h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, Dmitri.

I don't often give up on a book after a few paragraphs or pages. Luckily, a bad beginning can morph into something better. (Maybe some authors just aren't good at beginnings? Hard to believe, right? ).

But what is most likely to frustrate readers is not knowing whether important characters are male of female. "Middlesex" managed to blur the boundaries, but some care was taken to make the main character
of a single gender at first.

That reminds me of Cleverbot A87884914 and the familiar refrain, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' 'No'.

Interesting suggestion that not knowing the (binary?) gender of a character might be more frustrating to a reader than not knowing the colour of their skin, for example... As with race, and 'white by default' there is likely to be a 'masculine by default' assumption - like the cute cartoon character I wrote about A87924937

I like being challenged, though, as I recognise I read and put my characters into a world that I am familiar with, and then a good author can cleverly jolt the world using 'show, don't tell'. Robert Heinlein's character who lost a leg and had to put up with it being replaced by one with white skin was a good one, as was Monica Hughes' character who lived on Mars - she was human but had had her skin altered to cope with the additional radiation so she was green.

That's a good point, Sasha.

That's a good point about not knowing the color of a character's skin.
Some authors deliberately make their characters a color that no human would be -- Dr. Seuss's Grinch is green. Barney is purple.

I think that when you or I start reading a book, we'd like to find a way inside the story. If there are a lot of unpalatable characters, the author might include an innocent or childlike one. Tiny Tim, in"A Christmas carol," or even Jiminy cricket in "Pinocchio." Someone the reader can relate to.

William Golding's "The Inheritors" was a challenge to get inside.

Hm. I personally found Golding's Neanderthals very relatable.

He did a masterful job, though it was still tough for a 17-year-old me to get inside their minds. I was still moved by books like "A Separate peace," which had no actual neanderthals in it.

Nowadays, the Neanderthals look pretty good in retrospect compared with some of what is happening in Washington.

I liked "Clan of the cave bear" a lot.