Bear also gets big points for being a Jethro Tull fan.

[roadrunnertwice]

Elizabeth Bear says, on the subject of midbooks:

Open three books you like to page 150 and see what's going on. Flip a few dozen pages to either side. I betcha, in most of them, something Big will have just changed.

Well, whaddaya know:
Gaudy Night: Miss DeVine, while prodding away at Harriet's personal history, manages to both lay bare Harriet's central emotional conflict and obliquely point the reader toward the identity (or at least the motivation) of the poltergeist.
Snow Crash: Raven, demonstrating his real capacity for violence for the first time, murders Lagos, the librarian who put together the Babel/Infocalypse stack. He then proceeds to waste a couple of innocent Crips, and we learn about the H-bomb he carries in his sidecar.
Watership Down: Captain Holly, of the Sandleford Warren, shows up at Watership at the head of Sandleford's entire surviving population: Him and Bluebell. Fiver's magical powers, which until now had been mostly a matter of faith (notwithstanding Like Trees in November, where everyone with his head on straight could tell something was wrong), are suddenly inescapably real.

Comments

[froborr.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. A novel is a series of interconnected arcs, each rising and falling independently. It makes sense to me that there'd usually be peaks at the powers of 1/2. And since novels come in a fairly narrow set of standard lengths for publishing reasons...