The Anachronist

The Honest Scam: If I Were a Scam Publisher

Writers!  My new anthology is looking to exploit you!

Here’s what you do.  You have to send us your work.  We’re not going to mention any formatting requirements like standard manuscript format, because honestly, we’re a scam and we just don’t care what you’ve written.

Your work should be somewhere between zero and seven hundred thousand words.  Since you’ll be paying for all the copies of it yourself, we’re not too concerned about the shipping costs of a box of tremendous books.

Since we feel it’s important to at least pretend we’re being selective, we’ve decided that our anthology theme will be a cross-section of today’s most popular books—probably the same books that inspired you to be a writer!

Our anthology theme will involve stories about a television show where teenage wizard vampires battle to the death in an arena designed by the Norse god Loki.

Other than that, you have complete creative freedom!

READING FEE: $1/word.  We’re a pro market, guys.

RIGHTS: By submitting, you give us exclusive rights to your work indefinitely, though you retain the copyright.  HA!

Note: I’m writing this to help you recognize the telltale signs that a publication is trying to exploit you.  Yes, this is way more blatant than anything will ever be, but when you read between the lines you’ll recognize that if a press takes away your rights to your own work and requires you to pay it, along with a number of other circumstantial shady signs, it’s time to turn and run.

You know, I see all these e-readers and suchlike, and I can’t help but think of the silliest thing.  It was in one of the Animorphs books that I read as a kid, in a passage when Ax, the Andalite alien, was talking about humanity’s achievements.

One of the things he said was how amazing books are, containing so much information with absolutely no load time beyond turning a page, no downtime, nothing to break.  I like e-readers, but…KA Applegate had a point.

Hugo Quest: THE FOREVER WAR and FOREVER PEACE, by Joe Haldeman

I read these two awhile ago, but putting my thoughts to “paper” has taken me some time for them.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, THE FOREVER WAR, the 1976 Best Novel, is Joe Haldeman’s “Vietnam in Space,” a fantastic anti-war opus that uses the disorientation and trauma felt by soldiers in an interstellar war as a metaphor for the disorientation and trauma of soldiers returning from the US’s war in Vietnam.  Haldeman himself is a Vietnam veteran, and that personal experience with the horrors of war is certainly felt within the novel.  It is particularly amazing how this book contrasts with STARSHIP TROOPERS, but I’ll save that for another time.  THE FOREVER WAR uses time dilation from interstellar relativistic travel as a metaphor for the effects of having been in a war zone.  Where soldiers returning from Vietnam may have felt isolated and traumatized by their experiences, the soldiers in THE FOREVER WAR are temporally isolated.  In their experience, just a few months have passed, but in the decades or even centuries of time that have passed on Earth, a great many things have changed.  One part of the novel is even titled “You Can Never Go Back,” which is about returning to Earth.  This title is borrowed as a revolutionary slogan by Kim Stanley Robinson in his MARS books, interestingly enough.

FOREVER PEACE, though it shares a title and theme with THE FOREVER WAR, is not a sequel to Haldeman’s earlier winner.  It won for Best Novel in 1998.  It’s got a lot to do with drone-based warfare and how technologies that encourage empathy could eventually also promote pacifism.  It’s also notable because it features an African American protagonist, though I can’t say that this book is really about the African American experience.  I think that detail is just nice, since it adds some diversity.  I’m tired of the assumption that white is the default main character skin colour.

I think you can compare these two books in a simple, useful way.  FOREVER PEACE is an “idea book,” where compelling characters, technologies, and events interact in such a way as to make a point about human nature in the future.  In this case it’s about peace.  I don’t usually love books with that kind of goal, but that’s a matter of personal preference.  It’s a skillfully crafted novel.

THE FOREVER WAR, on the other hand, is about the visceral emotional experience of being in a war situation, being pulled out of time, and being unable to relate to the greater cultural context of the war that you’re a part of.  The feeling of having terrible things happen to you for reasons that society has long left behind.  To give it a name, it’s an “experience book,” much in the same way that STARSHIP TROOPERS is an experience book.  It’s to give you the feeling of having done something.  In this case, it should convince most everyone that they really don’t want to have the experiences depicted.  I gravitate toward this model much more easily; I feel like I’m being put in the shoes of the main character and getting a clear depiction of what he or she feels during the course of events.

I rather prefer the “experience book” model, but the problem is that it doesn’t always work well for idealistic books.  If you want to write a novel about the end of all war, that’s an experience nobody’s ever had.  So you’re stuck with the “idea book” model, which doesn’t always feel as real to me.  As a result, THE FOREVER WAR stuck with me a lot more than FOREVER PEACE, though both were masterworks.

Hugo Quest: A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, Vernor Vinge

It feels important to me to keep cataloging my experiences as I try to read all of the Hugo Award-winning books.  Before, I was kind of reviewing them, but I think it should be a little different than that.  I’m beginning to see these books as my sensei in becoming a fully trained science fiction writer.  Instead of having one master to teach me the techniques I need to learn, I have many.

Vernor Vinge is one of the masters who I feel a close affinity with.  Like me, he is a scientist who balances his science fiction writing career with an actual academic science career.  I see certain flourishes within his writing that betray both the commitment to detail as well as the appreciation of wonder which is common to many scientists.

But I also see other things, hard-won lessons that I can learn not only for my writing but for the kind of person I want to be.  Let’s get it out of the way: I think both of these books are fantastic.  They are in the same series, and share a charater.  A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY is a prequel to A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, and set 20,000 years earlier.  Still, I recommend reading them in publication order.  The experience is more satisfying, and when you’re dealing with space sagas this sweeping, you don’t want to blunt the full force of the awesome.

But there are two characters who really struck me, one from each book, as different sides to the coin of having broad-based interests.  In A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, the “Tines,” a race of pack-animals whose minds are spread across a pack of multiple creatures, one of these packs, Scriber, is a dilletante with bunches of actually rather good ideas, but who is ultimately ineffective and a tragic joke.  They look crazy to his contemporaries, who are stuck in a middle ages level of technology, and he’s too unwise himself to bring them to fruition.

In A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, there is the spider-creature Sherkaner Underhill, the veritable Einstein of his race, who has as many ideas from as many realms as the Scriber of the previous book.  Except that Sherkaner has certain advantages that Scriber lacks.  For one thing, Sherkaner meets people who have both the willingness and the wherewithal to research his ideas.  So much depends on who we meet in life.  For another, Sherkaner is careful, and patient.  He sticks to his guns when it matters, and he knows when to admit he is wrong.

I’m a person who often has these “flights of ideas,” almost like a neurology patient with a tumor pressing on the part of his brain where stupid inventions come from.  I am a scientist, and a writer, and a founder of an organization that seeks to be a public commons for information.  Each of these characters is something I could become, if I make the right (or wrong) choices.  It’s not the inherent dilletante creativity that makes Scriber so ineffective, nor is there something particularly special about Sherkaner that makes his ideas more likely to work.  The difference is in how they approach actualizing their ideas.  Through these two characters, I’ve learned an important lesson.

RED, GREEN, BLUE MARS

When I was 11, my sister lived in New York City, on West 76th St.  It was a big world to live in, much bigger than the sprawling suburban identity that my childhood was subsumed within.  Where we had a small wood at the foot of a hill behind our house, she had a kitchen that would have been fired as a closet in Westchester.

I would go and stay with her for the occasional weekend, spending Friday afternoon on her candlewax-besodden laptop and then finding our way to some kind of religio-social event later that evening.  Sometimes on those evenings, I would wander to what was then the largest bookstore I had ever seen, on Broadway.

The year before, I had been introduced to “large” books by a teacher who knew I was far beyond the short things she had the other students read on a weekly basis.  In the course of fifth grade, I’d read WATERSHIP DOWN, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, THE HOBBIT, and DUNE.

I felt it was time to branch out and start picking the books on my own.  After all, I was in SIXTH grade now.  A veritable adult.  I needed to establish my own preferences.  So, in that palatial bookstore on the Upper West Side, I ventured past the “X-Phile” fan books and found my way into the world of commercial genre fiction, a world from which I have no desire to separate myself, almost 15 years later.

And the first book I picked up, the book I didn’t understand at all at the time, was BLUE MARS.  I don’t remember why I didn’t buy the first two books of the series (RED and GREEN MARS), but for some reason my 11-year-old mind wanted to read this book about a fully developed Martian society.

And I read it, and didn’t understand even an iota of it.  It was full of heady ideas.  The technology I understood, and I thought it was just another sci fi novel where the author loses thought for his characters for love of scientific accuracy.

Now, as an “adult” I find myself reading RED and GREEN MARS for this Hugo-reading-quest I have undertaken.  And in reading these, I’ve come to recognize the depth of character and human understanding that Kim Stanley Robinson betrays within this series.

And I wonder, how did I read BLUE MARS and not catch this?  It makes me think of the children in GREEN MARS, which I am currently reading.  They are born to these celebrities, famous settlers who have faded themselves into the background after the harrowing events of RED MARS.  These children have no idea the cultural context for the events that have happened around them, having been simply an idea of their parents at the time of RED MARS.  Much in the way that I was, reading BLUE MARS out of series, with no context for how these tired old scientists had struggled to build a world that left behind the problems of Earth.  Older, wiser, still growing, I’ve come to appreciate it more.

This series has waited quite patiently as I’ve grown into it.  I hope I continue to do so.

Hugo Review: AMERICAN GODS

Okay, so, I think before I begin this one I have a little disclosure to make: I didn’t actually read this one for the Hugo quest, but instead read it a couple of years ago because I wanted to read it.  Generally speaking I’ve been skipping books that I’ve already read in the interests of time and not reviewing them because I felt my impression of them was too long ago to give a good review.  For AMERICAN GODS, though, that’s not really true, as I read it during the winter of 2009 and I can remember it well enough to review.

A lot of people really love this book.  I liked it a lot, but I can’t say I really loved it.

From a viewpoint of cultural discourse, AMERICAN GODS is a really fascinating document.  American Gods is about American culture, and about how the beliefs that immigrants brought on their boats with them and the beliefs of modern America can appear to be at war at times.  It has a bit of ancient culture, a bit of nostalgia for the lost traditions that wander about our world, and a bit of traveling salesman/world’s largest ball of twine Americanism.  It’s a wonderful mosaic of the ingredients of this country.

It’s by Neil Gaiman, who started out his career in the UK as an author of prose stories and comics and has since earned a place as a literary rockstar, moved to the US, and written too many fantastic things to count.  Well, actually, you could probably count them, but let’s just finish by saying he’s a legend instead.  There’s a great profile of him that The New Yorker did a year or two ago, and if you want to know more, read that.

The point that I’m trying to make with the history is that only a guy like Neil Gaiman could have written this book.  I feel kind of confident saying that, but let’s be clear: a lot of what I’m about to say is just guessing.  Neil Gaiman was born in the UK to Jewish parents, and his family had some ties to Scientology.  Then he moved to the US.  He’s got “outsider” written all over him, or at least, he came to US culture as an outsider.  I’ve got some of that in my own life; I’m a Canadian-American Jew.  There are times when I’d thought about how a book like AMERICAN GODS could be written, before I knew it existed, because there are certain things you see when you feel like an outsider that are hard to see when you’re steeped in the culture.

If the United States is a melting pot, some pieces melt a little slower than others, and Neil Gaiman had that advantage of objectivity when looking at how the US is put together.  He researched the hell out of this book, and it really shows.  It’s a beautiful work in that respect, showing you a lot of where the US came from in a contemporary style.  If you’re looking for what it means to be an American on a deeper level than what you hear from politicians, this book might just show that to you.

A few of these things weren’t so new to me, so maybe some of the mind blowing effects of the book were lost on me, and in the end, I found something lacking in the characters.

The supporting characters, the gods who were created by the cultures brought to the US by immigrants, are all very full and wonderful and exciting, but there’s something about Gaiman’s earlier novel protagonists that I’ve found missing.  Shadow and Laura both have a very flat affect, meaning that their emotions do not seem to break the surface of their overall character.  I cannot tell you what these people are like, because I do not know if they are really like anything or anyone.

This is a problem I see a lot in novels written by comics authors.  It’s also true in NEVERWHERE, of the protagonist Roger.  My theory is that comics authors come to rely on the art to convey emotion, and their viewpoint character comes to serve as a “window” onto the other characters that replaces the comic panel.  This leads to viewpoint characters being very flat by necessity, because any affect on their part would result in tinting of the window.

It’s the biggest problem—it may even be the only problem—that AMERICAN GODS has.

Either way, I strongly recommend it.  It has a good story, it is an important cultural document, and it’s fun to read.  Shadow may be a bit empty, at the end of the day, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading AMERICAN GODS.

Hugo Review: PALADIN OF SOULS

I continue with my quest to read all the Hugo award winners for best novel.

PALADIN OF SOULS is a lovely book by Lois McMaster Bujold.  It’s the sequel to the also excellent THE CURSE OF CHALION, which did not win the Hugo, but which I had to read in order to have the full context for this book.

PALADIN OF SOULS can be read on its own, but I think having read THE CURSE OF CHALION made it a richer experience.

Both books take place in a medieval high fantasy world that Bujold has created.  One of my majors was medieval history, so I have to say that I truly love how well she has simulated a country with the feel of medieval Spain.  The religious system, a cornerstone of both books, is also quite remarkable and something that will get you thinking about the nature of loyalty and belief, if those are topics that interest you.  Overall, the worldbuilding is very reminiscent of the classic Earthsea books (also must-reads).

But without a doubt the best thing about these books is the character development.  It’s richer than I’ve seen in many, many other books.  The main characters in both books are spectacularly believable.  They are like fine sculptures that show both features and flaws in stunning detail.

The bottom line is that these books are going to make a fantasy fan a happier person after reading them.  So get on that, fantasy fans.

Hugo Quest: HOMINIDS

It looks like I left off posting Hugo award book reviews after I read SPIN, by Robert Charles Wilson.

I read PALADIN OF SOULS after I read SPIN, but I said I’d review HOMINIDS next, so that’s what I’ll do.

HOMINIDS, as you can see, is a Hugo award winner for Best Novel written by Robert J. Sawyer.  It won the Hugo in 2003.  It’s about a neanderthal from a parallel universe full of neanderthals who comes to the homo sapiens sapiens’ universe.

I think it’s interesting to line this book up against SPIN, because Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson are both prominent science fiction writers who are also Canadians.  Since I’m a Canadian-American and I want to be a science fiction author too, I was really excited to read both of these books.

When I finished SPIN, I was blown away by its quality.  When I finished HOMINIDS, I was glad it was over.  It made me wonder how these two books could have won the same award.  HOMINIDS had a lot of promise when I first started it…but then…it didn’t.

It fuses quantum mechanics with neanderthals and tries to portray scientists as real people, especially female scientists.  All good…in principle.  It fails in the implementation.

It fails at the quantum mechanics pretty spectacularly.  It’s just scientifically wrong.

It treats the neanderthals as magic noble savages who have a perfect society because they don’t have religion, which really doesn’t have anything to do with neanderthals, does it?

It turns one of the female scientists into a complete sex object who uses her appeal to manipulate men, and it turns the other into a rape victim that it uses to justify its claims that the religion-free neanderthals are simply better for no apparent biological or anthropological reason.

And then the big, strong neanderthal physicist comes in to protect the little, weak rape victim, just like all men should, right?

I found the book’s politics and misogyny-disguised-as-feminism to be a big let down.

Wouldn’t read again.