Matthew Buscemi's Blog, page 27

Writers Read

But those [writers] who stick around soon hit an entirely different wall. You can have killer story ideas, and think relentlessly about one day writing them down, but if you aren’t reading you’ll find yourself completely unable to actually follow through and do the hard work of writing. And when I say reading, I mean consuming books in the way Olympic weightlifters eat potatoes…in bulk and with lashings of butter!

- Damien Walter, "What's the Number One Reason You Aren't Writing?"

I have kept Damien Walter's blog on my Feedly, despite having been frustrated with him in the past. This is part of my effort to continue to confront myself with opposing viewpoints. If I choose to block out everything I disagree with, I risk ending up in an echo chamber. I almost passed up reading the post linked above, and I'm glad I didn't. I don't know how many time I've seen someone build a blog post around the slogan "writers write" and thought that such an aphorism misrepresents the writerly life–writers must be avid readers, too.

Although Walter's assertion isn't perfect, and I'd like to amend it. I've not witnessed any evidence that a lack of reading slows writers down. I have known quite a few writers who churn out story after story, novel after novel, all while admitting that reading fiction is just not for them. The fact that these writers are producing schlock doesn't phase them because they don't know that they're producing it. They haven't read enough to develop a sense for what schlock looks like.

The whole point of reading is to expose yourself to other styles, other methods, other techniques, and even other ideologies. This is where Walter is spot on in his assessment. Reading bad writing is useful in as much as it teaches you how not to write, if you can make yourself perceptive enough to tell what's going wrong. Good writing often gives you a new lens through which to view your own writing. If good writing challenges your beliefs and ideology and causes you to look at the world in a completely new way, all the better. The worlds you imagine will be more nuanced as a result.

The obvious follow up to Walter's article is the answer to the question left in its wake: What constitutes good writing? To extend the metaphor Walter established, he told us we're supposed to gorge on potatoes, but that not all potatoes are created equal, that there good ones and bad ones... So which are the good ones?

To answer this question, one need to create a list of preferred works. In other words, a canon. And doing that comes with a lot of complex baggage. A canon, by its very form, suggest that it contains the "good books" and leaves out the "bad books." Especially in the age of consumerism and mass media, we're supposed to set such snobbish ideas aside and rely on Amazon and Google popularity algorithms to help us get more of the things we already inherently know are good. As for myself, I'll take the opinion of someone well studied in the subject-matter over the determination of a popularity algorithm, or even my own predisposition of the moment. I want to keep my mind flexible and open to new ideas.

Still, even you agree with me on that matter, the creation of any literary canon, no matter who it comes from, is bound to be flawed. A canon cannot help but suggest that any book contained within it is good and any book not contained within it is inferior. What we have to do when approaching canons is understand that no matter how experienced and well-intentioned the creator, inclusion and exclusion from the list are not cemented and perpetual determinations of value. Canons can and should change. And one person's canon can be just as valid as another's, even if they contain completely different works.

Approach a canon like you approach a novel. Give it a fair shake and find out what it has to teach you.

So, with that out of the way, I'm going to take a shot at answering the question left in the wake of Walter's article. If you are interested in writing speculative fiction of any variety, here's what I recommend you read, ordered by literary period in SF.

The Dawn of SF

Most of the researchers I've read agree that science fiction comes into being with Mary Shelley's publication of Frankenstein in 1818. She followed this up with the less well known The Last Man, the earliest rendition of the post-apocalyptic novel I'm aware of.

The Rest of the Nineteenth Century

Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stand out as the most notable authors before the turn of the century (and about half of Wells's bibliography appears on the other side of the century line).

Books to read by Verne include Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne was prolific, and I plan to add more of his long bibliography to my reading list.

H.G. Wells is best known for The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man also appear well regarded. I've seen When the Sleeper Wakes mentioned in criticism frequently, so that's on my list, too. Wells has a long bibliography, but I've haven't seen works outside of these five mentioned very much.

Early Twentieth Century

My favorite work from the early years of the twentieth century is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It presages Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, also written in this era (1932). Both these works are examples of dystopian fiction.

One cannot pass through this period without mentioning two of the giants of the fantasy genre: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) should be on your reading list, as should The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis).

E.E. Doc Smith and Olaf Stapledon appear frequently mentioned in regards to this era, but I have yet to read anything they've written.

Mid-Twentieth Century–the So-Called "Golden Age"

A couple of things happen in American science fiction during this time. In the run-up to World War II and immediately following, the US pulp science fiction magazines go berserk, and this leads to the so-called Golden Age of science fiction. Writers to read here are A.E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, and Arthur C. Clarke.

However, the "Golden Age" science fiction of the pulp magazines distinguished itself sharply from literary fiction. Whereas stories of adventure and discovery in the vein of Verne and Wells sat alongside stories about social mores the role and responsibilities of humanity in a technological future in the vein of Shelley, Zamyatin, and Huxley in the years prior, from the 1950's onward, the two were rent apart into opposing ideological groups, "genre" and "literary" respectively.

The mid-twentieth century also gave us Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Also check out Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

Another notable author is John Wyndham, whose novels The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and The Day of the Triffids are frequently mentioned as foundational literature in the horror genre.

There is also Mervyn Peake, who I only recently became aware of. His novels Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone are considered proto-"New Weird," a sub-genre that won't appear until the end of the twentieth century.

Mid-Late-Twentieth Century–the New Wave

By the nineteen-sixties, SF had become primed for a reaction to the Golden Age, which arrived in the form of the New Wave. Driving this reaction was the fact that Golden Age writers had a tendency to be white, male, and reactionary in their politics. And it was the sixties after all, so there were social norms to turn over left and right. There were some motions at mending the rift between genre and literary, but overall, it's my impression that the New Wave movement couldn't seem to decide whether it was trying to bridge that divide or rend the two sides further apart.

Feminist science fiction gets going with the appearance of Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ. Ursula K. Le Guin is, in my opinion, a must read. The Earthsea Cycle, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest are all phenomenal, and my personal favorite novel of all time is The Lathe of Heaven.

Queer science fiction begins properly with Samuel Delaney. Notable works include Trouble on Triton, Babel-17, The Nevèrÿon Series, and Dahlgren.

Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem both begin publishing during this period as well. Dick's got a huge bibliography, and from what I've read so far, I give only The Man in the High Castle my recommendation. I'm reading him in chronological order of publication, so I'm holding out hope that Ubik, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and A Scanner Darkly will improve upon what I've read of him so far. Lem's Solaris is phenomenal.

Other notable authors worth checking out: J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, and Christopher Priest (I can wholeheartedly recommend Inverted World).

The End of the Twentieth Century and the Twenty-First Century Aughts–SF Diaspora

You'll find the terms "Golden Age" and "New Wave" in other works of literary criticism. "SF Diaspora" is my own invention, admittedly drawn from China Miéville's Embassytown.

Speaking of China Miéville, he appears during this period, popping onto the scene with King Rat in 1998, but he really gets the "New Weird" sub-genre going in 2000 with Perdido Street Station. I can recommend everything I've read by him. Finish off the Bas Lag Trilogy with The Scar and Iron Council. Then make sure also to read Un Lun Dun, Embassytown, The City and the City, and Railsea.

Also a New Weird writer, Jeff VanderMeer appears during this time, but his Area X Trilogy, which appears later, is what will put him on the map. Of that trilogy, only Annihiliation gets my recommendation.

Margaret Atwood expands the dystopian genre to consider the oppression of woman as well as social classes with her novel The Handmaid's Tale.

As computer technology increases exponentially, this gets a lot of people thinking about where it, in particular, is going. Authors writing to some aspect of futurism (AI, singularity, terraforming, etc.) include Alastair Reynolds, Ian M. Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Dan Simmons.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is an excellent fusion of a lot of different motifs of this era.

Doris Lessing and Octavia Butler produce notable works as well.

2010 to Present–The Era of the Literature Product

The Kindle Direct Publishing Platform launched in 2007. By 2010 it had massively disrupted the business of the six major print publishers in the US, which became five in 2013. It's my opinion that the arrival of the KDP was as impactful to literature as Gutenberg's printing press, but whereas the quality of that change was largely positive, I believe KDP's legacy will be largely negative. And society is just as much at fault as Amazon, because the cultural changes that brought the KDP about and made it successful had been gaining power for decades.

The "Era of the Literature Product" is another creation of mine. In brief, from 2010 onward we have societally formalized (with KDP) the nascent attitude that whatever you like is what is good for you, that no one is allowed to tell you otherwise, that this principle applies to books amongst a vast many other things, and that the marketplace is the most efficient and best way for you to get whatever kind of "literature" it is that you want.

Given that I'm clearly biased about this era, I'm going to hold off citing authors for now, but suffice it to say, I think there is still literature worth reading being produced, it's just a lot harder to find than ever before, which is ironic given our vast, worldwide, digital information network.

More on all this in a later post.

I populated much of the above chronology from the introductory timeline in Teaching Science Fiction by Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright. I am not as well read as I would like to be, but I am doing the best I can with admittedly limited temporal resources. The above reading list will be revised as I become more well read. Some authors may fall off, or I might expand their sections as I read more works by them; authors I discover will be added as well.

I'm compiling this list because I want it to be easier to find good books, and to see SF from a broader point of view. I have done this for myself the only way I know how. I have cobbled together a picture of my own from disparate resources. I hope someone else finds this chronology useful.

If you have recommendations for additions, please post them in the comments.

The Author Test

At a recent book convention, I approached another author's table. I am fairly selective, and don't usually approach all other authors' tables, but I decided to approach this particular author because the art style she presented, both on her table display and on her book covers was very stylistically unique, and was therefore intriguing.

I first read over the promotional material she had on display–some review quotes, pretty decent-looking. The only thing I could find to knock off points for in those was a comparison to George R. R. Martin, but then it's not like that means much these days. A reviewer might compare anyone who writes high fantasy to Martin.

It was time to find out more. I pointed to the novel with the more interesting cover art of the two. "What's this novel about?"

The author launched into a long explanation of the plot.

"Okay," I replied. "That's the plot. What's your novel about?"

The author immediately clenched her jaw and straightened her back. "I'm not interested in a test. No. That's not okay."

"Sure," I said, and returned to my table.

It was easy to move on and immerse myself in conversations with other authors and potential readers, but as the day transitioned from afternoon into evening and the foot traffic died down, I couldn't help but notice my mind drifting back to this very uncomfortable exchange. Tense interactions such as the ones above are no longer as emotionally draining for me as they once were, so it's not as though I minded being challenged in this way. On the contrary, the more I thought about this author's position, the more firmly I decided to maintain my current stance, and the more I saw within this failed interaction the microcosm of a disturbing trend in our society today.

I asked what I believed was a straightforward question: "What is one of your novels about?" The author replied that the novel was about Event A leading to Event B leading to Event C leading to Situation D causing Problem E and oh, however will the characters solve that problem. On some level, I agree that this can be construed as an interpretation of what the novel is about, but when I ask what a novel is about, I am far more interested in why its author chose to create it than I am what specific events the author rendered within it.

The author's defensiveness led me to believe that she did not know why she created it; she only knew what she had created. Furthermore, I find it concerning, on a social level, at the implications of the author's statement, "I'm not interested in a test." What kind of test did she presume I had in mind? The only test truly in my mind was one of whether or not I was going to choose to spend a small portion of my money and a heaping portion of my precious time on her novel. However, it seems that the only reason a person could have these days for asking an author to talk about the why instead of the what is that they are interested in proving some kind of academic or intellectual point. Commercial transactions must certainly all be about elaborating surface details. I mean, it couldn't possibly be that someone actually interested in spending money on a novel could want to know if its author was expressing an idea of philosophical, ethical, social, or intellectual value. No, such an inquiry could only be the result of some kind of intellectual snobbery. Clearly.

Is it important for an author to know the why of their novel in addition to the what? That's my belief. And that's because beliefs and attitudes, the stuff of the why, are not imbued within a work at the author's behest, they are imbued within a work whether the author likes it or not. Regardless of how much or how little an author wants their work to be about something (other than plot), every story they write will be about something. Better for the author to be cognizant, in my opinion, of what they're espousing.

As an author, I am interested in being tested in this way. For every word of every novel, every book interior and cover design I lay out, I try to stay aware of why I am making the choices I do. When I pitch my novels at convention, I start from a description of the why and move on to elements of the what only after the potential reader shows some interest in the story's core ideas. Voyage Embarkation is about growing up different in a seemingly chaotic and incomprehensible world. Insomnium is about finding productive ways of pulling oneself up out of a dark and troubling life situation. Alterra is about religion, science, and the way human ideology underlies both. And Schrödinger's City, my most thematically coherent novel yet, is about perception and uncertainty. I embrace the question of the why, and I don't find it interesting to talk about the what, except if I need specific examples of how I chose to achieve the why.

Hopefully, we will gain renewed awareness as a society that novels are more than just bags of titillating events, that novels have the power to enrich our lives rather than deaden our minds with an endless onslaught of dopamine hits: And then just when you thought they'd have a nice wedding, everyone was ruthlessly slaughtered instead!–It turned out that their enemies had been genetically engineered into wolf creatures who began tearing the remaining competitors limb from limb and feasting upon their raw flesh!

The true test of authorship is whether or not an author can tell you why and not just what. The author I engaged with at this convention was right to be defensive, as she gave away the fact that her novel was, in all likelihood, about nothing at all.

Not Ourselves Without Others

Great writing seeks subtlety. It’s the words that are unwritten, the descriptions that are inferred, the meaning that comes across through the subtext of what is explicit that writing excels at communicating. [Bad] writing doesn’t ask me to look within myself for answers. It asks me to look no further than the page.

from a user comment included as part of Your 2016 Authorial Mandate is Here by Chuck Wendig

There was a time when I found Wendig's intentional crudity humorous and endearing. That time is now multiple years past, but I continue to follow his blog, because his posts are substantive and I usually find myself half-agreeing with them, and thus they make for good critical reflection.

The "authorial mandate" mentioned in Wendig's post's title is for the reader of his blog, presumably a writer, to spurn and ignore all advice that seeks to mold the writer's voice into a shape deemed "better" by the advice-giver. Critiquers, Wendig argues, should be invested in helping writers find their own, individual voices, not in imposing the critiquer's voice upon the writer.

And I agree... kind of.

The quote that I started this post with is an excerpt from a very hostile and negative evaluation of Wendig's work. And for all the commenter's arrogant nastiness (see Wendig's post for the full original), the small segment I've quoted rings true. Unfortunately, the anonymous commenter has completely sacrificed any opportunity he may have had for Wendig to hear his message, and chose instead to take cheap shots at Wendig's process and style*. And, as the unfortunate cycle goes, this sets Wendig up to take subsequent cheap shots at the writer of the comment, and all of Wendig's readers laugh at his playful vulgarity, and the commenter seems so stupid, and in some other corner of the internet some faux-literary commenter and perhaps his/her friends are decrying the fall from grace of true style and depth, and no one is listening to anyone else, and–

Let's back up.

"Great writing seeks subtlety." Yes. "Bad writing doesn't ask me to look within myself for answers. It asks me to look no further than the page." Yes.

These statements ring true.

Wendig, and all other writers, regardless of income level or status within the literary world, deserve to have themselves and their writing treated with a basic modicum of respect when it is critiqued. And this goes all the way up the highest levels of critical reviewer. I lost a lot of respect for Christopher Priest when he reviewed Barricade, because he took his critique way past the fuzzy gray zone and into a full-on attack upon the author and the author's intent, rather than focusing on an honest evaluation of the work. For stark contrast, check out how Le Guin handled her review of On Such a Full Sea.

On the flip side, Wendig, and all other writers, have a responsibility to their own integrity to seriously engage with all critical claims against their work.

I get the resistance to such suggestions. I myself have received very hurtful, very abusive feedback. And dealing with that feedback sucked. And the abuse wasn't at all necessary. And it felt very natural to stubbornly assert that the critiquer was an idiot and I was just fine the way I was. But I let it in a bit, and I reacted to it. I had to. I have never had the luxury of an editor or publisher who will reassure me by phone or email that my vision is superb and that my books are selling well. I have never looked in my bank account and thought about how comfortable and secure my writing makes me. When my abusive feedback arrived, I had to do something with it. I could not, as Wendig suggests, just slough it off. He is probably in the minority of writers able to easily do so.

It's easy to see where the resultant conclusions of the commenter's argumentation become scary, because it's a place human society is very familiar with. When "subtlety" and "depth" become so narrowly defined that only those fitting a very particular mold can find their way in, then diversity and originality suffer. But I would like to also suggest that our society can arrive in the same place of stifling homogeneity from the opposite angle, from Wendig's angle–by jamming our fingers in our ears, shouting at our attackers that they just don't understand us, and we're just fine the way we are, and we never learn and never grow and never change, and boy this is a really comfortable and lucrative mode of writing, so why should we consider any other ways of doing things, especially when all the other successful things around us look so much like everything that we create?

We should not tolerate bullies, either physical or intellectual. But we must remember always that we must listen to and engage with and reflect upon the substance of the messages of even (and especially) our harshest critics in order to truly be ourselves.

* A big part of the commenter's argument against Wendig is the speed at which he produces completed novels. I am curious how the commenter would evaluate the works of Philip K Dick, who is widely understood to be a very deep, very literary writer, but who is also well known for writing out his novels quickly and without much editing.

Review: Not on Fire, but Burning by Greg Hrbek

What an incredible way to kick off my 2016 reading. Not many novels achieve the kind of stylistic and thematic sophistication demonstrated by Greg Hrbek in Not on Fire, but Burning. This was an incredible novel to immerse myself in.

Multiple parallel timelines.

In one of them, a UFO appears above the Golden Gate bridge, severs all its cords, and then sets off a nuclear explosion. Skyler Wakefield, who is babysitting in Presidio Heights at the time, is one of thousands of unfortunate individuals far enough from the blast to avoid being incinerated, but close enough to receive a lethal dose of radiation, which leads to her demise within days.

Fast forward nine years to Skyler's little brother Damian, now age twelve, whose family relocated to the East Coast after the terrible events in San Francisco. Damian tries to grapple with the loss his sister, but the rest of the family is upset by his behavior. Not, as it turns out, because mom and dad are trying to repress or suppress memories of Skyler, but because Damian and the reader have actually shifted timelines–to a universe where Skyler was never born. Instead of being allowed to process his grief, Damian was diagnosed instead as "overly imaginative." He has somehow been accessing memories of his sister from another universe, with enough frequency and intensity to believe that his family is covering up her demise and her very existence. He was, after all, only three when she died.

On yet another universe entirely, Skyler Wakefield was born, and she went home the summer after her Freshman year, putting her one hundred miles distant from the explosion in San Francisco that would have killed her if she had taken that internship and done the babysitting that got her killed in the first universe.

And on yet another universe, no explosion occurred.

As the story progresses, memories of other universes flow into the narrative as though the pages themselves are crumbling, unable to hold their own against the erosion of realities. The presence and narrative voice of an unnamed quantum custodian guides the reader through an increasingly bizarre landscape of multiple histories intermingling, all the time suggesting that the thing that blew up over San Francisco, far from the terrorist attack most people think it was, was actually something far stranger, something capable of shattering reality.

Herein lies the real power of Not on Fire, but Burning: its dialogue with the ethnic bigotry and the fear of terror present in the real world. In the universe of Damian's memories of the sister who was never born, Damian finds a scapegoat for his frustration and grief in his society's Islamophobia. As that timeline goes, the center of the country was evacuated after the SF attack, and following a racial backlash against Middle-Easterners, many American Arabs were interned in states like the Dakotas.

Damian's parents are horrified by the attitudes he develops, and work with the local Muslim community to open up a dialogue and correct their son's behavior. And when a neighbor adopts a child from the internment camps, his parents jump on the opportunity to teach Damian better behaviors. But this particular universe feels socially compelled toward entropy. Despite the humanity evident in both Damian's and Karim's (the adopted boy) points of view, the culture around them is stuck in a perpetually worsening cycle of hatred that, while Damian and Karim resist it, is impossible for a single individual, or even a single family, to halt, and which eventually subsumes them both.

Most brilliantly, of all the novel's devices, none of these universes are ours. In all of them, America appears to be composed of colonies and territories ("Connecticut Colony", "the Dakota Territory"), as though their union into the "United States of America" never took place. All the modern marvels of twenty-first century life appear vibrantly–cell phones, the internet, social media, image manipulation, etc.–but a crucial social revolution is absent, an effect which aligns brilliantly with the rest of the novel's themes.

What universe, then, are we? Where do we fall on the quantum custodian's Cartesian grid? What kind of universe will we create for ourselves and those around us? Is it too late to escape the death spiral into racial hatred and warfare? Greg Hrbek's novel suggests that we examine these questions in detail, and therein lies the incredible power of its narrative.

2015 Retrospective & 2016 Planning

2015 was an incredible year.

I blew my reading goals out of the water, finishing a total of thirty-one books instead of the planned twenty-four. Three of those books were works of literary criticism: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction by Darko Suvin, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Critical Theory and Science Fiction by Carl Freedman. I have a fourth lined up for next year, Archeologies of the Future by Frederic Jameson.

I accomplished all of my publishing goals, too. I published both Lore & Logos and Schrödinger's City, and I set myself up well in terms of short stories. I wrote enough of them this year to constitute a second collection, which I have planned for March, titled Transmutations of Fire and Void.

If there was one area in which I slipped, it's that I don't have a draft of a novel ready to go for late next year. I attribute this largely to the fact that I've spent a lot of time searching for the novel that will follow Schrödinger's City instead of writing it. Last year at this time, I thought that novel would be Fren, but that novel didn't feel right, not right now. I then came up with a wonderful nugget of an idea in the form of a project titled The Land of the Free, and while that's a great, great concept with many appealing aspects to it, it's just not logistically feasible–I'd have to do a lot of expensive traveling to get all of its details right, and I'm not prepared to financially commit to that right now.

And then I stumbled upon Dessyit. That shall be my next project. When a project dominates my mental world in the way this idea has, I know it's right.

My reading goal for 2016: thirty-two books.

My publishing goals for 2016: Transmutations of Fire and Void, Dessyit, and the anthology I'm editing, Beyond the Hedge.

I'm looking forward to an incredible 2016 as well.

A New Definition for the Literary Novel

What does it mean for a novel to be "literary?" For many years, writers of science fiction and fantasy have been excluded from the gated community of the so-called "literary writers," and thus excluded from the writerly prestige afforded to its members. Members of this community have argued that "genre," or the un-literary (science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, thriller, etc.), possesses internal constraints that prevent such works from embodying the qualities of "literariness."

But such qualities have remained elusive, and for each quality that one identifies, a novel deemed to be "literary" by the establishment can be found which violates it. As a result, the buttressed borders between science fiction "genre" and realistic "literature" have begun to crumble and blur, especially since the turn of the century.

Some individuals, riding on the heels of the deconstructionist agenda, proclaimed that the border was completely arbitrary in the first place and that we should consider The Hunger Games as worthy of serious intellectual investigation as 1984, and we should put The Maze Runner on par with Brave New World. I find this view extreme. 1984 and Brave New World feel as though they contain a certain something that The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner do not. But what is that something? And is it literary?

In 1979, Darko Suvin wrote a work of literary criticism called Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, which inaugurated the age in which works of science fiction and fantasy could be taken seriously by literary critics. It did so by providing a framework for interpreting such novels that was compatible with existing literary criticism.

Suvin's framework hinges on the concept of the "novum." A novum is a way in which the world of the novel differs from the reader's reality. But not just any difference can be a novum. If a novel were to depict a pharmacy at the corner of Third Avenue and Pike Street in Seattle, when it's Macy's in reality, then such a difference would not be a novum. A novum, crucially, must be a difference that causes the reader to reconsider her own interpretation of the real world.

In 1984, the systematized destruction of all interpersonal relationships that might constitute a force of power capable of standing against the entrenched hegemony is a novum–it causes the reader to consider whether or not the entrenched hegemonies of the real world are behaving in an authoritarian way. In Brave New World, the failure of the protagonist to integrate himself into a world of homogenized bliss and pain-avoidance is a novum–it causes the reader to wonder if his own society is anesthetizing its population into subservience.

What are the novums of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner? Do they possess any? What do they teach us about ourselves? It's not enough for a novel to simply project enjoyable images into our brains (unless we want to live in the kind of society that Brave New World depicts). Novels must be capable of teaching us something about ourselves. This is the real difference between "literary" and "non-literary," as opposed to the socially-constructed, artificial difference of "realism" and "non-realism." 

Carl Freedman took this line of thinking a step farther in his book Critical Theory and Science Fiction. He constructed a compelling argument that Suvin's novum could be applied to the entirety of literature, regardless of genre. Works of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, thriller, realism, all of them could be interpreted to be successful literature based on the salience of their novums, and how critical of the real world those novums enabled their readers to be. Under Freedman's interpretation, the division of "literature" and "science fiction," becomes "literature" and "literature on steroids." A well-written science fiction novel, to Freedman, has more potential for literariness than the best-written realistic novel.

This stance of Freedman's raises a very obvious question. If science fiction is better equipped than realism to tackle literary aspirations, then why has science fiction been relegated to its "ghetto" status for so long? Why is he the first scholar to notice this in the century and a half since Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein? His answer is startling. Science fiction has been ghettoized and its best works have been either ignored or fitted awkwardly into realism because the entrenched hegemony has a vested interest in undermining the authority science fiction is capable of wielding. Real science fiction must, by its very nature, call into question the legitimacy of the power structures of the real world. Those who find themselves at the top of the "literary" power pyramid have either consciously or unconsciously dismissed those works which threaten their positions, and it just happens to be convenient to group such works into a "genre" which by definition is, supposedly, lesser and "unliterary."

I side unabashedly with Freedman. A "literary science fiction novel" should be referred to as simply a "good novel." It must engage its reader's imagination and bring about a new ("novel") awareness of reality via Suvin's novum. Such a novel exists within a continuum of other literature. It is aware of where literature has been, and drives literature in a direction the author is aware of trying to drive it. It does not project puerile images within a vacuum.

Despite the growing popularity of mainstream science fiction and fantasy, I see many signs that most of this work is not really science fiction in Suvin or Freedman's sense. I see Google Plus groups which purport to be about writers and writing, but whose participants are uninterested in discussing novels. I see an Amazon ebook ecosystem composed almost exclusively of homogenized book products, and a disturbing dearth of "novels" in the true sense of books that expose something new. And most upsettingly, I have participated in writing critique groups who encourage their members to consider "action" (which actually means sex and violence) and "pacing" (which actually means the obliteration of all salient environmental and emotional details) above all else. I see a general conflation of "popular," "profitable," and "good" throughout our entire culture.

I wish to open up a new discussion: Is it possible that the entrenched hegemony of our modern world has embraced a new means of delegitimizing science fiction? Are we being bombarded with mundane, boring realism dressed up in science fiction's clothes in order to deflect attention away from what real science fiction does well?

As a science fiction writer, I can imagine and have to hope for a better world. It is my firm belief that one day humanity will experience an age in which the general perception of literature aligns with Freedman's analysis. It will be one in which "good literature" and "science fiction" are understood to be one in the same.

Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Freedman, C. H. (2000). Critical theory and science fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

Despite my qualms about Planetfall (and I've got quite a few), it is at least a complex novel with an extremely relatable, well-rendered protagonist, and that is more than most novels accomplish nowadays.

Renata Ghali is the most highly skilled molecular printer engineer in a colony of humans living on an unspecified alien planet. She and her fellow colonists have been living and thriving there for twenty-two years, having left Earth in the wake of the chaos caused by overpopulation and ecological instability.

And that was not the only thing driving them to this particular planet. Years prior to their departure, Renata's best friend from college, Lee Suh-Mi, suffered a coma, and upon waking discovered herself strangely drawn to a particular Earth-like planet that had recently been surveyed with unmanned interstellar ships.

Upon this particular planet lies a structure that Renata and the colonists call "God's city," but which physical description constructs as a hybrid of the Yggdrasil and a Cthulhu monstrosity. The novel's tension is derived mostly from waiting for the events surrounding the colonists' arrival to be revealed in order to help explain the reverential cult of personality that has grown up around Suh-Mi, and explain why she's now living alone at the top of God's city.

The largest of my qualms with the novel is certainly that aforementioned element of the mystery genre–the intentional holding back of key information relevant to bring the larger themes into context. In a mystery novel, the reader doesn't require the context of the missing information to make sense of the environment and social dynamics, as those typically occur in a realistic setting. In Planetfall, the withholding of the crucial information is merely frustrating.

At first, I also found Renata's characterization suspect. The narrative is told in the first person. Why did Renata seem to be avoiding thinking about the events that would enlighten the reader? It became clear as her personality developed that she had very, very believable reasons for not wanting to. Well-realized characters make a novel shine, and Renata does just that for Planetfall. Her pain and anxiety are very human, and it is largely on the strength of her character that I can recommend this novel.

As for the other characters... not so much. Carmen seems to be merely a flat anti-Renata, and Mack makes some decisions toward the beginning of the novel that didn't line up with his character as depicted in the reveal, but I found Sung-Soo the most problematic character of all. For all of Renata's mental challenges, I trust her enough as narrator to accurately relate the facts of other characters' behaviors. If Renata's view of his behaviors is to be trusted, then Sung-Soo threatens basic believability, or there is something wildly wrong with him mentally. I physically groaned at his mini-reveal.

And then there is the highest level to consider, that of what the novel, as sf, can teach the reader about humanity and human society. I found this vector troubling. Planetfall falls into the common science fiction trap of painting religious belief as the result of intellectual weakness and emotional insecurity, its sole utility as merely a lever for the power-hungry to exploit. And I believe it's this vector from which all of Planetfall's troubles emanate. Since the novel can't have a nuanced dialogue with the topic of religious belief, since its goal is to merely denegrate it, then characters must behave strangely, and Renata must paint black-and-white pictures of "what would have been" if they hadn't been stupid enough to believe.

For all its foibles, Planetfall is certainly an engaging novel with an intriguing protagonist and enough substance to prompt a discussion of ethics, though I question how far the novel could take such a discussion.

Reader Identity and the Reset Button

As a child and young adult, I played a lot of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs). A common feature of the JRPG is the ability to rename playable characters to whatever the player wishes. When I first started playing JRPGs, I fell easily into the tendency of naming the central protagonist after myself. When I was playing such games as a child in the late eighties and early nineties, the games being produced contained almost exclusively young, male protagonists. I also spent the majority of the games controlling the behavior of this character. And so, their was little, if any, cognitive dissonance in giving my name to them and imagining it was me discovering such fantastic worlds instead of them.

In 1994, a game called Final Fantasy 6 was released in the United States (though it was called Final Fantasy 3 at the time; the reasons for that constitute a story too long to tell here). Final Fantasy 6 upset my ingrained naming strategy by introducing me straight away to a female protagonist at the game's onset. At the time, I was a boggled, perhaps even a bit upset. I left her name as it was, and continued playing. Within half an hour of play, another namable character came along, and then another, and another, and another, and soon it was all too evident that none of these were the "main character." In fact, Final Fantasy 6 has a cast of six to eight who are central to the plot with another six or so side characters.

Final Fantasy 6 was the first story that forced me to question identifying myself directly with the protagonist, though I'll admit I still had a lot of work to do in that regard throughout my adolescence.

Perhaps this was why, by my late teens, when I discovered a science fiction TV show called Farscape, that I became confused by the comments upon the (then nascent) internet fan forums for the show. The two most mind-boggling elements I discovered were the existence of "shippers," fans who yearn for certain characters to form romantic relationships, and also of a general attitude of disdain for something called a "reset button story," a plot construct Farscape utilized at least twice before I gave up on the series in the middle of its third season. The term "reset button" applies to any story in which the events of the story are caused to have never happened as a result of changes to the story's timeline (alternate realities, time travel, etc.).

The "reset button story" of my formative years was the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect," in which the ship and its crew are caught in a temporal paradox. They are eventually able to escape the paradox by discovering how to pass information from one loop to the next, helped along by the auditory echoes of previous loops. I enjoyed this story as a child, and I still enjoy it as an adult.

However, a person who dislikes reset buttons would argue that this story and all others of its type are flawed storytelling. When the majority of the episode's events are erased by timeline changes, the argument goes, then "nothing has changed." This is portrayed as a sort of fatal flaw, as though the purpose of a story is to cause change for its characters. I thought the point of a story was to change me.

I remained befuddled by this argument for years after first hearing it. Eventually, I would think back to my childhood experiences with JRPGs and put two and two together. If an observer's goal is merely to identify as (not "with," "as") one of the characters, then a reset button story does the unthinkable: it forces the observer to invest their own ego into their favorite protagonist's struggles, only to wrench all that away at the end and revert the character to their original state, a situation that I'm sure is incredibly frustrating for fans who form such relationships with characters, much as I was frustrated when Final Fantasy 6 presented me with my first naming opportunity and the character and I didn't share the same gender, as every JRPG prior had.

As I suggested above, experienced participants in literary or cinematographic art do not identify as the characters in a work, they identify with them. It comes naturally for the inexperienced reader to pretend that the events of a book are actually happening to them, but a more skilled reader does the mental work of imagining that characters are fully-realized people with many differences from themselves. It's quite an effort, but it's incredibly rewarding. Entirely new facets of human existence open up that were inaccessible (because they were unimaginable) before.

E-Format Reconsidered

I posted a few days ago that I will be publishing to Amazon seven of the stories that will be in my next print collection Transmutations of Fire and Void. This act represents a change in a principle I decided upon late in 2014, namely that I no longer wished to participate in the Amazon ebook marketplace, nor any other ebook marketplace.

As to my reasons, I could not perceive that Amazon (or any other online retailer) was helping me connect with discerning, intelligent readers. To date, the only way I have achieved that is directly–by establishing direct, person-to-person communication. This has happened across a variety of media, both online and offline: I have met people on social media; I have met people at conventions; and I have met people at the writing groups I run. But if any of the people who discovered my books through Amazon were of this quality, I have yet to hear about it. They certainly didn't email me when I pulled all my ebooks from Amazon early in 2015, and they didn't post reviews, either. To be clear, I did get a number of Amazon reviews from the aforementioned awesome individuals I met through other channels, but Amazon failed to generate me a single reader through their own platform.

I attribute this situation largely to my choice not to participate in KDP Select, a program whereby in exchange for marketplace exclusivity, Amazon allows the author-publisher to access various attention-getting mechanisms for their titles, from paid advertising to allowing the setting of a price below $0.99 USD (albeit still constrained). What upset me was the discovery that opting out of KDP Select did not merely seal off access to these marketing features, but also caused Amazon to hide my books.

My motivations were noble. I wanted readers who owned any of the available ebook devices to have access to my books. I targeted six platforms in total: Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iTunes, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords. Sales on Amazon eked in at a slow trickle, and the other five platforms might as well have been non-existent.

Fed up and seeing no point in any of it, I pulled my books from all of these storefronts and decided to focus on print, especially since it's a medium that allows me to fully expresses my vision in terms of presentation. Electronic books are more of a hollow simulacrum, as I have zero control over font, margins, spacing, and a bevy of other stylistic toggles and levers available in print. To add insult to injury, eBooks are a time-consuming pain to build properly. I create my eBook files from scratch with the help of an application called Sigil. I refuse to convert Microsoft Word documents.

So, what has changed?

I've decided I am willing to agree to Amazon's terms for KDP Select long enough to see if there exists a readership for my work on the platform, which I now understand to be only accessible through KDP Select. If the answer turns out to be "no," I can discontinue and pull my work in three months, in which case I'm no worse off than I was before. And I no longer care about cutting out the other vendors, since they were even worse than Amazon at driving the right (or any) eyeballs to my books.

So, here I go. The seven stories going up this January are some of my best work yet. I'm immensely proud of them. Here's to hoping that second time's charm. You can find my Amazon author page here.

The Displaced Utopia

The idealistic notion of star exploration and discovering “new life and new civilizations” crumbled when the world grew up. For so long the Americas cried for true peace as the Cold War remained an invisible weight on our lives. This naiveté yearning [sic] to grow beyond hatred spawned a generation and more yearning for hope.

- M. J. Moores, Why Star Trek Won’t Make it to the 23rd Century via SF Signal

The notion that Star Trek represents some kind of "naive" idealism has been cropping up a lot recently. This is the first time I've seen it displayed prominently on a major blog, and I would like to address it, especially as it will give me a chance to elaborate on my own conceptions of science fiction, or what literary theorists would call sf. As I've been discovering of late, I am more aligned with them than anyone else.

In 1979, a literary critic named Darko Suvin wrote Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, and in doing so kicked off all serious academic investigation of science fiction as an art form (dubbed "sf" to distinguish a work of serious literary merit from pulp, "science fiction").

Suvin argued that sf was as eligible to be literature as other genres, and worthy of critical investigation based on the presence of a novum. In Suvin's words, "...SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional 'novum' (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic" (Suvin, p. 63). In other words, while a science fiction novel may merely entertain or titillate, an sf novel presents the reader with an altered world, one in which the alterations cause the reader to consider new ideas, perspectives, or world views. And those new ideas of sf, offered up since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, have been entirely focused around the fate of our society amidst the ceaseless march of technology and science. In other words, sf is primarily about utopian idealism, or at least how not to blow ourselves to kingdom come as we become ever more technologically powerful.

In light of all this, one might consider a story about a spaceship that ferries humans from one planet to another so that they might rape and pillage their enemies, and probably decide that it is "science fiction". However, in 1960's America, a story about a spaceship that ferries an ethnically diverse yet socially functional group of humans from one planet to another so that they might learn and discover not just more about aliens, but more about themselves, and who would only use force as a means of self-defense, never as a means of conquering or pillaging–this was sf, even if it was on television, and even if had to be supplemented heavily with baser content to appeal to the masses.

I find it incredibly infuriating when Star Trek's achievements are referred to as "naive." If our modern world needs help interpreting terrorism, as Moores suggests in her article, they might try looking to Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 Episode 12 "The High Ground," which offers an incredibly nuanced and sophisticated view on terrorism, one I would argue would be nearly impossible to popularize if produced in our current social climate.

Star Trek: The Next Generation kept the series' integrity largely alive, with beautifully rendered sf stories, such as "Who Watches the Watchers" and "The Inner Light." But as the franchise strayed into the Voyager and especially Deep Space Nine series, the stories did not become "more real," as Moores suggests, but rather, the Paramount leadership discovered that they could make significantly more money by ditching the sf content and offering up science fiction, and even eventually, science fiction's veneer.

The vast majority of Deep Space Nine from the fourth season onward consists of mundane drama that is science fictional only by virtue of its setting and props. The fact that the action is set on a space station and that some of the characters are aliens is unrelated to many stories' plots, and subtext disappears from the series entirely. The later Deep Space Nine stories not only fail to pass Suvin's test of sf, since there is nothing cognitively estranging about them, but they also fail to constitute science fiction in the pulp sense, which would demand at least some level of scientific rigor to the changed world. Instead we are presented with stories about noble warriors, star-crossed lovers, evil empires, and everything else under the sun, and while such stories might be functional drama and have certainly got the trappings of science fiction, they are decidedly nothing of science fiction in substance.

In the end, the most depressing element of all this is that the questions at the very core of sf, questions that Suvin's novum is expertly equipped to help us explore, are being cast aside and forgotten. Questions such as: Who are we as human beings at our best? How do we relate to our world and to each other? What is society, and how should different human societies optimally interact? These are questions our modern world needs addressed more urgently than ever, and even as we know we are developing deeper and deeper yearnings to explore them, we placate ourselves with ever more vapid and insipid entertainments.

A science fiction television show once challenged a deeply racist culture to believe that people of varying skin color and ethnic background could travel the stars together and leave not just their planet but their galaxy a little better than they found it.

Now we are bombarded by a media full of base entertainments, most of which reinforce the status quo, and give us canned, convenient answers to the prejudices and injustices of our day. Some might call that "practical." Or "realistic." Or more likely just "profitable."

I call it "naive."

Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.