ENDGAME advance readers request

[ksmith]

eosblog is looking for 10 folks to read/review ENDGAME:

"If you're interested, send an email to eosbooks@harpercollins.com with your name and address."

US readers only, unfortunately.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am somewhat dubious about hybridizing species from unrelated worlds.

I don't remember exactly when this happened but I ran into two otherwise dissimilar paranormal romances with the same background detail and commented on the odd coincidence on my LJ [1]. Ilona Andrews observed that her book would make number three, at which point I had to point out to her that I'd mentioned getting her book just a couple of days before she joined my FL.

1: This happens to me all the time. I get runs of "books about magical apocalypses in the future", followed by "horrible families do terrible things to each other", "Aging male SF writer forgets how to do basic math" and so on. I don't know if this is random chance, a reflection publishing realities or if someone at Bookspan deliberately arranges for streams of themed books to be sent my way.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I am somewhat dubious about hybridizing species from unrelated worlds.

I did realize that I was standing on shaky ground there. Some backstory that I never included implied some sort of common ancestry--that probably would have made a decent story but not one I was interested in writing at the time. I did take pains to note that these weren't rapid processes--they required a lot of medical supervision, they could blow up at any time, and it was a long road to completion. I was actually surprised that more folks didn't take issue with it, but hybridization had been played roles in other stories, and with a lot fewer physical consequences. I think it's almost an accepted trope, like traversible wormhole networks.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Even in hardish SF, biology tends to be the child who shows up at school with unexplained bruises. Readers tend to have a high tolerance for problematic biology in SF.

Take Niven's Pak. In Known Space, humans come from a planet in the galactic core and are utterly unrelated to anything on Earth back to the days when the Slavers seeded worlds with life. The problem is that humans are clearly related to terrestrial life and the idea that two unrelated worlds would come with eg the same basic design of skeleton is absurd. The idea that a species could randomly pick a world 28,000 light years from home and manage to hit one whose lifeforms were so similar is also pretty silly.

The really odd thing is that other intelligent species in KS don't look at all like humans under the skin. The bauplans are completely different.

My explanation for this is that someone (Porbably the Outsiders) transported Terrestial primates to the core millions of years ago and when the first ship of Pak headed out of the core, they were heading back to the world that that they somehow knew was their original homeworld.