on the big adventure

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, when you’re reading books written in or set in the distant or not-quite-so-distant past, you’re constantly picking up evidence about how the world of the book works so that what the characters are doing makes sense. Charlotte Brontë doesn’t tell you that being a governess is one of the only respectable jobs available to a woman like Jane Eyre or that it was pretty impossible to get divorced in England in the 1840s, but you figure that out while reading because you’re a smart person, right? That kind of detective work is exactly what you have to do in science fiction when the author introduces you to a new universe.

THOMAS I’ll save you!