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Dec 15

A Holiday Gift Guide for the Genre-inclined


If you’re like me, then you probably haven’t started your holiday shopping yet. If that’s the case, then let me borrow from Douglas Adams and offer some advice: DON’T PANIC! (I hope those letters are friendly on your display). Regardless of what holiday you’re celebrating, buying stuff for loved ones into science fiction, fantasy, and horror can often be difficult. So this week, I want to offer a little holiday gift guide to help you shop for those folks in your life who love genre:

For the Zombie-lover


American Zombie		 We’ve seen what happens when the re-animated dead hunger. We’ve seen blood, and guts, and above all braaaaaiiins. But have we ever considered the zombies’ perspective? Have we ever wondered what it’s like to be part of that maligned, feared underclass in American society? American Zombie is a fun and creative documentary that follows the lives and dreams of several zombies living (un-living?) in Los Angeles. Fun, intelligent satire on our fascination with the walking dead.

The Do-it-Yourself Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse		 The zombie lover in your life probably thinks about the coming apocalypse pretty frequently. They might have escape routes, fortification schematics, weapons caches, the whole nine yards. If that’s the case, or even if not, this book makes a very practical addition to your loved one’s library. With easy to follow guidance, it is sure to keep your loved ones safe. After all, at 10″ by 7.4″ and 160 pages, it could do some damage in a pinch.

The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead		 This self-help book is a perfect distillation of the zombie ethos. With a practical twelve-step guide to zombiefication, and lessons to learn about adaptability and being your own boss, this book can make your loved ones more satisfied with their life and happier in the work.

Gerber 22-41576 Gator Machete with Sheath		 Movies and books aside, the gift that keeps on giving might be a good idea. Your zombie-phile loved ones will definitely appreciate a sturdy, 15″ double-edged (straight on one edge, and saw-toothed on the other) machete perfect for slicing and dicing anything out to eat some brains. Also makes a great companion gift to The Do-it-Yourself Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

For the Epic Fantasy Fan


Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen)		 If they haven’t read Steven Erikson, this is a gift guaranteed to blow the mind of any epic fantasy fan: a 10-book, doorstopper-sized epic fantasy series that actually finishes! Unlike most epic fantasy series that go beyond three (let alone six) books, Erikson and his publishers have consistently delivered books more-or-less on-time. The last book in the series (number 10) is currently set to be released on March 1, 2011 and Amazon is already taking pre-orders for it. With great writing, well-textured world-building, and fun characters Erikson’s Malazan books of the fallen are probably the best epic fantasy written in the last twenty years.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm		 Alright, I admit it: I myself am not that big a fan of WoW. However, I know that lots of people (and lots of epic fantasy fans especially) are. So if the epic fantasy fan in your life enjoys WoW, or MMORPGs, or RPGs then they’re likely to enjoy the new world-changing experience of Cataclysm.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel		 The essential guide book for anyone setting out on a fantasy adventure. Written by Dianna Wynne-Jones, who has taken many an intrepid tourist on a fantasy vacation, this book offers practical advice for navigating the wilds of fantasyland, the etiquette of interacting with the locals, and helpful guidance on what to bring, what to wear, and how to get about. Be sure to get an edition that is Dark Lord Approved!

For Vampire Fans who Hate Glitter


I Am Legend		 Okay, I know I talk about this book a lot on this blog. But it really is one of the best vampire novels ever written. Dark, frightening, and leaves you faint and reeling at the end. Isn’t that what a good vampire should do?

American Vampire Vol. 1		 With stories written by Stephen King and Scott Snyder and illustration by Rafael Albuquereque, American Vampire offers some grisly blood-sucking fun set in the Wild West and 1920’s Hollywood. An entertaining read, with restrained illustration capable of exploding into bloody viscera where and when needed, this graphic novel will be appreciated by those of us who enjoy evolving vampire myths.

Shadow of the Vampire		 John Malkovich and Willem Defoe star as F.W. Murnau and Max Schrek (of silent movie fame) respectively in this fictionalized account of the filming of Nosferatu. Of course, in this version, Max Schrek in fact is a monstrous vampire, who preys on the cast and crew of the movie.

For the Steampunk Aficionado


Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded		 A second steampunk anthology edited by the inestimable Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, this book collects twenty three short stories, two essays, and one roundtable interview that delves into the vagaries of steampunk literature. The fiction makes this anthology worth it, with some really great stories from authors like Jeffrey Ford and Tanith Lee.

Test Tube Spice Rack		 Credit where credit is due, I actually found this concept on the STEAMED! blog. This is a great gift for any mad scientist who likes to experiment in the kitchen. The only advice I would have is to make sure your test tubes are properly labeled. It is – alas – all too easy to mistake strychnine for salt, after all.

Airship Aerodynamics: Technical Manual		 While this military manual dates from 1941, your loved ones are sure to appreciate the detailed specs on flying and maintaining airships found in this treatise. Sure it’s dry and full of engineering and pilot jargon, but if your loved ones want to pilot an airship, shouldn’t they do it right?

For the Robot or Alien Lover


How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies		 A very practical guide to building and utilizing a robot army for dealing with the myriad dangers lurking just around the corner, including (but not limited to) ninjas, aliens, Godzilla, and great white sharks. Written by Daniel Wilson, who holds a doctorate in robotics (no fooling!), the book is firmly grounded in science. With its sections on using robots against the zombie hordes, this might make a great cross-over gift for the zombie-lover in your life as well!

Mars Attacks!		 This wonderfully sweet, heart-warming family movie directed by Tim Burton and starring the always even-keeled Jack Nicholson will reach out and touch the heart of any alien aficionado. Also, the sweet dulcet tones of Slim Whitman are sure to appeal to any science fiction music lovers!

Bottled Water		 It should go without saying that you want to keep your loved ones safe from aliens. And if the cat on a hot skillet yowling of Slim Whitman is too much for you, thankfully M. Night Shyamalan shows us an alternative alien-bashing weapon: good old-fashioned H2O. A couple drops of this stuff, and those aliens will go the way of the Wicked Witch of the West! Of course, why hydrophobic aliens capable of interstellar travel would come to a planet 70% covered with the stuff, only Shyamalan could possibly tell us (I can picture the aliens’ reasoning now: what a world, what a world…).

What are some other gifts out there for those of us who love science fiction, fantasy, and horror? I’m certain there are tons of other ideas out there, and I’d love to hear some of them (whether serious or not).

Dec 8

4 Comments

Where Do We Go from Here? Utopia in Contemporary Science Fiction


Over the weekend, science fiction author Charles Stross posted a call for more utopian speculation in contemporary science fiction. I was weaned on Huxley, Wells, Skinner, and Orwell, and so Charles’ call got me thinking: why has the utopian sub-genre fizzled out of style in the last fifty or so years? Why has the search for a good place (eutopia) ended up going no place (utopia)? (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun). I think the decline of utopian fiction is linked to the lack of a cogent utopian response to dystopian critique. What makes the dystopian critique so effective? How are the best dystopias constructed?

The Structures of Utopia and Dystopia

How to Make Perfection Entertaining

The vast majority of utopian fiction was written during the end of the industrial revolution (1880 – 1950), riding on the popularization of socialist philosophy in western Europe. Dystopias rose in parallel, although in far greater number due to their greater entertainment value. The brutal fact is that dystopias sell better than utopias because perfection makes it very hard for an author to introduce conflict.

Starting with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, every piece of utopian fiction has been written like a travelogue. The reader follows a protagonist who comes from our imperfect society, and who enters (one way or another) the perfect society. Given this set up, it becomes almost impossible to introduce tension. Why would the visitor ever want to leave? What would the hero need to fight against? Conflict is out-moded in a utopia, and this makes storytelling very difficult.

The vast majority of utopian fiction appeals to logos first and pathos second, and it wasn’t until Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delaney that those priorities were revsered. In the 1960s and ’70s, authors like Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia), and Samuel R. Delany (Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia) introduced real conflict into their utopian plots. Each did this by throwing the utopia or its representatives (Heinlein’s anarcho-libertarian Luna, Le Guin’s collectivist Shevek/Anarres, Delany’s sex/gender heterotopia Triton) into armed conflict with a non-utopian society (Earth, Urras, and Earth respectively).

As Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany made clear, the entertainment value of contemporary utopian fiction relies upon the relationship between the utopia and a different (possibly opposed) society. More recently, Iain M. Banks has done this to good effect in his Culture novels, where his protagonists tend to be Special Circumstances operatives (spies) interacting with non-utopian planets/societies/situations. While retaining some aspects of the travelogue, these books take a page out of Victor Hugo’s work and embody the utopian ideal into a principle character. Similarly, they then take the opposing viewpoint and embody that value system into a different character and let the two collide.

Le Guin effectively reversed the utopian travelogue structure: her hero Shevek is the collectivist utopian, but the world he visits (Urras) is the anti-thesis of his collectivist home planet. By making her visitor the utopian, she was able to explore more clearly the strengths and flaws of her collectivist/anarchist society and the opposed individualist/capitalist society. Delany does something similar by sending a visitor (Brom) whose values are inimical to those of the utopia he visits. This sets the stage for a gripping and powerful conflict between him and those he has relationships with, which is mirrored by the interplanetary conflict with Earth.

For those looking to write entertaining utopian fiction that has a hope of competing against dystopias, the lessons are deceptively simple:

  1. Personify your value systems.
  2. Play with perspective, by shifting which character is either narrating the story or the viewpoint character.
  3. Focus on individual relationships, instead of on the philosophical ones.

Viva la Revolucion!

Dystopias, by contrast, are stories of revolution. An ostensibly perfect society is shown to be deeply flawed, hypocritical, unjust. Our hero – usually a died-in-the-wool believer at the story’s opening – realizes his perfect society is a lie and either brings the system down or escapes to a liberated area outside of the proscribed area. The conflict practically writes itself: the situation is dire (our hero is usually alone against oppressive odds), and the stakes are high (death, or worse: conversion).

Structurally, dystopias tend to be logical extrapolations of a central conceit, a conceit that tends to be tied to the philosophical, sociological, and economic concerns of the time:

  • Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We takes the early 20th century’s industrialization, Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, and constructs a totalitarian world state where individuals are referred to only by number and any burgeoning individuality is earnestly squashed.
  • Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the principles of assembly-line manufacturing are now applied to individuals, whose roles in life are rigidly determined based on their genetic engineering.
  • George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, directly inspired by Zamyatin’s work and extrapolating the concept of a society founded on the Panopticon.
  • Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which depicts censorship taken to a logical extreme.
  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (published in Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories), which shows a state in which everyone is forced to be average in all aspects of their being.
  • Jack Vance’s Alastor trilogy, where each book explores a different society built around a particular social concept (respectively gambling, fuedalism, collectivism).
  • John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, which take show plausible consequences of Malthusian overpopulation and ecological collapse.
  • Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, which takes 1980’s Thatcherite politics and postulates a future based upon them.
  • Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which shows a society built on religious fundamentalism and male chauvinism.
  • James Morrow’s City of Truth, which posits a society founded upon (always) telling the truth.
  • Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which builds a society around providing the masses with “bread and circuses” (gladiatorial conflict) to keep them in line.

All of the examples listed above hinge upon a central character who comes to doubt the society they are a part of. Whether it is Bradbury’s Montag, or Morrow’s Jack Sperry, the protagonist is a product of the dystopian society who comes to vehemently oppose it. This opposition lends even early dystopias powerful conflict, rising tension, and thematic tension. Even the earlier dystopias established the pattern of embodying opposing principles in their characters. For every Winston Smith, we have an O’Brien (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). For every Bernard Marx and John the Savage, we have a Mustapha Mond (Huxley’s Brave New World). This gives the opposing philosophies a face, makes them personable and – in the case of Mustapha Mond, at least – deceptively sympathetic.

If utopian fiction has traditionally appealed to logos, and then pathos, then dystopian fiction has traditionally reversed that order. As a result, the success or failure of dystopian fiction lies in its world-building. The memorable dystopian works tend to have fully-realized characters, and conflict-prone plots that put their heroes in desperate situations philosophically and physically.

The Dystopian Critique of Utopia

If Charles Stross is looking for more utopian fiction, then he should be looking for more utopias that apply lessons from their dystopian cousins. By relying upon more three-dimensional characters, dystopian fiction better illustrates how flawed humans may react to situations and choices. “Human nature” is often cited as a criticism of utopian philosophy, and only the works of Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delaney have tried to respond to that criticism. Heinlein’s utopia takes the cynical, ultra-libertarian view of individualism and applies it. Le Guin readily admits to the flaws in her utopia, and posits that society as an aspirational work-in-progress reliant upon the ethos of its inhabitants. Delaney shows that any utopia is indelibly based upon a shared value system, and elements which “don’t fit in” may or may not have a place within that society…even if by ostensible definition, it is an all-encompassing, all-permitting society.

These are not the techniques of H.G. Wells or earlier utopian authors. They are instead the techniques of dystopian fiction, applied to utopian concepts. And if we are to look for modern-day utopian fiction, we should try to write more books that attempt the same. Thinly-veiled imperative lectures (à la Wells or Morris) would not sell today, and though well-written utopian travelogues (like Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age) may win awards and earn respect, they are extremely difficult to get right. I also suspect there is limited demand for them.

If we want to see contemporary utopian fiction, one option is to take a page out of Iain M. Banks’ playbook: establish the utopia in the far-distant future, so far removed as to make it effectively fait accomplit, then use Le Guin’s tactic of taking a dyed-in-the-wool utopian and putting them in conflict/interaction with opposing viewpoints. It’s a technique that works for the most-recent utopias, whether Iain M. Banks’ Culture or the Star Trek Federation. While this technique makes for compelling reading, but the fact that there are few “new” types of utopia limits the potential thematic impact.

Another option is to do as John C. Wright does in his Golden Age trilogy. There, the author takes a page out of the dystopian playbook: he uses a dyed-in-the-wool utopian character to uncover the flaws in his own utopia. Whereas in a truly dystopian work, that hero would then go on to either destroy or escape his society, Wright’s hero instead tries to save his society despite its flaws. Structurally, this is probably the most interesting utopian fiction I have seen in many years. While the utopia itself is of the nearly-ubiquitous individualist/anarchist mold, the technique by which Wright explores his themes is quite refreshing.

A third – and perhaps most challenging – option is to actually come up with some fresh utopian philosophies. In many ways, utopian philosophy has become almost synonymous with either libertarian anarchy or collectivist anarchy, and I question whether there is much more to be said on either subject. Instead, perhaps we should come up with some new models for looking at society, for structuring our relationships. If we do that, then we should apply the structural lessons of dystopian fiction to make the characters compelling, the plots full of conflict, and fundamentally resonant.

One possibility which I see is for utopian fiction that actually precedes the utopia itself. Utopia is – by definition – a static place. But the process of building a utopia, whatever its value system, surely is not. Why not utopian fiction that is directly aspirational? The reality of watching a utopia be built might be like the making of law and sausages: best left unwatched. But if we’re dealing with fiction, then I’m sure we can squeeze some entertainment and thematic resonance out of the struggle for a better world. After all, once that struggle is won, we’ll have no more conflict to write about.

Nov 30

4 Comments

REVIEW: The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin


The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin Title: The Broken Kingdoms
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Pub Date: November 3rd, 2010
Chris’ Rating (5 possible): 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point
An Attempt at Categorization If You Like… / You Might Like…

In The Broken Kingdoms (the second book in her Inheritance Trilogy, begun in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Jemisin successfully avoids the middle-book-blues by constructing a beautiful mosaic of unique and skillfully executed traits rarely seen in fantasy. Most importantly (and most impressively), you can enjoy it without having read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), although the experience will be richer if you have.

It is hard enough to maintain momentum, pattern, and voice in a single novel. But publishers love multi-book series for good economic reasons (who doesn’t love reprint sales?), and so do authors (who doesn’t love contracted advances?). Unfortunately, very few authors are up to the challenge of constructing a story arc that will span multiple books, not drag, let each installment work on a standalone basis, and do something new, meaningful, and entertaining. If Broadway is littered with excellent first acts, then Borders is littered with excellent first books. Readers of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms may be surprised to see few characters they recognize. While set in the same universe and dealing with the same (divine) conflict established earlier, this book is told from the perspective of a very different hero. It is a complete, and self-contained story that builds off of the events of the previous book and would be an excellent standalone novel in its own right. Jemisin is constructing a fascinating standalone epic trilogy that reminds me more of Homer’s Odyssey than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The Broken Kingdoms follows Oree Shoth, a blind artist living in Shadow, a city beneath the World Tree and the city of Sky perched atop it. Oree takes in a taciturn and mysterious lodger, and finds herself plunged into a conspiracy centered around the serial murders of godlings. The conspiracy, Oree’s involvement, and the steps she takes to survive give the book a solid rhythm and provide momentum that Jemisin maintains through to the end. And while this book’s plot is strong and engaging, the book’s real engine are the characters and their relationships and its fuel are the ways in which it subverts epic fantasy tropes.

Oree is a disabled member of a historically-oppressed minority. As a result, she represents a refreshing antithesis to the standard fantasy heroine (Oree is neither white, nor is she able to wield two swords at once in a spinning dance of death). In the hands of a lesser author, Oree’s race would turn this book into a simplistic caricature of contemporary racial relations, but Jemisin neatly avoids that trap. Oree’s background and the history of her race are intrinsic to the plot, but her character is woven of more complex strands than race alone. By taking the societal consequences of ancient choices and making them concrete through the experiences of her characters, Jemisin produces a rich and complex society, and avoids the solipsistic condemnation of either the majority or the minority. This enables Jemisin to introduce much stronger and deeper characterization for her principle actors, building a very subtle and effectively post-racial character without sacrificing the plot elements that hinge upon her narrator’s background.

Oree has some magical ability, but she neither understands it nor is it ever explained to her by a helpful teacher. Reading the book, we are as much in the dark as to her ability as she is, and we are pulled right along with her as she discovers the truth about herself. The emotional core of the book are Oree’s complicated relationships with the men in her life (the silent homeless man she names “Shiny”, and her godling lover Madding), and it is these relationships and her complex feelings for them that motivate her actions. The supporting characters are all drawn believably. The godlings – by their very nature – are flat characters yearning to break into three dimensions, and the sensitivity with which their efforts are handled really make you feel for them. Just like the mortal Oree, they are products of their own histories and their own family histories, and it is through this excellent characterization that Jemisin is able to explore her primary themes of choices, family, and relationships.

Oree, as the mortal narrator, provides us with a very identifiable perspective on these themes, both within herself (as a mortal Maro) and amongst the gods of her world. The characterization in this novel is the best part about it, although the characterization is so good precisely because everything else (the world-building, the language used, the magical system) contributes to it. Jemisin uses first person narration to extremely good effect, limiting the reader’s awareness to that which Oree herself would notice. But the real trick of characterization, and what seals the deal for me actually occurs at the end. I won’t spoil it here, but the denouement is used in an exceptional way to tie together the themes that Jemisin explores throughout. It brought tears to my eyes, which for jaded old me is not that easy to do.

By subverting so many fantasy tropes, it is difficult to categorize The Broken Kingdoms. It shares a palpable sense of consequence and history with Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, but it is (thankfully) more approachable, less convoluted, and less gritty. It shares the playful and sensitive touch when twisting fantasy tropes that can be found in Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker and Elantris, but it is more powerful thematically than either. It has the gripping pacing and excellent characterization of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, but Jemisin’s novel is more complete on a standalone basis. Probably the closest comparison I can come up with is Suzanne Collins’ excellent Hunger Games Trilogy, which similarly deals unflinchingly with delicate, complex, and powerful themes while keeping each book as an effective standalone novel.

The Broken Kingdoms is an exceptional new chapter in the already-enjoyable Inheritance Trilogy. Jemisin has done everything right: her characters are rich and engaging, her world is complex and believable, and her plot is fast-paced. This is an ambitious book, and it satisfies by completely addressing important themes in an innovative and immensely readable fashion.

I will be eagerly looking forward to the third and final book in the series, The Kingdom of the Gods, which is due out from Orbit in 2011.

Nov 24

The Uses of Food in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror


Thanksgiving’s secular ethos built around food, family, and friends (three things I love) make this my favorite holiday of the year. Superficially, it’s all about the great feast centered around the Thanksgiving turkey, and so I thought why not post about how food is used in science fiction, fantasy, and horror?

The Difficulties with Food

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we are evolutionarily wired to pay attention to food. That makes it very difficult for food to appear in a story or scene without becoming a major facet. Genre films use the visual of food to great effect: who can forget the scene in The Return of the King when Denethor is feasting during the charge for Osgiliath? Or the dinner scene in Beetlejuice? And let’s not forget those movies that are all about the dangers of late night snacking: Gremlins and Gremlins 2?

The filmmakers all knew that the instant food appears on screen, at least for a moment, our eyes are naturally drawn to it, our focus shifts and – depending on how it’s depicted – our mouths start watering. It’s a Pavlovian response, and the best film-makers make use of it in their movie making. The same thing happens when we read. The feast-time strategy session is a trope of epic fantasy, and much horror (including the recent zombie resurgence) is centered around food (of one sort or another). Avoiding the cliche and making food a seamless, important part of the story is much more difficult. Too little focus, and the food becomes incidental, a cliche distraction. Too much focus, and the food becomes the point of the scene (which sometimes is what you want).

So how does genre fiction actually make use of food? Well, from a brief persual of my bookshelves, it seems that I can see four different uses:

  1. As a metaphor.
  2. As a characterization device.
  3. As a distancing device.
  4. As imagery of the sublime.

Food as a Metaphor

This is one of the more obvious uses, but can be quite difficult to do tastefully. Consider two different works and their metaphoric use of food:


A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses dinner as symbols of class division. The Spirit of Christmas Present shows us many people eating on Christmas Eve, the most memorable of which is surely the Cratchit’s feast. Poor, down-trodden Bob Cratchit and his family put together a lovely spread. Dickens knows that food is not just about the meal itself, but about the way it is presented, the way it is served, the company in which it is enjoyed. He puts all of this to mouth-watering use as he describes their (meager) fare of Christmas goose and pudding:

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds, a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course – and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot, Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigor, Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple sauce, Martha dusted the hot plates, Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table, the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and, mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped.

Setting up the table, laying out the plates, anticipating the taste, these are the rituals of most any family. The “pre-game” sets the mood, establishes the characters, the joy of a holiday meal. Note how Dickens points out that geese are not that rare, that they are easy to be had…but that the Cratchits still rarely enjoy them: “you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds…and in truth it was something very like it in that house“. Or consider how the Cratchits react to the pudding:

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly, too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that, now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

The metaphor works here because Dickens does not beat us over the head with it. Granted, he beats us over the head with Scrooge’s mistreatment of Cratchit. But when describing the scene with the food, he implies its meaning quite rightly. The fact that the Cratchits eat a poor man’s meal are subtly implied, not stated. The focus is not on the meagerness of their meal: the text instead focuses on their dignity under duress, and that is what makes the metaphor effective. When, after his ordeal, Scrooge sends them the giant Christmas turkey (“It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim.“) the contrast with the goose and the small pudding resonates that much more strongly because it is not pointed out to the reader.

Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine uses a very different tact. Unlike Dickens, Bradbury hands us the key to his metaphor directly:

Danelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.

The entire third chapter of Dandelion Wine describes how the wine represents the joys of summer, bottled to bring a taste of summer into the cold winter months. With a book so nostalgic, the book itself represents an analogous metaphor. Just as the bottles of dandelion wine bring summer into winter, so too does the book itself bring magical childhood into adult life. Both Dickens and Bradbury use metaphor: one by implication and understatement, the other explicitly and structurally. Other authors in genre use food metaphors more obliquely (Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rosetti) but I find Dickens’ and Bradbury’s methods the most memorable.

Food as Characterization

One of my favorite scenes involving food takes place in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (first of his Gormenghast novels). The scene is a conversation between the ruthlessly ambitious social-climber Steerpike, the somewhat embittered Dr. Prunesquallor, the flighty but loving Fuchsia, and her shattered Nannie Slagg. In this scene, Steerpike endeavors to secure employment with Doctor Prunesquallor, and has coerced Fuchsia and Nannie Slagg into bringing him to the good doctor.

They do not eat at this meeting, but they do drink. And Peake uses the act of drinking to further establish his characters. Western culture associates certain traits with certain alcohols. Advertisers rely on this when crafting their brand messages: think of the archetypal images you see in the typical whiskey ad. Peake was a master of characterization (arguably, his trilogy is one long study in characterization), and he knew that he could use his characters’ chosen libations as a window into their souls:

‘Drink, my Fuchsia dear,’ [Prunesquallor] said. ‘Drink to all those things that you love best. I know. I know,’ he added with his hands folded at his chin again. ‘Drink to everything that’s bright and glossy. Drink to the Coloured Things.’

Fuchsia nodded her head unsmilingly at the toast and took a gulp. She looked up at the Doctor very seriously. ‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘I like elderberry wine. Do you like your drink, Nannie?’

Mrs. Slagg very nearly spilt her port over the arm of the chair when she heard herself addressed. She nodded her head violently.

‘And now for the brandy,’ said the Doctor. ‘The brandy for Master…Master…’

‘Steerpike,’ said the youth. ‘My name is Steerpike, sir.’

The whole scene goes on for some paragraphs more. Fuchsia is confused, and easily distracted, and whether this is a result of the wine or her own nature is a matter of conjecture. Slagg falls asleep. Prunesquallor does not even so much as taste his cognac. And Steerpike? Steerpike keeps his distance. Verbally, he remains aloof and speaks and sips only to underline the specific points of his dialog and as a tool to help him achieve his goals. The differences in what they drink, and the differences in how they drink it, create a perfect alignment between character and action. If the characters all drank the same way (sipped, gulped, or ignored their glasses), we would finish the passage with a weaker understanding. If they were all drinking sherry, or wine, or beer, so too we would have a less strongly-formed sense of the characters. Using such half-measures would have weakened the unity between their words and deeds. But Peake draws characters too well for that.

Food as a Distancing Device

Food is often used for comedic/tragic effect in science fiction (“It’s a cookbook! It’s a cookbook!”). But perhaps one of the best ways that it is used is as a distancing device. The most memorable (for me) scene in Julie E. Czerneda’s Survival is when the heroine Mac finds herself aboard a Dhryn (alien) spaceship. In order for the rest of the book (and the rest of the series) to work, Czerneda needs to ensure that we view the Dhryn as aliens. They need to have alien value systems, alien biologies, alien everything, to establish that sense of Other.

When Mac first comes aboard the ship, there are no Dhryn to be seen. Instead, she is alone in her quarters, and must figure out how she is to eat and drink. She is offered what is – ostensibly – food, but it is so unlike any food she has ever seen that she has no way of knowing if it is even edible (for humans). With no food, and no water, and no ability to communicate with her hosts she finds herself in dire straits, until she attempts the following experiment:

Step one. After her experiment with the Dhryn shower, Mac wasn’t going to risk herself without due care. She chose the outside of her left arm as most expendable and pressed it against one of the cylinders.

It felt cold, which didn’t mean it was chilled. Room temperature, Mac concluded. She examined the skin that had touched the food. No reddening or swelling. She brought her forearm close to her nostrils and sniffed.

Blah! Mac wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t sure if it smelled more like hot tar or sulfur. It certainly didn’t smell edible.

Step two. She picked up one of the cylinders, doing her best not to react to its slimy feel or rubbery consistency, and brought it to her mouth. Slowly, fighting the urge to vomit – a potentially disastrous loss of fluid – she stuck out her tongue and touched it to the side of the cylinder.

Nothing.

Her tongue might be too dry. Mac brought her tongue back inside her mouth, letting its tip contact what saliva she had left, then, cautiously, she moved that saliva around so it contacted all the taste buds on her tongue.

BLAH! Mac barely succeeded in keeping her gorge in her throat. God, it was bitter. Putting down the cylinder, she crushed a bit of nutrient bar in her hand and licked up the crumbs. The sweetness helped, barely. She resisted the urge to take another sip. Thirty minutes until her next.

Step three. Mac breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, centering herself, slowing her heart rate from frantic to tolerably terrified. Then she picked up a cylinder and took a bite.

BITTER! Before she could spit it out, moist sweetness flooded her senses as her teeth fully closed. Startled, she poked the jellylike msas around in her mouth. A tang of bitterness remained, but the overall impression was of having bitten off a piece of…

…overripe banana. Not that flavor, but the same consistency and texture. This taste was complex, more spicy than bland, and seemed to change as the material sat in her mouth. A good sign, Mac thought, chewing cautiously. The enzyme in her saliva was acting on what had to be carbohydrate. The moisture in the mouthful was more than welcome.

She swallowed. When nothing worse happened than the impact of a mouthful thudding into her empty stomach, Mac examined the cylinder. Where she’d bitten it, glistening material was slowly oozing onto her hand, as if through a hole.

Mac laughed. If the sound had a tinge of hysteria to it, she felt entitled. “I ate the damn wrapper,” she said, wiping her eyes.

The use of humor is an effective tool, a way of releasing the tension built up in the preceding pages. The systematic, experimental nature of the meal is in keeping with the character’s profession (scientist). And the description of the food itself is sufficiently alien that up until that last sentence, we can believe that this is whatever food the Dhryn normally eat. An effective way of establishing Mac as the only human aboard this very alien starship headed for alien lands.

Food as the Sublime

The final way for food to be used is as sublime imagery. There are many ways to do that, whether in genre or out of genre. But in genre, horror stories probably do this most frequently. A disturbingly fun example that makes me squirm whenever I read it is Micaela Morrissette’s Wendigo, published in Weird Tales. The whole story is one long description of banquets, and cooking, and feasting. But Morrissette’s language artfully sets up images that are unsettling, disturbing, but still clearly food that her character finds sumptuous:

She swallowed the wine that paused in her mouth, clung there, spreading itself. She swallowed the black soup: thin, sour broth swimming with clots that trailed delicate filaments. She swallowed the tempura of cobra lily, and, inside its cup, the pale, limp moth that seemed to sigh and dissolve on her tongue. When the songbirds were served, her gracious companion, sensing her confusion, placed a steadying hand on the back of her neck and guided her head under the starched napkin. She ate the scorching meat, needled with tiny bones her teeth had splintered. She felt little ruptures where they scratched her throat. Her companion was missing the fifth and second fingertips of his right hand, the entire middle finger of his left. Bluntly, blindly, fondly, the stubs knocked against her skin. The manservant brought the baby octopi in shallow bowls filled with, her host informed the company, vibrio fischeri, which sent a faint gold-green luminescence throughout the water. She dipped an octopus in the spicy sauce and trapped it lightly between her teeth. Its small heavings and sucks brushed against the pads of her cheeks like tiny kisses. She kissed back.

The imagery is sublime, and we’re drawn along with its magic. But what gradually becomes clear is that the sublime in this case is horrific, as the story descends into a rivetingly unsettling tale of cannibalism. This is horror at its finest, using sublime imagery to simultaneously repulse the reader and keep them rapt.

Fun Food Links in Conclusion

So now that we’ve talked about how science fiction, fantasy and horror often use food, maybe as you’re enjoying Thanksgiving this week you can benefit from some fun science fictional recipes and other fun resources:

I hope you’ll be having some fantastic food this week, and above all else sharing it with your family and friends!

TOKEN: MXV3N4RDRBHG

Nov 17

3 Comments

The Difference Between Writing a Short Story and a Novel


So I finished writing my first novel last night. Typing it out like that makes it sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. It’s the first draft of an eighty-three thousand word fantasy novel, and is my first attempt at anything longer than a short story since I was twelve years old. Now, I’m going to put it aside for several weeks, work on other things, and then return to re-write it, and then maybe I’ll dance a little jig. Maybe. We’ll see how I feel about the finished product in a couple of months. But since this is NaNoWriMo, I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on how the process of writing this particular novel differed from my earlier experiences writing short stories.

DISCLAIMER: The experiences I’m describing here relate to this particular novel, and to me as a writer. Many of these experiences would not translate to a different novel with a different structure, and a different set of challenges. They might not translate to anyone else’s approach to writing, either. For that matter, I’m also new at this. This is my first novel, and so the observations and methods that worked for this one might be trashed by the time I’m on my sixth. So take anything you read here with a grain of salt, as I’m kind of making it up as I go.

Why I Write Short Stories, or Why I Didn’t Write Novels

At some point, I got it into my head that short stories demand tighter writing than novels do. I figured that if I could get my short story technique down, then when I applied my craft to the longer form, it would be better, faster, stronger. So in the last two years, I finished about fifty short stories, ranging in length from 1,300 words to 7,000 words. Mostly fantasy, spanning a variety of types from fairy tales, to (the very rare) sword and sorcery, some horror, and some mainstream literary stuff. I looked at it as good practice for when I started writing novels, and I definitely think that it helped me to write the novel in a number of ways:

1 Short stories are short enough to experiment with. Lots of people argue that writing exercises are a good way to practice, but somehow I’m always disappointed if I do a writing exercise that does not yield a fully functional story. I think of it like whipping up some pancake batter for the practice, then chucking it without putting it in the pan. It’s helpful, sure; but finishing something delicious is more so. Even if you write slowly, churning out a 2,000 word short story will take you far less than an 80,000 or 100,000 word novel – which makes them a great way to build confidence and develop skills, without the danger of discovering you’ve written yourself into a corner at 60,000 words.
2 Short stories have fewer moving parts. As I talked about in an earlier post, short stories just don’t have the room for a lot of complexity. This makes them easier to disassemble than a novel. I find that I can take a short story apart, look at all of the pieces that it’s composed of, and then re-assemble it differently, or fix a broken element, much faster than if I had to do that in a novel. It also makes it easier to learn the craft of plotting, or how characters get built, or how world-building works, than in a novel. I kind of think of it like learning architecture from LEGO’s, before moving onto bricks.
3 Short stories can teach you how to schedule productive writing time. I’ve got a full-time day job, I do volunteer work, I have a social life. Carving out time for writing is painful. But if I want to set a self-imposed deadline upon myself (e.g. “Write a novel by the end of the year”), I need to use an awareness of how quickly I write to schedule around it. That’s just the way my schedule, and my scheduling approach, works. Writing short stories taught me to think before I write. I learned to think through many different aspects of a story, starting from the voice, the plot, the characters, the setting, etc. By thinking (sometimes for weeks or months) before I ever write a single word lets me actually write the story extremely quickly once I do sit down. I know not everyone works this way. But with my schedule, it is easier to find time to think (shower, car, lying awake in bed) than it is to find time to actually write. So producing short stories trained me to think first, and then when I’ve thought it through enough, to sit down and write quickly.
4 Editorial Feedback Writing is all about waiting. You write something, ship it off to agents, editors, and someday (six months later if you’re lucky) somebody gets back to you with a response. In the novel market, my understanding is that it is almost always a form rejection. Thankfully, the professional (and semi-pro) short fiction markets have a faster turn-around. Taking what I considered my best short stories, I could expect a response in several weeks, rather than months. As my writing improved, I could see changes in the responses: fewer and fewer form letters, editors offering reasons (sometimes precise, sometimes not) on why a story didn’t work for them. This was enormously helpful. It helped focus my attention on what needed work in my writing, taught me to deal constructively with rejections (a vital skill for any aspiring writer), and gave me confidence that my hard work was paying off. By writing and trying to sell shorts, I was able to go through multiple feedback iterations in the same time it would have taken me to write a single 100,000 novel.

Novels Are Not Short Stories

Getting Ready to Write

But novels are not short stories. I usually write short stories in a two step process: I think about them enough to develop a narrative voice, identify my principal character, perhaps identify the general mood for the story. It’s the act of actually disciplining my imagination, and sometimes it can take five minutes or it can take weeks. But once this step is done, I can sit down and write the first draft of the story in a couple of hours. I don’t outline, I don’t take notes. I just write the story and then revise it after the fact.

I knew that this approach wouldn’t work for a novel. Structurally, it’s just too big: too many characters, too many side-plots, too many moving parts to figure them out in my head before sitting down to write. So I adopted a different approach. So I started by taking some notes. Not an outline, something a lot simpler. I started with my premise (“How a world built on magic responds to the invention of the printing press”). The world of my story would start from this premise. With a premise like that, I knew the conflict would be between groups in the society, and between specific characters within those groups. So I started by sketching a paragraph of notes about different groups in this society: their histories, their motivations, their value systems, etc. This didn’t let me identify any characters, yet, but it did allow me to sketch a basic plot. Each group would have to respond somehow to the printing press. And so these responses formed my high-level, basic plot outline. With that premise, with the social outline, the basic skeleton of a plot, I was able to (preliminary) identify my characters: after all, someone would have to actually do whatever the groups’ responses would be. I hadn’t had to do this kind of outlining for any of my short stories. They were simpler, with less complex relationships, and less complex conflicts. But if I hadn’t done this, I don’t think I would have found a way to actually start my novel.

Starting to Write

The first 17,000 words (20% of the finished draft) were very hard. I must have written the first several chapters five or six times before I was happy with them. I started with close third person, switched to first, swapped the point in my (very general) timeline where the story began once or twice, and changed a bunch of my initial character outlines. Getting past these false starts was the hardest part in actually writing the book.

In terms of my actual writing, I wrote each chapter as if it were a movement in a short story. When I write short stories, if I’m writing the beginning I’m already thinking about what needs to happen in the middle. By the time I’m working on the middle, I’m thinking about the end. I tried to do the same thing with chapters: while I was writing one chapter, I would be thinking about what needed to happen in the next. Characters would act in the “current” chapter, and what would follow could only be a logical continuation (a response) of that action, or a sidestep to establish a new side-plot.

At this stage, I didn’t have any kind of real plot outline. The focus was on setting the stage, establishing characters and side-plots. It was hard work to write each chapter, to set up the dominoes. But the next chapter would be that much easier to write, because by the time I had gotten there, I had narrowed down the places where I could go. Once I had set up one row of dominoes, I had limited where others could go if I wanted them to fall in sequence.

Getting over the Hump

The next 40,000 words (20 – 67% of the finished work) got much easier much faster. That’s not to say they were easy (they weren’t), but they did begin to flow easier. However, as the number of established side plots grew, I decided to get much more systematic in the writing. I actually made an outline, of sorts. It was an Excel worksheet, with one row for each chapter. Each row had four columns:

  • The chapter number,
  • The version number of my preferred draft for that chapter,
  • The word count of that chapter, and;
  • A couple of sentences summarizing the events of that chapter.

I had never needed anything like this for short stories, but this became an invaluable tool for me while writing the middle of the book. It allowed me to keep track of characters, events, pacing, and side-plots. The outline actually laid a road map for me as I wrote, because I was able to outline six or seven chapters ahead of my current place. As I wrote, I would revise the outline. I would decide to shift events to earlier (or later) chapters, and would revise as I went. But I didn’t actually extend the outline until I achieved certain key plot milestones in my writing.

During this phase of the writing, I was able to build a rhythm for the writing. While I couldn’t find the time to write every day (unfortunately), I was able to find a rhythm that let me write about 10,000 words a week, which struck me as a perfectly good rate if I could maintain it throughout the novel. The biggest trouble I ran into during this phase was my narrative voice. By the time I had written 20,000 words, I was certain I had lost my narrative voice somewhere around 10,000 words. I chose not to go back and revise. Instead, I chose to keep writing (trying to regain my original voice), and to focus particular attention on it when I re-wrote the book after it was done.

Whether this was a good choice or not, I don’t know. Whether my fear was real or not, I don’t know. I won’t know until after I have let the story sit for a couple of weeks and return to the re-write with a fresh mind.

Rushing to the End

By the time I had written 55,000 words, I had enough (plot) visibility to outline the last 20 chapters of the book. During this phase, my focus was on maintaining momentum and executing on the outline I had put together. I actually accelerated my writing pace during this phase, as if it were a sprint to the finish line. That may or may not have weakened the actual writing, but I also realize I am still too close to the story to judge that accurately. That goes onto the list of things to pay special attention to during the re-write.

As I neared the end, I also started to plan out the next phase: the re-write itself. I know that I’ll have to revisit the entire book. I know that before I do that, I’ll have to put it aside for several weeks, if not several months. I’ll work on something else, put it out of my mind, and only then return to the re-write. When I do start the re-write, I have a list of issues that I know I need to address. Some are major, functional issues (narrative voice). Others are problems that I know I need to fix (background that I came up with mid-way into the book, which I should have established early on). Or still others are thoughts I might have to put more meat on the book’s bones, since 83,000 words is a little light for a debut novel (most genre editors seem to seek 80 – 110k). But before I do any of that, I need to gain some distance from the book. Put the plot, the world, the characters from my mind so that I can look at it fresh.

Moving Beyond the First Novel

So now that I have finished my first novel-length work, there are two major things on my mind: first, the fact that most first novels become an author’s embarrassing baby photo. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a multiple-book author who loves the first book they ever published. Usually, they seem to prefer their later (more experienced, mature) works for a variety of reasons. And I’ve heard too many stories of authors whose first (or first several) books collect dust in some desk drawer, never seeing the light of day. That’s probably not unlike my first short stories, and I would not be at all surprised if my first novel joins them. I am perfectly comfortable with that. Even if this book never sells, I know that I have written it and I have learned a lot about writing through the process. Probably the most important lesson is that I can write novel-length works, which is worth a lot. And is also one of the points of NaNoWriMo (even if this wasn’t a NaNoWriMo book, I still think NaNoWriMo is a great initiative for startup authors).

Which brings me to the second thing on my mind: writing my second novel. I’ve already got it well underway. This one is more ambitious, more complicated, and a bit more difficult (stylistically and thematically) than the novel I just finished. I’m already about 25,000 words into it, and I am well into its middle. It has a very different structure, and practically inverses the challenges of my first novel. Either way, I’m having fun writing it and I think it will be a good way to clear my first novel from my mind…in time to return to my first book in December for a re-write.

So if you’re a writer reading this blog post, or if you want to be, what do you think about the differences between writing a novel and short stories? What have your experiences been? There are probably about as many methodologies and lessons to be learned as there are writers, so I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts.

Nov 9

2 Comments

REVIEW: The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman


The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman Title: The Half-Made World
Author: Felix Gilman
Pub Date: October 12, 2010
Chris’ Rating (5 possible): 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point
An Attempt at Categorization If You Like… / You Might Like…
Exciting, adventurous, thoughtful steampunk fantasy.

The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman is the gripping story of war on a brutal frontier. This is Gilman’s third book, after his excellent 2007 debut Thunderer and its disappointing sequel Gears of the City. Set in an entirely different universe, The Half-Made World shows that Gilman has clearly disciplined his imagination and gained a focus that had been lacking in his last novel.

If you are looking for steampunk with Victorian mannerisms and airships, look elsewhere. While it shares elements of the steampunk aesthetic, it is firmly rooted in the oily, Wild West and Sinclair’s blood-stained Chicago stockyards. For those critics who complain that steampunk never has anything important to say, I recommend they read this book. It takes place in (as the title would suggest) a half-made world, where the east is settled and established, operating along “realistic” lines. The west remains wild, and reminds me of the aboriginal Dreaming. The rules that govern it are shifting, changing, and magic (of a sort) is real. From a thematic standpoint, The Half-Made World is a serious examination of the complex and conflicting values inherent in the romantic and manifest destiny movements of the 19th century. But despite its important themes and artful writing, it is an entertaining and exciting read, striking that rare balance between adventure and literature.

Gilman’s frontier is torn apart by an unending war between the Line (railroads, trains, manifest destiny) and the Gun (guns, fatalistically doomed heroes, romance). When the book opens, it is entirely plausible that the Line and the Gun are merely the colloquial names for a set of combating ethos: symbols, and little besides. But it quickly becomes apparent that these opposing forces are in fact very real spirits or demons, who embody particular mores and values and who attract particular types of followers. The opposing cultures of Line and Gun, and the setting they create, are some of the most important characters in this book.

The story is told from three perspectives:

  • Lowry, an agent of the Line,
  • John Creedmor an agent of the Gun, and;
  • Liv Alverhuysen, a “neutral party” from the settled East swept up in the frontier conflict.

While each of the perspective characters is engaging, the Line and the Gun themselves provide the text with a foundation. Gilman’s writing is extremely tight, and the natures of the Line and the Gun come through in the little details: the methods their agents employ, the territories they control, the people who live under their rule. Even the slight shifts in narrative voice used for the different perspectives help cement the setting. The Line and the Gun are not ephemeral constructs, or religious ideologies. They are real: dirty, smelly, and intensely human forces for all of their inhuman power.

Gilman does something very difficult with his three perspective characters. Each personifies a particular ethos: Lowry is the embodiment of the Line, with all its systematic and methodical values. Creedmor embodies the Gun, with its heroic strengths and tragic weaknesses. Liv personifies a third set of values (still nascent, I would say), which seems designed to balance the Line and the Gun. To paint characters who personify abstract values well is very difficult. It is so easy for them to become caricatures of their mores. Hugo pulls it off exceptionally in Les Miserables. Ayn Rand does it well, though less-reliably than Hugo. While Gilman is not quite as powerful as Hugo, nor (thankfully) as insistent as Rand, his characters remain true to the forces they personify, as well as to their own humanity. They are flawed and identifiable, in a most beautifully human way.

The jacket, designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill and with art by Ross MacDonald, drew my eye in the bookstore, reminding me of the futuristic designs drawn by Albert Robida in the late 19th century. While I don’t think the image depicted on the cover appears at any point in the action of the book, the design is elegant and understated. It captures the spirit of the text, if not its literal action. The book opens slowly, but gathers steam after the first eighty or so pages. The prose is dense, and rich throughout, and Gilman fleshes out his principal and supporting characters gradually over the course of the book. The last third is especially well-paced, and I found myself on the edge of my seat. The perspective and writing remain crisp, and at no point does it come off the rails (no pun intended).

While on the whole this book was excellent, I was mildly disappointed in how Gilman dealt with one of the characters at its end. It is difficult to explain the details without giving anything away, but this is clearly the first book in a larger whole, and to make it self-contained, certain strands needed to be tied up. I understand that, and I understand that there were equally-good or equally-bad options for how to do so. Gilman chose one of them, and his choice is not in and of itself bad and I suspect other readers might be satisfied with it. But when I read it, I found elements of its ending to be slightly anticlimactic, almost bathetic. However, it is entirely possible that bathos was part of Gilman’s point, and while it was disappointing, I find myself waffling on whether it is a weakness or not.

The book ends poised for a continuation of the adventure, without crossing the liminal boundary into cliff-hanger. As a result, I am eagerly looking forward to the sequel. I strongly recommend The Half-Made World to anyone looking for thoughtful steampunk, or who enjoys the frontier adventures of Emma Bull (Territory) or Jeffrey Ford (The Physiognomy). If (like me) you were turned off by Gilman’s earlier Gears of the City, I’d suggest you give him another shot: The Half-Made World is incomparably stronger in every way.

Nov 2

3 Comments

Liking Little Things: Dissecting Short Stories and Flash Fiction


This past Friday, @tordotcom tweeted a fun challenge asking for six-word fantasy stories. Like all such challenges, it’s inspired by (what I consider to be) the best short story ever written (supposedly by Ernest Hemingway to win a bet):

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This challenge got me thinking about what it takes to write a great short story or flash piece, which I think is especially relevant to anyone writing in the science fiction, fantasy or horror genres. Basically, if we write short stories or flash fiction, odds are we’re writing in genre for the simple reason that there aren’t many markets outside of the genres for us to sell to. The literary journals are few and far between, literary anthologies tend to reprint old stories written by past masters, and there just don’t seem to be that many places for us to place something that isn’t a genre story. So given all of this, what does it take to write a great genre short story?

If they are successful, shorts can pack the emotional punch of a novel into a space one tenth the size. I find it hard not to appreciate the economy – the discipline – that demands. If you’re bumping up against your publisher’s 2000 or 3000 word cap, every single word matters. Of course, we like to think that every word in a novel matters too…but the fact is they don’t. They should, but with the reality of deadlines and the challenge of completing the novel-writing marathon, some poor constructions just squeak through the editorial cracks. It happens to every writer, good and great included. It’s just the way it works. But short fiction – whether short stories or the relatively nascent form of flash fiction – does not have that luxury.

Artistic Techniques of Good Short Stories

The Reader’s Investment Our reader is always going to be less invested in a ten-page, 2000-word story than the two-hundred page, 100,000-word novel they’re halfway into. If at any point our short story loses their interest, our reader might say “Screw it, this story sucks” and go back to playing Fallout. What have they lost? With a short story, a very small amount of time. Short stories are a lot less forgiving as a form, in relation to their length. As I write, I always try to remember:

  • Writing is re-writing. Revise the story with the eye of a zealot. Trim all of the fat we can find.
  • Big things are made of smaller things. For each act, each character, each paragraph, each sentence, we should ask ourselves: is this really needed? Can we say this more economically?
  • Don’t fear the delete key. It can be tough to cut something we’ve written. But whatever tightens the story, strengthens it.
Limited Cast of Characters We’ve all read the massive epics that require a dramatis personae either before or after the text to keep track of the cast of characters. Ever seen a short story with one? I always try to think about this in terms of:

  • Purpose. Any character (certainly any named character) in our story has to serve a specific thematic or plot purpose. He or she needs to perform some action, and every action adds words to our length. To keep it tight, we should limit these characters and their actions to that which is essential to the story.
Limited Perspective Each time we shift perspective, we have to pull the reader out of the character they have already invested in and convince them to re-invest elsewhere. Sometimes, this is necessary. But it should be used very judiciously. I usually think about:

  • Speed. Perspective is the key to getting our reader invested in our character and the world we create. We should grab our reader quickly and hold onto him or her throughout the story.
  • Narrative Voice. Who is our narrator? Can we tell the story from a first-person perspective? Can we give our narrator a distinct voice, spicing it with opinions/values to rapidly build our world around our reader?
  • Use of the First-Person. A great trick for maximizing speed is to tell our story from a first-person perspective. When we read something from an “I”-perspective, it instantly puts us in the character’s head, instantly builds the character’s world around us.
Limited Plot I love Byzantine side-plots, with twists and turns and double-agents and triple-crosses and all that fun stuff. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the space to cram a lot of that complexity into our short stories.

  • Choose your battles. Pick the plot arc that is most important to our story and its themes. Stick with that.
  • High stakes yield high emotion. If we want our reader to be invested in our story, the stakes at play must matter to our characters. If they don’t care, if they are not invested, why should our reader be?
The Ongoing Dialog in Letters Every editor is looking for stories that are “new” and “fresh.” Genre fiction pre-supposes some reader familiarity with its history and tropes. Back in January, Jo Walton posted a great piece on Tor.com about the concept of “reading protocols”, which should be required reading for anyone writing or editing in genre. For our short story to be fresh it has to be one step ahead of what the best writers are producing today. To figure out what that is, we need to:

  • Know our markets. This is more than just reading submission guidelines carefully. It means following what the best writers are producing today.
  • Track trends. What are the over-saturated sub-genres in the marketplace? Seeing too many vampires, too much steampunk, too much “insert-trope-here”? Use what we see to stake a new claim.
  • Learn editorial preferences. Each editor has different tastes. By reading her submission guidelines, by tracking what else she buys, and by submitting different stuff of our own to her, we can (over time) learn what her tastes are.
The Rise of On-screen Reading As the markets for short fiction increasingly go online-only, odds are people will read our short story on a screen rather than a page. This fact has tremendous implications for how we construct our story: have you ever tried to read a 200-word paragraph on screen? Did you get through it all? Reading on screen is (for better or for worse) different than reading on paper, and it does affect how we should write our stories:

  • Use shorter paragraphs. They are easier to read on-screen, and they force a certain economy of thought into our writing, thus contributing to the story’s overall tightness.
  • Use clearly delineated sentences. This is another trend in English literature championed by Hemingway. Clarity in sentence construction is also a more economical use of words, and contributes to shorter paragraphs.
  • Avoid typographic chicanery. I love the poems of ee cummings. But in today’s short prose markets, there is precious little demand for typographic tricks of that nature. It takes a lot of work for a publisher to make complex typography display consistently across multiple different devices, browsers, screen resolutions, etc. Which is why if our story relies on typographic sleight of hand, it’ll be a much tougher sell.

The Economics of Good Short Stories

Competition in the Short Markets Two facts contribute to increased competition in the short fiction markets:

  1. The number of markets paying professional rates has shrunk. New markets are increasingly cropping up online, however the majority of them can afford to publish 2 – 4 short stories per month (as opposed to the 8 – 10 stories the old print magazines used to run).
  2. Computers and the Internet make writing easier. Everyone has one, and everyone (myself included) thinks they have a story or two in them. This means that slush piles today are larger than they were thirty years ago.

Thus, there are more stories out there fighting for fewer publishing spaces. And that’s just if we’re talking about slush: let’s not forget many published stories are solicited, by-passing the slush piles entirely. This makes short fiction an extremely competitive market, and it means that in order to break into the space we need to:

  • Write better.
  • Not give up.
  • Know what the markets we’re submitting to like to buy.
  • Write better.
  • Network: meet the people (online and offline), because people buy from people.
  • Write better.
  • Keep at it.
Less Money in Short Fiction The last ten years have seen a huge shift in how short fiction gets paid for (at least in science fiction, fantasy and horror). A quick glance at the listings on Duotrope suggests that a majority of short fiction markets paying professional rates are now online-only, and donation-funded. This introduces revenue uncertainty and irregularity for the publishers, which drives down what they can pay for stories, and limits the number of stories they can buy/publish. If an editor can buy two powerful (but shorter) stories for the price of one longer story of similar resonance, which would make the most sense? This is one of the main factors that is driving the increased call for flash fiction (short shorts < 1000 words, though definitions/preferences vary).

The Art of Implication

So given all of the above, what makes Hemingway’s six-word story so damned good? Why does it resonate so well? Because it adheres to all of the principles outlined above, while packing a tremendous emotional punch in only six short words. How does he do it? He employs what I call “the art of implication”. It’s a theory that Hemingway himself outlined in Death in the Afternoon and which since has come to be called the “iceberg theory”.

In a grossly over-simplified version, the theory says that the reader will fill in the blanks if the author leaves things out of the written story. The author can leave out events, characters, opinions, plot, etc. If what remains is written well enough, if there are enough context clues embedded in the text, the reader should be able to intuit or imagine what was left out. Each reader might intuit something different, but that would not detract from the overall emotional resonance of the story: if anything, it would strengthen the story by making it more resonant across a broader range of readers. That short, six-word sentence is a perfect example of this theory in practice:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
The Reader’s Investment This story is six words long. Hemingway is asking us for a very small investment of time. Who wouldn’t invest the time to read six short words?
Limited Cast of Characters This story – ostensibly – lacks characters. The characters are implied by the text. Who is the narrator? Who is selling these shoes? Is it the baby’s mother? The father? Some other relative? A stranger? A neighbor? Each of us fills in this blank for ourselves, putting a character into the story that they we will identify closely with.
Limited Perspective This is one of the very few stories I can think of that has no perspective. No matter how hard I try, I cannot read that sentence and determine (based on the evidence in the text) who is speaking. It does not feel like an omniscient narrator, but there is no evidence to the contrary. There is no hint of first person narration in the text itself, but (to me) it feels like there is. There is only one perspective in this story, and that perspective is whatever we put into it.
Limited Plot This story lacks a plot. That’s not a bad thing: some of the best stories lack a classic plot. In this case, the plot, the conflict, the events of the story are also implied. They take place in a time leading up to those six little words, and whatever occurred is something we intuit or imagine.
Economics

The urban legend states that Hemingway put this six-word story together to win a bet. He didn’t sell it anywhere, it wasn’t published anywhere, it is just one of the many anecdotes that follow legendary writers. Of course, it’s impossible to state definitively whether it would sell today. I doubt there’s an editor working in the English language today who isn’t familiar with this story.

However, if we’re looking to make a living writing six-word stories, I’d suggest we reconsider: while it’s an interesting exercise, there isn’t terribly much commercial demand for it. While stories of this length are clever, and can be momentarily satisfying, the investment and payoff are not – in and of themselves – quite satisfying enough. It’s a nice entre cours, but what readers are looking for is an plat principal with a little more meat on its bones.

So what do you think makes short stories work well? What kind of structures do you like to see? What are some of the best six-word stories you like? If you want to see the stories people came up with in response to Tor.com’s Twitter challenge, just do a Twitter search for #sixwordfantasy (or today’s #sixwordscifi).

And in case you’re wondering what I came up with:

#sixwordfantasy:

Murder! Hungry witch roasted by kids!
#sixwordscifi:

Traveler constructs her own quantum fates.

Nowhere near as good as Hemingway’s, but hopefully fun.

Oct 26

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The Grisly Anatomy of Horror: Methods in Horror Fiction


Halloween is upon us, and I can’t think of a better season to consider the anatomy of the horror genre. I’m not looking for a definition of the genre (most definitions run along the lines of “the horror genre generates a feeling of terror or horror in the audience” – DUH!). Instead, the ghouls and ghosts and ninja pirates outside my door ravenously seeking my candy inspire me to ask the following questions:

  1. What kinds of emotional response can be evoked by the horror genre?
  2. How does the horror genre evoke that emotional response?

Terror, Horror, and Identification/Realization

Of course, all writing is manipulative to a greater or lesser degree. But horror especially plays on our ethos to achieve the author’s goal: eliciting a strong emotional response. This is the case whether we’re considering:

Horror makes use of three primary modes:

Terror (Dread) The fear of predicted or anticipated events. The fear of what is to come.
Horror (Revulsion) The fear of events or facts that have already happened/been shown. Revulsion at what is perceived.
Identification (Realization) Lingering terror or horror at the conclusion of a story that relies upon internalization of the story’s themes.

Any particular work of horror can (and often does) utilize all three modes at different points in the story. I won’t bother commenting much on the first two (Terror vs. Horror) because a lot has already been said about that. If you’re looking for some of that discussion, a good starting point is the Wikipedia entry on Horror and Terror.

I would, however, like to spend a moment discussing the concept of identification. This is not horror in the “what’s that behind the door” (terror) or “my god that’s disgusting” (horror) variety. Instead, it is a thematic horror that lingers after the book has been closed. This type of horror relies on the reader’s self-identification with the story elements that had – until the climax – been the object of terror/horror. It is fundamentally the realization that “The monster is Us” and is often used in the most memorable horror stories. It is that sensation at the end of a horror story that leaves you feeling like:

  • you could see yourself as the monster, and/or
  • you would behave as the (doomed) protagonists were you in their shoes.

While the entire horror genre uses terror, horror, or both, I believe that the most-memorable horror also relies on this third mode for its resonance. Matheson’s I Am Legend would be unremarkable if not for its use of realization. Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death is powerful precisely because we identify with the doomed revelers.

So how does the horror genre evoke these three emotional modes? Just as with any genre, horror has its share of tropes. But I believe there are two tools which are universal across all of the sub-genres of horror (intrusion horror, zombie horror, vampire horror, etc.) and all of the mediums of horror (books, film, comics, etc.): uncertainty and horrific imagery.

Uncertainty: The Gasoline in the Horror Plot

Every story – regardless of genre – relies to some extent on uncertainty. We (the reader) are uncertain of what our hero is going to do next, or of how a situation will resolve itself, and so we keep turning pages. In the horror genre, our uncertainty is typically shared by the hero. The hero is uncertain of the monster: is it real? What is it? What are its weaknesses? What does it want? While on the journey with our hero, we share that uncertainty. Good horror is frequently written in either first-person narration or close-perspective third person. This is done specifically to put us in the hero’s head, to understand his perceptions of his situation. If the hero (and the reader by extension) were certain of the situation, then there would no fear, and thus no horror.

From a plotting standpoint, resolving this uncertainty gives the story its forward motion. It’s the gasoline that powers the story’s engine. Consider Stephen King’s Needful Things. In that novel, Sheriff Pangborn tries to unravel the mystery of why Castle Rock’s residents are suddenly killing each other. He is uncertain of Leland Gaunt’s intentions, and initially of his guilt. Similarly, Dan Simmons’ Drood is propelled by Dickens’ and the narrator’s desire to uncover the mystery of Edwin Drood. In James Cameron’s Alien, the uncertainty rests around if and how Ripley and the rest of the crew will escape the xenomorphs. In the 1997 film Event Horizon, the uncertainty stems from the Event Horizon‘s appearance and its strange gravity drive.

How the characters respond to these uncertainties elicits the sensation of dread (terror) or revulsion (horror). Just as your characters’ reaction to magic systems makes them believable in fantasy, so the characters’ reaction to uncertainty generates fear in the reader. This effect can be enhanced through the use of horrific imagery.

Imagery: The Keys to Horror

Effective horror imagery manipulates that part of our brain which our ancestors used to identify (and fight or flee) from threats. I believe that there are five principle types of horror imagery, each of which has different components and different effects:

Imagery Typical Effect, Method, & Examples
Mood
  • Establishes the mood of a story.
  • Puts the reader in a receptive frame of mind.
  • Builds a feeling of palpable anticipation (dread).
Manipulates our limbic system (that reptilian part of our brain that controls the fight or flight response). Dark, chilly rain forests replete with mysterious sounds still make us wary, despite the fact that most of us left the forest floor millenia ago. A fog-covered city street in the dead of night automatically puts us on our guard because our brain knows that “unnamed threats” can lurk in the mists. If your setting is built with imagery that can hide or hint at monsters, it can be used to make your audience receptive to the sensation of dread you’re seeking to instill. It can be a subtle effect, gradually building through layers of disconcerting and slightly shadowed images. Look to Poe or HP Lovecraft for great examples of how this can be done.
Pin-point Terror
  • Elicits a sense of immediate threat.
  • Places the hero and reader in a state of perceived jeopardy.
A more direct type of horrific imagery used to “jump start” the limbic system. If layering horrific imagery throughout your story produces the appropriate mood, throwing in explicit imagery of your monsters can be excellent punctuation. Be careful not to over-do it. You want to show enough of your monster to terrify your audience, but leave enough uncertainty for them to keep jumping at shadows. The classic image that comes to mind is eyes glowing in the dark. It makes us think of wolves in the night, monsters whose eyes you can see without any idea of how large or dangerous they are. This combination of immediate danger while maintaining uncertainty is a great way to up your audience’s heart rate.
Repugnance
  • Generates a sense of revulsion.
  • Explicitly describes what the reader would rather not see.
The explicit description of the repugnant (cannibalism, gore, viscera, etc.). Repugnant imagery is straightforward and understandable: it is the pulling back of the curtain on the uglier sides of fantasy; showing the reader things they would rather not see.
“Wrongness”
  • Generates a sense of revulsion.
  • Describes something impossible which our mind rejects as contrary to our sense of right and wrong.
“Wrong” imagery takes an image that the reader is intimately familiar with (e.g. the human body) and twists it, placing it at odds with the reader’s accepted norms. Think of the grotesque, hunched physique of Mr. Hyde in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or horror film’s usage of twisted body shapes (head-spinning in The Exorcist or the contorted “spider-walk” in many horror movies), or the shambling, broken gait of the walking dead. These are images which when our eye sees (or imagines) them our brain instantly classifies them as wrong: incorrect and unnatural.
Cultural Legacy
  • Uses cultural tropes to evoke an emotional response.
  • Relies on cultural background (folk tales, pop culture, etc.) for the audience to “fill in the blank”.
Every culture has its ghost stories, folk tales, and frightening myths. Devils, demons, cannibals, etc. lurk somewhere in every zeitgeist. George A. Romero’s living dead are a recent addition. These images can be utilized by creators as a short-hand for all of the other imagery. The very word “zombie” conjures certain images in the reader’s mind, and creators can use that cultural legacy either to “shortcut” some narrative or to “level-set” the reader’s mind-set. Or consider Stephen King’s usage of the clown Pennywise in It. While this is a useful (and often powerful) tool, it should be used judiciously as over-reliance can leave the work feeling trite or comedic in nature.

So as you lie in wait for monsters to come trick or treating to your door, try to think a little bit about the horror genre. What makes it good? What makes it horrific? Maybe you can add a little more horror into your Halloween? And please, let me know if you can think of any other tools that creators of excellent horror utilize. I’d love to add them to my ghoulish toolkit.

With that being said, and in the spirit of Halloween, allow me to leave you with an image I have always found fun and terrifying. Happy Halloween!

Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's It

Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's It

Oct 19

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REVIEW: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald


Title: The Dervish House
Author: Ian McDonald
Pub Date: July 27, 2010
Chris’ Rating (5 possible): 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point
An Attempt at Categorization If You Like… / You Might Like…
Exceptionally well-crafted setting and utterly believable.

The Dervish House is Ian McDonald’s new novel set in a near-future Istanbul. Soaked in history, nanotechnology, and McDonald’s always-amazing settings, this book is arguably one of the best science fiction titles I’ve read this year.

I have loved “traveling” with McDonald since I first picked up River of Gods, his 2004 novel set in a near-future India. Following that book, he has carved a very nice niche for himself by setting his novels in somewhat unusual (read: non-American/British) settings. Chaga (published in the US as Evolution’s Shore) took us to Kenya, River of Gods took us to India, Brasyl took us to (surprise!) Brazil, and now The Dervish House brings us to Istanbul.

Setting has always been central to McDonald’s works (even in his earliest novels like the harsh yet beautiful Desolation Road). I’ve traveled a lot in my life, but I’d never visited India, Brazil, or Kenya. So when I read his earlier books, the settings were lush and fascinating to me, but still alien. But Istanbul, I’m familiar with. I lived in Europe for ten years and spent quite some time in Turkey on business, so for the first time I was able to read a McDonald book with pre-existing familiarity with the setting and culture. And as far as I can tell, McDonald nails it.

Istanbul has always been a crossroads of commerce, history and religion. Today, it’s at the heart of a maelstrom of geopolitics, religious debate, and energy economics. McDonald captures that intersection and projects outwards from it, taking us to a Turkey that just-recently joined the European Union and still struggles with its identity as a nation, its religious history, its place in the region, and its internal politics (generals vs. intelligentsia vs. religious fundamentalists of various types). His Istanbul is recognizable to anyone who has even spent a day in that city, capturing the Byzantine streets and the culture of a city that straddles two continents. A writer of lesser skill would have simplified the reality, perhaps skimped on the economics or drawn caricatures of the complex cultures that intertwine in the city. But McDonald doesn’t. He balances the different interests and cultural backgrounds of his characters deftly, showcasing a nation that waking up to its dreaming potential.

The book follows the lives of six characters who live in an old building that long ago had belonged to or been involved with an ascetic Sufi fraternity. The dervish house is the hub, the connecting strand that joins together the six characters in this story. The events of the book unfold starting with a suicide bombing, and how it affects – directly and indirectly – the lives of the people who live in the tekke (dervish house). The story is told from the perspectives of each:

  • An academic economist forced into retirement,
  • A nine-year old boy with a dangerous heart condition,
  • A rural young woman determined to make it as a professional in the big city,
  • An ambitious young woman who runs a religious art gallery,
  • A ruthless energy trader, and;
  • A troubled, screw-up caught up in the development of street sharia.

Their lives are tied to together by the tekke, by the suicide bombing several blocks away, and by a near-mythical relic from Istanbul’s past. Each character is painstakingly crafted. Their voices are distinct, their judgments and values a clear outgrowth of their background. These characters have depth, and plainly show McDonald’s careful research into some of the more esoteric branches of market theory, contemporary futures contracts, and obscure kabbalistic sects. This research gives this book its lush, rich texture and bring the characters and setting alive.

The intersecting character arcs are exceptionally well done, and they are at once the book’s primary strength and its greatest weakness. In fact, that’s the only reason why I’m giving this book four stars instead of five: I feel like I have seen this device used before. When I think about McDonald’s works, the ones that instantly come to mind are Desolation Road, its sequel Ares Express, and River of Gods. Each of these books relies on the same narrative structure: different characters whose lives intersect through one (or a handful) of locations. McDonald does this better than anyone I can think of just now. But I’d like to see him stretch more, maybe try some different structures out. It would be nice to see, because having read most of his work I find that I know how it will flow. I can’t predict the events of the plot, but I can predict its cadences and rhythms. It’s like listening to a new symphony by a beloved composer: you can just tell how the music will swell next, even if you’ve never heard it. Much as I enjoy McDonald’s symphonies, I’d like to be surprised.

The physical book itself is great. Pyr did an excellent job with the hardcover, designed by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke and with a cover illustration by Stephan Martiniere. The cover illustration sets the tone for the whole work, showing the crowded streets of 2027 Istanbul, the combination of history (old buildings, traditional clothes) and uber-modernity (neon advertisements, robots, etc.). That cover image captures the mixing pot that is Istanbul, and captures the intersections of its residents lives just as well as the text. Martiniere’s covers and McDonald’s prose are a great pairing, and I’m glad to see that Pyr has maintained that connection through all of McDonald’s books they have published. Great job with that, and I hope they maintain it since I think that combination is just getting better and better.

This is not a rip-through-it-in-one-night, page-turning adventure. It has its moments of high tension and danger, but this is the kind of book that you want to enjoy over the course of several nights. This prose should be savored. If you have had your fill of anglophone settings and cultures in your science fiction, you should pick this up. If you are interested in high-quality literary fiction that just happens to be set in the future, pick this up. I think this is one of McDonald’s better works, and I definitely enjoyed the trip he took me on. If you find that you like this, there’s a variety of other great science fiction set outside of the American/British cultural background that you might enjoy, most notably the books by George Alec Effinger and Lucius Shepard‘s Life During Wartime.

Oct 12

REVIEW: New York Comic Con


Whew…I’d forgotten how exhausting Comic Con can be. This weekend saw Comic Con return to New York City for the first time in 18 months, and this triumphant return saw several improvements over the previous show:

  • The floor space was doubled. Artist Alley and Autograph Alley seemed significantly larger, and there were more exhibitors.
  • Comic Con was held parallel to the New York Anime Festival. What could be more fun than comics, science fiction, fantasy, video games and anime?
  • Massive gaming stations (for multiplayer computer games as well as tabletop gaming)  were added if you were so inclined.

Unfortunately, I think the organizers underestimated the number of people interested in comics, video games and speculative fiction. This has been a chronic problem with the NYCC, dating back to several years ago when the fire marshal had to kick people out. By Saturday afternoon, this year’s show had sold out, and crossing from one end to the other was a 45 minute battle against a rising tide of costumed humanity. Next time, rather than squeeze another booth into every last square inch the organizers just drop one row of exhibitors and expand the traffic aisles so that the crowd can have better flow. It will make the experience a lot more pleasant for everyone.

That being said, there was a lot to do at Comic Con. Between walking the booths, talking to people, demo’ing upcoming video games and trying to grab a couple of panels it was a wild and exhausting couple of days. I tried to divide my explorations into some specific categories, and so here are the highlights that I walked away from the event with:

Literary (books, as opposed to comics)

I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the book publisher aisles. I had some general observations and some specific comments:

General Observations

  • The expanded floor space gave the publishers the opportunity to really stretch their space. Most of the big publishers had large booths (double, triple or quadruple booths seemed the norm).
  • The publishers relied less on ARC’s (advanced reader copies) and galleys to pimp their titles: most (even the big houses) were making visitors purchase their books to a far greater degree than I remembered.
  • I saw far more mass-market titles than trade, which while not terribly surprising was a little disappointing.
  • Most publishers (large and small) offered good author signings. Standard practice was for an author with a new title out to be signing copies of a previous book that the publisher was giving away. A handful of publishers dropped the free give-aways and instead made people buy the books.
  • There were several significant genre publishers whose absence was notable for me:
    • Scholastic. This is a shame considering their excellent line-up of middle-grade and YA books (especially strong in the paranormal teen romance and quirky science fiction). While the other publishers there were all pimping their YA lists/imprints, Scholastic’s absence really stood out.
    • Pyr did not have a booth. Considering the impressive list that they have put together and their excellent blend of commercial and literary appeal, I was really surprised. This audience would have eaten their stuff up like there was no tomorrow.
    • Night Shade Books did not have a booth. This is not really surprising, considering their size: NYCC would have been an expensive proposition. But there were a bunch of other smaller-press publishers doing a brisk trade at the event, and considering what Night Shade’s list looks like, I’m sure they would have benefited from a presence.
    • Genre magazine publishers were completely absent. Again, not a surprise considering the cost of exhibiting. But I can guarantee that most of the people on that floor are completely unaware of the existence of magazines like F&SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Apex, etc. I’m not sure if it’ll ever happen, but they may want to consider banding together and sharing a booth in the future if for no other reason than for mutual promotion. Couldn’t hurt and may help expand the audience.

Specific Observations

  • Tom Doherty Associates (Tor/Forge) had the best-organized booth layout, keeping it simple and classic and always having it manned by well-informed publicists, marketing reps and the occasional editor. The booth itself wasn’t terribly large, but the displays were thoughtfully set up and very well managed. On display were a handful of books from their 2010 lineup and book plates for titles on their 2011 list. I was a little disappointed by the paucity of their author signings however, as they only had a handful of authors there (their major headliner being Brandon Sanderson).
  • HarperCollins had the weakest booth of the lot. That’s not to say that they have weak books – but their event management just sucked. They had some interesting looking books displayed, but the booth was so understaffed that I couldn’t ask anyone about them. I was there all day on Friday and Saturday and spent quite a lot of time in the vicinity of their booth, but only saw one (rather beleaguered) person manning it both days. The displays themselves were not terribly well done, typically displaying only a handful of copies of select titles. The impression I had was that they were not really serious about marketing to the NYCC crowd, which is somewhat surprising considering the popularity of their competitors’ booths.
  • Penguin Group had a rather sizable showing. The staff were generally knowledgeable, friendly, and had decent displays. Their primary strength was their large number of author signings (including Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, etc.) but the downside was that you either had to bring the authors’ books to the signing or buy them beforehand on the other side of the booth…about 30 feet away. That might not seem bad, but it’s really crappy event management: traveling 30 feet at Comic Con is a challenge, and having to do so after spending 15 minutes in line and then spending another 15 minutes in line after the purchase is quite annoying. It wouldn’t have been that hard to have a stack of books at the signing and tell people to pay for them after they’ve been signed. First Second Books (a smaller graphic novel press) managed that type of setup quite well and if Penguin had tried it, things would have flowed smoother and far fewer people would have been frustrated.
  • Random House had by far the biggest showing of the lot. They practically took up two whole sections of one aisle, although all of their imprints were basically doing their own thing. I didn’t have too many notable comments on the Random House crowd, other than a general observation that they seemed to have fewer author signings than the other publishers.

Video Games

Video games seemed to occupy a third of the floor space (that’s not a complaint). There were far too many upcoming games for me to comment on all of them, so instead I’ll just focus on the ones that most appealed to me:

  • James Bond 007: GoldenEye for the Wii. I loved the original Goldeneye game on the N64, and they have made an awesome new version of it for the Wii. Gameplay will be instantly recognizable to anyone who played the N64 version. The graphics have been updated (though seeing this on an Xbox-360 or PS3 would be even cooler), and the multiplayer is awesome as it ever was. Don’t know how the single-player mode runs, but multiplayer was great.
  • Disney Epic Mickey for the Wii. This game looks awesome. Set in a dark and twisted world of rejected cartoons, you play as Mickey trying to bring some brightness with a magic paint brush. The graphics are great, the gameplay looks fun (I didn’t get a chance to play myself, alas), and the story is just dark and twisted enough to be awesome.
  • Captain America: Super Soldier for every system out there. If you loved Batman: Arkham Asylum, odds are you’ll love Captain America: Super Solider. The gameplay looks very similar (they weren’t letting anyone play the demo, but the videos and the in-person demo’s by the reps looked identical). I loved Arkham Asylum and I’m definitely buying the new Cap game as soon as it hits the shelves.
  • Dead Space 2 for all the major systems. Looks like the original, only with some cool new gameplay features thrown in (jetpack!). The fun part seems to be what they’re doing with the story, basically giving Isaac a little more character and initiative than he had in the first game.

Manga/Anime

It is incredibly unfortunate that the New York Anime Festival was relegated to a single room in the deep underbelly of the Javitz Center. I found it near the end of my second day at the Comic Con, when I only had the strength to dash through the aisles pretty quickly. It seemed to be primarily full of anime artists and cosplay fans – which on the whole seemed neat – but its location was unfortunate. I wanted to find more dark, interesting anime/manga (Naruto is not my scene) but I was too late getting there to have the patience to find any. Maybe if it were better positioned, I would have thought to spend more time there sooner and found something cool. Maybe next time.

Panels

I attended (or tried to attend) several panels that I thought might be cool, but again the organizers let me down. The first panel I tried to attend had a neat title: “The Search for Humanity through Utopias and Dystopias”. Just the kind of dorky little panel that I find fascinating and fun. The panel started thirty five minutes late because of technical blunders. By that point, boredom had set in and the presentation didn’t help. Maybe I’m spoiled by corporate presentations and research papers from my day job, but I know people in the comic book industry can present well. Unfortunately, the organization of this panel was atrocious and the content ended up uninteresting.

The second panel I went to – “Editors on Editing Comic Books” – actually came off without a hitch. I found it really interesting and informative. On stage were veteran editors from the three big houses (DC, Marvel and IDW) and they basically told the audience the truth about breaking into the business. It was refreshing to see the editors pull no punches. They told the packed room that each editor has writers, pencillers, letterers, inkers and colorists who they have worked with successfully in the past, and that these colleagues are looking for work. Translation: if you want to break into the business, you need to be technically better than the current professionals, and overcome the “relationship advantage” that your entrenched competition already has. That’s a tall order, and I saw a lot of disappointed faces in the crowd. But hey, that’s the truth of it. Probably the truth of it in any medium. Those creators who internalize that message will do better work because of it, and invest the time (often years) needed to build relationship in the industry.

The organizers dropped the ball on the third panel I tried to attend as well. It was the fantasy writers’ panel, and it sounded like it would be a lot of fun with Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, Naomi Novik and Peter V. Brett. But alas, the organizers shoehorned the event into a tiny room far off in a distant corner. By the time I got there (fifteen minutes before the panel was due to start) it was standing room only. I was three people away from the door when the organizers said “No one else! Get out of here!” and shut the door. Did the organizers think that comic book fans wouldn’t be interested in fantasy? They should have given this panel one of the larger rooms available.

Comics

I have become so disillusioned over the writing in comic books over the years, that I have to admit they’re last on my list. That’s ironic, considering that I spent about twenty hours wandering amidst the crowd of the New York Comic Con. But it was really telling that when listening to comics editors speak about their work, they openly admit to focusing entirely on the art and not caring so much for the writing. That’s understandable, considering that good art is a must-have for a decent comic book, but it’s still sad to hear editors (editors!) say “I’m in comics so I don’t have to deal with words.” There are a few exceptionally-well-written comics out there (Fables?). I tried to find some more, but alas no luck. Oh well.

I’ll definitely be looking forward to NYCC next year. Mark your calendars for October 14 – 16, 2011!

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