The Adventure Continues

Horizon: Forbidden West went on sale during the massive and ongoing black-cyber-frimonday sales and I've started it. It looks gorgeous. But something has slipped in the character acting. Even compared to the pre-remastered Horizon Zero Dawn the characters feel less lifelike and less interesting.

A lot of this is intensity. Sun-King Avad is a bit of a dork in the original. He is young and inexperienced and doing his best. But the weight of his position gives him gravitas, he has charisma and he's hot. But above all that, there's intensity.

The HFW version he just comes across as a bit of a goof. Intensity is the same complaint with several other returning characters, even Varl (despite growing a beard). I've got a sneaking suspicion at the moment that this was intentional. That they told the voice actors to dial it down a little, possibly to make the later original characters look better.

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Anyhow.

The thing about an adventure archaeologist character is that there are always ideas for them. Especially if you have already decided not to go the way of the greatest hits, because there's only a dozen big name artifacts and even fewer big-name locations to discover (and once you've done the Atlantis story, it is hard to top it with somewhere even more big important and magical.) There are, however, millions of ways a student archaeologist can get in trouble, even if they end up being more cozy murder mystery plots and the archaeology is tangential.

I know the things I don't like about the previous books, but I don't know how to pivot. Making a big pivot in a series is tough because unless you want to re-write all the early books, you are setting up for one audience then changing to a different audience. How can you introduce the new reader you are after when the first books aren't like that at all? And what about the readers that got interested in what was happening in the older books?

My version today of what went wrong is that the absurd detail and the way that detail is presented is baked in, and will be there as long as I continue with the format of throwing an inexperienced traveler into a new culture.

That's the biggest part of it. The first book was largely about Penny being overwhelmed, and gradually coming into confidence in navigating strange places. And I've kept that, at least as long as she is still going into places that are fully immersive; where she doesn't speak the language, where she is having to eat locally and sleep locally and otherwise deal with the unfamiliar culture 24-7. 

I backed off a little in the Paris book. There are several unusual things about the Paris book. She is largely in tourist areas and most of her conversations are with a fellow American. And her dip is less into modern Parisian culture and more into history -- and at that, it is art history, so further divorced from her Japanese experience of finding herself in a wooden room with tatami mat floors and going, "What am I supposed to be doing here?"

Thing is, I am also doing classic mysteries. My read is that the Cozy Mystery genre introduces a cast of characters with issues and that is the Gordian Knot that needs to be unravelled (cutting isn't usually allowed in those stories).

I don't know if there is a name or even a recognized genre, but I am writing mysteries where the place and the culture are the thing that has to be understood. The solution to the mystery in each of the Athena Fox books is reached through gaining a gestalt of a place and people. And the process of gaining that gestalt is through being a sponge. Learning everything she can because she doesn't know what the important stuff is yet.

Come to think, Asimov's Caves of Steel and some of Niven's Gil the Arm stories also hinge on grasping subtle elements of culture. Many is the case in those stories where someone says, "Belters don't do that because on a single-ship..."

This may change. The things that are at the top of my list right now for new Athena Fox stories have several that are a local sub-culture that can be experienced in small doses with a ready retreat back to the familiar. And Penny is gaining confidence and experience to where she isn't intended to be overwhelmed but instead has the tools to pick up what she needs and keep her cool.

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So what's at the top of the list right now? I mean, I want to do underwater archaeology, and do the Holy Land, and visit Antarctica...but my list of plausible and might do them soonish is rather smaller.

The White Sands one. I've already backed off on trying to work in Old West stuff, or ghost towns, and I might have to put the UFO stuff further back in the mix. More and more, it is about that specific bit of geography and the various peoples that have inhabited it. Three in particular; the neuvomexicanos, who are connected to the pueblo -- mostly Tewa. The Los Alamos group. And the hominid who may have left footprints well before the Clovis peoples.

The Darien Gap one. Archaeological tourism, some mayincatec stuff (whatever seems appropriate) possibly the fake artifact trade, and a survival story.

The Minnesota Vikings one. Penny revisiting a different life-path by getting hooked up with folk music and Viking re-enactors, plus of course some pseudo-archaeology like the Kensington Runestone.

The one on a boat. The private yacht of a billionaire collector is in international waters and an eclectic group of feuding experts (and ringers and spies) are gathered to try and figure out which artifacts should be repatriated, and to whom. 

And last place is split between hanging with warbird fliers and the kind of WWII buffs who dance to big band music at the Hornet Museum, with of course an experimental flying machine unwisely named Icarus in the mix. Or, one about a brand-new science museum with a living exhibit on the space race and early visions of the future; L5 society, plus maybe work some Lustron Houses in there somehow.