Blog

Sixteen Candles

Posted on by Patrick

Today marks six­teen years that Kath­leen and I have been mar­ried. Man, the time just flies by, don’t it, when you’re in love?

Hap­py anniver­sary to us.

Astrophotography at Brandon North

Posted on by Patrick

Bran­don North is a now-aban­doned train sta­tion north of the city of Bran­don — actu­al­ly north of For­rest, which is north of Bran­don. I head­ed up there a cou­ple nights ago, hop­ing for dark skies so I could take some pho­tos of stars.

Alas, the sta­tion itself is now more bright­ly-lit than when it was in ser­vice. How­ev­er, just down the hill, the lights are most­ly blocked. I got some good photos:

Starfield

The Big Dipper

The Milky Way

World-building

Posted on by Patrick

There’s an arti­cle on io9.com ask­ing whether The Phan­tom Men­ace has bet­ter world-build­ing than Star Wars 1. The debate, in my mind, boils down to this: Show vs. Tell. Every book, every arti­cle on writ­ing that I’ve ever read stressed one core rule for expo­si­tion, and by exten­sion for world-build­ing 2: Show, don’t tell.

Char­lie Jane Anders, the author of the io9 piece, comes down in favour of Show, don’t tell. She shares my view that the orig­i­nal film had far bet­ter world-build­ing than the first pre­quel, because Star Wars showed you the world you were in, with lit­tle pieces in vir­tu­al­ly every scene, where­as The Phan­tom Men­ace told you most of what you “need­ed” to know, either in the open­ing crawl or in “as you know, Bob” 3-style dia­logue.

I much pre­fer my sci­ence fic­tion — actu­al­ly, any fic­tion — to stay clear of too many giant expos­i­to­ry infor­ma­tion dumps. (One series that kind of annoyed me for this rea­son was the Hype­r­i­on Can­tos by Dan Sim­mons — the sto­ry was flow­ing along pret­ty well, and then the final book fea­tured a lengthy chap­ter that was essen­tial­ly one char­ac­ter explain­ing the sto­ry to a group of oth­er (and, by proxy, the read­er). It stopped every hint of for­ward momen­tum, and it let me down, I feel, as a reader.)

Here’s a list of nov­els & series that I think did their world-build­ing right:

  • Frank Her­bert’s amaz­ing Dune saga 4
  • Michael Swan­wick­’s Sta­tions of the Tide
  • William Gib­son’s nov­els — I have a soft place in my heart for the Sprawl tril­o­gy, especially
  • Joe Halde­man’s For­ev­er War
  • Stephen King’s Dark Tow­er saga — the open­ing line spoke vol­umes: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gun­slinger followed.”

Look­ing at my list, it seems that I like sto­ries that dump me into the sto­ry in the mid­dle — in media res, as they say — and then let me build the world in my own mind as I read.

What about you? Where have you seen/read excep­tion­al world-building?

  1. Fine, fine, A New Hope. ↩
  2. Real­ly, world-build­ing is a class of expo­si­tion, one that requires as light a touch as any oth­er. ↩
  3. “As you know, Bob, the Force is car­ried by sym­bi­ot­ic blood­stream par­a­sites called oh look the entire audi­ence is snooz­ing now.” ↩
  4. Nope, not the pre­quels. They would have made me hap­pi­er by sim­ply pub­lish­ing Frank’s notes. ↩

Review: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Posted on by Patrick

I can’t remem­ber the sec­ond-last book that I read in a sin­gle day, but I can tell you what the last one was: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.

Thanks, Doug, for sug­gest­ing that I check out this author.

Claire DeWitt is hired by Leon to find out what hap­pened to his uncle Vic, the DA in New Orleans. Vic has van­ished; Leon isn’t sure if he’s alive or dead, though he sus­pects the lat­ter. Leon hired Claire because she’s the best, but she’s far from ordi­nary. A dis­ci­ple of a lit­tle-known French inves­ti­ga­tor, Jacques Silette, who wrote a sin­gle book on his inves­tiga­tive prin­ci­ples, Détec­tion, back in the ’50s. Silet­te’s style of detec­tive work is only part­ly about find­ing out who done it; it’s more about solv­ing the mys­tery of one’s own self. Every­one already knows the solu­tion, he claims; it’s just that very, very few are will­ing to accept and admit the truth.

Claire DeWitt remind­ed me of both Sher­lock Holmes and his lat­ter-day avatar Dar­ryl Zero1. She has the uncan­ny abil­i­ty to con­struct entire truths out of the thinnest of clues; after learn­ing that one young man’s sis­ter used to call him Nee-Nee, she not only divined his name (Nicholas) but also his place of birth, the num­ber of sib­lings he had, and the ice-cream par­lour where he’d most recent­ly worked. Like Holmes, too, she has a fond­ness for the drugs: booze, weed, var­i­ous mush­room-based com­pounds — heck, at least once, she smoked a joint laced with embalm­ing flu­id. (No kidding.)

But Claire is a com­plete­ly orig­i­nal cre­ation. She’s a fatal­ist, a men­tal case, a per­haps-mur­der­er. She’s a deeply flawed char­ac­ter, an anti-hero who grew up in a decay­ing man­sion, a blood-sis­ter who gave up look­ing for her best friend when she van­ished. Her men­tor was mur­dered in a ran­dom act of sense­less violence.

The set­ting, too, is key. The nov­el is set in New Orleans, post-Kat­ri­na, and the city itself is a char­ac­ter: it’s a wound­ed beast, per­haps mor­tal­ly so, try­ing des­per­ate­ly to recov­er, but it’s not clear if it can recov­er, or even if it’s worth recov­er­ing. It’s not a city for hap­py end­ings, a fact that is repeat­ed sev­er­al times, by dif­fer­ent peo­ple. It’s a warn­ing to the read­er, too: This does­n’t end well. (Does it end well? You’ll have to read it to find out.)

The sto­ry itself is taut­ly plot­ted, and moves along at a great clip. Claire’s leaps of log­ic are (most­ly) explained to the read­er, and they (most­ly) make sense in the end. The sto­ry kept me immersed, com­plete­ly — like I said, I read it in a day, some­thing I haven’t done in a long time.

I loved this book, and I eager­ly look for­ward to read­ing its sequel, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemi­an High­way.

Get it from:
McNal­ly Robinson
| Chapters/Indigo
| Ama­zon

  1. If you haven’t seen Zero Effect, hunt it down. ↩

WordPress talk: The Big Move

Posted on by Patrick

Appar­ent­ly my talk from Word­Camp Toron­to Dev has gone online.

in situ on WordCamp.tv

Found via WPDaily.co. (Holy crap, my name shows up on WPDaily.co!)

(Also: I’ve since updat­ed my code to use get_option() and its sib­lings in the Options API, rather than using $wpdb to update the options. In non-nerd words, I’m using The Word­Press Way instead of The Dumb Way.)

Maybe my Win­nipeg one will go live soon too. A boy can dream…