{"id":95,"date":"2011-07-08T16:45:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T20:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2011-09-22T11:34:06","modified_gmt":"2011-09-22T15:34:06","slug":"stuff-i-learned-from-hull-zero-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Bits I Learned from Hull Zero Three"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gregbear.com\/books\/hull.cfm\">Hull Zero Three:<\/a> a neatly-done amnesia mystery on a spooky old spaceship.\u00a0 So, what did I take away from it as a writer?\u00a0<strong> I warn you: spoilers.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The setting is a character.<\/strong> It&#8217;s moody. Fickle. Mean. It doesn&#8217;t care if you die. It wants you to die. It provides for you. It reacts to your touch. You wonder what it wants from you, if it even knows you&#8217;re there. These are the makings of a complex and memorable character. It&#8217;s even called &#8220;Ship&#8221;, as if it were a person by that name.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>You don&#8217;t have to explain it all<\/strong>.\u00a0 Why the strange bodies of the characters? They vary widely in size, shape, and color based on some sort of functional utility &#8212; but were they like that on Earth? Or were they created on-ship? The honking people had their own language; was it developed before the ship launched?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Many questions, but it&#8217;s OK. I didn&#8217;t need the full history of the world, just enough to keep me going in the story.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Everyone is superstitious, even in the future.<\/strong> The issue of the silvery beings was my favorite of the novel. Hearing sci-fi characters talk about something as if it were a fairy or a yeti or the Virgin Mary rang very true to they way people actually act. Everyone has experiences they can&#8217;t explain, and the most logical solution isn&#8217;t always the right one. Giving characters an odd phenomenon to react to provides an opportunity to show (or discover) more about who they are.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>All in all, a good take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hull Zero Three: a neatly-done amnesia mystery on a spooky old spaceship.\u00a0 So, what did I take away from it as a writer?\u00a0 I warn you: spoilers. &nbsp; The setting is a character. It&#8217;s moody. Fickle. Mean. It doesn&#8217;t care if you die. It wants you to die. It provides for you. It reacts to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}