Cutting Words

Continuing in my analyses of stories from the 29th volume of the Writers of the Future contest anthology, I give you:

Twelve Seconds, by Tina Gower

This one won the gold award, so is definitely worth analyzing. 

It’s essentially a near-future detective story, but is told from an unusual point of view, as the main character (not in fact a detective as such) is autistic. 

As with “Planetary Scouts,” the narrative is formed in the traditional manner, with a series of events unfolding in chronological order and with the main character undergoing a significant amount of emotional growth.

Story statistics / information

Length: 30 pages (about 7500 words)

Genre: Near-future science fiction / detective

PoV: First person present

Protagonist: White, male, autistic technician-type

Antagonist: White, male, mentally troubled neurosurgeon; AND societal conceptions about autism

Supporting Characters:

1)      White, male detective.  He is trying to overcome his wife’s recent death and is, in the protagonist’s words, somewhat of a jerk because of it.

2)      Chicana, female detective.  Suffering from PTSD over an unnamed incident (possibly the same train wreck which caused the detective’s wife’s death), and one of the few people in the department to treat the protagonist as something like a normal person.  The protagonist seems to consider her somewhere between a romantic interest, a mother figure, and (towards the end of the story) a kind of damsel in distress.

Plot: An autistic man who works for the police department processing people’s last memories must overcome his social discomfort and his feelings about his disorder to solve a series of apparently unconnected deaths.  When his female co-worker considers an experimental treatment he is sure is connected to the deaths, he must race to stop the man he is sure is the killer before it is too late.

Ending: The protagonist doesn’t save the girl (she dies on the operating table), but he does catch the killer, and his suspicions are validated.  He also comes to realize that his autism is an essential part of who he is, and that instead of trying to pretend he’s just like everybody else, he should embrace his differences.  This marks a major character change from the beginning of the story, and throughout it, where he wears special goggles designed to help what he calls “people like him.”  His relationship with the supporting detective character is also improved, as there is now a little more mutual respect and understanding.  Society presumably still does not understand, but the protagonist appears to understand that this is not his problem.

Setting: Near-future United States (roughly 15-35 years from now).  On the whole, the setting is described minimally due to the protagonist’s autistic viewpoint.  We rarely get what might be considered a typical description of an entire building, or an entire city, etcetera.  Instead, we get brief, focused descriptions of small parts of the setting, and very general information about the macro-level setting of the country as a whole.  The main elements which make this science fictional instead of pure detective are:

• the country has been connected by Maglev trains, which make travel between its various parts very quick
  
  
• the augmented reality goggles which the protagonist wears to try and tone down his autism to socially acceptable levels.

These elements of the setting are both integral to the plot, and not just tacked on to make an otherwise mainstream detective story fit into a sci-fi anthology.  The major personal struggle the protagonist undergoes is whether or not to keep wearing the goggles.

Prose:

Mostly clean, with a pervasive and strong voice.  There are occasional spots of tense confusion, mostly where the author uses the conditional and/or simple past when simple present would make more sense (e.g. would instead of will).

Story Analysis:

Mystery is one of the main elements here, and it’s one that David Farland identifies as working across both genders.  On top of that, there’s action (male audience) and romance (female audience)

I feel like I still have to ding the story a little for heteronormativity (a word I promised Tina, the author, I’d only use once in this analysis) since the point of view character is male and women are chiefly defined through his relationships with them—or at least how he feels about them.  Also, the otherwise strong supporting female character essentially gets turned into a “damsel in distress” at the end of the story, which kind of undercuts her action and agency elsewhere in the piece.

But things aren’t as straightforward as in “War Hero” or even in “Planetary Scouts,” as both the female characters are clearly employed in nontraditional places: they both work for the police, and one of them is even a detective.  They also both have clear opinions of their own, and are not afraid to state them.

The reason this story works as well as it does is all viewpoint.  The protagonist is immediately sympathetic, or at least interesting, and we root for him to reach his goals.  When he does (at least mostly successfully) by the end of the story, we feel relief, validation, and the emotional payoff David Farland, the coordinating judge, talks about in his Million Dollar Outlines. 

Why the Gold?

As I’ve just said, the major thing that makes this story stand out is its viewpoint character, and the strength of his voice.  Let’s take a quick look at the first paragraph:

Eddie and I process memory siphons.  I clean and sort. Eddie approves for archival. We are cogs, endlessly pinching, prodding, and polishing homicide victim’s last memories on aging holodesks in a dark room. My desk lines up against a wall, so I don’t see people’s faces when they walk in the door. While siphons render I like to stare at the tranquil beige ceiling paint, or trace the perfect symmetry of police station floor tiles.

By now, we already have a clear idea not only of what our basic plot outline is likely to be (“homicide victims” is in the fourth sentence), but a solid understanding of our protagonist through his description of his actions and surroundings. 

We don’t just get “Eddie and I sit in the basement darkroom all day processing memory siphons” (which is all this whole paragraph really says).  Instead, we get a full description not just of the important parts of the room, but why they are important and how the protagonist feels about them. 

Already, after fewer than 100 words, we have a very clear idea of whose head we’ll be in, and what it will be like there.  Setting is plot is character, and all of it is voice.  That’s very deftly handled.

On top of that, there’s a clear character change by the end of the story, and we go through the classic try-fail cycle that Farland mentions in his book. On top of that, the resolution at the end of the story isn’t storybook perfect.  It reads like real life, and not like fiction, which gives us that much more emotional stress relief oomph.

So:

1)      Solid, unique voice

2)      Clear plot

3)      Try-fail cycles

4)      Uplifting—but not perfect—resolution.  (More importantly: resolution on internal and external levels.)

Planetary Scouts, by Stephen Sottong

This story is adventure, with just a dash of the picaresque (i.e. it shows us a character who, while he doesn’t necessarily think the rules of society are just or fair, is more interested in using them to his own advantage than he is in changing them to be fair or just). It’s a little like a far-future version of Heller’s Catch-22, showing us a character stuck in a bureaucratic, pseudo-militaristic corporation, and who is determined to just get through it as best he can, so he can retire and live the good life. The work is longish, and split into six segments.

Unlike “War Hero,” the first story in the volume, there’s a more typical progression of character and plot in this story. The narrative, while episodic, is more or less continuous, and while the picaro main character doesn’t really change much, his co-protagonist clearly does.

So, let’s go into more detail.

Story statistics/information

Length: 51 pages. (Over 15,000 words, and pretty close to the contest’s upper limit.)

Genre: Far-future Science Fiction—almost space opera, given that FTL seems to exist and there are numerous other intelligent races which don’t have space travel.

PoV: First person past

Protagonist: White, male, picaro type adventurer

Antagonist: Pseudo-military bureaucracy (macro); various alien creatures and environments (micro)

Supporting Characters:

1) White, male, hero-type adventurer who eventually becomes more of a picaro-type. He is a rookie scout, and the main character’s new partner.

2) Unspecified ethnicity, female, love-interest for supporting protagonist. Flat, very limited screen-time, but fits only partly into stereotypes. She seems mostly interested in pursuing her love interest, but she also has a career and it’s implied that she has ties to a sort of Greenpeace-like subversive resistance movement.

3) Japanese-named, female, love-interest and former partner of the main character. Nontraditional in her role as working scout, but still mostly defined in the story as love interest due to PoV. She is stuck in quarantine for life due to alien biota.

Plot:

A veteran scout and his new rookie partner, whose job it is to determine the possibility of intelligent life on newly-discovered planets, try to survive until their 25th mission so they can retire with full benefits. But when they anger top brass by leaking a plot to kill an intelligent—if unsavoury—species, they must suffer the consequences.

Ending:

Conflict resolved as the top brass are forced into early retirement and the intelligent race is left alone. Both characters are severely injured by an incident on one of the planets, but survive more or less intact. The main character, having contracted an alien virus, is sent to quarantine where he and his love interest are finally able to pursue their mutual romance. His picaresque understanding of the universe is upheld, although he is perhaps a bit less acerbic than he was at the start. The supporting protagonist is mentally damaged, but able to retire on disability and live with his love interest. He has become less hero-type and a little bit picaresque.

Setting:

The planets and their alien fauna are well-described and interesting. The overall setting for the piece is an Iain Banks-ish space opera milieu, with the human drive for expansion in full swing. While this may not be particularly original, the descriptions of the specific organizations and the set-up of the important planets serve to differentiate the story from other space opera like settings.

Prose:

Clean and descriptive, with a few awkward uses of present tense but no major problems.

Story Analysis:
I don’t really have as much to say about this one as I did about the first story in the volume. 

The presumed audience for the story is male, as the focus is on adventure and women feature in the story almost exclusively as love interests. However, neither of the major female characters fit entirely into traditional, submissive roles.

The story works well in its depiction of the secondary protagonist’s character change over time, and also in setting us up with a sympathetic main character through the sardonic humour he uses to deal with his problems.  The main character does not really undergo any change, but this is fairly standard for picaro-type characters.

Sticking with David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines, this story sticks fairly well to the idea that a story should serve as emotional stress relief.  We worry for the main character as he goes through his trials and tribulations, and his sense of humour helps to make the challenges he faces bearable despite their intense nature. 

By the end of the story, we get an emotional payoff—even though he’s stuck in quarantine for the rest of his life (presumably) due to an alien virus of some sort—because he’s reunited with his former partner in an environment where they are now both free of the restraints which stopped them from acting on their feelings for one another.  We also get an emotional payoff in seeing the likeable (if naïve) secondary protagonist able to retire from his work (albeit with mental damage) and in a situation where he can connect with his own love interest somewhere he wants to be.

From a literary point of view, the ending is perfect for a picaresque.  The main character, in being placed in a hospital for life, is now free of the pressures of society which require him to work for his living.  He is essentially given a pass to lounge around playing cards with a woman he loves for the rest of his life.

In short: we’re given two characters who are almost opposite in personality and desires, paired together and working as a team due to a shared goal.  Both characters communicate with one another well (after some initial tension) and both get what they want in the end.  The story works not only because we’re happy for both of them, but because it reminds us that we’re all in this together, and that if we work together, everybody wins.

Specific Critiques:

Other than the fact that I would have liked to see slightly stronger female characters, nothing in particular stands out. A well-written tale.

archiemcphee:

Alright Japan, now you’re just toying with us. Your relentless onslaught of weirdness and cuteness has us glued to our monitors lest we miss the next awesome thing you create or do. We’re putty in your hands. Now you’ve gone and made a series of photographs of cats dressed up as creative interpretations of sushi toppings, resting comfortably atop giant mounds of sushi rice, secured by enormous strips of nori. This one has pretty much rendered us speechless.

These “Sushi Cats” or “Neko-Sushi” are the work of Japan-based company Tange & Nakimushi Peanuts. Who needs to shower or go to work when there is stuff like this to see?

“According to the History of Sushi Cats video, the cats are a magical and historical creature that have been influencing humans since the beginning of time. Tange & Nakimushi Peanuts has released a mobile game app for iPhone and Android phones featuring the Sushi Cats. They also have an online store that offers photo prints, postcards and more (only available in Japan).”

Neko-Sushi is an extremely unusual life-form consisting of a cat on top of a portion of sushi rice. Although several references have come down to us through history from various researchers and witnesses, their existence is still shrouded in mystery and actual sightings remain rare.

There are several academics who have devoted their lives to the study of these creatures. According to a number of these, Neko-Sushi make use of gaps in space to come to us from an alternate dimension. Beyond these “gaps” lies the world of the Neko-Sushi in which, it is recently understood, lies the true identity of the cats that dwell with us here in the human dimension.

We can’t look away. It’s just too cute… too strange… too awesome.

Visit Laughing Squid for even more Neko-Sushi goodness.

Oh dear.

(via wilwheaton)

Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists - NYTimes.com (via techladymafia)

Eeesh.  Although clearly the fix to the solution is to create the category and move the men writers there, and set up “American novelists” as a simple redirect page to “female American novelists” and “male American novelists”.  (That way, “female” gets to be first on the page. ;) )

(via womenorgnow)

What a great button.

(Source: keirr, via lloudmouth)

I’ve been a fan of Writers of the Future since I picked one up in an airport about 5 years ago.  Since I’ve started writing seriously (about the same length of time), it’s also been somewhere I’d like to be published.

With that in mind, I’m going to read through the stories in this volume and post analyses here as I go.  If you’d like to read along, you can buy it on Amazon as a mass market paperback or ebook: http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Future-Volume-Hubbard-Presents/dp/161986200X/

Here’s story one in the volume, “War Hero” by Brian Trent.  (This story was the 2nd place winner in Quarter 4, according to the official blog post.)

I’m coming at this from a slightly different angle from most analyses I write, I think, having just read the first few bits of David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines.  If you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, you should check out MDO, which contains a few really great insights into why people read stories on top of the usual writing manual stuff.  Any copies you buy will also help out David Farland, whose son is in ICU following a longboarding accident and who does not have insurance due to a pre-existing condition.  You can find more information about David, his son’s current condition, and his writing, at: http://www.helpwolverton.com/

So, without further ado:

War Hero, by Brian Trent

This is a story I didn’t want to like. It’s very heteronormative, and heroic, and generally all the other stuff I find bland in fiction.

But, damn me, it works.

As Ben and Rupert note there categorically cannot be any character development, which is a bit unusual. I was a bit surprised when the story abruptly ended, as well, and it practically ends on a joke—the old harking back to “dog bites man” style newspaper articles.

Also interestingly, none of the characters are particularly dynamic. Nobody really undergoes any huge changes, due to the structure more than anything I think. (Well, we don’t see them undergoing change because of that, anyway.)

So… why does this story work?

Story statistics/information

Length: 26 pages (something like 7000 words, middle-of-the-road, WotF-wise.)

Genre: Futuristic Science Fiction (almost science fantasy, given the implausability of having a “Save point” that can be used to insert somebody’s essence into an inert body of flesh.)

PoV: First person present.  (An effective choice for this plot, and clearly not used only for reasons of style.)

Protagonist: white, male, hero-type

Antagonist: white, male (at least originally), fairly flat-and-evil sadistic puppetmaster-type.

Supporting characters:

• 1) white, female love interest, flat and pretty much not actually in the story except one side note that mentions the character’s having sex with her once before he died
• 2) white, female boss, flat and not really much in the story

Plot: A war veteran is reincarnated into the body of his arch-enemy’s son, and discovers that his arch-enemy is both the mother and father. He faces torture in the fight to kill his arch-enemy (a war criminal), and ensure that the rebellion for control of Mars and solar system wide peace has been completely effected.

Ending: Presumed resolution. The character has killed his enemy (in both reincarnated bodies) and has been reincarnated again, in his original body, into a presumably post-revolutionary, peaceful Mars. The character is literally the same man he was when the story began, as he has no memory of any events past the “save point” established in scene one.

Setting: I’d just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy when I read this story, so the setting seemed frankly derivative. However, the regeneration areas (original to the story), are well-described and seem fully realized. The few actual descriptions of of Martian city-scapes are also well-handled and original, so that it’s probably just a case of KSR doing such a damn good job in his (Nebula- and Hugo-winning) novels that his martian landscape is permanently etched into my brain…

Prose: Clean and evocative, with a few punctuation glitches. (I noticed two comma splices.)

Story Analysis

The assumed audience for this story is white, adolescent, and male. I may seem to be hung up on this a little, but everybody in this damn story is white. Although there’s a female in a non-romantic role (she’s the protagonist’s boss, and seems to be mostly in charge of the rebellion), there’s also a female love interest who gets zero screen time and there’s that weird aside when the just-before-dying narrator tells his newly-regenerated self via e-mail that he got lucky before he died. Weird.

That Feminist/post-imperialist critique aside, the story is handled well, the protagonist is sympathetic and interesting, and even if the cast is not as diverse as I’d like it to be there’s no sense that this is out of deliberate design.  Of particular interest is the fact that the antagonist has reincarnated himself into two bodies, one of which is female.  In addition to this being just damn creepy, it could also be read pretty well as a critique of authoritarian handling of women’s rights, if you were so inclined.

Er, anyway.  (Didn’t I just say “Feminist critique aside”?)

As to why the story works…

In Million Dollar Outlines, there’s a spot where David Farland (DF) talks about story-telling as an exercise in emotional stress relief.  In order for a story to have a good pay-off, he says, it has to put a character we care about in a stressful situation where a lot is at stake, and then bring us to a spot where he or she succeeds in achieving his or her goals (personal or political, etc.).  This success at the end of the narrative gets our brain to release happy-making chemicals, and makes us feel emotionally satisfied with the story.

In this case, the pay-off is political, not personal, and that makes this story somewhat unusual—especially in WotF, which so often focuses on character growth as essential to story.

What we get at the end of this story is emotional payoff in knowing that the Partisans (the radical, authoritarian government the arch-enemy was at the center of) have been defeated for good—or at least, for good as far as anyone knows.  The protagonist’s sacrifice of himself as a pawn in that battle—even if he doesn’t remember a jot of it—is also emotionally effective.  And, again, even if he categorically cannot have grown at all by the end of the story, we get the sense that this growth is just around the corner for him and those he cares for, now that the threat of the Partisans is gone.

What makes this otherwise static, priveleged-white-male-soldier character so effective a narrator, I think, is his disorientation.  We see him struggling to regain, in some sense, his sense of who he is, and when he is.  He’s torn from his life violently several times, and then thrown back into the world with no real knowledge of what’s transpired.  This stops him from being an overbearing stereotype and gives him—despite all his privilege—a feeling of underdogginess.

Trent also leaves us a pretty solid clue that he is going to learn about what happened, too.  This is why, I think, he ends the way he does—more or less on a joke.  That “older, weirder headline” that his boss gives him when he wakes up drives him into her office, where we assume he’s going to drill her for info until she explains everything that’s happened to him, and he’ll be able to move on with his life.

This suggestion, coupled with what we know about his past (while it might be a bit of a cheap PoV trick), is an effective way of showing us that he has suffered, and that his suffering is now at an end. We appreciate his sacrifices, and wish him the best.

Specific Critiques

Overall, of course, this is a pro-quality story or it wouldn’t have been published in WotF (in a 2nd-place spot, to boot).

Like Ben says, the ending is a bit of a Deus Ex.  While there is the suggestion that the narrator has a way out (the early mention of a “dom patch”), it’s not really clear what’s going on, and the information is withheld from us until the protagonist actually needs his out.

But that, and the Feminist stuff I’ve already gone into, is really my only complaint.

A solid piece of work.  (And the fact that I can still remember this much about it a day and after reading it shows clearly that it works!)

ecantwell:

The Adventures of Renaissance Batman

Ha.

“Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly.
“No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I cite… hard.”

My mouth drops open. Cite… hard! Holy shit, that…

This is awesome.

ironspy:

DIY Killer Comic Book Heels
Pricetag: Around £15
Time: Eight hours per shoe (I’m a perfectionist and I have big feet)

Brief tutorial under the cut.

Read More

Pity I don’t look good in heels.

(via yougoof)

wilwheaton:

[T]he single greatest strength the far right and their paymasters enjoy is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything - to gain an advantage in any debate, and be damned to whoever takes a screwing in the process.  

A perfect example: on Wednesday, Rand Paul (R-KY), darling of teabagger nation and son of that walking farce of a fake Libertarian Ron Paul, blocked a vote on extending FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program until the Senate votes on legislation declaring that human life begins at conception. Forget all those people in Iowa and Florida who are swamping out their homes after being inundated with record rainfall. We need legislation on fetuses…but God help them if they’re born, because these God-fearing Republicans don’t give a fig for them once they’ve passed through the birth canal. Welcome to the planet, brat. You’re on your own.

[…]

more than 2,000 bridges are trembling on the edge of collapse in Massachusetts alone. Why has this incredibly important problem not been addressed?Adam Peck of ThinkProgress provided an answer last week:

With as many as 2.9 million new and existing jobs on the line, House Republicans are refusing to pass a transportation reauthorization bill, even after the Senate’s version of the bill overwhelmingly passed through the upper chamber in a 74-22 bipartisan vote.

The deadline for new transportation funding is June 30, and if the calendar flips to July without a compromise, as many as 1.9 million workers could lose their jobs, at least temporarily. The Senate version of the bill, if adopted, would create an additional one million new jobs as well, according to Department of Transportation projections.

So why are House Republicans holding nearly three million jobs hostage? Because they want approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to be included in the bill. The State Department estimates that roughly 6,000 jobs would be created if the Keystone XL is approved, but as few as 20 of them will be permanent.

These are but two examples; there are dozens upon dozens more.