Quotes from Anne McCaffrey

The first six of the quotations tweeted from @sueannbowling over the past week are from All the Weyrs of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey.

“It is the function of a machine to do what it is designed to do. Fandarel, approving of Aivas’ insistence on doing exactly as told.

“Success will depend on the learning of new skills and disciplines.” Aivas to the assembled Pernese, after he has told them it is possible to eradicate Thread.

“Learning is not limited to the young.” Aivis speaking to Robinton, who by this time is a very old man and painfully aware of that fact.

“Mankind has always put great faith in oracles.” Aivas to Robinton, when a crowd wishes to question it.

“The winds of change create a climate of resistance. That is to be expected.” Aivas, after it is attacked.

“A full purse can close many a mouth.” Lytol, when the talk turns to how people are getting to Southern.

“He almost missed the escape route, dismissing it as their own trail.” Roi is trying to track the escaping horses. Sue Ann Bowling, Tourist Trap.

Review of Darcy’s Decision, by Maria Grace

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a prequel should at least lead to the possibility of the original book. At least I thought it was universally acknowledged. Darcy’s Decision, by Maria Grace, had me wondering.

Granted, this book is part of a series and I thought the next book might clear things up. But in Pride and Prejudice Darcy’s change of heart, though not really explained, is brought about in some way by Elizabeth. Here a clergyman causes considerable reformation before Darcy even meets Elizabeth. Wickham is certainly a villain and his conduct in this book, though appalling, is in line with the character sketched out by Jane Austin. But the plot development seemed to make his further flirtations next to impossible.

I went ahead and got the second book in the Given Good Principles series, The Future Mrs. Darcy, simply because I was curious as to how on earth the writer was going to get herself out of the corner she had written herself into in a way that made the Jane Austin plot possible. After I read the second book, I started to realize this was never intended to be a prequel. Rather, Ms. Grace has taken the characters and the initial setup of Pride and Prejudice and written her own story. Not a prequel, not a change in point of view, not a sequel, but a “what if?” What if Darcy had been forced to see his selfishness before he ever met Elizabeth? What if Lydia’s flirtatiousness had been recognized earlier? At this point the series has been written out to the point that Darcy and Elizbeth have just met — and not at a ball.

Still, I have few hopes that this series will be anything like as good as Pamela Aidan’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman series.

One of the things this book has forced me to recognize is that there are a number of kinds of books based on Pride and Prejudice. I’ve categorized them (for the moment) as:
1. Non-fiction. This can include scholarly critiques, biographies of Jane Austin, and books about her times, which can be helpful in defining words such as squabs (carriage cushions) or the difference between a curricle and a chaise.
2. Prequel. Books whose main action is before the action of Pride and Prejudice. I haven’t read one, but a book about the marriage of Darcy’s parents, or of Elizabeth’s early life, would certainly qualify.
3. Pride and Prejudice from a different point of view. There are a number from Darcy’s POV, and of course the movie versions are almost of necessity from an omniscient point of view. I haven’t come across versions from other points of view such as Bingley’s, Mary’s, Wickham’s, or those of other characters such as Lady Catherine de Burgh, but they’re certainly possible. Maybe this challenge will help me find some!
4. Same time period, same characters, different story. The Given Good Principles series falls into this category, and so does Lost in Austin.
5. Sequel. This and 3 are the largest categories. Sequels can be straightforward, mysteries (I have several of those), paranormal (sometimes combined with mystery) or for all I know science fiction or any other genre you can think of. Sequels from different points of view exist, too; I’ve just started reading Georgiana Darcy’s Diary, which starts with Darcy and Elizabeth already married and a house party that makes me shudder. (Mrs. Bennett and Lady Catherine are both guests.)

I’m not even going to count romances where the characters start out misunderstanding each other; that’s become a plot element too common to catalog.

Henceforth I’ll try to determine what category a book belongs in before writing a review!

North Pole Weather 1/21/13

White ice, or rather snow on its way to being white ice. This is the road I live on.

The sun will rise at 10:09 this morning and set at 3:57 this afternoon, giving us 5 hours 47 minutes of “daylight.” I actually saw the sun from my window last Thursday, and we’ll be up to 6 hours of daylight by Wednesday. It’s still not what you’d call warm – temperature back and forth around 0°F – but it’s warm enough for us at this time of year. The rain a week ago we can do without!

That rain is still here, as far as the effects are concerned. Roads are covered with white ice and gray ice, though very little black ice. They’re all covered, though, and correspondingly slick. I found myself fishtailing a little going around corners, after staying home for several days. And how many places do you know where they cancel school because the temperature is above freezing? They did, a week ago. But the seed catalogs are starting to pile up! Spring should be coming sometime!

The darker lanes are gray ice. If you look closely, you can see where bits have chipped off, giving a much darker color.

I got another batch of slides in for digitizing, including a couple of hundred I took when I took the long way around returning to Alaska (the first time I drove the Alaska Highway, back when only the first hundred miles were paved.) As I recall, I managed to hit quite a number of parks and monuments going north from the Grand Canyon to the Canadian border between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, all the time traveling with two Siamese cats who started yowling the minute we got off the pavement and continued until we crossed the Alaska border and got back on pavement. I hope the photos aren’t too faded; I might share some of my memories of that trip.

P.S. about 2:30 pm. I just picked up the digitized slides, but haven’t looked at them yet. I did get some pictures of white and gray ice, though. (And I no doubt annoyed cars behind me by driving under the speed limit. It will be a long time before it’s safe to drive at normal speeds.)

Six Sentence Sunday: Horse Power

A bit of a change today, as I’m not posting from War’s End. (I’ll return to it next week.) This is from a short story I’ve just uploaded to Amazon Select and it does tie in with War’s End as a remote prequel. Coralie is from Horizon, the planet on which the action of “Horse Power” takes place, and she’s a descendant (about 8 generations on) of Timi and Amber. Roi, who does not age, is her husband and Audi’s, though Coralie is new to the family and still not quite sure how she feels about Audi. (For that matter Kelty was one of Roi’s rescued children and Ginger is torn between Roi and Roi’s other medical assistant, Mark.)

Here a much younger Roi is checking out a rumor that the colonizing company on Horizon is maneuvering the colonists into debt slavery, and his old friends Timi and Amber, now among the colonists, have put him up for the night in one of their children’s rooms. This is the next morning, edited a little to get to six sentences. Roi is the first speaker.

“Between the birds, the worms and the spiders the children obviously like animals. Is there a reason they don’t have more conventional pets?”

“Spiders?” Amber moaned. “I didn’t know about those.”

Probably just as well he hadn’t mentioned the snake that had been in bed with him this morning, Roi thought. It had been a perfectly friendly little grass snake, but he doubted that Amber would see it that way.

“Horse Power” is priced at $.99, but it’s free today. Pick up a copy, and I’d love reviews. Just click on the book cover to get there.

Incidentally, I finally talked iUniverse into dropping the ebook prices on Homecoming and Tourist Trap to $4.99 each. If Amazon and Barnes & Noble haven’t dropped theirs yet, they should soon.

Now, on to the rest of the Six Sentence Sunday snippets!

The Frame Gene in Horses

Chestnut paint. This particular horse appears to have the frame allele rather than sabino, judging from the face and lower legs, in spite of the ragged appearance of the spots.

Frame is another type of spotting gene in horses, formerly lumped into overo and sometimes called frame overo. It has nothing to do with the KIT locus, unlike tobiano and sabino-1.

Frame involves patterns of white which do not usually include roaning, though frame may occur in conjunction with other genes that cause roaning. In frame, the white areas tend to be arranged horizontally on the sides of the horse, and almost never cross the back. Frame is also almost the only pinto pattern in which the legs remain pigmented, though normal leg markings may occur.

Like all spotted horses, frame horses may vary from mostly colored to predominantly white. A frame horse will almost always have a wide blaze or bald face, and an apparently unspotted horse with a bald face but no white leg markings is likely to be a minimally marked frame. As the white expands the head may become mostly white and the white areas on the sides may expand to cover most of the horse, with the spine and legs being the last areas to lose color.

Another Frame. Note minimal leg markings with wide blaze and white spots on sides.

Frame is due to a single allele, frame (Fr), at a locus called endothelin receptor b (EDNRB) on equine chromosome 17. The locus has two known alleles, frame (Fr^Fr) and wild-type (Fr⁺). Frame horses, some of which are so minimally marked as to look solid, have one frame and one wild-type allele.

Breeding two frame horses together may produce lethal white foals, with two frame alleles. Such foals are born white, and the part of their nervous systems that controls the lower intestinal tract does not develop properly. They normally die within 72 hours of birth, though most are euthanized as soon as they are recognized. Most breeders avoid mating two frame horses together in order to avoid the production of such foals.

The frame allele can be tested for. Such testing has demonstrated that some genetically frame horses appear to be solid colored. Whether this is due to a suppressor gene or genes or is simply the extreme end of random variation of amount of white is unknown.

(If you’re here because you like horses, my story, Horse Power, is free today on Kindle. Click on the cover in the sidebar.)

Jarn’s Journal Year 5 Day 15

 Year 5 Day 15

The vegetation is changing rapidly as I move farther south. I think I must be approaching the summer-wet zone as the shores are rapidly getting greener, though a green that looks somewhat wilted. Palm trees are reappearing, and where rivers flow out of the interior of the continent (as they do here) they are lined with trees.  When I levitate as high as I can while still being able to breathe, it looks as if the coast is bending west ahead of me. I am still far north and west of where I crashed, but the varying climates are starting to make sense.

I think I will curtail my further exploration, though if I am right about approaching a summer-wet area it will be much harder to map in a few moon-cycles than it is now. But I find I am looking forward far more than I expected to the return of the People to the lake shore. Meerkat and Songbird are frantically making adornments for all of us, though I certainly have enough from last year. Songbird, however, insists that I must have ornaments that suit my status as a god, and apparently last year’s won’t do.

Could I possibly convince them to limit their adornments of me to body paint, and concentrate on suitable decoration for WildDog? Or perhaps I could make myself some kind of jewelry? At least I am not going to wear that headdress or leopard skin cloak! They are far too hot!

Jarn’s Journal is the fictional journal of a human-like alien stranded on Earth, in Africa, 125,000 years ago. He has joined (and to his annoyance been accepted as a god) by a group of primitive humans he refers to as The People — their name for themselves. His story is the remote backstory of the Jarnian Confederation, in which my science fiction is set. His Journal to date is on my author website.

Blog Challenges

Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! The sun is back; I actually saw it out of my south windows!

Pardon the chain link; the gate was so frozen in place after the weekend’s thaw I couldn’t open it.

No, I’m not quite crazy; having the sun rise high enough that its beams make it through the trees on the south horizon is as much a promise of spring as the seed catalogs arriving in the mail. If you want some proof of my craziness, I’ve just signed up for my third blogfest of the year. And the dates of the first two are rapidly approaching.

First (in terms of when I signed up) is the Year of the Snake. On February 10, 2013, we pass from the year of the Dragon to the Year of the Snake. The challenge is: “Find within your work a passage that embodies the spirit of the snake as defined above. You are encouraged to include a giveaway, but it’s not required. Snakes would find you foolish, but I won’t.” Well, that’s Sunday, and while Six Sentence Sunday will be gone, I’ll still be posting bits of my work. I’m planning to take Wendy Russo (who’s hosting the hop) a bit more literally than she probably intended, but as it happens the work I’ve been selecting bits from does have an appropriate passage.

Then I couldn’t resist the World Building Blogfest, though it will probably mean double posts on some days. That one’s five days, from January 28 through February 1, with posts on the world you’ve built in your fiction. For me it’ll be worlds, and some of the challenges are going to be “It varies according to which planet you’re on,” with examples. The challenges are:

Post #1 – 1/28 – History & Government
Post #2 – 1/29 – Religion & Culture
Post #3 – 1/30 – Food & Drink
Post #4 – 1/31 – Geography & Climate
Post #5 – 2/1 – Demonstrating world-building in an excerpt

#1 and #3 will be double post days; #5 will be an episode of Jarn’s Journal. I need to get busy writing the other four.

The new one, today, is the Pride and Prejudice Bicentenary Challenge. The idea is to read (or watch) and blog on a number of books and/or videos connected with Jean Austin’s masterpiece. Now I am not generally a romance reader (the modern ones are a little too explicit for my taste) but I adore Jane Austin. I even used Pride and Prejudice and two spin-offs in a post I wrote about point of view. One is allowed to choose one to twelve pieces, so at most this will involve one post a month. I already had nine books that I thought would qualify (not counting the five I used in the point-of-view post) so while it’s a little early to identify which book goes on which day, I will be blogging about one of these books, or others on my TBR list, on (usually) the second Tuesday of each month.

The ones I have are:
The Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (Stephanie Barron)
Darcy’s Story (Janet Aylmer)
The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4^th to the death of  Charles the 1^st (Jane Austin)
The Jane Austin Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World (Margaret C. Sullivan)
Jane Austin and Her Times, 1775-1817 (G. E. Mitton)
Pride and Prescience (Carrie Bebris)
Suspense and Sensibility (Carrie Bebris)
The Matters at Mansfield (Carrie Bebris)
Death Comes to Pemberley (P. D. James)

The post hosting the blog and its comments have already suggested several others, and I’ve added to my iPad:
Georgiana Darcy’s Diary (Anne Elliott)
Mr. Darcy’s Diary (Amanda Grange)
Darcy’s Decision (Maria Grace)

I’ll be watching others’ reviews for what else to add. I have some DVD’s in mind, too, so my reviews will be back, at least occasionally.

Quotes from Andre Norton

Here are the contexts of the quotes tweeted from @sueannbowling between January 10 and January 16.

“I pay no blood. I deal not in death, but in life.” “Sword of Lost Battles” by Andre Norton, in Trey of Swords. Crytha’s words to Ninutra as she refuses the order to kill Tsali.

“ Pride does not put food in the mouth, covering on the back, keep breath within one’s body.” Zarsthor’s Bane, Andre Norton.  Brixia was once Lady of a Keep, but is now a homeless wanderer with only a cat to speak to. But she has another kind of pride, one not based on her outward appearance.

“We share life truly—this lesson have I learned.” Zarsthor’s Bane, Andre Norton.  Brixia is speaking to the tree which has sheltered and fed her.

“I serve no will save my own.” Zarsthor’s Bane, Andre Norton.  Brixia’s defiance when she finds herself herded to the waste.

“One could imagine anything in the night.” Zarsthor’s Bane, Andre Norton.  Brixia is wandering in darkness, half-hearing voices.

“All the world was balanced, light against dark, good against evil.” Zarsthor’s Bane, Andre Norton.  Brixia is trying to decide whether the magic she faces is of the Dark or of the Light.

“Being free wasn’t as—well–free as he had once thought.” Homecoming, Sue Ann Bowling. Roi’s thoughts as he begins to realize the responsibilities of no longer being a slave.

North Pole Weather 1/14/13

We don’t need this! As of 3 pm it’s raining. In North Pole, Alaska, in January. Pity the poor voles. And the snow “curtains” in the second photo have collapsed.

As of 8:37 the temperature is at the freezing point and we have intermittent freezing rain and snow. It is way too warm for this time of year!

The sun will “rise” at 10:30 this morning and “set” at 3:30 this afternoon for a whole 5 hours 5 minutes of alleged daylight. We’re gaining almost 6 minutes a day, now, and the sun is 8 times its diameter above the horizon at noon. I should be able to see the sun from the south windows, once the clouds clear up. Like maybe the end of the week?

We’ve finally had a little snow, though not enough to make up for the settling. It’s also turned warm – too warm for this time of year. No actual icicles yet, but my thermometer was up to 30°F yesterday, which is far too warm when the roads are covered with snow and the forecast calls for mixed rain and snow. I stayed home. Sadly, because yesterday was my critique group – but it’s half an hour away, and the driving conditions were too bad to risk.

The moderate warmth last week caused the thin piles of snow on the raised bed hoops to start clinging together and at the same time weakened it enough that it gradually began to sag over and hang from the underside of the hoops. It didn’t look quite as striking yesterday, as the new snow on the beds just about eliminated the space between the bottom of the hanging snow curtain and the top of the snow beneath it. It’s hard to see from the photo, but the snow here falls so vertically that those thin plastic tubing hoops leave grooves in the snow on the actual beds, as they keep the snow from reaching the bed beneath them. The snow on the two by fours atop the lattice has leaned over on both sides of the lattice this year, giving a scalloped look.

I received the second round of slide digitizations, and once again found out how poorly sorted my slides are. And how much some, but not others, have faded or developed blurriness. I tried to clean this one up with iPhoto, as it’s one of the few I have of Chanty (Deryni Enchantress.) She was only about 6 months old in this one.

Six Sentence Sunday

Bounce is bringing back the alien that was on the ship, something Coralie had never seen before but Audi was able to identify as a Maung, a creature that is a symbiosis of an insect-like intelligence that can parasitize humans and a mammal-like body. Audi is speaking.

“If it dies out here, that will release the infective symbiont, and we’re probably the nearest potential hosts.  We’re much safer keeping it alive.  The problem’s communication.  Ginger, does that reader of yours have a color panel display?  If it does, I can at least say ‘friend’ and ‘stay with us.’  That’s about it, I’m afraid.”

A color panel display? But why would Audi need that?

I’m going to post from my new short story next week, as I’m making it free that day. It’s actually connected to War’s End, as Timi and Amber (characters in Horse Power) are Coralie’s remote ancestors. I’ll be back to Coralie’s group, though. You want to find out what a Maung looks like, don’t you?

For this week, at least, there are well over a hundred authors posting snippets of their work for Six Sentence Sunday. To find them, just click on the logo below.