Dear Editor

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Dear Editor: From now on all my communication with your office will be written in third person in the hopes that you will take it more seriously.

definition

How it relates to first person

Degrees of unreliableness, from tricking the reader to making a funny

examples:

• Jane Eyre: manipulation + fate
• Huck Finn: chilluns
• Edgar Allen Poe: Cask of Amontidillo + Tell Tale Heart
• Mystery Stories
• Frankenstein - monster narrates
• Oryx & Crake
• Left Hand of Darkness - insider/outsider
• As I Lay Dying (My mother is a fish)

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Dear Editor: You know, for a “science” fiction editor, you sure let a lot of things slide by. I think by now every one knows that you can’t break the speed of light barrier, and thus time travel is impossible. Or was that warp drive? WHATEVER. It’s all impossible!

IMPOSSIBLE, we say - http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1394

Quality Warning: Mysterious white noise in the background towards the end.  Mysterious!

Content:

• Time Travel:
  • Hyperion
  • Star Trek — lol let’s circle the sun? http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1307
  • Poul Anderson — time travelers strive to preserve the “original” timeline — time travel is for action/adventure and for the meeting of different cultures
  • OSC’s PastWatch — a complicated version of “if you could go back in time and kill Hitler…”
  • Timeline by Michael Crichton
  • Rip Van Winkle — what? I fell asleep!
  • Thomas Covenant — serves to complicate plot and add danger

• Cheating Time: (Remember that cheating distance is arguably the same as cheating the time it would have taken to travel that distance)
  • Frederick Pohl’s The World at the End of Time — cryogenics + relativistic travel
  • OSC’s Worthing Saga — “Somec” allows people to sleep away the years, and the society based on it.
  • Neuromancer
  • Futurama
  • Hyperion: Yes, it’s cheating if you can step through a door and end up on another planet
  • Search the Sky by Frederick Pohl (referred as “something Michelle read”)
  • www.qwantz.com - Dinosaur comics, specifically: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1554 PS. The guy who does this comic is really nice.  He helped me find this specific one!

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Dear Editor: I loved “The Battle of the Star Fish” so much, I think it could totally make an awesome movie.  The epic battle scene at the end would be SO EPIC.

Topic: Today we discuss books that have been made into movies, both the good and the bad.  Of course, we only cover movies that we’ve actually seen.

Content Warning: Dude, we cursed! Also used the phrase “black people.” Heh heh heh

Baby Warning: You can totally hear cute baby noises in this episode. :O

Content:

• Changing stories to fit movies
• Resident Evil games + movies
• LOTR and Tom Bombadil
• Narnia, especially Prince Caspian
• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Jim Carrey
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman, additional character
• Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin - miniseries was epic fail
• The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind - again with the random hat
• The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper - super epic fail

OMG we forgot to mention Blade Runner!  The movie sucked.  The book rocked.  Theeeeeeeeeeere you go.

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Today Michelle shares with you her favorite sources for podcast fiction.

Podcast Novels:

Goblin Market - Story about a girl who gets kidnapped into the world of fae and the sister who risks every thing to save her.  - http://jenniferhudock.com/goblin-market/

FETIDUS - (The Foundation for the Ethical Treatment of the Innocently Damned, Undead, and Supernatural) - gritty, post apocalyptic mystery complete with zombies and vampires - http://www.fetidus.org/

The Gearheart - very fun, pulp fiction-y steam punk about a mysterious construct that begins preying on magi - http://www.thegearheart.com/

The Dreamer’s Thread - about a woman who finds out that she creates dreams, and gets sucked into a dream world to help them fight the nightmare realm - http://www.thedreamersthreadnovel.com/

Nina Kimberly the Merciless - fantasy, comedy, about a warrior princess trying to ditch her ditsy suitor. - ninakimberly.com

Murder at Avedon Hill - fantasy mystery about a murder in a small town that controls an important pass into the mountains - http://pgholyfield.com/maah

Short story podcasts:

EscapePod - escapepod.org

PodCastle - podcastle.org

Clonepod - clonepod.org

Also mentioned: Podiobooks.com

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Intro:

Dear Editor: Do you prefer men or women?  I mean, you know, in all of your vast experience rejecting manuscripts.

Content:

• Are men better writers than women, or vice versa?
  • There is no answer because it all comes down to reader preference
  • There has been a historical dominance of literature by men
  • Personal experience may be random. Maybe you just happen to read all the bad male (or female) authors.
• OK, but is there a difference between male and female authored text?
  • Short answer: YES.
  • Long answer: Yes, especially in INFORMAL writing, readers can guess gender with an 80-90% accuracy.
  • Published literature is much more difficult to distinguish, with readers having a maximum of 60% accuracy.
  • However, there are statistical difference between men and women in published works, including:
    • Fiction vs. Nonfiction
    • Descriptive Words
    • Pronouns
    • Choice of Genre

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Dear Editor: Your form-letter rejection will haunt meh foreverz :’(

Content:

Fantasy and Scifi treat the afterlife differently

• Fantasy gets away with a lot more
• Scifi must try to explain most paranormal activities
• If the afterlife is present, it often is based on a real-world mythology
• People don’t like fantasy in their scifi and vice versa

Examples

• Sword of Truth, which includes communication with the dead and quick travel
• Hyperion series, which features the “Love” dimension

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Part 2!

Alienating the Reader vs Boring the Reader

• Use of context is also important
• Nonfiction targeted at specific demographics, does not need to worry so much

Quotes from Thomas Covenant:

• “Her percipience found no evidence of him at all.”
• “The enervation in his bones suddenly swamped him.”
• “A crepitation like the discharge of slow lightning made the air squirm.”

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Dear Editor: I’ve enjoyed each of the Thomas Covenant books, but may I suggest that a short dictionary be added as an appendix for future editions?

Very Vocabularly Podcast

Crazy Vocabulary Examples

• cordon
• efferent
• resplendent

Alienating the Reader vs Boring the Reader

• Children’s Literature must take special care and often actually explain the words outright - see A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Genre specific or occupation specific vocabulary, especially re: sci fi

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Dear Editor: I am writing to inform you that your last installation of “Rocket Man: Adventures in Space” is full of plot holes like swiss cheese. Please fire all your writers, who have betrayed your fan base, and hire back the old ones!

Where is the reset button found?

• Comic Books are especially notorious for this
• Star Trek!
• Stephen King (Dark Tower Series)
• Earthsea
• Doctor Who (uses it often!)

Why a reset button?

• Often authors feel they could improve upon earlier works
• Over-complicated universe can trap future renditions and makes fandom more like a clique
• Comic books rework storylines to update them for new generations to avoid seeming toooooo crazy
• Example: Making it darker, edgier (!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier)

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Dear Editor: Don’t you know space trains are scientifically impossible?! Your magazine is contributing to the dumbing down of the masses!

Intro: Be forewarned that there will be ranting in this episode. This is partly because we are not actually scientists, and because we believe that “real” science isn’t necessarily the point of Scifi.

1. So what? Sometimes the science in scifi is there more for its value as a literary technique. Science is magic? 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss

2. Science isn’t even sure what’s real science. Example: The Eschaton Sequence

3. Sometimes scifi actually influences or predicts where science goes because authors come up with devices that, if they can be made, would be practical/useful. Think Startrek + cellphones.

4. YES real science should still be important to scifi authors and readers. Keep up with the latest in science for cool stuff that we thought was impossible and stuff we’ve never dreamed of! Just learn to balance your love for the science of scifi with every thing else that goes into it.

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