Ha.
I have a fairly high tolerance for made up tech jargon, but agree that most authors don't know how to do it well, and in most non-Tolkien fantasy it drives me batty. [eta: Maybe it's because the real tech world is so full of idiotic Web 2.0 jargon that it stands to reason the future would be even worse?]
In general, I think made-up words work best when they're derived from real ones so your brain doesn't have to do a lot of work translating them every time they pop up. (I'm thinking of the Vorkosiganverse's comconscoles, which stand in for phones and computers - you don't need an appendix to translate that into modern Earth English.)
Also, I need to pick up Anathem.
I tend to agree with that, for the most part (Sarah Monette, I'm looking at you)
That's really interesting, because I find Sarah Monette to be exceptionally good at choosing placenames and using new words so that they seem natural and enrich the background of the story.
I find Sarah Monette to be exceptionally good at choosing placenames and using new words so that they seem natural and enrich the background of the story.
Her calendar system was maybe the hardest for me to wrap my brain around, so every time she referenced a unit of time, I had to stop and figure out what I thought it meant, and how/if that affected what the character was saying/doing.
It was very annoying.
so every time she referenced a unit of time, I had to stop and figure out what I thought it meant
Ha! That definitely helps explain our different reactions, as I could be described as time-impaired. I have no sense of time, I am bad at telling time, and I pretty much disregard time references when I see or read them. I just read her time stuff by context and didn't pay that much attention to the specifics.
Blackberry? Iphone?
More like a computer running Skype, but the wrist coms would be basically a smartphone shaped like a Dick Tracy watch.
whatsherface who writes "sci-fi romances" as Jayne Castle drove me crazy in the one book of hers I read - she'd compound words so people drank "cafftea" and so on - words compounded into long portmanteau word/phrases that were awkward. People are lazy - they wouldn't use the long versions.
Jayne Ann Krentz--yeah, that bugged me bigtime in her Castle books.
I prefer Robin D. Owens "Heart" series which features cats and other animals as familiars that can communicate telepathically with their human counterparts. The first one, Heartmate, has a really well-written cat as the main familiar.
Teppy - I slurked back in here to post that xkcd link. It's double funny because I paid full price for Anathem.
Sadly, Hayden Carruth just passed away. [link]
