Tag: writing

Women Destroy SF

I must confess that I am rather enjoying the way in which my original assertion from 2005 has now become an established meme in the science fiction community.  Sure, they intend it in an ironic way, but the publication will almost certainly provide additional supporting evidence for my hypothesis that women have destroyed the SF/F literary subgenre by feminizing it.

Women Destroy SF — Special Issue

September 5, 2013 — It could be said that women invented science fiction; after all, Mary Shelley wrote what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (Frankenstein). Yet some readers seem to have this funny idea that women don’t–or can’t–write science fiction. Some have even gone so far as to accuse women of destroying science fiction with their girl cooties.

So to help prove how silly that notion is, Lightspeed is proud to announce that in 2014 we’ll be publishing a “Women Destroy SF” special issue, with a guest editor at the helm. More details to come soon, so watch this space!

I tend to suspect it is going to confirm the notion rather than prove how silly it is, but we shall await the evidence before judging it. I would also point out that the problem isn’t the girl cooties per se, but rather, the strong female preference for writing thinly disguised romance that is then sold as science fiction to men who are perfectly aware of the bait-and-switch. It’s not that women can’t write excellent fiction. They can, they have, and they do. But most women who are sufficiently solitary-minded to write are too didactic, too self-obsessed, too bitter about their low SMV value, and too little interested in science or any other intellectual concepts to successfully write in a literary format that is first and foremost driven by ideas.

As it happens, the publishing situation is actually much more dire and the destruction caused by women is considerably more widespread than many people imagine.

Consider this: as of 10 November, I have sold or given away 26,092 Selenoth books on
Amazon alone in the last 11 months. Those are books that women at not
one, but two, mainstream publishers were instrumental in declining to
publish, and as a result, those books have not appeared in a single
bookstore anywhere in the world.

Now, think about the
multiplier effect of a major publisher’s distribution channel compared
to that of a small independent, electronic-only publisher?  Even if it
is only 5x, that likely would have been enough to put A Throne of Bones in the top 5 percent of best-selling fantasy.  (This may be why the bestselling author who wrote to me said:
“I very much found myself wondering what would have happened had it
been
published by a large house with a marketing campaign behind it.”) And
all the time spent reading those 26 thousand books, which was not
inconsiderable, is time that was obviously not spent reading the various offerings of the mainstream publishers.

More
importantly, the money that would have been spent on the nonexistent
“multiplier books” was mostly not spent on other science fiction and
fantasy novels, but was instead spent on the wide variety of other
non-literary options available to the sort of men who make up the books’
primary market. And I am far from the only male-oriented writer who was shut out by the SF/F gatekeepers in favor of the scalzified material. This means that there a very good case to be made that
women have not only destroyed science fiction, but have also contributed significantly to the lower profits of the publishing industry as well as the ongoing collapse of the chain and local bookstores.

Falling prices, failing publishers

As I demonstrated previously, falling ebook prices means additional pressure on mainstream publisher profits:

The average price of a best-selling ebook hit a new low last week but ticked up this week for the first time in a month. This week, the average price of a best-selling ebook is $5.81, up $0.40 from last week’s all-time low of $5.41. For the past four weeks, the average price of a best-selling ebook has been below $6.50.

A confluence of factors have been driving ebook prices down: Discounting by retailers; success of lower-priced self-published titles; and experimentation by publishers.

This is really remarkable.  Back in July, I noted the probable result of Apple being found guilty of collusion concerning ebook prices: “The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more
economically sensible levels.  And the power of the gatekeepers is going
to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to
fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from
independent publishers and self-publishers.”

But I never imagined that prices would fall so far, so fast. Not only have prices fallen below the $9.99 point that the colluding publishers were attempting to raise to $14.99, but only one of the top 50-sellers has a price in the $8.00 to $9.99 range.  And since October 1, 2012, the average price of an ebook bestseller has been cut nearly in half, falling from $11.37 to $5.81.

You may recall that the clueless president of the SFWA was very excited about the idea that publishers should pay the same $4.20 in ebook royalties to the author that they were paying on hardcover royalties.  How, one wonders, are they going to do that when at an average price of $5.61, (taking the average of the two most recent prices), they are dealing with a gross revenue per ebook of $3.93 after Amazon takes its 30 percent cut.

Assuming the conventional 25 percent ebook royalty, this means the author is going to make $1.40 per ebook and the publisher is going to make $2.53.  So, just to tread water, a mainstream publisher has to sell 2.24 ebooks to make the same $5.67 profit per book it was making previously. This is why the publishers fought so hard, and were even willing to break federal antitrust law, to get the price up to 12.99; at that price, they were making $6.82 per ebook, which was an actual improvement on hardcovers.(1)

Very few businesses can survive their profit-per-unit being cut in half. Don’t be surprised to see layoffs at the major publishers, contracts being cancelled, and imprints being closed. If you’re an independent, this is great news as the gatekeepers are dying and you’ll be able to compete on increasingly even ground.  But if you’re still hoping to break into conventional publishing, forget it. It’s all rapidly going the way of Random Houses’s Hydra, which is nothing more than an imitation of all the independent publishers, with zero advances and 50-50 royalty splits.

The guy responsible for it is my old editor at Pocket, who gave me my break into the business and was one of the first to recognize the potential in video-game tie-in novels. He’s a smart guy who is always ahead of the curve, and the fact that Random House is moving to this model means that all the other major publishers will soon be following suit. And I very much doubt he’s doing it because he wants to do so, but because it is the only way they can expect to stay in business.

(1) There is a trivial omission in this calculation which I left in for the sake of simplicity and means that the situation isn’t quite as bad as these numbers make it appear. But the consequences of it are fairly minor and don’t change my point in the slightest. Bragging rights to the first person to correctly identify it.

Showcase #7

The OC explains how he got here from there:

Things change. I’ve been getting a heavy dose of this lately, not because of the health issues, but because last month was the 30th anniversary of the release of MIDI 1.0—the industry-standard Musical Instrument Digital Interface—and my inbox has been filling up with related email. Some messages are from old friends I haven’t talked to in years, wanting to reminisce about the glory days. Others are from reporters or grad students, hoping to cadge an interview.

Did I mention that thirty-some years ago, I was on the design team that developed MIDI?

There are many things I don’t talk about but perhaps should, because they helped lay the foundation upon which Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories are built. For example, I didn’t set out to become a writer. I intended to make my mark on the world as a musician, and for many years worked very seriously at it. Before I started writing this editorial I went out to Wikipedia and took a deep dive into the section on Contemporary classical music, intending to write a proper article that puts it all into historical perspective.

But, no. Some other day. The editorial I started to write quickly deteriorated into a series of shout-outs and name-checks. Yep. Knew him. Knew her. Worked with him. Was there. Did that. Did that, too, but would rather not admit it.

I wish I could say there was some epiphany, some brilliant and unforgettable moment when the skies parted and the Minor Gods of Creativity thundered in antiphonal chorus, “No, thou shalt not be a musician! Thou wast meant for a greater calling! Thou shalt become…a science fiction writer!” It would make for a more dramatic column if I could describe that moment.

If it had happened, I would, but it never did. Instead there were only years of slop and overlap, spent in hard work on projects that went off in six different directions simultaneously and therefore never really went much of anywhere, with many tiny points of change that taken together still don’t add up to even one decent low-budget epiphany. Somewhere in there I discovered I was not cut out to sell my soul for rock ‘n’ roll, and that watching my friends who were made to live that lifestyle self-destruct and die young wasn’t much fun. Somewhere else in there I discovered that while I really did like theater (and if you’re at risk of taking me too seriously, you may take a moment now to imagine me in full pancake makeup and period costume, singing and dancing in the chorus line of a production of Mame), I wasn’t cut out for that lifestyle either, and watching my friends who were cut out for it self-destruct and die from AIDS wasn’t any better fun. Somewhere in there I learned to play the arts grants and commissions game well enough to succeed at it, but in the process lost most of my respect for the game itself. Somewhere else in there it became clear to me that my hopes of getting into major recording studio and soundtrack work were about as realistic as my chances of becoming a starting center in the NBA, and eventually—

Check out the stories too.  I thought there was something vaguely Poeish about Anatoly Belilovsky’s “In Vino Veritas”.

Mailvox: the changing writer’s market

NA writes about his perception of the current hole in the fantasy market:

Part of the reason I bought your books, along with Stephen King’s Dark
Tower series, was that I got burned by the last two fantasy series I
bought.  By which I mean Raymond Feist and George R. R. Martin.  I’ve
been looking for a good fantasy series to read and so far yours does not
disappoint. Another reason is that I want to write my own.  I figured I should get acquainted with others’ work before I get started.

Since I’ve last been a part of this hobby, there was no such thing as
e-books.  I’m way out of touch with the market and where it’s headed, as
far as it would concern a writer.  I’m also not aiming to become the
Next Big Thing in fantasy, but I’d still like to get published. I know it’s kind of an open ended question, but is
there anything I can do to help myself before I start putting words on
the screen?  

A lot of people like Martin’s
work, though I can barely understand why, so I know there’s a market out
there for fantasy.  In fact, if A Game of Thrones is considered some of
the best right now, then that market still has a gaping hole in it.
 People are hungry for fantasy fiction, but as far as I can tell they’re
willing to settle for McDonald’s because there’s no Cheesecake Factory
in sight. 

If you have a minute, I appreciate your insight.

My primary feeling is that the SF/F market is at a fascinating technologically imposed crossroads.  On the one hand, we have a narrow spectrum professionally published market that is shrinking, where the average advances are considerably smaller than they were, where the stakes are increasingly winner-takes-all, and books such as Redshirts and A Dance with Dragons represent the very best it has to offer.

And on the other, we have the rise of a broad spectrum independent digital scene where books are of wildly varying quality, the prices are better and many of them are free, there are no gatekeepers, distribution is limited, and it is very difficult for the average author to even let the average reader know his book exists.

Let’s put some basic facts before the reader. John Scalzi reported that Redshirts, the eventual Hugo Award winner written by the industry’s foremost self-promoter and pushed heavily by the biggest publisher in SF/F, sold 35,667 ebooks in its first eight months of release.  That represented 45 percent of the 79,279 sales-to-that-date; the rest were hardcover (34 percent) and audiobook (21 percent).  That’s pretty much the high water mark these days for anyone whose name does not begin with JK, EL, or GRR.  McRapey’s post is uncharacteristically understated, as that is not the state of A genre title, but in terms of 2013, THE genre title.

A Throne of Bones and its satellites, on the other hand, sold 3,865 ebooks in their first eight months of release.  Not bad for a book that has never seen the inside of a bookstore, on the other hand, at barely more than 10 percent of Redshirts ebook sales, it is a comparatively minor blip that is of no possible concern to the mainstream publishers, right?  Well, here is the problem for the publishers.  On a grand total of 13 free Kindle Select days, another 20,274 copies were downloaded from Amazon.

Now, there isn’t a lot of overlap between the SF reader interested in Redshirts and the EF reader interested in A Throne of Bones.  They are two fairly different markets. But there are probably 10 independent books that are to Redshirts what ATOB is to A Dance with Dragons.  The problem isn’t that the independents are necessarily a threat to the established bestsellers, but that they are standing in the way of the midlist writers as well as the mainstream writers of tomorrow.  And, of course, they are absolutely devastating the average margins.

If you simply run the numbers, it becomes apparent that the only thing keeping the mainstream publishers alive these days is the fact that Amazon now voluntarily limits its Kindle Select program to five free days per quarter. Readers are readers, after all, their ability to consume books is not infinite, and due to the relative price-elasticity of books, ATOB and its satellites are now reaching one-third as many readers as Redshirts without any marketing, without any press, and without any bookstore distribution.  In fact, were it not for Amazon’s Kindle Select limits, Selenoth could quite reasonably have reached 378,154 readers in the first eight months, nearly five times MORE than Redshirts did.

This is a game-changer.

Now, you can certainly point out that I have made considerably less money on my 24,139 copies sold/downloaded than McRapey did on his 79,279 copies sold in the first eight months. But that’s irrelevant and those are just today’s profits anyhow; as Facebook and Twitter have shown, there is considerable value in free users.  The point is that if you’re just getting into the writing game, there is virtually no reason in trying to work within the mainstream publishing model.

Consider: I did literally nothing to market my book except for publishing the Selenoth satellites. No ads. No billboards. No push from Audible. You can’t buy them anywhere but Amazon. The audiobook doesn’t even exist yet and there will never be a paperback. And yet, all it would take is an easily changed policy on the part of Amazon to permit me to reach more readers than the most relentlessly marketed writer in SF/F today. To cite a concept from Nassim Taleb’s excellent Antifragile, the mainstream publishing industry is EXCEEDINGLY fragile and is totally dependent upon the willingness of Amazon to avoid inadvertently wiping them out. Unless one is already tied to the world of professional publishing for contractual reasons, I see no reason whatsoever to waste any time or effort attempting to enter it.  For all practical intents and purposes, it may not even be there in a few years, so don’t be caught up in thought processes that were last valid three years ago.

As for the hole in the fantasy market, don’t be misled.  That is an artificial one caused primarily by the ideological biases of the professional publishing gatekeepers and it is being rapidly filled by the independents. In my opinion, NA’s best strategy is to publish as an independent and become a part of that process.  Remember, this is the situation today and future changes look to favor the independents, not the mainstream publishers.

Publishing bias and the new vertical markets

In which I take exception to Standout Author Larry Correia’s take on Cedar Fort’s decision to cancel a publishing contract given to a gay writer:

So Cedar Fort really likes a book submitted to them and says that they
think it will sell well. Cedar Fort gives a contract to these two
authors. They write their author bios. One mentions his “partner”
instead of his wife. Cedar Fort flips out and drops them.

There are two schools of thought with dealing with the Left.  Larry’s is presently the dominant one among conservatives, which is that one should play by idealistic rules of ideological fair play that are observably no longer in effect. He notes, correctly, that this decision by Cedar Fort to blackball homosexuals is no different than the decision by major Manhattan publishers to blackball writers of the political Right.  He writes:

I keep seeing authors get black listed for their political opinions, and
since the publishing industry is mostly in Manhattan, it is usually
writers who lean right (righters?) that get blackballed. Of course, when
I talk about this on the internet, proper goodthinking people tell me
that’s crazy talk.

As one of the few writers who has been blackballed by both left-wing Manhattan publishers AND right-wing regional publishers, (Thomas Nelson canceled the contract for Media Whores when it discovered that I was going to address various Fox News figures in addition to the mainstream media figures they expected to be targeted), I actually think it is a positive development that these publishing biases of left and right are exposed and made more visible to the reading public.

The observable fact is that all publishing houses are ideologically biased and none of them are solely motivated by business concerns due to the fact that the editors are human, and their financial interests in the publishing houses for which they work is generally negligible.  Their bias is further compounded by the fact that none of them has any real ability to know what will, and what will not, sell well, which means that they will always be free to indulge their ideological biases with regards to every writer who does not already have an established track record of considerable success.

My opinion is that it is a serious mistake for the Right to attempt to remain above the fray and refuse to play by the rules established by the Left.  As the example of Fox News shows, as the example of Larry’s own exceptional literary success shows, the Right has considerable economic power.  However, the Right has long played into the hands of the Left by being more than willing to financially sustain the Left while the Left is doing its level best to financially starve the Right. Many conservatives fall all over themselves to proclaim how eager they are to read books by gay black handicapped communist Che Guevara enthusiasts in a futile attempt to establish their cultural impartiality.

Which means that in the cultural civil war, the Left is playing the role of the ruthless Union while the Right is playing the role of a Confederacy that is too gentlemanly and refined to take the opposition seriously.  You may recall who won that war, and how.

I fully accept that no matter how many books I write, no matter how many games I sell, Tor and its filthy editors will never publish my books.  That is absolutely and entirely fine with me.  I never wanted to have anything to do with such despicable creatures, which is why I never submitted anything to them even prior to the changes in the publishing industry that are rendering the mainstream publishers less necessary than before.  I have no problem with the fact that the 4,000 daily readers of Whatever will never buy my books or with the fact that many left-wing fans of epic fantasy will prefer to wait another five years to slog through George R.R. Martin’s next interminable self-parody than read A Throne of Bones.  I realize, as I expect Larry does as well, that there are thousands of SF/F readers who will never even look at The Grimnoire Chronicles because they are written by an avid gun enthusiast and published by Baen Books.

And, in like manner, left-wing writers should learn to accept that right-leaning publishers will not work with them and an increasing number of right-leaning consumers will not read their works.  The age of the uniform mass market and its ideological impartiality is over and the age of ideologically-based vertical markets is upon us. The sooner everyone on the right side of the ideological aisle embraces that fact and begins to act accordingly, the sooner we will be able to stop swimming in the moral filth, breathing in the philosophical effluvia, and wandering aimlessly throughout the creative wasteland of the Left.

Larry, I have no doubt, will disagree with my opinion.  So will a number of other writers on the Right. And that’s fine, as we can disagree about this and debate this without feeling any need to excommunicate each other or rigidly enforce a dogmatic consensus because we are not rabbits of the Left.

Rules of Writing III

3. Thou shalt not make thy characters graven images of thyself

One of the weakest elements in a distressingly large amount of modern fiction is the character as authorial wish fulfillment. While all of the author’s characters spring from either the author’s personal experience, historical research, past reading, or imagination, the character as author’s representative almost always tends to weaken the story as well as the reader’s ability to immerse himself in it.

This can be seen most clearly in the example of the Mary Sue trope, which is described as follows:

The name “Mary Sue” comes from the 1974 Star Trek fanfic A Trekkie’s Tale. Originally written as a parody of the standard Self Insert Fic of the time (as opposed to any particular traits), the name was quickly adopted by the Star Trek fanfiction community…. The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing.

She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn’t love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal. She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author’s favorite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc. Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.

In other words, the term “Mary Sue” is generally slapped on a character who is important in the story, possesses unusual physical traits, and has an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.

The most important aspect of the Mary Sue is its role as the author’s idealized self-representative in the story.  An example that many of the readers here will recognize is Owen Zastava Pitt in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International. Now, the character of Pitt works much more effectively than the average Mary Sue because the idealized version of a giant Portuguese man who makes a regular habit of shooting very large guns is both intrinsically interesting and entirely credible when it comes to slaughtering werewolves and other monsters.  Larry can get away with it because he is a literally larger-than-life character himself. The average novelist, being an obese woman or a man of low socio-sexual rank, whose most notable personal characteristics are a moderately high IQ and a preference for snarky wit, cannot.

But even a credible Mary Sue limits the story and tends to render it predictable. This is because we immediately know who is going to win the argument, have the last word, get the girl, and save the day.  We know who the good guys and the bad guys will be on the basis of Mary Sue’s likes and dislikes. That’s not a problem in formulaic genres such as mystery and romance where the experience expected is akin to a literary roller coaster, but doesn’t work as well in other genres, particularly in a series.

Now, because they are drawn from his imagination, most of an author’s characters will reflect some aspect of the author.  A female character might not represent him, but rather, the sort of woman to whom he is attracted. Heinlein’s ubiquitous redheads would be the primary example here. A villainous character might not represent the author, but possess traits that the author dislikes or fears in himself or others.  Jim Butcher has written a guide to writing characters which I found very interesting in that it reveals how he has created characters who are both memorable and irritatingly unrealistic at the same time.

What is (or what makes) an interesting character?  While no one thing can really stake a sole claim, several things consistently make a team contribution: 

Exaggeration
Exotic position
Introduction
Verisimilitude
Empathy

I found Butcher’s thoughts on the subject to be fascinating because he has, over time, managed to create some of the most successful but irritating characters outside of the world of Robert Jordan.  But I suspect that the weaker aspects of his characters actually stem from the strength of his approach; the problem appears to be that Butcher often gets the aspects of verisimilitude and empathy wrong due to low socio-sexual rank and a sub-par grasp of human intersexual relations. I suspect that Harry Dresden is somewhat of a Mary Sue due to his arrested psychosexual development that prevents him from pursuing women or even responding to female advances.

(Holding off on banging the little supercop for a book or three in the interest of not devolving into a story about relationships is fine. Serially turning down every sexually interested woman for twenty books indicates either a religious vocation or serious problem.)

I’m not sure about the Exaggeration aspect either. I mean, I can see how it would be effective in the sort of series where one or two characters are considerably more important than the rest, but I think it would be mistake in a series that features more of an ensemble cast.

Exercises:

1. Write down the five chief characteristics of your Mary Sue character using Butcher’s guide. Now write five chief characteristics of a character that has nothing in common with the Mary Sue.  Then write a one-page interaction in which the latter character gets the better of the Mary Sue.  (You can post the Mary Sue characteristics here if you like.  But spare us the second five and the interaction.)

2. Identify which character from ATOB most closely approaches my Mary Sue. Explain why you believe that to be the case.

Rules of Writing II: Thou shalt know how it ends

Rules of Writing II

2. Thou shalt know how it ends

This may seem obvious, but based on numerous books I have read, knowing the ending is something that far too few writers do before they initially set their metaphorical pen to paper.

There are three types of novelists. The first is the Outliner. These are highly organized writers who are able to carefully plan out how the book will proceed and more or less stick to their plan.  This is probably the ideal way to go about writing novels, but it’s also extremely difficult if you are insufficiently organized.  Outliners tend to write books that are tightly plotted, idea-driven, complex, and formulaic. Due to the complexity and scope of A Throne of Bones, most people assume that I am an Outliner, but as it happens, I am not. JK Rowling is one example of an outliner and I suspect most writers of murder mystery series are based on the predictable sequence of events in many murder mysteries.

The second type of novelist is the Explorer.  Most authors are Explorers and not only don’t have an outline to hand, they often have no idea what they’re going to write about when they sit down and stare at the blank page. They tend to follow the story where it takes them rather than forcing the story into preconceived directions. Explorers tend to write books that start well and finish badly, (or vice-versa), that are character-driven, dialogue-heavy, and of varying quality from book to book. I am an Explorer; of all the various characters who died in ATOB, there were only two characters whose deaths were planned and one of them was dictated by the historical event upon which the situation was based.

The third type of novelist is the Autobiographer. This is the author who is the protagonist of his every book.  They are generally uninterested in anything that isn’t themselves; if one looks closely enough, one can always see the image of the author underneath all of the major characters. If their lives or personalities are sufficiently interesting, Autobiographers may have one or two very good books in them, after which point they run out of material as their books are experience-driven rather than plot- or idea-driven. Jay McInerney is the foremost example of an Autobiographer; Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace are more recent examples.  I also suspect that McRapey is an Autobiographer, which explains why his novels are more akin to professional fan fiction than original fiction.

But regardless of what type of novelist you are, it is always vital to know exactly how the book ends.  When I started writing ATOB, I knew precisely three things: the prologue, the conflict between the general and his young tribune, and the long retreat north.  But because I knew the beginning and the end, I had the necessary anchor points to prevent the story from wandering aimlessly adrift.

In the absence of an outline, knowing the end helps pace the story and forces it to keep moving forward. This can be done well or it can be done poorly, but one way or another, it will be done.  We have all read authors who wait too long to begin the descent into the end and wind up accelerating the story and crashing the book in the last two or three chapters, but even these negative examples are better than books that simply seem to stop without any warning or reason.  Knowing the end won’t only make the ending better, but it will help make everything in between the beginning and the end much more coherent.

Rules of Writing I: Thou shalt know thy world

Rules of writing I

A few weeks ago, Stickwick asked me if I would put down some of my thoughts concerning how one goes about writing fiction.  This is the first in who knows how many posts in response to her request.

1. Thou shalt know thy world

Many authors of SF/F don’t appear to give much, if any, thought to the world in which they are setting their novels.  I am not saying it is necessary to go to the lengths of a Tolkien and develop at least four of your own new languages and write a literature in each of them, only that if one simply leaps in and starts writing a novel without making some conscious decisions about the setting, one is going to be making unconscious decisions about it.

And most of the time, those unconscious decisions are going to draw heavily upon novels we have read or movies we have seen.  This is why, in many books in which one can readily observe that little conscious thought has gone into the setting, one can often recognize the various elements that are derived from other novels.  Even worse, those unconsciously copied elements are seldom harmonious and are not infrequently contradictory.

Let me make clear that I am not necessarily talking about the entire world here, only the section of the fictional world as it is exposed to the reader throughout the course of the novel. For example, in her Brother Cadfael novels, Ellis Peters seldom describes much of the world outside of Shropshire, but she provides a considerable amount of detail concerning Shrewsbury Abbey and the surrounding town and the bits of news that trickle in from outsiders indicate that she is well-versed in the relevant English history.

Exercises:  These should be answered here in the comments to permit discussion of them.  Try to come up with examples that someone else has not already provided.

1.  Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world the author has clearly contemplated in some detail.  Explain why you believe that to be the case.  Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.

2. Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world concerning which the author does not appear to have given sufficient thought to the setting.  Identify the primary disharmonious element that causes you to conclude that.  And just to forestall the obvious attempts at wit, Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.

SF from Showcase #5

The Original Cyberpunk presents Stupefying Stories Showcase #5, featuring “Space Program” by Lance Mushung:

SPACE PROGRAM

The rover moved at turtle speed over the lifeless powdery dirt. I’d been directing it up a gentle slope for hours. Although it was hard to believe, the scenery of the Moon’s surface was becoming a bit mundane, a bit mind-numbing. That was especially surprising considering how much the mottled gray Moon had beckoned since I was a kid.

Jan and Samir were sitting next to me and watching the camera monitors to make certain the rover didn’t get into trouble. The radio delay of a few seconds between the rover and Earth wasn’t a big problem since the rover was so slow, but caution was the order of the day. I thought of them as backseat drivers.

“Let’s be careful,” Jan said. “We don’t know what’s on the other side of this rise.”

“Thank you,” I said, masking my exasperation as best I could about once again being told something obvious. She was right about the unknowns beyond the rise though. I was hoping for at least a change of scenery.

“Stop for a few minutes next to that rock over there,” Samir said. He pointed to a stone on the monitor. “It’s unusual and I want to take a closer look.” With his wild gray hair, Samir looked like a mad scientist excited about studying some new and different specimen.

Read the rest of the SF short there. It’s nice to see someone is still publishing genuine science fiction these days.   “Lance J. Mushung graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an aerospace engineering degree. He worked for over 30 years with NASA contractors in Houston, Texas, performing engineering work on the Space Shuttle and its payloads.”

A Den of Literary Lions

Ideas stand on their own, they are not tainted by the individual who happens to produce them.  McRapey may be a creepy little gamma male who can’t argue his way out of a paper bag or produce an original idea for a book to save his life, but he is an unusually talented self-promoter from whom better writers can draw useful examples.

One thing that I initially liked was his Big Idea series, in which McRapey permits various authors to market their books to the Whatever warren.  I’d even considered doing something similar a few years ago, but the problem is that most of the Big Ideas I’d read, conceived as they were by modern SF/F writers, were trite, obvious, derivative, and sometimes downright embarrassing.

“I thought, you know, I should just TOTALLY make this female protagonist, only she’d be, like, strong and independent and she wouldn’t take ANY crap from ANYBODY.  And she’d be just SOOO snarky, you know, and like, she’d have this total dilemma, you know, because, like, all the men are totally in love with her, but she has to, like, choose, you know, but here’s the twist.  Instead of choosing between a white male werewolf and a white male vampire who are both in love with her, she’d be, like, forced to choose between an Asian werewolf and, like, a black FEMALE vampire!  My editor’s head just about exploded when she heard that, she was like, WHOAH, it’s like a whole new science fiction GENRE!”

Anyhow, the Ideas were anything but Big and they usually left me considerably less interested in the book than I had been before. I therefore abandoned the idea.

However, I have been receiving an increasing number of requests from various writers to read their works and comment upon them, requests I simply do not have the bandwidth to accommodate.  It occurred to me that there are both a goodly number of writers as well as well-read and sophisticated readers here.  As far as exposure goes, this blog sees about 40 percent more traffic than Whatever.  So, it should be possible to take the Big Idea concept and improve upon it in a
manner that would be both useful to the writers and entertaining for the
readers

My thought is that every two weeks, a writer will have the opportunity to present his book via a post dedicated to it here.  That post can focus on the central idea behind the book, it can focus on a particular aspect of the book, or it can focus on something that inspired the book.  The book can be conventionally published, self-published or even a work in progress with a complete first draft.  In addition to sending me a link to the cover and the text for the post, the author will send me the epub.

When the book is posted, if the author is interested, I will ask for three volunteers to read and review the book.  I’ll provide a template which will inform us a) if they enjoyed the book, b) what they felt were its strongest technical elements, c) what they felt was a typical writing sample, and, d) if the author requests, where they felt there was room for improvement.  The reviews can be short, but they should be substantive.  Between two and three weeks after the author’s post, I will post the reviews here.

Think of it as three parts marketing and one part writer’s workshop.

The review aspect won’t be required; if an author merely wishes to publicize his work by talking about it here and doesn’t want it to be reviewed, that’s certainly fine.  But if there are those who express an interest in reviewing the book in the comments, I would encourage the authors to take advantage of the opportunity to receive some constructive criticism.  That is, after all, the best way to improve.

Anyhow, if you’re a writer, you’ve got a book to publicize or polish, and you’re interested in a slot, please let me know via email.  If you consider yourself a potential reviewer, please mention as much in the comments.  And if you’re a reader, feel free to throw out any suggestions you might have to improve the process.  And if it’s a dumb idea in which no one has any interest, then we simply won’t bother with it.