The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 2: Dubious Creatures
Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon
November 30, 2017
Dubious Creatures, Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 2: Dubious Creatures
Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon
November 28, 2017
Brooding YA Hero Review
This week's book is Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.
This is the book version of the Brooding YA Hero twitter account. Broody, the brooding YA hero, sets out to write a how-to book to explain how supporting characters can become main characters. These how-to sections are interspersed with narrative interludes where his evil ex-girlfriend, Blondie, drags him around to meet various supporting characters in an attempt to get him to show some empathy.
A lot of what Broody says is repetitive, but that's the joke. He also never answers the question or gives any actionable advice on how to become a main character, but this is directly addressed and is also kind of the point: he has no idea what he's talking about.
There is some pretty good stuff in here about how toxic the typical brooding YA hero is, how "not like other girls" is problematic, and how female characters who are assertive and know how to wear makeup are always antagonists. IT doesn't go very deep, but it's based on a twitter account.
This is the book version of the Brooding YA Hero twitter account. Broody, the brooding YA hero, sets out to write a how-to book to explain how supporting characters can become main characters. These how-to sections are interspersed with narrative interludes where his evil ex-girlfriend, Blondie, drags him around to meet various supporting characters in an attempt to get him to show some empathy.
A lot of what Broody says is repetitive, but that's the joke. He also never answers the question or gives any actionable advice on how to become a main character, but this is directly addressed and is also kind of the point: he has no idea what he's talking about.
There is some pretty good stuff in here about how toxic the typical brooding YA hero is, how "not like other girls" is problematic, and how female characters who are assertive and know how to wear makeup are always antagonists. IT doesn't go very deep, but it's based on a twitter account.
November 26, 2017
Power Writing
My friend Dani recently introduced me to power writing, which she learned from her professor, Goldberry Long. Dani introduced it by saying that it sounds juvenile, but it's the most useful thing she picked up in grad school, so give it a try before judging it.
The rules go like this:
The power write is pretty much unreadable when you're done, but there will probably be one good thing in there that's going to make it into a story. Dani suggests chaining your power writes, so the one jewel you got out of the first one becomes the prompt that you can use for a second power write. I've found that after a power write, I can make an action plan, or an outline of what I'm going to actually write, so I spend a few minutes doing that. Then I'm ready to go and make the most of the time that I have.
It's pretty cool, and you might want to check it out.
The rules go like this:
- Write by hand. You're not going to get the same flow, and you're going to back track too much if you're typing.
- Set a timer. I do 5 minutes. Dani does 16 minutes. It doesn't really matter as long as it's not too long for you to keep it up and long enough for you to get something out of it.
- You can't use periods. A period ends a thought and you don't want to end a thought. You want to keep going, just spewing ideas. Instead of a period, you can use a comma and the word "and".
- You cannot stop
- You can write slow
- No crossing things out, fixing, or editing. You can say "That last bit should be crossed out" or "that's not the right word" or "No, no, I don't like that because..."
- If you get stuck, you can repeat the last word or the last phrase until you know what to say next.
The power write is pretty much unreadable when you're done, but there will probably be one good thing in there that's going to make it into a story. Dani suggests chaining your power writes, so the one jewel you got out of the first one becomes the prompt that you can use for a second power write. I've found that after a power write, I can make an action plan, or an outline of what I'm going to actually write, so I spend a few minutes doing that. Then I'm ready to go and make the most of the time that I have.
It's pretty cool, and you might want to check it out.
November 23, 2017
Dubious Creatures, Episode 2: The Gremlins
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 2: Dubious Creatures
Episode 2: The Gremlins
November 21, 2017
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Review
This week's story is Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Stories from the Wilderness, by Hal Johnson. I read this for research, because I'm trying to find a second story about a squonk. While it did have the one squonk story told in the most engaging way I've found so far, it didn't give me anything new. It was, however, a fun read.
So this is twenty short stories about "fearsome critters" or cryptozoology of North America. Most of them come from old lumberjack oral traditions, and they are all whacky tall-tales to explain why so-and-so disappeared in the woods. I love lumberjack folklore, and this had the appropriate level of whackiness that captures the spirit of the tales told aloud. A lot of the sources I've been through lately are...dry. The animals are presented as they would in a beastiary, with basics about where they can be found and what they look like and what they do. If the author was talking about an elephant, I'd call it factual, but when they're talking about a squonk...I don't know. This was not like that, and it was a pleasant experience.
What this is is a set of short stories, each about a different absurd animal. They are very short--maybe eight pages at most with big type and illustrations that glow in the dark. Yeah. It's that kind of book. While the narrator is attempting to tell you about the animal in question, he usually does it by detailing an incident, and that incident was where there was a narrative aspect missing in a lot of written accounts of these animals. The narrator also inserts himself into the stories more often than not, either as a main character or as someone whose opinion nobody bothered to ask or to compare someone in the story to his arch-nemesis. He's the same narrator in each other the stories, so we learn more and more about him as we work through the book. Not enough to piece together some sort of larger narrative, but enough to get to know him.
The thing I liked most about this was how it played with time and expectations. Most of these stories come from logging days, where the world was much less connected and they didn't have the technology we have today. So in a lot of writing about cryptozoology, the narrator is set in that time and is a kind of pseudo-scientist who didn't know any better. Here, the narrator has all of those trappings, and he's often telling stories set back in the day, but then he'll throw in something modern, and the juxtaposition will be funny.
After a while his whole existence itself becomes strange. He's a kooky anachronism, who studies animals that don't exist, except they...do? And the Smithsonian recognizes them. But still call the study of these animals cryptozoology. This is not a nitpicky complaint or me pointing at continuity errors, but it's purposefully silly.
The whole thing is pretty silly. At one point they're being chased by a monster, who can't penetrate a shield they've finagled, so the monster turns around, shoots in the opposite direction, and the projectile goes all the way around the Earth and kills the guy our narrator is with. At one point, he's describing an encounter with an animal that's half bear, half deer and confuses people into thinking that it's one or the other so they're not prepared to face both. In response to being cornered by this beast, "But it could not have foreseen that I was not just a hunter but also a fly fisherman." And thus he escapes. It's this level of absurdity that's present in the oral tall-tales that I've been missing in my other research.
***
Next week, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a satirical look at YA heroes, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.
So this is twenty short stories about "fearsome critters" or cryptozoology of North America. Most of them come from old lumberjack oral traditions, and they are all whacky tall-tales to explain why so-and-so disappeared in the woods. I love lumberjack folklore, and this had the appropriate level of whackiness that captures the spirit of the tales told aloud. A lot of the sources I've been through lately are...dry. The animals are presented as they would in a beastiary, with basics about where they can be found and what they look like and what they do. If the author was talking about an elephant, I'd call it factual, but when they're talking about a squonk...I don't know. This was not like that, and it was a pleasant experience.
What this is is a set of short stories, each about a different absurd animal. They are very short--maybe eight pages at most with big type and illustrations that glow in the dark. Yeah. It's that kind of book. While the narrator is attempting to tell you about the animal in question, he usually does it by detailing an incident, and that incident was where there was a narrative aspect missing in a lot of written accounts of these animals. The narrator also inserts himself into the stories more often than not, either as a main character or as someone whose opinion nobody bothered to ask or to compare someone in the story to his arch-nemesis. He's the same narrator in each other the stories, so we learn more and more about him as we work through the book. Not enough to piece together some sort of larger narrative, but enough to get to know him.
On an incident where a boyscout troop was eaten: "Five of these scouts were tenderfoots, and hardly missed, but the sixth, Beauregard Shugtemple, had earned the coveted merit badge in phrenology, and so search parties combed the area for weeks to no avail. Beauregard Shagtemple was my nephew, and the young scamp had hidden the keys to my strongbox a week before disappearing, so it was particularly important to me that he be found..."
The thing I liked most about this was how it played with time and expectations. Most of these stories come from logging days, where the world was much less connected and they didn't have the technology we have today. So in a lot of writing about cryptozoology, the narrator is set in that time and is a kind of pseudo-scientist who didn't know any better. Here, the narrator has all of those trappings, and he's often telling stories set back in the day, but then he'll throw in something modern, and the juxtaposition will be funny.
For a beast in California: "We hired several native guides, mostly surfers and out-of-work actors..."
After a while his whole existence itself becomes strange. He's a kooky anachronism, who studies animals that don't exist, except they...do? And the Smithsonian recognizes them. But still call the study of these animals cryptozoology. This is not a nitpicky complaint or me pointing at continuity errors, but it's purposefully silly.
The whole thing is pretty silly. At one point they're being chased by a monster, who can't penetrate a shield they've finagled, so the monster turns around, shoots in the opposite direction, and the projectile goes all the way around the Earth and kills the guy our narrator is with. At one point, he's describing an encounter with an animal that's half bear, half deer and confuses people into thinking that it's one or the other so they're not prepared to face both. In response to being cornered by this beast, "But it could not have foreseen that I was not just a hunter but also a fly fisherman." And thus he escapes. It's this level of absurdity that's present in the oral tall-tales that I've been missing in my other research.
***
Next week, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a satirical look at YA heroes, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.
November 19, 2017
Totoros Are Everywhere
My son gets stickers as rewards. He gets them for things like cleaning up and getting in and out of the bathtub without making a fuss.
I'm the one who picks the stickers, so I got a pack from My Neighbor Totoro a while back. They're high quality stickers, the puffy kind that have some heft to them, but not the slick puffy kind that are stiff, these are the mat puffy kind that can bend and curl. We used to put them on a cardboard long box from the comic book store, but lately he's been peeling all the stickers off so that he can give them to himself again. He sticks these stickers to his shirt and walks around the house. And while the less hefty stickers get shed all over the place because they're not sticky anymore, the Totoro stickers get peeled off his shirt and put in strange places, where he presses them down enough and they are still sticky enough as to be hard to remove when he's not looking.
The other issue is that he saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time a few weeks ago, and his little mind was blown at the idea that Totoro exists outside of his sticker collection. So he's been targeting the Totoro stickers in his re-stickering.
This is a long way of saying that I've been finding Totoros all over my house, and have consequently started taking photos of them.
I'm the one who picks the stickers, so I got a pack from My Neighbor Totoro a while back. They're high quality stickers, the puffy kind that have some heft to them, but not the slick puffy kind that are stiff, these are the mat puffy kind that can bend and curl. We used to put them on a cardboard long box from the comic book store, but lately he's been peeling all the stickers off so that he can give them to himself again. He sticks these stickers to his shirt and walks around the house. And while the less hefty stickers get shed all over the place because they're not sticky anymore, the Totoro stickers get peeled off his shirt and put in strange places, where he presses them down enough and they are still sticky enough as to be hard to remove when he's not looking.
The other issue is that he saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time a few weeks ago, and his little mind was blown at the idea that Totoro exists outside of his sticker collection. So he's been targeting the Totoro stickers in his re-stickering.
This is a long way of saying that I've been finding Totoros all over my house, and have consequently started taking photos of them.
 |
| The Bathroom Floor |
 |
| Bedroom |
 |
| Living Room |
 |
| My Desk |
 |
| Inside His Crib |
 |
| Hiding |
 |
| My Closet |
November 16, 2017
Dubious Creatures, Episode 1: The Wooded Island
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 2: Dubious Creatures
Episode 1: The Wooded Island
November 14, 2017
The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle Review
This week's novel is The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, by Janet Fox.
During the Blitz, Kat and her two siblings are sent from London to Rookskill Castle, where a distant relation of theirs has set up a boarding school. Strange things immediately start to happen, when kids start disappearing, children who aren't part of the school wander the castle, acting strangely, and all the teachers and staff are confused or forgetful. Practical Kat doesn't believe it's magic, but the evidence is starting to add up.
I liked how much Kat and her siblings missed their parents when they were sent away, and how they felt resentment that their parents were sending them away and guilt that they couldn't help the war effort. They showed more fear and sadness and anger than usually shows up in books with this setting. Maybe it's that I haven't read a lot of these books since I've been an adult and didn't pick up on it when I was a child, but I remember these stories being more about exciting, magical adventures in the countryside when no parents are around. Then again, maybe it's that books written closer to World War II, wanted to sugarcoat it to protect the children reading the books. "No! You'll have a great time with Uncle Albert on the moors! We'll just be doing boring grown-up stuff here. Have a great time!" This is all speculation and I haven't looked into it at all.
I also really enjoyed that the kids acted like kids. Kat is twelve and trying to act mature, to be strong for her siblings and make her parents and her country proud. Her brother wants to play with the swords on display in the castle so that he can help fight the Germans. They all think Kat is bossy, and Kat bursts into tears a couple times because she's trying so hard and doesn't know what to do. They act like kids, and that's pretty cool.
***
Next week, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Tales from the Wilderness by Hal Johnson.
During the Blitz, Kat and her two siblings are sent from London to Rookskill Castle, where a distant relation of theirs has set up a boarding school. Strange things immediately start to happen, when kids start disappearing, children who aren't part of the school wander the castle, acting strangely, and all the teachers and staff are confused or forgetful. Practical Kat doesn't believe it's magic, but the evidence is starting to add up.
I liked how much Kat and her siblings missed their parents when they were sent away, and how they felt resentment that their parents were sending them away and guilt that they couldn't help the war effort. They showed more fear and sadness and anger than usually shows up in books with this setting. Maybe it's that I haven't read a lot of these books since I've been an adult and didn't pick up on it when I was a child, but I remember these stories being more about exciting, magical adventures in the countryside when no parents are around. Then again, maybe it's that books written closer to World War II, wanted to sugarcoat it to protect the children reading the books. "No! You'll have a great time with Uncle Albert on the moors! We'll just be doing boring grown-up stuff here. Have a great time!" This is all speculation and I haven't looked into it at all.
I also really enjoyed that the kids acted like kids. Kat is twelve and trying to act mature, to be strong for her siblings and make her parents and her country proud. Her brother wants to play with the swords on display in the castle so that he can help fight the Germans. They all think Kat is bossy, and Kat bursts into tears a couple times because she's trying so hard and doesn't know what to do. They act like kids, and that's pretty cool.
***
Next week, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Tales from the Wilderness by Hal Johnson.
November 7, 2017
A Dark Unwinding Review
This week's novel is A Dark Unwinding, YA Gothic by Sharon Cameron.
Katherine's aunt sends her to visit her uncle's estate so that she can declare him insane and her cousin can inherit the family fortune. Katherine follows her aunt's instructions, knowing that if she deviates, her aunt will throw her out on the street. But once she gets there, she finds that her odd uncle is an inventor of astounding clockwork contraptions, and he has employed almost a thousand people, who he plucked out of workhouses and who now live in a village on the estate, in order to run his gas works, forge, and workshops. If Katherine has her uncle committed, her aunt will displace everyone on the estate. The town both hates her and tries to butter her up, trying to convince her to lie for them. And at the same time, strange things keep happening, everyone agrees the house is haunted, and Katherine starts to wonder if she's losing her mind just like her uncle.
I really liked this one. It's historical fiction bordering on Steampunk, but the Steampunk isn't overwhelming. It has all my favorite Gothic tropes done well. There's creepiness on the moors and a howling, eerie wind, but there's also household servants that despise Katherine and are probably up to something. There's the question of if there's a ghost or if she's crazy, if she's being gas-lit or if the oppressive and antagonistic atmosphere is just making her antsy. This last point is handled especially well. There's a bit where her hairbrush keeps ending up in the wrong drawer. There's a bit where her hat disappears and she finds it tied neatly to a point on the roof. There are secret tunnels and people popping into hallways only to vanish. There's how everyone keeps accusing her of being drunk, when we didn't see her drink anything or act oddly. Is someone moving around her hairbrush just to make her think she's losing it? Is someone moving it because they're using her hairbrush for some weird reason? Is she misremembering? Is she lying to the reader? It's creepy, and things like that keep happening, and happening in ways that sneak up on you.
I think part of why it works is because Katherine is very precise, so when her precision slips, it's jarring. She counts everything. A lot. Like it seems obsessive compulsive at times. She discovers that her uncle does this too, and they bond, but at the same time that this is exciting for her, it's also frightening, because she's there to have him institutionalized for doing things like that and maybe that means she is crazy too. (As a note, her uncle is probably autistic, which clearly isn't catching and would have shown up in Katherine earlier if she was autistic too, but then maybe she's on the spectrum and then maybe she is autistic and no one has bothered with her and since it's from her point of view, maybe she doesn't know about it either, bringing us back to her being an unreliable narrator.)
I enjoyed the way the romance was handled here. Dreamy Guy doesn't like Katherine since she's about to have him fired and then kick him and his family out of their house, but he also likes her because she's neat and he eventually starts to sympathize with her situation. So when he blows hot and cold, it all makes a lot of sense and it's all upfront rather than him coming off as one of those heroes who's rude because he just has too many brooding feelings that he can't express because he's not good enough for her or blah blah blah. As a result, there's never a time when she's confused about his feelings for her and they have a long, drawn out misunderstanding about how they do love each other. Instead, the barriers keeping them apart are all rational, mostly because Katherine is rational to a fault. And then there's what looks like might turn into a love triangle, but never really does, even when she's considering marrying the wrong guy.
At one point the grumpy cook/housekeeper said something amazing after being amazing for a whole novel, and I looked up, turned to my husband, and said, "I like everyone in this book."
I recommend it.
***
Next week: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, British kids escaping the Blitz go to a haunted castle, by Janet Fox.
Katherine's aunt sends her to visit her uncle's estate so that she can declare him insane and her cousin can inherit the family fortune. Katherine follows her aunt's instructions, knowing that if she deviates, her aunt will throw her out on the street. But once she gets there, she finds that her odd uncle is an inventor of astounding clockwork contraptions, and he has employed almost a thousand people, who he plucked out of workhouses and who now live in a village on the estate, in order to run his gas works, forge, and workshops. If Katherine has her uncle committed, her aunt will displace everyone on the estate. The town both hates her and tries to butter her up, trying to convince her to lie for them. And at the same time, strange things keep happening, everyone agrees the house is haunted, and Katherine starts to wonder if she's losing her mind just like her uncle.
I really liked this one. It's historical fiction bordering on Steampunk, but the Steampunk isn't overwhelming. It has all my favorite Gothic tropes done well. There's creepiness on the moors and a howling, eerie wind, but there's also household servants that despise Katherine and are probably up to something. There's the question of if there's a ghost or if she's crazy, if she's being gas-lit or if the oppressive and antagonistic atmosphere is just making her antsy. This last point is handled especially well. There's a bit where her hairbrush keeps ending up in the wrong drawer. There's a bit where her hat disappears and she finds it tied neatly to a point on the roof. There are secret tunnels and people popping into hallways only to vanish. There's how everyone keeps accusing her of being drunk, when we didn't see her drink anything or act oddly. Is someone moving around her hairbrush just to make her think she's losing it? Is someone moving it because they're using her hairbrush for some weird reason? Is she misremembering? Is she lying to the reader? It's creepy, and things like that keep happening, and happening in ways that sneak up on you.
I think part of why it works is because Katherine is very precise, so when her precision slips, it's jarring. She counts everything. A lot. Like it seems obsessive compulsive at times. She discovers that her uncle does this too, and they bond, but at the same time that this is exciting for her, it's also frightening, because she's there to have him institutionalized for doing things like that and maybe that means she is crazy too. (As a note, her uncle is probably autistic, which clearly isn't catching and would have shown up in Katherine earlier if she was autistic too, but then maybe she's on the spectrum and then maybe she is autistic and no one has bothered with her and since it's from her point of view, maybe she doesn't know about it either, bringing us back to her being an unreliable narrator.)
I enjoyed the way the romance was handled here. Dreamy Guy doesn't like Katherine since she's about to have him fired and then kick him and his family out of their house, but he also likes her because she's neat and he eventually starts to sympathize with her situation. So when he blows hot and cold, it all makes a lot of sense and it's all upfront rather than him coming off as one of those heroes who's rude because he just has too many brooding feelings that he can't express because he's not good enough for her or blah blah blah. As a result, there's never a time when she's confused about his feelings for her and they have a long, drawn out misunderstanding about how they do love each other. Instead, the barriers keeping them apart are all rational, mostly because Katherine is rational to a fault. And then there's what looks like might turn into a love triangle, but never really does, even when she's considering marrying the wrong guy.
At one point the grumpy cook/housekeeper said something amazing after being amazing for a whole novel, and I looked up, turned to my husband, and said, "I like everyone in this book."
I recommend it.
***
Next week: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, British kids escaping the Blitz go to a haunted castle, by Janet Fox.
November 2, 2017
Central Station Review
Life's been insane lately, so I've fallen behind on the blog. I apologize.
This week's novel is Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.
Central Station has its base in Tel Aviv and lifts to a suborbital platform for people to come and go from Earth. At the base of Central Station cultures collide, from Jewish people and Muslims, to the descendants of the workers brought in to build the station, to people passing through, to the mysterious Others.
The universe created here is thick. There's so much going on. There's the world you can see, then a layer of internet that everyone can access through the nodes put into their brains at birth, and then a layer of virtual reality. The solar system has been colonized (a trope I love) and there are different cultures on different planets and asteroids and moons. But this book takes it to a new level by having each colony or city started by a certain national or ethnic group, and then the cities act as diasporas. There's a city on Mars called Tong Yun which is Chinese, but they're Tong Yun Chinese, separate from Earth Chinese, and separate from the Tong Yun Chinese from virtual reality. There are cyborgs, there are different cyborgs, there are robots, there are sentient appliances, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness onto the internet as sentient code, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness into appliances, there are AIs that evolved on their own, there are AIs that co-habit a body with a human and give them super powers, then there are different people who also have super powers. There are prehistoric aliens from Mars, regrown and attached to human hosts, there are aliens in virtual reality, there are people who've surgically added arms and dyed themselves red to look like the aliens on virtual Mars. There are vampires who suck the data out of your node.
There is a lot happening in this book.
The sense of wonder about all these many many things drives the story rather than a plot. The book is a series of stories, each from a different point of view from a character in a completely different situation. That way, we see a lot of the universe that has been created, but if there's a mystery about why or how or what will happen to any of the characters, those won't be answered because that's not the point. The point is to marvel at the future. This didn't work for me so much because there were questions I had and there were people I cared about, but they were dropped after their chapter. I think if they were dropped completely and we never saw them again, if this was a collection of short stories all set in the same universe, it would have worked better for me. But the characters I cared about kept popping back up in the periphery of other stories, rubbing it in that I wasn't going to get any answers.
There were a lot of cool ideas here, and I wanted a deep dive into any of them. Instead, I was shown cool ideas, and that's how it goes sometimes.
This week's novel is Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.
Central Station has its base in Tel Aviv and lifts to a suborbital platform for people to come and go from Earth. At the base of Central Station cultures collide, from Jewish people and Muslims, to the descendants of the workers brought in to build the station, to people passing through, to the mysterious Others.
The universe created here is thick. There's so much going on. There's the world you can see, then a layer of internet that everyone can access through the nodes put into their brains at birth, and then a layer of virtual reality. The solar system has been colonized (a trope I love) and there are different cultures on different planets and asteroids and moons. But this book takes it to a new level by having each colony or city started by a certain national or ethnic group, and then the cities act as diasporas. There's a city on Mars called Tong Yun which is Chinese, but they're Tong Yun Chinese, separate from Earth Chinese, and separate from the Tong Yun Chinese from virtual reality. There are cyborgs, there are different cyborgs, there are robots, there are sentient appliances, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness onto the internet as sentient code, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness into appliances, there are AIs that evolved on their own, there are AIs that co-habit a body with a human and give them super powers, then there are different people who also have super powers. There are prehistoric aliens from Mars, regrown and attached to human hosts, there are aliens in virtual reality, there are people who've surgically added arms and dyed themselves red to look like the aliens on virtual Mars. There are vampires who suck the data out of your node.
There is a lot happening in this book.
The sense of wonder about all these many many things drives the story rather than a plot. The book is a series of stories, each from a different point of view from a character in a completely different situation. That way, we see a lot of the universe that has been created, but if there's a mystery about why or how or what will happen to any of the characters, those won't be answered because that's not the point. The point is to marvel at the future. This didn't work for me so much because there were questions I had and there were people I cared about, but they were dropped after their chapter. I think if they were dropped completely and we never saw them again, if this was a collection of short stories all set in the same universe, it would have worked better for me. But the characters I cared about kept popping back up in the periphery of other stories, rubbing it in that I wasn't going to get any answers.
There were a lot of cool ideas here, and I wanted a deep dive into any of them. Instead, I was shown cool ideas, and that's how it goes sometimes.
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