Writing | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Sep

up onto the banks of this hard land

Posted by Perich at 9:13 am

Our ancestors were hunters and foragers. The kind of hunger that we call “starving” today (as in “Mom, I’m -”), they lived with every waking hour. They followed herds of animals that were faster, stronger and better armed than they were and they died if they weren’t smarter. For the first ninety thousand years of its existence, the human race knew only one song and that was keep moving.

Fast forward ninety thousand years to this Tuesday, when my email at work was so slow that I couldn’t use it. I would click on a message with a file attachment and count one, two, three, four, five, six before it opened. The message, that is, not the file. Opening a file merited a trip to the water cooler.

“You have eighteen thousand emails in your inbox,” someone said. “Try deleting a few.”

Humans can’t visualize eighteen thousand of something. Hell, we have a hard time with more than seven. We’re descended from a species that never saw a thousand of anything useful. I didn’t intend to have eighteen thousand emails in my inbox. It might have been eighteen hundred or eighteen million.

Apparently my work email doesn’t have a limit on inbox size. Every other company I’ve ever worked for dinged me when my inbox got too big. I used to find this insanely frustrating. Cloud computing!, I would yell at Outlook. Web 2.0! Paperless office! Cheap bandwidth! Agile management! I’d do this at least once a month, angrily archiving and wishing for more storage all the while.

I never realized that the limits were there to help me. If you don’t think of limits as helpful, try searching through eighteen thousand emails.

Limits force me to be lean. I have to be ruthless with my inbox. If it’s older than a month, archive it. If my name isn’t in the “To:” field, ignore it. If I can’t find it, ask the person to reforward it. This reduces the time that Outlook has to spend churning for something.

Limits reduce my processing time. Before, if I wanted to find an old email, I had to search through eighteen thousand. Now, I know an email is either in my inbox or my archive. I can search my inbox in a few seconds. And if more than half of my queries take a few seconds, rather than minutes, that makes me more efficient.

This isn’t accidental. Humans evolved to make the most of limited resources, including the energy available for our brains. A flock of birds takes off from the trees; you want to waste valuable calories counting each of them? Is there that much difference between a flock of two hundred and a flock of one hundred and ninety-seven? It’s a flock. It’s a whole mess of birds. Move on.

Every now and then I think about cutting back. When I’m not at work, I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m blogging, either for this little soapbox or for Overthinking It. When I’m not blogging, I’m at jiu-jitsu. When I’m not at jiu-jitsu, I’m piecing together a social life. Sometimes I eat; sometimes I sleep. And sometimes the stress of answering a hundred little bells makes me want to punch the sun out of the sky.

But I do my best work when I’m cornered. When every hour of the day is spoken for, I have to use my time wisely. I’m ruthless with my minutes. I write like I’m hungry and I hustle like I’m broke. Even if my job does pay me a princely salary, I keep moving as if it doesn’t. I fill my days with the stuff that would be a second job or a night shift. I try not to let comfort catch up with me.

Milennia ago, my great-nth grandfather stood somewhere in Africa and wondered if there was a number higher than eighteen thousand. The fact that I’m here means he didn’t waste too much time wondering. I owe it to him to do the same. Ignore the numbers. Pick up the pace. Get lean and stay ruthless. Keep moving.

Aug

you can fence in your yard, you can pull all the cards

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Quitter: Jon Acuff’s book talked me out of quitting my day job to go pursue my dream. And for that I’m grateful.

Why? Because Acuff wants you to fully understand the risks of quitting a steady desk job for an uncertain dream. He wants you to have a plan to follow your dream, but not such a rigorous schedule that you plan your dream to death. And he wants your family in your corner.

Acuff doesn’t give you a book full of checklists, worksheets and exercises. What he gives instead is clear entertaining prose that makes clear he’s been in the same place you are. He recounts all the same fears that you’re having right now (I highlighted more passages in this book than I do in most others) and explains how to live with them. This isn’t a manual; it’s a philosophy.

A recurring theme of Acuff’s book is “falling in like with a job you don’t love.” That, more than any checklist or itemized plan, is what I needed to hear. I complain a lot about the hours at my day job, the recurring meetings and the staccato demands of my clients. But it’s still a good job! There’s a lot to like about it. I’m doing challenging work in a growing field that connects me to a broader industry and making plenty of money in the process. If I can strike a balance between that and doing what I love, why wouldn’t I? Acuff’s point is that I probably can.

Two caveats. First, a little more concrete guidance would have been nice. I know everyone’s passion is different, but a Seven Step Plan to Making Your Dream Secure wouldn’t have hurt. Second, Acuff makes a point of talking about his Christian faith. It comes up a lot when he talks about his work with David Ramsey, a nationally syndicated Christian radio host with a talk show about personal finance. However, most of the faith talk comes in background discussion. At no point does he suggest in the power of prayer to make your dreams come true. For me, this was critical. And it’s not a trivial point, as there are plenty of life coaches who tell you that turning your life around requires some kind of mystic surrender.

Plus, even with a lack of scorecards, the book has already moved me to take concrete steps. After finishing Quitter, I started working on my dream job – my fiction writing – in the morning rather than the evening. I set the alarm half an hour earlier, then got up every day to write for 45 minutes. Doing this guaranteed that, short of a housewrecking emergency, I would always get writing done that day. I could get a phone call at 8:00 AM telling me that I’d lost my job and my car, but I’d still have written my thousand words for the day. It’s also increased the volume of writing work I can do. 45 x 5 is greater than 2 x 60, especially since fatigue or other commitments would often keep me from writing twice in the evenings.

Most importantly, writing in the morning has improved my attitude. Now my dream is no longer something I defer for my free time. My dream is a commitment. I schedule the rest of my day around it; my day can not start until I’ve contributed to the novel. Writing brackets my day with inspiration. I start the day doing something I love, then set it aside to go do a job I like (for all that I bitch about the hours).

I’ve been told about people who write first thing in the morning for all my creative life. But it took a change in my mindset to start me on it.

Aug

I don’t know you, you don’t know me

Posted by Perich at 6:58 am

This week I finished writing a novel.

If you’ve known me a few years, that’s not news. I’ve finished several novels. I average about one a year. What makes this different, though, is that this is the first novel I’ve put concerted effort into revising.

This week I finished the third draft of a novel. I brought it from 55,000 down to 52,000 words, and then up to 67,000. I followed up on all the notes I’d left. I read and re-read until I found myself making fiddly little changes just for the sake of making them.

Now I need your help. I need beta readers who can take a look at this penultimate draft and give me honest feedback.

What am I looking for in a beta reader?

Someone who can read a short novel in two to four weeks.
Someone who’s comfortable giving honest feedback. I don’t want line-by-line corrections (though if you find lots of grammatical errors, let me know). I want a sense of what you liked and what you didn’t.
Someone who has some familiarity and comfort with the thriller genre. You don’t need to be the world’s biggest Harlan Coben fan, for example, but if you consider the thriller genre to be irredeemable trash, this book won’t appeal to you.
OPTIONAL BUT HIGHLY VALUED: Someone who has some familiarity with the law, journalism or the city of Boston.

If this sounds like you, please let me know via comment (I’ll see your e-mail address) or e-mailing me (perich AT periscopedepth.com).

And thank you either way. Thank you either for volunteering to read something I’ve made or for simply understanding and supporting me while I’ve worked on it. I talk a lot about how lonely a calling art is. It’s always comforting (and surprising!) to know that when I leave my desk, I still have friends waiting outside.

Aug

I don’t like your fashion business, mister

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I’ve become one of Those People that carries a Moleskine notebook.

Okay, not an actual Moleskine, but an inspired knockoff. A Wild & Wolf “Qwerty” A6 notebook. It has the same hard cover, elastic strap, cloth bookmark and storage pocket that the most prestigious name in notebooks is known for. I have a nice pen tucked into the strap. It’s small enough to fit into my hip pocket.

I bought it at the disintegrating Borders in Downtown Crossing for a modest discount. On the way back to work, I spotted a man with a leathery homeless tan and white bushy hair. He wore mesh shorts and a running jersey. His legs were skinnier than my arms. In one hand he held a cigarette; in the other, a single long-stemmed rose. “Can you do me a favor?” he asked of a man behind me as I passed.

I stopped off at Capone’s afterward to pick up a meatball sub. It was after 2:00, so I’d missed the lunch rush. Just me and the folks behind the counter. “Come in,” the owner said, “nice and warm.” He was a broad man in his fifties with curly hair, gray at the temples. He sat at a table in the back, an adding machine and a stack of yellow receipts in front of him. When he got up to hand something to the lady behind the counter, I saw that his left arm was significantly shorter than his right. Like a bad break that never healed right.

But I’m burying the lede: why buy a fancy notebook? So I remember things like that. If I’m going to improve as a writer, I need to work on description. I need to find things that are real, like homeless guys with roses and shop owners with broken arms. I need to get better at boiling a scene down into a few brief words. Plus, when I take the notebook out, it tells everyone that I’m a writer. It’s not just every chump in Cambridge that totes a Moleskine, let me tell you.

Jun

caught the early plane back to London, fifty acorns tied in a sack

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Still editing the same novel.

I got to talk to Tess Gerritsen about this project when I was at Muse and the Marketplace. I felt so self-conscious during the whole conversation that I became at least three separate people. But the topic of the seminar she’d given was How You Know If You Have A Good Idea, and she’d solicited suggestions from the audience. So I had an in.

She listened to the concept, asked a follow-up question, then nodded. “There’s something there,” she said. “How many words is it?”

“Fifty-five thousand.”

She winced. “Too short. You need a subplot.”

And it’s true that fifty-five thousand words is too short for a commercial novel. Unless my name is enough to sell a book (and it isn’t), almost no publishing houses would be interested. The fixed costs are such that it’s not worth their time.

(As a tangent, this is also an argument for breaking away from traditional publishing arrangements. People still read novels that are shorter than seventy thousand words. The thin paperbacks that you find in used book stores and that you used to find in wire racks in drug stores? Between 50K and 60K. So there’s demand for it. Just not a demand a big publishing house can profitably satisfy)

When I started editing this draft, I made note of places where I could add more detail. I tend to write few, if any, descriptions in a rough draft. Why do I need to describe what a bar looks like? I think. It’s a bar! There’s beer and walls and a TV with the game on. But normal people need concrete details to give them a sense of immersion. So I make notes with red pen in the margins.

I also realized that my heroine plunges into the mystery at reckless speed. This is good for pacing, but it means what she does for a living gets short shrift. While I didn’t pull a complete Homer Simpson on the first draft (“do you even have a job anymore?”), I saw that I could add more detail here. So more notes.

As a result, the editing process has meant a lot of writing. The 53,000 words (I fudged a little for Gerritsen) are already 59,000. And I’m a third of the way through the manuscript. By the time I’m finished, I could break 70K easy.

This wouldn’t bother me if I hadn’t gone from the rough draft to the second draft by taking so many words out. I pared it down from 58K to 53K. Now I have to bump it back up to 70K. Every time I sit at the computer, a constant refrain of do you even know what you’re doing, do you even know what you’re doing hums in my skull.

Not that reverting to the rough draft would help me. All the words I took out in the first draft needed to go. They were stale crust. They were the result of writing like I talk, rather than writing what I wanted to say.

Editing your novel doesn’t make it perfect. Nothing makes a novel perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect novel. There’s “not done yet” and “good enough for deadline.” The problem with a novel on spec is that no one’s given me a deadline. So I can rush out a half-baked product or I can tinker with it until I’m dead and leave it for my heirs to deal with.

The neuroses that editing induces are mild, and they’re nothing a tall gin and tonic can’t address. Add plenty of ice; garnish with lime to taste.

Jun

you wanna know if it doesn’t hurt me

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In the whiteboard of the largest conference room here at MicroMachines, there was, for months, a quote by President Eisenhower:

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

This quote resonated with me because it encapsulates the odd blend of neuroticism and indifference with which I approach life. I never stop anticipating events, but when it comes to execution I’ll take “good enough” over “perfect” any day.

When I produced the quiz show Quickly Now this past May at ImprovBoston, I knew in my head how every detail of the show should be paced. First we do the intros, then we do the ring-in round, then we do the round where people arrange placards on a board, etc. But when it came time to produce the show, I couldn’t get all the materials I’d envisioned. This didn’t bother me. No cheap easels on which to hang placards for round 3? Post-It Notes will do. Only three buzzers for a panel of four contestants? Place on buzzer for every two contestants and have them fight over it.

I do all my stressing on the front end (lead-in, prep) so I don’t have to stress on the back end (execution). This has worked pretty well for me so far. Except when it comes to writing.

A first draft is the embodiment of the “close enough” mindset. If you obsess over every detail in a first draft, you will never get it done. The first draft is when you dump all the Legos on the table. You only start building the house in the second (and successive) drafts. First drafts thrive on enthusiasm and momentum. Sit down, every chance you get, and pound on the keyboard.

The later drafts don’t work that way. In the second and successive drafts, you need to start grinding. Examine every paragraph and ask what it contributes to the story. Examine every sentence and ask what its place is in the paragraph. Examine every word and ask if it belongs in the sentence. Do this for every page of a 300+ page manuscript. Then eat drain cleaner and die.

This kills me because, to my mind, it’s exactly backward. If I had a good outline, or if I had a compelling vision, I shouldn’t need to rework! The hard stuff comes first; the fun stuff comes second. First the anal retentive planning, then the relaxed execution. You sweat in practice so you don’t bleed in the match. And all the other cliches.

The idea that I have to sweat over something, breeze it out, and then sweat over it again, paralyzes me. Imagine running a marathon and then walking back over the course, picking up every cup you dropped. That’s what editing feels like to me.

So if my regular blog posts slack a little in the coming weeks, forgive me. I’ve got a novel in its second-and-a-half draft right now. I’m critiquing my passion. I’m second-guessing my enthusiasm. I’m doing surgery on my own abdomen, extracting the useless lumps of metal while Jean Reno and Michel Lonsdale look on.

You can let me know if it’s worth it.

May

muse and the marketplace 2011 (pt2)

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I owe you some more.

Kelley & Hall: Kelley & Hall are a family of well-regarded local publicists. I showed up late to their talk, so I may have missed a lot of the most useful stuff. But I got a few interesting tidbits, such as how far ahead of time the major glossy magazines decide what they’re publishing (six months, at least). They also listed a number of places where journalists go for sources, and a great way to build publicity is to be cited as a source. The entire audience snapped to attention and started jotting names down at that point. Pity you weren’t there.

(Oh, fine, here’s one for free: Help A Reporter Out [HARO] )

Vantage Press: David Lamb, owner of. I’ll give you the highlights:

Out of 300,000 books published in 2009, about 80,000 were self-published.
In February 2011, e-books outsold hardcovers and trade paperbacks. (I presume the trend hasn’t reverted since)
An author makes about a $3 royalty on a $27.95 commercial hardcover.
Most commercial publishers pay out royalties twice per year. However, self-publishing markets like CreateSpace have been putting more pressure on traditional houses by paying out monthly. Vantage might be moving to quarterly royalties soon as a result (no word on the big boys).
Vantage’s price points: $8000 for a short book, $10K for a long book and $13K for “dreadnoughts.” Lamb’s words, not mine. Additional services like copy editing, line editing and developmental editing cost extra.
Copy editors can not agree on whether “copy-editing” should be hyphenated or not.
Vantage works with Lightning Source, who also offers their services to anyone with a .pdf and a credit card. The value-add of Vantage is editing (which you can find online) and publicity (see Kelley & Hall, above).

Not that I don’t think Vantage and houses like it have no role in the future apocalypse, when the tottering wrecks of the publishing houses crash to earth. But I picked up a Kindle sample of a well-received Vantage book, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. It has a starred Publishers’ Weekly review and was a New York Times bestseller, so Vantage clearly put some weight behind it. But whatever editing package Mr. Marlantes was sold, he should have gone one up.

Ann Collette: A frank little lady with a thick Boston accent. She gave her version of the Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Thriller. The difference: as a veteran from the Rees Literary Agency, she was offering her perspective on what she could sell. In addition to the usual good advice – avoid passive voice, stick to “said” as a verb of speech, avoid starting with dreams or weather – she gave a few tidbits based on what she’d heard from the market. Editors want female protagonists, she said, but “not a man in a skirt.”

She ended the seminar by taking some first pages from attendees and giving her feedback live. She rarely made it past the first paragraph – and never past the third – before giving her verdict. Most submissions needed another polish. “Try and find a writing group,” she suggested, in a tone that was kind without being warm. But one submission hit all of her requirements. Not only that, it introduced a puzzle within the first few paragraphs that propelled the reader onward. “I’m going to give you my e-mail,” she said. “I’d like to see the rest of this chapter.” That’s why you keep going to Muse: for magic bits of inspiration.

May

muse and the marketplace 2011 (pt1)

Posted by Perich at 7:58 am

Muse and the Marketplace always toys with my emotions. Between one seminar and the next, I go from convinced that I can make it as a writer to convinced that I have years left to go. The advice given by the M+M instructors reaffirms my strengths and points out my weaknesses. Which is what it should be doing. Steady writing should be a constant exercise in reaffirmation and humility. The upside: criticism and compliments both encourage me to write more.

Some notes on the speakers I heard:

Gary Braver: who also lectures at Northeastern under his birth name, Gary Goshgarian (any NU kids take him?). He talked about the basics of writing a thriller. A thriller is distinct from a mystery (says Braver) by the feeling of dread its meant to inspire. In a thriller the focus is less on the whodunit and more on the ticking clock, the danger and the stakes. Also, a thriller – like any good novel – requires the protagonist to have two quests: a public one (reflected in the plot) and a private one (reflected in character growth).

Tess Gerritsen: One of my favorite thriller authors, and always an entertaining speaker. She talked about turning ideas into novel-worthy plots. Everyone thinks they have an idea (says Gerritsen) for a thriller: there’s a serial killer at a girls’ school. There’s a bomb in Grand Central Station. The problem is, without creating a character and a situation that the audience can invest in emotionally, that’s still a boring novel. Gerritsen’s suggestion is to take an odd idea and keep asking “What if …” until you come up with something that creeps you out or excites you. What if an extremophile – a type of organism that can only survive in hostile environments, like the archaeans who live in volcanic vents – was brought aboard the I.S.S. to be studied? And what if removal from Earth’s gravity caused it to mutate in some way? And what if it grew so toxic in the process that the White House ordered that the shuttle docked with the I.S.S. couldn’t return to Earth? That’s where Gerritsen got the idea for Gravity from.

Gerritsen also brought up, unprompted, a point I’ve heard in several other seminars on thrillers: that most reading overall, and about 85% of thriller reading, is done by women. “If you can’t sell to women, you have a problem.” Of the remaining thriller readers who are men, many of them won’t read anything written by a woman. So it’s a weird market, unless you have a man’s name on the cover of your novel and you’re writing about serial killers stalking career women. In which case you’re fine.

Raffi Yessayan: a former A.D.A. in District Court in Roxbury and former head of Boston’s Gang Unit in the Suffolk County D.A.’s office. Yessayan was much more compelling when he went off-script and fielded questions from the audience. He told the story of his quest for an agent: how he introduced himself to every agent at Crimebake with his business card out and a 5-second career spiel. That’s a perfect platform for a new thriller author, the kind of thing agents and editors eat up. Yet he got no calls. He mentioned his writing to a coworker in the D.A.’s office, who mentioned a cousin who’d just written a book on bass fishing. She introduced them, her cousin reached out to his agent, and that’s how Yessayan sold 2 in the Hat.

Yessayan also had some good points on how to work in jargon without losing a reader. Little details give the reader a sense of place (“did you run his BOP?”) but nothing sounds phonier than one character expositioning something he’d already know (“his Bureau of Prisons record? yeah, he’s clean”).

More tomorrow.

Apr

it’s a dirty story of a dirty man and his clinging wife who doesn’t understand

Posted by Perich at 8:09 am

The Kill Zone is one of my favorite writing blogs. It’s a group blog, with each day of the week covered by an author in the thriller/mystery/horror genre. The authors are all big enough to have years of publishing experience, but not so big that they don’t have time to field questions in the comment threads.

Every once in a while, they offer “first page critiques.” Readers can submit the first 400 words of a manuscript to the site and get feedback from one of the writers. Since writing a killer opening is essential in making a book saleable for a new author, this is an amazing service. Slots fill up quickly and the feedback can be harsh.

So, if you wonder why I’m grinning like an idiot this week, now you know.

If you don’t give (or receive) a lot of writing criticism, you might wonder what I’m so psyched about. Most of Jordan’s response is critique, after all. Things I need to work on. How to structure the scene, where to start it, etc. And everyone prefers praise to prodding.

Part of growing as a writer, however, means knowing that what you write is imperfect. It’s acknowledging how much work a draft needs – a lot, a little, minor polishes – even if you don’t know where it needs work. There’s a big difference between a story that needs to focus on different elements in order to work and a story that just doesn’t work.

You can teach craft. But it’s much harder to teach the fundamentals. And what’s got me laughing behind my hand with surprise is reading the following:

Generally I like the voice of this woman character. She comes across as a no nonsense person who could sustain a reader’s interest with the uniqueness of her character’s attitude and her low key fashion sense. And her attachment to alcohol could prove to be interesting as baggage.

[...]

Even though this scene could be written better, it shows promise with a compelling character voice.

[this from James Scott Bell, another TKZ author] I like where this scene begins, late night phone call, as mentioned. That’s what I call a “disturbance” and is where all novels should begin–something out of the ordinary rippling the character’s ordinary world. “Your story begins when you light the match, not when you lay the wood.”

I can do this. Craft I can polish; structure I can rebuild. But I can tell a story that gets experienced authors in the genre wanting to read more.

All right, enough basking. Back to the keyboard.

Jan

your circuit’s dead; there’s someting wrong

Posted by Perich at 7:43 am

Ferrett, whom I respect as a writer^*, has an interesting post up about the term “speculative fiction.” He takes it to task for being “a bloodless nothing of a phrase that encompasses everything and yet evokes nothing.”

Speculative Fiction is, well, accurate as far as it goes. We speculate about things that break (or at least bend) the known laws of physics, one way or the other. (Unless you’re one of those hard-core Peter Watts-style SF writers, in which case you may well be getting e-mails from the future.) So we do that.

But does it evoke anything? Shit, reducing the wealth and breadth of everything we cool people write to “Speculative Fiction” is like looking at a jar of jellybeans and calling it “A container for spectrum-varietal confectionary goods.” Our world of fiction is so filled with mind-blowing concepts, from the realms of aliens to magic spells to dripping horrors to unicorns on candy mountain – and you’re telling me the best the greatest minds in all of our kind of writing could come with is “Speculative Fiction”?!!

First up, I have to concede that the above is true. “Speculative fiction” is a dry, uninteresting phrase. But I contend that’s all to the good.

For its first fifty years or so, fantastic fiction (the term “speculative fiction” is meant to replace) was of one of two types:

Pr0n for engineers; or
Fascism with wizards

And that was really it. Scholars of the genre can find the occasional exception, I’m sure, but those exceptions won’t try the rule.

Consider Asimov’s robot stories – his most famous short fiction, his biggest contribution to the young genre and where he made his money. Asimov’s robot stories typically involved two or four engineers, whose names were so white-bread that I can’t distinguish between them^**, and a troublemaking robot. But how can a robot make trouble, when its brain is stamped with the Three Laws? What followed were four to six thousand words of cleverly written puzzle-solving. Our heroes triumphed over the tricky machine and the story ends on an up note.

Consider Howard’s Conan stories – his most famous short fiction, his biggest contribution to the young genre, and where he made his money. My friend Auston (also a writer I respect) noted that Conan was thrust into a wide variety of problems, often involving naked women, but could invariably solve them because of these two rules:

1. Conan has a sword.
2. Conan is immune to snakes.

Those rules were never violated. If Conan needed to have a sword, he would find a sword. If Conan were attacked with giant snakes, they could not kill him. And to coin a phrase, when all you have is a sword, every problem looks like a giant snake.

It wasn’t until the Sixties, the New Wave, and writers like Bester, Zelazny, Dick and Moorcock that the genre became known for its ideas. After that, you could expect sci-fi / fantasy stories that weren’t just about problem solving (“how do we stop the Earth from crashing into the sun?” “how do we stop these orcs from invading our kingdom?”) but about characters. The New Wave discovered that sci-fi and fantasy had one advantage over conventional fiction: you could throw characters into impossible situations. Doing this gave writers a lot of creative opportunities to explore the psyche, relationships and drama.

The impact of the New Wave has been profound. And it’s been almost entirely good. But it hasn’t been total.

The influence of Asimov, Howard and their like was so pervasive that you find the genre tropes they lay down still present sixty years later. The weakest parts of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War are the parts where he apes Heinlein. You can’t really sink into Stross’s Singularity Sky or Accelerando without knowing what “perihelion,” “utility fog” or “lossy transmission” mean. And fantasy novels without evil races or triumph by sword thrust are as rare as, well, the ncient blood that the prophesied hero bears in his veins.

There is still a lot of science fiction which is about the science first, the fiction second. There is still a lot of fantasy that exists solely to fantasize.

The reason the term “speculative fiction” needs to exist – or a more colorful term that means the same – is to describe stories that fit in the futuristic / fantastic genre but are not sci-fi or fantasy. Stories like The Handmaid’s Tale or Slaughterhouse-Five or Brave New World or Infinite Jest or Never Let Me Go. In these stories, the fantastic elements are essential to the setting but not the plot. A sci-fi version of The Handmaid’s Tale would end with our heroine toppling the oppressive government; a sci-fi version of Infinite Jest would present a definitive, grounded explanation of “The Entertainment.”

All of those would be called sci-fi, except for the connotations inherent to the term. Oh, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t sci-fi, Atwood insists. It’s not engineering pr0n. And I can’t argue with her.

I’m not saying sci-fi and fantasy can’t be literary. Consider Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, or Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, or any of a handful of others. These are stories in which fantastic considerations are far more essential to the plot: you couldn’t tell Dune, a story of the human race transcending the destiny of resource wars, without prescience. Purely fantastic and highly literary.

But for those novels in which the fantastic only lines the setting, rather than enabling the plot, we need a different phrase. And for that, “speculative fiction” will have to do. Either that, or we need to stop reading engineering pr0n.

* Folks who know me will recognize that as a compliment, not a euphemism; I respect almost no one as a writer.

** There was one named “Donovan.” I remember that much.

« Previous Page