It’s Fantasy & Science Fiction time again

The new Fantasy & Science Fiction issue is here! Thank the gods, because I’ve had nothing good to read lately and have been morosely picking through the back issues on my Kindle.

Now, if only I could read it in the bath. 

Hmm, I do have that older Kindle and some gallon zip bags…

Thursday Nextisms are Inflectious

Today was another day of rest, so I finished One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. Some of my favorites:

• “The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters.”
• “Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive.”
• “Verb-Ease™ for troublesome irregularity.”
• Malapropism: “The average working life of a Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals was barely fifty readings. The unrelenting comedic misuse of words eventually caused them to suffer postsyntax stress disorder, and once their speech became irreversibly abstruse, they were simply replaced. Most ‘retired’ Mrs. Malaprops were released into the BookWorld, where they turned ferrule…”
• “‘Now, then,’ I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, ‘it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”
• “Large sections of dramatic irony were hacked from the books and boiled down to extract the raw metaphor, rendering once-fine novels mere husks suitable only for scrapping.”
• TransGenre Taxi {every time I see this, my brain first thinks TransGender taxi}
• Dark Reading Matter (DRM). “The hypothetical last resting place of books never published, ideas never penned and poems held only in the heart by poets who died without passing them on.”
• Metamyth
• Narrative Clunker Unit (NCU)
• “Distilling metaphor out of raw euphemism was wasteful and expensive, and the euphemism-producing genres on the island were always squeezing the market. Besides, the by-product of metaphor using the Cracked Euphemism Process liberates irony-238 and dangerous quantities of alliteration, which are associated with downright dangerous disposal difficulties. – Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (9th edition).”
• “Don’t anyone move… I think we’ve driven into a mimefield.”
• “I was reminded of Clark’s Second Law of Egodynamics: ‘For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.’”
• “Plot 9 (Human Drama) revolved around a protagonist returning to a dying parent to seek reconciliation for past strife and then finding new meaning to his or her life. If you live anywhere but HumDram, ‘go do a Plot 9’ was considered a serious insult, the Outlander equivalent of being told to ‘go screw yourself.’ – Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition).”
• Antikern: “What this does is remove the white spaces entirely – within an instant this entire boat and everyone in it will implode into nothing more than an oily puddle of ink floating on the river.”

Also, I learned a new idiom—“Wheels within Wheels”:

“Complex interacting processes, agents, or motives, as in It’s difficult to find out just which government agency is responsible; there are wheels within wheels. This term, which now evokes the complex interaction of gears, may derive from a scene in the Bible (Ezekiel 1:16): ‘Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ [c. 1600]”

and a new word—Epizeuxis

“Repetition of words with no others between, for vehemence or emphasis.” Example: “O horror, horror, horror.” (Macbeth)

Some of my favorite made-up words from “Lost in a Good Book”

Following are just a few of my favorite made-up words from Lost in a Good Book. As the Goliath Book Rating at the front states, “Made-up words: 44.” I have no idea if there are actually 44 made-up words, but if you count character names, it seems plausible. If I had taken notes while reading this and The Eyre Affair, I would have a lot more of these:

• tensionologist
• bloophole
• fworp
• jackanoried
• sprogging time
• Jurisfiction

Time travel & coincidences

This is a week of catching up with colleagues and friends, worky-techy events, the aforementioned planning and scheming, and hopefully, snow! Which could interrupt any or all of the above. And my step-kids are going to be so excited if they get their first snow day already.

I’m well into Lost in a Good Book, the 2nd in the Thursday Next series, a completely different sort of time travel book from Blackout and All Clear. These books are much more light, full of clever word play; often silly. But they still have ways of making me think. Lost is all about coincidences:

“‘On the subject of coincidences, Uncle, any thoughts on what they are and how they come about?

‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely, given the amount of people on the planet and the amount of different things we do in our lives.’

‘I see,’ I replied slowly. ‘That explains things on a minor coincidental level, but what about the bigger coincidences? How high would you rate seven people in a Skyrail shuttle all called Irma Cohen and the clues of a crossword reading out “Meddlesome Thursday goodbye” just before someone tried to kill me?’ … 

‘Thursday, think for a moment about the fact that the universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back onto the table. … Every atom of the glass that shattered would contravene no laws of physics if it were to rejoin—on a subatomic level all particle interactions are reversible. Down there we can’t tell which event precedes which. It’s only out here that we can see things age and define a strict direction in which time travels. …  That these things don’t happen is because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder in the universe always increases; the amount of this disorder is a quantity known as entropy.’

‘So,’ I said slowly, ‘What you are saying is that really really weird coincidences are caused by a drop in entropy?’”

‘Exactly so. But it’s only a theory.’

Obsessing and reading, in that order

What I’m reading this week:

• Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2012
• The Eyre Affair. I’m hoping that I’ll start clicking with the principal character, Thursday Next, so that I can go on to read the next 5 novels in the series. So far, I’ve liked Shades of Grey a lot more—I’ve seen rumours of a sequel, but can’t find it anywhere… Fforde has a few other series that I can check out as well.

What I’m obsessing about this week:

• What’s going to be economical and practical for vegan school lunches for two 11-year-olds and a 15-year-old? Are the other kids going to think they’re weird? Thankfully there are plenty of good resources available on healthy vegan kids, like Vegan For Life.
• Getting my step-kids settled. Kid #2 arrives tomorrow. The twins start their new school Monday.