| Fine Structure: The Story So Far |
[May. 4th, 2008|06:49 pm] |
There's a new Fine Structure story up, called The Story So Far. Go read it. Actually, there's another one that I never got round to posting about, called Failure Mode, which is... rather moving, actually. Great stuff.
Anyway, the missing story ( has now been revealed... )
I'm not going to write too much now, because I have a hangover. But I think there'd be some benefit to thinking harder about the fictional physics - I definitely should have spotted the "superlight" connection. I think there may be more insights to come from that source.
There's now a comments system on the Fine Structure pages themselves, which I suspect will largely replace the discussions here. Please continue to comment on my posts if you want, though! I'm hoping someone else will start blogging in depth about FS. Maybe we need a Fine Structure wiki? An E2 node? |
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| Too Much Information |
[Mar. 9th, 2008|12:04 pm] |
There's a new Fine Structure story out, called Too Much Information. In addition, the Crash stories have been incorporated into their own subdirectory, called 1970-. Some analysis of TMI and its implications has already started in the comments threads of my previous FS posts, and I'll have to revise my own thoughts in light of it, but for now:
( Discussion, including spoilers )
By the way, if anyone else is planning on blogging about FS, please leave a link here, so we can all follow what each other are saying :-) |
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| More Fine Structure badgery |
[Feb. 29th, 2008|02:40 pm] |
It's become apparent to me that many of the mysteries in Fine Structure depend on the precise order in which the stories occur. Time to get systematic. Obviously, this whole post is full of spoilers.
( Plot summaries )
( Chronology )
I should probably put all this stuff into some sort of Hasse diagram, but right now I can't be bothered :-) |
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| Thoughts on Sam Hughes' Fine Structure |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|02:10 pm] |
I've been reading some science fiction written by a guy called Sam Hughes1, and posted on his website Things of Interest. Most recently, I've been reading his Ed stories, about Sam and his (fictional) genius flatmate Ed, who builds battlemechs in their basement and saves the world from annihilation on a regular basis, and to whom Sam plays a sort of bemused Watson. It starts out as a fun bit of wish-fulfilment à la early Sluggy Freelance, and turns into something rather more. Well worth a read.
But I don't want to talk about that: I want to talk about his novel-in-progress, Fine Structure, and where I think it's going. It's a collection of loosely-linked short stories whose connections only become apparent later on, somewhat like Trainspotting: I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but let's just say it has elements of Contact, Superman and Strata, in a refreshingly hard-sf style. And it's garnered positive reviews from no less a person than David Brin (search for "Power of Two"). It's probably best to read them in order, but I started with Power of Two and it didn't do me too much harm (and it's one of my favourites).
Edit: further posts on this topic can be found here.
( MAJOR spoilers. Go and read the stories first! )
A word of warning: I have literally lost days to browsing Sam's website. Interesting days, mind :-)
1 Some of you might even know him: he was a maths student at Corpus, Cambridge a few years ago. Or you might have encountered him on some online community or other: he generally goes by the username "sam512". |
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