesting plot twist at the end. What I found was a surprisingly fun and extremely creative little fantasy adventure that you'll probably enjoy as long as you don't hate puns.
A Spell for Chameleon has a few "big" fantasy ideas that are pretty interesting, but where it really shines is in the huge number of "little" fantasy ideas that Anthony packs into the book. The main characters are interesting and well-written, and the pacing is just right--not too fast but steady and constantly moving.
The dialogue is very good, with different characters having very different voices.
The tone is a little strange, with a bit of a childish/storybook feel through most of the books, but enough adult situations to put it in the upper range of young adult. Nothing too raunchy, but descriptions are detailed, funny, and frank through the whole book, including the adult situations.
Kind of the language you might expect a teenage boy to have in his head, but hopefully enough sense not to say out loud.
All in all, a good read as long as you don't mind puns. I really loved the creature-craft, and that alone makes it worth looking at again. Anthony's creativity is seemingly unbounded and a good inspiration. Probably will check out the sequel soon, but I'm not drooling over it.
