Hmmmm

OK, so my year of Sci Fi only is over, with only minor transgressions along the way. As I was writing my 'novel' for 2009 NaNoWriMO, I realized I had never read a romance. So last month I did, just to get a feel for what (some) woman read. Interesting reading. I chose Nora Roberts (Dance Upon the Air), and I must say, I enjoyed the quality for the writing. The only real difference that jumped out at me in terms of the writing was the plot - it just wasn't the sort of thing I was into. I liked the characters OK, but the conflict wasn't the sort of thing I enjoy. Which is what I should have expected. There was no reason to expect the writing would be a lower quality. I really did like the characters. It was just not my flavor of story. The learning continues.

I just finished Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula Winner Timescape . I will review it over at Jupiter Three , but let me just say, it definitely qualifies as Hard Sci Fi. The author is a physicist, and his handling of the physics of time and space was deep enough to boggle my mind. OK, maybe not a stretch, but still. The end of the copy I have has an excellent essay by Susan Stone Blackburn entitled Science Meets Literature , which I found to be just as interesting as the book. The essay was published in 1988, and helped me to understand the book after I read it. (Warning - the essay includes spoilers, so don't read it first, no matter how helpful it would be!) Enough said here; but if you are looking for a good example of Hard Science Fiction, this is an excellent sample!

DePauw University has some excellent articles archived on the Hard Science Fiction genre. I found it interesting that books dealing with social or religious issues are more marketable than those dealing with harder topics. But no, I guess it makes sense.

I realize as I read that I have more interest in the themes explored in soft sci fi than in the purity of hard sci fi. I like it when the facts are as true as we can know them, don't get me wrong. I'll go out on a limb and say I loved the works of Michael Crichton, and the research he put into his books. But I especially like the social issues he explored. I'm reading C.J.Cherryh right now. I have mixed feelings. I don't like the "start a character, then skip 200 years" style. On the other hand, I like some of the political angles she plays with. I am reading Foreigner , and once I got into it it reminds me somewhat of Shogun. We'll see.

I used PDT, a PHP version of eclipse, to debug my issues. I had to add the Wordpress files to the PHP include of my project, then I could run my script in debug mode. My issues were multiple. The syntax error was an extra closing parenthesis (doh!). More importantly, $wpdb->query did not work as I expected. If the query fails, it returns false. If the query succeeds, it returns the number of rows acted on (rows selected, or inserted, or deleted, etc...). Was more confusing to me, but makes sense I guess, is that $wpdb->print_error() will still return a valid String on success, complete with an error message (but no error). So my insert was succeeding, but I thought I had an error, causing my error logic to execute. All better now. I now have my first working plugin!

I have been working on a plugin for Jupiter Three that uses shortcodes to create a custom Amazon post featuring a single Book based on ASIN. What I have run into is issues with debugging - how do I create simple debug output so I can see if my code is running correctly? I get errors from Mysql using wpdb but not clear on what the errors are. The interesting thing about the DB errors is that my inserts still go in, but a drop table won't drop. I have posts in the forums. Hope to hear something soon. I am stuck.

I ask because I am reading Alastair Reynolds' 2000 novel Revelation Space , and that is how it is being touted. Apparently that label was not originally a positive one. Wikipedia states that it was originally applied to "the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving [story]". It is more generally applied to stories where "settings, characters, battles, powers, and themes tend to be very large-scale". OK, I assume the second is the reason it is applied to Revelation Space . It's taking me some time to read it, and it was a little slow to get into, but now that I am, I want to see what happens. I will be reviewing it at jupiterthree.com when I finish it.