For those very patient people who are still watching me despite my self-centered sabbatical, here is one of the major projects I've been working on during my break!
What we have here is the prelude to a sci-fi novel, an indication of its completeness to a degree that I think it would be okay for other people to read it.
Now if you're the sort of person who likes reading sci-fi novels that may not be all that good, and you've got some free time, give me a holler (or shoot me an email at [email protected]). I could really use some extra eyes on this, since right now I'm about as good a judge at how ugly this is as I am of my own face when staring at it in the mirror.
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Posted by Aleph-Null 16 years ago Report
I'll probably read this latter today.
Just so people know, you'll probably have to download the file. I at least only see the first page after expanding the window but the download yields all four.
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
Ahhh.. Thanks for noting that. Actually, all four pages are shown, but it looks like something weird happened with the headers and footers so it just crammed them all into a single footer and called it page 1.
Poor formatting on my part. :(
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
There... that should fix it!
Posted by jacquelope 16 years ago Report
Hey there dude! Long time no see! Glad to see you've got something in the works.
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
Thanks! I've been following blogs somewhat meanwhile - sound like you're cranking right along!
Posted by Aleph-Null 16 years ago Report
Sorry It took so long for me to comment after I said I'd "probably read this latter today". Was a little busy.
Anyway I would say it's a good prelude. It starts off at a decent pace while giving you a feel for the characters.
The only gripe I have is with the use of the megasecond as a unit of time.
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
In that it seems to be used inappropriately, or in that you're not a fan of metric time?
Posted by Aleph-Null 16 years ago Report
Neither entirely.
This of course is all coming from the perspective of someone who has only read these four pages. It may not feel awkward after reading the first chapter.
Typically metric time is used as needed but not more than needed. It's advantages over having to convert multiple units of time are obvious. However people tend to use other units of time when precise measurement is less important, or they won't need to use that unit in a calculation. The uses here didn't seem to refer to things that would require this precision.
Granted the whole lab is probably on metric time, however using megaseconds as part of the narration feels awkward to me because it isn't a unit of time I have an intuitive feel for.
This of course could be cleared up in chapter one if a reason for the universal use of metric time was established.
The narration seems to establish the megasecond having replaced the common use of the week and month. That is a huge cultural change but the rest of the elements of the story don't support it. They do not conflict with it but simply do not hint at any reason for it.
As it stands, the use of the megasecond felt to me a bit like an anomalous peak on a graph; you know something caused it but you don't know what.
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
Gotcha. Yeah, I think that thinking in terms of metric time is definitely a learning curve, especially in my story for reasons I won't complicate matters with here. I'd suggest that it's the same kind of learning curve we'd have for switching from feet to meters and quarts to liters, except that we don't see metric time all around us every day, and while we have good visual perceptions for most metric units, not so for time - we're almost completely dependent on a clock to know the length of an hour, as our experience of time is subjective.
That said, I had a lot of the same problems you did as I was reading back through (that, and I hadn't calculated the length of a gigasecond properly.) But I do think that if Man ever became a space-faring race metric time would become much more popular very, very quickly as minutes, hours, days and months as currently measured (with no easy divisibility between one and the other) became old-earth relics with no bearing in space.
I tried to find some middle ground, and since I already posted it on my personal blog (which I usually keep separated from here, but whatever) - maybe what I propose there (and what I'm working back into the story on my current editing run) helps to solve some of the problems? The link is <a href="http://wraygun.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/metric-time-in-_a-diamond-in-snow_/">here</a>
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
or here. I dunno - I forget formatting already. :(
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
Oh well... you can copy and paste now. :)
Posted by Aleph-Null 16 years ago Report
I think the key element to dropping weeks months and years would be lack of communication with earth. Or at very least earth would have to lose political influence over humans.
If not than the day, week month and year would persist due to the need to synch up with earth events.
The one unit that I do not think would go away (for humans) is the day. For various reasons humans as a group can benefit from having a "day" even in the absence of a natural day/night cycle. This may change from 86.4 Kseconds but it would probably be in that ballpark.
I checked out your blog, I have to say that base 12 would take significantly more getting used to than metric time.
Posted by Aleph-Null 16 years ago Report
Man I wish I could edit these comments ;)
I forgot to mention that I don't read a lot of sci-fi. This is probably a lot more intuitive for a different audience.
Posted by 4ofSwords 16 years ago Report
Yup, I think that would be a likely condition, at least as far as common usage goes.
I agree that the day would be hard for folks to dismiss easily, as would the hour and the year, which is why I worked day, year, and ke back into the list of units (ke and kilosec together basically replace the hour).
And you're probably right about metric time coming easier than base 12. Learning base 12 is like learning a new language, if you don't want to be constantly translating in your head.