The Making of Waylines

written by Darryl Knickrehm

How to (kind of) Make a Magazine
aka The Making of Waylines

First – be fans of your subject. David Rees-Thomas and I love science fiction. In fact we talked about it almost every week at our weekly beer binging. From the latest stories in Clarkesworld or Lightspeed, to the classics like The Left Hand of Darkness. We love this stuff.

Second – write. Again, David and I are aspiring writers. At the time of conceptualizing the magazine, I had been making and writing short films for years and had moved on to feature screenplays and a novel. David too had written poetry and short stories for years and gotten in to Clarion West. As writers, we wanted to get involved in the community and to add something to it (and all that beer sure didn’t dampen our inhibitions at such loft prospects).

From there, in our drunken stupor, we got the idea of starting a magazine. And so we came up with Waylines!

Waylines? Yes, Waylines! Haven’t heard of it? It’s a SFF magazine with a twist. We publish short speculative fiction PLUS stream short speculative films (and it’s free!) We’ve been out for a year now. In 2013 we ran 6 issues, published 14 stories and screened 18 films. We were lucky enough to run some great stories by Jake Kerr, Anaea Lay, and Eric Del Carlo among others, and get some interviews by the likes of Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Aliette de Bodard (we even interviewed old David Steffen). It was a great year.

Now Waylines is back for 2014 (although David has sadly left the magazine). And like any project, it’s important to have it grow. Like that old axiom: the sequel has to be bigger, the 2nd series has to expand upon the last, etc. Magazines are no different. So Waylines is evolving. We’ll still be running our usual brand of short fiction, film, and interviews, but we’re also trying to make some stellar additions.

So what are some of the things brewing in the Waylines? One is poetry. From the hip, to the edgy, to that which is simply beautiful, we are now exploring the wisdom of words. And with the new section, comes a new Poetry Editor. The lovely Beth Cato. This is going to be good.

The next addition, the one we are currently working on setting up, is: comics. Because when creating anything, it’s always a good idea to keep your influences close. And I’ve always loved comics that were a little outside the mainstream (like the original Heavy Metal, and a lot of Japanese Manga). And since comics are a big part of science fiction, I’d love to add that to the mix. We’re currently in the works of setting up this new section and are really excited about it.

Now all of that ‘new’ stuff is important to keep things fresh, but there is one part of making a magazine that is even more important: developing a concept/feel and staying true to it. The concept with Waylines, since those first beer-fueled conversations, was that Waylines could be a place where the various communities of speculative fiction could intermingle and possibly get a taste of the other formats (film or fiction). So while everything in this year’s lineup is moving forward to try new things, it’s all being done in support of our original concept. In truth, it’s a lot like plotting a story.

Yet despite having all these ideas, all these plans lined up, there is one thing that stands in the way. Finances. You’ve got to pay your writers and contributors. For Year One, we paid .05 a word for fiction, and for Year Two we’d like to continue to pay pro-rates (this year at .06 a word, in accordance to the SFWA’s guidelines). For Year One, we were able to raise funds through Kickstarter. For Year Two, we’re trying to do the same. We’re running the campaign right now, from Jan 10 – Feb 10 . Whether this campaign is a success or not will determine if we can implement all of these plans.

If you’re able to do all of that — poof — you’ll have a magazine on your hands! Well, kind of. You still have to do the reading, editing, design, layout, and promoting. But that’s not really that important. Now get to work! It’s time to make something cool.

bigavatar.largeA filmmaker now exploring novel-writing and illustration, Darryl has 8 short films under his belt. In 2009, he began writing his dystopian series, The Citizens of Oblivion. The first book in the series, In Dreams, was released on Jan 20, 2014. In the past year, Darryl was a finalist for the Illustrators of the Future two times, and he also co-founded Waylines Magazine. For more information on his current projects, check out dariru.com or his blog.

Interview: Brad Torgersen


interviewed by Carl Slaughter

Brad TorgersenHugo nominee, Nebula nominee, Campbell nominee, Writers of the Future winner, and Analog regular Brad Torgersen talks with Diabolical Plots about his journey as a writer, the blue chip veterans who mentored him, and his hopes for the Society Advancement of Speculative Storytelling.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Did you write the proverbial one million words before you got published in Analog? Before you won Writers of the Future?

BRAD TORGERSEN: Just about. When I won the Writers of the Future Contest I sat down and added up everything I’d written to date, and all totaled it came out to be roughly 850,000 unpublished words. So in my case I feel the “first million words” really were an accurate gauge. I know this also goes by the 10,000 hour rule. And I think it’s true. Fledgling and/or aspiring writers need to understand that it can take a lot of work and time to reach what more or less passes for entry-level professional quality. That’s not a bad thing, really. Almost anyone desiring to do a thing professionally,especially an artistic thing,needs to put in his or her practice.

 

Lights in DeepCS: Do you have a first reader?

BT: No. I have in the past used an exclusive reader group. But for the last two years virtually everything I’ve written and sold has gone through one and only one first reader: my editor(s) at Analog magazine, Baen books, etc. I know some writers swear by their first readers. Me? I fly solo these days, and do so knowing that I have only myself to trust when I am sculpting the stories. It’s a little unsettling, until I get that next acceptance letter in my e-mail. Then I breathe a sigh of relief and remember something I like to tell new writers: the point of a writing group or a first reader is to not become dependent on the writing group or the first reader. Your objective should be to eventually get proficient enough to send directly to editors without fretting about whether or not the story has what it takes to impress an editor.

 

CS: Do you use workshops?

BT: I have used several different workshops over the last five years. The first one I ever did was called the “Kris and Dean Show” and it was a weekend event hosted by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith out in Lincoln City, Oregon. “The Kris and Dean Show” was a kind of two-day crash course in how publishing works, and it really knocked my socks off at a time when I was struggling a great deal, and wondering if I would ever become good enough to sell even one story, much less the many stories and book I’ve since sold. I liked the “Kris and Dean Show” so much, I went back (after I won Writers of the Future) to do Kris and Dean’s short story workshops, and a novel pitch/packaging workshop. I sold all of the stories I did for the short story workshops (two of which got covers, and one of which was nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula) and the novel pitch/package workshop was hugely valuable. Needless to say, I am not just a fan of the workshops in Lincoln City, I am a friend of Kris and Dean now too. Lovely, wonderful people.

Speaking of which, I’ve also done Dave Wolverton’s “Million Dollar Outlines” workshop. Which, combined with the Kris and Dean novel workshop, helped prepare me to sell to the book-buying world. Having cut my teeth and proven my worth at short fiction length, I really wanted to zero in on some stuff for my books. I knew the skillsets for writing at book length were different from writing short stories, and I really needed help putting my brain through the outlining process. Because I am a “seat of the pants” man for short fiction. But, having lost several older books to this method in the past, I didn’t want to lose any more books. So I appealed to Dave for help, and his week-long workshop was amazingly informative. Dave’s really got his pulse on the underlying emotional and “legendary” aspects of storytelling. Perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever seen, as writers like Brandon Sanderson (a student of Dave’s) might attest.

Mike ResnickAnd of course, there is the Writers of the Future workshop itself; which is free to all winners of the Contest, and puts a new writer through his or her professional paces. The best benefit I can think of from Writers of the Future was the networking: being able to meet and talk to all these very-successful and award-winning authors. In an intimate setting. Often for hours and hours. I not only left the workshop with numerous contacts in the industry, I eventually became good friends with many of the judges, such as Kevin J. Anderson, Eric Flint, and especially Mike Resnick; the last having become like a father to me in the business.

One thing about workshops: there are workshops for craft, and there are workshops for business. Be sure what you want to do (and where you need the emphasis most) before you sign up. Kevin J. Anderson (along with Dave Wolverton, Brandon Sanderson, Rebecca Moesta, Eric Flint, and several others) runs a stupendously useful and very fun professional business workshop called Superstars Writing Seminars. I took the three-day course at Kevin’s encouragement, following my stint in L.A. for Writers of the Future, and I found Superstars to be chock full of valuable writing business advice, anecdotes, cautionary tales, and encouraging news. A top-notch workshop if I do say so myself; excellent for those writers who, having published a bit, are wanting to bump up to the next level and really start making money.

 

CS: How many times do you revise the same story?

BT: I used to endlessly revise my stories to death. It was what I thought you had to do to become a pro. Dean Wesley Smith disabused me of that notion in 2008-2009 and it paid off: I won Writers of the Future, and have not looked back since. Now I give myself roughly three passes through a thing: the initial creative pass, a second pass to check for consistency problems and emotional impact, and a final pass for fine-tooth-comb stuff like spelling and grammar and occasional sentence or word changes. After that . . . I am done. I know the story or book is as good as I can possible make it (in that particular time and place) and I need to get the story out to the editors, and begin working on something new. If I let a story linger too long, and go for even more passes, I always have a bad time of it. Always. So I try to make sure I don’t get cold feet. I grow more as a writer working on new work than I ever do endlessly “fixing” old work. I think many writers are the same way, but we’ve all been taught this myth that exhaustive revision is the only way to be good. I think it’s not so.

 

CS: Do you write an outline, character profiles, etc?

For short fiction? Almost never. For books? I lost six books writing by the seat of my pants, and swore I’d never do it again. I went and sat at the feet of professionals with dozens and dozens of novels to their credit, and forced myself to learn how to outline. I used to think working with an outline was stifling and would kill the creative juice of the story. But I was wrong. An outline (for book length) is the only way I personally know how to do something that long, and not get lost in the sub-plots, let the small characters grow and take over the big characters, etc. Outlines can be anywhere from a few pages, up to as much as 50 pages. Depends on how much world building and character development I want to do before I actually begin writing the prose. And there is always a *lot* of that behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn’t wind up in the book verbatim. Because while I may need to know a character’s eight-paragraph bio in order for her to make sense to me in the overall plot, the reader may only need to know a few details dispersed here and there; as the action moves along.

 

Analog 2CS: Are most of your stories primarily premise-oriented, character-oriented, plot-oriented, or theme-oriented?

BT: All of the above. I have written stories based purely on a suggestive title, a nugget of a plot, a single interesting character premise, or a theme that’s rolling around in my head and which I want to explore. Usually I wait for two or three of these things to collide in my unconscious before I decide I have enough material to put together an interesting and engaging story. One of my best-known stories, a novelette called “Outbound,” actually began as a kludging-together of two previous stories which had, on their own, failed to gel. One of them had a good theme and a decent plot, but no compelling character or situation. The other had a compelling character and situation, but no theme or plot. Throwing these elements from these separate stories together, and making a brand new story from the bones of the old, made all the difference.

 

CS: Do you make major changes at an editor’s request or hold your ground?

BT: I am easy-going. Toni Weisskopf, Stan Schmidt, Edmund Schubert, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Trevor Quachri, they all have valuable feedback, and there is almost never a time when I can’t improve a story with some experienced feedback from the editor. That’s what they’re there for, after all. And no editor, especially book-buyer like Toni, ever gets a book from a new author which cannot use at least some commentary and feedback. I look at it like a perpetual learning process, and as long as the editor seems to see the same (more or less) story that I am seeing (and this is almost always the case) then I am perfectly happy making whatever changes work best. Or which might be required to take a decent story, and make it into a good story. Or take a good story, and make it into a great story.

 

BradConCS: How many stories has Analog bought and how many have they rejected?

BT: Before Stan Schmidt bought “Outbound” in January 2010, he had rejected two or three dozen previous stories. Since then Stan (and his successor, Trevor Quachri) have bounced a tiny handful. All of which found their way to homes with other markets. One of the nice things about cracking the professional glass and gaining entry-level proficiency as a story teller, when a story gets rejected these days, it’s almost always a matter of taste for a given editor; someone else (with a different taste) will almost always like the story and pick it up. I often go to Analog with my stories first because Analog’s needs so closely match my particular style and content; of story subject, theme, protagonists, etc. But not always. Analog has taken things other editors could not use, and vice versa. Again, a perk of being pro level.

 

CS: Now that Analog has a new editor, will the magazine, or you, have a fundamental shift in MO?

BT: Nope. I’ve sold two big stories to Trevor Quachri (“The Chaplain’s Legacy” was a massive novella, and “Life Flight” was a substantial novelette) which I believe would have easily sold to Stan Schmidt when he was editing. In fact when Stan Schmidt did the intro for my short story collection LIGHTS IN THE DEEP he noted that his wife had already read “The Chaplain’s Legacy” in the magazine, and gave it very high marks. And he tends to trust her taste, so I think Analog and I will continue to have a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s a lot of fun being able to publish in such a well-known and venerable magazine. I am pleased that Analog’s readers have continued to respond so well to my work. I hope that’s always the case, and I endeavor with each story I send to Analog to match the bar I set for myself with the last Analog publication.

 


CS: How long is the “Unpublished But Hopeful Stories by Brad Torgersen” list?

BT: Difficult to gauge, as I generally have several dozen ideas rolling around in my head at any one moment. I have on occasion gone back to the “trunk” an unearthed an old story which got rejected at all the markets previously, then reworked the story from the ground up, and sold it contemporarily. In those cases it’s a total rebuild, almost always using the character or the idea as the skeleton around which the new, re-drafted (Dean Wesley Smith’s phrase) story takes shape.

 

DP: Do you anticipate ever breaking into novels? Anthologies? Editing? Full time sci fi work?

BT: Full-time writing would be great, but give the vagaries of the marketplace and the needs of my family, it remains to be seen if full-time ever becomes truly feasible. I have spoken to several of the elder statesmen in the Utah spec fic writing community, and among them is a fellow named L.E. Modesitt, Jr. who says full-time writing (pre-retirement) isn’t even a necessary goal, as long as I keep putting the hours in at night and can produce fresh work on a regular basis. So, for now, I live with late nights. Yes, I’ve sold my first novel, a “fix up book” (in the vernacular of Mike Resnick) called THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR to Baen Books. It’s based on my two Analog stories “The Chaplain’s Assistant” and “The Chaplain’s Legacy,” both of which appeared in print previously. I’ve had several stories reprinted, and have also put fresh work into anthologies on request from the editors. I am not sure I can afford the time to edit right now. Though if a choice editorial opportunity came along (and I felt it was my chance to really make a statement and/or affect the field) I might try to take it. But only provided that I could work it in with my other jobs: full-time healthcare nerd, part-time Army Reserve soldier, and night-time sci-fi writer.

 

CS: Give us the background on Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling?

BT: Lou Antonelli came to me shortly after I broke into print, and he proposed the idea that the spec fic community needed a new organization that could not only focus on bona fide advocating for established authors, but which might also help foster the growth and development of aspirants as well. Now, I knew then as well as anyone the heartache of the aspirant, and I like a lot of what Lou had it mind, so I signed on. Unfortunately, because my three jobs still have to take precedent, I wasn’t able to do much more for SASS at the start, than serve as a hood ornament Vice President while Lou got the word out and tried to attract new members. I think SASS is definitely something that will gain speed and momentum over time, whether I am able to lend it much credibility or not. Right now I am a dues-paying member and I like (again) what Lou is trying to do with the organization. Spec fic really could use a group capable of bona fide professional advocacy, combined with grass-roots growing and fostering of new talent. Too often sometimes (at least in my perception) the existing bod(ies) get tangled up in personality disputes or political bickering that’s got nothing to do with anything important to me as a professional. Can SASS be the answer? I would certainly like to think so. I hope Lou continues to gain traction and that SASS moves forward.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

 

 

 

Review: Electric Velocipede #27 (final issue)

written by David Steffen

Issue 27 is the very last issue of Electric Velocipede, the Hugo-winning speculative short fiction magazine edited by John Klima.

I don’t often do reviews, and even less often do I do reviews of short fiction magazines. Why? Well, mostly because I feel terrible giving a short story author a bad review for a story that I didn’t like. I don’t worry about that with Hollywood movies or big name novels since they’re not going to notice or care what I think anyway. Short stories are a varied bunch, and I find that I have gotten a lot more choosy over the years for what kind of fiction I like. I still consume loads of it, but I usually just share the ones that I love (like my Best Of podcast lists) and leave the others unmentioned. But somehow, when I’m reviewing an issue of a magazine I usually feel like I should review everything in it.

So I did think about doing that with this issue. There were stories I loved. There weren’t any stories I hated, but there were stories to which my principle reaction was “I don’t get it” or “It’s not for me.” Thinking on it further, I didn’t really have that much more to say about those stories, so I’m just going to list the stories that I really liked and tell you a little bit about why they were good for me. I’ll also note that I rarely grasp poetry (apart from Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, and perhaps the occasional by another poet) so none of the poems are on this list–not a reflection of the poetry, I expect, but my lack of understanding of the medium.

The Girls of the Forest by Margaret Ronald
Cynthia, a heron-girl who can become a human or heron or a mixture at will, returns pregnant to her forest home from the mundane world after the end of her relationship. Before she left the forest, she saw so many others leave and come back like that, and she always swore that she would never make their stupid mistakes, yet here she is returning alone with the seed of a child in her. Great story, well told. Great worldbuilding. I can imagine this mythical place where discarded mythical lovers return to and endlessly compare notes about their lives in the mundane world. I could really root for Cynthia, trying to raise her half-human child in this place surrounded by discouragement.

The Fungi That Talk Softly by Harry Markov
This one was decidedly weird. The story posits that fungi are a collective intelligence that communicates through some kind of mental bond. They assimilate the memories of any animal whose body they consume, and so are by far the superior intellect on the planet. They live on such a scale that they can note the extinction of species, but only once have they noted an individual of a species–this is the story of the relationship they grow with Rostislav Kazakchiev, a peculiar man who learns to speak with them.

The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown by Caroline M. Yoachim
Speaking of weird. The protagonist is the “seed clown” of candy carnivals made by a magician. Just before he hosts a children’s party, he dissolves her in water and makes a new circus which includes her and an entire candy cast and set of candy props. She serves as the seed for carnival after carnival and they are sent away to perform and be eaten without her. But she wants a change and she will do what she can to make it happen.

Song of Mary by Geoffrey W. Cole
I like stories about generation ships where something has gone wrong. In this particular one, the generators have weakened to a point that there is not enough energy to sustain the entire colony. The ship’s AI must do what she can to help the population find a way to trim their numbers and maintain the survivors.

Ondine’s Curse by Katherine Mankiller
A sea witch becomes romantically entangled with an unsavory man she rescues from a shipwreck. She is old and powerful, but naive to the ways of such men, and he sees little value in any relationship aside from short-term gains.

The State of the Grinder: Year One

written by David Steffen

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since we officially launched The Submission Grinder? At that time the Grinder only had its base functionality , the minimum required feature set to make it basically useful. We had just launched, so of course we didn’t have any submission data yet apart from the data of its founders. The Grinder site was pretty unreliable as well, down almost as often as not. And the choice of Courier font for everything on the site, while chosen with the intention of giving a nod to the typewriter-based standard manuscript format that is somehow still used today, managed to almost universally annoy everyone who visited the site.

These days the site is stable, we’ve changed the style to be more aesthetically pleasing, our user base is growing and with it our collection of data. We continue to hold to our commitment to never charge anyone for any feature. And our feature set is continually improving.

A concern oft-cited in the early days was that the site would be just a flash in the pan, here today gone tomorrow. To which we responded “The only thing that proves longevity is longevity”. So here we are a year later and still going strong, still improving. And we plan to stick around. So what’s gone on in the last year since the launch?

Statistics

Markets: 2642 (1165 open)
Users: 2033
Submissions: 34,403
Total site visits: 244,963
Unique visitors: 28,013
Pageviews: 1,444,035
Page per visit: 5.89
Largest contributors of site usage
1. Organic (Google)
2. DiabolicalPlots.com (Main Site)
3. Codex
4. AbsoluteWrite
5. Facebook

Shiny Features

We have implemented a wide variety of features that we feel are shiny and useful, too many to want to list them exhaustively here. But here are a few of the ones we are the proudest of.

1. Response Time Chart

GrinderFeature_ResponseTimeChart

 

A histogram on each market page of the response times for that market. The red bars represent rejections, the green are acceptances. The higher the bar, the more responses on that particular number of days wait. You can see in this example that this particular market has a nice bell curve of rejections centered at around 20 days, with a long tail and acceptances scattered all over. You can get a lot of information at a glance.

2. Response Recency Chart

GrinderFeature_ResponseRecencyChart2

GrinderFeature_ResponseRecencyChart

Another histogram, this one represents how long ago the responses were reported, with today being on the left side of the graph and one year ago being on the right. From this you can glean different kinds of information. For instance, you can discern an expected period of response,such as the Writers of the Future snapshot here where you can see their quarterly submission cycle pretty well. And you can also tell if a market just stops responding for some period of time, like you can see at intervals in the Analog snapshot.

3. My Market Response List

GrinderFeature_MyMarketResponseList

 

It’s common to want to look at the recently reported responses just for the markets where you have pending submissions, but before this feature you would have to visit each page manually and look at that list. This list provides a single list which lists out the recent responses that only includes those markets where you have pending submissions.

4. Post-Acceptance Tracking

GrinderFeature_PostAcceptance

Acceptance of a story is one of the goals of writing a story, but it’s not the ultimate goal. After the story’s accepted, you need to deal with the contract, payment, and publication of the work. That is all an important part of the process so we let you track that information as well.

 

Upcoming Shiny Features

And we have plenty more coming down the pipeline, including:

1. Newsletter
Among other things, you will be able to customize the newsletter to suit your exact interests. If you only want to hear about updates to pro-paying romance markets, that’s what you’ll get. This will also include other sections like a Fundraising callout which will provide links to newly announced publishing-related fundraising drives.

2. Poetry and Nonfiction Markets
We don’t yet have full support for these,you can track your submissions to them, but the full listing and search engine is being worked on.

3. Publication Brag.
Users who opt-in can already see their name on the site when they get that rare acceptance, but this will also help you spread the word when that story actually gets published.

4. Dean Wesley Smith Submission Score
The author Dean Wesley Smith has published a suggested system called the Race for encouraging writers to submit which has proven itself extremely useful. The Grinder will calculate this number for you, to help spur you on to send that story out.

Review: Ender’s Game (Movie vs. Book)

written by David Steffen

Recently I went to see the Ender’s Game movie, based on the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card (who I interviewed here some time ago). They take place in a future decades after an invasion of insect-like aliens attacked Earth and nearly wiped out the human race. The last invasion was only repelled by the last-ditch effort of a master strategist which turned the tide of the war. Earth needs a new leader, a new master strategist, to lead this war effort, but no ideal candidate has stepped forward. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the orbital Battle School plucks the most promising children to train them in strategy, to see who will come out to be the best of the best and become the new master strategist that Earth needs. Ender is a third child, a rare on this planet with reproductive legislation that limits parents to two children to limit population growth–his parents were allowed to have a third because their first two children were very promising candidates but his older brother Peter was often uncontrollably violent and his older sister Valentine too empathetic to allow them to be viable candidates. Can Ender become the master strategist that Earth is hoping for? Will he be capable of doing what needs to be done to save humanity? Will his training break him?

I read the book for the first time about five years ago, so it wasn’t very fresh when I went to see the movie. After seeing the movie, I re-read the book to refresh it in my mind before writing the review. I’ll give an overview and general impression of each of them in a non-spoiler way, but will follow that up with a spoiler section where I compare/contrast them in more detail without concern for ruining major plot points.

 

The Book

In the book, Ender is recruited at the tender age of six years old, and the main events of the book take until he is about eleven. So by the end he has spent about half of his life in military training. The book follows relationships that he develops with the other students, starting off on a bad note when the head administrator of the school sets out to isolate him from the others on the launch. Most of the school (and thus most of the book) is based around the game which can be most concisely described as zero-gravity laser tag with teams of forty facing off against each other.

The reason that I thought the book was so phenomenal is that it convinced me very thoroughly that Ender is a strategic genius. He is set playing the game that others have been playing for years and years, passing down the most common strategies to their successors for decades, and in relatively little time Ender can see through all of these routine maneuvers and see the flaws in them, see ways to exploit them. For a book based around combat strategy, Card couldn’t get by on just telling us how great Ender is at strategy. He has to convince me of that through Ender’s actions, and Card succeeds at this with flying colors. That is what makes this book so great. There were moments when I first read the book that some of these moments just made my jaw drop at the unexpectedness of a new strategy–something which totally makes sense in retrospect, but which I never would’ve thought of. Even on the re-read, these moments hadn’t lost their luster. And the ending of the book was especially effective, and still gives me chills when I think of it.

In some ways, Ender’s Game has left a mark on the way that I think about everything, and how I interact with people, much in the same way that the concepts of Game Theory have affected me. The thing about the Game Theory kind of mindset that most people don’t realize is that it applies to everything. It’s all about trying to predict outcomes and choose ways to behave and act in situations with other people involved, trying to understand their motivations and what those motivations will push people to do. I’ve used this kind of mindset in recent discussions with Human Resources at my company to point out that certain policies might encourage undesirable behavior and to suggest alterations to policies that might do better. I didn’t always think of things in such terms, but I think that reading Ender’s Game did a lot to make me think in that way which has been very useful.

 

 

The Movie

And then there’s the movie. It’s been a long time in the coming, even though Card had opportunities to make it into a film in the 80s and 90s, because Card insisted on a certain level of creative control. And good for him in sticking to his guns on that. This was the story that put him on the map, and I’ve seen way too many film adaptations that just mangled the original so badly that they didn’t only not do justice to the original, they were an insult to the original.

The film wasn’t bad. The core of the book is there, though there are many significant changes. The casting was good all around, the dialog writing portrayed well the parts that they reflected in the book. The special effects served the movie well.

But the movie is a pale shadow of the book.

I think the reason for that is that it’s just so compressed, both in the time available for the film to convey its story, and in the actual timeline of the story. I don’t know exactly the timeline of the movie, but I’d guess that Ender went to battle school when he was maybe… eleven years old? And he hasn’t aged noticeably by the end, so I’d guess it ended within a year. As opposed to the book where Ender spent literally half his life at Battle school, including those years where he went from a naive child to basically being a man. The ending really depends on this school being his whole life, and the timeline of the movie just doesn’t work with that, so the ending didn’t work like it should have even though it was pretty similar.

And the plot of movie had to compress so much to fit in the allotted time that there was no point at which I was convinced that Ender was a master strategist. A couple of the big strategies of the book are in the movie, but in some cases they are given to him by other characters for free, in other cases they just come to mind without the extreme stress that the book clearly made as a necessary step to being able to push to such strategies. Sure, he was sharp for a grade-schooler, but the book’s Ender Wiggin wasn’t just smart for a grade schooler, he could out-strategize anyone else who was available for the job, which is why he’s their hope to save humanity. The movie just doesn’t convince me of that and so, for me, it fails.

The one thing that I thought the movie improved on was cutting out a subplot that involved Ender’s brother and sister back on Earth–I felt like that was a waste of space.

 

The Ending (Herein Be Spoilers)

Okay, now that we’re being the cloak of a spoiler warning shield, let’s talk about the ending.

The ending is one of the things that really makes the book worthwhile. For most of the book, he’s in battle school with all the other kids, much of that time being spent in the battle room. As he’s learning to combat other strategies, he’s also constantly revising his personal relationships with the other children as he rises in the ranks to commander. By the time he leaves Battle School he’s proven that he is the beset of anyone there, at a younger age than most, even though the school at the end is intentionally weighing the game situations against him. Finally they graduate him and send him to Command School where he starts running complex simulations where he has control of a fleet of ships facing off against alien ships as he is in command of commanders who each control a subset of the fleet. These simulations are grueling, always against overwhelming odds, often several times a day, and are meant to be a simulation of what the attack on the aliens actually will be like.

By the time he gets to the end of the simulations, some of his commanders have broken beneath him and had to be retired, he has worn himself to exhaustion, and when he reaches the enemy’s planet he decides he wants to win spectacularly but in a way in which those judging him will never possibly consider him as a leader–by destroying their homeworld. And he does this, only to discover that this wasn’t a simulation after all. While directing what he thought was a simulation, he has destroyed an intelligent species. Those who have been training him chose this strategy because they knew that the only one who could beat the enemy would be one who could empathize with them to the point of thinking like them, but that person would not be able to destroy them if they thought the situation were actually real.

Holy crap, what an ending. But it depends a great deal on the timeline. The compressed timeline of the movie just makes this not work. If Ender resorts to genocide as easily as he does in the movie, even in a simulation, it’s hard to cut him any slack. There’s no mention in the movie that he’s trying to fail their test on purpose so they won’t choose him like he did in the book, and even if they did the compressed timeline of the movie likewise would make that very hard to justify. And I never got the impression that he and those beneath him had been pushed to the breaking point, either. Ender just reaches the planet and decides without warning “Oh, hey, I can blow up the planet. Therefore I will.” The end.

 

Conclusion

The movie is not a waste of time. At its core, it has much the same story, but the book is better on almost every level. If you see the movie first, you’ll be robbing yourself of the opportunity to see it play out the way it should in the book.

My advice: Read the book. Think about seeing the movie AFTER you read the book.

 

 

 

Daily Science Fiction: August 2013 Review

It’s almost Christmas and I’m still looking at summer stories. Time to get my rear in gear. Fortunately, August had some jewels to help me deal with the frigid weather.

 

An apology is like giving up a little piece of yourself, so says the author of Apology Accepted by Kathryn Felice Board (debut 8/1 and reviewed by Dustin Adams). Within the story, apologies cure on a physical, as well as emotional, level but come at the cost of the giver.

But what if the giver is a therapist, and people’s pain too unbearable for her to deny them a piece of herself, an apology from her to them? Would she eventually run out? If so, what kind of person would remain?

I thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking, emotional story. I imagine I’ll recollect it often in the days to come.

Recommended.

 

Inspired by a true story, For Sale by Owner by Kate Heartfield (debut 8/2 and reviewed by Dustin Adams) tells the tale of a man, Ron, who watches out his window, toward a cliff, for would-be jumpers. In a simple fashion, Ron invites them to his nearby home for “a cup of tea and a chat.” He has saved most, and lost many, but he himself endures stubbornly, seeking the day when his replacement comes along.

The mark of an extraordinary tale is one that makes all of life’s distractions disappear and loses the reader in the telling. This is one such story. This is why we read stories. This is why fiction exists, to enlighten the human condition, and to share it with others. This story, and the true story that inspired it, are both worth reading.

 

What could have been “another zombie story” turned out to be quite the opposite. In Zombie Widows by Natalie Graham (debut 8/5 and reviewed by Dustin Adams) we have a woman, recently widowed, who desperately misses her husband. Because zombies are created from any remaining DNA, a house must be purged of everything that once belonged to the deceased loved one, which makes for a sad tale indeed.

 

An abandoned pet waits vigilantly for his family to return in Sparg by Brian Trent (debut 8/6 and reviewed by Frank D). Sparg is making breakfast. He has observed his owners carefully during their morning ritual. The batter is difficult to stir, and bowl large to hold with his tentacles, but he so desperately seeks their approval and happiness. He is doing his best for them. Now if they were only here†¦

“Sparg” is the tale of loneness. He is a squid-like pet living in a low gravity environment. Clever, loyal, and eager to please, he wonders what he could have done to make them leave so suddenly as they did. The dominant member of the human family , Deepvoice , mentioned something about a war as they rushed out the door.

“Sparg” is a unique tale told from the perspective of a very bright pet. Although I was never sure of his species (squid sounds right), it is clear that he is capable of far more than any ordinary human companion. You can feel the loneliness of the abandoned family member and can sympathize with him while he attempts to right any wrong he believes he has done.

From “Old Yeller” to “Lady and the Tramp”, I have experienced many pet tales before. This one was out of this world.

Recommended.

 

A man foresees his future in Memories of Forgetting by Kenneth S Kao (debut 8/7 and reviewed by Frank D). Memories of a life yet to be unravel for a young man when he is approached by his future wife. The memories surface only when she is near and fade as soon as she leaves.

Intriguing tale. Not bad.

 

A new apprentice discovers innovative and improvement has little chance against the ingrained and familiar. The Traveling Raven Problem by Ian Watson (debut 8/8 and reviewed by Frank D) follows Igar on his first day as an indentured servant for a carrier raven service. The Corvomaester has little use for his new helper’s questions and suggestions. The service has run on the same routine for three millennia. Clearly it isn’t broke, so there is nothing that needs fixed.

“The Traveling Raven” is a tale of entrenchment. Igar’s boss is uneducated and is comfortable with his position as Corvomaester. It is clear ‘new’ ideas fall way outside his comfort zone. The story is filled with back-and-forth dialog. The Corvomaester speaks a guttural dialect , very difficult to understand. Although I found the lesson of this tale intriguing, piecing together the speech of these characters was a chore.

 

Just Like Clockwork by K.G. Jewell (debut 8/9 and reviewed by Frank D). Hemiz is the zookeeper of a clockwork zoo. His animals are all mechanical works of dials, springs, and gears , except for the only Galactic Tech piece, the Shurilian lion. The lion is supposed to be indisputably accurate, so when its roar is slightly off in the zoo’s show, the perfectionist zookeeper won’t rest until he finds out why.

“Just Like Clockwork” is a sci-fi physics mystery. Earthquakes have plagued the technologically isolated planet of Krinnia ever since the Shurilian built their space elevator. The Shurilians have said their elevator has nothing to do with the quakes, and its lion is in tune with the planets rotation and cannot possibly be malfunctioning. Hemiz is sure all his clockwork animals are functioning as designed, and finds it unlikely his zoo animals couldn’t all be off at the same time. He has a theory, a theory that could prove dire for his world.

This story has a resolution I found cunning but the premise of two owners of a novelty attraction solving it I found difficult to believe. The villain of this piece was cut from the same cloth as a James Bond antagonist, foolishly revealing their plans for no good reason other to gloat.

 

A patient doesn’t know if he’s coming or going in Hiking in My Head by Gareth D Jones (debut 8/12 and reviewed by Frank D). The protagonist is in a mental hospital, but doesn’t know why. He sees people in his head, yet cannot remember who they are or who he is. The doctor says he is cured but his brain doesn’t know it yet.

“Hiking” is a story based on a theory I’ve never heard of before, where some dreams are influenced by outside events are memories run in reverse. An odd tale I had to read twice to partially understand it.

 

Explorers find the edge of the world and discover what lies below. In Nova Verba, Mundus Novus by Ken Liu (debut 8/13 and reviewed by Frank D) the crew of the Sesquipedilian brave the Atlantean Ocean, and with the aid of an aerostat, float over its side. The world is as he Hindu’s describe it , a flat disc resting on the back of an elephant, who stands on a stack of turtles. The lower they descend, the simpler they become. What changes are in store for this brave crew?

“Nova” is a lighthearted, yet clever, work of flash from one of the brightest writers of our time.

 

A curse afflicts a bride in Seaweed by Mari Ness (debut 8/14 and reviewed by Frank D). The woman in this tale awakes in a blanket of seaweed every morning. Despite the best efforts of many in the kingdom, nothing can be done to halt this curse. She (and her husband) know from whence this curse came, and she is determined that her husband takes responsibility for his part.

This is an odd tale and I’m not quite sure if I got the point of it.

 

A depressed and lonely girl finds solace and companionship In Dreams by Jeremy Erman (debut 8/15 and reviewed by Frank D). The protagonist dreams of a place with purple skies every night. It is a place for people like herself, withdrawn and shunned. She meets a boy, establishes a relationship. Like romances in real life, the dream and their feelings for each other fade, but she does not leave the surreal place empty handed.

This brief tale has a twist that many readers may have missed. So subtle.

 

A man hired to find the meaning of life for the dying searches for the meaning of living in The Black Bough by Conor Powers-Smith (debut 8/16 and reviewed by Frank D). Louis Gibbs is a dreamer. He absorbs the complete memories of his clients , every second of their life , and reflects upon it to give them the answers that always eluded them. Louis has the memories of sixteen people in his head when he absorbed his latest client’s memories. Henry is a widower afflicted with a terminal disease. Before Louis can finish mulling over Henry’s past, Henry dies. It has happened before, but while contemplating his client’s memories, sadness overtakes him with the knowledge of what Henry children will think of their fathers passing.

“Black Bough” is a tale of reflection. The middle-aged Louis has little trouble separating the memories of clients twice his age from his own. He managed to perform his job with a detached distance surgeons need to do to be effective. Henry’s long but common life becomes a tipping point for Louis on the heels of tragic news , his leukemia has returned.

This protagonist in Powers-Smith’s tale is a man who is suddenly struck with issues when he was absent of them before. His news has left Philosophy major emotively empty. Searching for his own meaning in life would be incomplete. His business, with its abundance of memory files, can offer so much more.

I contemplated why Louis would choose the course of actions which led to the finale of this piece. Without spoiling the ending for you (if I haven’t already), I can only assume he wasn’t really searching for an answer. Rather, he just became overwhelmed with a reality he couldn’t handle. Intriguing story but I’m unsure of its meaning.

 

An unassuming sidekick receives his just rewards in Recognition by Bill Glover (debut 8/19 and reviewed by Frank D). The protagonist is a loyal assistant to a superhero, the Checked Avenger. He has an inconspicuous nature for a power – others fail to notice him when he is present. Despite his unpretentious gift, he has never failed to miss the superhero award banquet. It is quite unexpected when his boss receives an award, but what happens next surprises the protagonist most of all.

Liked the moral of this tale but I do wonder, considering his power, how did the protagonist manage to get invited to the banquet in the first place?

 

A mailman falls for an extrinsic, yet reclusive, mysterious woman in The Matchmaker by Sara Puls (debut 8/20 and reviewed by Frank D). Don has hand delivered packages to Ruthetta for thirty years. Always marked fragile, Ruthetta has hinted to Don that they are filled with fairy tale characters. Don has always been drawn to the bubbly but alone woman, but never had the courage to tell her how he felt. As the frequency begins to slow to a trickle, then not at all, Don worries that he has waited too long to express himself.

“The Matchmaker” is a two tiered love story. Ruthetta cares for fairy tale creatures, doing her best to find them someone that will care for them. Don worries that poor Ruthetta never bothered to think of herself. Sweet little story.

 

A ghostly alien wonders about the strange orbs that circle the stars in An Impossible Matter by Sylvia Anna Hiven (debut 8/21 and reviewed by Frank D). Thorn is drawn to the 3rd orb an alluring blue and green ball of matter circling a star. The Grand Patri tells his inquisitive underling that nothing of importance can exist on such things.

“An Impossible Matter” is a short tale told from a unique perspective. A new story from a well-worn idea.

 

A family visits Granny in Tomorrow is Winter by Callie Snow (debut 8/22 and reviewed by Frank D). In this dystopian future, the protagonist is a little girl accompanying her parents to a retirement home. The first day of winter is coming. The day is a holiday, of a sort, but is celebrated as if the cold that marks the season rarely happens anymore.

“Tomorrow is Winter” has a storyline that is half metaphor. The story is told from a growing child who sees the hypocrisy of the celebration. Her town is covered in a dome to protect it from the pollution outside, making observing any changes of seasons irrelevant. An intriguing angle to this tale is Isabella’s (protagonist) corrective protocols to monitor her behavior. She is equipped with some sort of Pavlov-ian device that shocks her for her social faux paus. I would have liked to know more of this subplot. “Tomorrow” had some intriguing aspects but their details were elusive. A deeper story would have been preferable.

 

A heartless girl contemplates her cold demeanor in A Change of Heart by Rachel Halpern (debut 8/23 and reviewed by Frank D). Clara is an unusual child. She is well aware that she lacks the emotional peaks and valleys she sees in others. She has learned to mimic feelings, mindful of responsive cues to simulate face expressions and appropriate verbal responses to emotive situations. Faking it hasn’t left Clara satisfied, and she is wondering if the empty space in her chest may have something to do with her wooden condition.

“A Change of Heart” is a Tin Man tale. Clara’s parents fill in the pieces for her when they show her a wooden box and explain of the unusual procedure Dr. Annin preformed that saved her life at a young age. Her heart was dying, so the doctor removed it and stored it in the box, where it still beats. As long as it remains in the box, Clara is safe and immortal, but Clara knows that a life without a beating heart is not a life at all.

I have mixed emotions about “A Change of Heart”. Although the story is a solid one, I felt it was longer than it needed to be. The narrative seemed to drag, as if the author had trouble telling an emotional tale through the eyes of a protagonist who lack emotions. The result was too much backhanded explanations, a simile or two too many, and long stretches of internal contemplations. I felt the tale could have been stronger as a short-short, or maybe, as a work of flash. Nevertheless, the concept was an interesting one. I can see why the editors decided to publish.

 

Friendship is the theme of A Crown of Woven Nails by Caroline M. Yoachim (debut 8/26 and reviewed by Frank D). The protagonist is a little girl who makes friends with a shape shifting alien. The Splitters came to Earth to help rebuild civilization after an atomic war. Gratitude evolves into suspicion as fear compels humanity to imprison the Splitters. The little girl remembers her friend, Cobalt, and tries to rekindle their friendship years later after the aliens are free, but people change, as do the aliens who change shape at will.

“A Crown” revolves around the memory of gift the protagonist receives from Cobalt when they were adolescents, a crown Cobalt transforms from discarded nails. The story is much like any story could tell from their own experiences , a memory of a long ago friend from an innocent time. Although the shape-shifting aliens gave it a new flavor, the story’s theme I found less than remarkable.

 

An unwanted guest has a habit of crashing weddings in Three Weddings and an Objection by M. M. Domaille (debut 8/27 and reviewed by Frank D). An off world ice fishing community celebration is interrupted by a defense probe, ruining a blessed couples special day. The guests all flee before the murderous probe mistakes them for a rebel assembly. Two more weddings are attempted but the probe still appears each time. Will love conquer all?

This tale set in an isolated setting has a usual angle to it. There is a slight twist to the story, and a slight appeal to the tale.

 

Psychic abilities ruin a love affair in Love is Orange, Love is Red by Eric James Stone (debut 8/28 and reviewed by Frank D). A sickness afflicts a couple that grants them the ability to sense the emotions of each other. Disappoint is the result when they discover their feelings don’t run at equal depths.

Mr. Stone explores the consequences of knowing exactly how another feels about you. The protagonist attempts to explain his mundane emotional state for his lover with an analogy of viewing colors differently. Intriguing tale but this passion driven story is told from an emotional distance. It loses its luster in the processes, giving it a clinical feel to it.

 

Flip Side by Chip Houser (debut 8/29 and reviewed by James Hanzelka)

The woman sat beside the road in her tattered dress. She argued with herself about the past. Was the accident her fault? Was she driving too fast? Or was it Tommy’s for not watching where he was going? She throws her empty bottle in frustration. The old man eases his way across the street, dodging the crumbling asphalt and broken glass. Standing next to her he pulls out a bottle and holds it out to her. “Whiskey?” she asks. “Something better,” he replies. She drains the bottle, choking on the sickly sweet liquid. “You’ve poisoned me!” she cries. “No I’ve set you free,” he replies. “It will be better this time.”

“Flip Side” is a story about what could have been and what you would give to set the past right. The author deftly unfolds the tragedy that stunted this woman’s life, and shows us that there are worse things than death. He then offers us hope that someone out there will give us a second chance. Someone that will give us back the chance to make the right choice. I liked how well he did this and still found the room to paint such a vivid picture of the participants. This one is worth the read.

 

I’ll Never Find Another You by C J Paget (debut 8/30 and reviewed by James Hanzelka)

He first sees her at the party. She’s dressed like a genie. There’s something familiar about her, but he can’t quite place it. He works his way over to her and they exchange banter, agreeing to flee the boredom of the party. She retrieves her coat from the Jag and follows him to his Audi. “Nice car,” he says. “It’s stolen,” she replies. As they drive she asks about finance, and quantum mechanics. At his place he opens the gate and watches her face, the disappointment is obvious. “Not what you expected?” he asks. She shakes her head like it doesn’t belong there. “Now what’s this all about he asks?” “Quantum Mechanics,” she replies.

This story meanders along the trail of alternate universes and what-could-have-beens, ending in the only way it could. The author takes their time laying out the premise, which doesn’t help in my mind. Once you get to the end you’ll find you don’t care much for either of the two characters that populate the story. It has some interesting premises, but the inherent flaws in the characters are just too much to get past. I found myself hoping for the end to come, and it didn’t come fast enough.

 

Sound Check

A few reviews ago, I suggested the editors take a look into the audio market to help get their vast library out there. They responded to me by offering me the audio editor’s job. After sending several unanswered queries to the largest audio publishers out there, I can confidently confirm that I suck as an audio editor. I am clearly out of league but do firmly believe that an audio version of Not Just Rockets and Robots would be a hit. So†¦.

I am asking for help, advice, a shovel to help me dig out of this hole that I am in, to get Daily SF on its rightful place in the audio section of literature. Anyone got anything for me?

snapperFrank Dutkiewicz needs no introduction.

The Inside Scoop on Anthologies with Mike Resnick

interview by Carl Slaughter

In the 1990s, Mike Resnick launched more careers with his anthologies than Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF combined. He’s at it again with Stellar Guild. He gives Diabolical Plots the inside story on the nature and process of anthologies.

CARL SLAUGHTER: Which is a better/faster way to build a resume as a speculative fiction writer, anthologies or magazines?

MIKE RESNICK: The digest magazines. Then the print anthologies. Then the e-zines. But mass market novels are the quickest way of all.

 

CS: Which pays better?

MR: Depends on the market. Jim Baen’s Universe was paying a quarter a word when I was co-editing it with Eric Flint. Most of the print zines pay 7 to 9 cents, most of the SFWA-accepted e-zines pay 5 or 6 cents, though a few pay double that. The average anthology, at least the ones I’m acquainted with over the past half-dozen years, pay from 7 to 10 cents a word. Even when I was editing them twenty+ years ago, we never paid less than 6 cents. Which is to say, in sum, that it’s a crap shoot.

 

CS: Which involves surrendering fewer rights?

MR: Any legit magazine will buy first serial rights, and keep the option of buying it again for an anthology of stories from the magazine. Usually they want a six-month worldwide exclusive. Most anthologies will buy first serial rights, plus a worldwide non-exclusive (which means they can sell the anthology to other countries, giving you a pro rata split; but you can market the solo story anywhere you want.) That’s standard, but of course not all contracts are standard.

 

CS: From conception to publication, what’s the timeframe for a typical anthology?

MR: From conception, I assume you mean from the day the editor signs a contract with the publisher. If it’s an original anthology, figure twelve to sixteen months; if it’s reprint, maybe seven to twelve months.

 

CS: What’s the average number of stories per anthology?

MR: Varies wildly. Twenty is a nice safe average number.

 

CS: What’s the average word count per story?

MR: 5000 to 6500 usually. Which isn’t to say that flash fiction and novellas are totally absent from all anthologies.

 

CS: How well do anthologies sell?

MR: Not very. Most sales are made in the contracts, not the execution. And if a publisher is shelling out well under $10,000 for an anthology — and 95% of the anthologies go for four figures — then the only way he can get hurt is to spend $50,000 promoting it, or printing 300,000 copies, or hiring the equivalent of Frank Frazetta for the cover art…so he handles it like a $7,000 book…and lo and behold, it sells like a $7,000 book.

 

CS: Does every major speculative fiction publisher have an anthology division or are most anthology editors freelancers?

MR: Almost all anthologies are freelance edited.

 

CS: Where does a freelance anthology editor get capital for their next project?

MR: You talk to “Names” that will make the book marketable, and when you get enough commitments, you take your anthology idea to the various publishing houses until someone likes it enough to sign a contract and pay you an advance. I should add that almost all advances are half on signing and half on delivery…and since you budget about 90% of the advance for stories, the editor is often a few thousand dollars out-of-pocket until he delivers. (And mass market publishing is historically a month or two late on the signature advance, and two to four months late on the delivery/acceptance payment.)

 

CS: Are most anthologies open to submission or by invitation only?

MR: Most are invitation only. For sound economic reasons. If I sell an anthology for $8,000, I’ll budget it at $7,000…and someone always has diarrhea of the keyboard, so it’ll cost me about $7,300…which means I’ll make about $700. Now, if I’m dealing with journeyman writers whose work I like well enough to invite them, I can usually do the editing in a few days…but if I open it to submissions, I’m going to get about 600 stories, maybe 500 all-but-unreadable, and it’ll take me a month to wade my way through them…and if I’m only earning $700 a month, I’m in the wrong business.

 

CS: For the ones that are invitation only, how does an aspiring writer get on the editor’s radar?

MR: He keeps his eyes and ears open, he networks, he talks to pros, to other beginners, he attends conventions. I know it seems like “invite only” means “no beginners wanted”…but I bought more first stories for my anthologies in the 1990s than Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF combined.

 

CS: For the ones that accept submissions, how do they spread the word? Post on Codex, WOTF, Hatrack, and Critters; advertise in the SFWA newsletter; if it’s a horror anthology, advertise in the Horror Writers Association newsletter; if the subgenre is vampire or zombie, do they notify the Vampire Writers Association or Zombie Writers Association (I’m joking, are there such associations?)?

MR: You can whisper, very softly, that you accept submissions, and you’ll be whelmed over with hundreds of them within a couple of weeks.

 

CS: Novel editors put stories through extensive revision. What about anthology editors. Do they request multiple rewrites? Do they do the rewrites themselves?

MR: If it’s a theme anthology, and 90% of them are, that means it’s a story that wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t commissioned it…and that means I have a moral obligation to the writer. I will return any story for revisions if it needs them…and on those occasions that the author simply can’t give me what I want — and it’s only happened three times in over fortyanthologies, I’ll pay him a kill fee, since as I say he’d never have taken the time to write a story on that particular theme if I hadn’t assigned it.

 

CS: What percentage of stories in a typical anthology are by new writers?

MR: I can’t speak for any other editors. I’d say about 20-25% in my anthologies are by new or newer writers, or to be more blunt, by names we can’t put on the cover because they have absolutely no following or value at present. This, I should add, is not a permanent condition. 10 of the writers I have bought from made the Campbell ballot after I bought their stories.

 

CS: How often do we see anthologies with all new writers? Is it too much of a risk for publishers? Aren’t readers keen to check out new writers?

MR: My guess is: Never. I did one for SFWA, published by DAW, called NEW VOICES IN SCIENCE FICTION, a few years back, and it contained only writers who’d broken into print in the past five years…but even so it contained some bestsellers, a bunch of Campbell winners and nominees, etc.

 

CS: Who are/were the heavy hitters in the anthology industry and what is their greatest contribution?

MR: Anytime between 1980 and 2005 I’d have said there was Marty Greenberg and then there was Everyone Else. With Marty gone, no one has begun to dominate the field the way he did. John Joseph Adams is putting out some nice anthologies; so is the team of George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. And there’s something new afoot — the Kickstarter project. The best so far have come from Bryan Schmidt, Marty Halpern, Alex Shvartsman, and a few others…but it’s very early days in that field.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

written by David Steffen

“Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. ” This line is from the back-cover blurb of Ancillary Justice, the debut novel by Ann Leckie published by Orbit Books. Breq is a fragment of the ship AI known collectively as Justice of Toren, whose mind once occupied many bodies simultaneously: the body of the ship itself and thousands of ancillaries. Ancillaries are “corpse soldiers”, human bodies whose minds have been overwritten to function as appendages of a ship AI. At the point where the story begins, there is only Breq. All the rest of her is gone. She has chosen a mission, a dangerous mission against astronomical odds.

The genre is probably most easily described as a space opera SF. Galaxy-spanning empires, fights, drama, action. But I don’t mean that as a criticism. This book is everything that space opera should be: exciting, emotional, action-packed, and well-paced. The story hits the ground running–there’s no infodump to ground you in the politics or technology of the universe. Action is happening on page one, and reading the story is as much a puzzle to figure out the significance of different political factions, the limits of the available technology, as the story is happening around. With such a grand background, it would be easy to lose the individuals in the midst of it or to use one-dimensional characters from central casting, but the story is full of strong characters, including Breq herself, which give the very human, emotional components that a story needs to be really engaging.

In some ways Breq is superhuman–a very efficient killer when she wants to be, with flawless aim and a computer-like ability to calculate complex math. In other ways she struggles where an ordinary human would not–interpreting facial expressions, trying to tell male and female genders apart. It’s just taken for granted that she is extremely capable, but the book places her against such tough odds and difficult situations that even then her success is not inevitable. But it also manages to pull off the conclusion in a convincing manner so that it doesn’t seem a contrived success. A tough balance to strike but it is done well.

All that’s well and good, but what really makes this book stand out in my mind from other space operas is the interesting format of the point of view of Justice of Toren. The first scenes take place once Breq is all that’s left of Justice of Toren, and although she thinks and acts differently than a typical human, she is more-or-less very human-like, so the POV is not particularly novel. But scenes from that time period are interspersed with flashback scenes from Justice of Toren in all her legion of bodies. She is a single entity, despite all the bodies, receiving sensory input and exerting control over all of them simultaneously, and each body is basically an appendage of the whole, though the bodies are capable of functioning in isolation (as the continued existence of Breq shows you). Writing such a complicated point of view was a risk that could’ve easily made the book unreadable for anyone but the writer (who of course knows how it’s all supposed to fit together). Quite frankly, this is a point of view that shouldn’t work. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would be a garbled mess from which you wouldn’t be able to extract a narrative. Ann Leckie took a risk with this, and she made it look easy. If you’re interested in reading, if you’re interested in writing, even if you have no interest in space opera, you should try out the first few chapters of this book to see how she did it.

I’ll admit, there are parts of the book where I felt like I was falling a little behind, particularly having to do with the relation between some political/social factions. I think that I could sort these out with a second read-through. I don’t think these were the faults of the writing, but of me being a bit slow on the uptake, and even with that I was able to understand the central plotline perfectly well.

And, even better, this is slated to be the first book in a trilogy. The first book stands well enough on its own as a complete story that you don’t need to go further, but I’ll be looking forward to reading the next two books–it’s always hard to outdo the novelty of the first in a series, but I look forward to seeing what Leckie can do for a followup.

I’ve heard some buzz about Ancillary Justice in relation to Hugo and Nebula nominations. I will certainly be nominating it for the Hugo, and voting for it if it is one of the finalists. I would love to see this book get all the recognition it deserves. Please read this book and tell everyone you know about it.

Lou Anders Interview

interview by Carl Slaughter

LouBlueShirtLou Anders is the Hugo Award winning editorial director of the SF&F imprint Pyr Books, a Chesley Award winning art director, and the editor of nine anthologies. He has also been nominated for six additional Hugo Awards, five additional Chesley Awards, as well as the PKD, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and three World Fantasy Awards. His first novel, Frostborn, book one in a three-book middle grade fantasy adventure series called Thrones and Bones, will be published in August 2014 by Random House’s Crown Books for Young Readers.

 

ABOUT YOU

CARL SLAUGHTER: You’ve done stage, scriptwriting, magazine, journalism, ebook. How did each of these fields prepare you to be editorial director of a speculative fiction book imprint?

LOU ANDERS: In one form or another, I’ve been working in the science fiction and fantasy genre since the early 90s. If we carve off my (perhaps dubious) stage work, then I’ve been a professional in science fiction and fantasy entertainment since 1995, and I was in the ebook space in 2000 before there was such a thing! I think the diversity of my professional experience gives me well-rounded perspective on media, while keeping the focus on genre.

 

ABOUT YOU AND PYR:

CVG 2013 GoH Badge - Lou AndersCS: There were several speculative fiction imprints at the time Pyr was launched. Tor, Del Rey, Ace, DAW, Baen, Why another imprint? What void have you been filling? How is Pyr distinct from other imprints?

LA: My parent company, Prometheus Books, wanted to get into fiction and chose science fiction as an appropriate niche for a company founded on principles of humanism and science. When we were starting out, we very quickly dismissed the idea of specializing in a particular subgenre in favor of trying to provide high quality science fiction and fantasy in what Asimov’s once described as genre being “pitched down the middle of the field” but written at a higher level of prose quality. About three years into our run, we began to hear from the chain buyers and distributors that we had the “most consistent quality” of any publisher as well as the consistently best looking covers. So, I’d say that we are trying to be SFF “dialed to eleven.” One fan once told us that while they don’t always like every Pyr title, they know that every Pyr book will be an engrossing read, well executed.

 

CS: Pyr was launched in 2005. You were nominated for a Hugo for best editor in 2007 and have been nominated every year since. How did you come on so strong so early and how did you maintain that momentum?

LA: There were a lot of factors that came together at the right time around our debut. We’re very fortunate to have connected with the readership so strongly, and I’m grateful for all those nominations. All we can do is continue to do our best and be glad that people appreciate that.

 

CS: Imagine you’re assigned to write a three paragraph entry about Pyr for the next encyclopedia of speculative fiction. What do you say? Give us a peekat those three paragraphs.

LA: I can’t answer this. It’s up to the field to define who we are. We can only offer the best we can. How the readership responds to that offer isn’t up to us. So far they’ve liked what we do and we’ll work to ensure that continues as best we can.

 

CS: You’ve also been nominated several times for anthology editor. Give us a thumbnail sketch of your vision for anthologies, past, present, and future.

LA: Well, I don’t know if I’m going to do any more anthologies in the future. I’ve turned my attention to my own fiction, and given the copious amounts of free time I don’t have, any and all snatches of personal time I have that is not claimed by my family goes into my own creations. But when I did anthologies, my goal was to never simply present reprint collections of themed stories, but to ask questions of where I thought the genre was, where it was going next, and where it should be. Each of my nine anthologies are attempts to engage the dialogue of speculative fiction in a moment, whether that was my frustrations with the limits of post-cyberpunk fiction in Live Without a Net, or my desire to explore the intersection of sword and sorcery values with modern, “realistic” fantasy in Swords & Dark Magic (co-edited with Jonathan Strahan). Every anthology is a question put to the field and hopefully a collection of answers.

 

CS: You’ve won the Chesley Award for Best Art Direcotr. I confess,I’m not an art person. I confess further that most sci fi / fantasy art strikes me as, well, bizarre. Explain the why and how of cover art for the decidedly non-arts people.

LA: Well that makes me sad to hear. Our field is unique in that it has over a century of cooperation between visual artists and wordsmiths. It’s one of the most exciting and distinctive things about the SFF field. But you have to understand that a cover’s first function is to attract the attention of the one guy at Barnes and Noble who buys all genre books for the entire chain. Beyond that, it’s to get the distribution sales force excited about a book. Then it’s to catch the casual browser’s attention, to close that deal in the nanosecond you have when someone glances at a title before his or her eye slides on to the next one. Think of covers like flowers, signaling with their colors to the right insects they need for pollination. You have to match the right flower to the right bug , the right book to the right reader.

 

ABOUT PYR

CS: What percentage of fantasy versus science fiction versus, shall we say, works which defy category, have you published? How much hard science, space opera, alternate history, steam punk, horror, etc. How many serials, how many anthologies, how many reprints?

LA: We publish a great deal of epic fantasy and sword and sorcery fiction, a great deal of steampunk, some space opera and military science fiction. We don’t publish horror and very little of what you’d call slipstream. Our Vampire Empire trilogy may defy categorization as you say , being an alternate history, pulp fiction, paranormal romance, steampunk, vampire epic , but that’s not the same thing as the more literary “new wave fabulism” that I think you mean. I should point out that these days we publish a LOT more fantasy than science fiction, though when we do SF, we do it well (ahem, Ian McDonald). We also have some very hard hitting work coming out from Joel Shepherd.

 

CS: Is there a market niche you’re struggling to meet? Is there one with a glut of manuscripts?

LA: We are trying to publish the best stories we can and serve a wide variety of readers. That being said, the urban fantasy genre is certainly glutted and probably in retraction.

 

CS: Which subgenres are you drawn to and which subgenres do you avoid?

LA: I have a sweet spot for sword and sorcery, and for the modern fantasy epic.

 

CS: With fantasy, do you prefer original characters or classic creatures – dragon, vampire, werewolf, witch, ghost, mermaid.

LA: This depends entirely on execution. There’s been a backlash against classic fantasy characters like elves and dwarves for a while now. In the wake of George RR Martin’s success we’ve seen a lot of “humans only” fantasy. I think we’re actually due to come back from this.

 

CS: Vampires are all the rage. Sexy kickass heroines have been in vogue for some time. Alien invasion and alien encounter are staples. Do you go with the flow or do you resist the flow?

LA: Read Mark Hodder’s A Red Sun Also Rises and tell me what you think.

 

CS: Hypothetical question: You have 2 manuscripts on your desk, one sci fi, one fantasy, both by the same author, and you can publish only one. Which one, or does it just all depend? If the latter, depends on what?

LA: I publish the one that has me jumping out of my chair in excitement. Period. If I can’t get excited about it, how can I get you excited about it? That being said, you never have two manuscripts from the same author.

 

CS: Who do you have doing hard science, how do they approach hard science, and how is that approach distinguished from what else is on the market?

LA: Hard science fiction is very much a niche interest right now. When I publish hard science fiction, I lean away from transparent prose in favor of the literary end of that spectrum. I’d say all our hard SF is “literary award caliber.” I think our awards track record bears this out!

 

ABOUT ASPIRING WRITERS

CS: True or false: Every editor is eager to find new authors. It’s virtually impossible to sell a first novel manuscript without working your way up the short story magazine food chain til you’ve been published in SFWA markets a few times. A novel by a veteran sell better and are first novel sales sluggish, or is that also conventional wisdom? A big name author can sell you on a story with strictly the premise, but a rookie has to submit a full fledged outline.

LA: You have a number of false assumptions here. Plenty of first time novelists have never written/sold short stories. The two forms are very different and a lot of people find they excel at one and not the other. I myself am in that camp. I’ve only written a handful of short stories, none appearing in pro markets, and I’ve just sold a children’s book to Random House. And Pyr has published a lot of debut and new authors. Also, a novel by a veteran author may be constrained by his/her previous sales record, whereas a new author is an unknown quality, and that can be attractive. That being said, a “rookie” has to submit a full fledged NOVEL, not outline. No unproven writer can sell anything but a complete, polished manuscript. And most of my established authors are still giving me very, very detailed outlines if not whole manuscripts. (Ian McDonald’s outlines can run to around 60 pages.) Mike Resnick did sell me his Weird West quartet of steampunk Doc Holiday novels on a premise, but in that case it was because I called him up and said “Mike, how would you like to write Weird Western?”

 

CS: Hypothetical question: You have 2 manuscripts on your desk, one by an established author, one by an unestablished author, and you can publish only one. Which one, or does it just all depend? If the latter, depends on what?

LA: You seem to be implying that I’ve got this checklist of criteria or quota that I’m looking at when I select a manuscript. Need suburban werewolf space opera. Must fill niche. I publish the manuscript that has me jumping out of my chair. The one that has me gasping for breath. The one that has my heart racing. I publish the books I love. If a book is “interesting” but I can put it down, I pass. There is a great line in the film Ronin in which Robert De Niro says, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.” That’s my mandate when acquiring novels.

 

CS: Advice to an aspiring writer who is already working on a novel?

LA: Is this your first novel? Expect to write several more before you produce one of professional quality. Don’t be discouraged. Write a novel. Finish it. Write another. Writing is like any other profession. It takes long hours of hard work and practice to get good at it. I’m a big believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s
10,000 hours rule, the notion that 10,000 hours is the average time it takes to master a pursuit. I wouldn’t let a brain surgeon operate on me if he told me
he’d never been to med school but was “pretty sure he could perform a good operation.” So why would someone believe they could pound on a keyboard for the
very first time and produce a masterpiece? Write, write, write. That being said, it’s not my job to help aspiring writers. It’s my job to select the best
manuscripts I can possibly find for my publisher from the pool of those who have already mastered the craft. I’m serving the reader, not the writer. The
competition is fierce. There are much better ways to make a living. If anything can discourage you, you should listen to it and quit. If you can’t quit, you
might make it.

 

CS: Advice to an aspiring writer who is considering writing a novel?

LA: You have along road ahead of you. Get started. Or don’t.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.