Short Book Reviews: Encountering Warped Probabilities

Rosebud, by Paul Cornell (Tordotcom)

“The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.” Although they’re not human, at least not in their current form, they’re most definitely people. And they’re fanatically devoted to The Company, which for 300 years has placed them out in the back acres of space. When they come upon a mysterious black sphere, they arrive at a plan, after much squabbling: to capture the object for the Company, thereby earning lots of praise.

But the object is not what anyone might expect; it has the ability manipulate probability and time-lines, thereby controlling the crew of the Rosebud by selecting the futures with the most benign outcomes. As the crew attempts to understand what’s happening to them, their own pasts are revealed, as well as the less-than-benign nature of the Company.

I loved how the crew figures out that their memories are unreliable and what the object doing. In the end, however, I found the “universe-changing” revelations opaque. I wanted to like and understand the story, but ended up just not getting it, which is never a good feeling to leave a reader with.

Tyrannosaurus Lips and Other Wonders of Science

 Once my science classes progressed beyond "the parts of the cell," I loved them. So much so that my college degree is in Biology, which entailed many classes in Physics and General and Organic Chemistry. Fast forward many decades, I had the joy to attend Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, about which I have previously blogged. But I've never given up my love of Things Prehistoric. Here are some wonderful new stories:

T. rex had thin lips and a gummy smile, controversial study suggests

Theropod dinosaurs — a group of bipedal, mostly meat-eating dinosaurs that included T. rex, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus — may instead have concealed their deadly chompers behind thin lips that kept their teeth hydrated and tough enough to crush bones. 

Paleontologists had already suggested that T. rex may have had lips, and there has been debate whether carnivorous dinosaurs looked more like present-day crocodiles, which don’t have lips and have protruding teeth, or if they more likely resembled monitor lizards, whose large teeth are covered by scaly lips.

Rhino-like 'thunder beasts' grew massive in the evolutionary blink of an eye after dinos died off

In the aftermath of the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, a second explosion rocked the animal kingdom. 

This time, it was the mammals that blew up. Rhino-like horse relatives that had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs became gigantic "thunder beasts" as suddenly as an evolutionary lightning strike,  new research, published Thursday (May 11) in the journal Science(opens in new tab), shows.

"Even though other mammalian groups attained large sizes before [they did], brontotheres were the first animals to consistently reach large sizes," study first author Oscar Sanisidro(opens in new tab), a researcher with the Global Change Ecology and Evolution Research Group at the University of Alcalá in Spain. "Not only that, they reached maximum weights of 4-5 tons [3.6 to 4.5 metric tons] in just 16 million years, a short period of time from a geological perspective."

462 million-year-old fossilized eyes and brains uncovered in 'secret' Welsh fossil site

Last year, weird "bramble snout" fossils were documented at the site called "Castle Bank," but new research published May 1 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution(opens in new tab) describes the whole fossil deposit.

[Archives]: Mary Rosenblum on How To Handle Bad Reviews

In light of the recent story about an author who was dropped by her publisher after she engaged in a heated discussion with a reviewer, here are some thoughts from writer and teacher Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018), first published here in 2014 and still relevant.

How To Handle Bad Reviews

by Mary Rosenblum

Paul Klee

What do you do when you get a really nasty review?

You know, we don't teach writers about reviews and reviewers and we should. Everybody thinks of 'good' and 'bad' writing as a standard. If it's 'good' editors and readers will love it! If it's 'bad' nobody will publish the story and readers will hate it. Alas, that mean that many authors who had a really good story felt like failures when they couldn't sell it to a publisher, when it was a matter of simply not suiting the publisher's target audience. The quality of the book was excellent, the publisher felt it wouldn't get the huge numbers of sales they needed in order to show a profit.

Self-publishing has let authors take their stories directly to readers and they vote with their mouse-clicks. You either sell or you don't, but we all know that it's a bit of a slow process at first, that self-publishing is all about the long tail. Meaning your sales are probably not stellar at first, with only one or two books out. So, the feeling of 'success' or 'failure' gets put on hold. Gotta wait to see how many people like it…

Enter the reviewers.

We love Authority. Authorities Know A Lot. Authorities Pass Judgment and They Are Gods. Reviewers Are Authorities And Therefore, They Are Gods.

Really?

You know what? That has never ever ever been the case. Reviewers are people who are willing to read lots and lots of books quite quickly and write down a judgment about the quality of that book to meet a regular deadline. You know what skills are involved? You must be able to read and you must be able to write a relatively coherent commentary and -- most importantly -- do that on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, reliably.

See anything missing? How about a 'standard of excellence' or some other measuring tool so that you can effectively winnow 'good' from 'bad'? Don't see one, do you? You can become a reviewer. You should become a reviewer. It's a great way to meet new potential fans. One of my clients, from prison, has become a regular reviewer for a large circulation magazine.

Reviewers express their opinions. Their opinions. Remember that lacking 'standard of excellence'? Keep it in mind here. Some reviewers only review books they like, others review books they don't like. And the reasons they don't like them may have nothing to do with lots of other people liking your book. Mr. Reviewer may hate cats and is disposed to pick holes in any story that features a cute cat as a player. So your cozy mystery with the Miss Marple type sleuth who owns a cat gets picked to pieces. Will Mr. Reviewer come out and say 'I hate stories with cats'? No, of course not. How unprofessional! But he got even with you for putting that silly feline in there, didn't he? He called your cozy mystery weak, with an obvious ending.

And it really isn't weak and most readers are surprised by your clever ending.

Should you slit your wrists?

Short Book Reviews: Great Concepts, Disappointing Execution

Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott (Random House)

I requested this book from Netgalley based on the description. I loved the idea of an underworld of rebel women living secretly amid the ruins. Alas, the opening was so sedate and the characters so bland and unrelatable, I gave up in the middle of the second chapter. There simply wasn’t enough to keep me reading. By contrast, the next book I picked up grabbed me right away, so I saw no reason to take another look.

The Hundred Loves of Juliet, by Evelyn Skye (Del Rey)

What a great premise — Romeo and Juliet, reincarnated many times over the centuries, always drawn together and always linked in tragedy. In an added twist, Romeo is immortal and remembers all his previous loves. He knows, for example, that whoever Juliet is in any given lifetime, she will die within two years. Juliet, on the other hand, has no idea of their history together. Now in the 21^st Century, writer “Juliette” and sea captain “Romeo” find themselves thrown together by fate and consuming attraction. Can they break the cycle?

Well, maybe, if he would just sit down with her and have a candid conversation. Clearly, he’s failed to do that before, only to watch his beloved-of-this-century die, usually horribly. You would think he’d learn from his disasters. Of all the failings of a typical romance novel, the stupidity of keeping secrets ranks top of my list. Even if “Juliet” thinks he’s delusional and doesn’t believe him, at least he would have given her a rationale for him walking away from her. Which he tries to do, but because she has no idea why, it doesn’t work.

I had other quibbles, including the passages supposedly diaries and so forth from past centuries but laden with contemporary sensibilities, that the heroine tries way too hard to be likeable, that the hero is an example of “female-gaze” and not a real person. Although the prose is for the most part pretty good, it slips into tone deafness all too often.

I suspect that this is a romance with fantastic elements, rather than a reincarnation/time-travel fantasy with a love story, and that science fiction/fantasy readers like myself will have a much harder time with it than romance readers. Regardless, I gave up around the 24% mark. I simply didn’t care what happened next as long as the characters were being so dishonest with each other and themselves.

 

Memories of Baycon friends

I came across this image from Baycon 2006, me with Jeff Carlson and his wife, Diana, and Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. I felt a pang of sadness for the loss of both Jeff and Kevin, Jeff in 2017 and Kevin in 2012, and I've lost touch with Diana. Still, a poignant memory of good friends and good times. And I still have the green dragon T-shirt.