So, my novella “What We Hold Onto,” made it into the top five novella’s in 2016 in the Asimov’s Reader’s choice awards, which is wonderful, so the magazine has made it available for free download as a PDF. The reasons magazines do this is so the stories can be considered for awards by people who don’t subscribe; of course, on-line SF magazines like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed and Strange Horizons don’t have to go through this extra step; all their stuff is already readable on-line.
The Nebula award gets around this problem by making free downloads available to members of SFWA in private SFWA forums; the Hugo, being a fan award, demands content outside a firewall to be considered by the whole SF reading community, not just a single magazine’s subscriber base.
On the plus side, in this paper system your Hugo reading list is curated by the readers of the magazine. These stories are already award finalists. On the downside, Stuff in the paper magazine now exists outside of the twitter FB blogosphere ecosystem, which increasingly, in the sharing economy, is how most intellectual property is discovered, found, and monetized.
Books still make sense, longer form content; discussion forums and comments and blogs and author interviews can point at the monetized text, with excerpts and commentary sending up enough of a flare to make the walled off content viable.
Short fiction is a tougher sell; flash fiction is great for screen-reading, it’s sort of an evolutionary adaptation to the digital age’s fractured attention span. Stories in the 4-10k word range (10 to 25 paperback book pages) range really need to live with other stories to a sale-able thing, though the flexibility of the modern ebook has breathed new lives back into the novella; slender volumes at latte prices that could never stand along in a bookstore sell and read quite nicely as ebooks; TORs innovations along this line are a hopeful spot in the world of publishing.
Which is a super didactic and long winded way of saying, OMG PLEASE READ MY STORY PLEASE OH GOD IT’S FREE READ AND IF YOU LIKE IT PLEASE VOTE FOR IT FOR THE HUGO AWARD BECAUSE THAT WOULD MAKE ME SO HAPPY…
Ahem. (Visualize me tucking my eyes back in my head and wiping the spittle from my beard.)
This is the spoiler free post; I’ll tell you that the novella is set in that 50-100 years in the future window that I love which so many people don’t, and which I’ve been told not to write novels about, by people who know of what they speak.
So, read it, and then, tomorrow or the next day, I’ll post a ‘SPOILERS! post where I talk about what the story is about, really, and you can talk to me about it. Please do. Please. Don’t make me go into all caps again, okay?
One of the books that inform the flavor of my short story “Grandmaster,” in Analog March / April 2017
I did my research on that time period by reading two books; The Futurians by Damon Knight, and The Way the Future Was, by Fred Pohl, and then I just scrambled and reinvented various anecdotes to create my mythical C.L. Moore / Kuttner Writer Combo. (I’m reminded of the wonderful way Alan Moore creates whole universes of comic book characters you’ve never heard of that evoke ones you have.)
Generally speaking, all of their work during the time they were married is to a degree a collaboration, though some stories carry their shared pen name and some don’t. Rage, in my story, is an analog to the novel Fury, which Moore has described as being about 70% written by Kuttner.
It’s an awesome book, by the way.
So again, this is fantasy, or SF, and it’s about my fantasy, of this heroic woman and her doomed husband, and a reality underneath, which in this case is a romantic love story, because I’m a sucker for a love story, and the subversive element of the story that muddies its politics is the notion that, for some people, writing is a kind of intimacy with the people you’re writing with, and the readers and editors are a greek chorus.
In her introduction Moore ascribes the bulk of the writing of Fury to her husband, but it was a collaboration, regardless of the byline…
The fact that Moore stops writing, during her second marriage to a man who doesn’t like SF, is I guess, the source of that idea.This thought just occurred to me; it wasn’t conscious…
C.L. Moore’s most collected story, No Woman Born, is about a beautiful dancer / actress whose brain is moved into a robot body after she’s injured in a fire. It’s a wonderful story with a fairly dark ending, this notion that somehow the robotized woman may be losing her humanity. It’s observations on gender, beauty, and femininity are still relevant, according to many female scholars and readers I’ve found on the web. The story makes sense to me, too.
Vintage Season is the story the POV is talking finishing at the end, and it may in fact be pure C.L. Moore, even though it was published under a shared pen name; people disagree. Vintage Season takes place in an unnamed city in a time that feels like the past, and it may be the first ‘time traveler tourist’ story ever written. I make it Boston and Cambridge, in my funhouse mirror universe, because I live in Cambridge and have lived in Boston and I tend to set things here.
OH! Moore would have been the second woman to get the SF grandmaster award, not the first. The first is Andre Norton.
Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as. C.L. Moore who should have been the second female Grandmaster of SF award recipient… but wasn’t.
So the reviews are creeping in for my story Grandmaster in the current March / April issue of Analog, and they fall into two camps.
Pretty good story, moving, not sure who this character is supposed to be.
I found the story effective, but had to ask this old fan who this woman was, and now I’ll tell you.
Backstory. I’m fifty three, which makes me of a generation that read all science fiction. All of it. We read backwards and forwards, because the genre wasn’t that big, and we couldn’t get enough. We weren’t these super powered geek nerd reading machines, (well, we were but…) it’s just that before Star Wars, the world of SF was pretty small.
We couldn’t get enough.
Star Trek was moderately big, at seventy two episodes, three years, it had spawned it’s halo of novelizations, but before next generation there was over a decade of puttering about with a project at Paramount that never turned into a show. (Phase Two, it was called; bits and pieces of it end up in the Star Trek Movie and the TNG, Next generation.) But let’s face it, Star Trek is pretty cerebral. Most people… aren’t. The unbelievable appeal of genre materials wouldn’t be readily apparent until George Lucas was forbidden from remaking Flash Gordon, and so he ended up with something much, much better. Star Wars. Space fantasy, capturing the energy and spirit of the SF pulps of the 20s, 30s and 40s… in the late seventies…
Star Wars was always a kind of Happy Days of movie SF; it was always retro.
Picture Fonzie saying, “Aaaaaayyyyyyyy,” here if you want.
I remember reading after Star Wars, the ceiling was raised, and the bottom fell out. You could make a lot of money with an SF property, so there were many more of them, and you could lose your shirt. Of course, what drove us fans nuts was that so few projects were in any way connected to SF writing or the classics of the genre.
We were bludgeoned by pre-asimovian robots running amuck and giant insects we knew could never actually survive because of the square cube law and Martin Gardner’s wonderful essay ‘on the importance of being the right size.’
Anyway, fans of a certain age ended up reading at the very least representative hunks of stuff from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, as well as books being written in the now of the sixties and seventies. There wasn’t a huge split, into media related properties, movie tie ins and franchises, and Everything Else. There was just the everything else.
SF author culture of the 40s, 50s, sixties was supposedly oddly welcoming and supportive of new authors. The reasoning went, that most people made modest livings, writing SF, and that real fans bought or read it all, so it wasn’t a zero sum game; SF authors weren’t really competing for fans in a Darwinian show down. There was a cattiness and nastyness in Literature and Bestsellerdom, that SF lacked. Or so they said.
I came of age in the 80s, as the culture was wracked by Reagan and Just Say No, Morning in America, the end of the sexual revolution, the beginning of the great divide, the waves or privatization and income inequality that would radiate into cyberpunk and then become so ubiquitous that it wasn’t popular as fiction.
So, for me, that pre-sixties era was a golden dream, a dream of my father’s generation, or half a generation younger; this time of great SF camaraderie; of John W. Campbell at Astounding writing letters or critique back to Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov longer than the stories they’d submitted themselves.
At some point I bumped into the stories of The Futurians, a group of SF writers and editors who emerged from the fractious world of SF club culture to become a powerful force in SF publishing and writing. Yes. There was a SF club culture. Don’t laugh. Hey, think about the monstrous size of something like Comicon. Now stop laughing. That starts here.
While mostly men, there were women in these groups, and these women wrote and edited and dreamed and argued and smoked and slept with and married and divorced and remarried these men. Women were a vital part of it. Mary Shelly birthed the genre with her book Frankestein, and women were always there, always a driving force…
But C.L. Moore used the initials so that her gender wasn’t evident on a byline.
My Dad told me that Moore and her husband, Henry Kutner, whose life would be tragically cut short in the 40s by an abrupt heart attack, tag team wrote under pen names. It was anybodies guess really, who wrote what of the books they wrote together. To a lonely teenager, the idea of a writer wife you wrote with was the most romantic, attractive, and erotic thing imaginable. It haunted me for decades, even as I stopped being lonely.
While looking for more C.L. Moore to read a , beyond a few heavily anthologized classics, I spoke to Michael Morano, a Boston area horror novelist and reviewer, and he told me the story of her uncollected Grandmaster award.
“Her second husband’s family is ashamed of SF. It’s hard to find, her work is out of print but not public domain. Her husband said she was too far gone with Alzheimers to accept the award. So they didn’t give it to her,” Michael said to me.
And something in my heart broke.
So, big reveal, I’m a progressive and a feminist and supporter of GLBTQ rights, with GLBTQ family, but I’m also a pretty regular white-het-cis middle-aged guy, and my resonance with and emotional response to feminist and racial struggles varies. Intellectually, I’m always there, but emotionally, I know, some stories hit me in the gut, and some don’t.
But Catherine Moore I had read, and loved. Kuttner I had read, and loved. I had loved thinking of them writing together. I’d not known about the Grandmaster award. And suddenly the ghost of every unsung woman hero , every forgotten female pioneer, tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned, blinking, she punched me square in the face.
A character from a failed novel leapt in the time machine she was building to give C.L. Moore her award, an asperger-ish nerd girl from the year 2056, who I also love, even if her novel failed. But things with Autumn, that character, never run smoothly. She makes interesting mistakes. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t love her, and Moore, and feminism. But what began as a kind of progressive polemic ran headlong into the tricky business of character and unintended consequences and… well.
Read the story. It’s very short. Hopefully it does something for you.
A ton of names I know in this issue which I will start reading tomorrow. I’m Facebook friends with a half dozen or so of these folks. Adam-Troy Castro I’m familiar with in a few ways, as a reviewer at Fantastic and I’ve read an antho of his short stories. I did a signing with Jay Werkheiser a few years back at the Brooklyn Book Fair.
They left out my author’s bio… maybe I was late getting it to them? Oh well. Hopefully the next story will have one. Or maybe even get my name on the cover!
I can dream!
Grandmaster, the story here, is an odd little thing which leans on a deep knowledge of the history of SF, but it works to a degree even if you don’t have that background.
Anyway, I’m honored to be in the descendent of the late, great John W. Campbell’s Astounding; the magazine where Asimov’s robots and Foundation were founded, where Robert Heinlein’s Future History was laid down, where so many of the foundational texts of the genre were published.
This completes my print mag hat trick, Asimovs, Analog, and F&SF.
I’ve snuck into all three now without creating much of a splash, but damn. I got there. Twenty years late, maybe, but I’m not dead yet.
I have a friend who works at TOR, the world’s largest SF publisher, and I’ve done a few informal meetings with editors and my friend around what the hell I should be working on at novel length now that I have had my writer card punched by the SF magazine market. (See my bibliography.)
One of John Brunner’s Big Four Futures, a cycle of four big near future novels each set fifty years from the time of their creation.
(Googling “near future SF” and looking at that tag at Goodreads reveals a strange collection of titles, some not near future at all, but perhaps accessible to an audience that doesn’t think they like science fiction? The retro SF fantasy of YA novelist Marissa Meyer for example, who I enjoy…)
Brunner wrote four novels all set 50 years from when he was writing them, which subconsciously influenced my 2067 setting for a recent failed SF romance trilogy… (note to self: cyberpunk is over; near futures are not in vogue)
Limiting extrapolation to transformations not involving robust nano-tech and biohacking makes this ‘SF’ sort of retro-futurist or unnecessarily dense technothriller. Science fiction has moved on from cyberpunk, fracturing into biopunk, nanopunk, and steampunk sub-genres; science fantasy and urban fantasy, with plenty of old-school SF still being published inspired by half century old space opera franchises (the modern heirs of Asimov’s foundation and Star Trek and Star Wars, which handwave weakly at post humanism in order to tell stories where people still call most of the shots)
Why do I write in this increasingly unpopular genre?
Well, for one thing it avoids the mind-sucking unknowability of the Singularity and post-humanism. Another reason is that I’ve always been fascinated by gadgets and gizmos and tech and new culture coming down the pike that will unfold in our lifetimes. So my techno-fetishism acts as free research for generating this content.
In the 90s I hung out online, and a few times in person, with two groups, the Extropians and the Cypherpunks, ultra-right, libertarian software developers mostly, Ayn Randians. They had created this organized body of thought about tech and a future built around cryptography and the beloved ever-shrinking-government-small-enough-to-drown-in-a-bathtub. This Extropian thought experiment was conducted mostly in an email list from 1991 to 2006, when the list was closed.
In 2006, the board of directors of the Extropy Institute made a decision to close the organisation, stating that its mission was “essentially completed.”[7]
Extropian culture? You’re soaking in it!
One tech the extropians foresaw would eventually become known as blockchain or bitcoin. The consequences of anonymous interaction facilitated by the net are working themselves out now; from the flurry of fake news that helped elect Donald Trump, to the consequences widespread hacking of weak infrastructure, as in the leaked emails that helped elect Donald Trump, the cypherpunks and extropians explored the often horrific consequences of their coming stateless utopia with a kind of savage glee. They didn’t foresee social media exactly, but they saw a shit load of chaos coming down the internet pike.
As a lifelong progressive, I found the extrapolation challenging; oftentimes nauseating, truth be told. In many ways, as with Gibson, I was seeing the distorted echoes of the regressive era we’re now struggling through; a world of savage income quality and breakneck privatization. (Vast winner take-all-players dominating this world wasn’t part of the libertarian canon, of course, but Extropian’s generally shrugged at this, preferring corporate oligopoly to Big Statism.)
At this time, I began a cycle of stories I called BlackNet, based on the ideas of the list as filtered through my own progressive ambivalence. The term blacknet was part of extropian culture, and googling it reveals this little bit of science fiction world building…
BlackNet is nominally nondideological, but considers nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like to be relics of the pre-cyberspace era. Export and patent laws are often used to explicity project national power and imperialist, colonialist state fascism. BlackNet believes it is solely the responsibility of a secret
holder to keep that secret–not the responsibilty of the State, or of us,
or of anyone else who may come into possession of that secret. If a
secret’s worth having, it’s worth protecting.
Blacknet manifesto in a glorious monospaced font… back before graphic design dandified the net.
“Blacknet” based services in my cycle of stories were basically people accessing illegal content of various sorts; drugs, weapons, software, tools for 3d printing or fabricating drugs, weapons, etc. I wrote these stories in the 90s, leaving some of them unfinished, and reworked and published several of them in the last five years… the ideas are still mostly current; this stuff is still very much in play.
My Blacknet is now known as a Darknet market. As with any extrapolation, some of the Extropian thought has emerged as real tech (bitcoin, darknet) and some hasn’t caught on. (highly competitive low cost murder-for-hire services, for example.)
I’m still writing Blacknet stories, which are now really technothriller and not SF so much, and generally using the word to gesture at possible but not yet real uses of strong cryptography based products deployed via the net. I’m calling a site which distributes smart contract services to people www.deadmanswitch.com in a work-in-progress…
I need to complete the BlackNet story cycle. It segues into the Zeitgeist Stories, which are my post singularity stories.
Okay, this is a huge topic… sticking a pin it for now. Stay tuned.
So this is live now, and I have to say I really like the reading by Ralph Ambrose. The interview with Rob Boffard is interesting, it makes me want to check out his trilogy published by Orbit.
I’m really impressed by the whole team at Starship Sofa and I’m so glad to be in the archive with over a hundred other writers; legends from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and ah, teens, or whatever you call now, and people like Ken Liu and Ted Chiang and Nnedi Okorafor.
So it’s a huge honor, to be in this thing, and it’s so fun, to hear someone else interpret your story, and get it right. (With the exception of a single made up word that is super hard to pronounce. I forgive you, Ralph. Nanocalpyse isn’t exactly the same as nano-collapse, but I dig that you knew what I was talking about! It’s a neologism for the nano-tech apocalypse, which is the background for my Zeitgeist stories, a cycle of stories which take place in a post scarcity, post singularity world which will feel familiar to players of video games.) So Ralph says nano-collapse, twice, and the third time says nan-noc-cal-lips, that’s one thing, he’s talking about, the dawn of the Zeitgeist, the deal brokered for humanity by a dozen tech billionaires with the superintelligence(s) which emerge, abruptly, and remake the world…
So people, go check this out, and consider supporting Starship Sofa. They’re starting to pay authors (most of this content was donated; my story was) and the production values are good. They deserve support!
So I really really love this story, and was glad that it was available on-line for a month. Most of my stuff has been in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Interzone. For those that missed the story when it was on-line, the issue is for sale at amazon as print on demand here.
This magazine combines stories by newer writers with reprints from giants in the field, (and original stuff by giants, too). It’s edited by Mike Resnick, the most award winningest editor in the history of genre editing. I’m happy to be in here!
I tweeted something like “The Singularity! Sex! Fundamentalism!” because those things swirl around this story; it’s a profoundly weird little tale which came to life as I wrote it in a chilling way, the characters speaking very clearly in my head. I was barely able to steer this thing.
I dig the other stories in this issue as well, some by friends of mine. It’s really a great publication.
I’m getting some fan mail on my new novella in the June 2016 Asimov’s, which is awesome. The 38,000 word piece, “What We Hold Onto” is reaching a lot of people and giving them feels…
I’m trying to do my part, for Asimov’s and Sheila Williams and her team at Penny Press, to get the word out, and to urge people to leave reviews at Good Reads and Amazon and on their blogs and stuff if they want to keep reading issues with me on the cover.
Somehow though, the people who like the issue aren’t finding their way to Goodreads, so, if you’re there, please give the story a quick review. A few words and some stars would be nice.
Thanks!
Oh, the mailing list and the free story—
My Mailing List, Fictional Futures will be the occasional note about my new publications, deals on my ebooks and reprints, some indy original titles I’ll be publishing and well as reprints, and pointers to interviews and podcasts and stuff I’m doing that could be interesting.
You can always unsub if I’m too chatty. I promise not to be. I only do this stuff when I make my almost impossible to achieve word count goals.
But mostly, please join. I miss my time on FB, which I’ve cut back to a few minutes a day, and even though I’m enjoying the freed-up time writing, I need a sense of community to keep going.
Best wishes to all of you in your pursuits and endeavors. Thanks for listening to me talk about mine.
So my novella, “What We Hold Onto,” is out there. The 36 thousand word thing is maybe a three hour read, if you’re a deliberate reader, a two hour read if you read fast, and represents hundreds of hours of my time, and the work of a dozen beta-readers, workshoppers, and editors.
What’s it about?
I’m not qualified to say, as my subconscious and conscious mind coughed it up, but I think it’s about a near future based on trends we see today; things becoming digital, physical possessions feeling like impediments, boat-anchors, Marlie’s chain; how we value our skills and our relationships over our cars and houses, at least those of us lucky enough to still have professional identities.
It’s about how climate change, and the threat of an uncertain economic future, wipe away a lot of what has comforted us in the past.
It’s a hopeful vision of a world in turmoil and an artificial race of human beings who respond to that turmoil rationally–and irrationally, with love for their fellow person and narrow tribalism constantly at war. As always.
It’s also a manic pixie dream boy story with a menopausal female protagonist.
I have invented a new(ish) trope.
Even Maude in Harold and Maude, is a Manic-pixie dream girl. Nobody inverts this story.
I did.
Buy it. Read it. Please.
Review it. Share it. Talk to me about it.
Be honest. Be respectful. Be a friend. Show grandmotherly kindness, if necessary.
Read this issue of Asimov’s for FREE with a trial subscription to Asimov’s on the Kindle!
I received two fan notes yesterday on What We hold Onto, in this month’s Asimov’s. (the idea that I could have fans seems absurd to me but the word was used by one, so I’m running with it.)
One was from a man who loved the world-building; my half-destroyed world struggling to fix itself; my Nomad culture of people without physical possessions, technological affluent people who don’t do real estate, who keep all their property in a digital cloud. The Nomads, with their mission to heal the world, help displaced people, help humanity let go of the things in culture that no longer work.
The woman, who I made weep on Mother’s day, a fact for which I am both happy and sad, loved the way that the spec-fic existed in service of the human story, how it didn’t drown it out; it was about the people; their world, the gizmos, didn’t drown out their humanity.
This is as good as it gets.
Ok, picture me smiling, as well as I am able, as I say that. I’m not being ironic.
This is wonderful.
This is all I ever wanted to do. Now I just want to do it a lot more. And I would dearly love if more people felt the same and got something out of what I’m writing.
I think maybe they can. I think maybe I can do this now. I thought this twenty years ago, after my first sale to Charlie Ryan at Aboriginal SF, but I was wrong then. I hope I’m not wrong now.
OH! I wanted to urge people to write nice notes to the writers they read. Not to be morbid, but writers drop dead at any age. If you intend to say something good, something supportive, something decent, to someone who has made you feel something you appreciate, don’t put that off. Do it now. Do it when you think about it.
Oh. And, if you can, call your mother. I know mother’s day is over, but call her again.
We don’t know how long we get to be with each other in this world. Do not delay gratitude. Never postpone an act of love.
So, my novella “What We Hold Onto,” made it into the top five novella’s in 2016 in the Asimov’s Reader’s choice awards, which is wonderful, so the magazine has made it available for free download as a PDF. The reasons magazines do this is so the stories can be considered for awards by people who don’t subscribe; of course, on-line SF magazines like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed and Strange Horizons don’t have to go through this extra step; all their stuff is already readable on-line.
