The milestone most people think about when they imagine writing is the moment when the author types “The End”. (Spoiler alert: Whenever I start a new manuscript the first thing I type is – END – in bold, centered text.) Of course this is important … it’s a rare writer who is invulnerable to doubts like “Can I finish this?” or “Does this story have an ending?” But as satisfying as it might be to get to “the end”, that is hardly the end of work, certainly for any writer hoping to publish.
What comes after? Welcome to the twilight zone of REVISION. Here I’ll share what I’m doing with my current book, FORLORN TOYS.
What are the problems?
So you wrote your book and presumably you like it – otherwise why would you have written it the way you did? But at some level, depending on your goals as a writer, you want other people to like it. How do you know how your new creation stacks up?
The starting point is beta readers – people who get a free copy of the book, read it, then tell you what they think. I use different levels of beta reader:
Friends and Family: We’re talking siblings, children, maybe parents, and of course your reading-inclined acquaintances. I actually consider this pretty important – if people who know you the best don’t find much to say about your book, either the topic/genre is super far-afield, or the book is a tough read. And don’t discount the positive feedback as just politeness – I look for specific comments from this group, like “I loved character X!” or “The spaceship was so cool!” as core validation. But don’t expect much actionable criticism here.
Your Writing Circle: I belong to a few writers’ groups and its common for members to “trade” beta-reads – I’ll read yours if you read mine. What you can expect here is a more writing-craft level of feedback. I was fortunate to get two such readers, and they gave me lots of detailed feedback on slow pacing, including *why* it feels slow.
Paid Beta Readers: Nowadays there’s a substantial industry around supporting writers, both would-be and established. I use a company that offers both editorial services and beta-reads. The actual beta-readers are all pros, one way or another: they are editors, writing teachers, sometimes authors themselves. I have found this paid feedback is the most comprehensive and best presented.
I got important signals out of the FORLORN TOYS beta-read:
The core concept is a winner: A reaper who harvests technology from dead worlds learns of an ancient alien threat to all civilization. There’s an evil corporation, bad guys, henchmen, and a good amount of ultra-advanced tech in the story.
Everyone liked the characters. Some cited the revenge-driven main character Irá as their favorite, others were in the camp of robotically-enhanced, cheerful nihilist Judd, while still others were taken with flamboyant Promakos or wise and thoughtful Sejal.
The most consistent critique was on pacing, especially on scenes having to do with technical problem solving.
This gave me confidence to make the investment in the next round of feedback, engaging a developmental editor – a process that looks at the foundation elements of your book: Setting, Plot, Character, Structure. I say investment because this service typically costs between $0.02 and $0.05 per word. FORLORN TOYS is 92,000 words. Well, it was less than a full set of pro-line golf clubs.
Every editor will have their own process. if you are a writer and are interested in this, I urge you to have a get-acquainted convo with candidate editors before you sign a contract. My editor takes about a month for an edit, and gives back a letter – a 10+ page document that gives a summary of findings and recommendations – and manuscript comments. For FORLORN TOYS, I got 1,120 comments. Some examples:
I don’t know what this means, like who are they and what was stolen? I’m okay with not knowing, but am I supposed to understand or is it supposed to be developed over time?
Fantastic description of the space station, which feels cramped, poorly lit, and probably dusty.
Here’s where the story starts in earnest. Now I know she’s waiting for someone, she’s expecting a business deal to occur, and she probably needs the money. Is it possible that the story starts around here, or maybe when her business counterparts arrive?
What to do about it?
Here’s what I do with all this material:
I read every comment and assign it a status: INFO ONLY means just that, an observation, not a request for change; EVALUATE means I see the issue described and I will (later) try and address it; finally DISAGREE means I feel the comment misses the mark and that I won’t act on it. The breakdown of comments was 68% INFO ONLY, 21% EVALUATE, and 11% DISAGREE.
My next step is I then export all that to a spreadsheet so I can more easily read through the comments in isolation. This lets me identify themes in the comments, issues that probably need action at more than one point in the book. Some of these larger themes/issues:
More about Irá’s enemies: Irá has three adversaries, people who betrayed her and put her in prison for 10 years. Their names are mentioned on page 11 or so, but then the next mention, of a single name, is 90 pages later. I needed to reiterate these names more and have Irá a bit obsess over them and what they did. Then when that name comes up, we know who it is.
Irá’s Regeneration: A major aspect of the main character Irá is that she is a 70-year-old woman in the body of a 10-year-old. I always knew why that was: Irá at age 70 wouldn’t have the stamina to go on a mission of revenge so she needed to rejuvenate – but because she’s impatient, doesn’t plan on subduing her enemies by main force but instead will out-think them, and because she wants to save money (hey, those months in the regen pod ain’t free!) she opts to stop at age 10. Like I said, I always knew this, but never put it in the book; I was too taken with just writing the action. But this needs to be in there, it grounds the character and let’s the reader concentrate on what happens next, vs. theorizing about why she is 10 years old.
Motivation. FORLORN TOYS has a fair bit of complexity, around how alien worlds are discovered, how languages are translated, how reapers compete by keeping secrets, etc. I’m afraid as I wrote the story I concentrated a lot on what was being done, and left out a lot of the why. For example, early on Irá takes on a reaping job for someone she knew in her previous life, like 50 years back. The what is to do an archeological survey, and I showed a ton about that, but the why, which was she did this in order to secure help in her revenge plot, was just not clear enough.
What does this look like in practice? Here’s a before and after for a motivation-related change:
BEFORE
But she had two distractions. First was the anticipation of Duncan Baird’s help with her master plan. She was certain Baird had contacts at Dross that could introduce him to Volkov, or to Abara or D’Amboise. . And there was some chance he might already be connected to one or more of them.
AFTER
But she had two distractions. First was the anticipation of Duncan Baird’s help with her master plan – luring her betrayers into a fake technology hunt. Between the archaic writings and the cube artifact, Irá was confident she had more that satisfied Duncan’s brief for Breezeway, and that should dispose him to help with her plans – using his contacts at Dross that could link to Volkov, or to Abara or D’Amboise. And there was some chance he might already be directly connected to one or more of them.
Calling a Halt
I’ve been working on making actual manuscript changes for three weeks now. All told I’ve added 3,400 words. That’s about the length of a chapter, but of course it’s scattered across the whole story. Now I’m going to do a short line-edit for repeats and adverbs, then a full line-by-line read through. I’m hoping that’s no more than 1 week. After that, it will be preparing a package to send to agents.
I will say I’m optimistic about the revisions I’ve done. One big reason is I always intended for Irá’s character to change from a self-centered person obsessed with avenging wrongs she’s suffered, to someone who is more aware of the amazing scope of the universe and the futility of revenge, vs. justice. Irá’s actions all fit with that story, but if we don’t hear from her the why, we can’t understand her change.
Anyway, happy to report this time “revision” was not a Twilight Zone of mirrors and no path out … with all the high-quality feedback from my beta-readers and editor I think I was able to focus on things that made FORLORN TOYS a better book.
Maybe next post I’ll share about agents, query letters, synopses and all that … but that will be less of a Twilight Zone and more of a Valley of RejectionDespair umm, Optimism. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
That time of year, for a look back at what I’ve read since Last January 1. First a quick writing update:
Have gotten a fair amount of beta feedback on FORLORN TOYS and I have to say, it looks good. Some of the positive feedback I’ve received was about pace – several readers said “page turner”! Also the cast of characters and the multiple points-of-view structure of the book seem to be working. Now, the book is in the hands of my developmental editor. That process will look at the foundations of the book – worldbuilding, characters, plot – and will weigh in on how they can be improved. I expect to get that report a bit before Christmas, and then I’ll take stock on what updates/revisions to do.
Meanwhile I’ve already started work on the follow-on. Don’t want to say much so early, but I will give the title: THE HUNGRY JUDGES. It’s inspired by some lines from Pope:
… declining from the noon of day, the sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; the hungry Judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jury-men may dine.
– Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Now, on to the books!
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Adam Roberts’Lake of Darkness is a “concept” book. The blurb proclaims this, when it says “Good is a construct. Evil is a virus.” So, how did the concept read?
The book has big ideas that are pretty cool. The main plot is kicked off when two FTL spaceships meetup to investigate a black hole. Someone on one of the ships, without warning, murders all their crewmates. The crew of the second ship intervenes and among the things they find out is there are some sort of signals coming *from* the black hole – which of course, should not be possible. Another cool thing is a subplot about a thrill-seeking adventurer, kind of like a present-day YouTuber, who proposes to walk on the metallic core of a planet. This is an undertaking of mega-proportions, including excavations of tunnels leading to aforesaid core. Finally there’s lots of sciencey and social evolution stuff just thrown out there without much comment – for example, we learn that Nobel prizes are now handed out based on worldwide popular vote, and so there are tens of thousands of such prizes every year. Coming back to the “evil is a virus” thing, as the book unfolds we see that the compulsion to murder that seized the person from the first starship is a bit contagious.
How does all this work, as a book? I give it very high props for inventiveness but in the end the story did not bring me anywhere. Not that I expect or want a Hollywood ending with Hallmark-style moral, but when I reached the end I was disappointed the inventiveness did not say more.
One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson is a short work, 128 pages. It starts out on a colony planet, a hardscrabble place. A young girl, Ella, is on a fieldtrip with her schoolmates to the place where a spaceship landed everyone some years back. The setting is meadow and forest, and Ella claims to have seen a rabbit. But we immediately learn that all of this is a computer simulation, created by Ella’s Dad. And Ella knows more about what has happened to bring everyone there than other people know. Things are going wrong in the simulation – there used to be birds but now they’re gone, and the truck that took the class on the fieldtrip suddenly disappears. A mysterious “Technician” will soon arrive and supposedly they will fix everything.
I won’t recap the whole plot, I’ll just say a lot of it is about Daddy-issues – Ella is actually 60-some years old but her father has locked Ella’s simulation at about the 5 year-old level. The meaning of the book’s title is this: Ella discovers there’s simulations within simulations within simulations. And there’s a bit of a found family ending, with Ella exploring the multiverse with some new comrades. So pretty good SF worldbuilding and story, but I would have preferred less Daddy-issue stuff.
Speaking of found-family, You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo is 100% that. The subtitle of the book, “The Disco Space Opera Book 1”, totally proclaims what you’re going to get. The main character Niko Larson is a female former admiral in the space force of the “Hive Mind”, a kind of Borg-like galactic power. With Nico are a motley crew of former teammates, including: Dabry, an eight-foot-tall, four-armed alien with Iron Chef-level cooking skills; the squidlike Skidoo; and Thorn and Talon, twin were-lions. The title of the book is the name of the sentient ship that the gang commandeers and makes their own.
How to describe the book? Umm, stuff happens, I guess. A lot of stuff. The two biggest bits involve an exiled space princess and a vengeful space pirate. Come to think of it, there’s very little in this book that can’t be reasonably prefixed by the word “space”.
How to sum up? Lake of Darkness and One Level Down were big idea books – LoD especially – and they made my head hurt hunting for deep meanings. You Sexy Thing is as close as you’re going to get to a plain ‘ol fun SF read, no deep thinking required.
It’s hard to establish a new book series. Worldbuilding is more important, you need a setting and premise that readers will want to visit over and over again. Character is always important, but for a series you need to make sure your character(s) have enough room to change and grow over multiple books. Finally, story has to be there, but no more than in a standalone – in fact you want plots that leave lots of stuff unanswered, so you can have more to write about in books 2, 3 and beyond.
The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton aspires to start a series. I’m afraid it falls short. It puts forth a space opera world with two major powers: The Unity, and The Assembly. The main character, ex-soldier Dalton Greaves, is a human who is working for Unity on first-contact missions. The problem in the story is that the Assembly sends a first contact team to the same planet where Dalton is working. So Unity and Assembly are competitors, and over the course of the action we find the Assembly are more compassionate and egalitarian than Unity. The title of the book comes from how the planetary matriarch takes a shine to Dalton and names him her consort – she already has 3, so he is the 4th.
The problem with this book is it’s too shallow. Dalton has little in the way of aspirations or problems – he’s a slightly confused everyman who serves as a vehicle to learn all the facts about the aliens, and about Unity and Assembly. In the final chapters I was skimming bigger and bigger chunks. Don’t think that I’ll look at any subsequent books in this series.
Here’s another series: These Burning Stars, the debut novel from Bethany Jacobs, and book 1 of a trilogy; it came out in 2023, books 2 and 3 came out in 24 and 25 respectively. As the winner of the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award I had high hopes for this book.
Alas, it fell short. This is another space opera. The dominant polity is called the Kingdom, and it has 3 ruling castes: Clerics, Secretaries (technocrat types) and “Cloaksaan” – soldiers. Their respective attributes are: Righteousness, Cleverness, and Brutality. As you might guess, there’s a grimdark vibe in this book, which is not to my taste. Among the main characters is Esek Nightfoot, a hyper-competent (I hate it more already) female cleric who is driven to dominate everything she encounters – politically, militarily, and sexually. Her seeming adversary is “Six” – in the Kingdom you have to earn your name and you’re referred to by a number until you’re 15 or so – or until you die. And – who would have seen this coming? – Six is the only being in the universe who can match Esek in skills, cunning and self-centeredness.
To which I say: Ho hum. There’s a zillion other characters in this book, and they are all defined by their relationship to Esek: fearful, worshipful, resentful and so on.
I did not finish These Burning Stars. It descended into one implausible encounter after another, so I guess you could say the burning stars fizzled.
Rivers of London is the first book in a very successful series of 10. The author Ben Aaronovitch has written for Doctor Who, Blakes 7 and other series, and was GOH at BOSKONE 2024. I had high expectations for this.
The worldbuilding in Rivers of London is tremendous. The idea of elves, faeries and animate spirits being real and hidden all around us has been used in many fantasy works, from War for the Oaks (which has a real claim as the first contemporary urban fantasy) to Harry Potter. Aaronovitch’s version has an earthiness to it, I think because his conception is so tightly tied to the places and vibe of London. On top, the notion that you have detectives who specialize in supernatural crime is also not new – “ghost detectives” have been a staple of Asian fiction for centuries. Again, bringing the idea into Scotland Yard and having rivalry with non-supernatural crime fighters made it fresh.
Now the bad news. This book desperately needs an edit. There are more than a few “traveloguey” sections of several pages where Aaronovitch waxes at length on the details of Covent Garden, or the decor of a river spirit’s flat. And the main character Peter Grant is not my fave, and in fact is kind of a jerk as his romantic interests oscillate between his human friend Lesley and various female animate spirits.
But still, I’m glad I read it. I can see why there were nine more after the intro.
I got Future’s Edge after reading a review in Locus, that said “Future’s Edge is a fun, generally fast-paced space opera.” Also the book’s blurb alluded to space archaeology, which also features in my work-in-progress FORLORN TOYS, so I thought I’d see this author’s take on it.
This turned out to be another story about a thrown-together band of plucky adventurers striving to save all life in the galaxy – no pressure, right? The archaeology was extremely light: sometime in the past the main character got exposed to a 50+ million year old alien artifact and something happened that essentially gave her super-powers. Now the plucky band is on a quest to get back to that artifact because it is the key to thwarting the “Cutters” – savage aliens bent on killing everything. One interesting fact: The main character, Ursula, has an ex-boyfriend, Jack, captain of the warship Crisis Actor. When Ursula meets up with Jack, he is now *married* to the Crisis Actor – it is an AI sentient ship that can manifest in a robotic humanoid body that, like Data from the Enterprise D, is clearly “programmed in multiple techniques”.
This book has a lot in common with You Sexy Thing. It could be that cozy Science Fiction is a bigger trend than I thought.
Next to last in SF & F is Slow Gods, by Claire North. I also came to this from reading a review in Locus, that ended “I hope Slow Gods will appear on awards ballots, best-ofs, and many to-be-read piles. I expect it to prove to be one of the best science fiction books of 2025.”
The book certainly lives up the the “slow” in its title. Now, I don’t need firefights and amazing discoveries on every page, but you have to give me something. The main character is named Mawukana na-Vdnaze, who thankfully goes by “Maw”. After some grim dealings on his home planet – there everything you do, including just being born, incurs debt – Maw is made to pilot a starship. Because of the way the author conceives of FTL travel, the brains of pilots rarely survive more than one trip. But something happens with Maw and it turns out he can survive and remember multiple trips. This makes him the natural vehicle to chronicle a slowly unfolding – over centuries, if not millennia – catastrophe of supernovae and the waves of destruction they project.
For me, all this chronicling is a major problem. I’m 33% into the book and I’ve yet to see Maw do anything. He sees, he relates what has happened, but not much else.
There is an aspect of the book I find maddening: tons of synthetic pronouns. Because there’s lots of alien species and lots of new, alien-specific genders, apparently he/her do not suffice. So we get sentences like “I looked to Rencki for advice, but whether because qe had none or qis processors were occupied elsewhere, qe said nothing.” Other formulations include xe, xer, xis, and te, ter, tis.
The Locus review pointed out cases of political allusion in the book. I’ve yet to really get that. The starting point of the society obsessed with debt is so heavy handed its more like a cartoon; I haven’t yet got to other political references. Regardless, I’m put in mind of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous dictum on the purpose of literature: “To entertain, and then to instruct.” So far, Slow Gods is not entertaining me.
Tales of Galactic Pest Control is 33 stories, mostly new, some old, and all about dealing with alien pests – or i should say, pests that are alien to the residents, as in a few stories it’s humans that are the pests. Here’s a sampling of what you get:
David Gerrold explains how tribbles came to be and what they really mean.
Stephen Chappell writes about Clyde and Ray from Acme Pest Control dealing with a transdimensional wuzzlesneus.
In a story from 1950, Reginald Pretnor relates how gnurrs come out of the woodwork, and how they can be used in war.
In the Slime of Life, Edward M. Lerner tells how a sentient planet deals with that most pernicious infestation, men.
This is old school SF story telling – much recommended.
Writing
When I got Future’s Edge by Gareth Powell, Amazon had a deal where I could get About Writing for free. This is a “craft” book – the category writers use for books about how to write.
For me personally it was not super-enlightening, but if I had read it 3 years ago, it would have had a much greater impact on me – it’s just that I’ve already absorbed a lot of what Powell writes about through other books and experiences. But if you are interested in writing and want to explore making a go of it, this is the most inclusive book I’ve encountered. The structure is great. It starts with practical advice on how to organize as a writer – for example you have to take a lot more notes than you probably think – Powell’s recommendation that note-taking and idea recording have to be part of your day-to-day is solid. Likewise, his emphasis on knowing what your book is about – the theme and the idea, as to opposed what happens in it – is spot on. Then the book goes on to more detailed topics: Knowing your genre; How to get published; Finding an agent; Working with editors; Marketing your book; and so on.
The book has lots of Powell’s own experiences and techniques, which makes it more real-seeming. One of those examples gave me the one really new thing I got out of this book: I’ve been seeking an agent for 2 years now. In that time I’ve got hundreds of rejections. Many say “I just didn’t fall in love with your book”. That made me grumpy – what is this, Valentine’s Day? But Powell pointed out that getting an agent who doesn’t love your book makes no sense – how can they wholeheartedly sell it otherwise? Now while those rejections still sting, its not the fall-in-love part that’s responsible.
Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, a 2025 Hugo winner, was an eye-opening book. You can’t be an SF fan, much less an author, without having awareness of the connections the genre has to the far right: You probably know about sad puppies, that Heinlein had a strong affinity to right-wing tropes, or that Orson Scott Card is highly homophobic. But for all that, I always had the sense the genre, almost by definition, was inherently forward looking and would leave those negative ideas behind.
Speculative Whiteness paints a grimmer picture. On the 1st page you learn how the first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by an SF fan, who was in turn inspired by a far-right SF author. From there the book jumps to define metapolitics – a political model that leverages popular culture to build a sense of inevitability or inherent rightness behind a movement’s ideas. The book’s thesis is that the far-right connection to SF is a metapolitical strategy intended “to transform white nationalism from an unthinkable possibility into an inevitable future.” A critical bulwark of this strategy is the worldview that only white-people are mentally equipped to envisage the future. Every time a far right figure asserts that people of color are unable to plan rationally and can’t resist acting impulsively, they are laying claim to the idea that only white people can create meaningful SF.
The book has 4 sections: An introduction explaining metapolitics; “Invaders from the Future”, that covers Nick Land, the appropriation of geeks and nerds as natural alt-right members, and how genetics will eventually lead to a “marching morons” world that the nerds have abandoned ; “Whitey on the Moon” about the tension of NASA spending to send white people out to explore, vs. the ignored plight of non-white people; and a conclusion, “Tomorrow Belongs to Everyone,” a short piece that highlights recent progressive SF responses to the alt-right.
Speculative Whiteness could be “too much information” for the average fan. But if you care about the genre and/or intend to work in it, I would say it is an essential read.
Although Reverse Colonization, by David M. Higgins, is cited in Speculative Whiteness, that is not how I happened on the book. I came across it in this Substack, by Noah Berlatsky.
The subject of the book is stories where white people end up on the receiving end of being colonized. Probably the best well known such story is Wells’ War of the Worlds. Why do these stories exist? The book cites several drivers:
By claiming the role of the victim, colonizing societies perceive justification for their actions.
Through the acts of resistance typically presented, colonizers create a narrative of their own resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.
This is a dense book that examines its subject from many angles. For example the chapter “Victims of Entropy” looks at the writing of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, relative to the theme of imperial decay. Higgins asserts that Elric – sickly and weak – represents the British Empire and the his sword, StormBringer – black, vampiric and addictive – represents colonialism, which the Empire is trying to break away from but never totally can. Too florid of an analysis? Maybe, but I can’t deny it is thought provoking.
A data point on how relevant this is outside of SF: The Substack I linked to at the start of this bit is entitled “How Fascism Explains Trump’s Tariffs.” In the article Berlatsky notes how often Donald Trump says other countries are “ripping us off”, “making us look like fools”, and “they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before … nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” What Trump is claiming is victimhood – just like the white characters in reverse-colonization stories are victims – to justify his tariffs.
This is not a book for fans, or even very many writers. But it is a great guide to the more esoteric underpinnings of the SF genre.
“Wonderful” is the literal best way I can describe Adam Roberts’Fantasy: A Short History. Despite the qualifier in the title, the book is encyclopedic: it covers everything from Gilgamesh through Beowulf through Bunyan, the Victorian Era, the fantasy trends and sub-genres of the 20th century, and the same for the 21st. Through all that Roberts mostly keeps an intriguing thread: Despite the common wisdom that Fantasy is somehow “about the past” and Science Fiction “about the future”, Roberts contends the opposite is true. Over and over again SF takes something in the past – like WW2 – and projects those same circumstances onto an imagined future; while Fantasy concerns itself with worlds that never have been, but could be. Some highlights:
The Ballantine and DAW Books Fantasy “boom” of the 70s and 80s.
Romantasy, Grimdark, and Video Games.
This is a scholarly book, but highly readable. Recommended for authors and fans alike.
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a book in the mold of Fantasy: A Short History – though I should say the other way round, as Fussell’s book preceded Roberts’ by decades, and takes on a culturally much more significant topic.
The “modern” in the title means much more than “recent” or “up to date”. It is an attempt to capture how different an effect the Great War had on the psyche than previous wars. The pre-modern memory would recall wars as epic, tragic, ennobling, or any other of many grand literary themes. For Fussell, the memories his war invoked were ironic, futile, pathetic. The Great War was not merely larger in scope – it was an entirely different thing than any war that had come before.
Literature is Fussell’s context to examine these memories. The range he covers is vast: the troglodyte metaphors of the trenches; the naming of the enemy, “he”, while the British are always “we”; mythic appearances, like the Angels of Mons; the “theater” of war as both reality and farce; and the pastoral homoeroticism of “soldier boy” stories.
I can’t convey in this little space what an affecting book this was for me. Anyone who proposes to write about war in any fashion must read this book – along with, I would say, John Keegan’sThe Face of Battle, published in 1976, a year after The Great War and Modern Memory.
In the late 90’s, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, long time stalwarts of the SF genre, started a regular column in the SFWA Bulletin about the business aspects of writing. Ultimately they put out 47 such columns, most of which are compiled in The Business of Science Fiction.
The articles here date from 1998 to 2010, so this is a bit of an historical document. Even in 2007 Resnick and Malzberg were skeptical on e-books, holding that while they would eventually become popular it would take a long time. That very year the Kindle was introduced. In 2007 the global ebook market was $33 million. In 2024, it was $20-40 billion.
Yet other of their observations seem to me very relevant. Resnick had a great example on differences between agents: His first agent always sold to the same publisher and never made any foreign rights sales; he switched to a new agent that ran auctions for his books, and made 31 foreign sales in 18 months. I’d love to have problems like those – hope I get there.
Their take on conventions was interesting (Malzberg anti, Resnick pro) and their collective advice on professionalism seemed to me spot-on. One chapter titled “False Doctrines” seemed a good take on how wrong common wisdom can be. Example, in 2008 they both advised to skip the common-wisdom first step of selling a bunch of short works to magazines and then start trying to do novels. Even then the short fiction market was radically shrinking and they were right to call this out.
But in the end I have to say this was mostly a nostalgic look at a world that has since radically changed.
Non-Fiction
The first presidential election I voted in was 1980. I recall the decade as perplexing. Inflation was high – 13% – but Volcker got it down to 1% by 86. Reagan fired air traffic controllers, cut taxes, was important in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Myself, my wife and lots of our friends didn’t agree with what was happening, but all in all things didn’t seem so terrible. I daresay the years since have made clear a different conclusion.
It is the late Reagan era where John Ganz’ book, When The Clock Broke, begins. In it we learn how all the things that are so radically, tragically wrong today had their seeds in the late 80s and early 90s. Among the characters Ganz profiles:
David Duke, avowed KKK member and author of a sex-help book for women. While he won only a single election, for Louisiana State Representative (he served 2 years,) over time he ended up normalizing white supremacy as a political position.
Ross Perot, loopy populist billionaire (sound familiar?) who actually wanted to increase taxes on the rich (*not* familiar).
Pat Buchanan, anti-foreign intervention, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and likely anti-semite.
Newt Gingrich, one of the originators of winner-take-all, zero-compromise politics.
The book ends with the election of Clinton, the very year that The End of History was published, arguing that liberalism would be the dominant political theme of the years to come. That didn’t quite happen, though today various pundits and politicians are talking about “what comes after” Trump and MAGA. When The Clock Broke shows how the roots of the MAGA movement are deeper than just Trump … in that light, the MAGA movement may last longer than expected.
If you are interested in politics, this is highly recommended.
Abundance by NYT columnist Ezra Klein and contributing writer at The Atlantic Derek Thompson has been the subject of mixed responses from Progressives. On one hand many like it because it optimistically echoes the big goals of the New Deal era; on the other, many condemn it as inherently elitist and non-responsive to the most important injustices in the US. So, what is “abundance”?
The core idea is that the origin of many of our most pressing problems, around housing, energy and transportation to name a few, is in scarcity. Housing is super-expensive because there is not enough of it. Same for energy. The argument Klein and Thompson make is this scarcity is an unintended consequence of government policies – many of them supported by progressives – that individually are reasonable but in the aggregate create major roadblocks to making new stuff. An oft-cited example in the book is the California High-Speed Rail Project. Originally conceived in 1996, the idea floundered for years without a clear vision. In 2008, voters approved $33 billion for it. In 2011 when Jerry Brown returned to the governorship, he made it his signature project. The Obama administration strongly supported the project. But in 2018 Brown started lowering expectations, and Newsom, governor since 2019, dinged the project as too costly and taking too long. Today construction is active on only 119 miles of track, out of a total length of 776 miles.
The cause of this non-progress? The book submits it is the massive amount of negotiation – over eminent domain, over environmental impact, with unions, and more – that holds everything back. While many might debate the conclusion, its hard to get over the fact that in Canada – which has laws, government, and unions much as we do – builds a kilometer of rail for $295 million, while in the US it costs $609 million.
Abundance by itself is not the answer we need. But ignoring its arguments risks condemning us to the same old/same old. Highly recommended.
The Notebook, by Roland Allen, is a kind of book I love: Exploration of a workaday, overlooked bit of history that has had unexpected impact over centuries. The title tells you what it is about. Some highlights:
Paper first was manufactured in volume in 13th century Italy. Empty ledgers were among the very first things made from the paper.
Ink can easily be scraped off parchment, but it sinks permanently into paper and can’t be erased. Italian merchants seized on this property and starting recording financial information in notebooks. Around this time they invented double-entry bookkeeping.
In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer was an English diplomat in the court of Genoa. There he learned about Italian commercial innovations, read the Decameron, and became a convert to the Italian practice of zibaldone – a vernacular journal where one copied passages from books you read, before the valuable book was returned to its owner.
This book encompasses a lot – police notebooks, author’s notebooks, journaling as self-care, naturalists notebooks and too much more to list. If you have an interest in the important minutiae of history, this book is for you.
I’m reviewing Farewell To Reality and The Ant Mill together because they are both about the same thing: The state of theoretical physics today and how it got there. I read these books because in THE HUNGRY JUDGES, theoretical physics plays a part, and I want to get a sense of the terrain.
I daresay most SF fans have at least heard of The Standard Model, String Theory or possibly Quantum Gravity. The Standard Model is the framework of particles, forces and their interactions that make up matter and energy: protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, bosons, fermions, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, stuff like that. The Standard Model doesn’t have a good answer for gravity – it postulates gravity is “transmitted” by a particle, the graviton, but this has not yet been proven. The first bits of the Standard Model date from the 1920’s, and its greater part was in place by the late 80s. In 2013 the Higgs Boson was confirmed.
The Standard Model explains a lot but not everything. So for decades that is exactly what many physicists have been pursuing – a Theory of Everything that unifies Relativity and what it says about space and gravity with the Standard Model. String Theory first emerged in the late 1960s and has been through too many iterations and side-branches to count. Quantum Gravity is more of a category that encompasses many discrete theories, like Loop Quantum Gravity, M Theory, or Noncommutative Geometry.
Jim Baggot and Jesper Grimstrup in their respective books cover the landscape I’ve outlined. But their purpose is not purely informational; they jointly make the same case, that, for decades theoretical physics has been stuck in a closed loop, making no progress. The crux of this is how these candidate theories are virtually pure mathematics – while the relevant super-complex equations may balance out, there’s no way to experimentally prove their assertions. Without the pressure and confirmation of experiment, this work devolves into a kind of navel-gazing tribal activity – Grimstrup cites personal experiences of how certain conferences are informally “String Theory only” while others are “Loop Quantum Gravity only.” Researchers work on papers that are increasingly small refinements of their chosen tribal theory. And they have many co-authors, because in the physics science establishment, numbers of publications and numbers of citations all add up to more grant money.
If you are interested in this, YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist herself, has many videos on the topic.
So in my layman’s reading, the human race is not much closer to a “Theory of Everything” than it was 30 years ago. Maybe for me as an SF writer that’s good – since the specific answers to this stuff are not known, then I can just make stuff up! My main candidate to steal from is The Information Theoretic Universe.
And The Winner Is …
My favorite book of 2025 is not going to win a Hugo, be a bestseller, or even a medium-seller. It’s a Fantasy story with likeable, grounded characters, enough of a plot to keep you reading, an easy-going style, and *not* grimdark but with an optimistic message. It is a very authentic book, that is no more than it needs to be.
The book is Whisperlights, by Canadian Philosophy professor/Author Brendan Myers. In it we meet the twelve year-old Athena Kildare, her mother and father, and mysterious wizard/mentor Dubhdarra, who Athena claims materialized into a man out of a flock of birds. Dubhdarra gives Athena a magic token that will allow her to call upon him three times, then departs into mists. Not long after, Athena her parents, and her whole village are abducted by soldiers, as laborers or conscripts.
This is where the journey begins. Athena must abide her captivity a while, growing and learning. When the time is right, she breaks free. Then, aided by chance companions and sporadically guided by the faerie-like whisperlights, she seeks the Scatterlands, which contain the Gates of Morning. There, Athena will demand of the gods why they allow so much injustice in the world.
No, it is not a super-philosophical, allegorical kind of book, and that’s one of the reasons I like it. Myers keeps a light touch on his theme, with a good flow of action and rest, success and betrayal, all the stuff a good genre story should deliver. And the ending, I daresay very true to his Canadian outlook, is entirely common-sensical.
I’m looking forward to this author’s next books – I hope others will check him out.
Whew! A longish post, to be sure, hope people will get something out of it. Let me close with a snippet from the just-started THE HUNGRY JUDGES, where one of our heroes, Promakos, is talking with their aide de camp Andrew:
“It took some doing, but I have contrived a shipment for Vargas Station, fifty-four containers classed as ‘repair components’. At the same time, I have completed arrangements with the factor on Zerua for twelve kilograms of plutonium 239, also to be delivered to Vargas. Finally, all non-Hellenic operations on the station have terminated, everyone not an H-S employee has vacated.”
Promakos inclined their head gently.
“Excellent! No one can do logistics like a soldier – you have my thanks.”
Andrew blew out their cheeks.
“Don’t thank me yet. The time may come when you wish I had not enabled you to build three fusion bombs.”
“Four, or possibly five,” Promakos corrected. “I believe we can improve on standard designs and use less plutonium per package.”
“I wonder why we even need one,” Andrew gave back, almost wistful in his tone.
“Andrew, I daresay when we are certain of the need, it will be too late to build that one bomb.”
Another writing milestone reached: Just after Labor Day I finished the draft of my 2025 work, FORLORN TOYS. Now a bit more than 3 weeks later, I’ve done my first round of copy edits and the draft is ready to be read! What was up with that, you say? How can you be “done” but not done? Before the draft can be usefully read by others, I had to deal with 3 main things:
Handling repeated words
I read back to myself everything I write, and I read it aloud to Kim. That identifies a lot of awkward wording or construction. But a lot sneaks by. An example:
Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was available on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known, and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.
The two “availables”s just look and sound clunky. So that gets changed to:
Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.
This is a simple example. There were literally 1000s of such repeats to examine, the majority of which are perfectly Ok.
“I must expunge every last adverb,” said Tom editorially.
Doubtless many of you recognize a Tom Swifty when you see it. In this case, it’s no joke – too many adverbs in your text do make it read like a dime-store offering from a bygone time. Two examples I seemed to have used a lot were softly, and barely. I also got flagged for perpetually but that’s alright – the name of the heroes’ spaceship (and a minor star of the story I might add) is the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander.
Getting Consistent
Consistency may be be the hobgoblin of little minds, but in a book it counts for a lot. If in chapter 3 you say, “This trip will take seven whole days”, and in chapter 5 when the trip is done someone says “Well, that was a well-spent five days”, believe me, readers will notice.
Consistency is more than just timelines. Here’s one thing I found in going through my draft: About midway in the story the heroes find an important fact, that a certain person went to a certain star-system at a certain time. They learn this from a transponder on the relevant spaceship. Later in the story, the heroes need to locate that star system, and they use a very cool way to do that. But as I went through the book start to finish, it hit me: Didn’t the transponder thing already tell them that answer? The cool method I mentioned is necessary to the story line and I couldn’t drop it. So I had to go back and change the details of what the transponder was able to determine.
“Complete but there are probably bugs”
After decades developing software it’s too much to hope for that I would forget what a beta release is: Code that has been updated to include a target group of features, but that likely contains defects. The same concept applies to fiction: The story is complete but likely contains defects. But, how can a story have a “defect”? It’s not like we’re launching a rocket and downcasting a critical 64-bit floating point number into a 16-bit integer. Isn’t a story’s quality purely a subjective thing? No, not really.
For example, if a story tells us multiple times a character is a math genius, but then math never comes into the story, that’s a defect – we’ve confused and probably disappointed the reader by getting them to expect something and then not delivering. Pretty much all readers will have that poor experience. Another common defect involves settings: the story is set in a place that is either under- or over-described, or in place that has no connection to the plot and the characters. Again, the reaction to this kind of thing is pretty universal.
Certainly there some issues that bother some readers more than others. An example is the science in science fiction. Some SF readers are more interested in character or theme, and gloss over hand-wave-style magic technology. Others have a higher bar – they want to read about things that have at least some possibility of being consistent with real science.
The list of possible problems an author might have in their newborn book is long: unconvincing characters, sluggish pacing, confusing structure, dialog that sounds the same for everyone, unbelievable or unsatisfying plot turns, and so on. Of course I myself have opinions on whether those things are issues in my book, but I am also not objective and, after spending 9+ months staring at and typing the story, my brain is a bit numb to it. So I need other people to read the book and tell me what they think is wrong, or right, about it.
So far I have 6-5 “friends & family” beta-readers, and 3 paid beta-readers. All of of these are equally valid and important to me. But the feedback from the paid readers does have an extra benefit: these readers typically are English teachers, librarians, editors, or other writers, and so their feedback will speak directly to principles of the writing craft. They will say things like “Character XYZ’s personal stakes were not compelling”, “Supporting character ABC’s sub-plot is too thin” or “The build of tension in act 2 is too slow”. But still, it’s absolutely valuable to me to hear from regular readers “The plot seemed far fetched” or “This part made no sense” – it’s all important.
Sign up today!
I still could use more beta-readers so if you’d like to give it a try, drop me an email at: author (at) wild-puma (dot) com. FORLORN TOYS is about 92,000 words, typical size for a present-day SF novel. Here’s a short blurb that tells what you’d be getting into:
Irá Norlander – a 70-year-old woman in a regenerated 10-year-old body – wants revenge against the 3 false friends who stole from her the greatest discovery of extinct alien technology ever found. But as she searches for weapons to use against her enemies, she discovers how so many intelligent species became extinct, and how humanity could suffer the same fate.
Been a while since my last posting here, I’ll go through updates on various things.
Kim getting better
Wife Kim (https://string-or-nothing.com) continues to get stronger and have an easier time doing day to day tasks. In-home PT visits have ended, and now she does out-patient PT. Included in her daily routine are things like clamshells, between-the-knees ball squeeze, step-ups, and 1000s of cane-aided walking steps.
BTW, Kim’s cane, a carbon-fiber and molded composite affair, like all legendary tokens, has a name: Ichabod. Yes, you heard it right.
We’re soon to start the (hopefully!) last therapeutic process of the year. From the last week of August to end of October, Kim will be receiving proton beam radiation five days a week. We have yet to learn the details but it seems likely this will be a stereotactic method, where CAT-scans are used to aim the proton beams with very high precision. The point of all this is to reduce the chance of the original cancer recurring by zapping the specific precursor cells.
Can‘t I have just a little peril?
The peril at Castle Anthrax isn’t exactly what I mean here … I mean real live, big stakes, life-the-universe-and-everything peril. No, I’m not contemplating a new identity as an Evel Knievel or Felix Baumgartner. It’s just that I’m writing a new SF novel, FORLORN TOYS, and like all genre fiction, there has to be peril to get readers interested.
Of course most readers know this, at some level at least. The peril in Lord of the Rings is violent subjugation of an entire world. The threat of that peril is what gets Frodo out of the Shire, what gets the Fellowship on the road, and what drives Sam to stick things out to the bitter end.
Simple, right? Not really. LoTR puts forth many layers of peril, such as the peril of losing innocence, or the peril of losing an ancient culture. In an important exchange, Sam tells Faramir that “Boromir brought his peril with him” into Lórien, but thinks he has said too much. Faramir replies:
‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace! And be comforted, Samwise. If you seem to have stumbled, think that it was fated to be so. Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes.’
In the best stories, the peril comes at you from multiple directions, at multiple levels.
Violent and imperialistic overthrow of an existing order or population is the overwhelmingly most used peril in SF and Fantasy. The peril in War of the Worlds was pretty one-dimensional: Technologically advanced aliens from Mars are attacking with an intent to dominate White European culture (reverse-colonialization story!) The galaxy being ruled by the sadistic Harkonens is the main peril in Dune and, being a pretty good book, there’s a secondary peril in that being ruled by Paul Atreides might be worse. There’s too many similar examples to count. All of these were motivated in large part by the advent of 20th century large-scale mechanized warfare, followed by nuclear weapons. These were things that a great many people worried about, so stories that take those possibilities and show the what-ifs – mostly with the good guys living through it – make complete sense.
But is apocalyptic war the only peril that readers want to read about? Well, no. The most common peril in mystery stories is Justice defeated or avoided – a murderer goes uncaught. No one wants that, because we want to think better of the world and that evil-doers will pay for their crimes. Often that gets paired with a psychological peril on the part of the detective: Will I fail to prove myself? Will I fail someone I care about? A top favorite of mine in mysteries is Nero Wolfe who, aided by man-of-action Archie Goodwin, solves a wide range of murders. The peril in these stories is always, Will Nero Wolfe lose self-esteem and not live up to his reputation as a genius. This is a great example of how peril can be personal and small in scale yet still be fun to read.
Romance stories also have peril: Will I live my life alone? or some form of that. The universality of that peril is a major reason romance so strongly outsells SFF.
Back to SF, a class of peril that took root in the 80s, along with Cyberpunk, I call corporate peril. In these stories, a company is typically seeking unbreakable economic power, as a prelude to political power. Think The Tyrell Corp in BladeRunner/DADOES, or evil CEO L. Bob Rife in SnowCrash. Like total-war was the go-to peril for the boomer generation, corporate peril was the same for Gen X.
The details of storytelling peril come and go every decade, but there are some things that are constant:
The peril can be beat. Wouldn’t do much good to write a story with a problem that has no solution – “Jack tried to trick the Giant, but he just got killed” is not bestseller material. Sauron is vulnerable to the destruction of the Ring, the Harkonens are mystified by the weirding way, and the Hindu god pretenders of Lord of Light are unable to counter Buddhism.
The victory has to be credible. Of course we want our heroes to beat the bad guys, but they have to do it the right way. If the enemy is overcome too easily, or if some unexpected help arrives at the very last second, or if the enemy dialogs their plans telling the hero their secret weakness – all of those are weak. We need our heroes to believably suffer for their victories.
The clock is ticking … Almost all genre story climaxes have a time-limited aspect. James Bond defusing an atomic bomb is a cliche (but fun) example. In LoTR as Frodo and Sam approach Mount Doom, the armies of Sauron are close to overrunning the forces of the West; if Aragorn and Gondor are lost, destroying the ring would be a Pyrrhic victory. What you will see in story after story is, there comes a point where the heroes can’t fall back and regroup – that have to win now or all is lost. This keeps the reader engaged until – hopefully! – your unexpected way of succeeding kicks in, just in time.
Knee Deep In Peril
Why, you might ask, am I delving so deep into these perilous waters? It’s because at 79,000 words, my draft of FORLORN TOYS is now at the climactic ending chapters. While I have shown a lot of peril all through the story so far, the heroes don’t yet understand the full origins or extent of their enemy. That’s a good thing. LoTR was able to give a detailed picture of the threat of Sauron right in chapter 2, but that only worked because of the astounding worldbuilding that Tolkien had done – we know from the start the whole world is in peril, but only after 3 books do we really understand enough about that world to feel the real extent of that. So, not having that option, I have to more slowly unfold the details of the peril, which builds tension chapter by chapter, and makes for some – again, hopefully! – cool reveals in the climax.
Here’s an outline of my method:
Something I set down some time back was a high-level description of the bad guys’ capabilities: where they come from, and what they can do.
Based on that I had to do some thinking on what weaknesses were implied in that description.
I then set down 5 different options on how the good guys could prevail.
For each one I listed strengths and weaknesses, mainly using the rubric above, things like: How is the approach time-limited? Is it cliché or deus ex machina?
An additional factor to consider: future books in the series. In genre fiction, once a strategy has been used, it’s not expected to work again. So the strategy for book 1 has to succeed, but not leave the door open to just rinse-and-repeat in subsequent books.
Then, with some comments from Kim, I pick one out of the 5 and we’re off to the chapter races.
I’m happy with the result. Now, just 4 fairly short chapters to go; I’m aiming for a total of 90,000 words or less.
I’ll leave you with a bit from the draft. The heroine, Irá Norlander, is explaining to spaceship captain Judd Maddox something about information theory. Judd’s spaceship is named the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander:
“What do you think about information Judd?” she asked.
“Me? You mean, facts? Like, what facts do I know?”
“No, no – how would you define ‘information’, in general?”
Judd sat on Irá’s bunk and thought a moment. “Well, it would be facts, I suppose. Facts about things.”
“And then, are things that are not facts therefore not information?”
Judd thought once again.
“Tricky,” he said. “Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“I’m going to tell you something, Judd. Pay attention,” she said. Judd sat up straight and she continued.
“‘The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander is a little tweeting bird, chirping in a meadow.’ There, was that information?”
This is one of the more blatant easter eggs in the book, but I like it.
Had an interesting experience the past week at a virtual writers’ conference. The instructive sessions were good. One was on defamiliarization, a technique where familiar things or situations are presented in ways that are unexpected or not obvious. The presenter showed great examples from Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet, like this one:
Of course, this is a non-obvious way of presenting a sunburn.
During the conference I also had two opportunities to make a 10-minute pitch of my book STONE BY STONE to agents. The goal in these meetings is to get the agent to request your manuscript, which they would eventually read. Alas, I did not succeed in that, but I did get valuable feedback, about sub-genres in science fiction.
The vast majority of agents post what is commonly known as their MSWL, manuscript wish-list, the kind of books they are looking for. An example:
I am actively looking for:
Fantasy and space opera with lush, vivid worlds and complex political intrigues with deeply personal stakes. Always enjoy: deadly decadent courts, intricate religious orders, knife-to-throat romance. Especially eager for epic/historic fantasy worlds with cultural inspirations outside Europe from authors who know their way around those cultures and histories (Egyptian! Aztec! Ottoman!)
…
(BTW, this brief is an exact fit for Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine … space-opera inspired by Byzantine and Aztec empire.)
Hard vs. Soft
Many MSWLs list things the agent is *not* looking for. One of the agents I pitched called out that while she was interested in science fiction, she was not looking for hard science fiction. I decided to pitch to her anyway, because her reputation was impressive and I wanted to hear her thoughts, and because I felt STONE BY STONE is not hard science fiction.
Turns out I was wrong.
My appreciation of SF, for good or bad, originates in the 70s and 80s. I read everything by Asimov and Heinlein, everything by Jack Vance, and tons of other stuff, from Greg Bear to David Brin to Dan Simmons. What got fixed in my mind then is this: Asimov, Clarke, Bear, Niven and Pournelle – hard SF. Authors like Leguin were absolutely not hard SF, because their stories were inventive social commentary more than science. And for me, space opera, like CJ Cherryh and much of Vance, also did not equal “hard” SF, because their plots don’t necessarily turn on a scientific problem. For Vance in particular, his stories could be transported to modern day exotic settings and still work.
I think this was once true. Decades ago the SF-reading population was vastly smaller and was dominated by hardcore fans who took delight in the subtle differentiations I described. No SF reader of the 1970s would put Clarke and Vance in the same category.
But today, all is changed. The Google consensus is that 10-20% of all readers in the US read some science fiction. That’s millions of people. The vast majority of those readers buy one, maybe two SF books in a year. Looking at these facts, something one of the agents said to me makes perfect sense … Your book has spaceships and other planets – it’s hard SF. I can see how today’s readers would care about that; rather than obsess over fine distinctions, they probably want to know quickly if a book is adventure-across-the-stars like The Expanse, vs. a near-future Earth-bound story like Black Mirror, where we find that life has become a hellscape due to sentient parking meters.
(Note to self: There might be a novel in that premise. Possible titles: YOUR TIME IS UP, or ADD DNA FOR AN ADDITIONAL 15 MINUTES.)
What to do about it?
Even though I didn’t get either agent to take my MSS, I still feel my two agent sessions were wins rather than losses: Their feedback gave me great clarity on how important genre categories are in the market, and how they are far more important to agents than for readers. The agent who I knew upfront didn’t take hard SF, explained to me she had an author in her list, a good author, whose new books she just cannot place because they are hard SF and she lacks the editorial contacts who are interested in that.
So, what are my take-aways?
Own Your Label
As a book, STONE BY STONE has a lot going on. The main part is an SF-thriller plot where the hero, Finn, ultimately thwarts a plan where an evil oligarchic faction tries to seize total power on Finn’s planet. The personal struggle for Finn in all that is, How do you live a moral life in an amoral society? But a quarter of the book presents events – some pretty exciting ones, I daresay – that show the backstory of the planet and the origins of Finn’s character. I think that part of the book is unique, and so did all my beta readers.
But now I see, I need to not lead with that in any way. First priority – get an agent to read the whole MSS. Then they can decide if my approach was good or not. So, I’m going to run with the hard SF label and even talk it up.
Suss the Competition
Among authors discussions on “writing to market” (ie, writing stuff similar to what sells) rarely arrive at an answer. On one side is the “write what you feel” faction, on the other is the “what’s the point if nobody reads what you write?” faction. But for someone like me, who doesn’t need to write to live, there’s no reason you can’t do both.
So, I need to get a bit in the weeds of what SF is coming out every week, look at the loglines and blurbs, and see if that leads to ideas on positioning STONE BY STONE. Amazon conveniently shows its bestsellers in hard SF. Not surprisingly, it’s dominated by Andy Weir, Murderbot, The Three-Body Problem, and The Expanse. So, I’m not going to be competing with those. But by sifting through the list you find things like
On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Anthropologist Claire Knowland is about to stumble upon a discovery that will rewrite human history. What begins as a routine excavation erupts into a high-stakes game of survival when her team unearths evidence of an ancient intelligence that defies everything we believed about evolution. But some truths are too dangerous to uncover. As corrupt officials and ruthless oligarchs close in, Claire finds an unlikely ally in geologist Sergei Anachev, who harbors a secret of his own. Together, they race against time to protect a discovery that could revolutionize our understanding of human consciousness—or get them both killed.
Of course I don’t mean I need to start writing military SF, or archaeological SF … though actually with FORLORN TOYS I’m already doing that. What I do need to do is try and pick up on what’s common in the vibe of these books and find a way for STONE BY STONE to leverage that. As the saying goes, publishers want new books exactly like the old books – except different.
Two months since I last posted here, because real life has decided to intrude on my curated existence. This intrusion was in the form of illness – my wife Kim (learn all about her at string-or-nothing) was diagnosed with a rare cancer, chordoma, that affects the bones of the spine. Now, by rare I mean a literal one-in-a-million chance; there’s about 300 cases per year in the USA.
This is not the time to do a lot of world-building, so I’ll jump right to the end of the chapter. The surgery to remove the tumor was successful and Kim is on the road to recovery. Things are going slow, today is the 4-week anniversary of Kim’s stay in hospital, and she will probably have anywhere from 1 to 2 more weeks in a rehab facility. Then after the return home there will be more to do, regaining mobility, navigating stairs, simple around-the-house tasks and so on. That’s all because the surgery she had was truly major and recovery can’t happen overnight. When I think of my own surgeries – replacements of knee and hip for example – those were like Dunkin Donuts drive-throughs in comparison to Kim’s.
Over this month my own mind has bounced back and forth between different states: Early on I was frozen a lot of the time, waiting for results and answers and trying not to dwell on possibilities. Then came a lot of boredom, as for about 3 weeks I’ve been doing frequent drives to Providence, RI (about 55 miles) and Newport, RI (about 85 miles). And there have been episodes of comfort and, dare I say, happiness, like when Kim and I shared lunch a few weeks back, she with a grilled cheese sandwich – the first solid food after the surgery – and me with a ham sandwich from home.
Lastly, I find I have been just plain ‘ol thinking a lot. Herewith some of my musings …
We live in a Sci-Fi world
Science fiction has for a long time conditioned us to think of the future as having magical technology improvements. In the golden age that was mostly about spaceships, space stations, rayguns, etc. Towards the end of the 20th century, the Star Trek replicator was the signature tech idea that defined the SF future. Nowadays, sci-fi tech tends to concentrate on AI and/or virtual worlds as the hallmarks of conceived futures.
But if you look at medicine, as my up-top picture suggests, the future is here already. Chordoma as a disease was first identified in the 19th century, but for over 150 years nothing could be done to treat it. Since these tumors attack the spine or the base of the skull, removing them without destroying or damaging important nerves is extremely difficult. In the early 1980s the first radiation treatments were performed. Success was marginal, as chordoma is a kind of tumor resistant to radiation. In the late 1990’s the surgical removal of these tumors was being explored. Kim’s surgeon Dr. Ziya Gokaslan authored one of the first papers on this technique, available from NIH here. Since then the state of the art has been improving year by year. In my layman’s view that is not just a matter of surgical skill improving, but comes from improvements in imaging, analysis and neuro-physiology. Before Kim’s procedure she had a high-resolution MRI that showed in 3D the shape and extent of the tumor, and the affected nerves, at millimeter resolution. That became the “map” Dr. Gokaslan used to perform the surgery. In the end stage of the surgery, Kim’s spinal nerves received treatment to promote nerve healing. And there’s also biomechanical advances, like the system of screws and struts that now secures Kim’s spine to the two halves of her pelvis.
While I’d welcome Dr. Crusher’s dermal regenerator – BTW something like it is being prototyped – I think what we already have is pretty sci-fi.
Hospitals can’t help but be chaotic
Even just by visiting the hospital – let alone being the inmate – it doesn’t take long to see that things do not exactly go like clockwork. Something that is expected to happen at 9 gets pushed to 11, then to 3, then the next day. Expected people don’t show up, while unexpected people do. Despite endless pages of digital medical records, people often don’t know the plan or what has already been done. Food services send the wrong thing, or sometimes forget you altogether.
I imagine the typical American finds this uncomfortable, if not downright infuriating. Imagine if you took your car for a 1-hour oil change and it ended up taking a week. Probably a lot of people can’t help but view their healthcare services the same way, expecting Jiffy-Lube promptness for all their medical interactions. Popular culture shows this in the MAX show The Pitt, where an impatient man waiting for hours in the ER begins to show violent tendencies.
Now I have no behind-the-scenes experiences for how hospitals work, but I do have guesses on why things perform the way they do. I think the core reason is in our own unpredictability as organisms. Despite all the technical advances I mentioned, no doctor or nurse can predict your future. Something that happened to Kim was about 12-13 days after the surgery, she developed a high fever. The cause was found to be a blood infection, an E. Coli bacteriemia. Dealing with this needed consults from multiple doctors, her original surgeons and an infectious disease specialist. New diagnostics needed to be done, and a special antibiotic, currently in short supply was required. At least 4 people had to drop what they were doing in order to respond to this event. Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of patients and it makes total sense (to me) that hospital sailing won’t always be smooth.
Even though you’re not typing you can still be writing
Last year at this time I was well over 50,000 words into the 1st draft of STONE BY STONE, my 2024 writing project. For this year’s project, FORLORN TOYS, I’m at about the 30K mark – not discreditable but definitely a slower build. A lot is just mental distraction over Kim’s health, as well as days spent visiting down south in RI. Of course I wouldn’t change anything, in a way writing is a luxury.
But I find that even while I have less time doing scenes and chapters, I still can review and think. Like most genre fiction, FORLORN TOYS has a layered story. There’s an immediate plot line that goes like this:
Alien-tech archaeologist Galena Craft made the most important find ever of extinct alien technology – then three people she considered friends betrayed her, handing over the tech to the unscrupulous Dross Corporation and sending Galena to ten years in prison. Now Galena, taking the name Irá Norlander and in a regenerated body of a 10-year-old, is on a quest for vengeance against her three betrayers.
A classic premise, if I may say, with similarities to The Count of Monte Cristo and Vance’ The Demon Princes. If I can’t make something entertaining out of that idea, it won’t be because the premise is weak.
But there’s also a bigger story, a mystery about the future world that Irá lives in: Why did all these alien races, with such cool technology, all go extinct? The answer to that will unfold over 3 books – one for each betrayer, got it? But, you have to know the answer to the mystery before you can write it.
That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about. I feel I’ve achieved a milestone: I have figured out the mechanism for these large-scale backstory events. I won’t give spoilers, but this “mechanism” is pretty epic in scope and has lots of potential to say things about the world. Now I need to work through scenarios using the mechanism, to satisfy myself they make sense for the narrative. The scenarios need to be credible to readers, not too complicated that they get in the way of the story, yet be rich enough that they offer a spectrum of possibilities.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In the Star Wars universe The Force is the magic macguffin: the writer needs something, the force will do it. For some reason, George Lucas decided in The Phantom Menace he needed to explain the mechanism of the force: midichlorians, kind of like magic bacteria. The only reason for this bizarre invention was to give an objective measurement to the potential force-power in the child Anakin Skywalker. Once we learn “his midichlorians are off the scale!” we never hear about these magic microbes ever again. This is an example of a bad narrative mechanism: shallow, unadaptable, unconvincing.
I’ll leave you all with some lines from FORLORN TOYS. Irá has been traveling with JUDD MADDOX, a former COM-MED trooper and now an amiable but nihilistic spaceship captain. Judd’s ship is named The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander, Perp or sometimes PUB for short. They are about to visit the surface of Earth, a first-time for Judd:
The rest of the burn Irá rested. There was nothing for Judd or PUB to do for the final dock with the shuttle station, all was handled by a Sol System nav-management satellite. They waited in silence outside the airlock a few minutes for the dock to complete. Judd seemed limp as he floated, looking down at his feet.
“All clear,” PUB announced. “See you in a few days, or a week, or I suppose whenever it suits you. Have a good time.”
The airlock opened. Irá squeezed Judd’s massive hand with her tiny one.
“What’s the matter, Judd?” she asked.
His reply was a mumble.
“It’s a great folly to appear in the marketplace.”
Irá laughed at that, and Judd turned, confused.
“I’m in the mood for folly – let’s go!”
I find I’m more and more of Irá’s mood – I hope next time to tell you of some folly I have committed. Till then …
Just this weekend past was my second BOSKONE, last year’s report is here. It was for us an abbreviated con, due to the snow here Saturday night we missed the sessions on Sunday. But still an enjoyable and, dare I say? inspiring event. Herewith some short observations on the con …
Short Fiction
I haven’t been too interested in trying to do short fiction. I guess that’s because I don’t read much of it, and the reason for that is I rarely find short pieces to be satisfying reads: to me they are too often trite or one-dimensional. A few things at the con have me rethinking that. First was a great panel entitled Editing Short Fiction: Turning Great Ideas Into Perfect Stories. Panelists included Neil Clarke, publisher/editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Scott H. Andrews, editor/publisher of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Ellen Datlow, past editor of OMNI Magazine, past editor of SCIFICTION (the fiction arm of the SCIFI Channel) and now anthology editor for Tor.com and Reactor.
While this panel looked at multiple facets of the industry and process of short pieces, it kept coming back to the same question: As an editor, what causes you to buy a story? The answers were not very specific, but they made sense – the story has to sparkle, has to grab you, has to shine somehow. Some quotes from the panelists: “It has to have heart and passion” and “Tell the story only you can tell.”
That absolutely resonated with me. And as I’ll recount down below, clicked with things I heard from the BOSKONE Guest of Honor.
Some other points … All the panelists utterly discounted the so-called “market” – ie, the notion that there is some theme-of-the-moment and writers need to write about that in order to sell. Again, what is important is the story is good. Neil Clarke explained the details of the system at Clarkesworld: He has 2-4 slush readers who go through submissions. They get about 1,100 each month. Clarke himself also reads some of the slush. The majority of slush stories are never read past the first two paragraphs or so. Stories that make it past the slush phase then are given full read-throughs and critiques. The majority of stories here are perfectly good writing – whether they go forward is a matter of whether they have that special quality: the combination of intensity, invention, and heart.
All panelists agreed the number 1 flaw they see in stories is the beginning is too slow – the “real” start to these stories tends to be at the 15-20% mark. Sometime a story is salvageable just by cutting the upfront stuff. Another common thing is the story is more of an intro than a story; Clarke said “It’s the second story here that I want.”
Here’s a hopeful point: All the editors declared strong interest in finding new authors; in fact Scott Andrews said that was one of his measurements of success.
Another window on short fiction was the kaffeeklatsche – round table discussion – I attended with Ellen Datlow. She’s a different sort of editor from Clarke and Andrews, now she works exclusively on anthologies featuring stories from established writers. An interesting bit here was how she overbooks each anthology by 30% or so, assuming a proportion of writers will drop out or not finish. Another thing was how the theme of the anthology is the selling point. Among the themes she’s done are: Homage stories for Edgar Allen Poe (all the invited authors wanted to riff on “The Telltale Heart”); Christmas; and “Body Horror” , featuring gruesome plastic surgery, organ harvesting and more. Her view was “Best of” or “Year’s Best” anthologies are always poor sellers.
Guest of Honor: Jasper Fforde
I was a Fforde reader in the early 2000s. I read The Eyre Affair, Lost In A Good Book and (I’m pretty sure) Something Rotten. I also feel I read The Big Over Easy, the procedural about the murder of Humpty Dumpty. I stopped reading him because, to me, the literary world premise was getting a bit stale, and there’s other things to read. I had no idea what to expect from Fforde at the con, other than he would probably be funny and congenial in the British fashion. I ended up spending 3+ hours with Fforde, 2 in panels, and an hour and half in his kaffeeklatsche – I queued up an hour ahead of time in order to get into that.
So, how to sum up? Fforde was fantastic. Generous and easy-going in his conversation, I also found him to be tremendously inspiring. Something news to me: Fforde is dyslexic. He talked about that as a liberating thing: Having been deemed “stupid” by everyone, his parents included, the pressure was off. He could do whatever he wanted and was not burdened by high expectations. His first career was in film production, a camera man I believe. That work is very intermittent and in some of his downtime he decided to try writing. His first efforts were screenplays and he admitted they were bad. But he persevered and, still unburdened by expectations, wrote things that he liked. Among the books he tried selling was what would later become The Big Over Easy. When everyone passed on that, he kept writing books and in 1999 or so, The Eyre Affair got bought. Later he reworked the Humpty Dumpty story and sold that. Lessons here: Write what you like; Keep writing; Throw nothing away. He has published 17 books so far.
An absolutely fantastic notion he shared with us is, as he calls it, the Narrative Dare. The idea of the narrative dare is to articulate a story premise that in some way is extreme and on the face of it, unworkable. Then, you write a story that delivers that premise. The dare of The Eyre Affair is: Books are living worlds and someone kidnaps Jane Eyre from her book. This to me was obviously an intensely powerful notion: What better way to make a book that is unique and not derivative than to start with a premise that seems impossible to write?
BTW, he cited an example of a dare: Do Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but instead of changing into a cockroach, change into a banana. Then he talked through a way to deliver on the premise and I have to admit, it was not without appeal … as it were.
Also in the kaffeeklatsche Fforde spoke a bit about his short fiction writing. He does a lot of it, but mainly as an exercise in writing improvement, and to test out ideas for longer works.
Fforde also presented a 1 hour “master class” in writing. This was a bit meandering, but virtually everything Fforde said was valuable. Some quotes/highlights:
You need an answer to the question, Why do I want to be a writer? If the answer is, make money, then you need to educate yourself on formulaic fiction and start churning it out. If your answer is not that, it will dictate what you write and how.
First paragraphs really are important. If yours doesn’t powerfully set the atmosphere, and foreshadow at least some of the book, you need to fix that.
Tell me, what is your book about – and I don’t mean the plot. Have a theme.
Give your characters hidden agendas and they will express those without you consciously doing anything.
If you look at the sentence or paragraph of yours that you are most proud of, you probably didn’t think a lot about writing that – you just did it.
I don’t revise, I revise constantly. Keep writing, then keep changing, then keep writing again.
The universal answer to any writing question: Write better books.
Writing without risk is barely writing at all.
Takeaways
My first takeaway is: Do some short fiction. I will not stop doing novels – the stories I most want to tell are not short. But I now see short work as a “muscle” that is valuable to have. Just one of the benefits is, if you can write a 3,000 word piece that resonates and grabs readers, then you will be more able to write an opening for a novel that does the same. I’m already starting on some brainstorming on concepts. Right now if I can do two in a year, and also meet my long-form goals, I’ll be happy.
Second takeaway: Take on a narrative dare. My 2025 project, Forlorn Toys, has some daring elements, but I don’t think it’s over the top that Fforde is describing. I’m going to try and concentrate what I have, and elevate it, into a premise that will attract attention and force me to take more risks when I write. Fforde’s implicit message – what have you got to lose? – is hard to argue with.
A great con overall. Wish I had gotten to the Sunday part, there was a roundtable with a notable agent I had signed up for. So it goes.
Lots of writing work happening for me in the new year. I’m finalizing my query and synopsis for Stone By Stone, and I’m starting on a new SF piece, with the hopefully engaging tentative title Forlorn Toys. But this being January I feel like taking stock over some of things I read in 2024 – reading is also part of the work of writing. Here’s my list:
SF Classics
These were to fill in a bit my exposure to important past works.
The Fountains Of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke
I read a lot of Clarke in my 20s, notably Rendezvous With Rama and 2001. I decided to read this to reacquaint myself with Clarke as a writer.
The standout things here were first how conflict and peril free the story was. There certainly was conflict, in the form of the protagonist meeting opposition to his ideas for the space tower. But that was so mild, more like being frustrated at work because of a project put on the back burner than the typical clash-of-titans conflict you’ll see in a contemporary SF. And the peril … well, certainly people could have died, but what you really get is Clarke-signature competency bravura, as the protagonist has to MacGyver his way out of a space tower disaster, several hundred clicks above the surface of the Earth.
And the ending couldn’t have been more optimistic: In a few hundred years, every social problem we have seems solved, and we meet cool aliens to boot! I’ll vote for that.
For all the predictability and mildness, it was an enjoyable read.
My take is this book was just puzzling, is best I can describe it. As one of the first and probably the best well-known alternate history SF book, I had high hopes. The book started with interest, albeit a bit slow. I read this last March, so I only recall so much: The guy who is secretly a Jew who wants to make jewelry, the guy who sells antique Americana to the occupying Japanese, a possible Nazi defector and a mysterious plot, plus the couple going to visit the titular “Man in the High Castle”, the in-book author of an alternate history work where FDR lives to be president and the Allies win WWII.
Great setup … then the book just ends. I can’t say what the message was, maybe that all history is fiction.
So, interesting artifact, zero help to me in anything I do.
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
Another classic. Before starting this I had read a bit about Stanislaw Lem, and learned he was a philosopher and poet as much as an SF writer. So again, high hopes here.
Alas, I could not finish this. It was just epically too slow, it felt like it took an entire 20 page chapter just to get to the protagonist’s room on the space station. Then what I believed was the core concept, an intelligent planet, just seemed overly trite to me.
I’m sure there was a ton of depth, nuance and meaning there – it will have to fall to others to find it.
The Complete Stories of J.G.Ballard, by J. G. BallardI really only heard about J. G. Ballard in 2024, though the FB #Science Fiction group. Who knew that the author of the WWII/Southeast Asia novel/memoir Empire of the Sun was also an off-the-wall SF writer? I chose the short stories with the idea this would be the widest introductory read for this author.
My assessment was mixed. Lots of cool ideas, but the vibe is definitely of its time, kind of a mix of Twilight Zone and PD James. Example: An unaccomplished man, a life-of-quiet-desperation type, discovers he has the ability to cause the death of people just by willing it. First off, this has got to be a super-common fantasy. I’ll admit that I have had it and thought about writing the same concept. The man moves up the corporate ladder by eliminating rivals, then critics, then just future possible contenders. But the man is also increasingly worried about being found out and concludes there is one more death needed to secure his safety, it is … wait for it … YOU, the reader! Prepare for the end! Holy Fourth Wall, Batman!
I haven’t yet finished the collection. Every so often I read one more story.
New Guard SF & Fantasy
These were all part of my now ongoing mission, to read more of what the SFF market is buying and publishing today. Well, when I say “today” I mean anything from today to the past 20 years.
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
I was a big fantasy reader in the 70s and 80s. Then, The Sword of Shannara came out, I read it, and I lost interest in Tolkien-derivative doorstop-sized fantasy series. But hey, 35+ years have gone by so why not give the genre a fresh look? I had to start with Brandon Sanderson, mainly because I knew what I’d be getting if I read George RR Martin. Mistborn was Sanderson’s second published book; I chose it because it anchors a highly successful 7 book series.
Alas, could not finish this book. Too many tropes: the D&D like setting, evil nobles and cynical but heart-of-gold thieves, a mysterious evil lurking just out of sight. The place where I stopped was a 20+ page section of excruciating detail on the world’s magic system, which in summary is: swallow some shavings of a certain metal, you get a certain power, swallow another metal, you get another power.
My doubtless rosy memories of reading fantasy are about being transported to a new world. Mistborn transported me to a so-so RPG.
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
My desire to find fantasy that would spark my interest did not end with Mistborn. Can’t remember how I came across The Name of the Wind, probably while looking for best-of lists. When I saw on Amazon this book has over 83,000 reviews, virtually all of them 5-star, I had to give it a try.
Now, to go back to Mistborn, that was a well-written book. There was action, conflict, worldbuilding, etc. It was just not to my taste. The Name of the Wind, however, for me was not well written. The form of the book is, mysterious innkeeper Kvothe has a mysterious visitor to the inn. There’s a fight, there’s drinking, and then Kvothe begins relating his life story. There seems to be no realtime action in the book, its all past backstory. I suppose as the setup for multi-book series, you can try this, relating the life-to-date of the protagonist.
And what a life. If Mistborn was trope-y, NOTW is the Trope King. Please, other writers, never again write how a young boy, off fetching water, returns to find his parents and community all murdered by mysterious, well, murderers. And the pace. The narrator can only relate a week or two of personal history before he’s wracked with sad recollections and has to excuse himself to feed the horses or whatever. I made it to page 190 of 696 (!!!) before I stopped, having to go off and feed my own horses.
The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate, by Adam Roberts
C’mon, fantasy – you must have some good books, right? I came across Adam Roberts again from the FB #Science Fiction group. Roberts is a writer, seems to me, in the Tolkien-mold: A professor of literature, and clearly writing for himself more than for any market. I chose The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate because it was only a year old, and the premise – 1848 London – intrigued me.
This bet paid off! Roberts deftly invokes the world of Sherlock Holmes, by imagining his father, Vavasour Holmes, working on a case. No spoilers, but other classics of British lit, set in the late 19th century, make appearances here. the actual titular death is by a “demonic locomotive” – remind you of any spectral hounds? The opening sentence firmly tells you what the voice of this work is going to be:
The story of the death of Sir Martin Malprelate acquired, from its earliest telling, a phantasmagorical quality, shrouding the violence of the assault in an embellishment of diabolic spectres and uncanny mystery.
This book will never become a NYT bestseller, which is a shame. Highly recommended.
The Hammer and the Blade: An Egil & Nix Novel, by Paul S. Kemp
Above I mentioned my desire for fantasy books to transport me to new worlds. Well an important sub-genre of that is when the new world doesn’t take itself too seriously. Looking around for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser style books I found a number of folks citing the Egil and Nix series. Book 1 of the series The Hammer and the Blade, did not disappoint.
in summary: Egil, hammer-wielding priest, and Nix, a scoundrel as Princess Leia would describe, make a living as tomb robbers. In one robbery they awaken a demonic guardian. Well, they have their Hammer and they have their Blade – they kill it. Little did they know that the demon was the talisman of a corrupt and powerful wizard family. Wizards want revenge. Hammers and Blades want to avoid that. Poundings, stabbings and drinking ensue.
Also in the never-a-bestseller category, but a fun read. Recommended.
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
Now let’s look at some SF reading. This was another FB SF group find. The author Ada Palmer, is a professor of history, specializing in the Renaissance period. Too Like The Lightning was her first book. The title is inspired by this quote from Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet ponders whether loving Romeo is a good idea:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’
The author’s knowledge and affection for history is apparent: The 25th century she describes is a world of 5 or 6 regional confederations, in the model of Italian city-states, but at much greater scale. These confederations are all led by technology-centric aristocrats, all with different styles, stemming form the cultural differences region to region. Ok, interesting setup, if a bit abstruse.
Unfortunately, I ended up skimming through vast swathes of this one. There was too much interiority of the main character – I wanted something to happen. Once again, a matter of taste – others may well find this book riveting.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Cyberpunk is a big gap in my SF canon reading. Never piqued my interest, the sub-genre seemed too small scale, too inward looking. Also, being a software engineer for like, forever, I suspected the computer parts would leave me cold. But minds can change and no time like the present. I selected Snow Crash because of Neal Stephenson’s reputation as being a challenging writer.
Challenging isn’t the word I would use, based on this book. After only a few pages the words running through my head were: Glib, Lame, Ridiculous. Harsh, you might say? In the opening pages we learn in this world, the Mafia rule the USA, controlling not only the government but a majority of businesses. the protagonist is a combination hacker, expert swordsman, and pizza delivery driver. Apparently in the future, “30 minutes or less” is enforced by Luca Brasi, so you have to drive fast. It goes on to describe a system that, to the books credit, is almost exactly like Second Life. Kinda cool for 1992, but that’s it.
This thread from Y-Combinator says it all better than i could. A sample:
I greatly dislike Snow Crash: it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief.
The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
In speculative fiction circles this book is constantly cited, as a prescient and gripping story of climate change and decay of the social fabric. Published in 1993, nominated for a Nebula soon after, the book remained a genre thing until 2020, when it became a NYT Bestseller. So, this is a must-read.
After all this build up for POTS I was surprised at my experience of reading it. My opinion: It is not a good book. Some examples: Future southern California is afflicted by human-set wildfires (something which BTW has happened for decades). The people setting the fires are drug addicts. That’s all we are told and the story frankly lays the blame for all that on these anonymous zombie addicts. But why are they addicts? Does no one care? We never find out. Normal people all walk around armed, if they can manage it. Apparently this is to defend against opportunistic thieves. But we never see anything of what drives that: Is it poverty? Rage? What? The world we see is cardboard. There’s bad stuff happening, but why? No one knows.
All we really see in the book is the protagonist, Lauren. She is even more cardboard than the world. Her big thing is she invents a religion, “Earthseed”. Chapters are introduced with writings from her book of this religion. So, cool, I think, this religion is going to illuminate the problems, and then solve them. The prime tenet of Earthseed; Change is the only constant.
But, guess what? This religion has zero narrative impact. Nothing happens because of it. The final 2/3rds of the book is Lauren and a band of stragglers walking north, trying to get to this lake. Every day some flat, slightly tragic event occurs. Then every night, people talk around the campfire. Neither the protagonist, nor anyone else, changes. A few folks die, then the book ends.
I could go on. Here’s a critique that said it all better. Disappointing.
Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty
Ok, now we’re getting back into more readable space. There’s several cool ideas in Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty. Like, there’s some quality or quality attached to the protagonist such that murders consistently happen in her presence. Another one is a race of highly mineralized aliens that, in the maturity phase of their lifecycle, transform into a living artifact, like a space ship. Ok, it does strain belief a bit that a half-ton creature somehow morphs into a multi-ton spaceship, but the idea is still cool. Then, there’s the symbiotes that all sentient life *except* humans have. Except that is for Mallory, who … dang, I guess I spoiled it.
Net: Clever worldbuilding, good characters, good pace of action.
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Hmm, where to begin on this book. The capsule: Lesbian necromancers – in space!
Now that I think about it, the capsule is also a pretty complete summary. There’s quite a lot of characters in this book. The premise is, representatives from 5 or 6 necromantic planets meet on this one particularly spoooooky planet to undergo a trial. Aside form the title character, Gideon, those characters are all pretty interchangeable. Then, stuff happens: monsters are fought, puzzles solved, and so on. There’s little discernable point in this action, but it is entertaining.
The ending was, to me, very emo. Gideon, who you come to kinda like by the end, sacrifices herself and it is a big deal for some of the surviving characters, but for the life of me I can’t remember what was the point.
For all that, in at least one way this is an important book, in that it is an avatar of squeecore, a story style that emphasizes delight or excitement, vs. conflict or character growth. For a more in depth definition, see here.
Mystery
I’m also a big mystery fan – for a long, long time I read more mystery than SFF. Here’s this year’s selections:
The Wolf and the Watchman, by Niklas Natt och Dag
This is a Scandinavian noir, set in 1793 Stockholm. It was a grim time, especially in cities, and Natt och Dag shows every bit of that. The wolf of the title is Cecil Winge, an educated investigator suffering from tuberculosis; he can die at any time during the book. The watchman is Mickel Cardell, a soldier until he lost most of an arm, now a watchman who spends more time drinking than watching. Mickel happens upon the corpse of a horrific murder, Cecil investigates, and they partner up.
Two things to bear in mind about this book: First, it shows very graphically a lot of the ugliness of 18th century life; sometimes it is a bit like a Salvation Army polemic. Second, the book has an offbeat structure. Midway, whole chapters are devoted to new point-of-view characters and we don’t see much of Mickel or Cecil. At first I wonder, what does this have to do with the murder? But these chapters pay off well in the end, stick with them.
So, this was an engrossing read. The Wolf and the Watchman is first of a trilogy, the subsequent books take place in 1794 and 95. I may pick up the next one, if I get a sense it won’t cover the same ground as book 1.
Blaze Me A Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson
Another Scandinavian noir, I came to this through an NYT recommendation. Summary: A serial killer terrorizes a town, first eluding the town’s detective, then being identified by a chance relationship. But 30 years later the detective’s son, now a cop himself, questions his father’s handling of the case.
This is a somewhat slow moving book, but that’s the point: It is about attitudes and truths that persist over time, and how those are handed from generation to generation. I very much like a hard-boiled, this is my code and I’m sticking with it type of noir (see below) but this was a great change.
The Hunter, and The Outfit, by Richard Stark
Richard Stark is a penname of Donald Westlake, overall the most prolific American genre writer of the 20th century. His books have been made into no less than 20 movies, including The Hot Rock and Cops and Robbers. I had heard of Westlake but knew nothing about his contribution to the structuring of mystery and suspense fiction until I read Perplexing Plots. So I decided to take in a couple of Parker books, a series of 24 novels (!!) by Stark/Westlake.
A pseudo-intellectual review of this kind of book makes no sense, so I’ll just say this: If you think you might like a world of ruthless yet grimly principled men, women who are scorned, taken advantage of and who fight back with the weapons they have, and where money means more than justice, these books deliver. The writing is spare, witty, and fast-moving where it needs to be.
I’ll be reading more of Parker, not only because I like the mix of premise and voice Westlake created, but also because I’m curious: How the heck do you keep this fresh over 24 books?
And The Winner Is …
The genre book I both enjoyed the most, and got the most out of, was …
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This book, published in 2015, hits all my main buttons for science fiction: Science, in the form of relativistic interstellar travel, uploaded personalities, accelerated evolution and more; Aliens, in the form of earthly spiders who are recipients of aforesaid acceleration; and a Problem, in the form of a collapsed Human Empire, survivors looking for a new planet, and the afore-foresaid spiders, who have the planet and ain’t giving it up. The writing is a bit challenging, requiring the reader to pay attention, which i like. And the structure, which alternates chapters between spiders and humans, kept the anticipation for the next turn in the plot at a high level.
The book is just what-if after what-if, on a scale of millennia.
One thing not in this book: character development. Generally I find flat characters only work for certain kinds of books. In this book, I did not notice or care about the absence in the least.
This book is first of a trilogy. Not sure if I’ll take in the other two, not because I wasn’t sold by book 1, just just because I expect I have a lot of reading ground to cover in 2025.
There you have it. But BTW, I did a lot more reading than this in 2024: there were writing-craft books, political books, popular science books, etc. Maybe that will go into another post. That is, if my two ongoing projects, Stone By Stone and the brand new Forlorn Toys, allow it.
Short post this week. Last time I wrote about the development editing and revision approach for Stone By Stone (SBS). I’ve completed 14 items on my list – yay, me. The majority of these were to add text, or modify text, in order to clarify or strengthen something important to the story. For example, a key premise in the SBS world is that there are these “houses” that work on behalf of the alien founders of the planet Caron to build things, fix things, and generally drive the economy. From one perspective a house is like a business consultancy: experts for hire. But another aspect is they use violence and intimidation when those tactics can advance their interests. A house is then a combination technology contracting firm and Mafia protection racket. I think this is a cool idea.
But some feedback on SBS was to the effect readers weren’t certain about houses. The events the protagonist appears in were clear and, I daresay, exciting. But there wasn’t clarity on “Is this the norm on this planet?” That makes a big difference. If what the hero does is the norm, then we see he’s trapped in a system; but if its not the norm, he’s kind of a bad guy. The improvement was to add 2-3 events where supporting characters have run-ins with other houses. Turned out to be easy to do, and had no disruption to the main plot line.
That brings me to a bigger change I’m starting. Here’s a picture:
This shows the length, in pages, of every scene in SBS. A “scene” is an event or episode, usually but not always in a short period of time, but always with a start and an end. The book has 84 scenes, in 24 chapters. Long scenes are of two types. Early in the book there are some scenes that are context-setting. The 8-page scene at the beginning introduces the main character and his environment; scene 19 is 10 pages long and its where an important supporting character shares some revelations with the hero. But mostly the long scenes are where big events happen. The 8-page scene near the end is where the hero and bad guy have their big showdown. Such a scene has to be long, else after all your build up, the reader will feel cheated.
A last general observation … the variety in scene length is a big part of what keeps readers turning pages. If all your scenes were the same length that would be boring – it would be almost as if there were no scenes at all.
The reason I’m looking at this is I need to make a big change that requires whole new scenes, possibly a new chapter. I like the current flow. For example, the very short scenes, 46 and 47, precede a tragic turning point in the story. Those short glimpses of the main character gives extra context for the event he is about to experience. But if they were too long, that would deflate the impact of the big event. The graph above is my “map” that I’m hoping will let me situate the new content at the best point in the book.
Hoping to finish up these revisions in January. I expect then I’ll have a last call for Beta+ readers – would be chance for you to have an early glimpse of SBS if you didn’t beta-read already.
What, J. Jonah Jameson, editor extraordinaire and bête noir of both SpiderMan and Peter Parker? That can only mean I’m going to talk about the developmental edit of Stone By Stone.
But first a bit about Let This Be The Last, a 6,000 word story that reimagines the Norse god Loki.
I got a notion to do this when I was browsing Duotrope, a site that provides useful info to writers, like directories of publishers and their content specializations. Browsing through SF&F short-fiction publishers, I came across Flametree Publishing, that had an open call for stories about the trickster god. Now, I’ve never been good at writing prompts: “Write a story based on the song ‘My Home Town’”, stuff like that. But in the spirit of training I decided to work on this – a good writer should be able to write about anything, not just what bubbles up out of their own brain.
Here’s what I did. I knew from the start I wanted a story that mixed the age of myth with an SF future. What can I say, the idea seemed cool. Then I refreshed my detailed knowledge of the subject by spending a day or so reading everything Google sent my way. At first I was totally stumped. All the myths seemed, well, trite – I mean by definition they are stories that have been told and adapted for a thousand years or more. In a way, the most trite of all is the myth of Loki and Baldur. It occurred to me to wonder, why does Loki contrive the death of the most noble god? Is he jealous? Devoted to chaos and evil? Just a jerk? Then it further hit me, a new answer to that question might be worth writing about. After that, the three acts of the story – ancient Scandinavia, medieval Africa, and a future colony planet – fell into place. The 6,000 words were essentially done in 2 weeks. It’s with Flametree now, I won’t hear till March if they want it. Meanwhile, I think I’ll keep looking for similar opportunities – it was a good workout for the writing muscles.
Words, Words, Words
When Hamlet answers this to Polonius, he is uttering one of Shakespeare’s trademark ironies: books of course are nothing but words, but Hamlet’s blunt and deranged delivery makes us think, “Everyone knows books are more than that!” Now, having received an edit of Stone By Stone, and embarked on updating the book, I have a little insight on exactly how books are more than words.
If you don’t know what a developmental edit is, a quick definition: where copy-editing involves punctuation and formatting, and line-editing is about grammar and clarity, a developmental edit examines the high-level aspects of your story – character, plot and setting – and both analyzes and critiques your book at that level. The main reason to get a developmental edit is to answer questions like:
Are the characters engaging and believable? Do we understand their wants and needs?
Is the plot engaging and believable? Does it make sense? Does it pose problems that are big and interesting?
Is the setting presented complimentary to plot and character? What is unique about time and place that bears on the story?
I started this process in July. Looking at different directories online, I read websites and bios for about 30 editors. I reduced that to a short list of 4. After video calls with these candidates, I made my pick. Something that quickly became clear – editors, especially good ones, are extremely busy. My chosen editor could not start till mid October. BTW, in future I will share their name. I’m extremely happy with the work, I just want to see how things go with SBS before I say more.
The edit took a month and a few extra days. What I received was a 10-page single-spaced letter, analyzing the book and summarizing key recommendations, and my marked-up manuscript. The MSS included tracked-changes and comments. There were more than 1,000 changes and 1,405 comments.
“I’m a Writer, not an Engineer!”
Dr. McCoy’s catchphrase to the side, I am finding that to deal with this feedback, I have to think like an engineer. There’s two reasons for writing a novel, (1) For your own satisfaction, and (2) To connect with readers. If (1) is your only goal, you probably don’t need an editor at all. But if you are aiming at (2), you have to come to terms with understanding that the raw insight and creativity of your story is almost certainly not enough to connect with anyone. Making that connection requires that some fundamental expectations need to be fulfilled for the reader, like:
Relating to characters. No one is going to enjoy a book where the characters do things and we have no clue why they do them. Good books show us events that let us develop our own guesses as to character motivation. Great books bolster through things that characters say or think.
Knowing why it matters. It may seem obvious that your detective character would go after the bad guy. It’s not obvious to your reader: Why this detective, and not someone else? It has to be crystal clear that if the main character does not accept the challenge posed by the plot, then very bad things will happen.
Getting readers to turn the page. I expect we’ve all experienced books we “could not put down”. Likewise we’ve started some we just could not finish. Good books have a structure and a tone that takes you along for the ride: chapters that build tension and expectation, language that “feels right.” A common thing for poor books is they are like a lecture you just want to be over.
Note how none of this has to do with creativity, theme, or meaning. The same requirements apply to both a bubbly rom-com, and to a grimdark cautionary tale.
What does this have to do with engineering? Like a programmer responding to a code review, I am trying to take my editor’s feedback in a spirit of improvement, not criticism. I will tell you, it ain’t easy. Among those 1,405 comments in the MSS were probably about a 100 to the effect of “Why is he doing this?” My impulsive reaction was frankly, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “How can you not see that?” But just like when receiving a code-review comment to the effect of “The way you wrote this conditional is unclear”, I had to set my first reactions aside and try to see things through the commentor’s eyes. Sure enough, I had to admit, they were right, it wasn’t obvious what motivates my main character. It was obvious to me, and not just because I wrote it – my life experiences set me up to understand my own characters.
Another way dealing with editorial feedback is like engineering is how you do the needed changes. An widely accepted practice in software engineering is the minimal necessary change – the smallest thing you can do to meet a requirement. It’s the same with revising your book. To make your character’s motivation more clear, you don’t have to rewrite the whole book, you look for an important action the character takes, then you insert a thought or some dialogue where the motivation is clarified. Bonus points if you refer to a foreshadowing event that is the origin of the motivation. Net-change: probably 2 lines or less.
But, they have to be the right two lines.
You Write It, You Own It
Here’s where I am now. After I read through the letter and sampled the comments, I had a call with my editor to go over the main findings. The goal was to make sure I understood them correctly, and also to explore some of the bigger criticisms. Next I read every manuscript comment, responding with a quick notation like AGREE, EXPLORE, CLARIFY and so on, plus some short ideas on approach. Then I exported all the Word comments to an Excel file, so I could read them more easily. Going through the comments and responses that way it was easier to identify patterns.
I then created a revision plan document. This document has 22 changes and/or improvements to make. One example:
Condense Prologue
Shorten upfront part, eliminate several Civspace species from the prologue, get to Keret and Talon-va more quickly.
Like many SF books, mine has a prologue that sets the stage for the different species and planets in the story. My editor felt there was too much infodump in it. The new version is 459 words, down from 869, and features only things that directly bear on the story – Talon-va is the founder of the planet Caron, where the story takes place.
Here’s a bigger one:
Split and Condense Childhood and Adolescent Chapters
Split longer chapters into two, properly interleave into the flow. Maybe adult chapters need splitting to do that.
To start with, don’t change content, just the boundaries.
After the chapters are split, all non-adult chapters need pruning and focus. Emphasize connection points to Finn’s adult life.
This speaks to my editor’s biggest point. In Stone By Stone, I use a structure where 3 story arcs – the main character as a child, adolescent, and adult – are told simultaneously through interleaved chapters. The adult story is 75% of the content. I did this for several reasons: I wanted to do something that was structurally distinctive, and I wanted to convey important back story and worldbuilding in a more impactful way than flashbacks. My editor felt this was more a hindrance than a help, that the changes in perspective would be confusing. Their judgement was, this would reduce the marketability of the book.
I hope it’s clear from the above that I’m not switching to flashbacks. What I will do is make these non-adult chapters shorter, so they are less of a break from the main action. I’ll also “punch up” the main character’s early life events that explain his motivations as an adult. Will keeping the current structure make the book harder to sell? Maybe, though I’ve asked a number of people about this, including pros from the industry, and no one seems to feel what I’m doing is an explicit disqualification.
What it comes down to is, I own this book. Where execution is concerned, I will take my editor’s advice and try my best to make improvements. But as far as my vision for the book — I’m not going to give that up without even trying.
Ok, J. Jonah is growling at me for my next revision. Till next time …
