There are times when I love details
May. 5th, 2012 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesThere be spoilers here. I'll keep anything that's not spoiler-rific outside the cuts if you want to read it anyway.
I read the sample chapters to Mira Grant's (aka![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanan_mcguire) upcoming book, Blackout. And something caught me...
So, Georgia Mason, our narrator and protagonist, dies in Feed (handing off protagonist-ing duties to her brother). At the beginning of Blackout, it's revealed that the CDC has made a clone of Georgia and somehow recovered her memories from her corpse, so Copy Georgia takes a bit to realize it. Not long; unlike original-flavor Georgia, Copy Georgia has correctly-working eyes. That and her last memory before waking up in a quarantine ward is ordering Shaun to shoot her before the virus finished converting her to a zombie basically tipped the scales between to Highly Unlikely scenarios (the Government has the ability to transplant memories into a cloned body vs. not only did I survive a headshot and zombie virus, but somehow my eyes are both cured and repaired of an uncurable condition).
Anyway, one of the staff insinuate that Shaun died when Georgia did. She has an immediate emotional reaction (read: crying and panic and what do you expect, it was her brother and she's horrible codependent on him). After... she starts logicing at it and notes that they never actually said anything about Shaun, she's being denied internet access so she can't check, and the only skill Georgia considers she has that would be worth a very expensive resurrection is 'talking Shaun down from the warpath'.
But this isn't about that.
Because of Georgia's damaged eyes, she spent years being unable to cry. So, when she's considering the symptoms of 'I just sobbed my eyes out', she doesn't realize that things like the redness and puffiness and such are normal post-crying feelings, and only figures it must be normal from the fact that none of the doctors or orderlies are acting like she's about to turn into a zombie and attack. It's details like that that make the setting; realizing that what is perfectly normal for the readers is alien to the narrator.
There's another one in when Seanan McGuire asked who would win in a fight, Georgia, or the heroine of her other series, October Daye. Seanan noted that, while George was a better shot, Toby had one advantage.
Toby is known as working blood magic: she can use blood to see through another's eyes, even if they died. Moreover, she grew up in mid-century America. Georgia grew up in post-Rising America where any sign of blood was a risk of someone becoming a zombie, and any fluids from a zombie could spread the disease if they got into your body. So, Georgia has a reflexive avoidance of blood because of this, something a character from a setting that doesn't involve zombies just wouldn't have. Especially not a changeling that needs blood to work some magic.
Another worldbuilding detail that I didn't think about until the author pointed it out.
Somewhere in my brain is an essay comparing Feed with Robert Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars. Mostly in that they are first-person narratives told by a young woman that are taken over by her brother at/after the climax; in Podkayne's case, Heinlein originally wrote her as dying, but editors told him he wasn't allowed to kill the hero of a YA book, so she ended up comatose. Later editions often ended up printing Heinlein's original ending; the copy I read included both and a bunch of fan essays debating the merits.
Heinlein was on record as wanting to shake up the genre of juvenile SF; basically by noting that sometimes Our Heroes' victories come at a cost, and killing his narrator was the best way he could think about doing it in a way that no one could ignore. Grant, on the other hand, was sticking in-genre for zombie movies with the 'anyone can die', but even so, you don't expect the only narrator to get the axe. Heinlein at least had Podkayne's brother, Clarke in for a couple of asides. Though I suppose Grant also had excepts from Shaun's writings before she gave him narration duty.
(One thing I didn't like was the idea that Podkayne's death would be the thing that put Clark on the straight and narrow, since arguably, the fact he had more brains than sense, was what escalated the situation. My inner feminist seethes at the idea of a female character being reduced to something to motivate a male, because we've not reached the point where it's just as common as the reverse.)
I read the sample chapters to Mira Grant's (aka
seanan_mcguire) upcoming book, Blackout. And something caught me...So, Georgia Mason, our narrator and protagonist, dies in Feed (handing off protagonist-ing duties to her brother). At the beginning of Blackout, it's revealed that the CDC has made a clone of Georgia and somehow recovered her memories from her corpse, so Copy Georgia takes a bit to realize it. Not long; unlike original-flavor Georgia, Copy Georgia has correctly-working eyes. That and her last memory before waking up in a quarantine ward is ordering Shaun to shoot her before the virus finished converting her to a zombie basically tipped the scales between to Highly Unlikely scenarios (the Government has the ability to transplant memories into a cloned body vs. not only did I survive a headshot and zombie virus, but somehow my eyes are both cured and repaired of an uncurable condition).
Anyway, one of the staff insinuate that Shaun died when Georgia did. She has an immediate emotional reaction (read: crying and panic and what do you expect, it was her brother and she's horrible codependent on him). After... she starts logicing at it and notes that they never actually said anything about Shaun, she's being denied internet access so she can't check, and the only skill Georgia considers she has that would be worth a very expensive resurrection is 'talking Shaun down from the warpath'.
But this isn't about that.
Because of Georgia's damaged eyes, she spent years being unable to cry. So, when she's considering the symptoms of 'I just sobbed my eyes out', she doesn't realize that things like the redness and puffiness and such are normal post-crying feelings, and only figures it must be normal from the fact that none of the doctors or orderlies are acting like she's about to turn into a zombie and attack. It's details like that that make the setting; realizing that what is perfectly normal for the readers is alien to the narrator.
There's another one in when Seanan McGuire asked who would win in a fight, Georgia, or the heroine of her other series, October Daye. Seanan noted that, while George was a better shot, Toby had one advantage.
Toby is known as working blood magic: she can use blood to see through another's eyes, even if they died. Moreover, she grew up in mid-century America. Georgia grew up in post-Rising America where any sign of blood was a risk of someone becoming a zombie, and any fluids from a zombie could spread the disease if they got into your body. So, Georgia has a reflexive avoidance of blood because of this, something a character from a setting that doesn't involve zombies just wouldn't have. Especially not a changeling that needs blood to work some magic.
Another worldbuilding detail that I didn't think about until the author pointed it out.
Somewhere in my brain is an essay comparing Feed with Robert Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars. Mostly in that they are first-person narratives told by a young woman that are taken over by her brother at/after the climax; in Podkayne's case, Heinlein originally wrote her as dying, but editors told him he wasn't allowed to kill the hero of a YA book, so she ended up comatose. Later editions often ended up printing Heinlein's original ending; the copy I read included both and a bunch of fan essays debating the merits.
Heinlein was on record as wanting to shake up the genre of juvenile SF; basically by noting that sometimes Our Heroes' victories come at a cost, and killing his narrator was the best way he could think about doing it in a way that no one could ignore. Grant, on the other hand, was sticking in-genre for zombie movies with the 'anyone can die', but even so, you don't expect the only narrator to get the axe. Heinlein at least had Podkayne's brother, Clarke in for a couple of asides. Though I suppose Grant also had excepts from Shaun's writings before she gave him narration duty.
(One thing I didn't like was the idea that Podkayne's death would be the thing that put Clark on the straight and narrow, since arguably, the fact he had more brains than sense, was what escalated the situation. My inner feminist seethes at the idea of a female character being reduced to something to motivate a male, because we've not reached the point where it's just as common as the reverse.)
