Group re-read #2!

[melannen]

Okay, by popular demand, for the second book in our re-read we're going to skip right to the Good Stuff and start on the Diane Duane universe, with Pocket Books #13,

The Wounded Sky

Featuring the forest of Lórien, a starship named Lookfar, a somewhat extravagant number of supernovae, the discovery that the Message At The End of the Universe is "dn ǝpıs sıɥʇ", Captain Kirk mind-melding with his entire ship and helping a spun-glass spider make a baby, a landshark attack, and a whole lotta love.

Source will be up on the source post shortly (eta: is up), as soon as I've done copyediting the file. (You may need to join the community to see the source post.)

In approximately a week, I will post a discussion post where we can all share our thoughts on this book! (...you will note that the time-posts are already getting vaguer and vaguer...)

I have discovered, while training my spell-check on the file, that Star Trek books use a whole lot of jargon and technobabble, and it's become so much a part of my language that I forget it's not plain English. And that beyond that, Duane just has a ton of *fun* playing with language - switching between American and English spellings on a whim, and making new words willy-nilly as if she thinks the language is agglutinative or something. And it works, and I think I imprinted on it, because I do the same thing (though probably not as well.)

ETA: It's up on the source post now. Also, does anybody have access to JSTOR/etc. who'd be will to find & share these two articles from the bibilography? That would be *awesome*:

De Witt, B. S. "Spacetime as a sheaf of geodesics in superspace." In Carmeli et al, Relativity, NY.: Plenum Press, 1970.

Gott II, J. Richard. "Creation of Open Universes from de Sitter Space." Nature, Vol. 295, January 28, 1982, pp. 304-307 Got it! Thanks, sineala!

Comments

[trouble]

I have access to JSTOR. I can get them tomorrow or Monday. How do you want them?

[melannen]

Any format is fine, though the more cross-compatible, the better. (rtf, html, txt, pdf...)

Thanks so much! (I've only been wanting to get those articles for decades - I can't believe I never remembered to when I had JSTOR.)

[melannen]

sineala found the Nature article, and we're starting to wonder if the other one is accessible through any of the common databases. So if you still want to look tomorrow, that'd be great, but don't worry about it otherwise.

[stellar_dust]

JSTOR isn't giving me results for either, but I did find at least one paper that cites each of those, so despite the names (B.S. de Witt, really?) I suppose they are actually real papers.

(Or else the astrophysics community has been bamboozled by Diane Duane, which honestly wouldn't shock me.)

ooh, and I did find the abstract of the Gott paper on Ebsco/Nature.com, but I don't have access to the full text alas.

Hopefully trouble will have more luck!

[melannen]

Nature isn't on JSTOR? Really? D: That's suck. They have it in their for-pay online archives at nature.com, too.

I found a for-pay site offering the de Witt paper, too, (it's also on de Witt's CV); they're both real. That one might be harder to find, though, it looks like it's a conference paper that was only published in the conference anthology. (Alas, all the others in the bibliography exist only in an alternate timeline.) If I wasn't so broke I might just man up and buy them.

[stellar_dust]

It's also possible that my community-college-level JSTOR access is the suck!

[sineala]

May I just say: squee.

Also, here is the Gott paper: www.sendspace.com/file/mdnsr4

Not that it makes much sense to *me*, but maybe someone'll find it helpful.

Now we just need someone with a time machine to grab the other four... :)

[melannen]

Yay! Thank you.

...the papers are not required reading, except in the sense of OMG SQUEE she included a fourth-wall-breaking bibliography!

Though I have also linked to a .pdf of "the Tao of Physics" which covers some of the basics in a more pop-sci way (but is very, very long) and to a short fan-essay from 1986 by someone who read the papers and is trying to explain it simply.

[sineala]

You're welcome.

It never even occurred to me to look for the real papers, but I've always thought the bibliography was great.

Ooh, nice links. You might wanna mirror the fan essay somewhere else, given that Geocities is dying soon...?

[melannen]

(I was just disappointed that the 1990 paper didn't exist. I was reading it in the '90s! Surely the paper had been written in the interim!

...and yes, I checked again today just to make sure I hadn't...

If I ever publish an SF novel, I will totally have a bibliography.)

Good idea! I'm at least making sure I've got a backup.

[sineala]

I had to check the book publication date again to convince myself that one probably wasn't a real paper. :P

More fiction should have bibliographies. I wrote a Roman AU (for another fandom) a couple months ago and posted it with an annotated bibliography. *is a dork*

[sineala]

Whoops, forgot his number in the filename; he's J. Richard Gott III, apparently.

(I really need to buy a paid account just to be able to edit my comments. Blarg.)

Two colleges in the same system as mine appear to have the Relativity proceedings in their depositories; not sure how to ILL that...

[melannen]

If it's going to be that m uch trouble, really, don't bother!

(This had better not turn out like the time I searched out all the citations in "The Waste Land"...)

[sineala]

It looks like I can just request the book, but I'd have no idea how to get the article to you -- I don't have a scanner or any way to make a .pdf or anything.

*stares at request screen more, feels stupid*

Someone on article_request might have it, if one asks nicely.