Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 09JUN2026 – Tregonsee’s Three Pronouncements About Stuff

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Long ago my wife and daughters found my pronouncements amusing. I codified them in a set of rules (which became referred to as the Rules of Acquisition after the Ferengi rules in ST: Deep Space 9). I have three related to fiction and opinions

16. Opinions are like certain bodily orifices. Critically important but not something decent people expose in public.

17. In fiction (Written, Visual, or Interactive) I desire a story and escape. If I want morals I’ll hear a sermon, if I want to work at something I’ll go to work and get paid for it.

18. This is not to say a writer or other content producer may NOT provide meaning or morals. Just don’t shove it in my face unceasingly (Remember that orifice in rule 16? You wouldn’t shove that in my face either).

And yes Clarke and Asimov are far more of the “Idea” arm of SciFi. Asimov often has to work to make his male characters two dimensional. His female characters rarely rose to that and are almost literally paper cutouts. Clarke uses some stereotypes in his early short stories, but almost all his stories even the Big ones like 2001 , Childhood’s End and Rendevous with Rama depend far more on story (and the first two are reusing parts of several short stories pasted together) than on character. I think it is why Asimov and Clarke excel in the shorter forms (up to about Novella) but struggle more ion the longer forms. This may also stem from the fact that from mid ’40s to mid 60’s the primary form (and most financially viable form) of Scifi was the magizines either as short stories or serialized for longer pieces. These forms make character development harder I would think.

photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction

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Yesterday I formulated my first law of science fiction:

photog’s First Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not change more than one basic law of physics when making a good story.

Well, that was so much fun I thought I’d try for another one:

photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not bore the poor reader to death.

And really this should be the first law because it really is essential.  Honestly, if the reader is interested, he will probably forgive anything else; excessive use of time travel, repetitive battle scenes, gratuitous sex and violence, even scurrilous attacks on political enemies.  As long as the story keeps the reader’s interest, it’s a success.

Now this is an iron law for any kind of fiction.  But because different genres have different readers it behooves the author to pay attention to what his particular genre considers interesting.  So, if you write romantasy you must make sure you include plenty of female protagonists being ravaged by minotaurs or some other equally absurd mythical beast.

But if you write science fiction and especially if you write hard science fiction you have to make sure you can pass the science literacy test when it comes to the gadgets and phenomena that you hang your tale on.  So, that’s step one.

Step two is to make the characters and the plot interesting.  And this is where some of the best hard sf writers are found lacking.  For myself, personally, Arthur C Clarke seemed to have a hard time writing characters that were actual people.  Most of the time there just didn’t seem to be a recognizable human being on the page.  And I’m not saying he was a bad writer.  He wasn’t.  He was quite skilled.  It just seemed that he didn’t care about the human aspect in the story.  Now compare this to Isaac Asimov.  When I recently (four or five years ago) reread the Foundation books I thought the plot was at times marginal.  But even the less developed characters seemed to have recognizable voices and personalities.  Asimov managed to make the characters seem somewhat alive.  And live humans are interesting to live humans.  And since the people buying books are (for the most part) live humans it becomes critically important to write characters that appeal to the book buying public.

And that is why even the most technically savvy sf author must (in my opinion) learn how to simulate human characters.  And that is okay.  Because we don’t expect Tolstoy.  You can make the characters resemble almost any humans you’ve ever met.  In fact, it’s better if you mix it up and include a bunch of different types.  This will help to avoid the serious problem of all your characters sounding and thinking exactly like you.  And believe me, that is a big problem.

So, I guess the second law means that a good science fiction writer must also be a good writer in general if he doesn’t want to fail miserably.

Is Astrophage Science Fiction?

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Last week I reviewed “Project Hail Mary” and I approved of it as high quality science fiction.  But am I being consistent?  Should I be calling it fantasy?  In other words, can a story based on a completely impossible premise be considered science anything?  So, let’s talk about this.

Andy Weir used a microorganism of extraterrestrial origin as the basis for his story.  This lifeform which he called astrophage had a complement of remarkable properties that made it both the source of an existential threat to human existence on Earth and the key to human interstellar travel.  Astrophage can convert light into mass and it can also convert mass into light.  This is “explained” by claiming that it can harness the energy produced when neutrinos and their anti-matter opposites (which apparently are also just neutrinos) annihilate each other forming light.  So somehow, the living cell can store neutrinos and then harvest them to produced light that can be used as a motive force to propel the astrophage at velocities approaching light speed.

Okay, this is gibberish.  None of those things can be done in a particle accelerator, never mind inside the protoplasm of a cell.  So, all of this is no different than E. E. Doc Smith pointing to his “inertialess” drive that allows the Galactic Patrol and their Boskonian enemies to hurtle through interstellar space at many time the speed of light.  It’s just hand-waving to allow the action in the story to occur in a time period that allows for a fun story.

Now, granted, Weir at least restricts his velocities to the limit that General Relativity permits.  And he allows time dilation and other relativistic effects to govern the fate of his astronauts.  But having his starship reach 0.92 c is based on an energy production method that is completely inexplicable by any physics or biology that we can point to.

So, why isn’t that fantasy?

I think I’m going to invent a rule of science fiction.

photog’s First Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not change more than one basic law of physics when making a good story.

So, if Andy Weir wants astrophage to have a biological basis for matter/antimatter conversion then everything else about his story has to be “legit.”  So, he can use astrophage as his workaround for amazing energy density for things like interstellar flight but everything else still requires the laws of physics, chemistry and biology to work the way they do in the real world.  Now some folks might begrudge him xenonite because somehow, he turned a noble gas into unobtanium but there’s enough wiggle room in chemistry so that depending on what else besides xenon is in xenonite we could imagine all the properties of this make-believe material without calling down the lightning of the gods of the periodic table.

So, I think that’s fair.  If you only make up one crazy make-believe MacGuffin to allow for the action in your story then I won’t cry foul and demote the story to the depths of the fantasy dungeon.  I mean, who could ask for more than that.

08JUN2026 – Quote of the Day

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I saw a steady stream of men covered with mud, soaked through with rain, who were pouring irregularly, without any semblance of order, up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol. … I ran down-stairs and asked an “officer,” who was passing by, a pale young man, who looked exhausted to death, and who had lost his sword, for the empty sheath dangled at his side, where the men were coming from. “Where from? Well, sir, I guess we’re all coming out of Virginny as fast as we can, and pretty well whipped too.” “What! the whole army, sir?” “That’s more than I know. They may stay that like. I know I’m going home. I’ve had enough of fighting to last my lifetime.”

Why Beauregard does not come I know not, nor can I well guess. … The inmates of the White House are in a state of the utmost trepidation, and Mr. Lincoln… in despair…

My Diary: North and South (1863), ch. 51, pp. 467, 470, describing the aftermath of First Manassas

William Howard Russell

Word Count

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What is the perfect length for a story?  Well, I’m sure there is no agreement in the world on that.  And I must confess I have enjoyed books that go over a thousand pages (counting the “Lord of the Rings” as one story) and short stories that barely cover a handful of pages.

But I have an opinion and since I get to throw it out onto the internet for as long as I can pay for my hosting costs, I feel I should elaborate.  After all, I have to write my five hundred words tonight.  Although that length is hardly a perfect length for a work.

I believe that between 10,000 and 35,000 words is the sweet spot for telling a story.  I think that’s somewhere between a long short-story and a good-sized novella.  So, I’ve rejected the majority of modern novels and definitely all of the thousand-page potboilers that have been in fashion for the last few decades.  And look, that rejects the “Lord of the Rings!”  Well, hear me out.

I think long books are by nature composite creations.  They consist of a bunch of chapters strung together to get our hero from Point A to Point B.  And in my opinion each chapter (or at most a few chapters together) is a separate story.  This is like a play or a movie having multiple acts or scenes.  You string those together and you tell a larger story.  But usually in a movie or a play there is a climactic scene when all of the emotional power of the story is unleashed.  If the writer is exceptionally skilled, he can drag out the emotional interest from the beginning of the story until this climax.  But no matter how well-written the longer story is it doesn’t have the same impact as a shorter work that can be digested in one sitting.  Even a long movie has the danger that it can overtax the watcher’s attention and patience.

I think that if I kept my work within that 10,000-35,000-word range I could make the maximum impact on the reader.  Of course, 10,000 is really close to the minimum that can result in a rich word-picture.  But I think if an author works carefully to paint a vivid sketch of a scene even the 10,000 should yield a memorable story.

Of course, I am painfully aware that the commercial market for shorter fiction is essentially nil.  I was reading recently that science fiction short story magazines and collections don’t sell at all.  So that guarantees that authors will continue to pump out door-stops.  And honestly, the longer episodic genre books are perfectly enjoyable just as they are.  But in my opinion the true masterpieces of writing are a shorter type of story that weaves a tapestry in front of the reader’s mind in a unified effect that goes from beginning to end in a single story arc that satisfies the reader’s interest in the subject and provides a legitimate conclusion to the story.

Well, anyway that’s how it seems to me.

Graham Platner: The New Democrat

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In search of a populist communist, the Democrats have embraced Graham Platner the former combat Marine, oyster farmer, misogynist and philosopher king.  Platner is embroiled in a scandal that just keeps getting weirder with every passing day but his poll numbers have been so strong up till now that the powers that be in the party have everyone from Sunny Hostin of the View to Chris Hayes of MS NOW playing along with Platner being what the party needs in Maine.  Now all of this is very interesting because Platner has a history of making disparaging statements about women and gays.  He also has a Nazi SS death’s head tattoo on his chest (although he has now tattooed over it).  Several of his girlfriends have described violent and controlling behavior toward them.  His wife has reported that he also has a history of “sexting” women on a service called Kik that is much frequented by Gen Z users.

But my all-time favorite detail about Mr. Platner is a remark he made to one of his girlfriends when describing what he would do if a man broke into his house.  He said he would the rape the man (but not in a “gay” way) to show his dominance.

Well, what can we say.  Graham Platner sounds like a certifiable mental case.  He has serious anger management problems and by his own admissions he’s a heavy drinker and drug user.  Sounds like the perfect Democrat Senate candidate for Maine.  As I mentioned above, Platner has been ahead of his Democrat rivals from the start so that the establishment candidate, the current Governor, Janet Mills, suspended her campaign.  And Platner is still higher in the polls than the Republican incumbent Susan Collins though that lead has lessened significantly.  But all of this negative publicity has rattled a lot of the Democrat establishment and Mills has reminded voters that she still appears on the primary ballot so if Platner is further damaged by scandal they can vote for her.  Also, even if Platner wins the primary on June 9th he can drop out of the race and the Democrats can pick another candidate for the regular election in November.  So right now, there is an enormous unsettled cloud over Platner’s status.  The Democrats are convinced that they must win in Maine in order to retake the Senate from the Republicans.

Well, this is wonderful.  Listening to feminists bending over backwards to explain how they can vote for a caveman misogynist against a woman is just too delicious to ignore.  And the best part is that the Democrats are frightened to death that there is still more dirty laundry waiting for after the drop-dead date on July 13th after which Platner’s name must stay on the ballot.

Now let me be clear.  I think of Susan Collins as a Democrat.  There is absolutely nothing conservative about her.  So, if Platner were to win in November I wouldn’t be too upset.  New England does not have a conservative constituency.  It should have the lousy communist politicians it deserves.  But it would be nice if we could squeak by without losing the House or the Senate in this midterm election.

Anyway, watching Chris Hayes making nice with a guy who claims he would rape a male home intruder in a non-gay way has to be an important milestone.  We’ve reached terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) fallout.  At this point, I believe the Democrats would vote for Hitler himself if he promised to unseat Trump.  So good luck Mr. Platner.  And good luck to any burglars who may be working up there in Sullivan, Maine.  It sounds like a tricky proposition.