Spring 2007 Read online

  Winter 2007

  In this Issue:

  The following features are in this issue:

  • Column: Bears Examine #2 by Elizabeth Bear

  • Column: Bears Examine #3 by Elizabeth Bear

  • Column: HARVESTING THE DARKNESS #2: FULLY STOKE(re)D by Norman Partridge

  • Column: Me and Lucifer by Mike Resnick

  • Fiction: A Plain Tale from Our Hills by Bruce Sterling

  • Fiction: A Season of Broken Dolls by Caitlin R Kiernan

  • Fiction: Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale

  • Fiction: Eating Crow by Neal Barrett, Jr.

  • Fiction: Jude Confronts Global Warming by Joe Hill

  • Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross

  • Fiction: Pluto Tells All by John Scalzi

  • Fiction: The Leopard's Paw by Jay Lake

  • Fiction The Lost Continent of Moo: A Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick

  • Review: Jack Knife and Map of Dreams

  • Review: Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 edited by Mike Resnick

  • Review: On the Road with Harlan Ellison volume 3

  • Review: Softspoken by Lucius Shepard

  • Review: The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

  • Review: The Yiddish Policeman's Union By Michael Chabon

  • Review: White Night by Jim Butcher & Wizards edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  • Review:The Best of the Best Volume 2 20 Years of The Best Short Science Fiction Novels

  • Review: Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor Volume 2

  Column: Bears Examine #2 by Elizabeth Bear

  I hate the word ought, and I hate blanket imperatives. For that reason, I am not about to say that every aspiring writer really ought to spend a year reading slush.

  But I will say that aspiring writers can learn by reading slush. For one thing, it will show you what everybody else is doing, and maybe why it’s not such a great idea for you to do exactly the same thing.

  But moreover, you will learn something more important to your development as a writer.

  You learn why editors reject stories.

  And editors reject stories for very simple reasons. Essentially, it boils down to one thing (sort of like the old joke that Cause of Death is really always the same: “lack of oxygen to the brain”) if a story is rejected, it’s because the story failed to enthrall the editor.

  I still read slush, for the online ‘zine Ideomancer. I don’t get paid to do it. I’m not the person who makes the final editorial decisions. I am just the Cerberus at the gate, the person you have to get past to get to the people who will actually decide if we are going to publish you.

  And they reject most of what I send up, because I don’t actually have to love everything I pass along. I just have to get to the end and not roll my eyes.

  I’m going to be candid. The eyeroll is when I reject. It’s my red line of death. (Damon Knight used to draw a line on critique manuscripts to indicate the point at which he rejected them.)

  The moment I send a story back whence it came is the moment when I take a breath and think, “Why am I reading this?”

  The main thing an editor cares about is if the story keeps her reading.

  And that’s it. That’s all you have to do. You’re not being graded on a curve. You’re not being graded pass/fail. You are not, in fact, being graded.

  In other words, you don’t have to be “good enough.” There is no such thing as good enough. It doesn’t matter what your writing group is doing, either: this is not about peer promotion; it’s about entertainment.

  If you can entertain, you get the job.

  If you can’t… the job goes to somebody who can. Because the slush reader’s job is to anticipate the entertainment reader. The end consumer. The guy who buys the book.

  That reader is an entirely selfish beast, you see, and he doesn’t owe the writer anything. An inconvenient fact, and one I find a tremendous frustration, but there you go. He’s the one with the money in his pocket; he is completely in control of the relationship.

  This doesn’t mean that you should let him run your life, though. Because this is where artistic integrity comes in.

  As a writer, you have to be able to set limits on what you are or are not willing to do. I personally would recommend not writing anything you’re not sufficiently passionate about to really want to write.

  And readers, in addition to being fickle, are psychic.

  They can tell if you don’t care. Not-caring is boring. And if the slush reader is bored, the regular reader is going to be bored too.

  The bad news is, not-caring is not the only form of being boring. My slush is full of stories about which the writer obviously cares deeply. Those may be unpublishable for a variety of other reasons.

  As a slush reader, I have a list of other things that I have come to find boring. Preachiness is boring. Predictability is boring. Twist endings are boring.

  Most of the things aspiring writers do to punch up the beginning of a story are boring. (Explosions, sex, shocking revelations, the inevitable heat death of the universe.) All that stuff is boring.

  So what’s a writer to do?

  Here’s the counterintuitive thing. A story can be incredibly engaging from word one, even if it starts with a great big wodge of exposition.

  Because what pulls us into the story is the narrative urgency, the drive, and the disconnect. The little mystery, the incongruity… and the writer’s voice. That’s the dirty secret: what keeps you reading, as an editor, is whether or not the writer can rub words together.

  The good news is, this is a learnable skill for most people. Just like juggling. And just like juggling, it’s not easy. And requires years of practice.

  A lucky few come in gifted in terms of voice, but they generally have other problems–and their problems may be harder to address, because it’s my completely unscientific experience that those writers start selling sooner, and so may have less motivation to push themselves and keep pushing.

  Voice, in other words, is the thing that emerges when one has written one’s million words for the trunk. (Mine was considerably more than a million. Just so you know.) The horrible thing about the million words is that you can’t write them expressly for the trunk. You never learn that way, just writing bad words. You have to push for the best words, bleed for them, train yourself to exceed your current limits.

  It’s hard.

  And as far as I know, there is no shortcut.

  But there is that other thing I mentioned. The disconnect. The incongruity. It’s not the lake of blood or the masturbating vampire on page one that will keep a reader engaged in the story. (Actually, come to think of it, a masturbating vampire might just do the trick. I don’t see those every day. [Every slush reader in the business is cursing my name right now, FYI.])

  What I mean is, what pulls a slush reader into a story is a certain vividness, of prose and image, of character and action. And that little thing that niggles, that you have to keep reading, to find out about.

  Column: Bears Examine #3 by Elizabeth Bear

  I come not to satirize Truesdale, but to bury him.

  When Bill Schafer asked me to write these columns, he also mentioned that he’d like it if I could be as outrageous and topical and argumentative and controversial as possible. I’m honestly a pretty phlegmatic soul about most things, and I cautioned him that I wasn’t sure how much of that I could manage, really.

  Well, you know. I could talk about the Hugo Ballot, and whose fault it is that there aren’t many women on it (1). And the Philip K. Dick Award, and why there aren’t many men on it. (2)

  I could talk about how the Hugos are decided by a small group of dedicated fans of a certain age, who have
well-established favorites, and who have a lock on the award for as long as they continue voting, because they are the ones voting. I could talk about the apparent trend that books nominated for the Hugos are those released in hardcover, and the perception that women writers are more likely to be released in paperback. I could speculate on whether this is due to their readerships, the coincidence of editorial tastes, the sort of topics that women writers trend to, the business models of the publishing houses that feature a preponderance of women writers, or the intersection of all of the above.

  I could talk about why Chris Moriarty isn’t in hardcover, say.

  I could talk about my inexpressible relief that Dave Truesdale can’t be arsed to read my books, especially when he considers calling some of the top women writers in SFF a bunch of pussies to be somehow satirical. I could talk about Adrienne Martini’s apparently bottomless ignorance of the Hugo nominating process. I could talk about whether or not a major genre magazine is undermining its credibility by featuring a columnist who by his own declaration isn’t a “writer.”

  I could suggest that, as a genre, or a critical discussion, or whatever, what we really need is some satirists who are actually, you know, funny.

  I could.

  You know, I could, really. I could go on for hours. With minimal provocation.

  But who the hell cares? I’d be bored before I got to the bottom of the page, and so would you (3). Talk about beating your dead horses.

  So, in the spirit of flagellating corpses, I’d rather talk about zombies.

  Now, zombies (4) are cool. They rot. And drop bits all over the place. And they shuffle, so you can run faster than they can(5), but they’re pretty much inexorable and implacable. What with being already dead.

  And they want to eat your braiiiiinnnnssssss.

  In some ways, I think of zombies as being like the creepy old man at the end of the block, when you were a kid. Remember him? The one in the paint-splattered medium-gray trousers cut off at the knee and the mustard-stained v-neck T-shirt, with his hair combed over his glossy age-spotted pate? Probably with a large carbuncle on the side of his head?

  The one who would come lurching out his front door, around the patio wall, in his black socks and carpet slippers, shouting “You kids get off of my laaaaaaaaaawnnnn?”

  Pretty much just like a zombie. Which is to say, carrying out a reflexive action (bellowing, and possibly waving a rake) without really any consideration of the whyfor or howfor of it. You step on his lawn. He bellows. You run, laughing like a fool.

  He never seems to catch on that all the fun in tromping across his lawn is to get him to come out and bellow.

  Zombies are the same way. They don’t have a lot of higher processing functions (after all, their brains are mostly mush. Or maggots. Which is why they want to eat yours.) They don’t move very fast. So you can outrun them. They’re only really worrisome in groups, because then they can surround or overwhelm you.

  Well, admittedly, some zombies will ambush.

  But under most circumstances, if you’ve got just one zombie, or a small group, your best bet is either to keep your distance, or maybe whack them with a cricket bat. That’s kind of violent, though, and you have to get close to them to do it. And if you don’t behead them with the first blow, then you’re stuck in close combat.

  You can’t reason with a zombie. As I mentioned above, they react reflexively. They just shuffle around looking for brains to suck, and you’re not going to get much sense out of one.

  Besides, in going in there with that cricket bat, you run the risk of zombie bite. Which, untreated, can turn you into a zombie too, mindlessly flailing about and bellowing BRAINS and YOU KIDS STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOOOSEEEEBUUUSHES! And that’s where the real trouble starts.

  Too much of that, and then you have zombie packs.

  And besides, the damn things are already dead. They can’t adapt. They can’t process new ideas. (6) They’re hopelessly stuck at the moment of their demise. Brain-death.

  So, okay, not great conversationalists. And they are, of course, dead. And rotting. (7)

  And a bit stinky.

  But they’re still cool.

  They’re cool because they serve as a metaphor for the destructive influence of conventional society, among other things. For the perniciousness of programmed behavior and ossified thought patterns.

  They provoke the protagonist into motion, and provide the impetus for him (or her) to get it together. To change his (or her) life. To win the boy (or girl) of his (or her) dreams.

  To take action. To stand up.

  To become a hero.

  To take that swing. To become a leader. To get involved.

  Also, bonking them on the head can be a pretty fantastic workout. Cricket bats aren’t light.

  ***

  (1) Eleven women in seventy-six slots, of which two are nominated for fiction, and some of whom share their nomination with a man, but in the spirit of putting my thumb on the scale as ridiculously as possible, I counted each of those as a whole nomination. It comes to 14.5%. If you count the JWC not-a-Hugo-Award.

  (2) Two out of seven, or 28.6%.

  (3) Bet you a shiny penny.

  (4) Unlike internet slapfights

  (5) Unless of course they are the superspeed zombies from 28 Days Later, which are all zippy and can run you down! They’re highly evolved zombies! They’re way cool, but they are not germane to the satire.

  (6) Except for George Romero zombies. Which are also way cool, and also not germane to the satire.

  (7) Some of them, such as Michael Jackson, can dance. However, bits may still fall off occasionally.

  Column: HARVESTING THE DARKNESS #2: FULLY STOKE(re)D by Norman Partridge

  Last weekend I picked up my third Bram Stoker award. Well, not really. Joe Lansdale picked it up for me. The truth is that I’ve never been present to accept any of the Stokers I’ve won. The first two times, Lucy Taylor picked them up. That was okay, because I’m sure most folks in the audience were damn near ecstatic to find themselves staring at Lucy instead of me. Joe’s another story, though. Sure, Lansdale’s a handsome enough guy… but, hell, I’ve still got all my hair.

  Still, I was pleased to see my short novel Dark Harvest get the award for Long Fiction this year. If you read my first column here at Subterranean Online, you know it’s a book that’s close to my heart in a few different ways. That makes receiving Haunted House #3 pretty sweet. Toss in the fact that it comes from my peers… well, that’s sweeter. Fact is I wish I’d been in Toronto to belly up to the bar and raise a tall glass of semper fi with all of you.

  Of course, said sweetness had about as much staying power as the Costo-sized heavyweights who pass for contenders these days. That was my own fault, because I checked the buzz on a few message boards after I heard the news. It wasn’t long before the bitching and moaning started up, re: The Stoker Process, and everyone gathered ’round for a good catfight.

  Ever notice how that happens? And how those threads endure? Man, some of them remind me of Marvin Hagler in his prime. They go the full fifteen rounds. Threads in which the merits of books and writers are intelligently debated–those die a quick death. But give folks a chance to rail against the powers that be, or work up a head of steam about how much better things in this disordered mess of a world would work if only they could don a metal suit and reign unchallenged à la Victor Von Doom… well, do that and you’re good for ten pages and a couple thousand views, for sure and for certain.

  And right about here I’m tempted to haul a 60 Minutes crew straight down the rabbit hole to Message Board Land, where the Internet warriors dwell, and go a few rounds myself. But Bill Schafer only allows me 1,000 words for this gig, so we’ll have to raincheck that action. Let’s get back to those threads chewing over the Stokers and the awards process itself, since that’s what this column’s about. See, in the midst of the weekend hubbub, some interesting questions managed to rear their heads, and I’d like to take a cr
ack at them.

  Since we’re talking Stokers, an award decided by popular vote, much of the discussion focused on the responsibility of the voters. Tote up the final ballot this year, you’ve got just over three dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of money to spend if the membership’s ponying up dollars for books. The question is: how many voters actually make that trip, and–realistically–should they be expected to?

  To find an answer, let’s slap together three quick scenarios:

  1. It’s a perfect world. Everybody reads everything and votes accordingly. 2. Nothing’s perfect… but, hey, everyone tries. Members read what they can, and–since they’re professionals and know the field–they cast some votes based on factors other than the particular work in question. Say, a writer’s entire body of work, or career. 3. Are you kidding, idiot? The world sucks. The most popular kids win every goddamn time. Welcome to Horror High School.

  Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the gray areas between those scenarios. And the truth isn’t consistent, either. It varies from year to year. So what can be done to make things better, and move us toward that ideal in Scenario #1?

  Someone suggested that nominated works be made available to the HWA membership, perhaps as PDF files. And, hey, that might work in some categories–say a short story. But I don’t see it happening with longer pieces. These collections, novels, and novellas represent the sweat of each creator’s brow. The nominees worked hard on them. Personally, I can’t see an author giving up what might be the best work of his or her career in pursuit of an award. That doesn’t sit right with me… and I didn’t do that with Dark Harvest. My reasoning was simple. Mostly, it just didn’t seem fair to the readers who were supporting my work by popping forty bucks for the hardcover over at Cemetery Dance.

  And even if I had gone the PDF route, and every other nominee had, too… remember, we’re talking more than three dozen works showing up in members’ email boxes in the relatively short time between final ballot and vote casting. Me, I work a joe job and write–there are some years where I don’t finish that many books. In other words: Sorry, Charlie, there’s too much tortoise in the equation, not near enough hare.