Saturday, July 29
matociquala and sosostris2012 are writing lists of Eleven Things I will do my best not to put in a fantasy novel unless I am trying to undermine them, and could do without entirely from now on, thanks.
Sadly, I do not write fantasy.
So I'm doing my best with science fiction, and figuring that some will cross over.
1. Naive farmboys/girls from a backwater planet.*
The people who write these characters must buy into the unspoilt shepherdess myth that's been around since, oh, the Roman era, because inevitably he/she is invariably shocked by the corruption and depravity of city life, grow woozy at the sight of blood, panic prettily in a crisis, and have no other perceptible personality, aside from really big muscles or boobs.
I can only assume these are the same people who drive out to our farm and say wistfully, "You're so lucky, living the quiet life like this."
I have spent more time up to my elbows in blood than I really like to think about, and "crisis situation" is the normal state of affairs on any farm, in any era. Also, when you've spent the weekend keeping the female dog from humping my sick calf while she was down and couldn't defend herself, human depravity looses some of its shock value. As for corruption... have these people never lived in a small town? Nepotism and casual embezzling are assumed in any small-town government, we have backstabbing family feuds going back half a century, and don't even get me started on the way outsiders are treated.
It's an outgrowth of the virginity myth (see below) that drives me especially batty. Country life is no more idyllic than city life; there is the same problem in the country as the city, namely, that someone went and stuck people in it and, wouldn't you know it, they're being people.
In other words: this is your Hero. Try for an actual personality.
2. Naturally Good virgins, children, and animals.
Let me explain something here. Lack of experience != Good. Okay? Okay. Can we move on now?
Aside from the fact that those untouched virgins are usually farmboys/girls (really, guys: what did you think deserted country lanes were for?), there's this idea that people are better in their natural state, pure, kind, and instinctively Good, like children and animals.
People who think this have not spent much time around children or animals.
Children and animals are naturally innocent, which means that they don't know right from wrong and can be influenced only by punishment or bribery. This is fundamentally different from being Good. And virgins aren't even innocent. They're just ignorant. You are supposed to be writing science fiction: try and get your mind out of the Victorian era.
3. Societies that exist only to confirm a set of prejudices.
I do not care what the prejudices are, or even whether they match my prejudices. Soapbox societies make boring reading. And I'm lookin' at you, Libertarians, if only because historically you've been the biggest offender in science fiction.
Real societies have problems. Real societies have advantages. If you present me with a society that has only one or the other, your book gets shut. Is that simple enough for you?
4. Twentieth century transplants.
"Oh, look! It's the Cold War with spaceships!"
"Oh, look! It's the British Empire with planets!"
"Oh, look! It's Middle America on Alpha Centauri!"
It's one thing to grab a familiar construct and stick it in the 31st century to see if it does tricks. It's another thing to use this construct in place of actual invention.
I think the first time I noticed this one was at fifteen or so when I read Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. Not a bad book, as I remember, but I read a bit where one of the characters was musing on his estates and went "Wait a minute. Why does this society have lords?"
And the whole book came to a screeching halt, because the society was, yes, the British Empire with planets, and not only was there no reason for them to have re-instituted the feudal system, there was no way the thing was going to work.
This happens a lot, when writers who don't want to think about an aspect of their world (the society, the aliens, the economy, whatever) uproot something from our world and plonk it down without noticing the roots and tendrils waving around helplessly looking for some dirt; without noticing, in other words, that the transplant has come with assumptions, many of which directly clash with the world they are trying to build. It's having lords and kings without a feudal system. It's having a thousand-planet empire with no clear lines of communication. It's having a "prison world" or an "agricultural world" with no given reason why the homeworld is going to all the trouble and expense of shipping stuff across the light-years.
Writing science fiction requires you to think. Exhausting, I know, but true. And thinking means noticing when your story-world is clashing with itself.**
5. Homogeneity.
This tends to be a corollary to Soapbox Societies and Transplants. The futuristic society is exactly the same, despite existing on thirty planets with weeks of travel in between 'em. Everyone in the Soapbox Society holds the same values. All aliens are members of the same religion and live under the same government (unless the writer has stretched herself to two -- in which case they will oppose each other) and have the same two or three character traits. All robots act alike. All cities look alike. All planets are jungle planets, desert planets, ice planets.
People, please. We read science fiction to get away from suburbia.
The problem is that it's a lot of work to create even the appearance of a real society out of scratch. But it being a lot of work doesn't excuse you from the artistic necessity of doing it.
You are permitted to whine about it if you wish.
6. The "One Change" Fallacy.
This is where worldbuilding follows the pattern "The *element* is just like us, except for *variable*" : mostly seen in aliens and societies. It is a close cousin to Soapbox Societies, Transplants, and Homogeneity, and stems from the same basic laziness. The only difference is that it works even worse than they do. A statement like "the aliens are just like us, only they can't lie" or "the society is much like ours, except with no crime" is absurd even when well-integrated, because even the barest research will make the reader realize the fundamental impossibility of what they're proposing. And it is never well-integrated. Writers like this follow through on the most obvious changes and leave the rest untouched, because if they were the type to do the research or work out the full consequences of a change, they'd be taking the far easier path of creating a society from scratch anyway.
Nothing makes me close a book faster than reading the words "just like us, except...."
Well, okay. A few things might. But it's a short list.
7. Bigotry.
Racism, sexism, elitism, tokenism: these are the ways of the Dark Side, and most of them are pretty self-explainatory. Of them all, I frankly find tokenism most annoying. Yes, it's irritating to open a book and find not a single character who's not white, straight, male, and/or middle class... but it's infuriating to open a book and find a character whose only purpose in life is to be colored, gay, female, and/or "common folk". And it makes the writer seem like more of a bigot, not less, because though they've made the effort to be PC they clearly haven't caught on that Others are people, not the sum total of their differences.
Elitism, though -- elitism seems something science fiction is prone to. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the future is populated entirely by white-collar college grads, with a great shortage of, say, mechanics or electricians. Who's making and fixing stuff? 'Cause if you're expecting the electrical engineers to patch your wiring, you're in for a surprise.
8. Godlike technology.
To believers of either camp, there are only two positions to take: either you have a fervent belief in the existence of God, or you have a fervent belief in the non-existence of god. I sometimes think science fiction has fallen into the same view of technology. Either it's super-perfect or it breaks catastrophically. It doesn't matter whether it's nanotechnology, mind upload, FTL travel, or artificial intelligence, it either succeeds or fails as a whole. It never, you know, works most of the time, or works only if you kick it, or uploads all your memories except the ones of your Great-Aunt Mable who you then have to spend hundreds of years convincing that it was a mistake, honest, Aunty, like I'd do that on purpose!
Maybe I'm a scientific agnostic, or maybe it's that I only have experience with the useful-but-fallible tech... but I find both ends of the spectrum equally dull.
9. Explanations of technomagic that make things worse.
The word "midichlorians" springs to mind here, but I'm also thinking of a plot device from Simon R. Green's Deathstalker books. This was a far-future series in which everyone used swords. The explanation (as I remember it -- it's been about ten years) was that they had really good guns, guns that could fire through almost anything and knock out the special force fields they all wore, but that took about two minutes to recharge, so in between recharges everyone stood around fighting with swords.
My immediate thought was "Okay, but you wave your saber around for those two minutes; I'll be over here with the AK-47."
There's a tradition in science fiction that you must have a solid scientific explanation for everything. It is an honorable tradition. But on those occasions when I will violate this tradition, I intend to do so quickly and shamelessly, not stop to draw attention to my slip with fallacious psuedo-science.
10. Gratuitous trauma.
For a while it was torture. Then it was rape. Child abuse was quite fashionable for a time, and now we seem to be back to rape, only with pointier objects. There are certain scenes in certain books that make me think of a seven-year-old I once tutored at reading, who used to sit giving me excuses for why she didn't feel like reading today and watching me sidelong to see if I was impressed yet, until we ended up somewhere like, "and then a car hit my mom and she died. It was really sad."
The motive is similar for both child and writer: afraid they're not garnering the proper sympathy for self or character, they invent more and more extreme situations, looking for the magic button that will instantly get the right response from teacher or reader. And my reaction to both is similar: that's nice, kid. Now do your homework.
11. Taverns.
Because really, the world does not need another Space Bar.***
* Karl Schroeder actually does this well in Ventus; the MC is not exactly a farmboy, but still, it's a portrayal of a backwater rube that manages not to push my buttons. And an excellent story that I recommend you all read.
** If you wanna know how to steal right, go read Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis. The society's roots are clearly British Empire (perhaps with a bit of Chinese thrown in) but by the time he's done with it, it's his own and no other. The series is excellent both as a traditional space opera and a nifty deconstruction of traditional space opera tropes.
*** Timothy Zahn is exempt from this rule, because I *heart* Icarus Hunt.
Sadly, I do not write fantasy.
So I'm doing my best with science fiction, and figuring that some will cross over.
1. Naive farmboys/girls from a backwater planet.*
The people who write these characters must buy into the unspoilt shepherdess myth that's been around since, oh, the Roman era, because inevitably he/she is invariably shocked by the corruption and depravity of city life, grow woozy at the sight of blood, panic prettily in a crisis, and have no other perceptible personality, aside from really big muscles or boobs.
I can only assume these are the same people who drive out to our farm and say wistfully, "You're so lucky, living the quiet life like this."
I have spent more time up to my elbows in blood than I really like to think about, and "crisis situation" is the normal state of affairs on any farm, in any era. Also, when you've spent the weekend keeping the female dog from humping my sick calf while she was down and couldn't defend herself, human depravity looses some of its shock value. As for corruption... have these people never lived in a small town? Nepotism and casual embezzling are assumed in any small-town government, we have backstabbing family feuds going back half a century, and don't even get me started on the way outsiders are treated.
It's an outgrowth of the virginity myth (see below) that drives me especially batty. Country life is no more idyllic than city life; there is the same problem in the country as the city, namely, that someone went and stuck people in it and, wouldn't you know it, they're being people.
In other words: this is your Hero. Try for an actual personality.
2. Naturally Good virgins, children, and animals.
Let me explain something here. Lack of experience != Good. Okay? Okay. Can we move on now?
Aside from the fact that those untouched virgins are usually farmboys/girls (really, guys: what did you think deserted country lanes were for?), there's this idea that people are better in their natural state, pure, kind, and instinctively Good, like children and animals.
People who think this have not spent much time around children or animals.
Children and animals are naturally innocent, which means that they don't know right from wrong and can be influenced only by punishment or bribery. This is fundamentally different from being Good. And virgins aren't even innocent. They're just ignorant. You are supposed to be writing science fiction: try and get your mind out of the Victorian era.
3. Societies that exist only to confirm a set of prejudices.
I do not care what the prejudices are, or even whether they match my prejudices. Soapbox societies make boring reading. And I'm lookin' at you, Libertarians, if only because historically you've been the biggest offender in science fiction.
Real societies have problems. Real societies have advantages. If you present me with a society that has only one or the other, your book gets shut. Is that simple enough for you?
4. Twentieth century transplants.
"Oh, look! It's the Cold War with spaceships!"
"Oh, look! It's the British Empire with planets!"
"Oh, look! It's Middle America on Alpha Centauri!"
It's one thing to grab a familiar construct and stick it in the 31st century to see if it does tricks. It's another thing to use this construct in place of actual invention.
I think the first time I noticed this one was at fifteen or so when I read Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. Not a bad book, as I remember, but I read a bit where one of the characters was musing on his estates and went "Wait a minute. Why does this society have lords?"
And the whole book came to a screeching halt, because the society was, yes, the British Empire with planets, and not only was there no reason for them to have re-instituted the feudal system, there was no way the thing was going to work.
This happens a lot, when writers who don't want to think about an aspect of their world (the society, the aliens, the economy, whatever) uproot something from our world and plonk it down without noticing the roots and tendrils waving around helplessly looking for some dirt; without noticing, in other words, that the transplant has come with assumptions, many of which directly clash with the world they are trying to build. It's having lords and kings without a feudal system. It's having a thousand-planet empire with no clear lines of communication. It's having a "prison world" or an "agricultural world" with no given reason why the homeworld is going to all the trouble and expense of shipping stuff across the light-years.
Writing science fiction requires you to think. Exhausting, I know, but true. And thinking means noticing when your story-world is clashing with itself.**
5. Homogeneity.
This tends to be a corollary to Soapbox Societies and Transplants. The futuristic society is exactly the same, despite existing on thirty planets with weeks of travel in between 'em. Everyone in the Soapbox Society holds the same values. All aliens are members of the same religion and live under the same government (unless the writer has stretched herself to two -- in which case they will oppose each other) and have the same two or three character traits. All robots act alike. All cities look alike. All planets are jungle planets, desert planets, ice planets.
People, please. We read science fiction to get away from suburbia.
The problem is that it's a lot of work to create even the appearance of a real society out of scratch. But it being a lot of work doesn't excuse you from the artistic necessity of doing it.
You are permitted to whine about it if you wish.
6. The "One Change" Fallacy.
This is where worldbuilding follows the pattern "The *element* is just like us, except for *variable*" : mostly seen in aliens and societies. It is a close cousin to Soapbox Societies, Transplants, and Homogeneity, and stems from the same basic laziness. The only difference is that it works even worse than they do. A statement like "the aliens are just like us, only they can't lie" or "the society is much like ours, except with no crime" is absurd even when well-integrated, because even the barest research will make the reader realize the fundamental impossibility of what they're proposing. And it is never well-integrated. Writers like this follow through on the most obvious changes and leave the rest untouched, because if they were the type to do the research or work out the full consequences of a change, they'd be taking the far easier path of creating a society from scratch anyway.
Nothing makes me close a book faster than reading the words "just like us, except...."
Well, okay. A few things might. But it's a short list.
7. Bigotry.
Racism, sexism, elitism, tokenism: these are the ways of the Dark Side, and most of them are pretty self-explainatory. Of them all, I frankly find tokenism most annoying. Yes, it's irritating to open a book and find not a single character who's not white, straight, male, and/or middle class... but it's infuriating to open a book and find a character whose only purpose in life is to be colored, gay, female, and/or "common folk". And it makes the writer seem like more of a bigot, not less, because though they've made the effort to be PC they clearly haven't caught on that Others are people, not the sum total of their differences.
Elitism, though -- elitism seems something science fiction is prone to. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the future is populated entirely by white-collar college grads, with a great shortage of, say, mechanics or electricians. Who's making and fixing stuff? 'Cause if you're expecting the electrical engineers to patch your wiring, you're in for a surprise.
8. Godlike technology.
To believers of either camp, there are only two positions to take: either you have a fervent belief in the existence of God, or you have a fervent belief in the non-existence of god. I sometimes think science fiction has fallen into the same view of technology. Either it's super-perfect or it breaks catastrophically. It doesn't matter whether it's nanotechnology, mind upload, FTL travel, or artificial intelligence, it either succeeds or fails as a whole. It never, you know, works most of the time, or works only if you kick it, or uploads all your memories except the ones of your Great-Aunt Mable who you then have to spend hundreds of years convincing that it was a mistake, honest, Aunty, like I'd do that on purpose!
Maybe I'm a scientific agnostic, or maybe it's that I only have experience with the useful-but-fallible tech... but I find both ends of the spectrum equally dull.
9. Explanations of technomagic that make things worse.
The word "midichlorians" springs to mind here, but I'm also thinking of a plot device from Simon R. Green's Deathstalker books. This was a far-future series in which everyone used swords. The explanation (as I remember it -- it's been about ten years) was that they had really good guns, guns that could fire through almost anything and knock out the special force fields they all wore, but that took about two minutes to recharge, so in between recharges everyone stood around fighting with swords.
My immediate thought was "Okay, but you wave your saber around for those two minutes; I'll be over here with the AK-47."
There's a tradition in science fiction that you must have a solid scientific explanation for everything. It is an honorable tradition. But on those occasions when I will violate this tradition, I intend to do so quickly and shamelessly, not stop to draw attention to my slip with fallacious psuedo-science.
10. Gratuitous trauma.
For a while it was torture. Then it was rape. Child abuse was quite fashionable for a time, and now we seem to be back to rape, only with pointier objects. There are certain scenes in certain books that make me think of a seven-year-old I once tutored at reading, who used to sit giving me excuses for why she didn't feel like reading today and watching me sidelong to see if I was impressed yet, until we ended up somewhere like, "and then a car hit my mom and she died. It was really sad."
The motive is similar for both child and writer: afraid they're not garnering the proper sympathy for self or character, they invent more and more extreme situations, looking for the magic button that will instantly get the right response from teacher or reader. And my reaction to both is similar: that's nice, kid. Now do your homework.
11. Taverns.
Because really, the world does not need another Space Bar.***
* Karl Schroeder actually does this well in Ventus; the MC is not exactly a farmboy, but still, it's a portrayal of a backwater rube that manages not to push my buttons. And an excellent story that I recommend you all read.
** If you wanna know how to steal right, go read Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis. The society's roots are clearly British Empire (perhaps with a bit of Chinese thrown in) but by the time he's done with it, it's his own and no other. The series is excellent both as a traditional space opera and a nifty deconstruction of traditional space opera tropes.
*** Timothy Zahn is exempt from this rule, because I *heart* Icarus Hunt.
Sunday, July 23
Submission metrics (because I'm guessing only my writer-friends are nuts enough to be keeping up with blogs on a Sunday):
13 queries rejected
2 partials requested
2 partials rejected
4 non-responders
5 queries going out the door tomorrow.*
After this I'm down to two agencies who aren't accepting submissions right now and five that I'm lukewarm on for various reasons -- usually that they don't have a science fiction backlist. And after that, it's down to publisher submissions, which I'm distinctly unenthused about. They tend to be slower than agents, and I have less hope for the submissions.
And after that I decide whether I want to plunge into the morass that is small publishing. Sorting out the good, the bad, and the merely incompetent was enough work when it was agents. And I am already suffering Revision Syndrome with this book. (aka, "No one wants my book. I wonder why... wait! Wait! It's just come to me! I know the problem! And all it will take is ripping apart the plot, adding another point of view, redoing most of the stuff I've already written, and then somehow getting rid of the extra 50,000 words that this will add to an already borderline wordcount, and it'll be VIRTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE!")
Or maybe I'll just chalk it up to the learning process and write a different book.
Not yet, though. For now, I submit. AND write another book, assuming I have spare time again at some point in the next decade.
*For the truly curious (or those building their own submit-to list) the rejections were from Maya Rock, Eleanor Wood, Joshua Bilmes, Kimberley Cameron, Jennifer Jackson, Matt Bialer, Barbara Bova, Shana Cohen, Brian Townsell, Ethan Ellenberg, Rachel Vater, and Caitlin Blasdell. Almost all of those have listings on my agent page (I'm behind. And some of 'em are hard to find info for.)
The partials were Kristin Nelson and Susan Anne Protter.
The non-responders are Peter Rubie (51 days and counting), Russell Galen (68 days and counting), Shawna McCarthy (114 days and counting), and Jack Byrne (151 days and counting.) Rubie probably hasn't gotten around to it, and Galen apparently often doesn't respond unless he's interested. The other two... well, something has clearly gone wrong in the process. I'll probably resubmit soonish.
The queries going out today are to Jenny Rappaport, Jane Chelius, Nikki Van De Car, Elizabeth Little, and Richard Henshaw.
There, aren't you sorry you asked?
13 queries rejected
2 partials requested
2 partials rejected
4 non-responders
5 queries going out the door tomorrow.*
After this I'm down to two agencies who aren't accepting submissions right now and five that I'm lukewarm on for various reasons -- usually that they don't have a science fiction backlist. And after that, it's down to publisher submissions, which I'm distinctly unenthused about. They tend to be slower than agents, and I have less hope for the submissions.
And after that I decide whether I want to plunge into the morass that is small publishing. Sorting out the good, the bad, and the merely incompetent was enough work when it was agents. And I am already suffering Revision Syndrome with this book. (aka, "No one wants my book. I wonder why... wait! Wait! It's just come to me! I know the problem! And all it will take is ripping apart the plot, adding another point of view, redoing most of the stuff I've already written, and then somehow getting rid of the extra 50,000 words that this will add to an already borderline wordcount, and it'll be VIRTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE!")
Or maybe I'll just chalk it up to the learning process and write a different book.
Not yet, though. For now, I submit. AND write another book, assuming I have spare time again at some point in the next decade.
*For the truly curious (or those building their own submit-to list) the rejections were from Maya Rock, Eleanor Wood, Joshua Bilmes, Kimberley Cameron, Jennifer Jackson, Matt Bialer, Barbara Bova, Shana Cohen, Brian Townsell, Ethan Ellenberg, Rachel Vater, and Caitlin Blasdell. Almost all of those have listings on my agent page (I'm behind. And some of 'em are hard to find info for.)
The partials were Kristin Nelson and Susan Anne Protter.
The non-responders are Peter Rubie (51 days and counting), Russell Galen (68 days and counting), Shawna McCarthy (114 days and counting), and Jack Byrne (151 days and counting.) Rubie probably hasn't gotten around to it, and Galen apparently often doesn't respond unless he's interested. The other two... well, something has clearly gone wrong in the process. I'll probably resubmit soonish.
The queries going out today are to Jenny Rappaport, Jane Chelius, Nikki Van De Car, Elizabeth Little, and Richard Henshaw.
There, aren't you sorry you asked?
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