Hello, friends!

I survived the move—my wife and I spent about two weeks packing and living out of suitcases prior to the move, so it was pretty easy to round things up into the trailer and get out quick on the day of. We’re living in an in-between place until the house we want to buy has finished renovations, but we’re comfortable and happy in the meantime.

Comfortable, happy… and tired, which the baby isn’t. Maybe because she spent all of her weekend playing with grandma and an aunt rather than helping move heavy things or pack/unpack boxes. If anything, she’s disappointed that mom and dad are low-energy at the moment.

Oh, and lest I forget… The Failed Technomancer chapter 9 is live!

Bloggyness Review—Starfish

Starfish (Peter Watts) is book 1 of the Rifters Trilogy… featuring four books, so it appears that Watts and Christopher Paolini must have gone to the same kindergarten—although at least Paolini stopped advertising Eragon as a trilogy once he started on the third book and realized there was going to be a fourth. The Rifters Trilogy is still advertised as a trilogy, with the final book split into two parts. (Coupled with multiple statements on the author’s blog that the two-part finale should have been one book, and viewing this situation as an outsider years later, it’s kinda funny.)

Anyway, Starfish is a near-future hard science fiction novel where humans have built generators on deep undersea rifts to harness energy from them. (Harvesting energy from a unique source was also a big feature in the Firefall books, so energy consumption is clearly something Watts thinks about a lot, at least in his writing.) The outcasts of society are recruited to live and work around these generators, doing maintenance and such so above-water society can survive. Trouble comes a-calling when something incredibly dangerous is discovered in one of these rifts…

Starfish is Peter Watts first novel, and it’s not as strong as Blindsight—but, again, first novel, I didn’t expect it to be. Still, I mostly finished Starfish out of a love for Blindsight and never really got into it for its own sake. There were a lot of roaches to eat around, including significant swearing and a lot of crassness apparently for its own sake—or, perhaps, for the purpose of portraying humanity as lowly and dirty, metaphorically speaking.

After three novels, here’s a clear issue I’ve found in all of Peter Watts literature so far: misanthropy. In the sense that you can dislike humanity if you want to, you’re entitled to your own pessimism, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being misanthropic. Humans do have problems (although I don’t think those problems merit an attitude of throwing in the towel). Where that turns into a literary problem is that Starfish (and his other books) seem to go out of their way to make most humans mean and unlikable, and then has the plot revolve around saving the human race from apocalypse. It’s a paradox that doesn’t work for me.

Here’s an example. In Starfish, one of the viewpoint characters, Joel, is a submarine operator. He doesn’t show up a lot, but he pops up here and there, and, significantly, in one of his viewpoint scenes we learn that he uses VR to simulate rape for pleasure. It’s… really gross, to put it lightly. Fortunately, the scene doesn’t go into detail, but it’s still a really defining look into his character. Then, at the end of the book, when he dies, the last thing he does is tell the protagonist how much he would have liked to have sex with her—and for some reason his death motivates her to try and take down the world? I don’t get how Joel, or anyone inspired by Joel, is supposed to be the kind of character I can get behind and root for, but he’s a convenient representative of how unlikable (for a very diverse number of reasons) most of the people are in Starfish. Maybe I’d be invested in this book if I were excited to see the human race burn, but that’s about it.

Anyway, I don’t plan on reading the sequels.

Here’s one thing that can always be said for Peter Watts, though: his hard sci-fi is fascinating. His views of the future are depressing, but his science is incredible, and it, in large part, pulled me through Blindsight until that book clicked for me, and it basically entirely pulled me through Echopraxia. There’s a lot of roaches to eat around in these books, but if you enjoy reading science fiction solely to see the futuristic hard sci-fi that well-educated authors can envision, there’s still a lot of good to mine out of Watts’ stuff. It just wasn’t enough to keep me going long after Blindsight.

Writing Updates

Draft one is finished, so I feel like I can finally announce my next writing project: epic muridae science fantasy.

Yes, I’ve written a story about mice. And that should get you very, very excited.

Or, more specifically, I’ve written one short story about a mouse named Thistle, and this short story is helping me lay the groundwork for many more to come.

Here’s how I got to this point.

I want to inspire and motivate people with what I write—that’s really important to me. Entertain first and foremost, of course, but I want to write (non-preachy) entertainment with substance. So as I considered the various story inspirations I’ve had in my life, as well as story ideas and elements I currently have sketched out, for some reason my mind began to explode with worldbuilding potential when I asked myself what the lovechild of Watership Down and various mouse fantasy stories (think Redwall, or Mouse Guard—maybe Of Mice and Magic) would look like. I then fell down the rabbit hole—mouse burrow?—of research into real-world mice, rats, and other rodents and how they operate, and found a wealth of story and worldbuilding ideas that were beautiful and bizarre. Real-world rodents do things that feel like they should only exist in fiction! Combine all of those elements with a love for well-thought-out fantasy and science fiction, and this seed took root and grew fast.

I don’t write for a living and I don’t have a lot of writing time, so deciding to focus on short stories over novels, at least for the time being, just seemed smart. I also decided I specifically wanted to avoid medieval-style mouse stories—as much as I love swords and bows, that’s done to death in heroic mouse fantasy. Finally, I wanted to keep grounded, at least as I define it and as I received inspiration from Watership Down: I’m going to do my research and try to make each animal, bug, and plant be drawn from real-world analogues, meaning for just about everything I can point at it and go, “Yeah, that group of mice are basically a conglomerate of the real Acomys genus of mice. Isn’t that super cool? They really do have almost superhero levels of healing!” But at the same time, this is a fictional world with both magical and sci-fi elements, so I’m going to use that literary license to have some animals clash that wouldn’t normally exist in the same ecosystems, as well as play with some magic, sci-fi, and other elements that you’ll discover as time goes on.

As for this story specifically, The Courage in a Small Heart (working title), when finished, I hope will be 17,000 words—then I can submit it to Writers of the Future! It’s currently closer to 19,000. So it may be a little bit of time, between me refining through further drafts and waiting for a response from Writers of the Future, but this story will be posted for free on this blog as soon as I can do so. And you’re going to have fun with it. My writing group is a little cranky with me that it’s just a short story—they are having so much fun! One member described mice using spears with cat teeth as spearheads as “Completely metal,” while another told me this has been scratching a Redwall itch he didn’t know he had but desperately needed scratching. And here’s a quote: “A really good story about overcoming your fears and natural weaknesses.”

Maybe I shouldn’t overhype things when it could be weeks or months before I can post this story on the blog, but the wait will be worth it.

Send-Off

Since we’re thinking of mice right now, here’s the question(s) on my mind: Are you a Redwall fan? What’s your favorite part? Or are you a Mouse Guard fan? Of Mice and Magic? Do you prefer fantasy stories that focus on other critters, like the rabbits in Watership Down? Tell me about it!

Addendum

What the heck, here’s the first scene of the short story! Please note that this is a first draft and a lot will probably change before the final draft, but it should give you a good taste of what’s to come. (Let me know what you think!)

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The world outside Whiskerroot was far larger than Thistle had imagined—impossibly large. Mind-bogglingly huge. Gargantuan trees stretched skyward such that Thistle had to crane her neck until her nose pointed directly upward to see where the tops of trunks disappeared into leaves. They must share the same space as the clouds. Any one of their leaves would cover her entirely if it fell. Their fallen sisters shifted under her paws as she walked by, hunched and alternating between steps and hops as all mice did when walking on their back paws alone. She easily envisioned two of her, not including tails, could stretch out nose-to-end and only barely reach both edges of any of these leaves.

Anything could be hiding in the leaves. Up in the high leaves, owls would perch, unseen, unheard. A mouse would never know one was there until one of her companions squeaked in terror as he was snatched up and carried away—or worse, until she felt those cold, sharp talons pierce her own hide. Down in the low leaves, a snake could strike without warning, materializing as if it had been instantly formed from the brown, fallen leaves.

Thistle shivered and pulled the edges of her furry cloak tighter around her. Feeling its soft skin helped her to imagine that she was still in her mother’s nest, surrounded by brothers and sisters, in a pile of safety and bliss.

She wore little beyond the furred cloak: a belt with a pouch tied to it, in which she kept pebbles that she found interesting (and could fit in her paw); a bag on her back, over the cloak, which carried some seeds and other empty bags for collecting the spoils of foraging; and two spears, one tied to each side of her back-bag, both produced from a short, sturdy stick, mouse-fur rope, and the sharpened tooth of a cat. A predator that was found dead, she was told—cat-tooth spears were the results of fortunate opportunity and nothing more. A mouse never had any hope of killing a cat.

And yet, she was trailing one. The thought made Thistle’s body start to shake.

“Keep up, Halfwhisker,” another mouse called.

Thistle tried to, but after a few steps she stumbled, leaned against a root—taller than she was, and gnarled like an ancient mouse of six winters—and focused on breathing.

Halfwhisker was a descriptive moniker. Before she had weaned and left her mother’s nest, Thistle had run face-first into a fire while exploring the deepest parts of Whiskerroot—where the bloodskræchers lived. The whiskers on the right side of her face had never regrown, although most of the fur had. The bloodskræcher that had found her and nursed her back to health told her she was lucky enough that her nose still worked and shouldn’t ask for anything more.

“Craemus^[1] slowing us down,” another voice grunted.

Thistle couldn’t respond. The fact that she was frozen in place, helpless if a predator should appear, now captured her mind, further stiffening her limbs and quickening her breath. Overwhelming smell flooded her nose with each inhalation: the familiar stink of the mice she travelled with, the mustiness of rotting leaves, a promise of edible fungi, and multiple species of insects. Her twitching ears caught the rustling of leaves, the scraping of branches, skittering that could be a fleeing beetle, the stepping of her companions as they sighed and turned around. Moments later, Thistle was surrounded.

Mouse paws grabbed her own and began licking them, then helped her to thayma^[2]. Feeling her own paws running up and down her snout, through her whiskers, and over her ears was soothing, and soon Thistle calmed down enough to continue the grooming herself. As she did so, she risked a glance upward.

Pebble Cloudeye was nose-to-nose with her; Thistle froze again. At seven inches tall, fully stretched out, Pebble was a mountain of a mouse, and the leader of this band of Sharpteeth. Her body was well-muscled, her tail short and thick, and she had one black eye and one the uneven color of a puddle full of white dust. She was infamous for being fearless, even compared to other gorskrmus^[3], and had once scared a fox into flight by stabbing it in the nose with one of her long spears. That all said, her fearlessness had cost her sight in an eye, which was evidence enough for many mice to think she was insane. She was almost everything Thistle wished to be, yet being this close to her was terrifying.

“Heart and heroism, Halfwhisker,” Pebble grunted; she had to nearly lie on her belly to speak on Thistle’s level. Pebble jerked her head the direction they had been travelling. “Sunrise soon. A little farther and we’ll have shelter. Not safe to pause here.” She turned her head to give Thistle a long look with her good eye, then stood and hopped off, using a spear as a walking stick. She was followed by their bloodskræcher, wrapped tightly in a thick cloak; the other mice surrounding Thistle followed, moving in single file.

The last mouse to leave paused as he passed Thistle. He offered a paw. She took it and he pulled her onto her back paws. He was an average mouse in every way, a little over four inches from the tip of his nose to his bottom and covered with grayish-brown fur. His ears were large and round as the two moons that hung in the sky. He smiled and said, “I was terrified my first time leaving Whiskerroot, too. Now I’m just nervous.” Then he nudged Thistle onward.

Each step was hard, but at the same time each new step was slightly easier than the one before it. Brushing under ferns and scurrying over roots, treading lightly on soft soil, keeping leaves and branches between herself and any unknown dangers above, Thistle hurried onward, heart still pounding within her chest.

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[1] There are many kinds of mice who live within the great-nest of Whiskerroot. While they all intermingle with each other, species of mice that are most similar tend to get grouped together. Craemus are the smallest of mice—rarely more than two inches long when fully grown—and are somewhat separate from the rest for their preference of mostly living in the hollowed-out trunk of the tree above the great-nest, or otherwise above ground. Crae–/craets– is a prefix which stands for “small, cute, or harmless,” and mus is their old word for mouse—pronounced almost like “muse.”

[2] Most rodents—as well as their close relatives, lagomorphs—comfort themselves by grooming their face, ears, and whiskers. Their word for this action is thayma, pronounced with the same “th” sound found in this.

[3] Among the mice living in Whiskerroot are hulking, mostly carnivorous creatures referred to as gorskrmus—”large, great, or dangerous” mice. Despite being the most physically imposing of mice, and generally respected (or seen as lunatic) for being comparatively aggressive, the largest gorskrmus are only about the same size as the average rat.