Swords! Episode 1: Eyes

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 11: Swords!

Episode 1: Eyes

I Read Project Hail Mary

 

I read Project Hail Mary in two days, and I need to rant about it a little bit.  This book is a wild ride, and I need you all to read it so I can talk about it.

I usually hate it when people tell me to go into a book or a movie without knowing anything about it.  Of course I should know some basic things about it before I dedicate substantial time to it!  What if it's something I hate?  What if there's something I love and I would have been way more excited earlier if I had just been informed that Baby Yoda is there and he's adorable?  So I understand that it's hypocritical of me to say that now about Project Hail Mary: it's better if you don't know.  But the thing that worked for me in this regard was that I did know a fair amount about what to expect even if I didn't know where the plot was going.  The front cover has a guy in a spacesuit, floating in space, so I had an idea of the setting.  I've read The Martian, so I know Andy Weir loves writing  solitary men doing math and cracking dad jokes.  And that is exactly what this book is. 

A guy wakes up alone with amnesia.  He gradually pieces together that he's on a desperate mission to save humanity.  And that's all I'm telling you, and I think you'll know if you're onboard or not.

There are some emotional moments that got to me, especially since there are two characters that I am absolutely obsessed with (Rocky and Stratt, neither of whom are the main guy).  The pacing is great and the tension is terrific.  But what really blew me away was the structure.  Impeccable structure.

First of all, our guy wakes up with amnesia.  I've talked about this a fair bit with Breath of the Wild (a Zelda video game that maybe I like a little too much).  In that, the main character wakes up with amnesia, which means you, the player, are discovering the world along with the character, even though he ought to know where everything is.  It also means you uncover memories and piece together what happened as you play, giving you an unfolding story in a game where you can do anything in whatever order you want.

Although the functions and the outcome are different, this book reminded me of that.  Our main character wakes up knowing nothing along with the reader, so to a small extent, he's an audience proxy.  You figure out what's going on as he does.  And there's a lot going on, so this structure makes it so there's no huge info dump at the beginning of the book.  It also means the stakes at the beginning are fairly low: he's in a room and there are robot arms and he doesn't know where he is.  Where is he?  How will he find out?  Well, he can do a small experiment to learn more!  Then as more is uncovered, the questions get bigger.  What's that?  What's THAT?  Where is he?  How will he fix that problem?  Well, he can do some bigger experiments to learn more! 

So in this way, the reader isn't overwhelmed, there's a sense of wonder about each new discovery, and the stakes build and build and build.

Every now and then, he will remember something, which results in the story having two timelines: one while he's an amnesiac trying to save the world and one before his adventure where Earth was falling apart. The order that the memories are revealed is pretty much chronological, which I guess isn't very accurate to memory retrieval for amnesiacs, but that means the stakes in the memories get bigger and bigger as the situation on Earth grows more and more dire.  That way the stakes in both timelines track together. 

But also something will be happening in the present timeline that will trigger a memory of the past that's thematically similar or that explains some of the science.  At first this felt like just a convenient way to convey information.  The amnesia felt superfluous and we could have just had flashbacks.  However, there's a point towards the end where it all comes together and I no longer felt this way at all, and at that point I started raving about structure.  The dual time periods start to give tension to each other, like when we figure out enough to know how the story in the past ends: with disaster. Then there's tension when you learn more about what's at stake.  The dual time periods mean that there's some interesting explorations of themes from different points in our main character's life.  There's juxtaposition between personal tragedy and global tragedy playing out in both time periods.

And I think it's awesome how all this could thrive because of the use of structure.

Cryptid Wedding, Episode 12: A Success

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 10: The Cryptid Wedding

Episode 12: A Success

Cryptid Wedding, Episode 11: Lord of the Cavern

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 10: The Cryptid Wedding

Episode 11: Lord of the Cavern

Cryptid Wedding, Episode 10: A Dramatic Dinner

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 10: The Cryptid Wedding

Episode 10: A Dramatic Dinner

Someone's Ranting about Dog Man

 The latest publishing drama/hate click bait is an article on The Cut.  I'm not going to give the link, because they don't deserve the traffic.

In the article, the author posits that there are no "good" children's books.  It seems they are specifically referring to middle grade books, although they don't use the term "middle grade."  They also never define what would make a "good" book.  They say that their children are voracious readers, and although the author seems to be pleased at how much their children read, they're upset that everything the children read is garbage.  They then go on to describe how it is impossible to find more books, as if they have never heard of librarians, recommendation lists, Goodreads, or Google.  

Now, there are many conversations to be had around this (the relatively small offerings in middle grade as opposed to young adult, how juggernaut titles take over genres, how adult sensibilities need to be set aside to write fiction an 8-year-old will love, etc etc).  But this article does not engage with any of those.  In fact it spends most of its word count singling out Dav Pilkey's "Dog Man" and complaining about how annoying it is.

If you're not familiar with Dog Man, let me give you the skinny.  The whole thing is a comic drawn by two middle school boys, George and Harold, who are the main characters from another Dav Pilkey series called Captain Underpants.  The art (in early books in the series) looks like it was done by middle schoolers, and there are spelling mistakes and words that are misspelled, crossed out, and then rewritten.  The story is that, once upon a time, there was a police officer and his K9 unit.  They were in a horrible accident caused by Petey the Cat, where the cop's head was died and the dog's body died, but someone had the great idea to combine the surviving parts, creating Dog Man!  Half cop, half dog.  The first few books are Petey having an evil plan (which are as ridiculous as you would expect from the Dog Man premise), Dog Man catching him and throwing him in jail, and then Petey escaping again.

But then, Petey has an idea.  He can clone himself and then there would be two of him to be twice as evil!  However, when he clones himself, he creates Little Petey, who is a little kid, hopeful and innocent, and with none of Petey's jadedness.  Petey is infinitely frustrated with Little Petey's childishness.  Over the course of several books, Little Petey starts to wear Petey down, thawing his icy heart.  And here the series starts to get into deeper themes: not just that Petey's literal clone is good and maybe there's good in Petey too if he just chooses kindness, but it also gets into cycles of generational trauma.  One of my favorite parts is that when Petey is in jail, Little Petey lives with Dog Man, which ends up being "on the weekends," which is a set up similar to kids with divorced parents who have to travel between houses.

Also there are a lot of fart jokes.  And fart songs.

The author of this article does not like the fart jokes (and yes, for me--an adult--they get old).  The author of this article doesn't like that the jokes repeat over and over again (and, yes, for me--an adult--they get old).  My kid cackles every single time, rolling around in his reading spot, scream laughing as he sings, "Stinkle stinkle little fart!"  But I think the author of this article fails to understand several points about the humor. 1. Kids think that's funny, and the book was written for kids and not for adults. 2. Even if the joke wasn't repeated multiple times across several books, your kid would read that one section over and over and roll around and cackle.  3. This actually is teaching children humor (now hold on a second, let me finish).  Kids learn by repeated exposure.  That's why a lot of modern curricula are set up as "spiral curricula" where you keep coming back to the same concept over and over and over.  Yes, these books tell the same jokes over and over, but each time your kid learns a little more about structure and expectation.  At one point, Petey (who is also furious that Little Petey keeps telling the same joke) explains about the structure of knock knock jokes and why they're funny, which in turn is a perfect set up for one of Little Petey's jokes that ends with "popped on your head."

And that got me thinking.  The writer of this article:

• Comically dislikes Dog Man.
• Hates that they keep telling the same bad jokes
• Wishes that everyone could just grow up already

Y'all.   I think Petey wrote this article.

And that makes me feel better.

First of all, even though I know this is click bait and I should ignore it, it's much easier to ignore it knowing that Petey wrote it.  It's just Petey being Petey. Ignore him.

But also, one of the big critiques of this article that keeps cropping up is a concern that this parent's disgust for their child's choice of reading material might result in the child feeling shamed and no longer wanting to read.  But if this is Petey writing this, then we know how that's going to turn out: Little Petey will not be deterred.  Eventually Petey will see the light and let kindness into his heart.

And if Petey didn't write this article, then at least these children are reading Dog Man, and they have Little Petey as a role model of how to not give up.

Cryptid Wedding, Episode 9: Twelve Plots

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 10: The Cryptid Wedding

Episode 9: Twelve Plots