The Hidden SF Treasure Box

There’s been a fair amount of discussion lately about a trend in science fiction that has become quite pronounced in the last few years, namely, the near moribund adult sf market and the strong surge in YA sf, as practiced by the likes of Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Garth Nix, and recent entries by the likes of Cory Doctorow.  At least some of this has been driven by the fantastic success of the Harry Potter books and movies, which phenomenon has certainly had an influence on young people looking for more of the same. Which at least helps explain why the YA field has enjoyed good sales numbers, but does nothing to explain why adult SF has not enjoyed similar growth - after all, the young teens who cut their teeth on the first Harry Potter book are now in their twenties, and could reasonably be expected to have graduated to more ‘adult’ fare.

But what makes this dichotomy even more puzzling is the fact that YA today is not the YA over-the-hill types like myself grew up with, the Heinleins, Nortons, Asimovs (Paul French), etc. The most obvious difference is that during the day these writers were publishing their ‘YA’ material, any reference to sex was an absolute no-no. Heinlein’s run-ins with his editor at Scribners about this subject are now legendary, and his methods of getting around her very puritanical attitudes are somewhat hilarious - “Raising John Thomases” in The Star Beast, the title of Tunnel in the Sky  (TITS),  as well as being ingenious. Even back then, the authors writing material for teens were well aware that teens knew what sex was and had very normal concerns and issues about the subject that they wanted to see addressed, but the rules of the day were that sex was an off-limits subject, not ‘appropriate’ material for teens to be reading about, which certainly frustrated the writers.

Nowadays, the subject is not off-limits, though there are still concerns about being too graphic. Most of the better writers in this field today do inject something about it in their works, as after all, teens do think about sex, and presenting characters where this is not even a little part of their lives is highly unrealistic. In some cases, they do much more than indicate that sex exists, but explore in detail the concerns and problems teens face in this area.

But given this new freedom to present teens as more complete, real people, it starts to beggar the question of just what the difference is between YA and adult sf. And for the life of me, I can’t see any difference except YA books have young protagonists, and most often the problems they face involve some aspect of growing up to be mature adults. Vocabulary, situations, scientific detail, concepts, and portrayed societies are seemingly identical between many YA and adult sf books. Except, perhaps, that most YA sf is more accessible and/or relevant to the average reader than a lot of current ‘hard’ sf.

But for whatever reason, YA material is selling better than adult sf, and it is attracting some very competent writers. Those adult sf readers who turn up their noses at such books are, IMO, missing a lot of decent reading, and need to develop the habit of browsing the YA shelves in the bookstores, as most bookstores do not double-shelve in both the YA and SF areas. Perhaps it is just this separation in shelving that might be part of the reason for the disparity in sales and why those reading YA don’t seem to be graduating to the adult section later in life, as they’ve never formed the habit of looking in the SF section, just as the adults quit browsing the YA section a long time ago.

Good writing is good writing, and there’s a lot of it in the YA section. Go give it a look.

Literary Markers

Just how is a consensus opinion about the quality of any particular book formed? And what impact does that opinion have on the book’s sales?

First I think we should look at the intended audience. Most books are not written to try and appeal to everyone. This is obviously true in terms of ‘genre’ books, but it is also true of those written as ‘mainstream literary’ works - the audience for this type of book is just as limited. Often there is very little crossover between books that appeal to, say, an SF fan, and one that targets potential Pulitzer prizes. ‘Best Sellers’, by definition, appeal to a larger proportion of readers than other books, but they still won’t appeal to everyone.

But within its target audience, each book eventually gathers some form of opinion about just how good (or bad) it is. How? It used to be that the word about new books was disseminated via a very limited communication method, reviews in newspapers, magazines, and journals by professional reviewers. Often libraries would base their purchase decisions on those reviews. Only after the book had been out for some time would there be any feedback from Mr. Average Reader by way of word of mouth to their friends and co-workers, and which books Mr. Average Reader looked at was at least partially influenced by those same professional reviews or by the book’s availability at the library. This made it quite difficult for new authors who didn’t immediately wow the professional reviewers to get much notice (or sales), unless their publisher really pushed to market the book (not something most publishers did with unknowns). On this basis, it’s quite probable that books were published in years gone by that deserved a wide audience, but never got a chance. Of those that did get noticed, it would often take years for a book that only received initial lukewarm reviews to start to gather a reputation for being something that should be put on everyone’s reading list. Within all of this, literary awards played a significant role. Books that won Pulitizers or Booker awards were almost guaranteed best-seller status, and a lot of attention from literary scholars. Winning one those awards, though, was then (and is now) something of a crapshoot, as the judges for these awards are a small number of people, each of whom has their own biases, likes, and dislikes. What appeals to this limited group of people may or may not appeal to a larger audience, giving these awards a somewhat limited utility as a guide to Mr. Average Reader - but because they are award winners, that reader is much more likely to give the book a try. More significant, though, is winning such an award gives the book a ‘marker’ about its quality. And it is the accumulation of such markers that eventually define its literary reputation.

Today there is something called an internet, and it is changing just how books accumulate such markers. First is the fact that critical reviews are no longer the property of professional reviewers only. Amateurs can not only write their own reviews, from their perspective, but have them prominently displayed for all the world to see on sites like Amazon. While many people still rely on professional reviews for determining what they’ll read next, these on-line reviews are gathering more and more credence as viable ‘markers’ of a book’s quality. And, while some of these amateur reviews are truly amateurish and provide little help to Mr. Average Reader, a great many of them are at least equal to the quality of those written by professionals, with the added benefits of having viewpoints different from those of the professional critic and not even potentially influenced by the effect of cash payments for the review.

Now most of these amateur reviewers are inspired to write reviews mainly for those things they read and liked (and the self-choice factor means they probably pick more books of the type they will probably like in the first place). But there are also a significant number who are just as inspired by books they hated, and the reviews they write about these books are often of great value to the prospective buyer/reader of same, giving very cogent and specific reasons for what they felt was wrong with the book. If there are enough of these negative reviews, it will eventually push the book into the trashbin of literary history, even if the literary academic world thinks it’s great. Literary greatness is not measured solely by its credit ‘markers’: its awards, the in-depth analyses it gets, its acceptance by the academic world, etc, but must also, somewhere along the line, impress enough ‘average readers’ that it has special qualities, that it is worth the time to read, understand, and enjoy, before it can really join the pantheon of ‘classic literature’.

Clearly, today’s publishing market has changed. While aggressive advertising campaigns can still push a book onto the best-seller lists, at least temporarily, the long-term sales outlook for a book is much more likely to be dependent on feedback from the readers than was true in earlier times. And its reputation for being a solid, worthwhile book, rather than a forgettable piece of fluff, is also getting more than a little of its assessment from those same everyday readers. The chances of a really good book that is not aggressively marketed (or marketed at all) getting noticed and achieving decent sales have improved as word-of-mouth via these on-line reviews travels faster and to a far larger potential audience than what was achievable via local reading groups and letters to editors.

Publishers are just beginning to realize the power of these ‘amateur’ reviews. Literary academics have so far ignored them, but they may not be able to much longer. It’s a more democratic world out there, with more freedom to publish via print-on-demand and other such vehicles, and more and more a book’s reputation is being established by a consensus of all of its readers, not just those who make a living critiquing books.

The Default Reader Attitude

John Scalzi, over on his Whatever blog, comments again about his lack of racial markers for his characters in his novels, a certain ‘color-blindness’ that no one really paid attention to, until the point was made that the average American reader, faced with a lack of such markers, defaults these characters to ‘white’. At this point, John has indicated that he knew what color his characters were, but didn’t find this characteristic germane to his work, focusing more on the character’s social, economic, and educational background. With J. K. Rowling’s announcement last week that Dumbledore is gay, this has led to more comments about ‘out-of-novel’ announcements by the authors about their works, which has upset a few people who have had their conceptions about these works suddenly modified.

Which brings to mind several things:

1. Racial bias is, in the main, both unconscious and pernicious. As the song ‘You’ve Got to be Taught’ in the musical South Pacific indicates, it really starts at a very early age, as children absorb the attitudes (often never directly stated to the children) of their parents, and is reinforced by their peer groups and the general culture in which they grow up. And almost always, ‘different’ is equated with ‘not as good as I am’. This attitude is very difficult to eliminate once it is in place. As the American general culture is ‘white’ biased (and has been almost since Columbus’s time), this does mean that the default picture most have when reading about fictional characters is also ‘white’, absent any overt markers that the character is ‘other’. Does this then mean that authors have a responsibility to sprinkle their works with characters who are clearly marked as ‘other’, just to avoid reinforcing the concept that only ‘whites’ are deserving of being protagonists? Certainly not. Loading up a book with such racial (or sexual orientation) material, when it is not germane to plot or theme of the book, is a bad mistake, as it means that now people will be looking for why such characters were given such characteristics, and how closely they conform to the reader’s stereotype of how such people should act and talk, which merely deprives from the focus on what the book is really about, whatever that is. It is not the author’s responsibility to correct the reader’s mindset, it is the reader’s.

John goes into some detail about his high school years and the influence it had on his attitudes, where the school he attended was very racially heterogeneous, but quite homogenous in terms of wealth and class, to where he says that ‘people like him’ pretty much conform to that school structure. I’m not sure if that really holds, as the attitudes about such things seemed to be formed at a much earlier age than high school (not that I’m saying that his attitudes about this are anything other than what he describes - merely that they they were actually formed much earlier).

Nor can I say that my own attitudes are color-blind. I spent a great proportion of my very early years in England, Australia, and then schools in Michigan, West Virginia, and Ohio, and all of these places were very strongly ‘white’ both in composition and attitude (especially so at the time I was there). These formative years have influenced me - in general, I find (if I think about it all), that when reading the characters do default to ‘white’ in my head (so that it came as something of a shock when I discovered at the end of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers that Juan Rico was not white). And it is also somewhat ironic, as in investigating my genealogy I’ve found that I’m part American Indian, along with Irish, English, Scottish, French, and German (during the Civil War some lines in my family could not fight in the regular regiments, but had to fight with the ‘colored/mixed breed’ ones, as we had too great a proportion of Indian blood). But this is my problem as a reader; the authors should not be tasked with crusading for racial equality.

2. Political correctness is still running rampant throughout the discourse about many things in this country. While it may be of benefit to not use derogatory terms to describe any class of people, it has reached the point that no matter what you say, someone will take you task for being insensitive and Neanderthal for your statements. I mean, ‘height-challenged’ in place of ’short’?! That’s taking it a little too far.

3. You take from a book what you see in it. It may not be what the author had in mind, but that’s actually immaterial. If the average reader’s vision is far different from what the author intended, it may indicate a failure on the author’s part to make clear what he was trying to say, but if the points of difference between author and reader’s view differ only in things that are not the main focus of the work, then the author should not be under any obligation to ‘correct’ that view, though he/she (more PCness) may wish to, as Rowling has done.

The Grapevine in Action

Apparently, some book, game, and CD publishers are finally getting hip to the fact that the online community of reviewers are a valuable resource, and that the reviews such people post are often  as good or even perhaps better than those written by ‘professional’ reviewers (though not always - there are quite a few pretty atrocious ones out there too). Evidence for this is a new program from Amazon, which they are calling ‘Vine Voices’, where those who are members of the program can get free advanced review copies of some works in return for writing honest, unbiased reviews of same - which is basically the same deal that professional reviewers have gotten for many years, and this program is obviously being supported by the publishers. I’ve signed up for this program, and ordered up as my first choice under this program a new book by Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road.

There have been at least a few instances of the book publishers using quotes from some of these ‘amateur’ reviews as back-0f-book blurbs, and there is now a fair amount of evidence that decent reviews on places like Amazon can have quite an influence on book sales. With many newspapers and magazines cutting down on the space they allocate for reviews, for many books online reviews may be the only recognition a book gets.

For a long time, many of the ‘professional’ reviewing set have denigrated these ‘amateur’ reviews as poorly written and/or ineffective. It looks like at least a few are waking up to fact that this is not true.

Planning for the Future

I’m contemplating my upcoming birthday, when I’ll turn 59. Back when I was in my twenties, 50 seemed to be an impossibly long time away, and an age that I’d never reach. Now, it looks like I might actually reach retirement age, despite various medical problems and a lot aches, pains, and non-limberness. With such a milestone actually in sight, planning for it has moved center stage: just how much capital will I have at that point, what income will I have, where do I want to live, and perhaps most importantly, just what will I do when I don’t have to get up and go to work everyday.

Most of my free time right now is spent reading, watching TV or movies, bowling, or playing chess. These activities probably just won’t be enough to really keep me occupied when all my time is ‘free’, and the item that looks most likely to fill that extra time is real writing. Part of the problem I have right now trying to write is the lack of large blocks of uninterrupted time that I can devote to this, when I can concentrate on what I want to say, immerse myself in the logic of the story, and figure out all the myriad details, secure in the knowledge that I won’t have to put it aside to go figure out the latest hardware or software bug. Because when that does happen now, I find it very difficult to get back into the story’s ambiance and logic after the interruption. But to make this work will require some discipline, setting aside particular hours to ‘work’, and getting my wife to recognize that these hours are not the time to regale me with the latest family gossip. It also means that whenever possible, I should work till there is a clear closure to a least a part of the story.

Planning for the other aspects of retirement, most especially the monetary ones, makes me realize just why it is so difficult for young people to do any serious saving or planning for their retirement. When you are that age, retirement exists only in never-never land; the time-frame is just too far away to be ‘real’. This is one great service that Social Security does perform, as it’s basically an enforced savings plan. What would be better, though, is a plan that requires that a certain percentage of your income be set aside, unspendable, but that the individual could control how it is invested, and is actually owned by the individual (unlike the Social Security funds, which really go to pay current retirees, not put into any kind of savings, and which depend on a continuous stream of new, young workers to pay the benefits to those retiring - a rather dangerous form of a Ponzi scheme, given that demographics can change in unanticipated ways). While the last attempt at setting up something like this failed the Congressional test, it’s a concept that I hope will not go away, and will eventually be implemented, because, you know, retirement is just so far away, man, and I just can’t be bothered with something like that now.

The Pitfalls of Self-Publishing

The latest book I read reminded me very forcefully why self-publishing is frequently not a good idea. This particular book violated just about every rule there is for good writing:

1. Grammar: run-on and incomplete sentences, inappropriately placed commas, semi-colons, quotation marks, near-random improper capitalization, disagreement between subject and verb, use of the wrong homonym (’there’ for ‘their’), spelling, verb tense-the list continues on and on. A lot of this would have been caught by any standard word processor, which obviously wasn’t used, and this really can’t be blamed on the typesetter, as there were just too many of the things (and even if it was, even a cursory proof-read should have caught and fixed most of this).

2. Lack of definition of precisely where in time a scene was. Apparently this author did not know how to indicate a break in the action or a shift in time, leading to many cases of reading two or three paragraphs before realizing that the focus had shifted to a time point several days after the preceding scene.

3. Chapter breaks not related to an actual conclusion of a particular scene. This sometimes led to ‘chapters’ as short as a half-page, and the succeeding chapter directly continuing the preceding artificially short chapter’s action. This also indicated a larger point: much of the work was not constructed in normal setup- conflict-resolution fashion, indicating the author did not have a good handle on where he wanted his story to go from one page to the next.

4. Introducing and then dropping large numbers of characters (sometimes by killing them off, sometimes merely by forgetting to ever mention them again). Now this isn’t much of problem for minor spear-carrying characters, but when this is done to major players, it becomes very hard to maintain any involvement or interest in the story.

5. Related to (4) is the introduction of entirely new major players late in the story, separated from the original cast by hundreds of years, without any handles given to the reader for how these new people relate to the earlier portion of the story.

6. Basic errors of fact, such as referring to the constant pi (spelled ‘pie’!) as a recurring decimal, something it decidedly is not, and this is by a character who is supposedly a mathematical prodigy.

7. Large info-dumps that interrupt the story flow (what there is of it).

Now why should I go into such detail about a bad book? Because, underneath all the problems,  I could see the elements of a good story, with a fairly well worked out future ‘history’, some interesting speculations about where science and technology may be heading, and a thematic message of current relevance. The self-publishing service that this author used has services that would have corrected most of the grammatical and formatting problems, and could probably have given the author some good advice about the other problems. Of course, these services cost a bit more than their basic no-frills package, which is pretty obviously all this author paid for.

Now self-publishing can work, but it requires that the author do a lot of due diligence on his story, not the least of which is having someone else read the thing before pushing it out into the wild world, if nothing else to catch simple mistakes that the author just can’t see because he’s too close to it.  But it should also be a very large red flag if the story has been submitted to and rejected by multiple traditional publishers that there just might be something seriously wrong with the manuscript. The author should think very long and very hard before deciding to go the self-publish route (at the very least, this is a big economic decision, where you have to pay out instead of getting money coming to you).  Said author should have some very big overriding factor to go this way (such as, say, the work is so cutting edge or controversial that no traditional publisher will touch it).  And he’d better be pretty sure that it is just some such factor that caused all the rejections, not that the book is poorly written. Because no amount of advertising or promotion will help a bad book, and once something bad is out there for all to see, it will leave an indelible impression, telling any prospective buyer of future works “Avoid! Avoid!”

If you decide you must go the self-publish route, at the very least work with a firm that has good editorial services. Use them. Long-established authors pay attention to what their editor tells them. You should too. The end result will be a better book, and the extra cost of those editorial services will eventually seem like a bargain.

The Place of Women in SF

There’s been a fair amount of flap over the scarcity of women authors on the current Hugo nominee list. I think this needs to be looked at with a larger perspective than just the presence or absence of women on such a list, as there has been a long history of reported ‘discrimination’ against women in this field. Such a perspective is offered by Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, which I just finished reading. Within this book, she traces the impact and portrayal of women from the earliest days of sf as a separate genre (basically from 1926 onward).

Now clearly, looking at the sf produced in those early days, and continuing up to somewhere around the fifties, there was often (not always, but the exceptions were rare) both an implied and an explicit ‘niche’ that women were supposed to occupy: that of homemaker, baby factory, damsel in distress, love interest, a person that was clueless about science, and definitely not ‘hero’ (or heroine) material. As such, they were not supposed to even be interested in sf, let alone be fans or writers of a field that many rather prominent fans felt was a ‘male only’ area. But regardless of the protestations by some of these folk, in letter columns or some rather snide editorializing, clearly there were female fans, even in the early days. But portrayal of women within the actual stories almost invariably fell into the niche described (or they were left out entirely as not being germane to the story). Stories that actually developed a true romance between the characters were often panned, and female protagonists were almost unheard of (except for a few works that explicitly tried to explore gender boundaries and roles, such as those that posited an all-female world). Some editors also had a definite bias against stories that had such a ‘love interest’, or worse, actively discriminated against women writers. This is not to say that women didn’t write sf in that period. The names of Leigh Brackett, Katherine Maclean, Carol Emshmiller, C.L. Moore, Judith Merril, Zenna Henderson, along with quite a few more, are still known (and respected) today.

But it wasn’t till the late sixties that women authors and more realistic portrayals of women within the stories became a driving force within the field, a period often referred to as the ‘feminist revolution’. Joanna Russ, Ursala K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Vonda McIntyre and of course James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon, along with many others, propelled women to prominence, both as recognized authors of great skill and for their portrayal of women within their stories that were not tied down by the patriarchal attitude that had been so prevalent. As evidence of the their new prominence, the Hugo nomination lists for the period of  1968-1980 shows 41 nominations for women out of a total of 245, vs 6 out of 118 for the period of 1959-1967. Since this initial explosion of nominations, the ratio has held fairly steady at about 1/5 of all nominations, though there does seem to be a little fall off recently to about 1/6. Whether this ratio is appropriate obviously depends on just how many women authors there are versus men, a number nobody seems to have a good handle on. But perhaps the greatest marker of this change was an item that Dr. Larbalestier didn’t mention - Andre Norton, who had been writing sf since the mid-thirties (though most of it came after 1948), had almost invariably used male protagonists for her works, but in mid-sixties she switched to using female ones. The very name she wrote under (along with her other names of Andrew North and Allen Weston) is an indication of the prevailing attitude in early sf, choosing a ‘male’ name rather than her given one.

But it should also be noted that sf does not live in a vacuum, but is strongly influenced by the general cultural attitudes in which its authors and fans live. A large amount of all sf has been written by American and British authors, and at least for the period of, say, 1900 to 1960, the American/British culture was strongly patriarchal. This general attitude of considering women to be at best second-class citizens actually has a history stretching back far earlier than this (just note that America’s founding fathers didn’t think women deserved to vote). Women have been discriminated against within the ‘mainstream’ publishing area - I even hear stories today that there are some editors who tell prospective women authors to stick to ‘romance’ stories, that they’re not good enough to write ‘literary’ fiction (regardless of how many examples there are to the contrary).

SF has, for most of its history, been considered by many to be a mainly a ‘guy’ oriented type of literature. Clearly, this is not totally true. SF, as a literature of ideas, often has focused on gadgets, gee-whiz technology, and has sometimes forgotten about the social impact of those gadgets. But the best writers have always considered not just the gadgetry, but what people do and act like in whatever scenario has been envisioned, and this most definitely includes women as active parts of that society. Our society today still doesn’t quite treat women as the equal of men (note the difference in salaries and entrance rates to the corporate boardroom), but neither is it the same society of eighty years ago, where the only proper place for women was as a homemaker. SF stories have, to some degree, recognized that change. Much of the time such stories are written by women, but there are more and more stories that treat women as equal partners in life’s game where you really can’t tell if the author was male or female, and that’s as it should be.

Women authors are getting recognition for their work, though perhaps not quite in the numbers that are totally appropriate. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a SF fan today that would say women don’t belong in the field.

The Elusive Allusion

I’ve been reading Samuel Delany’s About Writing for the last couple of days. In terms of sound and solid advice about how to write, it is (as is almost constant in his work), excellent. Seeing how this man can take a mundane paragraph or two and with some seemingly minor changes turn it into something that sings and grabs is both incredible and daunting, as he makes it look easy, even though he’s the first to say that doing this is difficult and a lot of hard work.

But he also makes mention of the large amount of allusions he buried in his story Atlantis: 1924. Now I’ve read and appreciated this work, even though I typically do not like works that use ‘experimental’ techniques. But from seeing his words about this work, its genesis, background, and what he was trying to do with it, I realize that when I read it, I missed a very large amount of what was going on, and in fact placed an interpretation on a certain character within it that Delany did not intend. Which brings to the fore the question of how to use allusion, when it’s appropriate, and the even larger question of what happens to a story when the reader doesn’t so happen to catch whatever allusions are being used.

Now for this particular story, Delany structured it in such a manner that the interpretation I came up with not only made sense, it made its climax fully as satisfying as the one he intended. Few writers can do this, and even Delany sometimes falls well short of this mark (there are large chunks of his Dhalgren that fall very flat for me). More common is, when the allusion is missed, the story loses its brilliance, its frission, sometimes it totally fails as a story. Allusion can add depth, color, veracity, and evoke a whole complex of emotions and thoughts that otherwise might take many pages to achieve, if it’s achievable at all, but it is a dangerous tool. If it’s used, then the story really needs to be structured such that it still holds together even if a discriminating and widely-read reader so happens to not notice the allusion.

There’s also a certain amount of gamesmanship in the usage of this tool. Too much of it, and especially if the allusions are to obscure works that no one but literary scholars are likely to be aware of , and it comes across as a form of name-dropping. Some of the works I’ve read by Rushdie seem to fall into this category, and I, as a reader, find it very off-putting.

So: use sparingly, and be prepared to have it missed.

Now, if I can just get my prose to sing half as well as Delany’s, I’ll consider myself blessed.

Decisions, Decisions

Writing fiction and non-fiction/essays/articles are two totally different things. About the only thing common to them is the fact that both need to have words impressed on paper (or computer screens).

When I approach writing an essay or something like this blog post, everything is straightforward. I know what I want to say, the facts are there (or at least googleable), organizing the material is something that happens in the back of my head without any great effort on my part, and I don’t need to expend great deal of time in figuring out exactly how I want to say whatever it is I’m talking about.

Not so with a fiction work. Every paragraph seems to require thinking about every tiny detail:

Character: does this sentence not only fit this particular person, does it add to the overall picture of who this person is? Am I really in this person’s head, and can I make it so that any reader can also get in his head?

Scene: Just how much of the environs should I describe? Many times I find that I have a picture in my head of just what the scene is, and it’s often remarkably detailed (from the grain in the oak paneling to the way the sunlight pools bright points along the table…). But if I try and put all that detail down on paper, it will simply overwhelm the story, so I’m forced to pick and choose just what and how much I describe. Which means I’m constantly making decisions with each sentence.

Dialog: This is probably my weakest point. It’s hard for me to ’see’ conversations the way I do the scenery, even if the characters involved are real people to me. Right alongside of this are vocabulary choices - go with the polysyllable or the Anglo-Saxon four letter version? I know I have a strong tendency to use vocabulary and sentence constructions that are too esoteric or complex; I have to constantly watch my back to make sure these villains are not encroaching.

Background: Just when and how do I introduce all that backstory information - Little Jimmy was in a car accident at age three, and has never been comfortable in a car since - without interrupting the story flow and either totally losing the reader from lack of context or boring him to death with info he doesn’t care about?

Plot: This is usually not too bad. Before starting I usually have a fair idea of each major scene/happening, and where the thing will end up. I don’t normally do outlines, though I have for a couple stories. But there are times when I find my original story arc doesn’t fit how the characters are developing or the whole plot starts to seem trivial or contrived, at which point I’m in real trouble, and all too often I end up shelving the story, unfinished.

And the worst enemy of all: Procrastination. Every time I run into one of the above decision points, and find that I can’t make that decision right that instant, I all too frequently pack it up and wait for another day. Trouble is, that doesn’t get the decision made, it’s still waiting there for me whenever I come back to the story (if I ever do). And that simply doesn’t get the story written.

As someone once said, writing is the hardest non-work you’ll ever do.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

For those of you wondering, this day got its name from a post by Howard V. Hendrix, current VP of the SFWA. Basically he complained that authors posting free stuff on the web were scabs, undercutting the market for authors actually trying to sell their work. John Scalzi, Jo Walton, and several other authors have not only derided this view of things, they declared today as the day for posting even more free things to read. Mr. Scalzi has posted the first half of a novel he wrote way back when (and never finished) - you can read his post about this and find the link to the novel here.

In the spirit of the day, I’ll direct you to some of my poetry, which is available here.

In today’s publishing world, getting the word out to the reading public is critical to the success of a work. There are an incredible number of new works being published every year, both online and the more traditional route. Most of these will sink without a trace without some form of publicity, and posting things on the web is at least one way to generate interest. In the future, everything might be published electronically, and the dead-tree format will be no more. If that happens, I’ll cry a bit, as I really like being able to curl up with a good book and see them ranked in my bookshelves, but I think such a change will also open up the publishing world to where more writers can get people to read their musings, even more so than has already happened with the advent of the web, and that’s not a bad thing.

World Building

My last post on the ‘wizard effect’ was written with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek, but it was meant to illustrate something that I see happening all the time in poor and even average level fantasy books: a failure to consider all the ramifications of whatever magical thing is present in the story. And fantasy novels are notoriously weak in the area of economics. It is not enough to draw up a pretty map, select your wayfarers for your quest, and define your battles. There needs to also be some serious world-building done, and at least part of that world-building should be figuring out how the average yeoman manages to make a living, just what industries and trades exist and how they all interact. Now many writers may figure that all this effort is not really required, that the traditional middle-ages economic scenario can be pretty much assumed, and to some extent this is correct, as long as whatever story is being written really does fit into this kind of background and there are no plot actions that will disturb the status quo. Sometimes determining just what will disturb that status is not all that obvious, as my little fable illustrates.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea set is one of the better fantasies out there, and one of the reasons for it is that she did consider some of the ‘unintended consequence’ effects that can ensue from use of magical powers. One of her prime themes within this work was the need for balance, which she often illustrated with a look at what the average person was doing. The background of her world was obviously detailed, though she rarely did any direct exposition of that background.

This same rule applies to science fiction. Often it is the little things in some imagined future or deep-space world that will give the whole that ‘real world’ feel that is so necessary to the ’suspension of disbelief’ that works in these genres require. Heinlein was a master at this. In his Space Cadet (1948), wading through the waters of Venus (hot and wet was the common scientific opinion of this planet at that time) was not a very nice swim, as Heinlein recognized that with no moon, there would be no significant tides to churn upper and lower water layers, allowing them to become very stagnant. A tiny point, but it adds significantly to the ‘feel’ of this world as a real place. Although the three days he and his wife spent manually calculating (no computers back then!) a Hohmann transfer orbit to verify the veracity of a single sentence in that book is probably carrying this a little too far.

Frank Herbert’s Dune, one of the true classics of the field, also benefited mightily from having taken the time and effort to create a complete background. Many readers have remarked on the incredible interplay between so many different elements present in this book: government and politics, both the underpinnings of religion and its effect on different types of cultures, ecology, genetic manipulation, ancient ‘history’ with its effects on attitudes about things like computers and robots, military strategy, and most significantly how vital commerce is held in thrall to the mental-enhancing effects of ’spice’, as without it transportation of goods, services, and personnel would take much longer and be more expensive.

Thinking globally about every aspect of an envisioned imaginary world is not easy or trivial and it is very time consuming. Since it does take so much effort, once a writer has created his world, there is a very strong temptation to set the next story in the same world, which leads to the multiple book ’series’ phenomenon so common today. There’s nothing wrong with this per se; readers, having grown used to a particular world/universe, feel more comfortable revisiting it - its now familiar, a worn and comfy couch. But it can lead to a stultifying round of re-treads, effectively telling the same story over and over, with nothing new and exciting. There’s also a temptation to directly delineate all those nifty details about your world that you’ve thought up, which is a bad idea, as then all this ‘background’ material will tend to drown out the story that you’re trying to tell.

The more I think about these aspects of these genres, the more it becomes obvious just how difficult it can be to write really good stories within their confines. Perhaps that’s why there is so much of this material that is not very good and is eminently forgettable. But when it is done right, the end result justifies all the effort, as these fields can tell stories that illuminate aspects of the human condition that either can’t be shown in ‘normal’ literature or at least are very difficult to portray. Those critics that look down their noses at these fields as ‘entertainment only’, insignificant literature, are not only missing the boat, they are depriving themselves of what can be a mind altering experience.

Don’t Support Your Local Wizard

The average fantasy novel typically has wizards running around, doing various things to either help or impede the protagonist. Often, especially with wizards who hail from the dark side, the motivations of the wizards themselves are not all that clear or comprehensible, but that’s a small item compared to the large hole of just what do wizards do when there isn’t some great battle or quest or dragon to fight?

Consider the typical one-horse town of middle ages technology that seems to permeate this sub-genre. It has some surrounding farms that provide the edibles, some tradesmen (smith, barkeep, miller, butcher, tinker, midwife/veterinarian), and an economy run as much on barter as on money. Things stay pretty much in balance: people normally get enough to eat, they raise their families, discuss the weather (not an item of trivial conversation), and in general go from day to day with little change or desire for change. Now into this mix let’s introduce a low-level wizard. He can’t do the great spells that change the landscape forever, but he can do little things: something that improves the crop yield for Farmer Smith, a little spell to make the beer and wine at the local tavern always taste great, heal minor ailments, provide love potions that work (most of the time, anyway). What effect will doing these things have?

Farmer Smith suddenly has an unfair advantage over the other local farmers. His lands now bring in twice the crop per acre as everyone else. This translates to greater wealth for Farmer Smith, which he uses to buy up more land, producing even more. This is a positive feedback cycle, and eventually Smith will be the proud owner of all the farmland around the town, and the rest of the farmers aren’t going to be too happy, as by now they’re just sharecroppers on land they used to own.

Barkeep Simon feels happy about the great drinks he serves, and all his patrons agree that getting that spell laid was the best thing he could have done. The tavern’s reputation spreads far and wide, and people that used to go the Henry’s tavern in the next town over now come to Simon’s. Henry, naturally, is not too happy about this loss of business, and starts plotting ways to ruin Simon’s great taste (but just as filling!). So he goes to the wizard, and in return for his first born child (why wizards want such things in payment is a mystery), the wizard agrees to cast a spell on Simon’s patrons that will make them gain five pounds for every tankard of beer they drink at Simon’s. Very shortly the patron’s are so heavy they’re unable to walk from their home to Simon’s (or anywhere else), and Simon’s business collapses.

All these heavy people naturally start developing other health problems associated with being so overweight, and they all contract with the wizard to help cure them of clogged arteries, varicose veins, and the occasional broken bone contracted from trying to sit in chairs that suddenly collapse under them. Of course, this means that all their wealth ends up in the wizards hands, and it would seem that the wizard and Farmer Smith now effectively own the whole town. Then, too, with a wizard on hand to cure everything, the local vet is also out of business, and he leaves in a huff for a town far away, one without a wizard, where the farmers appreciate his skill.

Now the local king gets word that Farmer Smith is very wealthy, and decides he wants a piece of this action, so he enacts a burdensome tax that only applies to very wealthy farmers. Farmer Smith, faced with the prospect of sudden confiscation of a good chunk of his holdings, goes to the wizard to get a spell to make the king’s tax collectors forget how to get to the town. This seems to work - no tax collectors show up. But the king, after a little while, realizes that something has gone wrong, so he goes to his wizard (all kings have signed long-term contracts with at least one wizard!) to find out what’s going on. When the wizard reports, after duly scrying out the landscape, that the king’s tax collectors are spell-befogged, the king decides that this means war, and directs his wizard to unleash all his powers against our little one-horse town wizard. The king’s wizard is naturally far more powerful and knows all kinds of spells that our little wizard has no defense against, and very shortly he is no more, disappearing in a cloud of atomized smoke. Unfortunately, the spell that disintegrated our wizard also does the same thing to all the buildings and inhabitants of our little one-horse town.

And that’s why you shouldn’t support your local wizard.

The Future of Futuristic SF

There’s been a fair amount of blather lately about the general health of the fantasy/science fiction market, which by just about everyone’s account is not doing all that well, and sf worse off than fantasy. Publishers are deliberately trying to present such books as something other than sf, or at least are doing covers for them that don’t scream SF! Don’t Touch! to the prospective buyer. Circulation figures for Asimov’s and Analog are down, as are overall sales of sf books. Why?

At least part of the reason can be traced to my last post on the SF info dump. New ‘hard’ sf is tackling concepts, gadgets, and environments that are well beyond the average reader’s comprehension and comfort space, and these concepts are complex enough that short, simple explanations just won’t do. The writers are left with a choice of trying to educate the reader, normally to the detriment of the story, or self-limiting their audience to those who already have some idea about these things, which is a very small (and probably shrinking) set of people. I certainly would not hand anyone not already steeped in sf some of this year’s Hugo nominees: Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, Stross’s Glasshouse, or Watt’s Blindsight, regardless of how well they are written, or what neat ideas they contain, as they would be nearly incomprehensible to the average man in the street.

Beyond the ‘hard’ sf realm, there is also a paucity of books for younger readers. While David Gerrold and John Varley have added a few works to this area, the days of the Heinlein and Asimov juveniles are long gone, and it is difficult to find books that are captivating to young minds that are not outdated.

Which leaves us with only a very few modern entries that still have that ‘gee-whiz’ factor without blowing the reader’s mind. John Scalzi’s efforts of the last few years certainly qualify in this regard, with his Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Androids Dream, but he seems to be something of an exception, as he deliberately is trying for something that is accessible, part of what he calls the ‘New Comprehensible’. Fantasy is another part of this group, not surprisingly,  as in general fantasy doesn’t have the same problem, and can present settings and story arcs that have large elements of familiarity (or at least don’t require a Ph.D. to figure out).  And then there are the series related works, the Star Trek/Star Wars/Game-Inspired stuff, which are ok are far as they go, but leave little room for true innovation or possible great literature.

Perhaps science has reached the point where Mr. Average Joe simply can’t assimilate not only its current state but projections of what it will mean and the effects it will have in the future, though at least some of the blame for this state of affairs can be laid (at least in the US) to an education system that is doing a poor job of getting kids excited about the possibilities inherent in current scientific and technological research. Clearly, if sf is to survive as a viable genre of literature, there needs to work done by the authors to make it more interesting without being too complex, the marketing of this stuff needs to try and grab readers who would never normally touch the stuff (and it looks like they are making at least some attempts in this area), and our schools could do a better job of introducing young people to the wonders of the field. But most importantly, we, the science fiction fans, need to spread the word to our non-sf fellows, finding works that will interest and captivate them, while not being beyond their capabilities to understand or believe in, till they can graduate to the cutting edge of today.

The SF Info-Dump

SF writers have had a problem since about day one of the genre. As the story must, in some way, involve science for the story to actually qualify as science fiction, and the average reader’s knowledge of said science cannot be assumed to be anything more than minimal, somewhere along the line the writer must explain whatever scientific theory, gadget, or fact that the story uses. This requirement is unique to the genre, and can make it far more difficult to write than conventional stories, as somehow interest in the story must be maintained while all this information is imparted.

Over the years, several methods have been used to accomplish this task, some of which are clearly better than others, and some of which are suited only for certain types of situations, stories, and scientific levels.

1. The ‘classic’ info-dump. In this method the story gets interrupted by a mini-lesson in whatever science is relevant. Whether this is handled in third-person omniscient mode, where the info might just have well have come straight out of a science textbook, or delivered via ‘dialogue’ between the story’s characters, this method has the severe disadvantage of being essentially a lecture to the reader. As the reader is looking for entertainment rather than a science lesson, most readers encountering this will be disappointed and unhappy with the story. Many stories from