Using Insomnia for Useless Things

Insomnia has been kicking my tail this week, and I haven't been trying to sleep all that hard. Rather, when I am finding it too hard to stay awake (around 4 am) I sleep and wake up at 6:30 and start my day. What have I been doing for the past couple of days between 11:30 and say 3:30?

Reading.

It is no secret that I love speculative fiction and I always have.

Sometime on Sunday, I remembered a story about a generation ship made out of a gas giant where the core had been turned into a (reasonably) habitable world for post-humans.

So, I thought that I remember which story this world was in and I wanted to read it.

I started with Pushing Ice and when I got to page 300 or so, I realized that I was reading the wrong book. But...I felt compelled to read it again. So, I finished it.

Then I thought it may have been in Eon, so I started reading that. The difference is that I realized my mistake about one hundred pages in, but once again, I felt compelled to finish the book.

Unwilling to let the vagaries of my memory determine which wild goose chase I would be going on, and it being 2 am, I let my Google Fu help out.

Turns out the novel I was looking for is called Marrow and while the story was right on, I never read the book.

Never.

So I did some more searching and discovered that the novel was based on a short story of the same name.

Maybe I read that?

Some more searching, led me to it being published in The Hard SF Renaissance which I have read through and was sitting in my bedroom. So, I read it.

With all that build-up and all that work, it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered.