Watch for that Asterisk

"Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests."

That’s the headline in the New York Times, at least. And, like many headlines, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Yes, a small and admittedly limited study at West Chester University in Pennsylvania found that children remembered less from reading ebooks than they remembered reading traditionally printed books. But there appears to be a lot more meaning embedded in the study than the headline and lede suppose.

What appears to be most revealing in this study (and I have to say appears since the NYT coverage is skint and the research and presentation themselves are behind a paywall) is that it’s the type of ebook that is damaging comprehension, not necessarily ebooks themselves, so watch it if you see this paper or this NYT link presented with the trumpeted headline without that ever-important asterisk.

Here’s what the NYT says:

They advise parents and teachers to look for e-books that enhance and extend interactions with the text, rather than those that offer only distractions; that promote interactions that are relatively brief rather than time-consuming; that provide supports for making text-based inferences or understanding difficult vocabulary; and that locate interactions on the same page as the text display, rather than on a separate screen.

They found that e-books which incorporated in-book games and other “rich” media elements were distracting students from reading, not that ebooks themselves were damaging to reading comprehension. The authors of the study cite another in which “children spent 43 percent of their e-book engagement time playing games embedded in the e-books rather than reading the text.

Other studies haven’t found a significant comprehension gap between ebooks and traditional books. In “Tablet vs. Paper: The Effect on Learners’ Reading Performance,” a study performed in Turkey in 2011, researchers discovered “there was no significant difference between the groups in reading speed or the level of reading comprehension.”

He Ain't Heavy

It's a long, long road with many a winding turn.
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.
But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain't heavy; he's my brother.


I've loved this song from The Hollies since I heard it as a child (and no, I'm not old enough to remember when it came out in 1969. I'm almost that old, but not quite). Over the years, its message has meant various things to me. Lately, it's come to reflect the journey I'm taking as a writer.

The road of a writer is indeed long, with many turns in the road, and you never quite know where you're going to end up. Oh, with an essay here, a letter there, a story, a poem, you may eventually find your way through the twists and turns to an ending that is satisfactory, but by and large, once one piece of writing is done, another one beckons. And you never know where it's going to take you.

But take those journeys. Each time you come to an end you see a new beginning. Take off again. Write. Continue to write.

Don't stop developing those talents. More importantly, keep what you write. Even if everything around it is bad in your eyes. Keep it. You never know when you're going to need it again. Back in college, I started writing a novel that I can see now was going to go nowhere. But I kept it. I kept it for a long time. And this week, as I revised my novel, a snatch from that other novel came to mind. I dug out the file and found that little bit of writing I remembered from so long ago fit perfectly in the bit of the new writing I'm doing now.

Keep what you write. RE-read what you write, and always write better. Keep on writing. And remember, your writing ain't heavy, it's your brother.

Code Re-Use

Many moons ago, I started writing an ill-fated story about a small family of moles who lived in a trailer park. One of the young moles falls in love with a human living in one of the trailers, and hilarious hijinx ensued. At least they would have ensued had I continued with the story and had it been any good.

There was only one part I liked, and that was a little chant the mole brothers and sisters of the besotted teased her with.

Tonight, I found a way to work it into Doleful Creatures.

It's not quite code reuse, but it's close.

Here it is:

Above, Chylus and Magda were getting amorous, much to the delight of the moles, most of whom were watching them now rather than listen to Jarrod.

A young female mole named Pinecone started a traditional molish love-chant: “Mole-heart, mole-heart, love with the sun," she shouted at the crows, grinning a mocking grin and bouncing on her heels.

"Mole-lass, mole-lass, make a wreath for one!" her brother Ditchbottom added in a rather silly voice.

"Leaf-dance, earth-dance, wed the lucky pair," chortled Pinecone, grabbing Ditchbottom's hand in her left hand and pulling him into a circle-dance below the now embarrassed crows.

"Love of one, love of two, tunnels through the air!" Ditchbottom finished the chant.

The moles watching the circle laughed. The crows sheepishly righted themselves on the branch above and settled a bit further apart than they liked. They flapped their wings in embarrassment.

And here's the code re-use reference:

Reveling in Another's Bad Karma? That's Bad Karma On You.

This video, of course, is making the social media rounds. In it we see an incident of road range in which the rager is delivered “instant karma” for his actions when he speeds past the object of his rage, swerves, then wrecks his truck.

Never mind that the woman recording the video is driving slow in the passing lane, recording a video while driving and reveling in the fact that the “rager” got his while she got off scot-free. Karma for him was bad, karma for her was good.

Except, as I read it, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what karma is, let alone what decent behavior should look like in the face of an aggressor whether you want a religious message mixed up in the behavior or not.

“The law of karma,” says the Spiritual Encyclopedia, “teaches us that all of our thoughts, words, and actions begin a chain of cause and effect, and that we will personally experience the effects of everything we cause. We may not experience the effect (the returning karma) right away, and it may not even be in this lifetime, but you can count on it just the same. Karma is a cosmic law, which means that it applies to everyone, everywhere, all the time.”

Read that again. Especially the part that ways “we will personally experience the effects of everything we cause.”

Video recording lady, you’re creating bad karma too.

What should have been done in that situation?

Well, backing off would have been good for both individuals involved. When I saw this video, I didn’t think of karma, I thought of this verse from Proverbs: “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.”

Rather than recording the video and acting aggressively herself as the man tried to pass, this woman could have simply moved over and let the idiot through. Yes, I suppose that means he “wins” the argument. But who knows how close the woman was to causing an accident herself – instantly reaping bad karma of her own. She claims she kept her eyes on the road while driving, but I have my doubts about that claim’s veracity. Even if she were keeping her eyes on the road, the more positive karmic solution would have been to move over and let the idiot through, rather than encouraging his rage and adding fuel to an already bad situation.

Both drivers were acting aggressively; it was only a matter of chance, not karma, that both were not involved in an accident. Neither individual’s behavior is worth applauding.

Claiming karma as vindication for her actions leads her down a path towards continued bad behavior. Recording the situation and aggravating it worked the last time for me, she’ll think. So when she’s in another situation where the choice is to act aggressively or back off, she’ll choose the former. And the consequences might be different that next time.

Because there is negative and positive karma, if you want to continue using karma as justification for behavior.

“The shortest explanation of karma that I know is ‘you get what you give,’” writes Views on Buddhism. “In other words; whatever you do intentionally to others, a similar things will happen to yourself in the future. Causing suffering to others will cause suffering to ourselves, causing happiness to others will result in happiness for oneself.”

Garbled grammar aside, it’s clear that karma is a concept that applies to oneself and one’s own behavior, tempting as it may be to cast aspersions at the karma of others. This should be a call for self-reflection and a reminder of the biblical and Confucian “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” not a revel in the punishments others receive for perceived bad behavior.

This message is explained well in the Gospel of St. Luke, wherein Jesus teaches “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also” (Luke 6:27-29).

Yeah, that’s a tougher thing to chew on that gleefully watching an enemy get his or her comeuppance in a situation both of you contributed to, but no one said being good (or building up good karma) was going to be easy.

It’s Not the People who Do Nothing who Learn New Things.

We’re all trying something.

We plan things out. Or not. We work hard at things. Or not. And in a general sense we hope through our work that we get to see the end result of things. That’s why I’m working on the third draft of my novel Doleful Creatures, and why my wife and I volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America and why I teach part-time as well as work-full time as a technical writer.

It’s pretty much a given that most of what we touch won’t go anywhere. But I like to think we’ll find a success or two.

So I’m intrigued by this Code for America keynote that Clay Shirky gave last year, in which he discusses not only the value of listening to sincerely helpful critics, but also in simply trying things out so we can discover for ourselves what works, what doesn’t, and how we may have misunderstood the problem or task we have before us. Give it a listen.

He does kind of perambulate about his point – a Shirky trademark – but he does have some interesting things to say. First of all: Our biggest gift is the ability to change our minds:

All of this matters, this sorting out of the helpful from the corrosive criticism, and knowing the level of the problem you’re trying to take on, because the most important resource you’ve got isn’t your strategy, your plan, your tactics, it’s not your tools, your technology, or your project management. The most important resource you’ve got is your own ability to change your mind. That’s what matters over the long haul.

Shirky goes on to talk about two fellow New Yorkers, Patrick McConlogue and Leo Grand, one a minor figure at a venture capital firm and the other a homeless man living in a park that happened to be on McConlogue’s way to work. McConlogue decides to offer the guy $100 or a chance to learn how to code – and he accepts the coding challenge.

I remember when this happened, and how the Internet vomited on the idea, pointing out its impracticalities and pointlessness. I may have said a thing or two about it myself. But Shirky sees it in a significantly different light, a light that should ring true to anyone who has taken on a seemingly impossible project or dared call themselves a Christian (or any other religion in which we’re advised to watch out for our fellow man as we watch out for ourselves):

If things go well for Leo, it’s not going to be because this is a general solution to some problem of homelessness, this will be a fairy godmother story. The important part of the story is that [Patrick] McConlogue went from being a guy who felt comfortable characterizing people as the justly or the unjustly homeless, a guy who felt comfortable talking about the homeless without even bothering to learn the name of the guy he was targeting. He’s turned from that guy into a guy who takes time out of a work day to try to get his friend bailed out of jail. And I’ll tell you as a New Yorker, nobody voluntarily interacts with the NYPD. That’s a big change.

So far, things seem to be working out for Leo. And the events haven't been lost on McConlogue either. Shirky adds:

What is clear is that McConlogue would not have learned when he learned about the problems with homelessness if he hadn’t started out with the wrong idea and been willing to test it in the world. It’s not the people who do nothing who learn new things.

If It's too Good to Be True . . .

It’s the kind of story we love: An outsider – in this case a fourteen-year-old kid (KID!) discovers a simple change in font selection could save the federal government upwards of $130 million dollars a year in printing costs. The link gets spread around the Internet (I know I spread it) and the unwashed masses revel in the ingenuity of said kid and the wasteful government that we have that’ll probably take YEARS to implement such a simple change.

And then the experts come in to pee on the parade.

Funny thing with expert pee, though: It knows its stuff.

In this case, the kid’s heart was in the right place: SuvirMirchandani wanted to make the flood of circulars coming home with him from school more ecologically sustainable, and figured out through actual study and math that using the Garamond typeface, with its thinner strokes, would use 24% less ink, saving his school up to $21,000 per year on ink costs.

Problem is while Mirchandani took great pains to compare font sizes and weighed papers to see which font used less ink and then conjured up accurate prices for ink jet cartridge ink, he’s no expert either in typography nor the way business or commercial printing (nor even likely the way his school district gets printing done) to see the flaws in his argument.

And the flaws are legion.

Thomas Phinney, writing at Phinney on Fonts, points out a few things for us:

It is not [Mirchandani’s] fault that the non-obvious aspects of the problem mess up the idea. Garamond lowercase is about 15% smaller than the average of the fonts they compare it to, while its caps are only about 7.5% smaller. So it is no surprise that it uses less ink at the same point size.

This is why most scientific studies comparing typefaces first compensate by resizing the fonts to eliminate differences in the lowercase height (called x-height by us font geeks). This study failed to do that. As a result, they actually get results that are the exact opposite of other studies. Century Gothic has a very large x-height, so printed at the same nominal point size it uses more ink than Times. Printed at the same x-height (as in other studies) it would use less.

Setting any font 15% smaller would save 28% of its area coverage. Of course, there are some caps in the texts as well, which would make the savings a bit less. Interestingly, this is pretty exactly much what the study found. So, you could just as easily save ink by setting the same font at a smaller point size.

Phinney and others also point out that the government, most businesses, and probably Mirchandani’s school district don’t go out and buy ink by the gallon at Chanel No. 5 prices. Most contract with other businesses to maintain their copiers, where they’re charged on a per-page basis, meaning the charge is the same whether the printer churns out a blank page or the page is completely covered in that expensive ink.

Also, most copiers and laser printers use toner, not ink, which is less expensive.

And as far as the federal government goes, they kinda get bulk discounts, seeing as much of what they print is run on printing presses, which reduces costs even further. Says Phinney:

[T]he study makes the interesting claim in a footnote: “Ink and toner are use synonymously in this study. Even though traditional ink is more expensive than toner, a focus on determining the percent savings in cost rather than the magnitude of the cost obviates this difference.” Um . . . how? They are assuming that the percent of printing cost allotted to the ink/toner is the same for all classes of output.

This is simply untrue. Many of the documents that account for a substantial percentage of the government’s overall printing costs are printed on a printing press, using offset lithography. For offset printing, the percentage of the cost of that is associated with ink is in fact much smaller than for laser or inkjet printing. But it isn’t a fixed percentage, either, due to the large proportion of the cost that is associated with setup. It will be a higher percentage for short runs, and lower for long runs.

Phinney and John Brownlee, writing at Fastcodesign.com, also point out another problem: Legibility. Says Brownlee:

[I]f you printed any of the other fonts to match Garamond's actual size, you'd get almost the same savings in ink cost, at the same expense of readability. Garamond doesn't really use less ink than Times New Roman, Comic Sans, or Century Gothic: it's just the equivalent of a 10-point font rendered on a 12-point line. And sure enough, if you look at Mirchandani's sample text, Garamond looks like it has been rendered at a much smaller point size than the other fonts; it's obviously harder to read.

So it pays to go to the experts, to lend your research moxie truth, rather than the air of truthiness.

Who Knew She Was Missing?

NOTE: Third draft of Doleful Creatures, and I found another character. Who knew she was missing?

Chapter Fifteen: Leaps from the Twigs

Don’t think we take our duty lightly, by the frivolity of our conversation.

We love Jarrod, no matter what the marmots say. Love him like a brother. Love him like a son. Love him like the weak fledgling who shouldn’t be leaving the nest but leaps from the twigs with his siblings to show them he’s no weakling.

But Jarrod is weak. Weak in body. It’s a rarity to see him eat. I know birds are renowned for their skimpy appetites, for their lithe bodies, for their skin and feather and bone. But Jarrod is thin, even for a bird. Thin as if he’d seen nothing but winter, naught of summer.

They pick at him so. Aloysius, to be sure. But it seems anyone crawling or flying to or through this part of the world knows he is weak. Not a week ago, a small flock of starlings chased him from his home in the barn, acting as if it had been their home for centuries.

He picks at himself as well. No idea that comes to his head isn’t bright enough that he can immediately see its flaws and half-convince himself not to go ahead with it. “I muck things up,” he says. “It’s these black feathers. They bring me bad luck.”

That, of course, is a laugh. May as well ask the sun to bring you luck, or the moon to bring you bad, if you believe such things. My Chylus points out all the time that we have black feathers too, and we have as much good luck as bad.

“But you don’t have a past,” he says. And usually flies off when he says it.

He lets what happened with the beavers hang over him like a dead branch creaking in the wind. I’m certain we don’t know even an eighth of the truth of what happened back then in that canyon, and maybe we never will, with Aloysius telling the story to every new bird or vole who wanders into the wood and with Jarrod not telling much of anything beyond the gloomy statements we’ve all heard a thousand times.

I don’t believe either of them, and I’ve told them so. Jarrod, told gently, while watching for bits of dandelion or cottonwood fluff of truth or lie that injure him if they hit too powerfully. Aloysius, with more venom than I probably should.

It’s painful to watch anyone in such torment. Chylus says it’s worse for the intelligent, but I don’t care if you’re wise or simple, tearing yourself up over something in your past that you may or may not have had control over is not the way to go through life and remain sane.

We hear him, nights, when he chooses to nest close by. He talks and gibbers in his sleep. He talks of the blood, “The blood on my wingtips,” he wails. And on the nights when she visits him with nightmares, he flees to the radio tower, there to perch and watch the stars or whatever else he can conjure to help him forget, or at least survive until sunrise. On those nights, Chylus and I fly with him. Giving him fair distance, of course, because the poor thing hates to think he’s putting anyone at an inconvenience. He’ll perch on his tatty nest in the tower and stare off into the black. We give him a few minutes, then we land nearby. Can’t land next to him, or he startles and falls out of the nest like a fledgling. A few times we’ve had to catch him, else he would have broken his skull on the ground. No, we land a distance away and edge towards him, one on each side, until we’re close enough we can feel him shivering. We don’t say a word. We just gaze off into the black with him. Eventually she shivers stop and he may nod off to sleep – a light doze, from which he startles as if the sun were rising. We take turns napping, the other watching.

If the morning dawns sunny, it’s as if nothing had happened. He’s chatty, ready to fly, to eat even a tiny bit, to share a joke. But if it dawns cloudy and grey, it’s as if the sun had never risen. We stay with him, through the wind and rain.

Sometimes we work to fix the nest. It was theirs, he said, long ago, before he knew of the beavers far off in the box canyon. She’s the one who showed him. She loved flying, and not just the teasing flights most magpies do. But long distances. “I’ll catch the horizon with these wings,” she said often to him. And he often believed it, and laughed as they raced to that distant line.

Once he found a bit of string, a faded bit of orange farmyard twine. He pulled at one end of it, poking out of the dirt at the edge of a field of potatoes, until its full length flew form the ground. She grabbed the other end and off they flew, one tugging at the twine one way to pull the other off course, then switching, Jarrod flying low in the trees and her above, doing their best to dodge the branches.

They laughed and the wood and all creatures in it were younger and happier to hear it.

Then one morning, Jarrod atop the barn, alone.

We flew to him, Chylus and I.

“Where is she? Where is Rebekah?”

He stared off at the sunrise.

“Jarrod?”

Silence.

The sun rose and reddened the low-hanging clouds.

“She came,” Jarrod said. “She came to claim her, and she left. Oh,” he choked, “oh how she did not want to go. But she had no choice. The Lady came and she had to go. I don’t know why, except that the Lady said it was her time.”

Matter-of-factly. Without empathy or remorse, he said. Just her time to go.

They touched wingtips as she faded into the moonlight, he said. “Her eyes were the stars.”

Then gone.

It was she who put the schemes into Jarrod’s head. To help the family of moles find their lost child. To watch the fledglings while the widowed left to find food. She planted ideas in his head, his Rebekah, and they couldn’t go anywhere in the wood or in the canyon or in the fields and mountains beyond without being hailed as a friend by bird or beast.

Even to the beavers, their grandest idea of all.

Then gone, the beavers and his Rebekah.

And he suffers.

And is mocked for his rare failures, where he does not see that one consequence she would have seen.

He mourns, and is bitter. But still he tries.

It doesn’t matter the tally is mostly in Jarrod’s favor. He’s the one who talked that lazy farm dog into chasing away that pair of feral cats who’d moved in to an old haystack and were taking more than their fair share of young ones and old ones. He’s also the one morose enough to stay up that night of the fierce thunderstorms, when the creek rose suddenly and would have drowned anyone underground had he not sounded the alarm.

“She would have seen,” he says. “She would have seen.”

Often, at sunrise, we see him atop the barn.

We know he is waiting.

He knows she will not return.

The Psychology of Anthropomorphism. Or Not.

As regular visitors to Yellowstone National Park (we live only 2 ½ hours to the south) we see it every time we visit.

There’s a buffalo or elk on the side of the road, or in a meadow nearby. Visitors, cameras and children in hand, flock to the roadside and begin snapping pictures. The vast majority of them – children included – keep a respectful distance. But there are always one or two of those hundredth monkeys who have to get closer. And closer. And closer. It’s always the adults, sometimes with a very reluctant child in tow. I’ve never seen anyone get gored or trampled, but I have seen enough buffalo and elk look at the interlopers and stomp their hoofs, only to run off, to know there are many close calls.

And I, myself, by choice, have been within twenty feet of a Yellowstone black bear. The smartest thing I’ve done in my life?

No.

But is anthropomorphism to blame? A study published in Psychology Today seems to intimate so. And I don’t buy it. (Of course, I'm doing what every other journalist is doing with such studies: Misinterpreting it in order to write a screed on my own agenda.)

The study looked at how children process information about animals based upon whether they’re exposed early on to fact-based information about them, or whether they’re told cute, cuddly little stories about them instead. (Big admission here: I’m currently writing a novel about anthropomorphized animals and grew up on such novels, so I have an obvious bias here.)

They’ve got some funny things to say in their study:

[T]he results of Study 1 indicate that preschoolers can learn simple biological facts about animals from books, whether the information is presented to them in a context that uses realistic or anthropomorphic language to describe animals. This ability is more robust in 4- and 5-year-olds than in 3-year-olds. This finding is consistent with the results of Ganea and colleagues regarding the learning of simple biological information (e.g., color camouflage) from picture books that varied the type of language (realistic vs. intentional) used.

The results also show that the type of language used in books affects how likely children are to attribute anthropomorphistic traits to real animals. Children were more likely to say that real animals feel human emotions or even talk after listening to stories that used anthropomorphic rather than realistic language. There are two ways to explain this effect: either that the anthropomorphic language increases children’s [sic] tendency to attribute anthropomorphic traits to animals, or that hearing realistic language suppresses their natural inclination to attribute human-like traits to other non-human animals.

So, first they say that it’s possible for children to learn “facts” about animals, whether the information is presented in realistic or anthropomorphized language. That’s fine. They also demonstrate that anthropomorphizing animals may make children more prone to attribute human characteristics to animals than if they read purely fact-based books.

Then, later in the study, they go on to say this:

When children in Study 2 were exposed to books where anthropomorphic images and language were combined they were less likely to apply the facts to photographs of the real animals compared to a book that used only anthropomorphic images. This type of book, which combines both fantastical language and anthropomorphic illustrations of animals, is typical of commercially available books. Our results suggest that this combination may create a story context that is too dissimilar from reality for preschoolers to realize that information important for the real world is being conveyed. As children get older and have more experience with fantastical stories, they may acquire knowledge that information encountered in fantastical books can’t be relevant to the real world, but the current findings indicate that this is not yet the case for preschool-aged children.

This, I suppose, would hold true if children only learned information about animals from books. Maybe that’s the case for many children, who live in situations and in cultures where real interactions with animals aren’t possible or practical. We do, after all, live in a world where many want to be or are by situation isolated from nature, where they don’t have pets, rarely frequent zoos or live in urban centers where the only animals to be seen in their natural habitat may be birds, insects, squirrels, and such.

And part of me wonders how much of the response they’re getting is just because the children are parroting what they’ve just learned, not because one set of information is more important to the real world than the other. What’s in the mind now with kids is most likely what is going to come out when you ask them questions. Thus the odd story of Jesus coming to Earth inside a meteor at a family discussion shortly after our kids saw the original Superman movie.

I grew up reading these kinds of books, and by choice. Ribsy. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They are what I enjoy (though I read many reality-based books these days) and what I want to write as an author.

Am I doing harm by writing such books?

No. And I don’t think the study is saying that, contrary to what Slate might be thinking about it at the moment. But I think it’s disingenuous to think that our preschoolers have to be filled with facts “relevant to the real world” and that reading them books of this nature is harmful to their learning. (Slate gets a bit silly on this as well, linking their article to that of a 12-year-old girl who “petted” a bear attacking her, neglecting in their summation to say that she petted the animal as a last-ditch attempt to stop its attack after she’d already been bitten, run away, and caught again, not because she’d read fuzzy stories in which the bears were nice and liked to be stroked.)

There is other learning that, perhaps, these folks didn’t study. I consider attributing human characteristics to animals as the first steps to developing sympathy and empathy for animals, notwithstanding the outlandish scenario I started this essay with.

This is a scary bear, right?

Are folks being gored and trampled in Yellowstone because they believe the animals they see are of the fuzzy, cute nature they’ve read in books? Maybe a portion of them are. But I think the bigger problem is that they are in the moment, wanting to get closer and closer to nature in a world where we’re so disconnected from nature that we have lost respect for it, notwithstanding the many real-world, relevant facts we may have learned from them. I can know that bears can climb trees and that they can run both downhill and uphill equally well and that they can outrun me, but in the moment those facts may be overridden by the desire to connect to nature, despite what I know.

And my children, who grew up around books that anthropomorphize, have learned a great respect for animals because we don’t rely on books to teach our kids how they should behave if they see an elk or buffalo or bear up close. We respect nature, because we know what it can do. And when I went to see that bear up the trail? My kids, who love Narnia and Warriors and other such books, stayed behind because they knew the dangers. How much more real-world do we need to get?

Besides, I want my kids to be sillyhearts, while still respecting nature:

TROPE ALL THE TROPES!

I know there’s little new in writing.

Actually, there’s a lot new. New ways of combining the old, new ways of twisting things, new ways of telling things.

I just don’t see anything new in Tom Holt’s “Blonde Bombshell.”

I know of all the genres, science fiction is troped to death. Holt seems to know that too, and so has hit them all: Technologically superior alien race disgusted by the shabby technology of humans, check. Technologically superior alien race befuddled by an otherwise unobtrusive element of human society, check. Sentient superior technology dispatched to destroy the irritating planet (originally here called Dirt) become enamored in some ways with the race they’re sent to destroy, check. Subversive faction of aliens send their own spies to Dirt to counteract the destruction, quickly discover that their human disguises have become permanent, check. Winking nods at human pop culture completely misunderstood by the aliens, check.

Yeah, it’s all there.

Tom Holt, I am disappoint. To use another trope.

I so liked “Flying Dutch,” so when I saw this book at Barnes and Noble, I had high hopes. Should have taken the hint that it was on the “severely discounted” table.

I know it’s easier to criticize than it is to write originally. I’m right now working on the third draft of a rather tropey fantasy novel of my own creation. But I’m hoping there’s enough originality there to make up for the tropes I use. Maybe there isn’t.

Thing is, there’s so much potential in what Holt has written here. But that potential is left so much to the undercurrents of the story – perhaps to avoid breaking into other sci-fi tropes – that what’s missing becomes the most notable in the story.

I've got about sixty pages to go. More later.

Sounds About Right