scalzi

One of the challenges I'm facing in writing the Scalzi-inspired stories, outside of the biggest challenge of keeping up with doing them daily, is maintaining a consistent narrative mode in each of the stories. I've been choosing a specific mode, not always the easiest for a given story, and using that style to challenge the way the story sounds.

What I remember from my high school literature classes is that there are four modes:

1. First person - "I did this, then I did that."
2. Second person - "You are eaten by a grue," choose-your-own-adventure stories
3. Third person - "He did this, then she did that."
4. Third person omniscient - "He looked at her and thought, 'Wow, what a hottie.'"

First person is the easiest, telling a tale from the viewer's point of view. Sometimes it works very well; the Dresden Files is a fantastic example of this.

Second person is the rarest, and usually found in only the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Zork-like tales.

Third person is where it becomes tricky with the omniscient parts.

The easiest way to write is to just blurt everything down, and leave nothing to the reader's imagination. This is also the least engaging for the reader with many authors' styles. When the omniscient part is thrown in and you know what every character is thinking, "He said this, he thought this, she thought this and then did that." there's less challenge for the reader, less to figure out, less to lure the reader into the story's world. I'm not particularly a fan of this style of writing, the third person fully-omniscient view, even as I use it sometimes when I'm lazy or haven't considered the narrative mode before I start writing.

Guy Gavriel Kay was fantastic with the third-person mode in his earlier books, The Fionavar Tapestry and The Lions of Al-Rassan. One of the beauties of his writing style was that he didn't spell everything out for the reader. In the Lions of Al-Rassan book, there's a scene where the heroine is walking through the town at night, and stops to look up at a lighted window. She watches it for a while, turns around and leaves. What is left to the reader's imagination, understanding is the internal conflict raging in the heroine as she stands there. We don't hear her thoughts, we don't know what she's thinking, we don't know what she decided, and that is what makes the scene so powerful. We read her actions, and need to fill in the details and understand the longing of this woman for the man in the window's room, without it being completely explained.

Kay's later books lose some of this style, which I find somewhat disappointing, but still enjoy the stories he tells enough to count him among my favorite authors.

So, I've been working with third person, where no thoughts are known, and third person limited-omniscient, where we know the thoughts of one character, but not all of the characters. I struggle to describe the characters' thoughts through their actions, but think my struggles will help me write clearer stories, the more I write. Sometimes the story needs to be first person, but I'm still finding enough of a challenge with a consistent third person viewpoint that I haven't tried the first person consistently yet.

Yeah, my thoughts on narrative mode, which I incorrectly termed "voice" when I first wrote this.

Time for another twenty minutes for the next Scalzi-inspired story...

So, the back cover of John Scalzi's book, The God Engines, reads:

"If J.G. Ballard and H.P. Lovecraft had ever collaborated on a space opera, the results might have been like this: ferociously inventive, painfully vivid, dispassionately bleak and dreadfully memorable."

When Jonathan saw the back of the book, he looked up at me. "If that was all I had to go on, I wouldn't read this book."

Yeah, I have to admit, I wouldn't have read it either.

But, as it turns out, I'm a huge Scalzi fan. Other than telling the same story from a different perspective (hello, Zoe's Tale), the man can do no wrong. I mean, seriously, if the man can write a book that opens with death by fart and still sound like Heinlein, I'm going to read anything he writes.

The book is a short book, probably best illustrated by the $4.99 price on the Kindle version, but really it's only 136 pages of large font, so fairly short, easily readable in under an hour and a half. Given that even books have gone the way of everything American (bigger is better), having a shorter book was a refreshing change. I didn't have to invest hours across severals days to finish the book, which was nice.

The story is a quick read, the characters described and developed well enough, the conflict easily resolved and the twist expected. I enjoyed the rich world hinted at in the story, though: enough to understand what's going on (after a few chapters), but also enough left to the imagination that the reader needs to fill in the history. That filling in part is what I enjoy.

One aspect I though was quite interesting is that the gender of one character in the book is never revealed. There's a picture that indicates the character is a woman, but really, feminine features and long hair do not a woman guarantee. There are no pronouns describing the character, nor any possessives referring to the character. The character, who is the captain's lover, is delightfully what the reader wants the character to be. I liked that aspect, too.

Yeah, so, Scalzi's work is generally science fiction, with a good dose of his humour in it. This one, while also science fiction has some other overtones, somewhat horror-ish, a dash of religion in the plot mechanism, not too much though. It's a darker tale the usual, but that just added to the interesting.

I enjoyed the book, read it quickly, would hand to Andy to read.

BTW, if you want something more specific on the plot, check out the Amazon page or search for the book at your favorite search engine. I prefer just going with books from authors whose previous works I've enjoyed, instead of criticizing the plot before I've even read it (which is why I chose not to include one here). I know I like Scalzi's style of writing, and I trust he won't bore me in the plot, so, I didn't look it up before I bought a copy of the book, I just bought it. If you're local and unsure if you'll like the story, you can borrow my copy.