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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!Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.
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.
The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.
Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (June 2018).
My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.
Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee.
The Page 69 Test: Fox Snare.
Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (October 2023).
My Book, The Movie: Moonstorm.
--Marshal Zeringue