The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)

[Buster's Uncle]

  The Papandreous told me about their adventure with a stasis box purchased from the Outsiders by the Piersen's Puppeteers. They were transporting it and a Puppeteer named Nessus when they were ambushed and captured in a secret Kzinti operation. A computerized spy's weapon found inside the box presumed the Kzinti had killed the rightful owner of the secret weapon, and self-destructed, killing all of the Kzinti. The Popandreous narrowly escaped because they were safely in a crash web at that moment. The Outsiders were aliens that migrated from the galactic core to it's rim and back, trading in information. The Puppateers  where named for their appearance, but it also described their nature- they were an advanced but cowardly race that acted behind the scenes. The Kzinti were an intelligent martial race that resembled bipedal tigers with ratlike tails.

You are caught red-handed expositing.  TMI.  There's very, very little nothing (I think) here I need to know for this story.  The Papandreous already had been established to have had a stasis box adventure in the previous paragraph, and that's all I needed to know - they're clever adventurers.  Niven wasn't all that much for spoiling one story in a later one any more than he had to for the later one to make sense.  Kill.  Kill the whole paragraph, unless I'm missing something...

[Buster's Uncle]

"How would you go to war against a race of alien telepathic mind readers with mind control, Jason?" I asked.

"I want to understand how the Tnuctipun did it. I want to know their mindset so that I can know why they made the Bandersnatchi the way they did. So please try to put yourself in their place for a moment."

Formatting - looks like Jason's answer, initially.  It's a good addition to the previous draft, fixing that they're not talking about fighting Grogs, but one/same paragraph.

-Suddenly, I'm parsing the writing, and that's a little harder to take than the fun kicking around ideas.  Note that no "you suck" is being said, even if it feels a little that way.  I have sensitive people in my life who can be very hard to help, so being careful in saying there's no You Suck...

[Rusty Edge]

"Anne-Marie was a willowy 'Crashlander'" -is that right?  I was thinking Wunderlander -almost as tall- or is that just what you had her in the previous draft?

Frankly, I don't remember which planet she is from, I'll have to check that fact.  The two weren't very distinct in my mind when I began the project. My hunch is she's from Wunderland, but that suggestion could have come from "The Asteroid Queen"

It's good to get your impressions along the way. The expositions tie together eventually, but there is some redundancy, so there's room to drop some of it and still have it make sense.  I was working from the writers write theory. Get the idea in print, it's easier to delete later than remember later.  I'll stick with the assumption that I'll do a re-write accordingly, beginning with a copy and starting a second draft.

Now as to which themes make the best story, well, that's something to be decided. But if the opening drags and I lose the reader, what good does the rest of it do? .


Nah. Well, as to how criticism feels, a lot of it depends on the day I read it, as I'm sure you know personally. Today, no big deal.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I totally have the days when EVERYthing sounds like You Suck...

Bed now.  Sleep tight.

[Rusty Edge]

Aha.
Well, I know what's happening here. My wife wanted to know why I was typing so much. I explained. She said she wanted to read it when it's finished.

So I wind up trying to explain Known space, writing for her and other uninformed rather than writing for the AC2 audience who is knowledgeable.

[Buster's Uncle]

No, that's doing it right -Niven's pretty good about not assuming the reader knows background- just, too info-dense with the exposition slows the flow of the plot and all that.  There's also the thing that Garvey is first-person, and he wouldn't explain stuff contemporary children probably know in telling his story, though you and Niven alike have to fudge that one a lot...

[Rusty Edge]

It's that time of year again, I'm packing for the fishing trip, so this month is shot in terms of me advancing the story. It's not on my mind. So you can procrastinate about this. But, for me to finish the thing, I'll need somebody to read it and give me input about what the real core story is here, and then we can discus why I included what I did, and I can work out revised versions accordingly, for comparison.

[Buster's Uncle]

I suck.

That is, Roger that.  Catch some big ones and be sure to tell even bigger lies...

[Rusty Edge]

Nah. You're working on all of these graphics, which will be really cool if the new game doesn't suck.

Short explanation- there will be bad connectivity at the lake this year. mostly phone.

[Buster's Uncle]

Interesting thought in re: making sense of Know Space: Earth's solar system is non-trivially variant from our own -Mercury and Pluto, not to mention Persephone in Protector- and I'm not sure if it's possible to reconcile The Coldest Place's tidally-locked Mercury with the one that seems to rotate properly in Madness Has its Place.  Less problematic, perhaps, is agreement between Wait it Out, though the Nerva rocket should have set Pluto afire, and World of Ptaavs - the protagonist of the former must have landed on the hemisphere away from Charon, if that Pluto has a Charon, and may have landed at a very different part of the Pluto year and missed the oxygen ice layer.

[Buster's Uncle]

Two things:

I finally found my copy of Neutron Star a few days ago, and have now re-read Relic Of Empire, The Soft Weapon and The Handicapped - no new insights, though.  Anne-Marie IS a Wunderlander, and in the middle of the story, Jason even says, worried that the Kzin in the room will overhear their whispered conversation, "I wish I spoke Wunderlander" She replies "I don't speak Wunderlander.  It's a dead language."

And irrelevant to this project, but there's a post-Crashlander Beowulf Shaffer story in one of the Man-Kzin War books that I haven't read called Fly-By-Night set during the flight to Home.  One can only hope that it includes at least a handwave to account for all the Louis never allowing anything about knowing either of his Dads, despite being confronted with related artifacts - Carlos is even constantly mentioned by name throughout Ringworld's Children.  (Did Louis just grow up strongly indoctrinated to keep his fugitive family's secrets?)  (Louis is also in the last {x} of Worlds book, which I also have yet to get my hands on.)

[Buster's Uncle]

...The possessive of "it" is "its", not "it's".  You'll want to fix that in a few places.

Not absolutely sure, but I think both the beginning Garvey exposition and the whole sequence talking to the 'snatch would profit from ruthless trimming for pace.  Everything in the middle with the Papandreous is gold.  Big Gee et al bringing some electronics experts to Jinx could maybe be clearer it's for the hyperphones (how can those work inside a gravity well, anyway?  The Regional President of General Products Jinx had to spend over a month sitting outside the Sirius system for At the Core to make sense, as written) and they really should have been told to bring some experts in booze chemistry, too...

[Buster's Uncle]

Fun fact about kicking around ideas with an author:  you put my Sunflowers-as-terraforming-and eco-warfare tools in Rich Mann's mouth, got in, got out, no one got hurt.  That gives me some proprietary pride in an excellent story.  A ruthless trimming draft to make the exposition terse and the snatch less verbose would yield a narrative lean and deft and clever, in an excellent Niven voice.  PROFESSIONAL quality.

-In fact, come up with a rationale/role and a character to rewrite to put a kzin prominent into Garvey's team, and you've got yourself a Man-Kzin Wars story I think they'd pay you to include in the series (not all that many of the stories honor the war part) and you'd find our ideas about Tnuctipun bio-artifacts turning up in other people's stories in the future.  You could sell it, I'm pretty sure.  It's that good.

In fact, I'm going to edit the OP to put in a copyright notice for you - though this folder doesn't legally count as public publication, I think, having so very few able to see.

[Buster's Uncle]

Bumped for Geo.

[Buster's Uncle]

Syn -and anyone else looking- do yourself, me and Rusty a favor, and start here:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17817.msg93719#msg93719
and read the latest draft of Rusty's story, then comment. It's most of the page with only one interruption from me, before the Epilogue.

He wants your input even if you dislike Larry Niven's work, of which this is a fanfic.  He wants it to be good, full stop, wants reaction.  Peacemill reading commenting is great as only he and I are known to have read.  If you don't finish on the first try, discuss what you did read.  That's still a big plus, even if you never finish.



If you DO like the Niven's Known Space oeuvre, then do follow-up reading the whole thread and start quoting and commenting as the whim strikes.  I think it's golden conversation for, especially, the Slaver corner of Known Space.  I wanna conversate more.