My super belated chime in on the whole death of the SF magazine market thing.

I think that Paolo’s and Erin’s comments are particularly interesting because they actually propose some forward movement in the market. The short SF market has shrunk so much that there’s almost nothing going on there, in terms of market diversity. I like some of the stories in the current magazines, but the return on investment is somewhat low: I don’t really like enough of them to keep buying them, although I continue to do so (at cover price) out of some sense of dogged loyalty to a kind of fiction that I love, at least for F&SF and Asimov’s. At the same time, none of the editors of the big three really speak to me, taste-wise, and their focuses aren’t my own. What I’d like to see are more magazines out there, with differing focuses and representing a wider variety of editorial tastes. For one thing, I’d like to see more ideas out there, more people thinking of various concepts for magazines, so that someone might actually get excited enough to take the plunge (or one of the existing magazines might get interested enough to launch a spin off).

So in that spirit, I present Energy States.

ES would be a mid-length monthly focusing entirely on overlapped serial short novels. The target length would be 30-50k words, too long to get published in most magazines, and too short to land a novel deal these days. The magazine would run these in 10-15kw chunks, aiming to put each novel in 3-5 issues. After each month, the first section of every story would be put online as a teaser for the rest of the story, and the entire story could be purchased stand-alone online for two dollars, once its print run was completed. Note that buying the story gives you access to previously purchased installments if the whole thing is not out yet, so the customer could catch up on a story that they’re particularly interested in without buying back issues. Bundles of popular stories could also be sold, and I imagine that you could make a deal with a PoD house for custom anthologies and chapbooks. Subscriptions, as a bonus, would get you access to all of the content, including back issues, online. For all individually sold items, the author would get a cut.

I’m not sure how well it would work out, honestly. I don’t know that there’s a reader’s market for this kind of thing, or if a starting magazine could possibly pay well enough to convince people to sell good work that they could possibly expand into a more profitable novel. This idea is mostly meant to address what I perceive as a gap in the writer’s market for story sales, allowing authors to get works out there that are currently considered unsalable.

That’s the title of a new David Levine story in April’s F&SF. I thought that his Hugo winner Tk’Tk’Tk was OK, but not mind blowing, but this one is really quite good. A an episodic story, told going backwards in time, wound around a string of just so stories about a spacer called Titanium Mike. I’ve just finished reading it, so I’m still not really sure why, but it really resonated with me. I think that I’m starting to understand what all the fuss is about.

Since I stayed home over the holidays, I got a lot of quiet time alone to read, which was nice. I also got to spend a lot of quality time with the cat, since just about no one else was in town or available. Oh well. Three books over the four day weekend, and one the week before, plus some commentary on Battlestar Galactica. Or at least that was the plan before a lack of time caused me to put this off for another week. So, add four books to the total, and since I’m cleaning the house today, I’ll inventory the to-read counts. Had I my camera, there would be pictures of the looming piles.

In other news, I’ve finished a couple of stories in the last two months, and the revision of said stories, while slow, is continuing, and I expect to start sending them off soon. Once they’re done, I intend to start on the book that they sketch the edges of, and will post some of the more interesting portions of it here, most likely.

Bookshelf Update:

Unread:

• Hardcover: 6

• Trade Paper: 22

• Mass Market: 15

• Total: 42

Partially Read:

• Hardcover: 3

• Trade Paper: 16

• Mass Market: 9

• Total: 28

Grand Total: 71

Ouch. Looking at the books in the pile, and at the turnover, I realize that for the most part a lot of these are books that I thought that I should read, but that never really captured my imagination. There has been plenty of time for me to read more of these (although not so much lately), but some of them just aren’t getting read because for all that they seemed interesting when I bought them, they are continually supplanted by other books that I’m more interested in reading.

I find that most books that I buy are read within a week or two of getting them. If they are not read by then there is fairly little chance that I’ll get to them anytime soon. Or at least, that’s the overall pattern, although there are notable exceptions. Since I’m bored and wondering how many I’ve read and desperately avoiding doing the housework, I’m going to count up the books that I have here and have read. Note that this isn’t the entirety of the books that I’ve read, since I’ve lost and sold and given some away or read it at the library, of course, nor could I bring all the books that I own out here to SF. It’s a lot of them, though, including almost all of the books that I’ve read in the last three years. The count is rough because there are a few (less than 20) books in there that I have not read and don’t really intend to read, at least not in the conventional sense. They’re mostly reference, and a few things from school.

Read:

• Hardcover: 62

• Trade Paper: 93

• Mass Market: 180

• Total: 335

Grand, Grand Total: 406

Read Percentage: 82.3%

Short Reviews:

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison.

I think that either you love Harrison or you hate him. He’s all about losers, people that you hate a lot, or at least don’t care about much, but at least they’re intriguing, in some way. One day I will find the right words to describe Harrison’s prose style, but I’m not really up to the task right now. Regardless, the writing here is achingly good. I am not entirely sure that I would want to write like Harrison, but I am certainly glad that he is there to do it.

You should likely start with his novel Light before you read this one, or you might be totally lost. Which might be the point, or maybe not. A good deal of the novel is about uncertainty in any case, and there are no characters carried over. If you like this one you should read Light, in any case.

The Ordinary by Jim Grimsley.

I am not certain what I think of this book now, since I just lately finished it. It’s certainly well written but the prose is short of exceptional. While the plotting is certainly intriguing, there are some deep structural problems that I had a hard time getting over. Most of the second half of the book is taken up with what might be called ‘revelation time, where the author spends a lot of space spelling out a lot of facts about the universe that he’s constructed and moving the plot forward almost not at all. This might have been a more forgivable flaw in a longer book, or one with more languid initial pacing, but unfortunately this is a short book that starts quickly and expects a good deal of figuring out from the reader. That is pauses so long for even a quite crucial scene is irritating at the least, and that he does is twice (the scene is done from two sides, but not identically), even more so.

That he then couples this with a pulled punch ending, adds the injury to it. I liked the book, but the point at which he leaves the story off is almost unforgivable. A sequel has just come out, and it might be easier to recommend them as a pair. We’ll have to see. For all of its flaws, it’s an engaging book, and the extra time that he spends at the expense of the plot is spent in well done character building. I’ll pick the new one up one of these days and let you know.

Also, in light of the furore over the fact that Bear’s Carnival contained even a tiny bit of it, I feel that I must inform some of my more faint-hearted readers that this book contains tiny bits of ‘teh gay’ and that if you read it it might get all over you. However, it primarily concerns lesbians, so I’m sure that people will be much less bothered.

The Mark of Ran by Paul Kearney.

This short little fantasy suffers from some of the same problems as the above, but at least you get a good sea battle at the end, something that’s been seemingly promised from the first couple of chapters. There are some good things and bad things about it, but it’s mostly good. Much in the same vein as but sadly somewhat inferior to the work of Steven Erikson. That said, it’s a quick, light book to read, and I’m hoping that the second volume of the story picks it up a lot. As this, this first of a trilogy, as I understand it, suffers a but from first child syndrome, over-heavy with world-building and character development and just finally gets into the plot right before it ends. This will be something that I’ll have to revisit once I’ve read the second volume (I’m honestly tempted to call it the second section).

Polity Agent by Neal Asher.

I’ve just noticed that of the four books that I’m talking about here, only one of them could possibly stand alone. It is not this book. Asher is essentially writing one novel that’s about two million words long. I have no problems with this, as it’s incredibly entertaining, and I think that you should read them all, as much as that is possible, since Tor skipped publishing Line of Polity and may or may not publish this one. I would recommend either going to amazon.ca or to your local specialty store, assuming that you have one.

One thing that bothers me these days, though, is that certain lengths are considered uncommercial. It’s no real secret that short fiction is a slow way to starve. Unfortunately, if you’re truly gifted at the form of the short novel, you’d better have a day job, because you’re going to starve quickly, as you’re too long for the magazines and too short for the main publishers, unless you’re a huge, huge name and people will publish anything that you write just because they know people would buy your spit on paper. Unfortunately this leads to a lot of weird things happening. The worst of it, I think, is that novels that are uncommercially short are padded out, often to great diminution of their effect. But then there are the longer novels that are, at the other end of the scale, cut into smaller parts so that that they can physically be published.

Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

Those of you who are fans of Matt Hughes’ work from F&SF no doubt will already be familiar with Hengis Hapthorne, the Holmes-like ‘freelance discriminator’ who features heavily within what is the more interesting thread of those stories. In this, the first full-length book featuring that character, we get to see that Hughes and his characters, who can seem cartoonish at times, are capable of holding forth at greater length and still maintaining the light tone and humor of the stories, while infusing the characters and their environment with additional depth and interest. Nor, it seems, is Hughes limited only to humor, for we get to see this deeply self-absorbed character confronted by his limitations and faced by a strange form of his own mortality. It’s well handled, and it’s nice to see that the character has more than one note.

Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds, in my opinion, is one of the more interesting writers of short fiction around, and I find that, despite his claims that he doesn’t work well at shorter lengths, that his short fiction is more effective, at least in terms of my enjoyment of his work, than his longer work. That holds true especially here, in a collection of much of his strongest short work that doesn’t take place in the Revelation Space universe. Highlights include “Spirey and the Queen”, “Hideaway”, and “Beyond the Aquila Rift”. This book just gives us all the more reason to lament the fact that an author can make no more than a tiny fraction of their living from writing short fiction. If it paid a little more, we might see more books like this one.

Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

I’m not entirely sure what to think of th this one. I’m a huge fan of Bug Jack Barron, and Spinrad is one of the most interesting stylists that SF has yet produced. That said, I think that this book was meant to be shocking, and unfortunately it fails at this today, although it may not have when the book was first released. For the most part, the book focuses on sex, almost exclusively heteronormative, and it does so at the expense of its setting. The language used is quite interesting and inventive, and some of the set-pieces are pretty magnificent, but the characters and the plot suffer a bit in comparison. There’s just not all that much going on there, and the additional difficulty imposed by the stylistic experimentation and visualizing some quite strange environments ends up being tiring rather than fascinating, because you don’t have the engine of a strong plot to propel you along.

The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman

I have to admit, I was a little doubtful coming in to this one. First off, the cover is, well, more than a little bit gaudy, and I’d never read anything else by Newman (although I have met him, and he’s quite a nice and good humored person, from what I could tell). But it’s from MonkeyBrain, and I trust Chris’ taste, generally. Thankfully, any apprehensions that I might have had were entirely unfounded. This is a great book and it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s also carried off with a great deal more stylistic panache than one would infer from the seeming wonkyness of the conceit. A collection of short stories revolving around psychic and disco fashion maven Richard Jepeson, the whole thing could be shallow and played for laughs, but Newman infuses the characters with feeling and depth that could easily have been left out if these stories had been written simply as a lark. The only issue that I had with these stories was that, as an American reader, with no deep knowledge of British popular culture, I constantly had the nagging feeling that I was missing quite a bit of the cultural references being made. I did not discover until after I had finished half the book that there was a generous glossary and explication of many of these references at the end of the book, which I found helpful and would recommend reading through first, if only so you don’t have to go to the back every time you get the feeling that you’re lost. Overall, this stuff was incredibly enjoyable and I’ll certainly be seeking out more of Newman’s work in the future.

Battlestar Galactica Start to ep 2×08

I’ve stopped watching this show. I don’t know whether it’s the Star Trek science, the hot topcism, or the irritatingly inconsistent way the characters seem to be written, but this show just doesn’t seem to be very good. The Gaius Baltar character is especially annoying. I think that the show might have worked better with some more serious constraints, like a statement at the outset that said the producers of the show would see the characters on Earth or dead in three seasons. That way you might get less of the sense of meandering that this series gives off. I don’t hate it, and there are many good moments, but I just can’t keep watching a show that has me stopping a few times an episode to cringe at how astoundingly bad the last couple of minutes were. Also, I know that they’re not going to give it the ending that I want already, so… meh (I don’t say that selfishly, as in I only want endings that I like or can predict, but I can already see it ending like so many of the other genre shows, drawing it out too long and slowly losing viewers until they have to finish the show in an unsatisfying hurry).

Things that I’ve read recently, and some brief reactions:

• Asimov’s August ‘06. Some good stuff, some interesting stuff, some irritating stuff. I’ve an extended post in the pipeline that I will post soon if I can ever get over this problem with posts just stalling out on me (five or six of them now. It’s getting to be a problem).

• Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. (NB: I tried to write this spoilerless, but found myself having to leave out too many things that I wanted to write about. So, heavy spoilers. If you like fantasy, skip this paragraph then go read it, and come back). This was pretty good, especially for a first novel. I found it enjoyable, but there were a couple of things that kept bothering me throughout (note that these are no indication that you shouldn’t read it, as it’s a fun story). Firstly, there are some things that grate against my personal preferences, mostly with regard to the treatment of religion in the setting. These won’t bother most people, so I won’t dwell on them further. Secondly, there’s a fair amount of idiot plot going on here to delay certain events until they’re supposed to happen, when, very often, it would make more sense and feel more natural if they were to happen earlier in the story. Also, there are a couple of revelations that just don’t really make any sense. Not big ones, but they aren’t well telegraphed enough, and it just sort of feels like they were pulled out of a hat to tie things together and make certain characters more monstrous than they are or to give them more things to fight against. I think that in particular the handling of the adjunct priest Dilaf could have been done more effectively, had he remained a more human kind of monster. Thirdly, while there is a good amount of remediation of the standard fantasy tropes of the noble prince and the fair (but bold and intelligent) princess, the common people here are treated too much like counters. You never see their faces, so it’s sometimes hard to care which group of noble assholes gets the prize. Also, the whole city of Elantris seems like a bit of a spoiler for people. I mean, it a bunch of random people just turn into magical gods every once in a while, I’d think that enough wives and children would get left behind so that someone would either figure out how to get everyone in on it, or get rid of it completely. I find it hard to stomach that the Elantreans are awesome just for handing out food and healing people. Finally, the solution to the magical problems posed in the beginning of the novel feels kind of weak to me, as the idea that none of the (well educated, immensely powerful, near-immortal) Elantreans would know how to fix the problem (yes, I know that they get slaughtered, but I doubt that the violence would be so complete that no one who knew the origins of the magic and was capable of figuring out how to fix it would have survived) would have been able to fix it.

• Lethe by Tricia Sullivan. I haaaate Tricia Sullivan. I just want you all to know that. I hate her because she wrote this one when she was younger than I am now and it’s very, very well done, if a bit clumsy in places. It’s a horrible fucking criminal shame that Sullivan isn’t one of our best known authors. This one’s out of print, I think, but shouldn’t be impossible to find used.

• The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny. Like most of Zelazny, in my experience, tremendously uneven. At his best, Zelazny is brilliant, but at his worst, he’s just barely adequate. I’m finding this one a bit slow going because of that. The bad stories are hard to get through, but the incredible ones make it worth it.

• Look to Windward and Consider Phlebas, parts of State of the Art all by Iain (M.) Banks. Rereads, all of them. I have a long, rambling post about the Culture, the statement that Banks seems to be making with it, the contours of the entire loose series, and some wondering why Banks isn’t very famous in the US, despite being a best seller in the UK. If I can ever finish it and clean it up, I might post it here.

I’m sure I’m forgetting about some other stuff. Four months of Asimov’s down and five months to go (counting the double issues as two months). I think that I’m short a month on the to-read stack, but that’s likely because the place where I have them stacked is on one of my cat’s high speed paths across my room and so it’s likely under my bed or something.

Also, I’m opening comments, as an experiment, so say hello, if you want to.

I only finished one magazine last night, mostly because I spent too much time re-reading Iain M. Banks’ first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. It sucked me in, and I ran low on time. Unfortunately, I bounced off almost everything in this issue, with the lone exception of the Robert Reed story, “Eight Episodes”. I read at least half of every story, and the whole of a couple of them, but nothing grabbed me. To be fair, even the Robert Reed story wasn’t one of his better ones, just another meditation on light-speed and the loneliness of organic species. Elegantly written and inventive as usual, but not something that we haven’t seen from him before. As an aside, I really want to witness a drunken argument between Reed and Ken MacLeod about the place of humanity on a deep time-scale. I feel that it would be deeply amusing, as long as they weren’t too respectful of each other. The most interesting discussion would come from what I perceive as MacLeod’s hopefulness and Reed’s pessimism (yes, I know that Reed has immortal, vital humanity in the deep future stories too, but they are, to me, less deeply felt than MacLeod’s, as if Reed were trying to sell us a future that he desperately wants to believe in, but cannot).

Anyway. Not an auspicious beginning. Hopefully I’ll resist the siren call of Consider Phlebas/Look to Windward tonight and make it through two of them.