This series focuses on stories that are both well-written and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week: SCIENCE!
Ever since I was old enough to read, I’ve loved reading about science. Not just science fiction, either, but any nonfiction I could lay my grubby little paws on. It always seemed like science could save the world. Later, when I was older, I learned how science could destroy it, too. But that’s for later. Right now, I’d like to spend some time on a story that puts science in the spotlight
In The Spark Will Travel, by Alter S. Reiss and published by The Sockdolager, a girl in a shantytown who tries to steal from an old tinkerer ends up apprenticed to him. He is (perhaps unsurprisingly) not entirely who he seems, and in another story he’d be the mentor who teaches her magic or planeshifting before going the way of all mentors.* In this story, though, he teaches her an even more useful skill: electrical engineering. (He also ensnares her in a continent-spanning Batman Gambit, but, really, that comes with the territory when you get a mentor in SFF.)
Useful skills don’t necessarily make for interesting stories, of course, or we’d see more blockbusters about really good pizza. That’s where the author’s skill comes in. The electrical engineering, the Batman Gambit, the tinkering…none of this would matter if it weren’t a good story. Because it’s an excellent story, though, it shows us how useful skills can also be awesome.
Every now and then in the course of a story I’m working on, I need to explain things like aerodynamics, lift, nanotechnology, or the effects of nuclear explosions on large bodies of water. (See? I told you we’d get to the nuclear weapons.) I hope I do it half as well as Reiss did in this story, in which he wove scientific concepts so seamlessly into his narrative that the reader doesn’t even realize they’re learning something.
*This one goes out there to all of the SFF mentors who didn’t make it past Act II. R.I.P., guys. Your sacrifices powered the story, not to mention a few generations of folklore scholarship.