{"id":9592,"date":"2014-09-21T08:57:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T12:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9592"},"modified":"2014-09-21T08:57:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-21T12:57:39","slug":"the-pleasure-of-working-things-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/09\/21\/the-pleasure-of-working-things-through\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pleasure of Working Things Through"},"content":{"rendered":"

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould’s Exo<\/cite><\/a> (excerpt at Tor<\/a>). This is the fourth book in the Jumper<\/cite> series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn’t be worth much of a review, because if you haven’t read the first three, this book won’t make a lick of sense. If you have read the others, it’s a worthy sequel, but three earlier books makes for a lot of backstory to explain in writing the book up.<\/p>\n

It’s worth noting, though, because it belongs to a sort of unofficial subgenre: books about Working Things Through. The story includes a huge amount of detail about the building of space suits and space habitats, which you might think would be crashingly dull. But it comes about fairly naturally in the course of the plot, while the main characters use the information to build a space suit and habitat, and because of that, it’s weirdly enjoyable. The characters are learning practical stuff for them, and the reader gets to enjoy a sped-up version of the learning process by proxy.<\/p>\n

Most of Gould’s earlier books also belong in this same subgenre; they almost all feature a character learning or employing some sophisticated skill (martial arts, scuba diving, flying). Even when the skill in question is something impossible– say, in the three previous books about people who can teleport– there’s an enjoyable level of rigor to the way the characters work through their abilities, and figure out how to employ them in the right way to deal with the problems they’re facing.<\/p>\n

Of course, Gould’s not the only one working in this general vein. I’ve read umpteen Recluce novels by L.E. Modesitt because they tend to scratch the same itch– the characters are generally apprenticed or newly enlisted, and spend most of the book working out how to do what they need to, and then systematically doing it. Another great one for this is Jack McDevitt, particularly the series I think of as Antiquities Dealers Innnn Spaaaace!!! (officially the Alex Benedict series<\/a>). And, of course, there’s a lot of this sort of thing in older SF novels, though a lot of them tend to spoil things a bit by going on at length with their political theories about How The World Works.<\/p>\n

The naive young protagonist who needs to learn the ropes is an eternal staple of sf, of course, being a very convenient excuse for infodumps in the form of instructive lectures. But the sort of books I’m talking about go well beyond that. The instructional sequences in most books are basically the literary equivalent of a montage in a movie– something you pass through quickly to get to the part where the hero confronts the Big Bad Guy. Harry Potter spends just enough time in class for his teachers to infodump about whatever new thing is needed to understand the plot of that book, but those are just a handful of scenes in a much larger plot. The books I’m thinking of make the learning central to everything; applied to Hogwarts, it would reduce the thwarting-of-Voldemort bits to a brief montage near the end.<\/p>\n

The failure mode of this sort of book is that it feels light on plot– a number of the Recluce books are kind of anticlimactic, and the eventual confrontation with the Big Bad Guys in Exo<\/cite> just narrowly misses feeling tacked-on. I’m a sucker for this when it’s done well, though, and Gould excels at it.<\/p>\n

(This is not unrelated to my desire for Ponder Stibbons stories<\/a>. And also my general scientific leaning…)<\/p>\n

So, you know, if you like that kind of story, check Gould’s books out. Exo<\/cite> is yet another example of a story where the real fun is watching the protagonist Working Things Through in a systematic way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould’s Exo (excerpt at Tor). This is the fourth book in the Jumper series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn’t be worth much of a review, because if you haven’t read the first three, this book won’t make a lick… Continue reading The Pleasure of Working Things Through<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}