Bah!

[davidgillon]

An email arrived last night just as I was thinking of going to bed. I made the mistake of checking it there and then - it was a rejection from Disabled People Destroy SF for The Art of Breathing. Damn, that was a market I really wanted to succeed in. They still have my essay, but it's the story I'm invested in. The only comment was that it had "some interesting ideas".

So I didn't get to sleep when I wanted, but I did do some useful thinking. Yoon's comments have set me to thinking that it's difficult to get a mystery to work in 6,000 words, particularly one that needs a significant amount of character background, and that really needs additional suspects (the mystery as it stands is "why did my ventilator fail", with the denoument as "Oh, actually that was an attempt to kill me, whoa!", whodunnit is obvious from that point). So the answer is probably to set it on the back burner, and let some additional sub-plots and characters ferment, then address it at longer length. One option is to pull it back to being near contemporary, rather than an undefined amount of time in the future, effectively shifting it into detective/technothriller rather than SF.

In other news, with the snow gone I managed to get out for the first time in a week and get some shopping done. Asda's sliced bread aisle appeared to have been stripped by locusts, though their in-house bakery was fully stocked. It looks like deliveries hadn't been getting through, which is a bit surprising when it's 2 minutes off the M2 and on a main road.

 

Back on the Ark, I have finally mastered the art of raising dodos from the egg. You pretty much have to feed them on the spot, so you can't safely do it in with the adult dodos, who keep getting in the way. So it's a case of having a hatching pen, a freezer full of fertilized eggs, and setting one or two out when you have a spare moment to watch them like a hawk. Hatchling dodos are incredibly cute, but annoyingly have the ability to occasionally walk through walls when following you, which makes dashing out to grab a supply pod when one lands fraught with additional stress. An hour later and they're fully adult. Unfortunately some eggs must turn up pretty much ready to hatch on the spot, as I've found dead infant dodos even when I only checked the pens 10 minutes before. This may even be a deliberate part of the game's economy, as you can butcher the dead infants for meat and hide.

I've also figured out how irrigation works on the Ark - you stick one end of a pipe in the sea, a tap on the other end (even if the other end is 3m higher), and fresh water comes out. It's plumbing, Jim. But not as we know it.

The lure to explore finally dragged me out and around half the periphery of the island. Spotted on the way, mostly on the edge of the swamps, which are a lot denser than I imagined - mangrove type, not the more open inland type I'd imagined.

Hespornis (Primitive acquatic birds)
Dilophosaurus (My favourites from my early days on the island, avoided)
Sarcosaurus (Giant crocodilian - swimming just below the surface. I only saw it because I was atop a small cliff. Ah, no, I won't go down to the water's edge to take a closer look at the Hespornis, then)
Beelzebufo (Giant toad. This looks particularly ludicruous considering they've scaled it up to be big enough to be ridden)
Achatina (Giant snail, similarly scaled up, though I don't think you can ride them, or would want to. Slooow.)
Dimetrodon (roughly man-sized non-aggressive carnivore with a large spinal crest. Apparently most useful in Ark as a substitute air conditioner for incubating eggs).
Titanoboa  (Humongous constrictor - rideable. Fossils apparently suggest a size up to 12m and weight of over a tonne, theoretically a fish eater, but I'm not sure this is true in Ark)
Paracertherium (Absolutely enormous hornless rhino. 5m at the shoulder, up to 15 tonnes. Three of these were browsing the edge of the swamp. For some reason they got into a squabble with the Titanoboa, which they then chased into the shallows and trampled to death. I was impressed)
Therizinosaur (large, feathered, herbivorous dinosaur with the bodyform of a tyrannosaur and humongous claws. I accidentally got myself killed in the early game by running - literally - into one of these in the dark. 10m long, 500kg, 1m long claws... Suspected to have lived in herds).

I also had my first serious try at taming something larger than a dodo, a triceratops that had wandered into my compound and gotten itself stuck on the porch (wide horns, good collision detection, but poor path determination mean you find a lot of stuck triceratops in Ark). I thought I had everything set up just right, but panicked slightly when it managed to twice knock me flying, never mind I was on the roof. I almost certainly used too many narcotic arrows, as when I came to feed the thing I found it was dead, not unconscious. I'll try longer range and a more measured attack next time. (And the take in meat and other stuff from a triceratops is pathetic - about 20 meat, not much hide and 2 keratin, which is enough meat for about three days, and not enough hide or keratin to achieve anything. The trilobites that crawl onto the beach at night yield about half that amount of meat, and far more chitin, which is usable instead of keratin, plus other stuff) 

 

Comments

[legionseagle]

I've always thought one of the problems with whodunnits in fantasy or SF is that you have to establish in advance which issues in the world building are applied or not-applied to the mystery. For example, Bujold having invented fast penta has to keep thinking of reasons why it can't be used to establish truth in particular circumstances. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a practically perfect detective story on the information we (and Harry) know about the wizarding world at that point, but looks a lot less plausible once Legilmency and veritaserum appear in later books.

And that puts even more strain on the word limits in shorter fiction.

[davidgillon]

Very true. It's deliberately a story with limited SFnal elements - the medical equipment the protagonist depends on, implied traffic control on city roads, and an SFnal set of projects she references as having worked on are the sum of it. The (attempted) murder weapon, an EMP, will feel SFnal to people, but is actually contemporary. It will be much more easy to make the SFnal limits clearer at longer length, though at the minute making it near-contemporary is singing a siren song.

[davidgillon]

Hmm, think I need to re-read Scalzi's Lock In (oh, the hardship!) before I go any further, I could easily end up with something thematically close if I'm not careful.

[hilarita]

It does sound like it could morph into a near-future technothriller might work quite well - possibly at novella length. I've noticed that detective short stories work best when you have an established detective cast (so you are minimising the boot-strapping you have to do).

[yhlee]

Ach, sympathies--crossed fingers for a rewrite taking you where you want to go with that story, and a good home for it later on.

[sovay]

An email arrived last night just as I was thinking of going to bed. I made the mistake of checking it there and then - it was a rejection from Disabled People Destroy SF for The Art of Breathing.

*hugs*

Well, I hope they take your essay anyway.