Teaser Tuesday – Wednesday Repost
(I’m reposting this from the main blog a day late, because I forgot to do it yesterday. Whoops. If you saw this yesterday and are looking for something else to read, I suggest going here or here.)
Today’s Tease is brought to you by Insomnia, which I just realized sounds like some sort of goofy man-perfume (AKA cologne). It’s a snippet from near the beginning of Castor that hopefully makes sense on its own.
Enjoy!
I mentioned books.
Most of the young Half-Adapts on the plantation couldn’t read. For some of them, it was because they were too young to have learned on Earth and their parents hadn’t the time or desire to teach them once they arrived on Castor. Reading didn’t help with the field work, after all. Then there were the war orphans and the street urchins and the whatever-elses, the ones who spent their years on Earth just trying to stay alive.
I’m one of those.
But even still, I could read. I had gone to school on Earth for long enough that I could muddle my way through a children’s book and write my own name. Then I got to Castor and pretty much forgot about it until I was about twelve, when my wages went up enough that I could maybe think about saving up to buy something with them.
There was a bookshop in First Landing – actually a bookshop and a liquor store, if you can believe that. Don’t ask me why anybody thought those two would go together. I went in with my handful of coins and came out with something to read.
The books you could get that far from the Gemini cost an awful lot, which is interesting given how crap they always were. The covers were usually just a solid colour with the title written across the front, and the pages were so thin that you could see through them if you held them up to the light. But there was something about them that I liked, so I kept at it, and pretty soon I could read ‘properly’.
It turns out you can tell the different between a good story and a bad story even when you’ve got nothing much to measure them by. I knew without having to be told that the stories in those books were awful. Everything felt contrived, nobody acted the way real people act, the endings always had the hero killing a whole bunch of people and marrying some random woman with huge breasts – and trust me, they made sure to describe those even if they forgot to say how anybody felt about all that murdering going on around them. Some of the really hilarious ones were set on Earth, and you could always tell if the author was a native of Castor because he’d get the colour of the sky wrong or forget that people on Earth don’t all speak the same language.
How can you be the kind of person who writes a book and still be that stupid?
