American - Author | 1949 -
Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect.
Edward M. Lerner
TimeTravelUniverseTime TravelOur
Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.
HistoryDetailStoryEnoughHawaii
A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.
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The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.
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Anything that can unambiguously represent two values - while resisting, just a wee bit, randomly flipping from the state you want retained into the opposite state - can encode binary data.
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The challenge - and much of the fun - of writing in an established future history lies in incorporating new knowledge while remaining true to what has gone before. Expanding and enriching, not contradicting.
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Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. 'The Two Towers,' for example, ought never to be read in isolation.
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Readers and viewers will differ about what's totally standalone, what's totally serially dependent, and what's merely enriched by reading/viewing in a particular order.
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Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.
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Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical.
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History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
TechnologyHistoryPoliceLearn
Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
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