Feedback on Emma Comes in from Cold

Thank you. I assure you that it gets better--lots more to come. The first chapters are just setup. I think that Emma's inherited a little of Dee's attitude which should come out in a few chapters; watch for it.

No, I mean Celsius, not Kelvin. That's why it's high temp. The low temp barrier was broken in 1978 (the BCS theory dates to that work) and reached about -70 C. The 13-14 C limit was reached in 2016 but at 10,000 atm pressure.

I knew someone who could do Fourier transforms in his head at 15 yrs old. In fact, he was one of my physics profs. He could also do trig (sin, cos, etc) and log derivations (which use Fourier series calcs) in his head.

When I was in grad school there was a physics grad student who was 17 yrs old. In his second year. Which meant he graduated college at 15.

Those people served as ability models for Emma for me and math prodigies aren't uncommon.

I wondered who would notice that I used real college "events" in that psrt. Well spotted. Yes, that was Rice. But I spiced it up a bit for this story to make it seem that there were lots of streaking activities going on at many places, including Rice. Fiction, ya know?

Univ of Michigan had one in the 1990s but their admin killed it off since everyone knew when it was held (finals week). Spoilsports.

And your point is...? Is that a "rule" for NiS stories? I wasn't aware that these stories had a rulebook which needs to be followed :)

@fenris13 Now that was a wicked awesome answer. Thank you!

@pyvent

Hey, the word is canon. Just sayin'. Since you're interested in the 'canon,' look at these statements from: https://www.asstr.org/~NIS-Admin/program/NiS_Program_analysis.html:

"The closer a story sticks to those rules the closer it is to what readers are likely to consider 'canon'. Note however that there is no actual 'canon' that stories are required to stick to, there is more of a 'loose range' and a sort of 'we know it when we see it'." and

"Every writer brings a unique point of view to the series. Such diversity is encouraged. The Naked in School Universe should NOT be considered a rigid template. If all the stories are exactly the same, it will only get stale."

So the OFFICIAL word from the NiS gods is that THERE IS NO CANON. Okay? Good. Now enjoy the story as we continue...

Thanks. And I hate the friggin' autocorrect too...

There is some "sex" in the Emma story but I wrote it as a coming of age story with a strong nudist slant and set it in the NiS universe because I wanted to have fun with an absurd situation--nudity in the frozen north. The sex stuff comes in the later chapters.

Emma's my fifth novel and the four previous ones actually do have a fair amount of NiS sex and teen interaction in them. All the stories are hosted both on ASSTR and SOL. In them, I do kind of talk about kids who are affected by the NiS experience, positively and negatively, and I also invented a different kind of HS sex-ed program, having very much the characteristics that you mention in your bulleted list. If you hadn't told me you didn't read my earlier stories, your bulleted list comes very close to the plot lines in several of those stories, actually.

I'm familiar with the stories you mention, Waif and Pam and Co. Definitely utopian and not really similar to mine except in very general terms. I find that many NiS stories are quite dystopian and even as fantasies, are totally not believable even given the parameters of the stories' set-up. I wrote my stories to show how the idea that a NiS program was just not gonna happen in any universe, and had fun with the tropes used in many of the other stories.

I urge you to read in order, Kevin and Denise; Roger and Cynthia; The Exported Rebellion; and Tom's Troubles. Most have social nudism as well as NiS themes plus an effective sex-ed course outside of the need for an NiS program.

If you do read them, I'd love to hear your thoughts. You actually nailed one of my major plot devices without knowing about it--well done!

https://storiesonline.net/a/Ndenyal

https://www.asstr.org/~Ndenyal

p.s. I had kind of a Naked in School experience in high school--naked swimming in the 1950s. No way was I gonna do that, so I did what the heroes of my stories did and figured out how to get out swimming, for my entire HS stay. The school officials never caught on to me until a few weeks before graduation--and they couldn't do anything about it then. Ha.

The reference I made to the different kind of sex-ed class isn't from Emma. K&D, my first story, serves as a prolog to that invented sex-ed class and the class itself is created in R&C and descriptions of it in operation continue in the following 2 books.

Sounds like you read K&D. Those two characters, Kevin and Denise, play a pivotal role in the alternative sex-ed class found in the following books.

You wrote ... My version would be more about the bonding process, not the sex. "Is it the duty of school to attempt to get too-shy wall-flower kids to participate in appropriate boy-girl relationships?"

Again, Emma doesn't have the class I mention--that's in the earlier books. The classes mentioned in Ch 10 of Emma, the ones described as taking place in the Hershey PA high school, are versions of the original dystopian NiS classes as created by Karen Wagner. The Emma book takes place about 6 years before K&D and the other books. The class I refer to has the bonding, respect building, sensitivity, and teamwork you promote as good features for teaching--not the abuse and humiliation of NiS.

You wrote ... Doing things that might get you razzed is right out.

We find the same modesty thing at many nudist resorts too. Teen boys as well as girls are far more modest than anyone else. (I'm the manager and board member at one such resort and visit many others.)

Thanks for your kind comments; especially the comparison to PeregrinF. (He's contacted me too about this story. He likes it.) That's a real ego boost. I had a lot of fun writing this story and I agree, I did set the NiS plot in a world very close to our "current" reality with no explanation of how it could have possibly come about. But wait until later in the Emma story and you'll see a hint of a possible reason why the society of her universe could have accepted it. My original intent in my first (then second, then third...) stories was to show just how impossible an idea the whole NiS universe was, and I tried to kill it off by preemptively shooting holes in any future stories by other authors. So yeah, my stories aren't NiS, they're actually anti-NiS.

My strong reaction against the NiS universe was that when I was to begin high school, they had a kind of naked in school program. This was back in the 1950s and my school had swimming classes in PE where the kids were required to be naked. There was no real privacy at the pool, too; people could see into the area. For me, that was an absolute non-starter; no way was I going to participate--so I arranged to get involved in the school's class scheduling (manual, before computers, obviously) and made sure I never got put in a gym class which had swimming. Yeah, how I did that was underhanded and very sneaky, and Emma channeled my high school self in many ways. But as to the school dictating that I had to give up my personal privacy? Not happening; so it didn't happen. When I came across the NiS stories, I had a gut reaction against them and that resulted in my own anti stories.

Anyway... I really don't mean to "ignore or subvert" the necessary suspension of disbelief needed to make the NiS universe become close to reality. As I mention at the end of "Roger and Cynthia," the idea of NiS is simply an extension of the naked psychotherapy sessions of the last century. From the last chapter:

"But your methods aren't at all new, you know. It was in the 1960s, actually, sessions kind of like what you did were known as 'encounter groups' and I think it was in 1967 that a guy named Paul Bindrim started workshops with the participants being nude and sessions included role-playing involving various experiences and they did touching exercises too. This kind of naked psychotherapy eventually faded away until its proponents brought it back—and we know its reincarnation as the Naked in School Program. ... That's the root of the Program. The psychologists who've been its champion are those who studied the naked psychotherapies of the 1960–70 era.

So back in the 60s and 70s, people just thought those shrinks were just weird. In my version of the universe, they just became main-stream. And the virulent U.S. anti-nudity prudery of current times (as opposed to attitudes in Europe) never developed.

I really try to avoid any grammar faux pas; I do my own editing and that means I probably miss stuff that I'd pick up when reading something "cold." Thanks for pointing out that one.

Politically? I'm sort of libertarian, I guess. Fairly conservative fiscally and a bit liberal socially. I like the Vermont motto, "Don't tread on me."

Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.

I read "Heat." Cute story; I liked it. I assume you know that "paradoxical effect" is a medical/pharmacological term and it means the response to the drug has the *opposite* effect to its normal and expected effect. You didn't quite use it in the medical sense, though. In your story, the higher dose was thought to possibly cause a less intense response; that's not truly "paradoxical" in the medical sense. Your use is closer to the "Eagle effect" (look it up--it's for microbiology but applies here). Anyway. Good story.

Two of the fields I'm familiar with are neuroscience and biochemistry/molecular biology/molecular genetics. So reading your take on your heros' "research" and their human subjects trial brought back memories. Research protocols, informed consent forms, dealing with IRBs and all that... ugh. Glad it's over with for me.

Btw: spelling--it's Jekyll; there's no "c"--back at'cha.

Yep, canon or genre, that's a total interpretation issue. It's NiS because that's MY interpretation of the NiS universe. And lots of my readers seem to have agreed with me.

(Because I used a lot of Brit slang, I used a Brit language spelling file and "publically" comes up as Brit spelling. Gotta watch the spelling though. I attended a medical conference years ago and one paper in the abstracts was entitled, "Tuberculosis: a Pubic Health Hazard.")

Cheers...

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

I'm writing, but not for this site. I usually write nonfiction. I've been asked to do a presentation in August for a mindfulness festival. It's on cultural anthropology and covers the period of the 1st millennium BCE in the middle east. I'm working on the essay which will be the basis for my presentation.

It will be a while before I can switch gears to get back to fiction again. History/anthropology is so much easier to research and write about. (If you need to know the distinction, history depends on written texts, first- or second-hand descriptions of events. Cultural anthropology depends on the physical artifacts the ancient society leaves behind, which show many things about the culture that the texts never reveal.)

Sorry. You asked.

It's been a while since I read your stories--under "pseudorandom"--some as early as 2007?--but I think I recall them. I did see your add-in stories last year to round out the Triad or Trio series, though. If I'm recalling the stories correctly, I thought your plot ideas were both unique and clever and your handling of dialog was quite good. So was the ironic humor.

Don't put yourself down.

And thanks for the thumbs up, too.

Thanks for the compliment. I'm gratified to hear that I captured Emma's south-London/south-east-end speech so well. That's the UK form of English which is fairly close to Australian in phrasing, usage, and idiomatic word choices. Of course if you heard her speak, she'd definitely sound like a south Londoner, not Australian. Picking up on written Australian isn't so easy unless the author uses some of any number of key giveaway words like earbashing, heaps, hooroo, dunny, sheila, fair dinkum, arvo, sweet as, togs, ripper, and many others unique to Australian.

In fact, her speech did confuse Stan; in Chapter 8, Stan wondered if she might be Australian. So your catch was actually a good call--you noticed the language similarities in her speech. Full marks to you.

Also, many people have noticed that Brits from Southeast England (which includes London) who've spent time in North America often do end up sounding a bit Australian. Emma's grandmother certainly is an example of such a person and her mother picked up that speech pattern.

That's true, and it's also true that "soccer" is used in several other countries (like Japan where it's "sakka"), but the game is football (association football) in the UK. Call it soccer there and you get sneered at. Only in the US and Canada is the sport universally called soccer. So Emma didn't know that the Brits originally got the word from something like Assoc. of Footballers which got compressed into soc-ers and then soccer. Ah, I just checked Wikipedia:

The word "soccer" was a recognised way of referring to Association football in the UK until around the 1970s, when it began to be perceived incorrectly as an Americanism.

So that's how Emma perceived it, like the rest of her UK counterparts. To her, the 1970s were ancient history...

Well, in a way, that did happen, but it wasn't his intent. He did it to permit calculations involving incrementally changing conditions, like acceleration, since he was mostly concerned with physical phenomena like gravitation and motion. The current math then couldn't deal with those kinds of calcs. His attempt at trying to solve a math problem was his impetus for inventing calculus, actually--not physics. He was trying to calculate the slope of a line tangent to a parabola at any point on the curve and regular maths couldn't cut it. His method actually resulted in calculating the derivative of the function, for example. Other operations on the curve resulted in calculating the integral. Also, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also invented calculus, independently, about 8 years later, and did a far better job of it. His is the version which was developed further, to what we have today. His methods were more systematic than Newton's and his notation is what we use today. Look up "The Great Sulk" for your amusement.

So that's why Emma didn't mention Newton and calculus. It's simply too involved of a history to make sense having her try to explain where calculus came from.

But it's a good thought--thanks for sharing it.