#mysteries

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Rebecca Roque’s “Till Human Voices Wake Us”

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TOMORROW (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

"Till Human Voices Wake Us" is Rebecca Roque's debut novel: it's a superb teen thriller, intricately plotted and brilliantly executed, packed with imaginative technological turns that amp up the tension and suspense:

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/till-human-voices-wake-us-gn3a.html#541=2790108

Modern technology presents a serious problem for a thriller writer. Once characters can call or text one another, a whole portfolio of suspense-building gimmicks – like the high-speed race across town – just stop working. For years, thriller writers contrived implausible – but narratively convenient – ways to go on using these tropes. Think of the shopworn "damn, my phone is out of battery/range just when I need it the most":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0

When that fails, often writers just lean into the "idiot plot" – a plot that only works because the characters are acting like idiots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot

But even as technology was sawing a hole in the suspense writer's bag of tricks, shrewd suspense writers were cooking up a whole new menu of clever ways to build suspense in ways that turn on the limitations and capabilities of technology. One pioneer of this was Iain M Banks (RIP), whose 2003 novel Dead Air was jammed with wildly ingenious ways to use cellphones to raise the stakes and heighten the tension:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030302073539/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/play.html?pg=8

This is "techno-realism" at its best. It's my favorite mode of storytelling, the thing I lean into with my Little Brother and Martin Hench books – stories that treat the things that technology can and can't do as features, not bugs. Rather than having the hacker "crack the mainframe's cryptography in 20 minutes when everyone swears it can't be done in less than 25," the techno-realist introduces something gnarlier, like a supply-chain attack that inserts a back-door, or a hardware keylogger, or a Remote Access Trojan.

Back to Roque's debut novel: it's a teen murder mystery told in the most technorealist way. Cia's best friend Alice has been trying to find her missing boyfriend for months, and in her investigation, she's discovered their small town's dark secret – a string of disappearances, deaths and fires that are the hidden backdrop to the town's out-of-control addiction problem.

Alice has something to tell Cia, something about the fire that orphaned her and cost her one leg when she was only five years old, but Cia refuses to hear it. Instead, they have a blazing fight, and part ways. It's the last time Cia and Alice ever see each other: that night, Alice kills herself.

Or does she? Cia is convinced that Alice has been murdered, and that her murder is connected to the drug- and death-epidemic that's ravaging their town. As Cia and her friends seek to discover the town's secret – and the identity of Alice's killer – we're dragged into an intense, gripping murder mystery/conspiracy story that is full of surprises and reversals, each more fiendishly clever than the last.

But as good as the storytelling, the characterization and the mystery are, Roque's clever technological gambits are even better. This book is a master-class in how a murder mystery can work in the age of social media and ubiquitous mobile devices. It's the first volume in a trilogy and it ends on a hell of a cliff-hanger, too.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/16/dead-air/#technorealism

#pluralistic #books #reviews #novels #mysteries #thrillers #technorealism #gift guide #rebecca roque

[dduane]

Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, Fagan

#mysteries

[todayontumblr]

Thursday the 20th.

You better believe.

We hope you've ironed your black t-shirt, found your favorite beanie, polished your golden chain. Every day for the last god knows how long, your alarm has blared you awake, you've prised your sticky eyes open, rolled out of bed, sat there staring into space for around 15 minutes, drawn back the curtains, and checked your Antonio Banderas calendar. And it was always a crushing disappointment, to compound the ordeal of waking up—sometimes, it was the 20th. Sometimes it was Thursday. From time to time it was Wednesday the 19th, or Friday the 21st, but it was never quite the money shot. Only today things are a little different—you will have completed the aforementioned morning routine and checked your calender—only today, It's Business Time. It's #thursday the 20th. Praise be! 

What makes today all the more remarkable is that its coming was foretold in an episode of The Simpsons, no less, that show with the uncanny ability to predict world events long before they actually happen. Smartwatches? The horse meat scandal? The three-eyed fish? The censoring of Michelangelo's David? Lady Gaga's Superbowl Performance? Facetime? Trump's election? The pandemic itself??

Admittedly, some of these are a little easier to vouch for than others, but it is indisputable that today's materialization of Thursday the 20th is more than a little spooky. Don't believe us? See for yourself. Sometimes, all that can be said is that the universe works in mysterious ways.

However you're spending your big day, make it count. It's only #thursday the 20th once in a blue moon, after all, but it always goes down smooth. And for some reason, unbeknownst to us, like a whisper in the breeze, today has got us thinking of another Simpsons coincidence. But perhaps some mysteries are best left unsolved.

#today on tumblr #thursday the 20th #simpsons #big day #20 #thursday #coincidence #spooky #mysteries

[fucxingcuties]

#mysteries #mammal #animals #nature #memes

[1five1two]

#photography #egypt #pyramids #mysteries

[thatsbelievable]

#The Butler Yawned #a very short story by Dawson Blagthorne #Dawson Blathorne #author #authors #writers #writer #writing #literature #books #mystery #mysteries #butler

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

#Cartoon #classic cartoon #cemetery #graves #tomb #Tombstone #horror aesthetic #Mysteries #mysterious #graveyard

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

The Mystery of the Strange Smell in the Air and Weird Residue on Cars Across Connecticut

Social media was flooded with posts on Friday 17 February,  from people complaining about a weird smell in the air and residue on their vehicles from rain that fell Thursday night and into Friday.

What is causing it? It's not entirely clear.

Connecticut Chief Meteorologist says it's possible the residue is from dust kicked up from a dust storm in the Plains a few days ago. He says he smelled a chlorine-like odor in West Hartford Friday morning, but he doesn't have an explanation for that.

They have also not been able to determine what is causing the residue on people's vehicles.

#connecticut #news #unsolved #unsolved mysteries #mysteries

[mysharona1987]

#Mysteries #cartoons #comics #Rt

[confused-robot-cat]

Can anyone tell me where this photo comes from and who this is?

I've done a reverse image search and all that comes up is "Doctor Who is real! It's Jack Harkness!!!" But I want to know who it really is and the photo's true origins.

Anyone know?

#jack harkness #world war 2 #ww2 #wwii #world war ii #doctor who #torchwood #mystery #mysteries #photography #war photography #world war two

[dduane]

Today's small mystery

Reshelving some books that got out of their normal shelf in the upstairs bedroom, with the usual side revelations: (a) I need ebook copies of all the [Insert Color Here] Fairy Books, as it'd be good to have a collection of searchable texts*; (b) I need ebook copies (implying searchable texts) of the entire C.S. Lewis collection, as hunting for one of the more obscure quotes online is a waste of time that could be spent doing useful things like baking, or on creating crap renders of the recalcitrant manes of local demigods: (c) Hmm, some of these have bookmarks stuck in them. I wonder what those are about...?

I went through two or three books that had marks in them (blank sticky notes, usually), and in all but one case was able to figure out why I'd marked them, and make a note elsewhere of their content and implications. (I've been flirting with getting into Obsidian to see if it helps me stay on top of this kind of issue, but am not sure I really need it yet.)

This one, though, has left me baffled. It might have simply been where I paused in my reading... but that's not usually how I use my bookmarks. Normally I place them as a reminder that there was something on that page or spread that needed my attention for some reason, or was related to something else that was going on in life, or writing, or something. In this case... now all I have to try to recall is exactly what the issue was.

The bookmark tells me that we're almost certainly talking about something I was reading in 1994, because it's a train ticket from the 5th of September in that year, which I bought on the train (because there's no "from" marking on it), while heading to Wicklow Town. ("Cill Mhantain" is Irish for Wicklow.)

...The book is the Abbey Classics edition of Petronius's Satyricon: the Burnaby translation of 1694. (Interestingly, the National Library of Ireland has the same edition I do. Though I bet theirs is in better condition.) This is what we'd think of as a paperback, though it's actually bound with a soft cloth binding and has a paper dust jacket. (A scan of the front cover and front flap is below.) There are a lot of places I could have picked this up used in Dublin, but my guess is that it comes from one of a number of trips to Hay-on-Wye.

...And here are the pages where the train ticket was stuck in: a passage from the middle of Trimalchio's feast.

So now all I have to do is work out why I marked those pages... thirty years ago. (eyeroll) Yay.**

Something to occupy myself while I go off and make a flammkuchen...

*They're all online at Gutenberg, so that's all right.

**Though looking at the obscure idiom/metaphor "She's a very Pye at his Bolster," I wonder if it was something to do with that. ETA: So the thing to do when you run into a phrase like this in translation is to check another translator and see what they've got. It hadn't occurred to me on first glance that "Pye" wasn't a culinary reference, but a contraction of "magpie". And surprise, the 1913 Heseltine translation at Tufts' Perseus Digital Library has this as "a magpie belonging to a sofa": i.e. a bird that "henpecks" you in your own bed. Ow.

#mysteries #small ones #Satyricon #Petronius Arbiter

[todayontumblr]

Friday May 19.

The Big Question.

It really is the question of our times. It has occupied the greatest minds over the generations and proven an intellectual wrestling match unlike any other. The Earth is our collective home, that much we can agree on, but the nature of this home is the subject of fierce debate. A mass debate, if you will. It has torn families apart, turned friends into enemies, turned the scientific community into a pack of savages in lab coats, and created a schism as fierce and vast as any political, religious, or ideological question.

Now, one brilliant mind has stepped to the fore and asserted their truth; neigh, what very may well be the truth. Some say the world is flat. Most say that it's round. Could it even be something else entirely? Well, it seems that @gierosajie-art might be the one to resolve this question once and for all. And we can only salute them for it.

flat? round? something else? you decide*

*though we live in hope it is a death star with fancy decoration x

#today on tumblr #earth #flat earth #round earth #snail #snail earth #planet earth #the big question #science #mysteries

[sisaloofafump]

Thank u. I need this info. Good night

#I am trying to sleep rn #but #mysteries #dc comics #batman #bruce wayne #my polls

[vavandeveresfan]

Columbo gets angry. Mood.

I can so identify with him in this compilation.

A little guy who believes in justice, who uses his cunning and wiles to lure murderers into smug complacency, and then nails their asses while smiling benignly. But every now and then his patience reaches a snapping point, the facade is tossed aside, and you see the passion in him.

Damn, I love Columbo. If anyone tries to remake this series I'll commit murder.

For the record, Columbo isn't really angry with the young man he's yelling at in Italian. He's pressuring him to give some information. I think. The only Italian I know are names of foods.

#Columbo #Peter Falk #mysteries #crime dramas #murder mysteries #sleuths #detectives #TV detectives #characters with ethics #justice dealers

[thatsbelievable]

#Here are the Clues You’ll Need to Solve Tonight’s Mystery #clues #mystery #detective #detectives #mysteries #Mr. Pickle

[ironical-ghosty]

A piece for a local art contest based on "Mysteries of the Ocean" theme~

#ocean #mysteries #abyss #sea #fish #angler fish #giant squid #vampire octopus #vampire squid #oarfish #goblin shark #sea angel #viperfish #digital painting