Floornight
Floornight is the other web fiction by @nostalgebraist, besides The Northern Caves, which I recently read and liked a lot.
In Floornight, scientists figured out that minds (called “souls” throughout) exist independently of brains, which are merely convenient hardware to run minds. There’s weird mind-physics which allows for conscious radiation, transient literal Boltzman minds hovering in space, and splitting a single mind into many shards coexisting in different universes (QM Many-Worlds-like) which can later be reintegrated back, remembering all versions together (this reminded me of Coil’s power in Worm). A small community of scientists study all this on the ocean floor which for some reason is a potent source of non-human mind-radiation.
While the premise is intriguing and much of the tech-building is superb, I didn’t like Floornight overall and abandoned it somewhere around the middle. My main complaint is that it’s very much not tight. I’d call a piece of fiction “tight” if everything in it feels inevitable in-world, everything fits snugly with everything else. Nothing feels ad hoc, made up to advance the plot but not making sense on its own. In Floornight, almost everything is ad hoc and flabby.
The intriguing sci-fi premise is stretched thin to enable plot twists that abuse its nature. E.g. at some point the entire community is forcibly “reintegrated” into a more “mainstream” reality, but none of them get double memories from their supposed counterparts, as they did before on a smaller scale. (It’s possible that this is explained later, or maybe even at that point and I missed the explanation. But even if there is an explanation, the fact that it’s needed makes it all feel artificial and arbitrary, flabby). Characters behave very unnaturally; they seem to follow emotional scripts preselected by the author, and barely react emotionally to the hugely important events around them, like the aforementioned “reintegration” that cuts them away from the entire world (this is lampshaded a little by the author, but still remains very hard to believe). Everyone is a rather clumsy puppet on a string.
Some things are excellent. The writing overall is very good. The characters are distinct and well-designed. Terminology, special effects, suspense, all these are great. But I couldn’t look past the very flabby plotting and the NPC-like behavior of the characters as the plot unfolds. By the middle of the book, I was bored with all the characters, my suspension of disbelief was completely shot and I couldn’t see myself caring about what adhocish unmotivated stuff is going to happen next.
It’s quite amazing just how much better TNC is (written just a few months later, I think?). None of the problems above exist in TNC; everything is orders of magnitude more motivated, interconnected, “tight”, confident.
Thanks for the commentary. (I mean that – constructive criticism is valuable. I hope the below doesn’t come off as overly defensive. I’m mostly trying to clarify where I’m coming from, which may be interesting if you’re wondering how I could produce these two stories in such close succesion.)
I think the “loose” or “ad hoc” nature of Floornight was an inevitable consequence of the kind of story I wanted to write. I deliberately wrote it as a “kitchen sink” story mixing together every cool idea or plot bunny that came to mind, with the hope that the sheer batshit weirdness, combined with my own enthusiasm for all of it, could create its own sense of wonder. I tended to err on the side of gluing on new plot elements I liked even when the glue wouldn’t be totally invisble, because my goal was chutzpah and grandeur, not fastidious flawlessness.
You’re right that TNC is “tighter,” but I don’t feel like this represents any kind of improvement on my part. The developments in TNC are more sensibly motivated because they’re (for the most part) mundane events happening for familiar reasons among (in most respects) ordinary people; they’re easier to believe because they’re much closer to things we’ve actually seen in our own lives, not because I’ve gotten any better at writing “believable” events.
TNC is a story in which – for most of the text – almost nothing actually happens; Floornight is a story in which, so to speak, almost everything happens. My hope was that the people and events in Floornight would get sufficiently far from familiar signposts that suspension of disbelief would remain because none of us really knows what it would be like for that stuff to happen anyway – but obviously it is possible for this strategy to fail.
The lack of multiple memories in the big reintegration is not ad hoc – it is presented as unexpected, and the characters remark on how surprising it is both at the time and afterwards. Moreover, it’s not as though I temporarily suspended the “real” rules of the setting in order to make things more convenient for me as a writer; I certainly could have included multiple memories without messing up the plot (and indeed it would allow for some cool possibilities), but that actually wouldn’t fit into the full rules of the setting, and I’d have had to do something ad hoc (!) to make it happen.
I think the real issue here is that I was dropping too much novelty on the reader too fast – I didn’t tell the reader that a large-scale reintegration like that could occur, or show them what a “normal” one would look like, before giving them an unusual case. I don’t think the inclusion of an unusual case is bad in itself, since after all this is (in part) a story about scientific discovery.
(None of this is to say that there isn’t plenty of ad hoc magic in the story, just that I don’t think this particular example is an instance of it.)
