John Walters's Blog, page 57

Writer’s Block

Near the end of last year I was on a roll.  I had been producing steadily throughout the year, with two novels and a long novella.  But the last few months of the year I turned my attention to short stories and began completing one after the other.  The amazing thing was that I would write nonfiction all day, starting before seven in the morning and often continuing until around eight in the evening.  After a break for dinner I would start my fiction writing.  I had gotten so depressed because I had no time for fiction that I determined to do something about it.  I decided to write five hundred words of original fiction every evening at least five evenings a week.  That was around November or December of 2014, and since then I have more or less stuck to it.  I allow myself to count the words I write for my blog, as I have no other time to write them, but otherwise it’s always been fiction.  It adds up if you keep at it steadily.

Obviously in a schedule like that it’s easier to write novels than short works, because it usually takes me as long to warm up for a short story as it does for a novel.  So once you get a novel going you can just keep tooling along on the momentum of the experience.  When you’re doing a string of short stories, however, you stop each time and have to start again from scratch.  The amazing thing about my streak in late 2015 was that I was writing substantial short stories, good ones too, one after the other, with only a day or two between the end of one and the beginning of the next.  As I said, I was on a roll.

Well, then life intruded.  The good life, to be sure.  It was Christmas season, and all my sons came into town, some stayed in our small apartment, and things got very, very busy.  I knew it would happen and I planned for it.  I took a couple weeks off fiction writing; it was all I could do.  There just wasn’t time.  But then…

But then began the horror story for all writers.  When it came time to get started again, to fire up the engine and let it roar back to life…  Nothing.  Blank.  I simply couldn’t think of a thing to say.  I wanted a character, a scene, a damn single sentence to get started with, and I couldn’t come up with a thing.  I was blocked good and proper.  I still am, in fact.  I am writing this in lieu of the fiction that I should be writing.  I have sat in front of a screen staring at a blank document night after night until necessity forced me to bed, knowing that I had to get up early and churn out the nonfiction to pay the bills regardless of how I felt.

And I found myself captive of my old dream, my recurring hope, that I could somehow bring in enough writing income to dispense with the nonfiction, to wake up every morning and give my entire mental and physical energy to the writing that I love.  Instead, I approach my beloved fiction in a state of exhaustion after a long day.  Whatever.  I can live with it.  I’ve broken blocks before.

The main reason I am writing this down tonight is that when I was thinking about what I could write I got a vision of a beach in Greece where I decided to resume my writing career.  I had started out as a young man with writing as my only goal in life.  I had attended the Clarion West science fiction writing workshop at the age of twenty.  I had set out on the road across the United States, around Europe, across the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent to gain experience and find my voice as a writer.

And then somewhere along the way I stopped writing.  I got married, began to raise a large family.  We ended up in Greece and I taught English for a living, and we would spend our summers at my Greek wife’s parents’ beach house in a small town on Halkidiki near Thessaloniki.  It was there on a beautiful sunny afternoon while on a walk along the shore with two or three of my sons that I felt it was time I should start writing again.  And I did.  Slowly and steadily, writing short stories, sending them off to markets, getting scattered sales.

Since then, there’s been a lot of progress.  Six novels, five short story collections, several other books.  I have no intention of stopping, and I shouldn’t let a gap in production of a few weeks weigh heavily on my mind.  But it does.  It does.  I can’t help it.  I rue every day of wasted time.  Should I have worked through the Christmas holidays instead of taking a break?  Perhaps.  But perhaps not.  My sons are important to me, and some of them came from far away.  I had to give them the attention they deserved, the attention I wanted to give them.  No, I think the break was necessary.  I just have to get past it.  In the meantime, I sit in front of the screen, mentally constipated.  That’s sort of what it’s like.  You know, when you know you have to go and you won’t feel comfortable until you do but it just won’t come out and no amount of forcing does the trick.

It’s happened before.  I’ve had breaks; I’ve had gaps, and they always broke loose and the flood pours forth again.  Writer’s block is one of the most frustrating experiences ever, whether it lasts a day, a week, or a month.  You want to work; there’s nothing you want to do more.  You’d sacrifice a lot to get the flow going.  But you have to wait it out.  It’s not as simple as a physical blockage you can take a laxative for.  It involves the mind and heart – your very soul.  To use another analogy, it’s sort of like sex.  Sometimes you have to rest up between sessions, give it a little time before getting into the next round.  In the meantime, I offer this essay.  C’est la vie.

Book Review: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

A quote by Scott Joplin, a famous ragtime musician, at the beginning of this novel, affirming that ragtime can never be played fast, gives away the style and tone.  It starts very slowly, with descriptions of the main characters, where they live, and what they do.  There is no inkling of a plot or hint that the book will be anything more than disparate descriptive passages for several chapters.  When interconnections between the characters interspersed with their encounters with some of the famous historical personages of the age begin to appear, these are the first indications that it will evolve into the semblance of a novel.  Somewhere along the way, about halfway through, the storyteller injects a fictional tale of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a black ragtime pianist who, after a personal affront by white bigots, stages a protest in J.P. Morgan’s personal museum.  It’s around there that the book begins to become interesting.

I realize that my comments here may be going against the grain, as many literary reviewers consider “Ragtime” a classic, and it has even won prestigious awards.  I can see why.  It is well-written, stylistically original, at least for the time in which it first appeared, and eventually, after hundreds of pages, develops into an interesting story.  But some of the literary pretensions are hard to get past.  The slow, slow start I already mentioned.  Then there are the long, long paragraphs that go on for pages, the lack of quotation marks to set apart the dialog, the lack of paragraph separations for different speakers, the abrupt switching of points of view in the middle of chapters and sometimes in the middle of paragraphs.  Granted, it’s the author’s prerogative what tools he wants to use to make his point, and I have even used most of these affectations myself in one story or another.  But that’s what they are:  affectations.  They do not make up for the glacially slow start to the story or the lack of coherence in the early chapters.

I had high hopes for this novel based on the cover descriptions and what I’d read about it previously.  I’ve been meaning to read some of Doctorow’s work for some time and have never gotten around to it until now.  Based on my perusing of other volumes of his that I haven’t yet read, the long paragraphs, lack of quotation marks, and so on seem to be a general style that he manifests in a number of his works.  I know he is very popular.  To each his own.  Now that I know the way he writes, I might even tackle another of his works in the future, but this time I will be prepared for a slow, slow ride at the beginning, like a roller coaster climbing an incline before a plunge, and a lack of stylistic norms that usually help readers along on their journeys through novels.

I don’t regret having read this novel.  It’s interesting enough if you accept it for what it is.  It’s kind of like sitting down with a venerable member of the family who first goes through an album of snapshots and describes each person in the pictures, and then after the album is finished tells you a long, rambling story about them interspersed with the history of the era.  In some ways this book reminded me of the movie “Forrest Gump,” in which the fictional character’s unlikely life circumstances intertwine with famous celebrities and famous moments in history.  It’s one way to recollect the past.

Book Review: Seattle City of Literature: Reflections From a Community of Writers, Edited by Ryan Boudinot

This book, though entertaining enough in its own way, disappointed me.  It’s my fault, really.  Too often my appreciation for things depends in a large part on my expectations.  I was on one of my forays to the Amazon physical book store in the University Village in Seattle, and as is becoming my habit – at least I’ve done it twice; the store hasn’t been there very long – I allowed myself a budget of one fiction book and one nonfiction book.  I knew I would probably be able to afford that much, as the prices of the books are linked to Amazon’s electronic website, and the physical bookstore offers the same generous discounts as the website does.  It would be nice to read something about Seattle, thought I, and sauntered over to a corner near the windows where a regional book section is set up.  Finding this book, I grabbed it without looking at it very closely, thinking that it would be intensely interesting to learn something about Seattle’s literary scene.

The book is interesting, but not in the way that I thought.  It doesn’t give much insight at all into the history or current status of the literary community in Seattle.  It’s more a collage such as you would find on a social media site:  brief snippets and anecdotes like photographs that capture moments in time but without depth.  Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.  I wanted a history of the literary scene in Seattle – how it began, how it developed, an in-depth look at the major players.  Instead, this book is a collection of brief essays in which writers recall stories of their favorite teachers of literature, notable readings they attended, drinking times with writer buddies, and so on.  The proprietors and employees of bookstores, instead of giving the readers a glimpse at the history and notable events of the establishments, answer trivia questions about hypothetical plot scenarios.  As I said, it’s entertaining in a light sort of way, but not what I expected or hoped to find.

One thing that disappointed me was its lack of comprehensiveness in dealing with Seattle’s multifaceted literary scene.  Most of the volume is taken up with poetry writers and poetry readings.  Now, I love good poetry but there is so much more that Seattle has to offer.  For instance, there is only a passing mention of the rich, vibrant science fiction and fantasy literary community in Seattle.  Seattle hosts the Clarion West science fiction writing workshop, where so many stellar speculative fiction writers honed their craft going all the way back to 1970 when it was initiated.  I’m biased, I know, because I attended Clarion West way back in 1973 when I was a literary stripling of twenty, far too young to imbibe most of the lessons the pro instructors were trying to teach me, and after finally returning to Seattle after thirty-five years of living abroad, it is to the science fiction and fantasy community that I felt drawn.  Many top award-winning speculative fiction writers live in the Seattle area, and the community is thriving, welcoming, generous, and a hell of a lot of fun.  That aside, there is too little detail on the multitudes of other novelists and short story writers who inhabit this corner of the country.

Having said all this, I offer no discredit to the book.  I expected something else and didn’t find it, but that is not to say that the editor and community of writers within did not accomplish the task they set out to accomplish.  I can’t really say that it’s a bird’s eye view of the Seattle writing community, because so much is missing, but it’s more like a gathering of images that give brief flashes of insight, moments in time that illuminate fragments of the past.

*     *     *

The editor of this book did a unique, innovative, interesting thing when the volume was almost complete.  He sent a copy to Paul Constant, a former books editor at the Seattle alternate weekly the Stranger, and asked him to write a review that he would include in the book as an afterword.  Constant’s review is vaguely complementary, but rather like mine doesn’t really say much because there isn’t much of substance in the book.  After I wrote my review, I searched the Net to see what others were saying about the book, and I came across an article Constant wrote in the Seattle Review of Books some time after “Seattle:  City of Literature” was published.  In it, he points out his failure to catch the lack of diversity in the book’s essays.  He mentions a conversation with Nicola Griffith, an award-winning science fiction writer, about the vital importance of diversity in every collaborative work.  He also cites another article in the Seattle Review of Books by Donna Miscolta that stresses the lack of voices from writers of color from a city that is overflowing with multiracial and multicultural influences.  She gives a number of examples of overlooked literary luminaries, and suggests that the editor should not promote the book as comprehensive with such glaring oversights.  I admit that my assertion of lack of balance in the anthology was based more on missing literary genres rather than missing cultural diversity, but I find it interesting that I am not the only one who feels that the book does, indeed, lack balance.

Mortality

Most of us, when we are young, give no heed to mortality.  Our sights are focused forward into the future, but the possibility of cessation of being doesn’t enter our awareness.  Instead, we strive to be older, more independent, more responsible. When we’re kids we can’t wait to go to school like our older siblings or acquaintances.  After a certain point, we can’t wait to get out of school and on with our lives.  We’re always looking ahead to the next step, the next goal.

This was epitomized for me in an instant one summer in the early 1970s.  I was casually seeing one girl, and we went to a party together.    While there, I met another girl and arranged to meet her at Ravenna Park in Seattle so we could get to know each other.  It was a beautiful day with blue sky and brilliant green foliage all around.  When she showed up the sunlight created a golden halo around the edges of her loosely curled hair.  We didn’t hit it off together, she and I, but that’s not the point.  When she showed up and we said hello to each other the moment of time surrounded by the greenery and the sunlight and so on created a snapshot of eternity.  I suddenly saw my life stretching decades into the future, year after year of life to be lived with no discernible end in sight.  It was a wonderful moment, a revelation of sorts.  As I said, it had little to do with the outward circumstances.  It was one of those infrequent instances when linear time ceases.  But in the midst of it my thoughts did not progress all the way to my inevitable and impending death.  Instead, it was a momentary glimpse of immortality.

The stark reality is, though, that no matter what we believe about life after death, this present life comes to an end.  And as I age, I become more and more aware of that.  I am not as strong as I used to be.  I don’t have the endurance I once did.  Parts of my body begin to deteriorate and break down.  In the last year or two, my thoughts have turned more and more to my mortality.  I don’t fear death, but I realize that as I progress through what remains of my life, however long or short it is, it will come to an end.

When confronted with such profound ruminations, I look naturally at priorities.  My overwhelming priority for several decades now has been the well-being of my sons.  However, they are growing up into strong, intelligent, confident young men.  Only the youngest, who is still a minor, remains dependent.  My other priority is my writing.  Not the nonfiction articles I write to help pay the bills, but my real writing, that which I consider my calling:  novels, short stories, memoirs.  I wish I was financially independent enough to devote my fulltime endeavors to these works, but alas, not yet.  In the meantime, I do what I can.  As my mortality confronts me, though, I realize that these works too will eventually come to an end.  I will write what I write, I will die, and other will read it or not.  Time tempers even fame and glory.  I wonder, in the presumed afterlife, if Shakespeare or other literary luminaries give a damn any more whether or not anyone reads the works they wrote while they were in their mortal shells.

These thoughts come into sharp focus at the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016.  The new year is historically an arbitrary designation, but it’s a useful one for assessing progress and setting goals.  My primary talent and obsession is writing, and I will continue to do it as long as I can.  I have said elsewhere I will keep writing as long as I live – that they’ll have to pry the keyboard out of my cold dead fingers – and I hope that this is true.  A calling is a calling.  Retirement from writing for me is inconceivable.  Though mortality does not instill fear, it does instill a sense of urgency.  This is what I am here to do now.  In the rest of eternity that follows, who knows?

Hindsight – December 2015

I’ve gone beyond the point where I give much of a damn what other people think about what I should or should not write.  I will compose straightforwardly or I will experiment as it pleases me and as the piece of writing demands.  That’s a nice place to be in as a writer.  I’ve paid my dues.  I’ve been writing for about four and a half decades now and don’t need to be concerned that there are ethereal gatekeepers that possess absolute truth when it comes to English prose.  It is all a matter of opinion.  One man’s nightmare is another man’s wet dream, as the saying goes.  At least once you get past the rudiments.  Sure, I’ll rewrite a story for an editor who offers to buy it; that’s a simple business proposition.  Otherwise, the words I pour forth are as valid as anyone’s.  After all, by what criteria do we evaluate literature?  Awards?  Sales?  Critical analysis?  Academic nitpicking?  Longevity?  These are all subjective.

After that introduction that came out of left field (I am left-handed, after all) I get back to the purpose of this extended expostulation:  a look at what I accomplished as a writer during this past year.  My biggest frustration is that I am still tied to writing nonfiction articles for less than minimum wage because my fiction and memoirs do not sell enough to make a living.  So let’s start with that nonfiction.  The numbers are similar to last year.  I’ve written and sold roughly 300,000 words of nonfiction articles to Internet content mills in 2015.  Whenever I consider that statistic, I realize that those 300,000 words could have been significant prose instead of bullshit if I could only support myself writing fiction.  This is one of my greatest regrets:  that I have to churn out prose for money only instead of focusing on the writing work that I really want to do.

In fact, I have had to spend so many hours researching and writing the articles (and just barely managing to pay the bills anyway) that there was a period near the end of last year when I stopped writing fiction.  I just couldn’t find the time.  This deeply depressed me.  As a result, I developed insomnia, among other problems.  Well, I’ve found since then that the insomnia has other causes, but it got me to thinking that if I couldn’t sleep I might as well be writing.  So I set myself a goal that for at least five days a week, at the end of the day, I would write at least five hundred words of my own, usually fiction, before I went to bed.  And pretty much since then, with occasional exceptions, I have accomplished that.  The first result, published in December 2014, was the noir murder mystery novel “The Fantasy Book Murders.”  Since then in those late night hours I have written (and later published) two science fiction novels, a science fiction novella, and a number of short stories.

Lately I have been focusing on short story writing.  When you write a novel, it’s easier to keep forging ahead, as you have your basic characters and some sort of idea of how to proceed.  When you’re writing a string of short stories, on the other hand, the tough part is when you finish one and need to start from scratch and plunge ahead into the next one.  It usually takes me a day or two to get my bearings and initiate momentum on the next idea; nevertheless I have been able to leap from one to the next more consistently on this stretch than I have in the past.  I am currently taking several days off because so many relatives have come to town for the Christmas holidays, but I hope to jump back into the fray as soon as I resume a regular schedule.  I love short stories.  I love reading them and I love writing them, and lately I have had the undeniable urge to focus on them.  That could change in the coming year.  We shall see.  I will definitely be working on something again soon, whatever it will be.

This is a look back, though, not a projection forward.  In 2015, I managed to have several stories published in magazines and anthologies, which was gratifying.  Additionally, I published an article in the Science Fiction Writers of America cookbook, and an article on living and working overseas as a writer for the SFWA website blog.  All in all, it was a year of progress as far as traditional publishing is concerned, something that I hope will snowball now that I’m finishing all these stories and sending them off to magazine and anthology markets.  Once I write them and send them off, though, there’s really nothing I can do but hope – and in the meantime get to work on the next one.

Book Review: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

In my last post I wrote down some thoughts this book inspired in me about how its themes relate to the world of publishing.  Now I want to directly confront what it says about global economics.  The basic premise of the book is that inclusive political and economic systems thrive, while extractive systems impoverish countries they control.  Once either type of system is in place, it is very difficult to dislodge, as it has inherent factors that strengthen it against adverse or opposite influences.  Critical junctures in history, however, can impact either type of system and bring about change.

Early on in the book, the authors spend several chapters refuting other explanations for global poverty and plenty, and in later chapters they reinforce their own theories with numerous examples.  The weight of example is compelling.  It’s hard to refute so much evidence.  And yet, I found myself wondering about certain aspects of their arguments.  Not the basics; the basics are sound.  There’s too much evidence to refute their postulations about the economic strength of inclusive systems and the inherent weakness of extractive ones.

The problem is, it doesn’t offer any solutions.  It presents the situation of why some countries are sinking in poverty with great clarity, but offers no way out.  It explains why extractive societies begin and endure but offers no alternative to the heartbreaking torment the mass of people go through under them.  All right, perhaps offering solutions wasn’t the intentions of the authors, but it leaves readers with a dilemma.  It’s as if you can see a mugger murdering someone and robbing them of everything they own but being helpless to do anything about it.  Dictators throughout history have exploited the poor, and in many countries in this present time they still do, and we see the evil but feel powerless.  Knowing what prompts social forces to give rise to and sustain the evil does nothing to mitigate it.

Don’t get me wrong; the book is still fascinating.  But I get a sinking feeling as I read and contemplate historical instance after instance of the depravity of human nature.  What is the solution?  What can we do about it?  This book presents no answers.

Another problem I have with this book is its writing style.  Perhaps I’m spoiled by reading too many historians like David Halberstam who are also stellar writers.  This book is written in workmanlike, academic, but hardly lively prose.  Part of the problem may be that there are two authors so there is no distinctive voice.  Part of it may be that the subject matter is so complex that it’s hard to express it in a lively, engaging manner.  Or perhaps it’s just me.  I found myself getting muddled sometimes and having to go back over parts to be able to extract their full meanings.  I seldom have to do that when I’m reading something by Halberstam, for instance.  The subject matter and approaches are different, you may say, and I might agree with you.  Nevertheless, if you tackle this tome, don’t expect an easy read.

All in all, this book is too valuable to ignore.  It’s important reading.  You have to diagnose the sickness and discover its causes before you can eradicate it and prevent it from happening again.  It’s discouraging, though, that throughout history, as the authors so efficiently expose, strong leaders are only too happy to seize control and enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow humans, their society, and their country.  It’s a very sad situation.

*     *     *

A few more thoughts to wind this up:

Near the end of the book the authors discuss the failure of foreign aid to alleviate the economic problems of poor countries.  They use Afghanistan as an example.  When the Taliban were defeated, aid organizations swarmed into the county, yet instead of setting up an infrastructure of inclusive economic and political institutions, they proceeded to construct an infrastructure of airfields so they could fly around from one place to another in their private jets.  Additionally, donated aid was siphoned off for administrative costs of the main aid organizations, contractors, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, and so on, until there was little or nothing left for the people for whom it was intended.  Transport organizations and other hired Afghanis were typically exploitive, extractive former Taliban who hiked up their rates many-fold for the aid organizations.  This is a common pattern concerning aid to underdeveloped countries.

The authors also bring up the inability of international organizations to engineer prosperity using the ignorance hypothesis.  This theory posits that poor countries are poor because they do not have the wisdom to follow proper economic guidelines without assistance.  If they only have the proper guidance, they will prosper.

A stark example of the failure of this theory in my own experience is the case of the Greek economic collapse, which I experienced while living in Greece.  A number of things precipitated the Greek crisis.  Its political system is predicated on extraction, on the ruling political parties awarding positions and business perks to their cronies, on bribery, on siphoning funds out of public treasuries.  But it took a turn for the worse when Greece joined the European Union and all of a sudden had access to vast loans from the EU.  It’s not that they used the money unwisely, although they did; it’s that they never should have had access to the funds in the first place.  It reminds me of the crazy credit card offers I receive all the time in the mail.  Those damned companies are not doing me any favors by offering me those cards; what they are doing is trying to sink their hooks in, hoping to be able in the future to extract interest and penalty fees and so on.  Greece should never have been lent so much money.  Once it was done and Greece couldn’t pay it back, the huge burden of debt accumulated from the compiling interest.  And then what did the EU do?  Crush Greek economic growth by unreasonable demands on its infrastructure.  The EU never should have distributed such large loans so liberally, and once it did, it should never have expected that a struggling country like Greece would somehow morph into a model economic entity that would be able to instantly make good on the loans.  And now, the EU is in a bind because Greece is a part of it, intricately woven into the European economic body, and to cut Greece loose would involve an amputation that would precipitate irrevocable side effects.  If the EU wants to help out, it needs to back off and let the Greek economy, however small and fragile, reassert itself, instead of imposing ever more draconian measures that only grind it into the dust.

As you can see, having lived there so long and having invested myself so much in Greece, I get a bit emotional when I see its present sad and sorry state.

Inclusive and Extractive Economies in Publishing

I have been reading a book on global economics, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, and my thoughts, as always, turn to publishing.

You don’t have to agree with everything the book says to be stimulated by its ideas.  It posits that political and economic institutions are mainly responsible for a nation’s poverty or prosperity rather than commonly held theories highlighting geography, culture, or the ignorance of their leaders.  When institutions are inclusive, that is, democratic and open to new ideas, technologies, innovators, and entrepreneurs, a nation flourishes.  However, when institutions become exclusive, that is, they exist for the enrichment of a small group of elite, they may experience growth, even rapid growth, for a while, but it is unsustainable due to the lack of incentive to develop new technologies or foster new investors for further growth.  The authors time travel through history giving the reader a myriad examples to support their theories, on the way explaining why other theories, such as Jared Diamond’s theory, as put forth in the prize-winning “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” of the natural resources in an area determining its prosperity, are inadequate or incomplete.

And so, of course, I inevitably begin to compare these economic postulations with the state of publishing today.  As writers see the field, which institutions are inclusive and which are extractive?  We have Amazon and other self-publishing venues on the one hand which have developed cutting-edge technologies, put them out on the market for free use, opened the gates wide for authors and other artists, and invited them to come share the wealth for a percentage of profits.  We have the oligarchs of big publishing on the other hand, who tell writers that these self-publishing venues are exploitive, that they encourage substandard work, that they upset the status quo, that they are not part of the traditional pattern of things.  It reminds me of the reaction of guilds of scribes after Gutenberg invented printing and moveable type.  Amazon is obviously and blatantly inclusive, while traditional publishing has always been exclusive and extractive, taking as many rights from authors that they possibly can while paying them as little as possible.  Apart from a few big-name authors who receive big advances, authors in a publishing company’s stable function as serfs, enduring the hard work of creation while passing on the bulk of the profits to overseers.

If this was all that was happening, however, it would not account for traditional publishing’s extreme reactions in the face of self-publishing.  After all, one would think, why should they care if people self-publish their books?  Traditional publishers posit that those works will get lost in a crowd of other works and come to nothing anyway.

But there is another extremely vital factor at work, and it is the reason that scribe guilds rose up against Gutenberg, and why the Luddites in England rose up against the Industrial Revolution.  It is what the authors of this book call creative destruction.  In an inclusive economic system, new technologies and innovations do not exist amicably together side by side with the old.  The new inevitably destroys or alters the old.  That’s why traditional publishing companies and authors who make their livings off the old system of publishing are up in arms against self-publishing and all the changes it brings about.  They see old facades and structures crumbling around them as the new systems assert themselves.  Change does not allow the intact preservation of the old.  Although inclusive economies may mean more prosperity for more people, the extractive elite inevitably lose out as the wealth becomes better distributed.  Since their prosperity is built on exploitation and exclusivity, if they want to retain their positions at the top of the pyramid they can do nothing else than fight back against the technologies that threaten them.  They could, theoretically, embrace the new technologies and welcome the changes, but it’s unusual throughout history for extractive institutions to do so, because by their nature they pander to a pampered elite.

I don’t think that self-publishing will completely destroy traditional publishing, but I do think that drastic changes to the publishing landscape are inevitable and irrevocable.  There’s no going back.  And the harder institutions and individuals fight against innovations, the harder it is for them to adapt and benefit from them.  When extractive institutions fall, they often fall hard and fast because of their lack of resiliency and flexibility.  They can’t bend in a storm, so they break.  The only way to grow is to embrace creative destruction, not attempt to forestall or avoid it.  What the authors of the book call historical critical junctures arise from time to time; institutions that have brought themselves to a point in which they are open to progress benefit, while others shatter or decay.

Analogies are not always precise or all-encompassing, and the complexity of social, political, and financial situations precludes neatly describing them in a few catchphrases, but these thoughts might help bring things into slightly better focus.

Book Review: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2105 edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams

I picked up this anthology recently when I went to check out the new physical Amazon book store in University Village shopping mall in Seattle.  I had heard through the online short story market grapevine that Adams was soliciting story submissions for a new series of year’s best anthologies, but I didn’t realize until I bought this that it’s the first entry in the science fiction and fantasy category in the larger “Best American” ongoing collections, which include Best American Short Stories, Mystery Stories, Essays, Travel Writing, Sports Writing, and so on.

To make the final selections, Adams perused the thousands of science fiction and fantasy stories published in 2014 and culled his favorites down to a list of eighty possibilities.  He then sent copies of the eighty stories to Joe Hill with the authors’ names removed, and Joe Hill read them all and chose the twenty he liked best as the final entrants in this volume.

Now of course a best of the year anthology is like any other anthology or magazine that selects an elite amount of finalists from thousands of possibilities.  It does not, of course, mean that these stories are the definitive best of the year, only that they are the stories that were the editors’ personal favorites.  There are a number of best of the year anthologies every year in the science fiction and fantasy field, and the stories seldom match volume to volume, because editors have different tastes.

As with any anthology, I found some of the stories to be superlative, some to be readable, some to be rather poor, and a few to be boring and all but unreadable.  I won’t go into criticizing the poor stories, because I have no inclination to discourage the writers.  Some of the stories I find excellent are “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawaii” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, about the social implications of an army of vampires conquering the world; Each to Each by Seanan McGuire, about a submarine crew of women mutated into mermaids to become more efficient sailors in the U.S. Navy; How the Marquis Got His Coat Back by Neil Gaiman, a bizarre fantasy set in the London Below universe from his “Neverwhere” novel; and “The Bad Graft” by Karen Russell, about a woman who becomes possessed by the spirit of a Joshua tree.

Some of the stories that I didn’t much care for appeared initially in slick literary magazines, and they struck me as similar to those that were innovative back in the 1960s and 1970s but have by now been done to death.  They are presented in polished language but bring nothing new to classics stories in their various subgenres.

Overall, I found the story quality no better or worse than in similar anthologies I have read recently.  What I did appreciate and find interesting, though, was the process of blind final selection by alternating editors.  Although Adams will continue to be the series editor and make initial selections, he plans to choose different editors each year to come up with the final choices.  This process, along with the opportunity to read some of the better new work in the field and the inexpensive price will probably encourage me to read more volumes in this series as they come out.  You’re never going to find an anthology that prompts bells and whistles from every story reading every time unless you edit it yourself, but I’ve found I can get something constructive from all the stories, good and bad.  The good ones will give me a great reading experience, and the bad ones will show me how not to do it – that is, cause me to analyze what’s wrong so I can avoid making the same mistakes.

Book Review: The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany

I went to a Halloween party held by a local writers group and among the festivities was a book exchange.  I brought a suitably creepy Stephen King novel and came away with this one.  “The Ballad of Beta 2” is not a novel, actually, but a fairly short novella.  Delany wrote it before he broke out of the pack with award winners such as “Babel 17,” and “The Einstein Intersection.”

It’s not a remarkable novella, actually.  It’s a fairly standard deep space adventure; neither the character nor the plot have any of the sophistication of work that Delany was soon to unleash.  It’s an early career effort that might not even find a publisher nowadays.  It reminded me of some of the early works I have read by Silverberg and Ellison and some of the others who became rising stars in the late 1960s.  They all went through a period of writing adequate, pedestrian stories before they broke out and found their own unique voices.  About the only one I can think of who came out of the mold full-blown brilliant was Roger Zelazny, who dazzled the science fiction universe right off the bat with his masterpiece “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” way back in 1962.  Ah, wait.  There was also Cordwainer Smith, whose first published story, “Scanners Live in Vain,” now considered one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, was rejected by all the major magazines and was finally published without payment in a small press periodical.  But most of them paid their dues by writing mediocre penny-a-word pulp at a prodigious rate before creating their masterpieces.

So “The Ballad of Beta 2” is readable and entertaining but otherwise unremarkable.  What I found interesting, though, was the publishing circumstances that made this print edition possible.  As I said, I don’t think it would be published like this today.  It’s a slim little volume with large print put out by Ace Books.  I’m surprised, considering its size, that they didn’t tack it onto one of those strange Ace Doubles.  Perhaps it’s the wrong era.  You might find tiny novellas like this independently published nowadays, but the big publishers steer clear of them, generally opting for thick bloated tomes to make readers think that they’re getting their money’s worth.  The thing is, a lot of the great classic award-winning books were short, around 50,000 words or so, back in the 1960s and 1970s.  Publishers allowed writers to tell stories at the length they needed to be told, rather than insisting on stuffing them with fluff to fill them out to higher word counts.  Literature lost something when publishers began demanding that every novel had to be a telephone book sized doorstopper.

Which brings us to self-publishing, come to think.  Before I lament the state of traditional publishing too much, I should remember that it’s no longer the only game in town.  Writers can publish their own works and set their own rules.  A lot of writer have taken to the novella or short novel length.  I’ve published several novellas myself as self-contained works in my series “The One Thousand.” And my recent novels such as “Caliban’s Children” and “The Fantasy Book Murders” come in at about 50,000 words each.  It’s a thrill to be able to let the work itself dictate its length rather than a suit in an office making accounting decisions.

Another interesting thing about this edition of “The Ballad of Beta 2” is its simplistic copyright page.  None of the fancy stuff that appears in modern books, just a simple statement that it’s a work copyrighted in 1965.  And in the publisher’s name, not the author’s.  At least that’s not common corporate habit anymore, to seize the copyright from the author right out of the starting gate.  Admittedly contracts with major publishers are still horrendous, with the publishers trying to seize as many rights as they can for as little money as they have to pay, but at least copyrights are usually registered in the names of the authors.  And again, it highlights a difference with self-publishing, where the author holds all the rights and fully controls his own career.

Just a few musings while pondering this paperback edition from years gone by.

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I found out through trusty Wikipedia that “The Ballad of Beta 2” did originally appear as the flip-side of an Ace Double in 1965 and didn’t appear as a single edition book, which is the book I obtained, until 1971.  The copyright page makes no mention of this.  By 1971, Delany had already won four Nebula awards and one Hugo award, which would have convinced the Ace editors that such a slim, spare book might sell on its own.

Book Review: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

This book is not only fascinating, exciting, surprising, adventurous, eye-opening, invigorating, and educating but it’s well-written too.  You’ve heard of Alexander Dumas, of course, the author who wrote “The Three Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and other tales of adventure; well, this book is the true story of his father Alex Dumas’s adventures upon which so many of the younger Dumas’s stories are based.  Reiss dove into an incredible amount of research to dig up this tale, and it was worth the effort.

The novelist Dumas’s grandfather was an aristocratic Frenchman who moved to the French colony in the Caribbean that encompasses what is now called Haiti and took a black mistress.  Alex Dumas was their son, a dark-skinned mulatto, half white French and half black Haitian slave woman.  Although he was born free, he spent a brief time as a slave before his father brought him to France and gave him an aristocratic upbringing and education.  It was a narrow window through which Alex Dumas leapt, as in the European countries all around blacks were kept as slaves, but in revolutionary France, for a brief period of time, they were freed and given the equal rights of all French people.

As a young man, Alex Dumas received a generous allowance from his father as he pursued his education and enjoyed the frivolities of Paris.  There came a time, though, when he enlisted in the French army as a dragoon, a common foot soldier, though with his aristocratic background he could have had an officer’s commission.  He was tall, broad-shouldered, and strong, and had been trained as a swordsman at one of the finest academies in Paris, and he quickly excelled and received promotion after promotion.  During one of his tours of duty he met the white Frenchwoman who became his wife and the mother of Dumas the novelist.

The book discusses the political background of France at the time in some depth to explain the extraordinary opportunity Alex Dumas had to excel and rise in rank.  With his battle prowess and intelligence he was a natural leader and hero.  France wanted to export its revolution to other European lands and set its armies out on conquests.  Dumas led his troops to victory after victory and found himself eventually promoted to general at the head of an entire army.  During the Italian campaign he began to run afoul of a young ambitious Corsican upstart named Napoleon, but he conducted himself so brilliantly that even Napoleon was forced into begrudging praise.

The next expedition was Napoleon’s disastrous journey to Egypt.  Dumas again excelled and proved himself a worthy leader, but Napoleon’s fleet was destroyed and the Egyptian campaign turned into an expensive fiasco.  Dumas left Egypt with a few other officers, only to encounter a Mediterranean storm aboard a leaking vessel.  They were forced to make port in southern Italy, which was held by enemies, and Dumas was arrested and imprisoned for two years.  It was this experience that inspired his son to write about the fictional Count of Monte Cristo and his terrible ordeal in a forgotten dungeon.

When Dumas was finally freed, his vigorous health was broken and France had changed.  The revolution was over.  Napoleon had taken over as dictator and had begun to create all sorts of new laws curtailing the freedoms of blacks and mulattos.  Dumas and his wife and children found themselves poverty-stricken, unable to claim the pension that Dumas was due.  It was discovered that he was very ill, with cancer as the author of the book relates, and he died forgotten and penniless at the age of forty.  Although his widow petitioned his old military friends and colleagues, Napoleon himself had given instructions that nothing was to be done for his family.  The novelist Alexander Dumas, along with his mother and sibling, grew up in poverty, and he was unable to afford a secondary education, but his talent as a writer brought him wealth and international fame.

This is a true story as exciting as any historical novel you might possibly find.  A great read.  Highly recommended.