I would disagree with anyone who claimed this book is not science fiction. However I would understand their claim. This book starts with the crash of a spaceship from Mars, the sole survivor is a mutant human, another Thirteen is recruited to hunt him down, this hunter was on Mars, and returned to Earth enhanced with military implants.

But this is another of Morgan’s detective story with cops and guns and government agents and conspiracies, and murder scenes and drug dealers.

I’m glad I read it and would recommend it to anyone interested in scifi, but I was disappointed that the science fiction elements played such a minor role. This story would be essentially identical if it had been written without any of them. The Kovacs trilogy was a lot more dependent on the scifi devices.

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I have been listening to Richard Morgan’s trilogy Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. I noticed that Morgan really likes the word “shrugged”. Kovacs and others use this word 30+ times per book. It’s annoying, probably an indicator that he rushed the books past an overworked editor. It also might be an indication that words can be overused in audiobooks even though the work is great on paper.

I assumed that I had a few overused words and I wondered how to find them. Word doesn’t offer a word count histogram, so I wrote one in perl. If you are lucky enough to use a Mac you are only about 3 minutes away from running your own word count on any document you like. If you are on a PC you probably will have to download ActiveState Perl and get it running. This might take awhile. I’ll look into building an exe file if there is sufficient interest.

On a Mac you have to do 4 things:

1) open the Terminal and go to your target directory

2) save this perl code in your target directory as an executable text file named wordcount.pl

3) save your document as a text file in the same directory, let’s say you name it doc.txt. This program will not read Word files or other formats, just text.

4) type ./wordcount.pl doc.txt

The lightning fast result is a histogram analysis of your word usage. A 53,000 word document on a MacBook Pro runs in about 2 seconds. If you want to save the output for future review type ./wordcount.pl doc.txt > results.txt then open results.ext in your word processor.

Each line of output starts with the number of times the word is used, followed by the word, like this:
1176 of
1255 and
1268 a
1441 to
2502 the

At the end is a summary: Total of 53955 words, 10352 distinct words used. My word count agreed exactly with Microsoft Word!! I would have bet money they would not be exactly the same. But at least it gives me confidence in my code.

Your most heavily used words will be of course: the, to, a, and….etc. You will have to dig through the list to find the first word which is not common.

My first word to study is Phillip, the name of my protagonist which I have used 122 times. This might be an indication I’m overusing his name, although it will take a careful reading of the book to decided when to drop the name.

Suppose you only want to see the dreaded adverb. It’s trivial to look for words containing in “ly”. You can modify my script by deleting the first # sign around line 21 => unless ($word =~ /ly/) {next;} # remove the first # sign if you want to look for adverbs

I learned that my novel contains 261 distinct words ending in ly, and I use them 800 times. I used “only” 98 times, “nearly” 53 times, and “really” 30 times. Awful, just awful. Instead of slowly reading each paragraph I can now target specific words in much faster editing sessions.

Editors look for overusage of adverbs and specific words. Statistical analysis of your work is a tool you can use to get past these roadblocks. I look forward to your feedback.

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http://www.richardkmorgan.com/article_soundfury.htm

His comments are great, but we need more analysis. Why is there civil warfare inside our genre? Isn’t there room enough for all of us?

1 First of all, more than anything else, this is about money. There are only so many euros to go around and everybody wants more. Anyone who shows some success is an immediate role model and target. Campy space-opera, hoky stories which appeal to NASCAR fans sells.

2 A long time ago somebody decided to call their story science fiction, ignoring the fact that the word science has an unambiguous meaning. This may have been a slur, a derogatory comment aimed at a teenager who appeared to be wasting his life. Or it may have been a wannabe, somebody writing a story about magic pixie dust. In the end the name stuck, and any supernatural and possible future story was branded “science fiction”. How many bookstores make any effort to separate out fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction?

3 Most of us hope, anticipate, or desire that our story will eventually come true. Even sword wielding wizards usually represent a desire for reality. Faster than light travel, talking robots, and time-travelling hobbits are frequently dreams for a different reality than we have now. If I predict a post-apocalyptic wasteland where street urchins scrounge petrol for their dirt bikes then how could your story about a drug dealing robot with empathic wifi signals also come true?

4 For real science fiction there is almost always an idea which contradicts the canon of science. It’s too easy to criticize fake science such as faster than light or time travel, perpetual motion, communications satellites, or a planetary network carrying video, voice, and real-time text messages. Some of these ideas come true, some are reasonable predictions, some are outlandish. But all of them are necessary to tell a story. In the end this is about telling a story, it’s not about predicting the future. The fake science helps us tell a good story.

5 If scifi writers or readers were polled we would see even more hostile commentary towards Grisham, Follet and any host of popular authors. Derisive opinions and scathing hatred are there for the asking outside the genre.

Thanks to Neal Asher for pointing out Mr. Morgan’s comments.

S

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