Aelliana and Daav need your help

[rolanni]

As reported elsewhere in this journal, Mouse and Dragon (forthcoming from Baen Books in September 2010) is the sequel to Scout's Progress.

Unless A Miracle Occurs(tm), Mouse and Dragon will appear without backup -- which is to say that the prequel book will be available, yes, but only as an ebook, not sitting has hardcopy on the shelf beside it.

That means that Mouse will need to make sense to Brand! New! readers who have never heard of the Liaden Universe®, and! it will have to Not Be Boring to readers who have been with us for years.

This is, believe it or don't, a tall order. And we the authors are far too close to both the universe and the text to know if we've hit or missed our various marks.

So! I'm asking for volunteers. For readers. For quick, canny readers who can tolerate romance with their SF and SF with their romance. I will this weekend have "ready" the first 100 pages of Mouse and Dragon. I propose to email them to willing readers, who will then let me know if the story so far works for them, if they're lost, or bored, or...whatever. This is not a call for proofreaders or for people to nitpick sentence structure. This is broad-base feedback, on a quick turn-around time.

In an ideal universe, I'd like to have the following:

*Someone(s) who has never read anything in the Liaden Universe®
*Someone(s) who adored Scout's Progress and Aelliana (oneminutemonkey, I'm lookin' at you)
*Someone(s) who is a Liaden Head, who has read the books multiple times and can quote significant chunks of them

Volunteers, please email me at rolanniATkorval.com (where The Usual replaces AT), with your qualifications. I plan on sending a pdf of the file, but I'm willing to talk format with those who are chosen.

Thank you for listening.

Edited to add: I've got a bunch of volunteers who are well-read Liadenphiles -- thank you! I'm really looking for that reader or two who hasn't gotten around to the Liaden Universe® yet.

Edited to add: Ladies and gentlemen, we have hit critical mass! Thanks to everyone who volunteered!

Comments

Re: Sequels and prequels

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I suspect that that's not the case--people who didn't know anyone under their Tuckerizations in Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes apparently enjoyed the book*, and there are series which people I have have picked up and read books starting at #2 or #3 and not had problems with (a friend recently read Michelle Sagara's second and third books in the Cast in... series from Luna, without having read the first book, and liked them a lot, and understood what was going on). There have been some series which I wondered about how accessible the series was for people who hadn't read the earlier book(s), which the people who read the books entering on later books, seemed not to have problems with.

The reading experience is different for someone showing up reading a later book without reading earlier book(s) in the series, but.... that's also true for e.g. someone who wasn't around when Star Trek the original series was airing, who's watching now something from the 1960s rooted in the perceptions of the 1960s and cultural outlook way back then, with the new viewer having grown up in a drastically different world--one which Star Trek in many ways was a key influence and conditioner of (compare cellphones to tricorders, the use of the term "sensor" ....).
* Fallen Angels is perhaps the most MarySue pastiche novel ever, in the sense that the book is basically the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and resurrects the space program, fans save the universe, and there are dozens of people Tuckerized in it and made Heroic in various ways.
(On the other hand.... I suddenly remembered Heinlein's Number of the Beast was it? My sister read it and thought it so lacking in merit that she proceeded on the phone to try to give me a detailed description of plot and chapter by chapter events to spare me in her perspective from reading the books and from wanting to read the book. I told her that it wasn't working and wasn;t going to work, because my main interest was in reading the book for the injokes and to see how much of the injokes and the Tuckerizations I picked up.... she's never been in the SF community, she's strictly a reader.)