*blink*

Just submitted for review: John C. Wright's Null-A Continuum (Tor, May '08), a sequel to A.E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A.

I haven't looked inside the book itself, so I can't comment there. I'm just a bit croggled that it exists at all, though I suppose it's no surprise that if someone was going to have the chutzpah to "continue" one of the most influential books in the American SF canon, it would be Wright. The jacket copy claims that he "trained himself to write in the exciting pulp style and manner of van Vogt". What a terrifying statement. I'm not sure I can bring myself to read the book just yet; I'm very glad I have a reviewer I can assign it to instead, so I'll have a bit of warning.

I told Josh at Skifferati* about this and he asked, "Can you think of anyone who's written a sequel for a dead famous author that was worthwhile? Outside of fanfic**?" I had to think hard, and the only name I could come up with was Ruth Plumly Thompson. Pulp sequels in particular are really the written SF world's equivalent of Hollywood remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still.

* Who also happens to be my husband.
** I think that in this case, the only distinction between "fanfic" and "not fanfic" is whether it's a) authorized or based on notes by the original author and b) being published on paper.

I haven't read Kevin J. Anderson's Slan Hunter, though our reviewer thought it was decent; that would be a natural point of comparison, but Anderson was working from van Vogt's notes, whereas Wright appears to have created this from whole cloth. At least I'm fairly sure that it can't be worse than the recent multi-author sequel to The Witches of Karres (or at least the first few pages of it, which is all I managed to get through before putting it back on the bookstore shelf and backing away).

Of course, the point isn't so much to outdo other sequels as to equal the original. It's also unfair to demand that it be as mind-blowing and groundbreaking as The World of Null-A was in 1949; it seems more honest to see whether Null-A Continuum can match the effect of the original on a present-day reader. I find Wright's novels contorted and stilted at best, but they are admittedly contorted and stilted in a way that's not all that far from the style of the pulp era's unpolished gems, and while van Vogt's writing has aged pretty well, there are a lot of places where someone familiar with the evolution of SF in the last sixty years would find it tired, predictable, or inane. I suppose at some point I'll just have to reread The World of Null-A and then see whether Wright's sequel does at least a good a job of standing up under modern critical examination. Hopefully framing it in those terms will sufficiently reduce my expectations. Hopefully.

At last!

A quick addendum to the timeline I posted here.

Day 57: The galleys being reviewed in this issue go in a cabinet, where we can access them if there are any questions about the review. They stay there for five weeks.

Day 92: Those galleys have hung around long enough. I put the ones I don't want on the Free to a Good Home cart near the office front door, and stack the ones I want on a shelf over my desk. That shelf fills up about every four to six weeks (since I also snag interesting galleys from other sections off the cart), at which point Josh and I bring in a bunch of sturdy cloth bags and haul it all home at once. This is why we keep buying new bookshelves.

This week I put the galleys for issue 1 of 2008 in the cabinet and took out the galleys from issue 47 of 2007. One of the books reviewed in 47 was Wastelands, which I've been dying to get my hands on ever since our reviewer emphatically starred it (you can read the review if you scroll down the Amazon page to the lowermost blog entry). Finally, three months after it first arrived in our office, I can sit down and read it in the comfort of my own home. Yay! Now I just have to find time for reading.

Those of you who envied me for getting to see nifty books way before everyone else may note that Wastelands is already in stores. The reviewers are the ones to envy. Thanks to the sitting-around-in-a-cabinet phase of the process, I end up reading things on pretty much the same schedule as everyone else.

The genre ghetto

I just finished my preliminary look through the Lambda Award SF/F/H nominees*. Lots of vampire stuff, unsurprisingly. Less kink than I remember from last year. Very heavy on the fantasy. Very, very heavy.

* See nomination guidelines here.

Total books received: 22.

Books from imprints that I recognize as being primarily F&SF-oriented: three (two from Haworth Positronic, one from Tor).

My reaction to this is complex. There's the good old-fashioned kick in the gut that comes from remembering that despite all the personal acceptance I get from others in the F&SF field, when it comes to the actual text of genre books, I'm a member of a thoroughly marginalized minority. There's the irritation over the award being basically ignored in genre circles, which means we get hardly any books from genre publishers, which means the award usually goes to queer books with genre content instead of genre books with queer content, which means it's basically ignored in genre circles. (I was looking up editions of China Mountain Zhang today and was startled to see its Lambda win mentioned in the same sentence as its Hugo and Nebula nods.) There's the frustrated certainty that several really good books that should have been in the box were not, including another title from Tor that arguably has more queer content than the one we got.

I really don't get the sense that authors of queer fiction need to be encouraged to write more spec fic. Authors of queer fiction seem very happy to include speculative elements, as evinced by this Lambda category even existing. I do get the sense that many authors of genre fiction could use some encouragement in the direction of including queer characters and queer themes. In my ideal world, the Lambda SF/F/H award would serve this purpose. To do that, it would need to go to books that are both excellent examples of queer fiction and excellent examples of speculative fiction, and that means getting nominees from the spec fic side of the fence as well as the queer side. According to the judging guidelines, queer themes and skillful handling of genre elements are of equal importance. I want to see that reflected in the books we get.

I note that this is my ideal world; my fellow judges and the folks at Lambda Literary may disagree. I will also note that the folks at Lambda Literary know I feel this way--I laid it out for them in no uncertain terms--and they know I come much more from a genre background than from a queer lit background and they still made me a judge for a second year running, so presumably they at least don't disagree too violently. Honestly, I don't think anyone benefits from the perception that the Lammies are just a bunch of queers congratulating each other on our queerness, nor do I think we need some sort of queer awards ghetto. I say, bring on the books from the big mainstream presses by the big mainstream authors! Send us more Spin Controls and Privilege of the Swords! This is not about drowning out queer authors. This is about recognizing people whose work excels in two genres simultaneously, no matter which one is their "native language", and about encouraging more people in both those worlds to aim as high as the best of either.

The deadline for this year is past, of course, but authors and publishers, if you think any of your 2008 titles might qualify, send 'em in during next year's nomination phase, which I believe is September 1 through December 1. It costs you four copies and twenty bucks; that's not a lot. (Readers, if you see something you like, encourage the author and publisher to nominate it, as they're the only ones who can.) At this point, I figure anyone who writes good queer genre fiction wants to see more of it, and wants to see what's already out there get some recognition. We can't recognize it if you don't send it to us! So please, send it in, and encourage others to do the same.

Maybe it's folly to think that broader recognition of the SF/F/H Lambda Award will encourage even one non-queer genre author to include queer characters and themes in their next book, but stranger things have happened. I think it's more realistic to hope that it will encourage queer authors to let their writing reflect that part of their lives. Either would be a really wonderful thing, a step away from the marginalization of this particular minority, and--I think--well worth rewarding.

eeee!

There are few things that will make my day like casually asking Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press whether he might someday do a snazzy boxed set of one of my favorite trilogies, and being told it's already in contract. I wrote back "You just made me squee like a Japanese fangirl!" and belatedly thought that perhaps that wouldn't do very much for my professional image... but here I am bouncing at my desk and very quietly going "eeee!" so as not to bother my cube-neighbors, so I might as well be honest about it.

(It hasn't been formally announced yet, so I can't divulge titles. But trust me, it's awesome.)

So many--four!

-- [Publisher] publicity, this is [name].

-- Hi, this is Rose Fox at Publishers Weekly. I'm working on our review of [title], by [author], and I was wondering if you have the final page count for the book.

-- Sure, hold on. Okay, I've got the finished book here. Do you just want the number on the last page, or do you count the blank page that comes after it?

-- ...

What I did not say: Page counts include all pages. They're always divisible by four--and usually, for trade-size books, by 16--because books are printed on large sheets that are then folded and cut. (This is, by the way, the reason for many intentionally blank pages.) The reason I called in the first place is that the page count on the book's Amazon listing was given as 275, and I knew that couldn't be right. Galley page counts often differ from those for the finished book, so I can't go by that either. This is the sort of information publicists are supposed to have at their fingertips.

What I said:

-- Don't worry about it. I'll just go by what Amazon has. Thanks.

*sigh*

Galley slave

I'm covering for one of the nonfiction reviews editors* this week, and it's striking to see the different ways that various nonfiction publishers do galleys. University presses and cookbook publishers make beautiful galleys, often full of color photos (which must be pretty pricy, but is extremely useful for reviewers). Self-help galleys, on the other hand, are quite likely to be manuscript pages that some intern got spiral-bound at Kinko's. If you're really lucky, they have completely blank cardboard covers.

* I hasten to note that all of our reviews are, in fact, nonfiction.

Fiction galleys run the gamut. Every house has its own style. For example, Random House helpfully stamps the imprint all over the cover like a wallpaper pattern. Less helpfully, they put a gritty B&W image of the cover on the flyleaf page, where they also put the jacket copy. This is very frustrating. I need to look at the jacket copy and cover image much more often than I need to figure out which imprint the book is under. Golden Gryphon goes one better: the covers of their galleys are entirely blank--even the spines--except for the GG logo and a number that I assume is the book's catalog number. If all the covers were identical, I would just chalk it up to having too low a budget to design and print individual ones. Given that they put a different number on each book, however, they could at least also put the author's name and the book title on the front cover and the spine.

Really, though, the best galleys are the ones that are essentially indistinguishable from the finished product except by the words "ADVANCE READING COPY" across the front (while I appreciate the compliment from galleys that call me an "advanced reader", they also make me cringe a little) and the edition and promo information on the back. Despite the brouhaha a while ago where it was suggested that sending spiffy galleys is tantamount to bribing reviewers, my preferences in this area have nothing to do with whether I want to keep the galley. It's simply easier to give an accurate review with a galley that gives you a reading experience as close as possible to the purchaser's reading experience, and it's easier to do good fact-checking if the author's name and the title are on the front and spine and the biblio data and jacket copy are on the back. For that matter, it's easier to find the book in the piles and piles and piles of books that cover every available surface in our office. We stack our books spine-out, like most people. If the spine of a galley is blank or shows nothing but the edges of manuscript pages, that makes it less memorable, and in turn less likely to be pulled out of the stack and assigned to a reviewer. I would think that publishers would want to make our job easier, not harder.

Look at any one of our reviews in the magazine or on the website and at the top you will see something that looks like this:

Title Title Title
Author Name, trans. from the language by Translator Name. Publisher/Imprint (www.imprint.publisher.com), $XX.XX (XXXp) ISBN 978-XXXXXXXXXX

At the end of the review, you might see:

64 color and 100 b&w photos. Author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers who include all that information on the galley cover have my undying gratitude. That won't affect whether the book gets a good review, of course, but it does make it more likely that the biblio text on our review will be accurate, which is very, very important to us and to publishers. (The worst sin that I can commit, as an editor, is failing to correct an erroneous ISBN.)

At the very least, galleys in book form are really a must. I've seen "galleys" that were rubber-banded manuscripts. We like our reviewers and we want to stay on good terms with them; we're not going to send them piles of paper unless we really have to review the book for some reason, and if we do, the reviewer will approach the book with a feeling of dread and irritation even before the first word is read. I assume that's not how publishers want their books to be approached, so I have no idea why they do this. I think it reflects very poorly on the publisher, and thereby on the book. Why not send a galley that encourages the reviewer to approach it with joyful anticipation? That's not bribery; it's just good sense.

A red-letter day

Dear reviewers:

Big words only make you sound smarter if you use them correctly.

When giving a page number citation, please make sure it is the right page number.

Please keep your wordcount within 10% of the limits provided with the assignment.

Thank you,
Ed.



Dear authors:

No, seriously, big words only make you sound smarter if you use them correctly.

When running a character name search/replace, make it case sensitive and select "whole word only". Otherwise you end up with interesting new words like "Kateegory" and "munSteveity", which somewhat disrupts the flow of your narrative.

Please make your character and place names pronounceable. It would be nice if they had similar linguistic origins, too. Do not, however, fill your dialogue with alien jargon in italics, no matter how great the temptation.

Thank you,
Ed.



Dear publishers:

Please send galleys in reusable and/or recyclable packaging. A sturdy paper envelope is fine, really. Your book is not made of glass; there is no need to pack it in bubble wrap.

Comparing your author to three famous dead authors in the same breath, or rather, in the same breathless sentence, is good for a laugh but not much else. The only reason we read the promo copy is to make sure the reviewer isn't cribbing from it. We certainly don't count on it to be accurate about the spelling of the protagonist's name, much less the quality of the writing.

Putting my name on the envelope does nothing but annoy me, since then I have to carry the books to the book room myself rather than having the nice fellow who delivers our mail do it for me. Address it to "F&SF Editor" like our publication guidelines tell you.

Thank you,
Ed.



Dear fellow editors:

Thank you for making loud, hilarious phone calls during working hours. They provide welcome relief from the frustrations detailed above.

I'm really proud of all of us for how rarely we flail our arms and swear at some of the terrible books we get.

If anyone has a bottle of good whiskey hidden in a filing cabinet someplace, please let me know.

Thank you,
Third cubicle on the left

Forgotten but not gone

Safely arrived in Boston.

I read Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts on the trip up. I'm always fascinated by the writing of writers' children. Even had I not known he was Stephen King's son, I would know at least one of his parents was a writer. His work just has that vibe about it, a blend of youthful rawness and decades of training that you only get when you start learning very, very young. It's something I try to erase from my own writing but don't really mind in others', as long as there's sufficient talent to balance out the overabundance of knowledge. Hill has talent and to spare.

Someone clearly told him "Start strong, end long", which he did, and it more or less worked. The first two stories, "Best New Horror" and "20th Century Ghosts", actually knocked the wind out of me. It's been a long time since writing left me breathless that way. Then there were a bunch of other stories, which failed to have quite the same impact, and then the final novella, "Voluntary Committal", which reminded me a great deal of Jeffrey Ford's "Botch Town", not least because 20th Century Ghosts (hereafter 20CG) tugs on many of the same heartstrings as The Empire of Ice Cream. Ford has a broader range and takes more chances; he's a fantasist who explores every nook and cranny of what that means, while Hill is a horror writer who takes occasional weekend trips to other genres. I was surprised to note a few stories in 20CG that had no fantastical component to them at all. I thought the ones that did were more successful, but Hill clearly has room to spread his wings in many different directions if he wants to. I don't get the sense that he wants to, just yet. That's the other thing that writers' children tend to have: a sense of the arc of a writer's career, an arc that often itself resembles a three-act story. Hill knows he's on the first few pages of his own arc, and he's content to be there, establishing context for himself. I hope he has as much time as he thinks he does. It will be interesting to see what his writing is like, decades down the road.

The title of 20CG is taken from a story about ghosts at the movies--Hill just loves the punning titles, sometimes to excess, as with "Pop Art", which is about an inflatable kid named Arthur who quite literally fears getting popped--but it's a highly apt description of the collection's overall vibe. I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of the naïf in fiction, especially speculative fiction, where the naïf most often is the child or stranger to whom the world is explained, a vehicle for delivering exposition to the reader without it seeming quite so much like exposition. Hill loves the naïf with a passion, and it has nothing to do with exposition at all. If slipstream is fiction that makes you feel unsettled and off-balance as the world tilts under your feet, this is anti-slipstream, where the tilting of the world underfoot is insufficient to disrupt the inner worlds of one supremely confident character after another. The narrators and main characters (who often have names like John and Jack, cipher names that also deliberately give the sense of the author's own name in a very thin disguise) are children and near-children: autists, idiots savant, grown men who live in their parents' basements. They are certain about the way the world is. They need no explanations from others. This is just as much a 20th Century feeling as slipstream's uncertainty is, the ghost of the 1950s when everyone's certainty about what went where and who was who masked tremendous unsettlement, dissatisfaction, and memories of wartime pain and atrocity and loss.

When characters in these stories do terrible things--a teenager throwing a brick off an overpass and causing a possibly fatal car accident, a mother abandoning her husband as she flees with their child--Hill repeatedly describes them being set aside and deliberately forgotten. The teenager builds a mental wall of bricks all too like the one he threw, locking away memories like his own personal casks of Amontillado. The mother suggests a fun new game called Amnesia, where they'll pretend the child's father never existed at all. The naïf must stay naïve; the world must not be allowed to tilt. It's a supremely successful formula and it works over and over and over again, because this sort of willful blindness is exactly what lets people do terrible things and survive terrible happenings in the real world. There is no need to suspend disbelief. We see it all around and within ourselves, every day. Hill adds a layer of complexity by making the terrible things uncertain (did anyone really die in that car accident? is the abandoned father really in danger or is the mother just delusional?), so that the happenings that must be forgotten or shut away are not even solidly real when faced head-on. Sometimes that makes the deliberate amnesia easier; other times, it's harder, especially when the veil is ripped away only for the character to realize that the time when any of the questions could have been answered is past.

The non-fantastical pieces don't really seem to fit with the rest, even the ones that have genre-ish settings. "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" is about a romance on the set of Dawn of the Dead, but it's still a romance, and the blue makeup and fake blood are almost certainly just blue makeup and fake blood. "Abraham's Boys" plays a little faster and looser with the genre line: it refuses to answer the question of whether Abraham Van Helsing legitimately hunted vampires or was just a lunatic, and also has enough creepiness and gore to put it firmly in the horror camp even without any supernatural elements. "The Widow's Breakfast" is so non-genre that the little creepy twists sit oddly on it, like clothes that don't quite fit. If this were a music CD rather than a book, I'd reorder it so that those pieces came first or perhaps went off into their own little mini-album. Having them interspersed among the more powerful, kick-in-the-gut fantasies like "The Cape" (about which I will say nothing except that it should be read without preconceptions for the best effect) rings a bit of uncertainty, as though Hill worries that the reader will be overwhelmed. Personally, I'd rather be overwhelmed. I don't want to get up and stretch my legs between acts; like one of the true movie aficionados in "20th Century Ghosts", I want to have the lights stay low, to be kept in my seat for longer than I'm entirely comfortable with, to stand up and stagger out only when I'm absolutely sure it's over.