Signal boosts: Luna, Princess Of Space; Lunnas Ache · 10:50pm Feb 8th, 2015
Here are two unusual and amazing stories about best princess that you might enjoy for very different reasons.
Chuckfinley's Luna, Princess of Space ([Romance] [Adventure] [AU], 13,597 words)
Chuckfinley was just featured by the RCL, and this is a different story from him which just hit the site today. In Chuck's words, Luna, Princess of Space is "a planetary romance and a love-letter to the works of Jack Vance, Robert E Howard, and Ray Bradbury."
What that means is unrepentant space opera, played very straight -- in a textual style that fell out of fashion before our lifetimes, but with an undeniable archaic charm. If you like prose like this, you will fall in love with the story from the first paragraph:
Onto this shining world stepped Space Princess Luna. Scion of a fading race, bounty hunter and former reaver, bringer of justice and desperate atoner. She of great strength and wit, dark-coated and bold, her blossoming joys matched only by her terrible woes. She had laid low the Star Drakes, saved ten-thousand colonists from the burning seas of Liath Macha, banished the space pirates from Lariat IV, and had now returned to New Canterlot once more.
If you look at that and see only oddly-voiced purple-prose telling, you should give this a pass and read the RCL-featured A Persimmon Spring instead; but if that evokes even the slightest twinge of nostalgia, you're in for a great ride.
???'s Lunnas Ache (2001 words)
This is an entrant into the February Writeoff Association competition (the author's identity has not yet been revealed). Note that I did not say "This is a story that was entered into the competition." It's many things -- primarily an homage to James Joyce's infamously experimental and dense Finnegans Wake -- but it's not a story.
This is an experiential text. A Discordian entheogen, a verbalaxative, an alternifact, a Key 17 precursor. This is SCUBA gear for deep-see diving. It is a poem:
Brittle mortal made awake. Slacking likely long aslape.
It is mouth-music:
Manimals made the noisome roccus. Brekketing, kekketing, koaxing, wuallowing, and quaoullauhing.
It is word-play, not merely punnery but an extended dance with layered meanings:
Flattershoes flew. The brunny angled hairs and flew alaughter the pregersi.
I guarantee that you will either love this story or you will hate it. (Reaction on the Writeoff thread is so far about 70% hate.) If the experience of soaking in beautiful glossolalia, just past the edge of comprehensibility, sounds like fun to you, drop everything you're doing and go read this. (Aloud.) If not, run away.
I should also mention that I started a crowdsourced project to make sense of the text. Love Lunnas Ache or hate it, you should check that document out and watch dozens of smart people pick apart the plot, language, and obscure sexual references.
(Full disclosure: I preread part of Luna, Princess of Space for Chuck. I may or may not have been involved with Lunnas Ache; I can't say for another week.)
With those almost-meaningful constructions, it sounds a bit like a badfic I wrote (loosely inspired by a certain Harshwhinny-related story), but taken up to eleven. (Incidentally, Fimfiction rejected my badfic for being too bad. ;p)
Actually, having looked at it, I'm not going to compare my own work to this. I'm not that talented in the insanity department. XD
Hey, it contains a climax and a resolution.
Based on the tidbits of those two stories you promote.
I am going to read those and will more then likely love them.
Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors, and I have not read a good space opera in a coon's age.
I know im not smart enough to truly grasp the second one but i am going to read it anyway as I enjoy good word play.
Now what/when is/are you going to do something about Hard Reset?
I need to keep annotating. D: How far along is that?
2780205 It sounds more like Howard than like Ray Bradbury. Howard/Vance/space opera, and Bradbury, are miles apart.
2780980
Have yet to get around to reading the fic.
I am more familiar with Ray Bradbury then the other two.
Vance I don't believe I have ever read, and Howard, I know the name but memory doesn't lend itself to recalling anything I may have read of his.
Either way the little bit the Horizon provided is enough to seriously grab my attention.
My headvoice for this was the voice used in the opening scene from Treasure Planet, the part telling the story of the infamous space pirate Nathaniel Flint. I think I might have to go follow up on this story just for that.
2780980
Bits of Bradbury, like his martian cities and his devil-may-care attitude to realistic dialogue, were influences here.
I don't know if the story or the annotated story was the weirder read.
I love the writeoff.
2799407
I'm torn between an "oh snap" on Congress' behalf and a sliver of cautious optimism for the literary community.