association-list

In which your scat­ter­brained pro­tag­o­nist makes a savage digres­sion and talks out of his ass for a while.

Reynolds is a hard man to figure. His first two books were full of promise and enor­mously enter­tain­ing to read. Rev­e­la­tion Space was fas­ci­nat­ing and imme­di­ately thrust you into a future deeply lay­ered. It felt like a real place. Chasm City just made it deeper and more real. Both novels have their faults. They’re too long by a quar­ter, not-​​quite-​​desperately in need of some tighter edit­ing. Occa­sion­ally, there are some struc­tural prob­lems, and there’s a lot of nar­ra­tive wan­der­ing, but with books this inter­est­ing, they’re easy to ignore. They’re less easy to ignore in the last two books con­tin­u­ing the story from Rev­e­la­tion Space, where Reynolds just seems to give up with sto­ry­telling and just gives us a col­or­less schematic of what would have hap­pened here, had he both­ered to write it. There are still some great scenes, but I think that in this case, his eyes got too big for his stom­ach, as it were. Edit­ing again. Or over-​​hasty pub­lish­ing. We may never know.

So I waited until Cen­tury Rain came out in paper­back, because a paid a ton for the others, get­ting them in their UK edi­tions because I was so excited by Chasm City. Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure whether I should have or not. Rain is not at the level of Chasm City, but nei­ther is it at the level of Redemp­tion Arc. It’s some­where inbe­tween. He saves his gift for den­sity of descrip­tion for his alter­nate Paris, so we never really get a feel for the future soci­ety which feels like it should be dom­i­nat­ing the novel. Again, it’s too long, except at the end, where it’s too short. Infor­ma­tion is drib­bled out in strange places, long after you’ve either fig­ured it out or just accepted it. People just do stuff and some people just vanish. The denoue­ment is nice. Econ­omy is lack­ing. That, I sup­pose, is the whole thing with Reynolds. He spends too many words telling parts of the story that don’t matter as much, and is left with too few when it comes to impor­tant scenes later in the book. Admit­tedly, most of my favorite books from some time ago, when books, on aver­age, were shorter. I don’t know what the cause is, although I sus­pect that it’s the ease that elec­tronic edit­ing brings to the process, but longer and longer books seem to be the rage these days. Were I to write a man­i­festo, it would spend a lot of time on this. Now that there’s an appar­ent demand for longer books, and writ­ing them is easier, I think that authors need an active dis­in­cen­tive to writ­ing long novels when they really don’t need to. This book could have been crack­ing at half of its length, and it isn’t Reynolds’ fail­ing alone. Most of the books that I read this year were padded out at least a little, and most could have been trimmed down by major frac­tions either at no loss or with sig­nif­i­cant gains in terms of clar­ity and nar­ra­tive strength.

Per­haps edi­tors should charge their authors by the page, weighted against their ten­dency to go on and on and weaken their books thereby. I real­ize, of course, that dif­fer­ent people work best at par­tic­u­lar lengths, and some authors can change it up more easily than others can, but I think that my obser­va­tion is sound. It isn’t like this trend is destroy­ing lit­er­a­ture or any­thing, but it would be really nice if we dropped this trend of nicing every­thing up and just said, ‘Enough, mister. You can’t write worth a damn over 250 pages. You need to take this novel and stuff it down into that space, or I’m not going to pub­lish it.’ or some­thing. That’s a stupid exam­ple, but it just seems to painfully plain to me that most authors, while fine writ­ers oth­er­wise, do not have the par­tic­u­lar skills nec­es­sary to take a book to extreme length. It requires a lot of plan­ning and dis­ci­pline and ideas and, for fucks’ sake, it takes more time than writ­ing a shorter book. You want less crap out there? Don’t expect 500 pages a year from some­one. Some can do it. Most can’t. Those authors who both work best at great length and also tend to ago­nize over their prose are doubly stuck. The demands of the mar­ket­place insist that they pro­duce at nearly a book a year, which leads to exhaus­tion and burnout. Of course, in our one price fits all cul­ture, they have to, because their books are sell­ing for just the same price as the guy down the road, who doesn’t give a toss if the prose is good or not and throws down four or five thinly veiled books about the glo­ries of being a psy­chotic killer fight­ing a card­board foe and bang­ing pretty, brain­less chicks in his down­time, or the guy next door to him who pro­duces excre­able books about sexy were­wolves at an even greater rate.

Actu­ally, he’s even worse off, because more people read those things, because they’re easy to read. There’s no intel­lec­tual strain there, it’s just intel­lec­tual pop­corn. And there’s noth­ing wrong with that. It is hon­estly what most people want. I have this sneak­ing feel­ing that most people regard those of us who spend our down­time read­ing hard books or watch­ing hard movies or lis­ten­ing to hard music as afflicted with some­thing on the level of masochism. And maybe we are. It doesn’t bother me, much. I get techy when I’m not think­ing about some­thing. I don’t do sit­ting around well and I bore easily. I know that not all people are like that. So if there’s a prob­lem here, it’s one of mis-​​addressing the market, rather than one of the market not exist­ing. There are a lot of people out there who’d like these books, I think. How­ever, I con­sis­tently hear (and make, let’s be honest) com­plaints about the philis­tin­ism of the aver­age con­sumer, that fewer and fewer people are read­ing, that kids don’t read, etc., etc., etc..

So, how do we turn this around? I don’t have the answer, or I’d be set­ting up shop for myself. But I have some suggestions:

• First off, the market for read­ing needs to grow. Very few people these days read more than a few books a year, and my instinct is that the fewer books that a person reads, the less likely that book is to be a good one. Book selec­tion takes knowl­edge and prac­tice, and if you read­ing only a few books a year, you’re not get­ting those. If the market grows, then the fringe grows too, and more inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties appear at the edges.

• Alter­na­tive meth­ods of dis­tri­b­u­tion and vend­ing need to be explored. Baen puts most of its older books online, for free. This is an inter­est­ing one, and is an exper­i­ment that I’m fol­low­ing with inter­est. But I think that more stuff could be done here. I’d per­son­ally like to see name authors set up sub­scrip­tions to their writ­ing. Say, for 40 dol­lars a year, I get instant elec­tronic access to every­thing that China Mieville writes. All the short sto­ries and novel­las and essays. When a new book comes out, I get that, too, and I also get the option to pay a little extra (50%, maybe, or the choice between a free TPB or half off of the HC) for whichever ver­sion of the book that I’d like to buy. It wouldn’t really take all that many people sub­scrib­ing to one of these ser­vices to make it a real con­tri­bu­tion to the author’s income. This one is most com­pli­cated from a con­tracts per­spec­tive, because most the pub­lish­ers are going to see it as a major threat, and the mag­a­zines aren’t going to like it all that much, I don’t think. For the most part, though, I think that it could be a work­able thing, and that it would make it easier for people to quit their day jobs and write full time. I don’t think that it would even damage book sales all that much. Sure, some people would read and not buy, but an author with a good sub­scrip­tion base could nego­ti­ate a lower advance or a lower roy­alty rate on their books, which, for them, would func­tion as more of an adver­tise­ment for the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice than any­thing else. If that sort of idea took off, I think that we’d see a reni­as­sance in short story writ­ing, as they’re cur­rently uneco­nom­i­cal for most writ­ers in terms of dol­lars made per hour spent writ­ing, but this would make them a far better propo­si­tion for most people. The mag­a­zines could then restruc­ture, even­tu­ally, as a digest ser­vice, reprint­ing for a small, nom­i­nal fee, the best of the short sto­ries on offer the pre­vi­ous month. Not the same busi­ness, but per­haps one that would work better than what’s cur­rently going on.

• I real­ize that spe­cial edi­tions make a lot of money for the smaller pub­lish­ers, but I don’t think that they’re a great idea in the long run. They don’t do any­thing to address the pri­mary prob­lem, which is that not a lot of people read, and fewer of them read sci­ence fic­tion. They do aught to make the pie higher, and thus don’t make a lot of sense in the long run.

• The main com­peti­tors to books are in per­cieved order (feel free to cor­rect me if I’m wrong) TV, Video Games, and Movies. You cannot defeat them. The scale is just too dif­fer­ent at the cur­rent time. That said, most tie-​​in novels are abom­inable, and most trans­la­tions from novel form to the screen are just as bad. This is an open ques­tion, but I think that if pub­lish­ing is to grow, its going to have to come to some sort of acco­mi­da­tion with these industries.