Month: May 2025

One Survivor

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Or from your favorite bookseller.

by Robert Plamondon
Norton Creek Press, 258 pages, ISBN 0981928447. 

Robert Plamondon’s novel is the kind of old-school SF adventure you love, with competent, strong-willed characters, believable technology, fast-paced action, humor, mystery, murder, betrayal, and a touch of the supernatural, all set against the backdrop of the ruined Terran Empire.

One Survivor will remind you of Heinlein’s early work, but with a depth of background more like Jack Vance. It pits fifteen-year-old Beverly di Mendoza against her parents’ murderers, on a backward planet whose inhabitants owe her nothing. With the help of two other teen-agers and their battered space ship, Beverly survives the initial onslaughts and soon moves to the offensive.

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How to Amost Use Dialect in Fiction

A (Good?) Example From the Master

What’s the big deal about using dialect in fiction? Let’s look at an example from the all-time master of dialect, Mark Twain:

“Say, Jim, I’ll fetch the water if you’ll whitewash some.”

Jim shook his head and said, “Can’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an’ git dis water an’ not stop foolin’ roun’ wid anybody. She say she spec’ Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an’ so she tole me go ’long an’ ’tend to my own business—she ’lowed she’d ’tend to de whitewashin’.”

“Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That’s the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket—I won’t be gone only a minute. She won’t ever know.”

“Oh, I dasn’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis she’d take an’ tar de head off’n me. ’Deed she would.”
—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

At the time (1876) many readers were familiar with the two related dialects spoken by Tom and Jim and appreciated the faithfulness of Twain’s rendition. If you’d grown up in the same town, you’d have talked like one of them yourself.

It sounds overwrought to the modern American ear, though, and some of it doesn’t connect with our experience. For example, I look at “gwine,” wonder how I’m really supposed to hear it, give up, and change it in my mind’s ear to “gonna.”

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