Writing

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.

Till next time …

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.

Empire of Silence: The Sun Eater: Book One. From the blurb:

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.

Another example, Deep Past:

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.

Till next time …

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.

Till next time …

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.

Till next time …

It’s self-evident that for a story to be a science fiction story, it has to portray the future – we have to  see a setting or circumstance that hasn’t happened yet, but is in some way credible based on what we know and expect. Classic stories like E.E. Smith’s Lensman series built on realities of the post-WW2 era – rapid progress in military technology, emergence of super-power nations – to present a future that was much like its present, but with spaceships and rayguns.  Gibson’s Neuromancer shows a future where massively-networked information technology becomes a landscape for commerce, social unrest and intrigue. There’s an entire sub-pantheon of dystopias, ranging from Brave New World to Fahrenheit 451 to The Hunger Games, that all extrapolate an aspect of the present into a pathologic future. Fans can cite countless examples of conceived futures, it’s a characteristic of the SF genre that the world of the story is often times just as important as the characters in it.

I like a truly inventive or cool SF world as much as the next fan. But what’s on my mind today is the shallowness you get in SF when their creators rush to update the window-dressing of their world, without thinking through what life would really be like. Here’s some obvious examples:

What can we discern from these images? That Zardoz is science fiction because Sean Connery is not wearing a tuxedo, he’s wearing a red nappy – clearly some calamity destroyed all the tuxedo factories. We also learn that in the future, women (unless they are typists) will go everywhere clad in their pajamas, doubtless because the entire world has AC and there’s an abundance of sofas for Raphael-esque posing. Finally, Sting shows us that the centuries ahead will be tough – so tough men need to wear cast-iron codpieces.

I know the 70s and 80s are easy targets for this sort of thing. But they are representative of a fairly common tendency in SF to posit arbitrary change in common activities or items. Its a cheap and easy way to create an “SF feel”. When Clockwork Orange came out with its Russian-infused slang I certainly found it cool: droogies and lewdies were totally horrowshow. But since then? Uggh. I’ve just started reading a late-90s cyberpunk book, included on many “best of” lists, and the terminology and dialogue are just tedious. If you cut from the first thirty pages all the linguistic c**p the author put in to signal to me, “Pay attention, things are really different!”, you’d have maybe two pages of actual events.

A lot of times it’s things that are not explained that leave me wondering. How do people get from place to place? What do they eat? Who cooks the food? What are peoples’ houses like? and so on. It’s not a good idea to over-show these kinds of things in your story, unless there’s a specific plot relevance. But people gotta eat – you can’t say zero about it.

A particular peeve of mine is coffee. Humans have been drinking it for a thousand years or more. Why would we stop, just because we go to Alpha Centauri or wherever? Or, why would we stop calling it coffee or adopt some new, goofy-named drink that takes the place of coffee?

There will be coffee. Don’t take my word for it, take hers:

Anyway, herewith are some of the guidelines I use in structuring my Civspace world, the setting for Blair MacAlister and the (hopefully!) upcoming Stone By Stone:

Big changes happen at the edges and build over time

Today’s hyperconnected/social-media-zed/instant-information world is so radically different from just 20 years ago, we forget how that happened. When I was a kid, TV wasn’t exactly new, but it was new enough that my parents and their friends recalled never having it. But adopting TV was easy. Assuming you could afford it, you just add one to your household, no need to give anything up. In the late 80s, personal computers started doing the same thing, they were easy and useful add-ons to your household. Then we got networks, that worked over cable or phone lines – again, no need to drop anything. After that. network effects were inevitable, and here we are.

The same thing is happening today with power generation. The need for electricity will always exist, but where it comes from changes: from oil and natural gas, and increasingly from solar and wind, in the future maybe fusion, then who knows? My bet is, a century from now when we get electricity  from anti-matter powered reactors, people will still use that power to run dishwashers, electric shavers and so on. In another example, imagine we invent spacecraft capable of relativistic speeds. That doesn’t mean we somehow no longer need pickup trucks.

Change most often happens through unforced adoption of new capabilities or alternatives, or through improved efficiency of existing systems.

Technology inflection points do sometimes happen

Counter to my examples above, history does offer cases of radical, displacing or destructive change. Gunpowder and musketry just in the span of a century caused the demise of Europe’s knightly class. An oft-cited span is that from The Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603). A broader but even more significant example was the Industrial Revolution, with the accompanying Transportation Revolution. Again in the space of a century, hand-work and horse-and-cart economies were transformed into systems of centralized mass production and worldwide distribution. This was not a “net add” change – the industrial revolution started the demise of traditional farming and artisanal crafts, led to widespread child labor, emptying of the countryside and overcrowding of cities, and heightened gender-based divisions of labor. This is the world we live in today and I daresay the changes and still echoing.

Will there be similar inflection points and upheavals in the future? Of course there may be. But until there’s some massive innovation, like the free energy Asimov wrote about in The Gods Themselves, I’d say it will be hard for coming innovations to offer enough marginal utility to radically displace what we already have.

Many things will be unchanging

As I said earlier, people will always need to eat. Despite efforts like lab-grown meat, I think the core realities and logistics of food production will be unchanged for centuries. Yes, we probably need to get more calories from grains and less from animals, and we need to make full use of the principles of sustainable agriculture. But it’s really hard to beat a system where you throw down seeds and the food just grows.

Another thing I see as being pretty stable is clothing. People have been wearing trousers for 3,000 years – why are they suddenly going to stop? Of course styles and fashions will always change, but spare me the goofiness.

Then there’s houses. Just as people have to eat, they also need roofs over their heads. Under those roofs, they need to do everything we do today: cook and eat food, work, sleep, relax. The need for privacy and sometime solitude will never go away. Do despite trends in home design we see today, I forecast we will never see significant adoption of houses with a single multi-purpose-room. How will these future houses be built? That brings me to the next topic.

Physics and Economics will never just go away

The raygun, like Star Trek’s phaser, is an enduring and iconic staple of SF. But when I see one, I always ask myself: Where does the energy come from? You can’t melt steel, or wholesale disintegrate objects, without expending massive amounts of energy – that’s true today and will be true 1,000 years from now. The US Army has in fact deployed a military laser, for shooting down drones. It requires 20 kilowatts to operate. A typical handheld battery supplies 90 watts. Yes, batteries will get better over time, but 200 times better? The theoretical maximum for a lithium-based battery is on the order of 300 watts.

So, rayguns are unlikely. More probable are handheld electromagnetic throwers, which already exist.

Coming back to houses, how will they be built? Again, I think things will be mostly like today. So, here’s a cool house:

You may recognize it, it’s called the Brenton House, and is one of the futuristic homes that appeared in the 1973 Woody Allen film Sleeper. This house was built by spraying a structural foam over a steel framework. As I said, this is cool, but clearly we do not see this technique displacing wood framing, brick and so on. That’s because the cost and marginal utility don’t add up. Just like with batteries and rayguns, that’s true today and likely will always be true.

Maybe we’ll see factory-built, modularized houses. Definitely some possible economic benefits there, but it will be hard for a fixed location that has to expend energy in transport to compete with mobile teams of workers that can show up anywhere.

That brings me to the last economic aspect for the future: labor. A common SF convention is the world where all labor is performed by robots. Of course that could happen, but I view that as an extremely late-stage phase in the development of an SF world. Imagine you’re colonizing a planet. You need an adaptable, general-purpose laborer to built all the bootstrap stuff you need. That means people, not robots – unless you want to magically posit a robot that is essentially a person, except you can order it around. My sense is an advanced civilization, with a technical history thousands of years long, will indeed transition menial tasks to automation. A final question here is, how likely is it such a civilization will have the general purpose AI capability to make such a premise workable? My view is: that may be never be solved, but that’s a topic for another post.

Your future sounds boring

No rayguns, stick-framed houses, primitive farming, no clever/companionable robots – your future sounds boring, you say. But is it? There’s an SF franchise that makes use of most everything in my lists:

The writing challenge is to go beyond overused tropes and look hard at science, and social change, to find new, cool possibilities, like (I think) the following:

Biology is the big frontier

Between Einstein, Quantum Mechanics and the rest of the physical sciences we know a lot about the fundamentals of the universe. These lead to lots of insurmountable limitations, like the whole raygun/battery thing. But for life – how it started, how it adapts – we know the basics but I feel there’s far more unknown than known. And the potential diversity of life is extremely vast. Biology figures prominently in my in-progress trilogy Only’s End, where the neural/genetic mechanism underlying the intelligence of one of the Civspace species leads to unexpected outcomes.

AI doesn’t need to be omniscient to be cool

Like I mentioned, I’m not a fan of the idea of general purpose ultra-intelligent AIs – I don’t think they are computationally credible and, story-telling wise, they are too convenient a device. But that doesn’t mean there’s no possibilities there. Again in Only’s End there’s a Chat-GPT like machine called ALEC (Advanced Learning and Estimating Complex). ALEC has the ability to predict with high accuracy the movements of financial markets – lots of story possibility there! More importantly, it was designed to be self-improving in that it is programmed to “value” certain outcomes and to be “dismayed” by others. It doesn’t feel pleasure or pain the way biological creatures do, but it presents like it does. ALEC triggers self-reflection in Blair and Terendurr to the effect of, Am I really so different?

Big science needs to be done right

A truly transcendent possibility latent in SF is to provoke a sense of wonder. When I watch 2001, A Space Odyssey I don’t obsess over how the monoliths work, or what laws of physics the monolith makers respect and which they break. I’m just awestruck by the concept, by the vast possibilities the story implies. That’s an extremely high bar for a writer to aim for, but it’s worth the shot.

The key (or at least a key) is to show the result and let the reader wonder what it means or how it came to be. A final example from Only’s End: In book 1 Blair discovers The Book of Manjit, a text that presents as folktales but is really a secret encoding of advanced science. An important part of the action is how Terendurr, and the adversary Bandal, respectively decode parts of the book and what use they make of it. It’s not too big a spoiler to reveal that Terendurr discovers a means of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distances, like 1000s of light-years. Yes, it’s LeGuin’s  ansible – an idea that I appropriate with reverence.

Don’t shy away from big science – just conceive it such that the impacts are big, then readers won’t care if it is consistent with Relativity.

Alright, that’s enough on worldbuilding. Need to get back to actual writing <g>. Till next time …

No, this post is not about that excellent show Mythic Quest (when is season 4 finally coming out???) What I want to talk about are some of the ideas from – the also excellent – SF YouTube channel authored by Damien Walter.

First off, I’m not exaggerating when I say Damien’s content and ideas are excellent. In my own “quest” to get better at writing, he’s been a fantastic resource about how SF & F have evolved, and what works in stories. But what I’m thinking about today is his view on what makes the greatest science fiction and fantasy stories is myth, that the story connects with the reader and the world in an archetypal way. Now I imagine anyone who’s taken a university English course, or even just read Edith Hamilton, understands that myths are part of our cultural context. When Frodo and the fellowship set out for Mordor – a strategy with almost no chance of success – that makes total sense to us, because we’ve been raised in a culture that “remembers” Orpheus questing into the underworld or Theseus facing the Minotaur. It is well known that Tolkien, an expert in myths like Beowulf, the Norse pantheon and much more, drew upon that in his conception of the world of Arda. When people read Harry Potter, Harry and Dumbledore are easy to understand because of Arthur and Merlin – the hero and mentor.

So, no question that myth provides all of us with concepts that let us relate stories to ourselves and the world.

Myth … or Trope?

Myths are indeed templates for stories. But the same can be said for a related concept, the trope. Tropes are general-purpose narrative constructs; because they are to some extent universal, they appear over and over again. A much-used example is the Ticking Time Bomb – some sort of peril or problem that must be solved in a typically short window of time. Time bomb appears no less than four times in James Bond novels; in the Star Trek universe, the starship auto-destruct with countdown is used (by my count) at least fifteen times.

There’s no ancient myth I can identify that prefigures the ticking time bomb. It seems likely this trope is just that – similar to when a character’s cell phone loses signal at a critical time, or when a hero in a car tells their sidekick, “take the wheel!”, the time bomb is a usage of the modern age. It is nothing more than a familiar, believable device.

But is that always true? Another endemic trope is the con man, a swindler, cheat, shady character, who may or may not have a heart of gold. Harold Hill in The Music Man is a con man, and of course so are Hooker and Gondorff in The Sting; have to include Quark on this list as well. Yes, these are all stock characters in a certain sense, but they have a mythic history: Hermes and Odysseus were con men, so was Loki, the Native American Coyote, and a host of others. The WikiPedia entry on this lists over 70 examples. Looks like some tropes are myths, or at least derive from them.

Meaning

Rather than nerd-out over the difference between myth and trope, I’ll propose a simple answer: Myths have meaning, tropes do not. Let’s take King Arthur as an example. Forgotten as a child, with no expectation of honor or position, Arthur becomes King when he shows his innate virtue by drawing the sword from the stone. Assisted by Merlin, and by The Lady in the Lake, Arthur strives to discover what is means to be a good king. Today anyone who knows the name King Arthur understands it as a symbol of honor, justice, and empathy. This myth is more than an entertaining story or series of clever twists, it tells us something about how we should view the world.

The best stories take myths like these and let us rediscover their meanings in new ways. Who is Aragorn from LoTR but Arthur? Gifted with a sword of kingship, Aragorn is assisted by a powerful mentor, and learns the weak are as important as the strong. Tolkien brought this myth to us in a new way, in a setting of global catastrophe, something that is much feared by those born in the twentieth century.

I submit that the gunslinger Shane is an Arthurian knight, and so is Robert Parker’s Spenser for Hire.

All these examples are entertaining. But they endure as classics of their genres because they have something more: meaning.

Science Fiction and Myths

Seen from my perspective as a writer, this is not all good news. It is hard enough to write entertainment. Now it has to have meaning as well? Can’t I just be satisfied with writing a ripping good yarn?

For the longest time, that’s exactly what science fiction was – genre tales with plots familiar to readers of westerns, mysteries, or adventure, but in settings with spaceships and planets. Yet something happened in the the 1950s. I’ll go with one of Damien’s videos, where he tags Isaac Asimov as a key point of the transformation of SF:

John W. Campbell had already started the transition of SF to be less adventure and more science. As one of Campbell’s writers, Asimov embraced that, but wanted to take a step beyond the engineering centric stories Campbell was himself writing. The Keynesian “economic revolution” of the 1940s was giving way to a more market-driven model – economics and mathematical modeling were certainly topics of interest for Asimov. Add the high-tension politics of the time, with the Cold War starting, and on one hand the nascent Civil Rights movement, and on the other organizations like the John Birch Society, it was easy to envisage a world spinning out of control.

Out of this, Asimov updates the myth of Prometheus the Inventor, creator of the forbidden, into Hari Seldon, the Scientist-Sage. Seldon’s invention, psychohistory, is a kind of economic modeling on steroids – multiplied by a billion. With it Seldon predicts the future of the galaxy, then plans for a sequence of interventions that will push that future in desirable directions. Seldon is not the mentor for the hero, he *is* the hero, the figure who through rationality and perseverance enacts a plan to save mankind. Unlike Prometheus, Seldon is not punished by the gods for his presumption, because in the Seldon myth, there are no gods – only science, and rationality.

Science Fiction and the 21st Century Myth

Thinking through this, it seems to me that science fiction and fantasy are uniquely positioned to bring forward new perspectives on myth. Why? Because like myths themselves, SF & F are stories where we make stuff up. Take a venerable genre like the police procedural. Yes, you can devise an even more cynical, quirky or mentally unique detective, but you can’t change the rules of the story: the crime must be solved, justice must be done. A romance can be in a never-seen before setting, or have colorful supporting characters, or modern day impediments to love, but at the end the principals must live happily ever after.

In SF & F there are no rules. We can decree the world to be any way we like, and then we can test what that means for a myth. Like:

• • What would Troy’s Cassandra do in a world where predictive AI was omnipresent?
  • What if Odysseus’ home was in another dimension?
  • What if the netherworld Gilgamesh journeys to is an electronic repository of the consciousnesses of the dead?

I know these examples are cheesy – I just made them up this moment – but I hope they make the point: Almost all genres of literature address the world as it is; SF & F explore worlds that might be, letting us do the experiment of whether an old myth is still valid, or needs to change, or needs to be rejected.

What are these “21st Century Myths” going to look like? Hard predictions would be foolish, but I do have guesses:

• They are not going to proclaim themselves, we’ll probably only figure out what happened some years after the myth is written.
• They are going to be apolitical. Not that there won’t be lessons that bear on politics, but myth is much, much bigger than politics.
• They are going to offer solutions. Not easy or obvious ones, but for a myth to resonate, it has to do more than warn, it has to offer the possibility of progress.

I’ll bring my ramblings to an end. Many thanks to Damien Walter for sharing all this. Reading back, I don’t see much above that wasn’t in his content to begin with. Nonetheless, I’m the sort who needs to step through something on my own before I can get it.

I’ll leave you with the most mythic Bugs Bunny cartoon ever:

What’s Opera Doc from 2K HistoryClips on Vimeo.

Till next time …

Regular readers may recall I’ve been sending my book, Bandal The Only, to agents. I blush to reveal the exact number, but let’s say since last November I’ve submitted the book over one hundred fifty times. The two most common responses are: Nothing, no response (57%), and a Rejection message (31%); the remaining 12% or so are still-active submissions. Of course, silence, after 10 weeks or so, is also rejection. But here it’s the concrete, not-gonna-happen ones I want to share with you all.

The Short Form

The majority of the rejections an author receives are pre-made, from templates. A great many of these are to the point:

Thank you for including me in your agent queries. I have reviewed it, and am afraid I must step aside on this proposed book. I wish you all the best with your endeavor.

or:

Thank you for your submission. I appreciate the opportunity to consider BANDAL THE ONLY. After careful review, I will be stepping aside.

Not much to be gleaned here, other than you didn’t make the cut. There’s a few more elaborate patterns I see, however.

We’re The Ivy League

In this type, the message is telling you: Hey, we’re the “Harvard” of agencies, don’t feel bad if you didn’t get in. Like this:

Thank you for considering me as a possible fit to represent your book. I have reviewed your query and, at this time, I do not believe that I am the right agent to represent your work. Please know that we are extremely selective, even with the materials we review. I do appreciate you thinking of us as an agency, however, and I encourage you to continue your search for an agent who is just the right fit for you. I wish you every success in your publishing endeavors.

or:

Thank you so much for thinking of <<AGENT>> for representation, but BANDAL THE ONLY is not right for her list at this time. With her very full client list, <<AGENT>> has to be extremely selective, and she wasn’t able to fully connect with your project. We wish you all the best, and thanks again for reaching out to us.

Love Is (Not) In The Air

Sometimes you get reminded of the need to get all googly-eyed over a book:

Thank you for submitting your query for BANDAL THE ONLY to <<AGENCY>> for our consideration. We apologize for the delay in our response. Unfortunately, we did not fall in love with the opening pages as much as we had hoped. For that reason, we are going to respectfully decline the manuscript this time.

Another:

It may not seem this way, but saying no is tough for me. I’m sure hearing it is tough for you, but it’s really important for me to fall in love with a project and that just did not happen in this case. Please know that I really appreciate your patience during this process and I truly wish you the best of luck in finding the right agent! I’ll be rooting for you!

And then there’s this longish one, trying (I guess) to soften the blow:

At <<AGENCY>>, we understand that writing is a passion, an intensely personal calling, a long-time dream for many, and frequently a lonely endeavor. We have great respect for authors, and we share the writer’s passion—that is why we are literary agents.

Unfortunately, publishing is a business that necessarily involves a lot of rejection, at every stage. One of the most difficult things for us as agents is to have to say no. Yet, we can take on only a small fraction of all the work we see, and this is simply a business reality.

We say no for many reasons—because of changing trends in the market; because we already have something similar on our list; because we know of similar published or forthcoming titles; because something isn’t right for us; because although something may be strong, well-written and even publishable, we didn’t fall in love with it.

Please do try to keep this one “no” in perspective. This is a highly subjective business and another agent may adore your work. All it takes is one “Yes.” We wish you success in finding that “Yes,” whether with us or another agent and publisher.

Grasping At Straws (of Feedback)

I can say with certainty that there’s nothing between the lines of these messages. The possible reasons for rejection are pretty clear:

1. The book’s premise or theme is weak and/or unmarketable.
2. The writing or voice is weak.
3. The agent is busy and actually is not accepting anything, or your submission wasn’t strong enough to justify pushing out existing work.

That being said, sometimes you get a rejection that does make you wonder, Was I close? or Should I change something? An example of a vaguely heartening one:

Thank you for thinking of me with your query for BANDAL THE ONLY. While this sounds like a strong project, I’m afraid it doesn’t strike me as a likely fit with me and my particular editorial contacts. I wish you well in finding the right agent for your work.

What this agent is saying is, with the publishers (i.e., the editorial contacts) they work with, they can’t envisage one of them wanting to take Bandal. So, all the mechanics of the submission were fine, just not a “fit” here. Here’s one that makes you think about making a change:

…apologies for the delay in responding. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I must pass. There is a lot to like here, but the narration felt very concerned with world building and I didn’t find myself as drawn in as I’d hoped.

Science Fiction by definition needs a lot of world building. If you’re writing a romance set in New York City, virtually no world building at all is needed, everyone has a picture of what NYC is like. But until they read your SF book, nobody knows what the planet Oglethorpe 5 is like. So, you have to show them. For all that, it is definitely possible to overdo it with SF world building, and today the market is much more about “character driven” books than those with a lot of elaborate details about environments or science.

Does Bandal have too much worldbuilding? Should I start in on a rewrite? The answers are: Maybe, and No. There’s still a lot of agents I haven’t heard from. Better to completely exhaust those possibilities before considering changes. If nothing else, sometimes agents get back to you explicitly requesting changes, the coveted revise and resubmit response.

‘Dese Are The Conditions That Prevail

That was Jimmy Durante’s catchphrase, and it reminds us that the key with dealing with a lot of life is just getting used to it – cause life ain’t gonna change. So it is with rejection. If you’re a writer, better get used to it – by the truckload.

That doesn’t mean you sit there in patient silence, waiting. First off, you need to bear in mind the positives on your ledger. In my case, one of these is that an agent requested my full manuscript and is currently reviewing it. That’s a big step. It could well lead to rejection .. or it could lead to that revise-and-resubmit, or even to an offer of representation. Then on top of that, one has to keep working. I’ve already talked about completing a new novel, Stone By Stone. I’m working on engaging an editor to help me polish that book. And at the same time, I’ve gone back to work on finishing the trilogy that begins with Bandal The Only. Just this past week I completed, I think, a strong outline for Only’s End, the conclusion to Blair and Terendurr’s struggle with Bandal. Hope it doesn’t have too much worldbuilding …

Then, you need to spend time looking at things like this, that I came across whilst Googling the Great Durante. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this old-time stuff. Till next time …