How To Write a Harry Turtledove AH
James Nicoll
Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
half wars an American can reasonably be expected to have heard about
in some detail: The American Revolutionary War (but outside the greater
context of Anglo-French rivalry, which is why it is only a half),
the American Civil War and World War Two (WWI counts as part of WWII
and will generally only be known as it relates to WWII). You _can_ use
other wars as models but you won't get the same visceral reaction and you
may alienate readers by confronting them with the unfamiliar*.
For example, you could steal the pacification methods
used to convince Philippinos to accomodate themselves to the US's
grander goals but people will just think you're bashing the US.
You could use the Tai Ping Rebellion, but very few people whose
families are not Chinese will have any idea what you are talking
about** and may well be startled and alarmed at the idea that
anything ever happened in China.
1a: Respect the power of the historical morphic field: regardless
of the actual sequence of events or whether the following makes sense
in context, all history must play out so as to create a resonance with
the 2 1/2 wars your readers know about. This means that even if aliens
have uplifted everyone in Japan into avalokitesvaras, Japan will bomb
Pearl Harbor sometime in the early 1940s. Indeed, even if Japan slid
beneath the Pacific sometime in the Triassic, Japan will bomb Pearl
Harbor in the 1940s.
Remember that "It's 1969, the meteor missed, the dinosaurs never
died and Richard Nixon has just been sworn in as President" isn't just a
good idea but the key to sales.
1b: Small changes are as good as big ones. So are purile changes. You
can get a four book series out of the ACW simply by swapping the
races of the masters and slaves in the slave states and you can
get a series out of copying an old war detail for detail and swapping
in fantasy elements for historical ones (wizards for artillery,
say, or dragons for Pershing's air scouts).
2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
for each.
2a: Many installments: It follows from the above that only as
many events as fit into 2,400 words are needed for the entire
book. Accordingly, each book will cover a relatively short
period of time. This means any long process will need lots
and lots of books to detail it.
2b: The Law of the Fecund: as old characters die, replace them
to keep the character count up.
3: The only reason to end a series is if people stop buying the
installments. This is a business, not art, and at current pay
scales for writers, you will need lots of installments. You
may need several series at once.
3a: But as is obvious from the above, you can reuse material
and settings over and over. This is a tremendous labour saving
device. I suggest preparing templates like "[Name Here] was
not a happy man" to slap into place as needed.
* Turtledove doesn't reply on copying Kipling but for people who do,
there's the Kipling Rule: SF fans who like Kipling generally are
virtually innocent of any contamination of information of Kipling's
context, save that which is in the stories themselves. This is
somewhat like trying to deduce American politics of the 1940s from
BEYOND THIS HORIZON.
** The one proper use of China is "Once they explored but then they
didn't and then all Chinese history ended."
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
Gene Ward Smith
James Nicoll wrote:
> Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
> half wars an American can reasonably be expected to have heard about
> in some detail
Americans all know about Vietnam vets. Doesn't that count for
something?
James Nicoll
Michael S. Schiffer
news:e0p2oo$ja2$1...@reader1.panix.com:
> In article
> <1143999436.8...@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>, Gene
> Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>> Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two
>>> and a half wars an American can reasonably be expected to have
>>> heard about in some detail
>>Americans all know about Vietnam vets. Doesn't that count for
>>something?
> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
"I have not reached the point where I can look at Viet Nam. I don't
have the objectivity." --Harry Turtledove, Sci-Fi.com chat
transcript, September 14, 1999,
<http://www.scifi.com/transcripts/1999/HarryTurtledove.html>.
Granted, that was a while back now, but probably not that far in
terms of his writing pipeline.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Gene Ward Smith
James Nicoll wrote:
> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
about that.
Nancy Lebovitz
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
I'm not sure if the problem is that the audience is American or that
the audience is human, but one of the easiest ways to make a story
salable is apparently to have a war on.
Unless you're Laurel Hamilton.
To be fair, Turtledove has a recent novel about a kidnapped cross-
universe traveller. I don't know whether it includes a war.
>half wars an American can reasonably be expected to have heard about
>in some detail: The American Revolutionary War (but outside the greater
>context of Anglo-French rivalry, which is why it is only a half),
>the American Civil War and World War Two (WWI counts as part of WWII
>and will generally only be known as it relates to WWII). You _can_ use
>other wars as models but you won't get the same visceral reaction and you
>may alienate readers by confronting them with the unfamiliar*.
>
>1a: Respect the power of the historical morphic field: regardless
>of the actual sequence of events or whether the following makes sense
>in context, all history must play out so as to create a resonance with
>the 2 1/2 wars your readers know about. This means that even if aliens
>have uplifted everyone in Japan into avalokitesvaras, Japan will bomb
>Pearl Harbor sometime in the early 1940s. Indeed, even if Japan slid
>beneath the Pacific sometime in the Triassic, Japan will bomb Pearl
>Harbor in the 1940s.
>
> Remember that "It's 1969, the meteor missed, the dinosaurs never
>died and Richard Nixon has just been sworn in as President" isn't just a
>good idea but the key to sales.
You could always read some Richard Garfinkle to clear your palate.
>
>2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
>have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
?
Perhaps "the less about each of them"? Or the less plot you have
to actually think about?
>cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
>for each.
>
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://livejournal.com/users/nancylebov
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
James Nicoll
Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
That would be over in the Write Best Sellers the David
Drake Way, which includes such pointers as "You may say 'violence
corrupt everything it touches' but your core readership will
see 'Yay! Zap! Kapow!'"
James Nicoll
The point is to emulate Turtledove's success, not to
explore unrelated possibilities.
James Nicoll
declines as X increases.
There's probably some small optimum range of characters,
one that gives you enough words/character so that the reader feels
something happened while avoiding having to do too much work on
any given character.
Joe Bernstein
First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them. Sometime
I'll try to force myself through another, I suppose, but please nobody
try to convince me to do that *now*, I've already done my Turtledove
time for this decade.)
> Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
> half wars an American can reasonably be expected to have heard about
> in some detail:
Second, this is moderately unfair. Turtledove has not only written
an endless series long ago that was about Byzantium in the 6th-7th
centuries, he has recently started a series about (more) ancient
Greeks, as well, I think - I don't keep track of him *that* well -
as continuing the endless series about Byzantium.
I acknowledge that these are not the series that have turned him into
a mandatory-hardcover sorta-household-name writer.
> 1b: Small changes are as good as big ones. So are purile changes. You
> can get a four book series out of the ACW simply by swapping the
> races of the masters and slaves in the slave states
For reasons obvious from the above, I don't know whether this describes
any of Turtledove's actual series (has he written more than three
Civil War ones?). But if it's a dig at Steven Barnes, it's off the
mark. Barnes does a lot more than that, but *just* by swapping the
races he gets considerable emotional power - his core white audience
can recognise itself in the slaves (a trivial bit of the tweak is
having his main white protagonist come from Ireland, a good bet in
the St. Patrick's Day enthusiastic US) and any blacks who do pick
the books up get an ambiguous emotional thrill.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
James Nicoll
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
>
>> 1b: Small changes are as good as big ones. So are purile changes. You
>> can get a four book series out of the ACW simply by swapping the
>> races of the masters and slaves in the slave states
>
>For reasons obvious from the above, I don't know whether this describes
>any of Turtledove's actual series (has he written more than three
>Civil War ones?). But if it's a dig at Steven Barnes, it's off the
>mark.
No, nothing to do with Barnes. For some reason, Barnes
seems to have thought about US race relations and the relationships
between people with power and those without more deeply than HT
has. Octavia Butler did as well, which can only mean that it must
come from the one thing they shared: a surname beginning with B.
HT, on the other hand, wrote a series for Baen that was
close to a 1:1 mapping of the ACW onto a fantasyland ACW, a
series in which he also flipped the races of the slave and
slave owner classes. Even more shockingly, he had the industrial
bits be in the _southern_ parts of the nation involved, rather
than the north. To steal from wikipedia:
War Between the Provinces Series
A reversed fantasy version of the US civil war. The industrial south
is fighting the rural north over the blond serfs.
* Sentry Peak (2000)
* Marching Through Peachtree (2001)
* Advance and Retreat (2002)
He apparently also did this for WWII but I have not read any
of those.
Bill Snyder
Nicoll) wrote:
>In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>
>>Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>>history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>>about that.
>>
> I'm sorry, is the volume off on this thing?
>
> The point is to emulate Turtledove's success, not to
>explore unrelated possibilities.
No problemo, you do an ACW in which Lee wins the battle of Gettysburg
because he didn't have all those eggs* helping to harden his arteries.
And there's just gotta be something clever you can do with
Southern-fried alligator.
[1] Lee actually did haul a hen around on campaign so he'd have fresh
eggs regularly.
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
David Johnston
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
>make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
>buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them.
>
Well personally I like bad writing. I know this because no matter
what I like, someone tells me that's badly written. I like bad acting
too.
James Nicoll
Carl Dershem
news:e0p3rc$ke1$1...@reader1.panix.com:
> In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
>
> I'm not sure if the problem is that the audience is American or that
> the audience is human, but one of the easiest ways to make a story
> salable is apparently to have a war on.
>
> Unless you're Laurel Hamilton.
Ummm... a lot of the conflicts behind her characters can be considered a
kind of cold war between, say, the vampires and werewolves.
cd
--
The difference between immorality and immortality is "T". I like Earl
Grey.
Nancy Lebovitz
Carl Dershem <der...@cox.net> wrote:
>nan...@panix.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote in
>news:e0p3rc$ke1$1...@reader1.panix.com:
>
>> In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
>>
>> I'm not sure if the problem is that the audience is American or that
>> the audience is human, but one of the easiest ways to make a story
>> salable is apparently to have a war on.
>>
>> Unless you're Laurel Hamilton.
>
>Ummm... a lot of the conflicts behind her characters can be considered a
>kind of cold war between, say, the vampires and werewolves.
True, but it's hardly a war by modern standards.
Dorothy J Heydt
s/chicken/dinosaur/ (see small/puerile changes, above), and Bob's
your uncle.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Dorothy J Heydt
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
>make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
>buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them. Sometime
>I'll try to force myself through another, I suppose, but please nobody
>try to convince me to do that *now*, I've already done my Turtledove
>time for this decade.)
Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you can
produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the Bottomlands".
Mike Schilling
"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
news:Ix471...@kithrup.com...
> In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
> Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>
>>Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>>history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>>about that.
>
> s/chicken/dinosaur/ (see small/puerile changes, above), and Bob's
> your uncle.
Or Fred Flintstone is, anyway.
Carl Dershem
@reader1.panix.com:
>>> I'm not sure if the problem is that the audience is American or that
>>> the audience is human, but one of the easiest ways to make a story
>>> salable is apparently to have a war on.
>>>
>>> Unless you're Laurel Hamilton.
>>
>>Ummm... a lot of the conflicts behind her characters can be considered a
>>kind of cold war between, say, the vampires and werewolves.
>
> True, but it's hardly a war by modern standards.
Yeah, but wait 'til she teams up with Bill Forstchen!
:o
Nancy Lebovitz
very much--not enough to remember titles, apparently, but enough
that I'll catch up with 3xT sooner or later.
Howard Brazee
Nicoll) wrote:
> The point is to emulate Turtledove's success, not to
>explore unrelated possibilities.
My favorite Turtledove book is _Household Gods_. My second favorite
is _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_.
It was his Civil War books that allowed him to quit his day job
though.
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>Well personally I like bad writing. I know this because no matter
>what I like, someone tells me that's badly written. I like bad acting
>too.
LOL!
Dan Goodman
This is about Turtledove's work, which is a rather small subset of what
could be written.
--
Dan Goodman
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
Clutterers Anonymous unofficial community
http://community.livejournal.com/clutterers_anon/
Decluttering http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood
Joe Bernstein
<nan...@panix.com> wrote:
> In article <Ix479...@kithrup.com>, Dorothy J Heydt
> <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
> >In article <e0p6oa$4kb$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Joe Bernstein
> ><j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
> >>First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
> >>make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
> >>buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them. Sometime
> >>I'll try to force myself through another, I suppose, but please nobody
> >>try to convince me to do that *now*, I've already done my Turtledove
> >>time for this decade.)
> >Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
> >good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
> >category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
> >one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you can
> >produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the Bottomlands".
> And I've read some of his short fiction from the 80s and liked it
> very much--not enough to remember titles, apparently, but enough
> that I'll catch up with 3xT sooner or later.
The mind boggles.
I actually tried, while cooking lunch, to figure out what my
Turtledove time to date has been, in case anyone called me on it.
What I came up with was:
1980s - Stories in the year of <Asimov's> a library helpfully threw
out. Maybe <Analog> too, I remember now those were also in
there. But I think <Asimov's>, and I think Turtledove is
the one author who was consistently bad enough that I noted
it (as against a number of authors who were added to my must-
read list on the basis of those issues).
(The year in question, in case anyone wants to check me on
this, approximates 1988, something like Feb.-Feb. with one
issue missing.)
1990s - <The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump>. After all, I'm writing a
history of fantasy, and this one is explicitly fantasy, so I've
gotta read it, right? And everyone says it's different from
his norm...
2000s - Whatever the first volume is of his Bronze Age series. Only
I'm not sure whether I finished it. Flipside, I read <Case>
less than ten years ago, I *think*, so I should still be fine.
Tastes differ, I guess.
Konrad Gaertner
>
> In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
> Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >James Nicoll wrote:
> >
> >> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
> >
> >Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
> >history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
> >about that.
>
> s/chicken/dinosaur/ (see small/puerile changes, above), and Bob's
> your uncle.
ObAlreadyWritten: Asimov's "Statue for Father"
--
Konrad Gaertner - - - - - - - - - - - - - - email: gae...@aol.com
http://kgbooklog.livejournal.com/
"I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface."
-- James Nicoll
David Loewe, Jr.
wrote:
>In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>
>>Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>>history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>>about that.
>
>s/chicken/dinosaur/ (see small/puerile changes, above), and Bob's
>your uncle.
All of a sudden you are Arthur Balfour?!?
The phrase "Bob's your uncle." comes from the appointment of Arthur
James Balfour to the cabinet of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (Robert
Gascoyne-Cecil) who was Balfour's uncle. Balfour eventually succeeded
Lord Salisbury as PM. Lord Salisbury was the last British PM who was
Leader of the House of Lords (Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
renouncing his Earldom - and ran successfully for seat in Commons
after being selected PM by Queen Elizabeth II after the health related
resignation of Macmillan) rather than leader of the House of Commons.
--
"Quantum particles: the dreams that stuff is made of."
- David Moser
Tim McDaniel
David Loewe, Jr. <dlo...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Lord Salisbury was the last British PM who was Leader of the House of
>Lords
There has never been a "Leader" of the House of Lords: they are
famously egalitarian (!) and even the Lord Chancellor doesn't have the
power of a speaker of a house.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Chancellor> puts it
Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor
can neither determine who is to speak when two individuals rise at
the same time, nor rule on points of order, nor discipline members
who violate the rules of the House---all these functions are
performed by the House of Lords as a whole. Furthermore, whilst
speeches in the House of Commons are addressed to "Mr Speaker",
those in the House of Lords are addressed to "My Lords". In
practice, the only task of the Lord Chancellor in the Lords
Chamber is to formally put the question before a vote, to announce
the result of any vote, and to act (where appropriate) as the
House's mouthpiece. Furthermore, the Lord Chancellor may end the
adjournment of the House (or "recall" the House) during a public
emergency. ...
Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor is
not expected to remain non-partisan whilst in office. Rather, the
Lord Chancellor continues to serve as an active spokesperson for
the government in the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor may
participate in debates; he either keeps his full court dress on
and speaks from beside the Woolsack, or relinquishes his place to
a Deputy Speaker, dons normal clothing and speaks from the
Government Front Bench. Whilst the Speaker of the House of Commons
cannot cast a vote (except when the other members are equally
divided), the Lord Chancellor votes together with the other
members.
>(Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
I wrote that sort of thing once and got corrected. "Lords" is a
cricket ground, I believe. "The Lords" is the House of Lords.
--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tm...@panix.com
ncw...@hotmail.com
James Nicoll wrote:
> In article <e0p3rc$ke1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Nancy Lebovitz <nan...@panix.com> wrote:
> >In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> >James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
> >>have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
> >
> >?
> >
> >Perhaps "the less about each of them"? Or the less plot you have
> >to actually think about?
> >
> Yeah. Given N words and X characters, the value of N/X
> declines as X increases.
>
> There's probably some small optimum range of characters,
> one that gives you enough words/character so that the reader feels
> something happened while avoiding having to do too much work on
> any given character.
Since _Guns of the South_ and _Ruled Britania_ probably count as two of
Turtledove's better novels, I guess that a value of two viewpoint
characters would be optimum.
Cheers,
Nigel.
ncw...@hotmail.com
James Nicoll wrote:
> 3a: But as is obvious from the above, you can reuse material
> and settings over and over. This is a tremendous labour saving
> device. I suggest preparing templates like "[Name Here] was
> not a happy man" to slap into place as needed.
>
The one template that got to me the most was "The next [x] that does
[y] will be the first". It's such a clumsy phrase that I can't
understand why he used it at all, let alone having numerous different
characters using it.
Cheers,
Nigel.
David Loewe, Jr.
I'll see your Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_of_the_House_of_Lords
"Leader of the House of Lords is a function in the British government
that is always held in combination with a formal Cabinet position,
most often Lord President of the Council, Lord Privy Seal or
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The Leader of the House takes
charge of the government's business in the House of Lords. Unless the
Leader is also a departmental minister, being Leader constitutes the
bulk of his government responsibilities, but it has never been an
independent salaried office.
Though the Leader of the House is a member of the cabinet and remains
a partisan figure, he also has responsibilities to the House as a
whole. In contrast to the House of Commons, where proceedings are
controlled by the Speaker, proceedings in the Lords are controlled by
peers themselves, under the rules set out in the Standing Orders. The
Leader of the House has the responsibility of reminding the House of
these rules and facilitating the Lords' self-regulation, though any
member may draw attention to breaches of order or failure to observe
customs. The Leader is often called upon to advise on procedures and
points of order, and is required to determine the order of speakers on
Supplementary Questions, subject to the wishes of the House. However,
like the Speaker of the Lords, he has no power to rule on points of
order or to intervene during an inappropriate speech.
Under the plans for constitutional change announced in June 2003 (and
following recommendations made by the Select Committee in November
2003, and agreed by the House of Lords on January 12, 2004), these
responsibilities to the House will almost certainly be transferred to
the Speaker, remaining within the framework of self-regulation. The
Speaker will in future be elected by the House and required to give up
party politics, whilst the Leader will remain an appointed member of
the Cabinet and become the most senior member of his party in the
House."
>
>>(Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
>
>I wrote that sort of thing once and got corrected. "Lords" is a
>cricket ground, I believe. "The Lords" is the House of Lords.
I bet they write "colour" instead of "color," too.
--
"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!"
William Shakespeare
Elf M. Sternberg
> 2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
> have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
> cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
> for each.
Careful, James. Those of us stuck in a short-story mode of
writing might suspect you've stumbled upon something useful.
Between that and Dan Brown's "Have two protagonists from wildly
different but relevant-to-the-narrative academic backgrounds so you can
fill pages and impress your readers with your research by infodumping to
each other," and you almost have the makings of a bestseller here.
Elf
James Nicoll
Elf M. Sternberg <e...@drizzle.com> wrote:
>jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
>
>> 2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
>> have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
>> cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
>> for each.
>
> Careful, James. Those of us stuck in a short-story mode of
>writing might suspect you've stumbled upon something useful.
I must admit it makes his AHs some of the easiest books
to sum up. You need two or three paras to describe what happened
on the global scale and then a para per character to say what
happened to each of them.
> Between that and Dan Brown's "Have two protagonists from wildly
>different but relevant-to-the-narrative academic backgrounds so you can
>fill pages and impress your readers with your research by infodumping to
>each other," and you almost have the makings of a bestseller here.
A large collection of experts would seem to have some
possibilities.
Christopher J. Henrich
Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> James Nicoll wrote:
>
> > Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>
> Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
> history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
> about that.
>
The question would arise: why could nobody domesticate the chickens? I
see a little shepherd boy who, if his flock is menaced by predators, is
instructed to call out, "Chicken! Chicken!"
--
Chris Henrich
http://www.mathinteract.com
God just doesn't fit inside a single religion.
James Nicoll
Christopher J. Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> wrote:
>In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>, Gene
>Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>> > Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>
>> Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>> history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>> about that.
>>
>The question would arise: why could nobody domesticate the chickens? I
>see a little shepherd boy who, if his flock is menaced by predators, is
>instructed to call out, "Chicken! Chicken!"
Since we have not domesticated all birds, it seems to me a
small change in chicken behavior might make them useless to us.
Oddly, while HT doesn't have a No Chickens Timeline [1], he
does have an alternate birds novella, which I won't be too specific
about because I think part of the fun is trying to figure out which
family of birds is involved.
It's also one of the very few island biogeography stories I
can think of: there's a large island within flying distance of NorAm
and it offered a convenient place for some species to diversify and
prosper. Unfortunately, because it is an island (and settled from
the New World [2]), the story is constrained to be a tragedy: by
the time Audubon sets out to document this set of species, most of
them have been wiped out.
James Nicoll
1: Considering how diseases move from domestic animals to us, this
would be profoundly different from our history, although oddly
Nixon would still become President.
2: Usually, species from smaller landmasses have a hard time competing
with ones from large ones. I'll just skip over the part where NorAm
families of animals, like the horses and the primates, spread to
the Old World and prospered.
westprog
"Tim McDaniel" <tm...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:e0qll0$aan$1...@tmcd.austin.tx.us...
> In article <f891329pmlu6krffk...@4ax.com>,
> David Loewe, Jr. <dlo...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >Lord Salisbury was the last British PM who was Leader of the House of
> >Lords
> >(Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
> I wrote that sort of thing once and got corrected. "Lords" is a
> cricket ground, I believe. "The Lords" is the House of Lords.
Though Douglas-Home was involved in Lords as well as The House of Lords,
IIRC. He might have been involved in the Basil D'Oliviera tour.
J/
David Cowie
>>(Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
>
> I wrote that sort of thing once and got corrected. "Lords" is a
> cricket ground, I believe. "The Lords" is the House of Lords.
The cricket ground originally belonged to Mr Lord, so it might even be
"Lord's".
--
David Cowie
Containment Failure + 20903:58
Andy Leighton
> On Mon, 03 Apr 2006 03:16:32 -0500, Tim McDaniel wrote:
>
>>>(Alec Douglas-Home resigned from Lords -
>>
>> I wrote that sort of thing once and got corrected. "Lords" is a
>> cricket ground, I believe. "The Lords" is the House of Lords.
>
> The cricket ground originally belonged to Mr Lord, so it might even be
> "Lord's".
Exactly right. The website for Lord's uses the apostrophe (I had to
rewrite that because I am not sure what the possessive for Lord's
is).
--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
Gene Ward Smith
James Nicoll wrote:
> Since we have not domesticated all birds, it seems to me a
> small change in chicken behavior might make them useless to us.
Or somebody domesticated another bird first, and we never got around to
chickens.
> Oddly, while HTes it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
> >> history doesn't have a No Chickens Timeline [1], he
> does have an alternate birds novella, which I won't be too specific
> about because I think part of the fun is trying to figure out which
> family of birds is involved.
Surely the Columbidae?
> 1: Considering how diseases move from domestic animals to us, this
> would be profoundly different from our history, although oddly
> Nixon would still become President.
Yeah, I thought about that. Not the Nixon part, though.
Richard Eney
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>
>>Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>>history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>>about that.
>>
>
> The point is to emulate Turtledove's success, not to
>explore unrelated possibilities.
All right, a related possibility (since Turtledove is writing about wars):
horses seem to have evolved mainly in the Americas -- they kept dying out
in Eurasia -- and cattle the other way around. The last time, the cattle
persisted in America while the equines -- by that time true _Equus_ --
persisted in Eurasia but died out in America. Just suppose this schedule
had been slightly skewed -- and the equines had been driven into
extinction in America by the competition of the bovines _before_ they
evolved _Equus_.
Now imagine what human history would have looked like if _that_ had
happened.
-- Dick Eney
OPERATION CRIFANAC PUBLICATIONS
http://www.crifanac.net/Index.htm
prozines and fanzines 'n' stuff
James Nicoll
Over on shwi, I once inadvertently eliminated humanity
by placing a barrier akin to Wallace's Line between North America
and Asia. Turns out the early primate may have appeared in NorAm....
Robert Sneddon
Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> writes
>
>James Nicoll wrote:
>
>> Since we have not domesticated all birds, it seems to me a
>> small change in chicken behavior might make them useless to us.
>
>Or somebody domesticated another bird first, and we never got around to
>chickens.
L. Neil Smith's AH book "The Probability Broach", the Confederacy had
domesticated the American Eagle leading to the chain of fast-food
Eagleburger restaurants. It was not in danger of extinction.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
James Nicoll
Funny, for no good reason I expect eagles to taste terrible.
One wonders what Colonel Sanders cooked in the birdwinia*
timeline.
* I thought it was collected but apparently not. In Birdwinia,
humans arrived in the new world to find continents populated
by marsupial and birds, but not placental mammals.
Robert Sneddon
<jdni...@panix.com> writes
>> L. Neil Smith's AH book "The Probability Broach", the Confederacy had
>>domesticated the American Eagle leading to the chain of fast-food
>>Eagleburger restaurants. It was not in danger of extinction.
>
> Funny, for no good reason I expect eagles to taste terrible.
I think, as raptors, eagle meat might be expected to be not very tasty
like the meat of most other carnivorous animals.
I believe there was a prominent member of the American government
called Eagleburger when Smith wrote this polemic^Wbook. The most common
meat animal in Smith's Confederacy was buffalo, not cattle. Whale was
off the menu, mostly because they had nukes.
James Nicoll
Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In message <e0rspb$h71$1...@reader1.panix.com>, James Nicoll
><jdni...@panix.com> writes
>>In article <HDWfkZY9...@nospam.demon.co.uk>,
>>Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>> L. Neil Smith's AH book "The Probability Broach", the Confederacy had
>>>domesticated the American Eagle leading to the chain of fast-food
>>>Eagleburger restaurants. It was not in danger of extinction.
>>
>> Funny, for no good reason I expect eagles to taste terrible.
>
> I think, as raptors, eagle meat might be expected to be not very tasty
>like the meat of most other carnivorous animals.
>
> I believe there was a prominent member of the American government
>called Eagleburger when Smith wrote this polemic^Wbook. The most common
>meat animal in Smith's Confederacy was buffalo, not cattle. Whale was
>off the menu, mostly because they had nukes.
Wasn't he Ambassador to Yugoslavia when TPB came out?
Not really that high profile a job, I would have thought.
Dorothy J Heydt
Carnivores don't taste good.
As to the chicken, if you ever go to the San Diego Zoo you'll see
what appear to be little chickens running around loose
everywhere. They're Southeast Asian jungle fowl, AFAIK the
ancestor of the domesticated chicken. They run around everywhere,
eating crumbs and, especially, fly larvae. So did man
domesticate the chicken, or did chickens simply move in as
commensals?
A similar question can be asked about the cat. Which leads me to
remember a picture I saw once, illustrating a book review in
_Nature_ sometime in the early 1990s. It showed a collar, like a
dog's collar, lying on the ground with a leash attached to it
rising up out of frame. But the collar was large, and stood
up from the ground like a kraal, and there were domesticated
animals inside it, like the horse and the cow and the dog, and
there were wild animals outside it, like the leopard and the
zebra and the man. And the cat was walking along the top of the
wall.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Ahasuerus
> Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote: [snip]
> > I believe there was a prominent member of the American government
>
> Wasn't he Ambassador to Yugoslavia when TPB came out?
> Not really that high profile a job, I would have thought.
True, Eagleburger was well below Smith's threshold in that book. You
had to be Tricky Dick Milhouse ("a third-rate second-story man. He's no
assassin, just a petty crook"), a certain peanut vendor, or something
along those lines to make it. On the other hand, Smith may have seen
the name in the papers, thought that it was funny and ran with it :)
--
Ahasuerus
Tim McDaniel
David Loewe, Jr. <dlo...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>On 3 Apr 2006 03:16:32 -0500, tm...@panix.com (Tim McDaniel) wrote:
>>There has never been a "Leader" of the House of Lords
>I'll see your Wikipedia...
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_of_the_House_of_Lords
>
>"Leader of the House of Lords is a function in the British government
My apologies for my insistent ignorance, and my thanks for
enlightening me.
Mike Schilling
"Ahasuerus" <ahas...@email.com> wrote in message
news:1144096655.0...@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
If you go back to the Nixon administration, "Egil Krogh" was pretty funny
too.
Evelyn C. Leeper
> In article <e0p6oa$4kb$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
>>In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
>>make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
>>buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them. Sometime
>>I'll try to force myself through another, I suppose, but please nobody
>>try to convince me to do that *now*, I've already done my Turtledove
>>time for this decade.)
>
>
> Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
> good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
> category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
> one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you can
> produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the Bottomlands".
The latter won a Hugo. The fact that his only Hugo was for a
shorter-than-novel-length-not-in-a-series-work should tell Turtledove
something.....
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
God grant me the company of those who seek the truth,
and God deliver me from those who have found it. -Isaac Newton
Michael S. Schiffer
news:4chYf.31$ZP5...@fe08.lga:
> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>...
>> Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
>> good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
>> category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
>> one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you
>> can produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the
>> Bottomlands".
> The latter won a Hugo. The fact that his only Hugo was for a
> shorter-than-novel-length-not-in-a-series-work should tell
> Turtledove something.....
Turtledove may know that something, but still choose the path that
ensures a steady and larger income. (At the 2000 Worldcon, my wife
and I shared an elevator with Turtledove, his wife, and his
daughters, who looked as if they would be needing college tuition,
well, about now. After getting off, my wife and I looked at each
other and I said "Well, I guess now we know why he's writing
_Worldwar_.")
And for all I know, it's easier and/or more fun for him to write a
sprawling series around one of the Big Three alternate nexuses than
smaller-scale stories with more skewed speculation. Even if not, I
can certainly respect a choice that evidently entertains a lot of
people, though I'd personally rather he were still writing stuff
like the stories in _Departures_.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Wilson Heydt
Michael S. Schiffer <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>"Evelyn C. Leeper" <ele...@optonline.net> wrote in
>news:4chYf.31$ZP5...@fe08.lga:
>
>> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>...
>>> Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
>>> good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
>>> category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
>>> one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you
>>> can produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the
>>> Bottomlands".
>
>> The latter won a Hugo. The fact that his only Hugo was for a
>> shorter-than-novel-length-not-in-a-series-work should tell
>> Turtledove something.....
>
>Turtledove
>
>sprawling series around one of the Big Three alternate nexuses than
>smaller-scale stories with more skewed speculation. Even if not, I
>can certainly respect a choice that evidently entertains a lot of
>people, though I'd personally rather he were still writing stuff
>like the stories in _Departures_.
I'd like to see him do something big with the universe of "The Road
not Taken."
--
Hal Heydt
Albany, CA
My dime, my opinions.
Sea Wasp
> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
>> good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
>> category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
>> one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you can
>> produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the Bottomlands".
>
>
> The latter won a Hugo. The fact that his only Hugo was for a
> shorter-than-novel-length-not-in-a-series-work should tell Turtledove
> something.....
>
... that if you want to make money, the Hugo audience ain't your
target. Fortunately he seems to understand this well.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/
Rich Horton
Nicoll) wrote:
>2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
>have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
>cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
>for each.
>
>2a: Many installments: It follows from the above that only as
>many events as fit into 2,400 words are needed for the entire
>book. Accordingly, each book will cover a relatively short
>period of time. This means any long process will need lots
>and lots of books to detail it.
>
>2b: The Law of the Fecund: as old characters die, replace them
>to keep the character count up.
>
This of course is a rule straight from BESTSELLERISM 101, hardly
attributable to Turtledove.
(To cite one example, it was used by Geoff Landis, a first rate short
story writer, in producing his only novel to date. I assume this was
partly a way for a short story writer to solve the problem of writing
at novel length.)
>* Turtledove doesn't reply on copying Kipling but for people who do,
>there's the Kipling Rule: SF fans who like Kipling generally are
>virtually innocent of any contamination of information of Kipling's
>context, save that which is in the stories themselves. This is
>somewhat like trying to deduce American politics of the 1940s from
>BEYOND THIS HORIZON.
As ever, this assumes that all readers of Kipling have read only
_Plain Tales from the Hills_, _The Jungle Book_, _The Just-So
Stories_, _Kim_, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC" (these in
some SF anthology), and perhaps _"Captains Courageous"_ and the
Soldiers Three stories. I reiterate that there is a lot of Kipling
besides these stories (very good as they are), and that both
pro-Kipling and anti-Kipling folks tend to ignore this fact.
Rich Horton
Nicoll) wrote:
> It's also one of the very few island biogeography stories I
>can think of: there's a large island within flying distance of NorAm
>and it offered a convenient place for some species to diversify and
>prosper. Unfortunately, because it is an island (and settled from
>the New World [2]), the story is constrained to be a tragedy: by
>the time Audubon sets out to document this set of species, most of
>them have been wiped out.
One assumes you are talking about his two recent stories in Analog.
(The first was good, the second was a truly appalling Holmes
pastiche.)
John
"Nancy Lebovitz" <nan...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:e0p3rc$ke1$1...@reader1.panix.com...>>Rule One: Your audience is American. In general, there are two and a
>
> I'm not sure if the problem is that the audience is American or that
> the audience is human, but one of the easiest ways to make a story
> salable is apparently to have a war on.
>
> Unless you're Laurel Hamilton.
For Hamilton, one of the easiest ways to make a story salable is apparently
to have a hard on.
Aaron Denney
I don't think that's quite the physiological state she uses.
--
Aaron Denney
-><-
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>Exactly right. The website for Lord's uses the apostrophe (I had to
>rewrite that because I am not sure what the possessive for Lord's
>is).
Speaking of which - what is the correct spelling for:
"Hear here"?
Dorothy J Heydt
Joe Bernstein
<jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
> 2: Usually, species from smaller landmasses have a hard time competing
> with ones from large ones. I'll just skip over the part where NorAm
> families of animals, like the horses and the primates, spread to
> the Old World and prospered.
Primates?
In <The Human Career>^2 by Richard Klein, I see that allegedly
Purgatorius, allegedly primate, lived in Montana 70-80 Mya.
By 70 Mya or so, the <Atlas of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Coastlines>
I recently mentioned here shows a land bridge between western North
America and northern Asia; Klein says there was also one from
western North America via Greenland to western Europe. This is
the only Cretaceous fossil Klein knows.
Next Klein talks in limited detail about "Euramerican" primates from
the Paleocene. At *some* point in the Paleocene, the <Atlas> shows
the Arctic Ocean fully ringed by land, so OK, at this point I can
buy this. Anyway, he says of these (long quote, in which I signal
that I've snipped the numeric codes he uses for references with the
@ sign):
"Curiously, in spite of their abundance and diversity, the presumed
Euramerican Paleocene primates provide few clues to the origins of
later, Eocene to Recent forms. They are unlikely ancestors themselves,
because they evolved dental specializations that later forms lack @.
These specializations include large, procumbent central incisors,
perhaps used to grasp food, and a reduced number of lateral incisors,
anterior premolars, or both. Except for some basically Paleocene taxa
that survived into the early Eocene before becoming extinct, Eocene
primates tended to have smaller, more generalized incisors, and they
commonly retained incisors or premolars that the Paleocene forms
had lost (fig. 3.15). Among known Paleocene taxa, only the earliest,
Purgatorius, was sufficiently generalized to be ancestral to Eocene to
Recent forms, but there is no reason to suppose it evolved in their
direction. More likely it gave rise to later, more specialized
Paleocene primates.
"Because the Euramerican Paleocene primates combined very primitive
features with specializations lacking in all other primates, they are
now commonly placed in their own infraorder, the Plesiadapiformes,
named for Plesiadapis, the best-known genus @. In vernacular terms,
they might equally well be called *archaic primates* @ as opposed to
the primates of modern aspect, or *euprimates*, that succeeded them @.
Alternatively, they may simply be the most primatelike of known
Paleocene mammals @, in which case they could be removed from the
Primates altogether and placed in a separate order that shared a
close Cretaceous ancestor with true Primates. One authority @ has
proposed such an order, the Proprimates, whose content would be
essentially the same as the previously proposed primate suborder,
Praesimii, listed here in table 3.1. [Plesiadapiformes plus
tree shrews.]
"None of the known Plesiadapiformes survived the Eocene, and
their extinction could have resulted at least in part from
unsuccessful competition with evolving rodents, bats, and
euprimates @. The origins of euprimates remain obscure for lack of
fossil evidence. A plesiadapiform root is unlikely for reasons
given above, and North America or the combined North American-
European landmass thus becomes an unlikely birthplace. South
America can probably also be excluded, since its relatively
well known late Cretaceous to Eocene fossil record contains no
early primates or likely primate ancestors. Asia remains possible,
and a case can be made from three jaws recovered in mid-Paleocene
deposits of the Wanghudun Formation, Anhui Province, southern
China @. These have been assigned to the genus Decoredon, whose
teeth have been likened to those of Eocene tarsiiform euprimates
discussed below. The specimens are poorly preserved, however, and
the primate status of Decoredon is questionable @.
"That leaves only Africa, which is arguably most plausible
a priori @, since it hosted so many later major events in primate
evolution. Unfortunately, African Paleocene and Eocene fossil
sites formed mainly on the continental margin, and they tend to be
poor in terrestrial mammals @. An important exception is the site
of Adrar Mgorn 1 at the foot of the High Atlas Mountains in
southern Morocco @. Here relatively abundant fossils of terrestrial
mammals occur in association with sharks' teeth indicating a late
Paleocene age, roughly 60 my ago. The mammalian fossils include
ten isolated teeth that share several derived features with teeth
of Eocene tarsiiforms in the family Omomyidae. The Adrar Mgorn
specimens have been assigned to a previously unknown omomyid
genus and species, Altiatlasius koulchii @, and if this diagnosis
is correct it supports an African origin for more advanced
primates in the Paleocene or late Cretaceous, followed by their
spread to northern continents in the very late Paleocene or
earliest Eocene."
Now, as Klein says, he's basically biased towards sourcing
everything to Africa. But assuming what he says is true, I don't
see any reasonable possibility of sourcing any primates ancestral
to us to North America later than the early Paleocene Purgatorius.
I'm taking for granted that the late Cretaceous and early Paleocene
faunas of western North America are, in general, absurdly well known,
so if there were an ancestor of ours there we would've found it.
References upon request; they get as late as 1994, only, and
plenty are as old as the 1970s. So sure, if there've been discoveries
in the last twelve-fourteen years, then this should be easy to answer.
Otherwise, am I just overly trusting to Klein's uncertainty about
Purgatorius being a primate? Or what?
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
Par
> That would be over in the Write Best Sellers the David
> Drake Way, which includes such pointers as "You may say 'violence
> corrupt everything it touches' but your core readership will
> see 'Yay! Zap! Kapow!'"
Ok. It's been 24 hours. Where is it?
I'll help you get started...
1. No one has read the classical adventure stories, but they have heard
about them. Thus you can not only plag^Wcrib^Wbe inspired by them, but
you can even brag about it in the very book.
2. If you claim that you mapped "ancient, rougher times" on the future
everyone will forgive your "heroes" being bloodsoaked ruffians looking
out for number one, and not giving a flying fuck about consequences to
bystanders.
3. Cool toys^Wguns are allways good. You can spend a paragraph
infodumping on them if it is short and the toy shiny. They do not have
to make sense, thus a hi-tech powergun that can't penetrate a scrubbery
is fine.
4. Indigs -- i.e. anyone not in the main character group -- is on no real
concern and can happilly be used as paving materials. They are also
almonst universally wilfully ignorant, backwards, and generally
slovenly.
5. No need to do any characterization, just do a 1:1 with original.
/Par
--
Par use...@hunter-gatherer.org
In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in the
proper order then why can't he?
Tim McDaniel
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <eag3329imumbqih4p...@4ax.com>,
>Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>>Speaking of which - what is the correct spelling for:
>>
>>"Hear here"?
>
>Hear, hear. Sort of formal English for "What he said."
Specifically, they're in the imperative mood. In English, that's used
for commands, like "Sit." or "Wait!" or "Shut up." or "RUN!".
"Hear, hear!" means "listen to him, listen to him".
Walter Bushell
nan...@panix.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> To be fair, Turtledove has a recent novel about a kidnapped cross-
> universe traveller. I don't know whether it includes a war.
No.
--
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any
charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his
peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totali-
tarian government whether Nazi or Communist." -- W. Churchill, Nov 21, 1943
Tim McDaniel
Par <use...@hunter-gatherer.org> wrote:
>4. Indigs -- i.e. anyone not in the main character group -- is of no
>real concern and can happilly be used as paving materials.
It helps getting in the mood to call them "wogs".
Nancy Lebovitz
Alligator is pretty tasty. I'm underwhelmed by rattlesnake, but that's because
it's tough and the two times I tried fried rattlesnake appetizer, it had
no perceptible flavor.
I don't know about non-reptile carnivores.
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://livejournal.com/users/nancylebov
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
Nancy Lebovitz
Rich Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>As ever, this assumes that all readers of Kipling have read only
>_Plain Tales from the Hills_, _The Jungle Book_, _The Just-So
>Stories_, _Kim_, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC" (these in
>some SF anthology), and perhaps _"Captains Courageous"_ and the
>Soldiers Three stories. I reiterate that there is a lot of Kipling
>besides these stories (very good as they are), and that both
>pro-Kipling and anti-Kipling folks tend to ignore this fact.
Can you expand on what the pro- and anti-Kipling folks are ignoring?
Rich Horton
Lebovitz) wrote:
>In article <jde332hvs26kc6sh7...@4ax.com>,
>Rich Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>>
>>As ever, this assumes that all readers of Kipling have read only
>>_Plain Tales from the Hills_, _The Jungle Book_, _The Just-So
>>Stories_, _Kim_, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC" (these in
>>some SF anthology), and perhaps _"Captains Courageous"_ and the
>>Soldiers Three stories. I reiterate that there is a lot of Kipling
>>besides these stories (very good as they are), and that both
>>pro-Kipling and anti-Kipling folks tend to ignore this fact.
>
>Can you expand on what the pro- and anti-Kipling folks are ignoring?
The stories they are ignoring are generally the later ones. That is,
those from _Traffics and Discoveries_ (1904) onwards. (The two "SF"
ones, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as A.B.C." are later but
that's why I specified in SF-oriented anthlogies.) Among the greatest
of these: "Mrs. Bathurst", "'They'", "Dayspring Mishandled", "The
Gardener", "A Madonna of the Trenches", "The Wish House", "The
Janeites", "Mary Postgate" ... and others I am not remembering just
now.
Typically they are very subtle, rather elliptical, and very complex in
their emotional force. They are not about India, and usually not in
any overt sense political. A story like "Mary Postgate", about a
downed airman during WWI who might (or might not) be a German, is
weirdly ambivalent about the very curious reaction of the title
character to this man.
They are also among the very greatest short stories ever in English.
Howard Brazee
Lebovitz) wrote:
>Alligator is pretty tasty. I'm underwhelmed by rattlesnake, but that's because
>it's tough and the two times I tried fried rattlesnake appetizer, it had
>no perceptible flavor.
>
>I don't know about non-reptile carnivores.
Specifically, chicken will eat anything - I don't know whether meat
eating chicken taste worse than purely vegetarian chicken.
Matthias Warkus
> Carnivores don't taste good.
Is that rule supposed to cover fish, too?
mawa
Evelyn C. Leeper
> James Nicoll wrote:
>
>> There's probably some small optimum range of characters,
>>one that gives you enough words/character so that the reader feels
>>something happened while avoiding having to do too much work on
>>any given character.
>
> Since _Guns of the South_ and _Ruled Britania_ probably count as two of
> Turtledove's better novels, I guess that a value of two viewpoint
> characters would be optimum.
And also not in a series.
Default User
Supposedly chicken raised "free range", so their diet consists of a
good portion of bugs they've scratched up, taste better. I believe that
a major reason most carnivores don't taste good is their propensity for
eating carrion. After all, there's no easier hunt than an animal
already dead.
Brian
--
If televison's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who
won't shut up.
-- Dorothy Gambrell (http://catandgirl.com)
Sean Eric Fagan
Default User <defaul...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I believe that
>a major reason most carnivores don't taste good is their propensity for
>eating carrion.
Few of the carnivores being discussed are carrion eaters.
>After all, there's no easier hunt than an animal
>already dead.
And there's little easier way to get so sick you die than by eating rotten
meat. There's a reason most carnivores don't eat carrion. (Amusing thing:
monitor lizards are big carrion eaters; the Komodo dragon eats so much carrion
that its mouth is chock-full of bacteria, to the point that it simulates a
venemous bite.)
Mammalian and avian predators don't tend to taste good because they work
*hard* for their food. So the muscle is very tough, with relatively little
fat. Reptiles, on the other hand, are -- in most cases -- very opportunistic
eaters: they tend to lie in wait for something to come by, and then -- and
only then -- exert a brief amount of effort, at which point they go back to
being restful again.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
Oh, omnivores taste _good_ -- consider pork. And I like alligator a
lot.
It's only mammalian obligate carnivores that taste nasty to us, and
there are people out there (mostly in Asia) who like dog just fine.
For that matter, Siberian tiger was a traditional delicacy in Harbin,
though they don't eat it anymore.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
Michael Alan Chary
You just have to know how to prepare the stuff properly.
--
The All-New, All-Different Howling Curmudgeons!
http://www.whiterose.org/howlingcurmudgeons
Richard Eney
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> Funny, for no good reason I expect eagles to taste terrible.
They are fish-eaters and otherwise predators. Both diets tend to produce
pretty gamy meat.
-- Dick Eney
OPERATION CRIFANAC PUBLICATIONS
http://www.crifanac.net/Index.htm
prozines and fanzines 'n' stuff
John
"Lawrence Watt-Evans" <l...@sff.net> wrote in message
news:bfe5321rcgks8upii...@news.rcn.com...
Virtually all food aversions are culturally based.
If there's sustanence available, and nothing else, that's what people eat.
"taste good" and "taste bad" become a matter of what you were brought up to
eat.
Midnighter
"Michael Alan Chary" <mch...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:e0uhfb$lt3$1...@reader2.panix.com...
It also depends on where and when the food is collected, also what the
animals primary food source was. It is most notable with wild animals. I
will use moose for example because I know the flavour from a few different
situations. If you get a moose towards spring it tastes piney, because it
consisted of a largely pine diet through the winter. If you get a moose
somewhere swampy the moose tastes swampy, etc etc. THe piney moose is kind
of shocking, makes me think of christmas.
Midnighter
"John" <ju...@junk.com> wrote in message
news:e0uus3$lia$1...@perki.connect.com.au...
Not neccesarily, there are some things that just taste foul. Lutefisk for
example. Even people I know that ate it as children hate and despise it.
I'm the same with seafood. HAte and loathe it. I'm from nova scotia,
seafood is kind of a big thing round here. YUCK!
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
>On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 11:56:00 GMT, Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net>
>wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 09:52:07 +0000 (UTC), nan...@panix.com (Nancy
>>Lebovitz) wrote:
>>
>>>Alligator is pretty tasty. I'm underwhelmed by rattlesnake, but that's because
>>>it's tough and the two times I tried fried rattlesnake appetizer, it had
>>>no perceptible flavor.
>>>
>>>I don't know about non-reptile carnivores.
>>
>>Specifically, chicken will eat anything - I don't know whether meat
>>eating chicken taste worse than purely vegetarian chicken.
>
>Oh, omnivores taste _good_ -- consider pork. And I like alligator a
>lot.
>
>It's only mammalian obligate carnivores that taste nasty to us, and
>there are people out there (mostly in Asia) who like dog just fine.
Dogs, of course, are not obligate carnivores. Cats are, dogs are
actually a little on the omnivorous side.
Rebecca
Errol Cavit
news:HDWfkZY9...@nospam.demon.co.uk...
> In message <1144084874.6...@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com>, Gene
> Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> writes
>>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Since we have not domesticated all birds, it seems to me a
>>> small change in chicken behavior might make them useless to us.
>>
>>Or somebody domesticated another bird first, and we never got around to
>>chickens.
>
> L. Neil Smith's AH book "The Probability Broach", the Confederacy had
> domesticated the American Eagle leading to the chain of fast-food
> Eagleburger restaurants. It was not in danger of extinction.
"New Zealand had no land mammals except for two species of bat so small as
to be hardly a snack for the hungry hunter-gatherer. What it did have was
large numbers of flightless birds. The largest of these were called 'moa',
after the domestic chicken of of tropical Polynesia. 'It must have tickled
the old fellows to apply the spare term of moa to such a hypertophied fowl,'
wrote Apirana Ngata. 'They certainly were one up on Hawaiki.'"
James Belich, _Making Peoples_
--
Errol Cavit | errol...@hotmail.com
So we have a paradox. The hard way was also the easy way. What has always
seemed most marvellous about the settlement of the Pacific is that it went
against the prevailing winds and it now transpires that, for people
interested in staying alive, it was taking that very direction that made it
possible. Geoffrey Irwin, 1992
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>> Funny, for no good reason I expect eagles to taste terrible.
>
>They are fish-eaters and otherwise predators. Both diets tend to produce
>pretty gamy meat.
Tuna are fish eaters.
Sean Case
wrote:
> (Amusing thing:
> monitor lizards are big carrion eaters; the Komodo dragon eats so much carrion
> that its mouth is chock-full of bacteria, to the point that it simulates a
> venemous bite.)
Actually, it was recently discovered that at least some monitors are
genuinely venomous:
http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/unarticleid_3009.html
Sean Case
mark5...@yahoo.com
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 11:56:00 GMT, Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net>
> wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 09:52:07 +0000 (UTC), nan...@panix.com (Nancy
> >Lebovitz) wrote:
> >
> >>Alligator is pretty tasty. I'm underwhelmed by rattlesnake, but that's because
> >>it's tough and the two times I tried fried rattlesnake appetizer, it had
> >>no perceptible flavor.
> >>
> >>I don't know about non-reptile carnivores.
> >
> >Specifically, chicken will eat anything - I don't know whether meat
> >eating chicken taste worse than purely vegetarian chicken.
>
> Oh, omnivores taste _good_ -- consider pork. And I like alligator a
> lot.
The problem with bald eagles I imagine is not that they eat meat. But
that they are carrion eaters. Eaters of rotting meat are not usually
top food sources for mammals.
Curious that the US chose such an animal as its symbol though. Why not
a vulture?
James Nicoll
brighter than its domesticated cousins (It's hard to see how it could
be stupider without being inanimate).
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
Dorothy J Heydt
Benjamin Franklin wanted them to choose the turkey. THEY taste
good.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Geoffrey
>>2: Cast of Thousands: The more characters you follow, the less you
>>have to write. A typical novel is perhaps 120K words long. If your
>>cast has fifty people in it, each book need only have 2,400 words
>>for each.
>>2a: Many installments: It follows from the above that only as
>>many events as fit into 2,400 words are needed for the entire
>>book. Accordingly, each book will cover a relatively short
>>period of time. This means any long process will need lots >>and
lots of books to detail it.
>>2b: The Law of the Fecund: as old characters die, replace them
>>to keep the character count up.
Rich Horton replied:
>This of course is a rule straight from BESTSELLERISM 101, hardly
>attributable to Turtledove.
>(To cite one example, it was used by Geoff Landis, a first rate short
>story writer, in producing his only novel to date. I assume this was
>partly a way for a short story writer to solve the problem of writing
at
>novel length.)
Hey, I resent that. My "cast of thousands" consisted of *six*
characters.
-- and I didn't replace any when I killed them, either.
(but thanks for calling me a "first-rate short-story writer").
--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis
Default User
> Benjamin Franklin wanted them to choose the turkey. THEY taste
> good.
That was more of a joke than anything. In a letter to his daughter,
while commenting on a poorly-drawn eagle that appeared on some symbol
or the other, he made the comments about preferring the turkey. It
wasn't even all THAT complimentary to the turkey, he refers to them as
a little vain and silly, but courageous.
Rich Horton
wrote:
>Hey, I resent that. My "cast of thousands" consisted of *six*
>characters.
>
>-- and I didn't replace any when I killed them, either.
>
Fair enough. What you did borrow from Bestsellerism 101, however, was
the short chapters. And the focus on multiple characters, each from
their own POV, even if "multiple" is only 6, not thousands.
>(but thanks for calling me a "first-rate short-story writer").
Which you are, of course.
And I enjoyed _Mars Crossing_ and found it compulsively readable, but
not wholly a success as a novel.
Walter Bushell
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
Go to talk.origins and study the creationists.
--
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any
charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his
peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totali-
tarian government whether Nazi or Communist." -- W. Churchill, Nov 21, 1943
John
"Midnighter" <torture...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:DgIYf.55183$VV4.9...@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
And the people who don't?
Geoffrey
On 5 Apr 2006 "Geoffrey" <geoffrey.lan...@sff.net> wrote:
>>...(but thanks for calling me a "first-rate short-story writer").
>
>Which you are, of course.
>And I enjoyed _Mars Crossing_ and found it compulsively readable, but
>not wholly a success as a novel.
Ha! When I quote you on my book jackets, I will, of course, just quote
that first line of that sentence.
"I enjoyed _Mars Crossing_ and found it compulsively readable."
-- Rich Horton
Alexey Romanov
> In article <1232qpm...@corp.supernews.com>,
> Richard Eney <dic...@radix.net> wrote:
>>In article <e0p48g$o0l$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>>In article <1144000796....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>>>Gene Ward Smith <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Name a Viet Nam war story from Turtledove.
>>>>
>>>>Why does it need to be a war? One of the great turning points in world
>>>>history was surely the domestication of the chicken. We could have AH
>>>>about that.
>>>>
>>> I'm sorry, is the volume off on this thing?
>>>
>>> The point is to emulate Turtledove's success, not to
>>>explore unrelated possibilities.
>>
>>All right, a related possibility (since Turtledove is writing about wars):
>>horses seem to have evolved mainly in the Americas -- they kept dying out
>>in Eurasia -- and cattle the other way around. The last time, the cattle
>>persisted in America while the equines -- by that time true _Equus_ --
>>persisted in Eurasia but died out in America. Just suppose this schedule
>>had been slightly skewed -- and the equines had been driven into
>>extinction in America by the competition of the bovines _before_ they
>>evolved _Equus_.
>>
>>Now imagine what human history would have looked like if _that_ had
>>happened.
>
> Over on shwi, I once inadvertently eliminated humanity
This almost never happens.
Alexey Romanov
> In article <e0p6oa$4kb$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>>In article <e0p12r$s66$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>First off, you left off the rule about writing quality. (As in,
>>make it actively bad. To this day I have no idea why people actually
>>buy Harry Turtledove books, since it can't be to read them. Sometime
>>I'll try to force myself through another, I suppose, but please nobody
>>try to convince me to do that *now*, I've already done my Turtledove
>>time for this decade.)
>
> Actually, some Turtledove is good. Some Turtledove AH is even
> good, though I don't count any of the megawar series in that
> category. But, e.g. _The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump_ (about
> one-quarter of the fun in which is observing how much AH you can
> produce just by cracking puns) and "Down in the Bottomlands".
>
>
> Dorothy J. Heydt
> Albany, California
> djh...@kithrup.com
Apparently the Russian translator never noticed the puns. Or maybe he
noticed them and said, "Eh, too much work."
Walter Bushell
Alexey Romanov <alex...@mail.ru> wrote:
Translating that book without the puns is just inutile. You loose a
great deal of the flavor.
Alexey Romanov
I guess now I need to read the original book, since even that translation
was a decent read.
Walter Bushell
Alexey Romanov <alex...@mail.ru> wrote:
A romance novel and bureaucrat engaged in a heroic quest the
possibilities for action and humor are endless.