Virtuality: a review

I watched Fox's "pilot" Virtuality on Friday night, from Battlestar Galactica producers Ron Moore and Michael Taylor. I never managed to get into BG but from the few snippets and trailers I did catch, I got a sense of the intensity of the show. Virtuality had the same intensity. A crew of 12 set off on a 1o-year voyage on the Phaeton to find new life on another star, with a reality show producer and TV host among them. Six months into the trip, their mission changes. Conditions on earth have become so bad due to global warning that Earth will be uninhabitable within a century, and the Phaeton's new mission is to find a habitable planet orbiting the target star.

Reality check: the premise makes little sense. Conditions on Earth would not deteriorate so fast that months earlier everything was fine and suddenly the end is nigh. Even if they did, humanity would not leave its future in the hands of 12 astronauts not trained for the mission they're now required to undertake. Phaeton only cost a few hundred billion dollars - peanuts on a global scale. World governments would surely build a hundred more Phaetons and send them out with experienced crews to multiple destinations to find that elusive terran-like world. The odds that Phaeton's target star has a habitable planet are miniscule.

However, if I suspend disbelief over the premise, at least we have an explantion for why the crew we've ended up with is so psychologically unstable. This was one of my major complaints about Sunshine, the 2007 movie with a similar premise: a crew travels to the sun to detonate a bomb in order to stop the star from dying. (The physics makes no sense at all - the sun cannot suddenly "die," and a bomb will not "reignite" it.) In Sunshine, humanity's last hope consists of a crew of psychotic, emotional, mostly young and mostly cowardly people who fall apart under pressure. The problem is that they were specifically selected for the mission. In its direst need, this was the best humanity could come up with? In Virtuality, the crew is equally unsuited for the job, but this is somewhat explained by the fact that they were originally chosen, we presume, for their photogenic qualities and conflicting personalities (given the mission was to be a reality TV show in search of alien life).

There's the possibility, of course, that the crew is being lied to about Earth's situation in order to see how they react under pressure (to boost the ratings), but you still have to wonder why the crew doesn't wonder why Earth isn't doing more to save itself.

Despite the shaky premise, Virtuality was an enjoyable 2-hour pilot. (It was promoted as a standalone TV movie, but clearly was filmed as a pilot. I get the feeling sci-fi fans are supposed to clamour for a series so that Fox, if they make one, can flatter said fans into believing it was their doing.) The crewmembers are an interesting assortment of personalities and relationships (though we get no background on most of them), including three married couples (one gay) and one extramarital affair. There's lots of "what its like to live on board a ship," which I love, and the sets are cool, if somewhat sterile. Hopefully we'll see some grit seep in later.

My biggest beef if this is an ongoing series is the virtual reality technology, which was a major plot element of the movie. It's the equivalent of Star Trek's holodeck, and it sucked then and it still sucks. It malfunctions, of course, which causes the commander to melt down, but more to the point it's boring. I have no interest in the fantasy lives of the crew. I want to see them interact with reality - with each other and with the challenges of their mission. If Virtuality's writers worry their characters' lives are so boring that we need to watch their VR experiences to be entertained, they should not have written a show about them in the first place. Anyway, given the Phaeton crew's ratings of five billion viewers back on Earth, we're led to believe their reality is fascinating.

And you have to wonder why those five billion viewers would watch a reality show about astronauts, however compelling, when they could just snap on the VR goggles and be an astronaut.

Crop circle mystery solved!

I don't write about aliens, although one day I may give it a try, but I love a good story about the supposed actions and motivations of planet Earth's alien visitors. They reguarly kidnap us ("us" being almost exclusively North Americans) and exhibit an extraordinary fascination with our rectums; they fly physics-defying craft over our planet for no apparent reason; and they use our paddocks as canvases for their art.

Or do they?

The BBC is now blaming stoned wallabies for crop circles in Aussie poppy fields. Outrageous! (The comments section of this article is as hilarious as the article itself.)

Recommended reading list:

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Grimspace

Patricia Altner interviews Ann Aguirre on her blog today.

I read Grimspace, the first book in Ann's science fiction series about a "jumper", Jax, who navigates ships through grimspace (aka subspace, or what I call nodespace in my book), last year. It's a futuristic adventure romance novel that I was really excited to find, because at that time Kristin was shopping my book to publishers and Grimspace was one of the best examples of a book that was a similar genre to mine (meaning, "if you liked that, you'll love this!"). Plus it had a cool cover.

It's published by Penguin Ace, so we had high hopes for that editor. She said of Song of Scarabaeus: "It's solid and the author has talent... I enjoyed the writing," but rejected the book as being "too technical, with more science than I was looking for in an SF novel with romantic elements."

Definitely one of my nicer rejections, especially because I was aiming for a book that includes plausible science as an integral part of the story and the worldbuilding. I majored in cell biology and zoology (eons ago) and read Scientific American and Stephen Jay Gould for pleasure. Science, particularly biology and physics, fascinates me. I had great fun inventing a new science for Song, extrapolating from what I know about ecology, genetic engineering and retroviruses.

Having said that, my focus is always on the characters and the story - which is what I enjoyed about Grimspace, with its fast pace and lively dialogue. It's written in first-person present tense, which takes some getting used to but works really well. There will be four books in the series (book 2, Wanderlust, is already on the shelves) so check it out.

Priority!

I love Priority Mail envelopes, with their desperate little stripe that screams, Open me! Now! I got here in a hurry and I'm exciting! I received an exciting-looking Priority Mail envelope today and I opened it in a hurry. It was from my agent. It had a check inside.

My advance has arrived! (Well, half of it.) Actually, it may have come yesterday but did not scream loud enough, and I forgot to look in the mailbox because I was preoccupied with a million things to do around the new house, like shuffling furniture and unpacking boxes and putting this thing here and that stuff there so I can tame the obstacle course that aspires to be my living room.

So now I have an advance and a signed contract. The IRS is involved. I feel like a "real" writer... and I haven't had time to write a word all week.

Starry starry night

Here in Tucson, the night sky is an awesome sight. Thanks to the presence of the Kitt Peak Observatory just outside town, many suburban streets do not have street lighting - which means we see a lot of stars. When I moved here a few years ago from the other side of the globe, the first thing I noticed (after the absence of the Southern Cross) was that you can always see the entire moon here, even when it's a crescent. Its full shape is always visible as a circular shadow.

I'm terrible with constellations, but Orion is hard to miss - and it's visible in both hemispheres. I've learned to pick out a few more constellations now, as well as super-bright Venus and red Mars.

Living near both an airport and an Airforce base, we do of course see a lot of UFOs at night. It's fascinating how viewing an aircraft from different angles and altitudes, under different conditions such as cloud cover and other obstacles, can have such a major impact on your perception.

Tonight while walking the dog, we saw the most amazing shooting star. A green fireball exploded across the sky, trailing flames, then turned white and continued on like a flare. It covered a much larger arc than a typical shooting star and lasted about four seconds. It lit up the neighborhood. Incredible!

Bring on the scientists: The American Meteor Society website says that a green fireball means the meteor contained nickel.

Stories of yore

Today while packing I came across my old school exercise books from infant school (grades K-2). These attractive grey books were issued by the City of Birmingham Education Committee and came in various sizes, lined and unlined. We wrote in them our news and our creative writing efforts.

What I have learned from a quick browse... When I was five-and-a-half in Middles (first grade), I was obsessed with my baby teeth falling out, which they did with great regularity. My parents paid us a penny for each one (no tooth fairy in our house). I gave my "fat and natghty" brother for his 4th birthday all the letters of the alphabet (which I drew and cut into squares myself), in a homemade case wrapped in pink crepe paper. Someone gave him wood and glue and he made "a thing that he called a flying boat." As for my dad - "his name was Dennis when he was a little boy" and "he tells mummy off when she cuts her finger." (Now my husband does the same thing to me.)

In second grade I wrote in my News book, "When I grow up I am going to marry Andrew Cull he is my boyfriend." I don't think Andrew Cull knew about this plan. I wanted to be a teacher and teach "good children" who "are never going to the head teacher for a smake." Those were the days when smacks, wallops and canings from the head teacher weren't illegal. I wrote, "I wonder if I will like it when I grow up."

My second grade Creative Writing book includes stories with titles such as "The Ghost Ship," "The Magic Garden," "The Magic Shoes," "The Island of Magic," "The Island of Tiny People," "The Land of the Funny Faces," "The Day I Was Lost" (told from the point of view of a penny) and "The Invisible Pond," in which a fairy makes a pond invisible and the royal coach drives into it, angering the Queen. The fairy's mother admonishes the fairy with: If you don't make that pond back to normal I shall put you to death. The fairy complies.

If I ever run out of ideas, I could go back to my six-year-old self and see what she comes up with.

Text dashes

I work as an editor. I don't think(?) I'm a grammar nazi, other than in the privacy of my own home (pity my husband), but as I have information to share, I might just share it on occasion.

So what is a text dash? Someone asked me the other day why text dashes come in different lengths and whether it matters. I am obliged to answer that of course it matters! Having edited on three different continents, it matters in different ways, and some of what follows might have a bit of an Aussie or British slant. But the differences aren't that big.

Let's start with the shortest text dash, actually a hyphen and not a dash at all, but it's often the only one that people use thanks to the lack of other easy options on a keyboard. (In fact, I don't bother with en- and em-dashes in this blog, even though it pains me not to do so.) The hyphen joins two words together to make a compound word, as in semi-circle. These days, punctuation is becoming an endangered species (particularly in Australia, where less is better - hence the dropping of the fullstop [a.k.a. period] after Mr and Mrs, and removal of all punctuation from addresses, for example), and so the hyphen is sometimes removed altogether to make a single word (semicircle).

The next longest dash is the en-dash or en-rule, which was traditionally as long as the letter "n" in typographical terms. An unspaced en-dash (no spaces either side) means "through" or "to" in the sense of a range of numbers. For example, "from 1990–1991" or "15–20 times." Note that "between 1990–1991" is incorrect. Always use "and" with "between": "between 1990 and 1991." In fiction, in any case, you would usually spell out the en-dash and the numbers as well (though not dates): "fifteen to twenty times."

Another usage for the en-dash is to join two words that do not form a compound word:

the stop–start descent

You can probably get away with a hyphen here, but... well, it would be wrong.

You can type an en-dash in Microsoft Word by hitting CTRL+minus on your keyboard.

A spaced en-dash has a letter space either side of it. It's interchangeable with an em-dash (see below), so it's a matter of house style as to which one you'd use. These days, with publishers importing your electronic manuscript into their desktop publishing software rather than rekeying it, you can use what you like and they'll search-and-replace if necessary. Just be consistent!

If you type space-hyphen-space within a sentence, Word will automatically convert the hyphen to a spaced en-dash.

The em-dash or em-rule is the length of the letter "m" and it is generally used where a period, colon, semi-colon or set of parentheses could have been used (not that it can always replace these). I admit to being overly fond of the em-dash, mostly because I don't like using colons, semi-colons or parentheses in fiction. Examples of these usages that I just grabbed from my manuscript (where I used 29 em-dashes in 3800 words in chapter 1... yikes):

With his head tilted up, Edie could see the narrow metal strip across his throat—a voice snag. [em-dash replaces colon]

"My friends here have boundary chips in their heads—you know what that means?" [em-dash replaces period and joins two related sentences]

She focused on a pair of boots—the other serf’s boots—on the scuffs and scratches that crisscrossed the leather. [em-dashes replace parentheses]

In his eyes she saw a calm, accepting trust—the knowledge she would save him. [here the em-dash extends the sentence with an additional thought]

The other use of an em-dash (I love using this one) is to indicate a sharp cut-off thought or dialogue:

“The leash,” he rasped. “Can you—” A coughing fit interrupted his question.

Don't use an ellipsis here. That's only for thoughts or dialogue that drift off:

“I don’t know. I just…” He shrugged but didn’t leave.

Alternatively (I love this one too. I just love the em-dash altogether too much.) for advanced users, the em-dash indicates an artificial break in dialogue in order to add action:

“And if they’re tranq’ed properly” —he indicated the drug regimen listed on his console— “they can’t fight.”

That's how I insert a complete sentence into the middle of a continuous line of dialogue. (I've seen it done other ways, too.)

You can type an em-dash in Microsoft Word by hitting CTRL+ALT+minus on your keyboard. If you're using Courier font for your manuscripts (personally, I find that font hard to read but some editors still swear by it), you can indicate an em-dash with two hyphens. However, Word will just convert that to an em-dash unless you turn off the function.

So there you have it, a text dash primer. I've left out some usages, particularly for the en-dash, but I think you'd only need them for technical writing. I only used one en-dash in my entire novel (the "stop–start" example above).

Artfully

Today I learned who my cover artist will be (I don't actually know if I'm allowed to say, so I'll hold it in for now). I checked out his website and... I'm floored. His work - mostly urban fantasy and science fiction - is absolutely amazing. His style is gritty and moody, his characters are gorgeous. I'm so excited to see what he comes up with for Song of Scarabaeus.

One box down, ?? to go

We take possession of our new house on Monday, so my mind is full of all the things I need to do and I've only done a little writing each day this week. Today I ordered an unmentionable quantity of packing foam, bubble wrap and tape (etc. etc.) online. 

My aim, when I'm on a run, is to write (or rewrite) a scene a day. This rarely happens, for various reasons. And it's not going to happen today. Too busy with phone calls and errands, and I even started packing -- one box of "Office" stuff. I realized this afternoon that I need to pack one room a day all weekend and next week to get it finished by Saturday, which is moving day.

I'm wishing for the days when everything I owned fitted in the back of my Mini.

Musical plots

Remember Jump? Not Van Halen, but the Pointer Sisters. It was playing in the car this afternoon and while it's a corny song, it's also a nostalgic one for me. Made me think about how music, good and bad, anchors certain moments in life - at least in retrospect.

I don't usually listen to music (or anything) while writing, but I've done a good deal of plotting while listening to one CD in particular: Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendez Vous. I don't listen to any other electronic music, but for some reason I ended up with Rendez Vous in my collection. 

I found the length (about an hour) ideal for running an entire "movie" of the plot through my head, even if I had no plot when I started. Plot arcs, scenes, emotions and other details emerge out of nowhere with little effort - no matter what the premise - because the musical pieces themselves form the overall structure of a story.

I've tried listening to instrumental movie soundtracks, as they usually include the same broad range of music styles, but unfortunately if I'm familiar with the movie, all my imagination comes up with is that movie. And I can't write at all to music with vocals, as my mind wanders to listen to the lyrics.

One of the pieces in Rendez Vous has an interesting history: it features a soulful sax, and was written for astronaut Ron McNair to be played and recorded in space. This never happened - McNair died in the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Vatta's War

After yesterday's negativity, it's time for a positive book review!

I've been reading Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Currently finishing up book 3, Engaging the Enemy. The series revolves around Ky Vatta, daughter of an interstellar trading family, whose father gives her a ship after she's thrown out of Fleet Academy. The ship, though, is bound for the junk yard - not much of a first mission. Everything goes horribly wrong, of course, and by book 3 Ky is not so much trading as assembling a fleet of privateers to take on a bunch of pirates who are menacing the trade routes.

The books have a quasi-military feel but are mostly what I label "procedural" - very detailed descriptions of ship life (from the captain's perspective, anyway) including finances, trading deals and other interactions. The first third of the first book, for example, is simply a series of shopping trips to prepare for the voyage. The action amounts to only a handful of incidents in each book.

If I've made it sound kind of boring... well, this is not the usual guns-blazing all-out action you might expect from "sci-fi adventure", especially that with a military flavor, but I'm finding the series compelling for a whole other reason. The worlds are incredibly well realized, and it's easy and exciting to imagine what it might be like to live in them.

One gripe: no romance for poor Ky! She's too busy saving the galaxy...

What doesn't work for me

A few weeks ago, a fellow Aussie SF reader emailed me after seeing my book sale on the Nelson Agency newsletter. Tez Miller talks about and reviews books on her blog, and I've been trawling it for reading recommendations. Take a look! She also links to some interesting author blogs. This week she's been reading Twilight, which I decided I "should" read earlier this year to see what all the fuss was about. This is my kinda sorta review of the book.

Tez's review mentions one of my biggest structural gripes with the book - the plot doesn't actually take off until near the end. Another major problem, as I see it, is that the last thing a 100-year-old vampire would ever do with eternity is spend it in high school. The entire premise falls apart right there.

Much has been said about the obsessive relationship between Bella and Edward, which becomes increasingly unhealthy to the point of mental illness in the second book (I haven't read books 3 & 4), and about Bella's general pathetic-ness. I found it impossible to empathize with her on any level, but then I'm not a self-absorbed 12-year-old. My main problem with the story takes these last two things a little further.

I was pretty much appalled by Bella and Edward's total lack of moral backbone. This culminates in book 2 when [spoiler alert] they walk away from an impending massacre of innocents without so much as a phone call to the cops. They're subsequently more concerned with each other's perfection than with those deaths. Bella recovers from the trauma in a matter of minutes.

Edward had the right idea for the wrong reasons: yes, he should have revealed the existence of vampires, but not for the cringe-worthy goal of committing suicide-by-vamp. He should have proved their existence to humankind and let the world's combined armed forces deal with it.

We could brush off Bella's wobbly ethics as lovestruck immaturity, I suppose (not that it makes her any more appealing), but Edward's behavior is unforgivable. He may be perfection itself on the outside, but he's pure selfish evil inside. He and his family have had, between them, hundreds of years to do something about man-eating vampires, but instead they've joined the conspiracy to keep the existence of vampires secret. They are just as much the enemy of humankind as the Italian mass murderers. Edward theorizes that vampires were created to be the natural enemy of humans, and he sides with the humans, yet he does nothing - not even revealing the very existence of these predators - to help humans. Some hero.

Let's just say the books did not work for me.

Cover story

"The Publisher shall consult the Author regarding the cover design..." Thus stateth my contract, and last week my editor asked me for cover ideas, so today I emailed her my "consultation." Basically, that means I scoured Amazon for sci-fi book covers and explained what I liked and didn't like about them.

In general I prefer a more stylized cover rather than a "scene from the book". The latter runs the risk of looking out of context and just plain bizarre, or alternatively too generic. I love hardware and hi-tech sci-fi stuff, but that typical "spaceship and planet" concept is wrong for my book. My idea is for something organic (since the story concerns alien ecosystems) merged with technology. If the title sticks, I guess there should also be a beetle on there somewhere.

In case the stylized thing doesn't fly, I listed scenes that could be illustrated. This most likely would include the main characters. In the book, I deliberately don't describe them in detail because I prefer books where the reader can imagine someone of their choosing in the main roles. But for the sake of the cover, I did provide descriptions, with photos of two people (a not-so-well-known singer and an even-less-well-known actor) who could (physically) fill the roles of Edie and Finn.

Now, of course, I can't wait to see what HarperCollins comes up with!

The most outrageous cover I ever owned was for an edition of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. I haven't read the book in decades but have never forgotten the story. It concerns a post-apocalyptic society in which genetic imperfections are not tolerated. A group of children have to keep their telepathic skills secret in order not to face banishment or execution for this abnormality. The cover depicted... a green ant-lizard-monster.

In googling for this cover, I've discovered the book was titled Re-Birth in the USA. I also discovered very different covers from several other editions, so here they are...