1: Misdirection

One way swings around that deliberately provocative ending line. We’re asked to fully reimagine the movie from the perspective of the all-invading alien monster, protean, agressively hegemonzing. A monster for whom the very rape cannot have any meaning. In the comments, Watts says,

Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you suggest: a metaorganism without sex wouldn’t know what rape was. Which is why I introduced the “rapist” dialog with Childs’ searchlight a couple of scenes earlier, during which the missionary admits to levels it cannot understand in that word. But it does learn connotation of “forced penetration of flesh”.

Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.

The typical convention to signal that a word being used is foreign is to put it in italics. Watts, or Clarkesworld, hasn’t done so here, but I think that it might have been useful to do so, just to emphasize that the creature doing the talking doesn’t actually understand the concept, but I figure it isn’t strictly necessary. There’s an argument to be had there, as the convention is certainly used earlier:

Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or assholes. It said that MacReady was sometimes called Mac. It said that this collection of structures was a camp.

The final line signals that we’re not being told the story that we expect we’re being told. We spend the entire story meticulously repicking each pivotal moment of the film, explaining why the missionary isn’t at fault, how the harm it caused all springs from incomprehension. But at the last we see the reversal: the missionary does mean to have us all, to release use from death and our tiny, brutish suffering.

The last line is there to tell us that we’re exploring ‘evil’ from the inside and that while we’re seeing the other side of the story, the interior interperetation is entirely consonant with the exterior.

It’s a neat trick.

2: Pacing

Another way to look at it is how to tell a story that most of the readers already know in a way that’s compelling. Reimagining is often a sterile exercise (imagining is often a sterile exercise), but finding a motivation for the creature, working a backstory that fits the facts on the ground and enriches, rather than usurps the polt. Whe shuffle back and forth between two strains. Missionary-as-Childs, walking into the long night and thinking through its experiences; and a retelling of the events in the movie, reinterpereted through the newly invented backstory.

Left alone, neither of these threads would work. A simple recounting of the story of the movie would leave us bored. What does it matter if the creature is there, sorrowing at the hostility that it encounters? By the same token, its reflections on the differences between its nature and that of the world that it finds itself in are hollow without the context of the framing story. Compellingly written, sure, but nothing but a decision and a small, quiet death happen. It takes a different kind of artistry to raise this sort of introspection out of the level of the dull. It’s unclear whether or not Watts can manage it, but here, hung of the scaffolding of the other thread, it becomes a sail, rather than a baggy pile of canvas.

3: Critter gonna get ya

Something of the evergreen popularity of this genre of story is that it makes for almost automatically compelling cinema. Honestly, it’s pretty hard to fuck it up too bad. Your characters can be paper thin or gilt cardboard and no one is going to care. Faults are excused and rationalized away by the stark moral dilemma of needing to get rid of the monster that is killing everyone one by one. No one really cares that MacReady is a swaggering jackass with silly hair, he’s as close as we’re going to get to a hero, so we’ll root for him as long as he lasts.

One of the things that makes The Thing so sticky in the memory is that the critter might already have got you, but you haven’t realized it yet. It’s a break from the standard convention. Later betrayals might not be telegraphed, as is a core of the form, because the characters are never sure which side they’ll shortly be on.

To some extent, to offer the critter’s perspective is to defuse the tension somewhat. Part of the fear comes from the fact that you never know where the threat is going to come from. I think that Watts does the best thing here. He doesn’t try. He knows that most of the readers will know how it comes out, that even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ll know the form, know the standards. He allows the movement and tension of the story to come from a course of revelation walked in a void in the existing story. Who will the creature get next stops being important. At the time of the telling, everything is already over, or almost. Who it will get next stops being the question, and it starts being, ‘What will it decide, and what will that mean?’.

4: Conclusions

This story more than most is ensnared in nets within nets of meaning, right from the workd go. “I am going to rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective”, is a simple enough statement. But since the source text for this remix exists in the way it does, you already have threads about cancer and paranoia and our unreliable biology and the feeling that death is hunting us all down one by one anyway, all before you write a single word. The colonialist stinger in the tail adds another layer of difficulty. I guess what I mean here is that I can’t get past the excellence of form and all of the accreted meaning to what Watts is trying to actually say. Which may be nothing, honestly, other than that it’s a fun thing to try and rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective.

The Naturalist by Maureen McHugh
Under the Moons of Venus by Damien Broderick
Brownian Emotion by Tom Holt
Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi
Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story by Peter S. Beagle
The Bodhisattvas by Gord Sellar
What We Take When We Take What We Need by Daryl Gregory
Harboring Pearls: A Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick
Her Deepness by Livia Llewellyn
Second Journey of the Magus by Ian R MacLeod
The Bohemian Astrobleme by Kage Baker
At the Store by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Flu Season by Barbara Roden
The Heart of a Mouse by K. J. Bishop
The Library of Babble by Michael Bishop
The Nonesuch by Brian Lumley
The Taborin Scale by Lucius Shepard
A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed by Lawrence Block
Amor Vincit Omnia by K. J. Parker
Ghosts In My Head By Cory Doctorow
Six Blind Men and an Alien by Mike Resnick

Clarkesworld Magazine

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M. Valente
Messenger by Julia M Sidorova
Beach Blanket Spaceship by Sandra McDonald
The Association of the Dead by Rahul Kanakia
Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My Father’s Singularity by Brenda Cooper
A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell
A Sweet Calling by Tony Pi
Between Two Dragons by Yoon Ha Lee
January by Becca De La Rosa
Alone With Gandhari by Gord Sellar
The History Within Us by Matthew Kressel
Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake
The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar
The Things by Peter Watts
All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg

Futurismic

Or We Will All Hang Separately by Nancy Jane Moore
Your Life Sentence by C C Finlay
Miguel and the Viatura by Eric Gregory
Windsor Executive Solutions by Chris Nakashima-Brown and Bruce Sterling
Out Walking the Streets by Eric Del Carlo
Tupac Shakur and the End of the World by Sandra McDonald
Biting the Snake’s Tail by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
White Swan by Jason Stoddard

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Prashkina’s Fire by Vylar Kaftan
The Shades of Morgana by Dean Wells
The Territorialist by Yoon Ha Lee
Throwing Stones by Mishell Baker
The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere by Marissa Lingen
The Isthmus Variation by Kris Millering
Memories in Bronze, Feathers, and Blood by Aliette de Bodard
Remembering Light by Marie Brennan
The Jewels of Montforte, Pt. I by Adam Corbin Fusco
The Jewels of Montforte, Pt. II by Adam Corbin Fusco
Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride by Saladin Ahmed
The Secret of Pogopolis by Matthew Bey
As the Prairie Grasses Sing by Sarah L. Edwards
And Other Such Delights by James Lecky
The Circus of King Minos’ Masque by Michael J. DeLuca
Pawn’s Gambit by Adam Heine
Knowing Neither Kin Nor Foe by Nancy Fulda
Waiting for Number Five by Tom Crosshill
Sanji’s Demon, Pt. II by Richard Parks
The Leafsmith in Love by K.J. Kabza
Sanji’s Demon, Pt. I by Richard Parks
In Memoriam by Alys Sterling
A Skirt of Many Colors by Catherine Mintz
Pale by Kathryn Allen
To Slay with a Thousand Kisses by Rodello Santos
The Motor, the Mirror, the Mind by T.F. Davenport
Gizzard Stones by Garth Upshaw
Shatterach Gates by Paul Daly
A Serpent in the Gears by Margaret Ronald
Bellwether by A.C. Smart

Strange horizons

Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier by Georgina Bruce
Where It Ends by Swapna Kishore
Father’s Day by Jen Larsen
The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu (part 1 of 2) by Grady Hendrix
The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu (part 2 of 2) by Grady Hendrix
The Red Bride by Samantha Henderson
Out of Sombra Canyon by Kyri Freeman
How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade by Nick Poniatowski
The Night Train by Lavie Tidhar
Kifli by Rose Lemberg
Waiting by Eilis O’Neal
On Not Going Extinct by Carol Emshwiller
Worlds Apart by Marlaina Gray
WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!! (part 1 of 2) by Meghan McCarron
WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!! (part 2 of 2) by Meghan McCarron
The Freedom by K M Lawrence
Birds by Benjamin Parzybok
Middle Aged Weirdo in a Cadillac by George R. Galuschak
The Duke of Vertumn’s Fingerling by Elizabeth Carroll
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra by Vandana Singh
Merrythoughts by Bill Kte’pi
The Kiss by Lauren LeBano
Who in Mortal Chains by Claire Humphrey
Small Burdens by Paul M. Berger
Sundowning by Joanne Merriam
Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions by Saladin Ahmed
After We Got Back the Lights by Eric Del Carlo
Cory’s Father by Francesca Forrest
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter (Part 1 of 2) by Theodora Goss
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter (Part 2 of 2) by Theodora Goss
The Blue Wonder by Chris Kammerud
Four Lies from the Mouth of God by Megan Arkenberg

Lightspeed

How to Become a Mars Overlord by Catherynne M. Valente
The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine
No Time Like the Present by Carol Emshwiller
Amaryllis by Carrie Vaughn
The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt
Cats in Victory by David Barr Kirtley
I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno by Vylar Kaftan

Fantasy Magazine

And the Blood of Dead Gods will Mark the Score by Gary Kloster
Stem, Stone, and Bone by Deb Taber
Perhaps this is Kushi’s Story by Swapna Kishore
Violets for Lee by Desirina Boskovich
The Seal of Sulaymaan by Tracy Canfield
The Stable Master’s Tale by Rachel Swirsky
Abandonware by An Owomoyela
Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory by Paul M. Berger
Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archaeology by Chris Howard
The Slavesinger by Louise Marley
Daha’s Son by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String by Lavie Tidhar
Wishes and Feathers by Patricia Russo
The Sometimes Child by Caroline Yoachim
Lighter than Air by Norman Spinrad
Exile by Karen Heuler
Whisper’s Voice by Elena Gleason
Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Saving the Gleeful Horse by KJ Bishop
In the Emperor’s Garden by Jay Lake and Shannon Page
The City of Lobster, or, The Dancers on Anchorage St. by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Bearing Fruit by Nikki Alfar
A Stray by Scott William Carter and Ray Vukcevich
Tenientes by Nathaniel Williams
The Armature of Flight by Sharon Mock
Stranger by Patricia Russo
After the Dragon by Sarah Monette
my mother, the ghost by Willow Fagan
Above It All by Carol Emshwiller
The Wing Collection by Eilis O’Neal

shareable.net

The Guy Who Worked For Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Playing to Type by Mary Robinette Kowal
Playing Against Type by Mary Robinette Kowal
A Type of Favor by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Exterminator’s Want-Ad Bruce Sterling
The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening by Cory Doctorow

tor.com

Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure by Richard Parks
The Final Now by Gregory Benford
Fare Thee Well by Cathy Clamp
Fangs for Hire by Jenna Black
Eve of Sin City by S. J. Day
The Cockroach Hat by Terry Bisson
The Cage by A. M. Dellamonica
Bogieman by Carole Nelson Douglas

Apex Magazine

Fair Ladies by Theodora Goss
Four Is Me! With Squeeeeee! (And LOLer) by Nick Mamatas
Artifact by Peter Atwood
Shrödinger’s Pussy by Terra LeMay
Laika’s Dream by Holly Hight
Sol Asleep by Naomi Libicki
The Last Stand of the Ant Maker by Paul Jessup
City of Refuge by Jerry Gordon

• Every three or four months, people get a notice from the office of party registrations. They can elect to stay with their current party or join a new one at this time. Not registering an opinion keeps you with your current party, but only for four or five consecutive periods. Then you’re moved into the unregistered category. Current running tallies and projection data are always available from the registrations office.
• Every party is required to get some percentage of signatures of its desired sphere of effectiveness to count an an official party, perhaps 3-7%. Party percentages are refigured every other year, to allow laws with short-term costs but long-term benefits to not sink a government.
• Every party is required to register short, easily understood versions of their planks, their overarching missions, and their positions on the most salient issues of the day. This should have sharp length and complexity limits, and be standardized by the registrations office. These should be browsable in the selections packets or web page.
• There is a unicameral ‘legislature’, composed of the leadership of all of the parties with more than the 3-7% of the vote above. The PM-equivalent proposes new laws, which are then analyzed in a strictly formalized way and made available for all to see. Part of the analysis must be a rendering of the bill into formal language and an analysis of its anticipated budgetary and social impacts. Amendments can be proposed by any party, and must be germane to the matter under review.
• Each party has its percentage of the registered population to one signficant digit of ‘votes’. A simple majority passes and the law moves immediately into judicial review, then into law.
• Laws are structurally dictated by the party or coalition in power and the amendments thereto, but are written by a class of professionals whose job it is to write laws and advise the politicians in a non-partisan manner about their construction.
• All majority-rules laws expire in 5 years. Each additional 5 year term requires an additional 5% of the vote. A law that is meant to be permanent must be passed as a change to the written constitution, which should require a 60% legislative vote, ratification by 60% of regional governing bodies, and perhaps a 60% bar popular referendum.

This way we’re spared all of the lame posturing and unpredictability of individual legislators who occasionally don’t vote for their parties. In the US, most of this stuff is an artifact of electoral pressures that make multiple parties difficult or impossible. So instead of a more socially conservative Midwestern Democratic Party, you get Democrats like Nelson, who’d lose as too conservative in a Republican race on the east coast. I think that getting multiple parties through voting reform is another way to get this, but mostly am proposing getting the people out because shit-stupid factors like height and personal attractiveness often swamp things like ideology, electorally. Without all of the posturing and drama, there would be less interesting news, but we’d get more responsible and accountable governance by smarter people.

Below the break is the letter I wrote. Feel free to borrow as much as you need:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

In my morning troll of the news, I was disturbed to notice reporting which said that you had taken a position against reform of the filibuster. As one of your constituents, I would urge you to reconsider that stance. Already, the Senate is markedly undemocratic. The minority obstruction enabled by the filibuster only makes the situation worse.

Perhaps you’re thinking strategically, looking forward to the next time your party is in the minority, but I believe this thinking to be short-sighted. While it is true that an obstructing minority benefits from the failures of the ruling party, in the longer term these failures and compromises hurt the country by obstructing the true costs and benefits of the policies favored by each party.

Apart from strategic concerns, there is the real harm that the filibuster causes and continues to cause, each and every day. In the sidebar of the page where I am writing this letter, there is a link to your statement about stopping global warming, possibly the most important issue of our time. Yet the filibuster, and practically nothing else, has stopped the Senate from even considering an effective bill to complement the bill passed by the house last year.

Once again, I urge you to reconsider your stance and to raise your voice in support of returning the Senate to its tradition of majority rule.

Sincerely,
< My name >
< The place in California I live >

Unfortunately, it was nearly unstartable. Rapidly, we get signs that there is going to be the kinden-escalation mentioned earlier, we spend too much time with ninja badassery, and then to seal the deal there is some truly embarrassing grade-school level concealed-information foreshadowing.

First, though, a deeply nerdy nitpick of the series so far: Having your characters wind a ‘clockwork engine’ is required to be less efficient than having them powering their vehicles directly. I realize this is fantasy but it’s science so bad that it’s a major distraction. What else are you getting incredibly wrong?

OK, maybe another one. The major ninja-badass of the series uses some sort of mantis-claw blade gauntlet thing which sounds really cool until you spend two seconds thinking about it, then you realize that it’s a recipe for a broken wrist and has some disadvantage compared to a more traditional sword of the same length.

All right, back to more serious concerns and a general broadening of the topic.

Initially we spend a lot of time in SoA2 with Tisamon and Tynisa watching them fight each other and various people and we spend little bit of time with a chilly (not really chilling) psychotic who has it in for the conflicted baddy of the first book and seems to ninja everyone nearby to death. As far as I can tell these scenes add exactly nothing to the book, save the up the ninja quotient.

At some point, you have Too Many Ninjas. Epic fantasy series, this is your bane.

Glen Cook’s Black Company books are arguably the model for all of the books under discussion here. Inasmuch as they were compelling, it was because they dealt primarily with real people, albeit tough people in dire circumstances. If there were ninjas, they were rare and seldom called upon, only to resolve plot points of heavily foreshadowed near-impossibility. They were short and punchy and Cook is a serviceable writer with a very clear conception of what skills he does and doesn’t have.

The early Malazan books from Steven Erikson were great fun. They had Cook-ian characters that you could relate to as they went their grumbling, competent-but-fallible way through this decadently overbuilt world. And Erikson is a decent writer, so when you finally get to the point where the Ninjas come on screen, he just lets rip, and they tear shit up. It’s pretty great, the way that it comes together in those first few books. Unfortunately, we’ve only ever got a couple of people we can relate to, and we spend less and less time with them as we go on. More and more people become ninja badasses, which makes them harder to relate to, and ensures that their storylines will be followed up on later, further bloating a series of books that arrived already overweight. Although at his best, Erikson is a finer writer than Cook, he’s less clear on what he’s good at, and the bad stuff (the poetry, the mythopoeic origin/gods-and-heroes sections) seems to get more and more protracted. Eventually you give up, if you’re me. The adjunct Crimson Guard books fail from the first, because not only are they less well-structured and less well-written, everyone you meet from page one either dies promptly or is/becomes a capital-N Ninja. It’s hard to share the author’s glee in their creation, because there’s no hook (or rather, there’s the attempt at one, but you don’t get enough time with him because there’s so much other Neat Stuff the author just can’t help but share).

Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books work better, though I give them less weight since structurally, they’re not epic fantasy in the Cook mold. But while they trade heavily in Tolkien subversion for structure, they borrow liberally from the Cook inspired gritty fantasy oeuvre, which I think makes them relevant here. For the most part, Ninjary is kept off-screen or invoked (in the case of Logen) at horrific cost to everyone nearby. The supernatural in general is sparse here, and thus the author feels constrained to limit his badasses to the merely human, or they’re used as enemies to sinister effect.

So, suggestions to future writers of epic fantasy, be it gritty, dark, or light:

1. Ninjas: err on the side of too few! They may allow for cool scenes but, but they distance your readers from the story that you’re trying to tell. The scenes that they allow are also too often hollow displays of showing. Either they carry more weight than ‘X fought Y and was (slightly/greviously/un)hurt.’, or it’s just so much special effects wankery.
2. Ultraviolence is near terminally overdone! It’s OK to have characters who have families and love people and care about things other than honor & skill. Writing a little romance won’t kill you, either.
3. Don’t underestimate the quality of writing in terms of making your books easier to read.
4. Shorten it up. I realize bloat is the tradition, but everyone will be better off if you can keep it down to 90-100k words or so. Take heart, it means you can sell 20 books instead of 5-10! But…
5. Pay attention to the broader structure of your books. You need multiple entry points and books that could potentially stand alone, otherwise you kind of disappear up your own tailpipe when book one goes out of print.

But this one got through to me for some reason. Perhaps I have too much of a soft-spot for geeky topics, or maybe it’s just that Williams is better at contemporary settings, but this one had me from beginning to end, staying up late, the whole bit. Other reviewers have complained about the end being too obvious, or revealed too early, but it didn’t bother me too much. My only nitpicks are about the drivers of the plot being too convenient, too limited to the scope of the story. It’s totally unbelievable that the AI trader scheme would be as easy to carry out as Williams frames it. That they’re able to take over more or less the entire financial world show touching faith in the rather brittle field of machine learning. Still, a clever idea well-enough integrated into the fiction of the world that it isn’t too obtrusive. Also, there’s a callousness — at times bordering on sociopathy — on the part of the protagonist and her friends to the suffering of the people caught in the AI-triggered currency crises. We spend the first part of the book where the protagonist lives through one of these crises and sees the effects it has on the natives, the deaths and chaos. Yet when she finds out that one of her best friends is more or less entirely responsible for the issue, she barely reacts. It could be that the flattened affect is intentional, after all, she’s freshly traumatized for most of the book, but the fact is that the good geek friend is significantly more dangerous and damaging than the actual sociopath who’s trying to kill her.

I should stress that unless you’re a CS person, you’re not going to be bothered by the first one, and the second never seems to matter while you’re reading. Not challenging, but an enjoyable read.

I wish that I could say that I unreservedly loved this book. It’s one of Reynold’s better outings (since the very beginning). Some fascinating stuff going on, all well told, in an interesting world. Strong central themes, decent characterizations (the central character is pretty wooden, but he’s surrounded by a number of winning secondary characters). Tore right through it. In the moment, it’s a great book with some forgivable flaws. Adam Roberts says more or less how I felt about it here (especially the extra 100 [or maybe 150] pages in the middle), save for:

• Some seriously abominable copy editing. Not Reynold’s fault, but c’mon, VG.
• Overkill on the foreshadowing. If there’s an arsenal on the mantle, we don’t need to see each gun fired in the third act, really.
• The end.

Oh god, the end. Which makes the title a stupid fucking pun. Which undermines the drama of the whole novel. Which leaves a bunch of bad questions yawning.

OK, so: The world is a terraformed colony world. It’s slowly dying because its citizens can no longer maintain the atmosphere because the world has been divided into zones where reality has a different resolution or grain size. The highest tech stuff doesn’t work at the lower levels because it’s too complicated, it dissolves into noise and seizure and plaque. To a certain extent these zones can be changed by people with the unsullied inheritance of the system’s maintainers, who were a genetic caste with modifications to allow them to operate the machinery of the world. They’re regarded as witches and hounded. So far so good.

Then you learn what machinery they’re meant to operate. A presumably superluminal gate-system that allowed people to travel between the stars. We’re on a world called Earthgate, maybe. A horrible accident has occurred some 10k years in the past, breaking the system. The entire system? Unclear. So the result is, if it’s happening everywhere, there are more interesting places to tell this story. It’s a sidelight, at best, to the main show. Worthy of a novella at best, not 500 pages. If it took out the whole damned system, where are the repairmen? The space dwellers? I suppose that I am being overly nit-picky about the world-building, here, but there was a lot of world-building. If I am going to sit through umpty-hundred little hints, your reveal better be both stunning and airtight.

This isn’t fair, to be honest. The book is not about the reveal. It’s about its characters and their interactions. Ultimately, it’s about the frailty of human societies, and how easily they fracture and degrade. These are new themes for Reynolds, mostly, and they’re well handled, if at too great a length. The whole novel is a solid effort, and if you can forget or forgive the ending (or don’t really care to think through its consequences), its one of the better books of the year so far. I couldn’t, though.

I really wanted to like Chill.

Honestly I did. I loved Dust, I think, although I’ll have to check my notes. I for sure love it in my memory.

I recognize that it’s the middle book of a three-book sequence, and that it’s setting up and leading up.

I loved getting to know Tristen and Benedik and their various failures, and their problems.

I loved revisiting the world.

But they have no agency.

We spend the entire book on a journey that is basically wasted.

If they’d been a day or two later, Cynric would have been reborn all the same, from how I read it.

In an ideal world, Tristen goes off after Arianrhod and returns with Cynric a chapter or two later, and this is done offscreen. We spend that time watching Ben and Caitlin patch things up, or try to, and then something else happens. Percival doesn’t spend the entire novel being wounded.

I can’t seem to find anything that I’ve written about Dust. Hopefully when Cleave/Grail is released I’ll have the time to read through them all at once and write something more substantive.

1. Inception: Coverage here should focus on background, on giving the reader the information that they need to initial position themselves on the issue, and any implications that are clear from the outset. There is room here for several lengthy articles framing the issue from different perspectives, providing context (at least some of it hopefully stripped of biases), identifying the players and the interested parties.
2. Development: Here we have the bulk of the current coverage. Almost anything labeled ‘breaking news’ is going to fall into this category. Reversals, defections, politicking, compromises, & etc.. I don’t think that this was the case twenty years ago. Clearly, a lot of the bloat has been added to fit the requirements of the so-called 24 hour news cycle, and also post requirements for professional bloggers. In some ways, it’s good, since you’re able, if say following an expert blogger like Ezra Klein, to follow an issue in minute detail, more or less as it happens (give or take a day). The downside is that the time-scales at which American politics works are mostly too long for this sort of as-it-happens coverage. It’s numbing and exhausting, both for the reader and, I imagine, the writer. I imagine that it needs to be done and that for most large issues, this sort of from-the-ground documentation will be invaluable for historians.
3. Resolution: Once the dust has settled, there’s a need for articles to summarize the history of the issue, explain the dynamics of the battle and who the key players turned out to be. Again, several in-depth articles are good thing here, as we need the perspectives of both the winners and the losers. For those who’re activist inclined, there will always exist places to take more action, and these should be detailed. For wonks, there will be weaknesses, and these will need some analysis so that people can think about how best to shore them up.

Mostly I’m writing this because I find it rough to keep up with current events. I do an OK job, and like to think that I’m better informed than most on the issues of the day. That said, the constant need for content is slowly wearing me down, because I need to at least glance at it to dismiss it. So I end up looking at something like 60 news items a day, at least 20 of them fairly substantive. I’m forever behind, and not having internet on the weekends is really giving me trouble on Mondays. Although that will eventually be remedied, I still have better things to do with my weekends than keeping up with the internet. It’s clear, of course, that blogs and RSS aren’t the answer, in the long run, but I am struggling to come up with something, as a software person, that makes the making-news process both easy to follow and easy to understand.

The app that I am thinking of works something like this (capitalized words define software objects that have a visible expression in the system): At any one time, there are some number of Issues open. Each issue has one or more Moderators, who may or may not be assigned a Perspective. An Issue is a monolithic collection of text and links (text is quotes and prose from the Moderator). A User has a personal feed, and subscribes to Issues individually on the site (kind of like following someone on twitter). Also included in their feed are announcements about new Issues being opened and their Moderators, and also Issues that they don’t follow which have had major changes in the last week. When an issue is updated, people who follow it get an update, which contains the sections that were updated and some context (may need to be some clever software here). Simple edits like typo corrections wouldn’t update peoples feeds, but there would be a strict size limit to this sort of thing, erring on the side of annoying the user in the pursuit of transparency. All Issues would have a full history available at any time. You could choose daily or weekly summaries, but my thoughts here are admittedly unclear. There would have to be a way for the Moderator to set the urgency of the change (horse-race vs. substantive development? How do you draw the line there?).

Of course, there’s only so much one can do with software in the pursuit of clarity and concision of accurate coverage. Eventually, some coverage norms would need to be developed that make the form easier to follow and understand. I am not sure what these would be. Nor do I understand the role that comments would play in a system like this (I’m generally unhappy with comments as they stand now, but that’s another post). Something to think about in the future.

When I call an author an synthesist, I’m mostly referring to what I call their primary mode of extrapolation. By primary, I mean the techniques that any one author generally uses to drive the ideas behind their stories. I’d say that there are at least three broad categories here, and I’ll attempt to name them, offer a brief definition, and provide some examples.

1. Compositive Sythesists: This is a category into which I slot Tidhar, Liz Williams, Wolfe, Delaney, Swanwick, etc.
   Very few of the ideas are new, and occasionally things that would otherwise flow naturally from the world building are missed. Rather they’re used with varying degrees of skill to evoke the settings and preconditions for their character’s stories to naturally unfold. Interestingly, I find that thsi category contains both some of the best and some of the worst SF disproportionately, going from the bottom, where the paint by numbers crowd operates, to the top, where some of the best artists of the genre pick and chose just the right elements out of the existing prop box to set the drama of their characters and plots off to greatest effect. There are some people in the middle, but they seem to be thinner on the ground than in my other (self-defined) categories.

2. Conjunctive (or Inventive) Sythesists: These are authors who’re largely working out of the box of standard props and tropes, but they’re interested enough in the ideas that they’re working with that they generally consider it incumbent upon them to come up with some fascinating and novel ideas and creations that shake out naturally from the quriks of their worldbuilding and how they’re throwing their ideas together.
   I’d put Stross, Tricia Sullivan, Justina Robson, Bruce Sterling, and Richard Morgan here, amongst others.

3. Subject Experts: These are your scientist-authors and your lay experts, who take their deep knowledge and research and use it to inform either their story ideas or their worldbuilding. They also draw from the common pool, but their unique bodies of knowledge lead to both insights and lacunae that other writers with a different speculative-extrapolative approach wouldn’t have come across.
   I’d include Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Vernor Vinge, and a number of others here.