Fragment

I just discovered the unfinished text of a random thoughts post I never got around to finishing. Here, have a couple more.

• I was thinking about the issues with oxygen in alien atmospheres, and fire. One suspects that highly technological civilization would require an oxygen atmosphere to develop, or at least that non-oxygen atmospheres represent a significant handicap. Why?
  
  Because, while any atmosphere will have phenomena analogous to combustion, in an oxygen atmosphere, it's much more noticeable, thanks to the peculiar semi-plasma it creates as a byproduct. Not only is it much more likely to attract inquisitive notice very early on, but it is uniquely useful as a source of both heat and light. One wonders what some other atmosphere's inhabitants would have to use instead—or if they wouldn't be stymied by the fact their heat- and light-sources probably wouldn't be as conceptually tidy as fire is.


• It is interesting to note that any writer who says they don't write (whatever genre) is generally not only a pure specimen of that genre, they are a very hacky pure specimen of that genre. Terry Goodkind claims he doesn't write fantasy, he writes "stories that have important human themes"—which seems to mean "uncredited Robert Jordan/Ayn Rand fanfic mashups". Or how about, apparently Nicholas Sparks—whose middle name, it seems, is not "motherf***ing", much to everyone's surprise—said he doesn't write romance novels. No, he writes "love stories", and, I quote, "In mine, you never know if it's going to be a happy ending, sad ending, bittersweet or tragic. You read a romance because you know what to expect. You read a love story because you don't know what to expect."
  
  Dude. Granted you don't write bodice-rippers, which seems to be what you think "romance novel" means, you emphatically write novels, which are about romance, and whose plots are basically find/change copies of each other. I doubt very much one could find someone who didn't know what to expect, in one of your books. Indeed, ask anyone who the most formulaic writer working today is, and they will not say "John Grisham" or "Dan Brown", they'll say you—and that is some stiff competition. You're a shoo-in for Hack Valhalla.