FutureTense

The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction is Jonathan Lethem’s essay on why it was a shame that Pynchon’s Granity’s Rainbow didn’t win the Nebula in 1973. (Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama took the top honor instead.)

Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren Philip K.
Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and
Thomas
Disch’s 334 - work to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s,
labels, categories, and genres aside.

Science fiction enjoys the ghetto it is confined to. There’s a comfortable community identity, good friends to meet at the conventions, and we don’t have to face up to a reality in which it is discovered the field we all love can’t cut the mustard outside of the nine walls and four towers. (My opines, not Mr. Lethem’s.) For you folks laughing quietly in Fantasy, your comeuppance is on its way, too, thanks to the New Weird and slipstream writers.

Which brings us to today. Where, against all odds, SF deserving of greater attention from a literary readership is still written. … SF’s literary writers exist now in a twilight world, neither respectable nor commercially viable. Their work drowns in a sea of garbage in bookstores, while much of SF’s promise is realized elsewhere by writers too savvy or oblivious to bother with its stigmatized identity. SF’s failure to present its own best face, to win proper respect, was never so tragic as now, when its strengths are so routinely preempted. In a literary culture where Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthelme, Coover, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Steve Erickson are ascendant powers, isn’t the division meaningless?

The essay is stunning. Quit reading this and head on over. Except for one last thing. Mr. Lethem’s “Fortress of Solitude” is brilliant. Get it. So what if it’s not strictly genre.

Best regards,

Alan Lattimore

Discussion here.

Writing of the fantastic, which neatly sidesteps the whole fantasy-bigotry-ghetto thing. As in “Why does it need to be called ’slipstream?’ Why isn’t it just ‘fantasy?’” Appearantly, it has a lot to do with marketing: getting Borders to buy it when it doesn’t fit their standard definition of “fantasy,” and then putting it on a shelf in a place where people who would normally walk right past R. A. Salvatore can find it.

James Patrick Kelly offers an overview of how the field arrived at the term.

Bruce Sterling’s original definition.

James D. Macdonald has an amazing thread on the business of writing that has gone twenty-seven pages now.


I can’t agree with all the specifics, but the general info thus far is a great read for beginning writers that I wanted to share. [Absolute Write Water Cooler.]

Cory Doctorow has posted his experiences with providing Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom as a free download and its subsequent reception as a printed work.

The whole thing is worth a read for those who are interested in how technology and print are likely to intersect.

The short form: for newer readers, it wasn’t enough to have just one format or the other. They really wanted both formats. And don’t short change the reader by giving them a teaser. Treat them right.

Best news: Mr. Doctorow found his experience so successful he’s doing it again and being even more liberal with what he makes available.

Biggest gripe: Mr. Doctorow downplays the distinction between the experience of text as ink and text as pixels. He argues that because we spend hours each day in front of a glowing tube that the experience of reading on CRT is essentially the same as that of reading dead trees.

I can’t speak for the next generation. Maybe having grown up without trees and with pixels, they’ll do better. But I can’t read long works on screen. Anything longer than two page scrolls and my mind has subtle issues, leaving me with a iced-over feeling and some minor comprehension gaps. Frequnetly, I have to re-read some sections of long e-stories before I can I’m sure I have the whole thing correct. I almost never have to re-read sections of print stories.

I may write on the computer, but when I read for errors or continuity, I print the damn thing out.

Back when I was a programmer, it wasn’t much different. You spent all day at the keyboard, but if you had to find a subtle bug, you were doing youself a favor to print it out. It wasn’t just me. A number of programmers I knew worked that way. Just some small difference in the way otherwise identical information is processed.

Worst news: Back in the day, Hugo Gernsbeck offered his writers pennies per word. Today’s writers are getting… pennies per word. Mr. Doctorow comes as close to saying “it will never be anything but a hobby” as you can without actually saying it. [futurismic]

Many years ago, I went to a 10 day seminar on kyudo, the art of Zen archery. It was held Vermont in the spring which meant lots of rain. One particularly sodden day, Sensei asked for open questions.

There was a lot of silence for a while. If anyone had questions, they weren’t asking.

I figure I can be an ignorant pussball with the best of them, so I asked: Why do we study kyudo in the modern age? It’s not like we’re going to become samurai warriors.

I thought it was a pretty insightful question when I stood up to ask it. Of course, as soon as I opened my mouth it became the dumbest thing anyone had ever said in all of history, recorded and unrecorded. That’s OK. I’m more or less at home with being dumb. Appearantly, I wasn’t alone in my assessment. As I recall, one of the senior students went so far as to ask me to sit down.

Sensei said that if I practiced every day for two years, my heart would open up. That was his personal response. He went on to give a more general response. He talked about how it takes about the same amount of time to produce a professional level archer under either Western or Zen teaching styles. After about 10 years, they have about the same level of skill with the bow. The difference is the Zen student will also have become a better person in that time.

Fast forward to the present. Laura Mixon-Gould has said there are there are two basic paths that a writer can follow. The one she has chosen is to follow is to produce ideosyncratic work. Write what you want to write. Write the novel that is different from what everyone else is doing.

The other path is to write the same kind of novel that everyone else is writing, only a little different.

There’s nothing wrong with moving with the herd. The herd exists because there’s a lot of readers who want to read the same thing. They read one epic fantasy, they liked it, now they want more.

I’ve been musing on this for the last week. It seems that if you take the compromise path–to run with the herd–you might improve your short term chances of getting published. But where will you be in 10 years?

I can’t guarantee the ideosyncratic path will change your life. But it just seems so much more interesting to be writing different stuff 10 years from now than the same old thing.

This runs counter to conventional wisdom, which has accepted as eternal truth the concept of finding or creating a vertical niche which you then mine for the rest of your writing career.

But the death of the midlist as a tenured institution has removed that dream from all but a handful of writers. Today’s market challenges the writer to constantly explore change and renewal.

Best regards,

Alan

"The Great Escape" is outta here, off to David Moles and Jay Lake at "All Star Adventures." I’m so glad it’s done. The story collapsed on me in the first part of Feb., imitating the birth of stars. It expanded so far, so fast that I was left with whisps of Hydrogen gas occupying vast emptiness.

It finally came together, merely twice as long as I had hoped. Which, for me, is darn good.

There’s a cautionary side to the experience. You have to beware of what you set your hand to: you might fall in love with it. The Zeppelin anthology encourages a neo-Victorian attitude, a Steampunk aesthetic. As if I didn’t have enough areas I wanted to work in: traditional fantasy, space opera, urban fantasy, cyberpunk.

Now I have one more.

It is common wisdom among writers that what editors really want is doorstop manuscripts. Before you commit doorstop, pause. Colleen, the Associate Director of Publicity at Del Rey, shines the light of her experience on the subject:

I think you guys have the misperception that editors ask writers to write big blocky books. I know that, at least here at Del Rey, we try to discourage it. They’re difficult to edit in a timely manner, they are hard to get reviewers to look at, they cause the price point to go up because of the cost of the paper involved and frankly, stores buy fewer of them because half as many fit in the shelf. That being said, nearly all of our authors seem to think it necessary to write enormous doorstoppers. … I think there are two culprits: one:) some authors just seem to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, and Two:) a lack of writing discipline thats something learned early on as a writer.

One reason I appreciate working with folks like Stephen Baxter [with the exception of that gigantor novel EVOLUTION] , Terry Brooks, David Gemmel, and Anne McCaffrey is that they are very disciplined writers, have been at this for a very long time and know how to tell a story fast.

You may not like their kind of writing, but the sheer ability to write and tell a fun story with brevity is impressive.

I think some authors think that it’ll be taken more seriously, ie, as “big idea” writing if it’s long. Terry Brooks knows that he is writing basically for a young adult audience, who want a fast-paced adventure story, so that’s what he delivers every time.

Some writers work well at this length; some readers enjoy the extended immersion. But its not for every reader and don’t assume that it’s a requirement for every writer.

These comments first appeared on the discussion boards at s1ngularity::criticism and are reproduced here by the kind permission of their author.