Must write faster!

[elfs]

I was in the library today, looking at all the bad science fiction writers who seem to have wild books of derring-do on the shelves. Some of them seemed to be terrific rehashes of themes that have been beaten about since the 1950s, soldiers doing soldiery things, AIs doing HAL-ish things, and so on. And I started to angst because, really, the one big thing missing from my first Caprice Starr novel was, well, the big thing. Every good SF book's got one. Something huge falls from the sky was a popular one for a while. Set us up the bomb. Illyan Simon forgetting himself for a moment at dinner. That sort of big thing.

I hadn't come up with one. I was thinking, I should have everything I needed: I had corruption, and pecadillos that bordered on the local culture's obscene-beyond-words, and threatened riots breaking out because the obscene-beyond-words gets mistranslated into a different kind of obscenity. I had the bright, slightly neurotic heroine with the mysterios background, the sad mysterious sidekick, the mustache-twirling villain (man, the priest with a rubber fetish was a godsend), I had the ready-to-explode Slums of Mars ™, full of a half-million down-and-outers marooned in underground tenements arcologies maintained by a Mars Agricultural Syndicate resentful at the constant, government-imposed upkeep of an aging, creaky infrastucture and its ungrateful occupants...

Oh.

Must write faster.

Comments

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that Simon Illyan having memory lapses counts as a The Big Thing except among those of us that Bujold already has firmly in her steely grasp. And for those, she hardly needs a The Big Thing; most of us would read a book about Miles reading the phone book.

Of course, in a Bujold book about Miles reading the phone book, by the end of the novel, Miles would be in the hospital from paper cuts, the pages of the phone book would be raining down across half of Vorbarr Sultana, and the Cetagandans would be sneaking around trying to recover the page with Terrance See's old phone number and address on it.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

LOL!

[elfs.livejournal.com]

That's so true. And the sequel to this would be the Ivan book, in which, while Miles is stuck in the hospital, Ivan tries to track down those Cetagandans, ends up on Beta mistaken for a male prostitute while visiting the Orb, wakes up in the loving arms of Seargent Taura, and later discovers that his customer was secretly Fletchir Giaja's long-lost love child.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In a later book, Miles will, while peeved with Ivan, sarcastically say,"Ivan, even you've had a little bit of emperor inside you."

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Uh.... I'm pretty sure that we're now discussing your book about Miles reading the phone book. >_>