It would be awesome. It also touches on another theme. The basic themes are cooperation, strength in diversity, and particularly in Shepard's case, indomitable determination. Well, these are similar themes to the original Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen; short, one-trick stories where the remorselessly logical city-sized killing machines of the title were owned by organic life being messy and complicated but ever so tenacious.
(And it being, you know, a third-person shooter sort of game, a meat-sack with a rifle is exactly the tool needed to take down a hostile base, starship, giant whatever. They might have weapons that can burn cities but get marines inside and their fate is just the same as a 20th century tank that's driven too far ahead of its crunchies.)
Hey, there's even more connection to the game. The big third act on Tuchunka is the effort to reverse the Krogan Genophage. Which was largely thanks to...Mordin Solus, everyone's favorite fast-talking, Gilbert-and-Sullivan singing, Scientist Salarian. So make Mordin the hero of the story, the one who leads the effort to gather all the civilizations of known space together to stop the Reapers. After all, "Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
So on to the topic. The problem I'm continuing to have with the current novel is with the basic underlying concept. How it works. If it works. I was reading the Scalzi-blog yesterday and they were talking about Impostor Syndrome. That is an idea I had for Penny/Athena. She's very much not a real archaeologist. She will end up in situations where she has to try to do the work of, pretend to be, or get mistaken for a real archaeologist.
But actually it is more complicated than that. This core element comes from a lame attempt to do an end-run around the impossibility of the Adventure Archaeologist archetype, and all the associated Lost Cities and Booby-trapped Tombs and Ancient Super-Weapons baggage. But, you see, I'm still on the fence about whether this stuff turns out to be just as much nonsense in the book as it is in the real world, or whether something different but just as implausible ends up actually being true.
On the smaller scale it seems to work. Various people can mistake Penny for her creation Athena, or at least treat her like it. And she can both get into situations that you would think only the fictional Athena would get into, and get out of them with stunts only that same fictional adventurer should be able to pull off. And lampshade it constantly, of course.
But...an actual Atlantis? Or, rather, something just as ridiculous? I don't know if it works.
Which is probably why every time I try to hit the first scene where Penny is (possibly!) mistaken for either a professional archaeologist or for someone who actually goes traipsing around the world addressing people in six languages (when they aren't shooting at her) and digging up the local equivalent of Excalibur (King not necessarily included), I run into problems.
I want her to have a conflicted relationship with the role. To recognize that playing Athena can get her into places...and into trouble. And to recognize that the character archetype and, more broadly, pseudo-archaeology and other misconceptions about archaeology are both wrong and potentially harmful.
So I keep veering back and forth about whether she is fully conscious of what she's trying to pull off as she acts her way through a situation, or whether she immerses in the role. And there's where Impostor Syndrome comes in; she of course recognizes she doesn't have, on one hand, the real-world professional skills she is pretending to, and on the other hand, the Protagonist skills of an Indiana Jones type. But does she think of this as pretending to be Athena and getting away with it, or that when she "dons the mask" of Athena -- lets herself be immersed in the character -- things become possible? I can't decide.
And there's specific issues with the first story. Basically reader trust and the contract with the reader. Played straight, in this key scene in a reception at a classy antiquities gallery we have an average-girl passing herself off as a professional and showing up people who might actually have degrees in the appropriate fields. And various people (herself and others) are speaking confidently and persuasively about a couple of pseudo-archaeological concepts.
At this point the reader doesn't know that these theories are going to be shown up as garbage. They might assume that this version of the Dorian Invasion is my own personal hobbyhorse as well. They also don't know that Penny is going to be very firmly lectured by an actual practicing archaeologist on just how insulting her pretense is.
There's an unconnected thread as well. This is the origin story, and large parts of the first half are Penny learning how to actually be the world traveler she pretends to be when she plays Athena. So the first chapters will show her visiting the typical tourist spots and acting like a typical tourist and seemingly not realizing all that she's getting wrong. Which is to say; I'll be looking like I only looked up the typical tourist places and if I visited, acted like the Ugly American.
Oh, and did I mention that she is making mistakes, mistakes about history, mistakes about dates, mistakes about people that she's not going to realize she made until many chapters later? First person she has dialog with, she describes as an Eritrean immigrant. Actually, he's a resident and his family has been in Greece for generations.
So, yeah. I want to keep the reader long enough to get to where Penny re-visits Athens. And gets out of the big Western-style hotel to live a little closer to street level. And where she questions the Return of the Heracleidae story she was told earlier. And where all the everyman-hero and Chosen One garbage is taken and thoroughly shaken out.
And here's another thing I'm on the fence about. There's a real tendency for the First-Person Sarcastic character to drop pop culture references everywhere and I'm trying to avoid that. There's enough to deal with (and enough wealth in potential historical references) that I don't want the narrator to be constantly comparing what is happening to something from a recent movie or, worse yet, a video game.
Trouble is, this is a legit part of her backstory. Her YouTube channel paid for the trip. Some of the conflict comes specifically from the way social media can leap on and amplify something (like the stupid Dorian theory someone in the story just dragged out). And, heck, if I'm talking about the reality of travel, talking about travel in the world of Google Street View and e-tickets and selfies is, well, part of the story.
Thing is, it would make sense with her character and background and within the larger plot -- all the way out to the meta-plot about public perception of what an archaeologist is, etc. -- for her to be media savvy, image conscious, social-media active, etc. And for various key plot points to unfold via the new technologies.
Here's some specific examples. I already have in my notes that the bad guys are tracking her across Europe because her too-helpful business manager has been updating her Facebook status for her. And a key moment in her shift to immersion in Athens is when her phone is damaged during her unplanned swim in the Adriatic and she's forced to interact more, actually ask for directions and attempt to read street signs and so on. (And it also figures in the plot where the bad guys lose track of her and thus it isn't until she returns to the gallery that...) Heck, I even had a thought about someone thinking the evidence was destroyed until she tells them she uses cloud storage for all the pictures she took (and the incriminating picture had its flag set, alas, to public).
Some of this, heck, most or even perhaps all of this, can be solved with sufficient skill. For instance, the same reception where the Dorian nonsense is trotted out, someone else is going on about Atlantis. All that might be necessary is to carefully frame it so both stories are presented in the same way, thus planting that necessary doubt even as the narrator takes the former at face value. Heck, Biro, the Athenian student whose dad cooks a mean tsebhi, could be shown rolling his eyes as Penny hails yet another taxi.
But this still doesn't answer my basic questions.
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