The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."

I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.

I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax -- how would you pronounce that?

The apostrophe here most likely represents a glottal stop (as in Hawai'i).

Unlikely, since no English speaker would be able to pronounce that cluster. The odds are overwhelming that it represents nothing at all, just like the apostrophe in "don't".

In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this planet.

Example word: vaa'an — genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"

Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard time with human names, so it became a tradition for dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon’s pronunciation as an honorific. So “Simon” becomes “S’mon.”

You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX - where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the next. F’lar really is just “fuhLAR”

IIRC, dragonriders always elide part of their name, and indicate the gap with an apostrophe. It's consistent and explained in the text at some point.

McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope.

It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?

By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.

Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.

it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.

I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power

Compare with the first sentence of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien:

> There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.

except for 'Arda', every new word is defined/clarified.

I'm a huge LOTR fan and a moderate Silmarillion fan, and I can see how maybe Tolkien is guilty of this 'new words for familiar things' problem.. I guess when Tolkien does it, I'm enchanted, e.g. the first non-introduction line in _Fellowship_:

> When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

To me this immediately evokes: we're in a foreign land, but it's going to be vaguely small-town England in its manners and interests.

It reminds me of opening the bible - especially the books in the old testament- or any old compendium of legends from ancient civilisations.

> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.

Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.

The thing about the alternative you offer is that none of the names in it are made-up, other than that Kowalski may be a fictional character.

There is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names, and some genres will require more than others, but I suspect that sentences in the style of McCaffrey's are partly intended to draw in the reader who feels, vaguely and probably subconsciously, as someone who has the inside scoop on esoteric knowledge from having deduced what sort of entities these names denote. To be clear, I am not immune to the effect, and it can be pleasant in small doses if the rest of the story is engaging.

That maybe very well be true, but it still doesn't indicate any problem with the McCaffrey sentence.

Also note that it's the start of the second chapter, so some of those nouns may have been introduced already.

My first paragraph is very well true. The second one says "there is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names", which seems to be in agreement with what you hold to be true.

I am also entirely in agreement with the position that no significant criticism of the author can be made from a single sentence, especially when presented without context.

Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.

That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.

You seem to be suggesting that it's good writing style to make your reader struggle as if with a foreign language?

My original example was going to be, a young person reading an adult book with a large vocabulary. I decided that might come off as rude, so I changed it, and maybe lost some impact.

Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.

I guess I don't interpret bmacho's comment as relating to disability, just a general objection to excessive weird words a la https://xkcd.com/483/

>Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.

This, although it's not even always a disability related issue. Sometimes things in life aren't made for you, and you'll be happier understanding that. It's similar to complaining that an advanced mathematics textbook wasn't understandable given your baseline understanding of maths. It's not being written for you.

Ever read A Clockwork Orange? Guessing that didn't go over well with you.

Oh that was great. In no small part because Burgess's slang is rooted in real etymology so it's not entirely a foreign language so much as creative use of our own. Snowcrash is similar in this respect.

> but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.

Not everybody agrees: https://www.jesusandmo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011-05-31.png

On a more serious note, I watched a Chinese drama with my parents, and the fact that the characters' names were in Chinese caused enormous problems for them.† This is hard for me to empathize with, but clearly it's something that some people can't handle.

† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee....

That's easier for me to empathize with; it causes difficulties for me too, but those difficulties are mostly in the nature of nailing down a bunch of different pieces of information about each character, not in the nature of "why are you speaking a language that isn't English?!?"

I don't think foreign names are 'bad writing' but I do experience more difficulty keeping track of names that are in a language I'm completely unfamiliar with.

English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system. Names in my second language can be slightly more difficult but I seem to have developed a similar system of breaking them down and storing them. But names that don't fit into patterns I'm familiar with can be like trying to memorize completely arbitrary strings of information.

For example (grabbing some Aztec mythology names) "Tlaltecuhtli" won't be accurately stored beyond the first syllable or two until I've seen it many, many times, and if there's another character called "Tlazolteotl" I'm likely to mix them up.

Same. One of my favorite duplicate file/similar image finders is https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

But I will never ever remember how to spell the name. It’s like the perfect combination of letters that are just alien to me. I usually find it by searching “hiccup github duplicate finder”

assuming it's Polish or Czech, it's pronounced ch-kavka, if that helps

To what extent can people pronounce -vk- (as opposed to -fk- or -vg-) in Polish and Czech?

>English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system.

I often 'round' them to the nearest English name or just see a long string of letters and mentally think 'the guy with the S name'. It gets confusing when there are additional weird names all starting with S though. Even relatively short names, if they are weird, I'll notice halfway through the book that I've been mentally pronouncing them as if 2 of the letters were swapped in a way to feels more natural.

>† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee.

I have that problem with watching anime, especially slice-of-life types where you have 20 people all in school uniforms and with realistic hair colors and such. They'll all be called 3-4 different names and have no real distinguishing characteristics.

> Made-up names are bad to read for me too.

Aren't all names made-up?

call them new names then

>McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.

This is honestly the core component of most criticisms of genre fiction as far as I've seen.

Not surprisingly, Robert Anton Wilson, one half of the writing team behind Illuminatus, was a huge fan and scholar of James Joyce. Indeed in the first volume, the character Epicene Wildeblood writes, a damning dismissal of what is obviously meant to be the trilogy itself, describing it as "a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce"[1]. I can't think of anything more Joycean. (Epicene doesn't think much of science fiction either, even when she transitions into a more relaxed Mary Margaret Wildeblood in the later Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.)

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Illuminatu...

> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence.

F'lar is unexplained within that sentence. Mnementh is also unexplained, but sounds like a constellation.

Fax and the High Reaches are explicitly marked as the names of a person and a place. Those are going to appear as proper nouns no matter what genre you're reading. It's the only possible way to do things. This is like complaining that Robin Hood's primary antagonist is the Sheriff of Nottingham. What's the complaint?

I seem to read more fiction now than I ever have, but much of it now slips through publishing (and editing)

So novels that start like that make me read uphill. Way better to plunge into the book.

The first few lines of books I recently liked...

"DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees."

"Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician - but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good."

“Like any good story, it began with a girl. It was supposed to end with a bullet."

"The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown."

a little conflicted on this one:

"ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth."

The books that made me read uphill in sentence 1 loosely correlate with the rest of the book.

Makes me think of the MrBeast pdf from yesterday wrt the first crucial seconds of a youtube video.

Consider Phlebas?

What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,

provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear.

It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama.

The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction.

Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting.

We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.

EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.

  "My breath froze into pink pretzels."

The temperature in the synthetic atmosphere wasn't precisely enough to prevent the character's exothermic respiration from condensing, inconveniently.

It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.

But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?

As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:

Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)

(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)

Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".

Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".

This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.

I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.

So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.

I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.

I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)

Don't forget the the, uh, pink widows? _Rosencrantz_ ("they're pinkish and make you dead, like him and Gildunstern"). Venemous ambush predators, low density (mostly made of this aeogel with hydrogen bladders). About an inch across and 8 inches long, like pink hovering snakes. They float, hiding in the exhalation contrails, waiting for prey to blunder into them.

mosquito eels with diseases

Sounds like something Peter Watts might have invented. I like it, sort of; almost plausible, barely survivable, and deeply unpleasant.

The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.

Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.

I never understood why the spaceplane had an atmosphere with helium in it, though. Either Crichton messed up or got confused about the mixing issues there (as well as the massive logistics problems, the plane was huge).

The spaceplane had an completely imcompressible hull, no synthetic atmosphere was required - in fact, serendipitulously an overkill herring, was the perfect atmosphere for humans.

It was the underwater habitat that had the possibility of extreme temperature gradient fluctuations.

It was at standard pressure (sea level ish)? And the nitrogen's fine for coming and going to the habitat as you wish (without the bends) because the pressure's so much lower? What about the oxygen toxicity from breathing normal air? Is that also fine because of the low relative pressure of the oxygen containing gas?

I'll have to revisit the chapter but I believe there was a few pages about the door, and a large hiss.

I assume the spacecraft detected and matched the artificial habitats - that's what I had meant, not surface atmosphere.

The atmosphere in the habitat is specified to be 33 atmospheres, mostly helium and oxygen.

The characters need to use "talkers" because their voices would be too high pitched to be understandable otherwise.

I think the author either forgot about the talkers when the characters were in the plane, or left them out. How he describes a voice "echoing" in the 96+ percent helium of the plane does not really make sense. Also, why does the plane have enough helium and oxygen gas to pressurize up to 33 atmospheres? Helium leaks like hell, right? It lasted that long? And it can't really have switched from something else, based on how the "wacky events" are claimed to happen in the book. If the ship has an AI, it's probably just standard control loops attached to an expert system (based on Crichton's other books, is that a fair assumption?), I doubt it would detect people outside and then adapt.

Wouldn't it get crushed before it had the opportunity to be pressurized in the first place? I doubt the mission planners knew it would jump into water, but I guess it was in shallower water and then sunk/the seabed collapsed or something?

If that's the explanation, it must have been pressurized according to an algorithm the entire time, not based on the habitat. The habitat was never connected to the plane before the characters went in, they walked over in suits.

I can't really see how something like that would last that long. Current soft plastics don't, and I don't really think that's solvable with incremental improvement, but incremental improvement is what's shown in the book.

Sure, you can add antioxidants to polymers, but that competes with dyes/carbon black for UV resistance, and flame retardants, for the filler percentage. Too high a filler percentage and the mechanical properties go in the trash, you can quite commonly see this with plastic parts that attach to circuit boards, they're really brittle. With soft plastics, you usually need plasticizers too, and those leach out/degrade over time, and I have no idea how to to fix that.

I'm thinking a fluoroelastomer with antioxidant/carbon black/some flame retardant as fillers, but fluoroelastomers don't have very good mechanical properties in the first place. I think that's really pushing it.

Sphere was so unnverving and good of a read that any plot holes, scientific inaccuracy, or iota of poor writing was somehow Jerry's affect on the narrator itself.

I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine

Confirmed by promo video footage

Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations. The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.

I have to admit i read the comments before i read the article and this comment made me feel like I was having a stroke

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!) purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's undecipherable to newcomers.

"My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?

I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s a sci-fi magazine ran a context: take a short text (something like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-fi writer of your choice.

The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"

I would love to see a Gene Wolf rendition of that

> Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.

It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this somewhat reflects life in America.

Easy transitional/establishing shots. Serves the same sort of purpose as when the show/movie serves up some wide shots of a city or the country, informing the viewer "we are at a new location," but more personal.