Whoosh

[redbird]

I wrote a whole 200 words this morning before going out to meet a friend for lunch and general hanging-out. That wound up going long enough that I'm going to the gym tomorrow instead of today (my decision, not her request). Then, tired but wanting to show off the new hairdo--which she spoke very highly of--I went to the rassef social, forgetting that it was in a dim enough bar that nobody would notice. And got into a stupid political argument. Between that and being a sympathetic ear for my friend, I was completely wiped out by the time I got home.

So cattitude and I had cheap takeout Tex-Mex for dinner, discovered we were too wiped to play Scrabble, and I don't think I'm even going to look at the novel tonight.

The problem is that it wants to wander off in the direction of cetacean intelligence, and probably at far too great length. I may have to save it by deciding that no, those whales aren't sapient--which means rewriting one paragraph--and thus that the Deep Dancers are on (mixed metaphor ahead!) a wild goose chase, falling in love with the whale songs when they're supposed to be finding and communicating with intelligent species. I also need to figure out how to name the Dancers, but that's a separate problem, and will exist whether or not I decide to assume Earth has native intelligent ocean-dwellers.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There isn't a lot written about sub-sapients, mostly because we have so few and we don't have an ethical way of thinking about them. We probably wiped out our cousin sub-sapients when we were barely ahead of them. But having whales turn out to be, yes, bright, on a cosmic scale, like chimps and pigs, and in a way much more comprehensible to the aliens than humans are, would be a very interesting thing to do.

OTOH, you could do a lot of research on cetacean intelligence.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd be interested in reading lots of cool stuff about cetacean intelligence. But then, I'm not sure what a sensible audience I represent; it was only a few days ago that I had the revelation that the whale taxonomy bit in _Moby Dick_ may not actually be as hilarious to people who don't do taxonomic stuff at work.