The Page 69 Test: "Moonstorm"

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

"Moonstorm"

A Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, Yoon Ha Lee finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Lee’s novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first

novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel, and was a New York Times bestseller. Lee’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Audubon Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Lee’s hobbies include composing music, art, and destroying the reader. He lives in Louisiana with his husband and an extremely lazy catten.

Lee applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Moonstorm, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Moonstorm opens with a discussion of state worship of the Empress and the heroine reiterating her desperation to become a lancer pilot instead of getting some scut job cleaning mold out of hydroponics as a refugee evacuated by an Imperial fleet. It took me several moments to remember what the heck was going on in this passage, and I wrote the dang thing!

Browsers looking only at this page would accurately be able to tell that (a) we’re in space (b) there’s a military (c) the heroine cares a lot about becoming a pilot. Most of the wider context or my heroine’s relationships to the other characters, not so much! Moonstorm is science fantasy rather than hard science fiction, for instance; gravity is caused/affected by religious/state ritual, space is filled with temporarily breathable aether; but you can’t tell that from page 69. So at least the browser would be in the ballpark for genre, and have a sense that at least some of the characters are space Koreans from the names (Hwa Young, Ye Jun, Geum).

Browsers would, on the other hand, get an accurate sense of the prose. I was asked to simplify this for the target audience, or to gloss terminology that YA readers might not be familiar with, such as IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) or C2 (command and control). I’m used to assuming that readers in adult quasi-military science fiction will have a handle on a lot of terminology that YA readers legitimately may not know off the top of their heads.