Let's see. Other problem... ah, right. There are a few chapters here where the characters start off talking, and then internal monologue explains who they are and why they're all there, in a very Now You Know The Rest Of The Story type way. This made me flip to the front of the book to see if they'd been published as seperate short stories in Analog or Asimov or some other sci-fi magazine previously. Didn't see any notice of it, so I was left wondering about that. S'weird.
The three stories "Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish", and "Viewed in a Harsh Light" were written first. The first two, in slightly different form than seen in the book, were actually circulated around a vampire mailing list in the early 90s. The three stories together were offered as an electronic novel "Morgantown: The Jason Wood Files", from Hyperbooks, for a few years. The other sections -- "Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies", "Live and Let Spy", and "Mirror Image" were written in a 2-month period when Baen indicated they just might have some interest in the story. (those who bought the electronic version I sent a free copy of the book when it came out).
In consequence there is one section which is clearly a recap (somewhere around page 80) which we missed on editing, until it was too late. C'est la vie. I would also probably slightly rewrite the first story if given the chance, to add in appropriate foreshadowing for Verne.
Let's see... uh. The story DOES occasionally seem to cross into Uberprotaganist lines, where Jason seems to have the resources and contacts to buy his way into obtaining pretty much any information on Earth. ... on the other hand, this is his job. I'll allow it.
Jason IS supposed to be UberInfo man, pretty close, though he does have to use contacts for some of it. And of course that's only for normal info. For other info he needs SPECIAL sources.
The plot also occasionally thickened to the point where I just couldn't follow it at all, so I let it wash over me and skimmed ahead to less muddy waters. This might have been a 3 AM thing.
That would be during the flashback sequences in "Viewed in a Harsh Light", I'm guessing. What I refer to as "The Biggest Test your WSOD will ever have". There are several readers who stopped dead there. I don't blame them. OTOH, I promise that if you manage to swallow THAT helping of WSOD, I will never ask you to take as big a gulp ever again in my writing. Digital Knight in a sense serves as a compressed introduction to virtually all important elements of my multiverse.
The more spoilery stuff probably ahead.
...they gone? Okay. Remember those Rules I mentioned? There's a couple that get a good solid boot to the sensitive spots. Here's a sampler.
Rule 1 - Vampires and Werewolves work pretty much like you'd expect from watching horror movies and reading Anne Rice novels.
Rulebreaker - Most people in this story have seen the movies, read the books, and are creative enough to come up with new solutions to old problems. Scream-like? A little, but who doesn't love seeing technology versus tradition acted out on this kind of scale? (And here I am thinking season two Buffy. "What's -that- do?" ...uh, go ask a fan for the ref.)
I know the ref. :) I always think of the quote from Predator: "if it bleeds... we can kill it."
One thing I insist on is knowing how and why the Powers work in my world; as a GM for 27+ years, it's an ingrained habit. Thus I had to work out how Vampires worked, and why, and the same for Werewolves. In actuality, of course, there's several different types of each, though you won't see any of the other types in DK; they're mostly resident on Zarathan, not Earth.
Rule 2 - The human world is generally too blind/unwilling to see The Awful Truth. Mysterious Things will go undetected.
Rulebreaker - The human world gets a good hard slap upside the head around halfway through the book, and the ramifications of such are covered, some in detail.
And this will go on. Jason in this case echoes my own feelings about the idiocies of things like the X-Files which manage to maintain an increasingly more ludicrous coverup for more and more flimsy reasons.
Continued again -- jeez, this limit is annoying...
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momijizukamori
The author comments on the Digital Knight review... Part 1
Date: 2004-01-19 06:49 pm (UTC)Let's see. Other problem... ah, right. There are a few chapters here where the characters start off talking, and then internal monologue explains who they are and why they're all there, in a very Now You Know The Rest Of The Story type way. This made me flip to the front of the book to see if they'd been published as seperate short stories in Analog or Asimov or some other sci-fi magazine previously. Didn't see any notice of it, so I was left wondering about that. S'weird.
The three stories "Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish", and "Viewed in a Harsh Light" were written first. The first two, in slightly different form than seen in the book, were actually circulated around a vampire mailing list in the early 90s. The three stories together were offered as an electronic novel "Morgantown: The Jason Wood Files", from Hyperbooks, for a few years. The other sections -- "Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies", "Live and Let Spy", and "Mirror Image" were written in a 2-month period when Baen indicated they just might have some interest in the story. (those who bought the electronic version I sent a free copy of the book when it came out).
In consequence there is one section which is clearly a recap (somewhere around page 80) which we missed on editing, until it was too late. C'est la vie. I would also probably slightly rewrite the first story if given the chance, to add in appropriate foreshadowing for Verne.
Let's see... uh. The story DOES occasionally seem to cross into Uberprotaganist lines, where Jason seems to have the resources and contacts to buy his way into obtaining pretty much any information on Earth. ... on the other hand, this is his job. I'll allow it.
Jason IS supposed to be UberInfo man, pretty close, though he does have to use contacts for some of it. And of course that's only for normal info. For other info he needs SPECIAL sources.
The plot also occasionally thickened to the point where I just couldn't follow it at all, so I let it wash over me and skimmed ahead to less muddy waters. This might have been a 3 AM thing.
That would be during the flashback sequences in "Viewed in a Harsh Light", I'm guessing. What I refer to as "The Biggest Test your WSOD will ever have". There are several readers who stopped dead there. I don't blame them. OTOH, I promise that if you manage to swallow THAT helping of WSOD, I will never ask you to take as big a gulp ever again in my writing. Digital Knight in a sense serves as a compressed introduction to virtually all important elements of my multiverse.
The more spoilery stuff probably ahead.
...they gone? Okay. Remember those Rules I mentioned? There's a couple that get a good solid boot to the sensitive spots. Here's a sampler.
Rule 1 - Vampires and Werewolves work pretty much like you'd expect from watching horror movies and reading Anne Rice novels.
Rulebreaker - Most people in this story have seen the movies, read the books, and are creative enough to come up with new solutions to old problems. Scream-like? A little, but who doesn't love seeing technology versus tradition acted out on this kind of scale? (And here I am thinking season two Buffy. "What's -that- do?" ...uh, go ask a fan for the ref.)
I know the ref. :) I always think of the quote from Predator: "if it bleeds... we can kill it."
One thing I insist on is knowing how and why the Powers work in my world; as a GM for 27+ years, it's an ingrained habit. Thus I had to work out how Vampires worked, and why, and the same for Werewolves. In actuality, of course, there's several different types of each, though you won't see any of the other types in DK; they're mostly resident on Zarathan, not Earth.
Rule 2 - The human world is generally too blind/unwilling to see The Awful Truth. Mysterious Things will go undetected.
Rulebreaker - The human world gets a good hard slap upside the head around halfway through the book, and the ramifications of such are covered, some in detail.
And this will go on. Jason in this case echoes my own feelings about the idiocies of things like the X-Files which manage to maintain an increasingly more ludicrous coverup for more and more flimsy reasons.
Continued again -- jeez, this limit is annoying...