Picking a Book

Dratted Apple. I suspect PhotoShop and their new stupid requirement to run their Cloud application just to let you use the software was also at fault.

My computer was running ridiculous hot, and stalling out on simple tasks. I checked Activity Monitor and it was Apple's Crash Reporter that was the culprit, taking up as much as 70% of the CPU and running constantly. 

And of course this is part of the "it just works" under the hood of Apple. Meaning no preferences pane, no control panel...ah, but there is the UNIX core down there and a power user had figured out how to delete it. I ran Terminal and sudo'd the fucking thing gone and my computer is back to not being the hottest thing in a small room on what are predicted to be several very hot days in a row.

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I'm plowing through the "blue line" part of the edit.

Also took time to draft up my first scene/part divider idea so I could prep manuscript for the beta readers in something resembling final form:

And I don't like it. Surprise! I might try a new inking; I had thought damaging the coin might take some emphasis off the hat but it just made things worse. Time to try drawing a trowel and see if I like that better.

Anyhow.

What I did was read the book quickly from top to tail looking for places where there was a big block of description or expositional dialog. I marked all of those by changing text colors; blue for "this could be condensed," and red for "I really don't need this."

The next pass is going to be for through lines and necessary information. I'll be jumping around a lot more with that.

But there are a couple of scenes that need to be re-written completely and I've hit the first big one and I'm stalled picking out a book. The scenario; Linnet is in the Nine Elms shelter, reading, and Wentworth passes by and says something.

But what book? Every book I've looked at so far goes way off into things I don't want to have come up in that conversation. I want her to be cautiously optimistic and I want him to not have an easy dismissal of "That Buck Rodgers stuff."

First problem. Rationing and attacks on convoys. She's not going to be getting what's hot off the American presses. Second problem; most of what's exciting and appropriate in SF at that point is in pulp magazines with gaudy covers. Which is actually sort of cute in a geeky way and I might be able to work with that.

Third problem; SF in period, especially from British authors, was depressing. There was a big phase of rise-of-fascism dystopias going on. SF, even in the pulps, had moved a bit beyond Buck Rodgers and was already into socialist, psychological, feminist, and other themes. It was at that point straining to be literary -- even though the New Wave was surprisingly far in the future.

So here's a few I considered; Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker. Ridiculously cosmic scale, philosophical in outlook (although Brian Aldiss describes his take on the nature of existence and the future of humanity as being told in terms "vast, cool, and unsympathetic.") 

Contemporary C.S. Lewis was appalled, and yes he also gets on the list with Out of the Silent Planet, unabashed Christian polemics on a basically unrecognizable Venus; to my opinion, Narnia if it was trying to be serious enough for an adult audience (but only succeeded in being ponderous).

Gray Lensman is on the list but was being serialized in an American pulp. It does come up later in the novel...but I'm not sure I want to establish it quite so strongly as a running theme.

L. Sprague de Camp provides Lest Darkness Fall. The hardcover British edition wasn't until 1941 but I suppose I could let that slide. The big advantage is also the disadvantage; this is a Connecticut Yankee story in which the time traveler tries to stave off the Fall of Rome. So on the one hand, it lets Wentworth get on his horse about last stands and fallen empires, but on the other, it is off the tracks for Linnet.

There's a peculiar little book in the rise-of-fascism mode that was in Britain in 1937 and got recommended by a Leftist reading club. Written by a woman under an assumed name, it describes a future England under the deified memory of a savior Hitler. It is both future history and feminist dystopia and there's a lot of fun resistance and fifth column stuff going on. That title jumps out at one, though; Swastika Night. 

Which makes my conundrum even more complicated. I am going to elide most of the details -- this is a novel, not a book review -- but leave in just enough so the reader would be able to recognize the work. "This de Camp fellow is one of those fantasists, right?" "No, I believe he studied history."

In Katharine Burdekin's case, though, the novel is obscure enough (just recently got a big push from a feminist press) she really should get her details recorded.

(That's 1943 or 1944, I forget which. The title story is an absolute snooze, written by the editor himself and having nothing to do with the previously-painted cover.)