“My Mask, Humanity” to Blast Off at Daily Science Fiction

Posted on March 22, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

Daily Science Fiction has bought my story “My Mask, Humanity.”  This is my second sale to them in the past year— “Still Life Through Water Droplets” was the other—and I’m excited to appear again in DSF. 

Since coming onto the market a couple of years of ago, DSF has built a large and loyal readership using an “alternative” publishing model.  Subscribers to DSF are emailed a story-a-day, Monday through Friday.  Most of the stories are short, something that can be read in a few minutes, with longer stories released on Fridays.  Each story is then published online for free reading a week later.  Subscriptions are free, which has left me wondering at times how DSF‘s business model actually works.

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IN SITU Release Delayed Again

Posted on March 20, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

Recently, fellow Hopefull Monster Colum Paget wondered if the IN SITU anthology was becoming the next Last Dangerous Visions.  I certainly hope not, but news I received last week isn’t encouraging.  This anthology was original due out in February 2011.  It got pushed to the summer 2011, then to late fall, then February 2012, and now its been delayed again.  The publisher,  Dagan Books, sent an email assuring me that the anthology will come out, with a new target release of March. 

IN SITU will have to come out soon, because the rights to my story “Hoodoo” revert back to me at the end of March, and I’m not certain how much longer I want the story tied up in publishing limbo.  I’ll have a difficult decision to make if the anthology doesn’t come out before the contract expires, and the publisher asks to re-up it for several more months.  Sales are hard to come by, so if there’s a reasonable chance IN SITU will come out, then I would leave it with Dagan Books—thier previous anthology was a beautifully produced and well-received volume, and I would be proud to have a story in a publication like that.  If it isn’t going to come out, then I want to put “Hoodoo” back into circulation and find it a home somewhere.  Hopefully it won’t come to that, and Dagan Books will get back on track.

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Past or Present: A Look at the Nebula Stories

Posted on March 18, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

A post I published a while ago about the use of present tense versus past in short fiction continues to attract readers.  I guess this shouldn’t surprise me because the use of the “non-traditional” present tense seems to elicit strong opinions from…well…just about everyone in the writing business: editors, agents, and writers.  Newer (younger?) writers seem more likely to embrace it while the “old guard” seems to dislike it (and some seem to absolutely despise it).

Having recently finished reading the stories in the short story and novelette categories for the Nebula Award, I thought I would briefly revisit the topic by examining the tense and point of view used in each nominated story to see if there is any pattern.  These fourteen stories were selected by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) as the “best” speculative fiction in 2011.  The SFWA is composed of over 3,000 speculative fiction writers who have meet minimum requirements in terms of professional rate sales, so they represent the “professional” authors working in the field.  That said, here’s what I found:

• “Fields of Gold (Rachel Swirsky)—3rd Person, Past
• “Ray of Light  (Brad R. Torgersen)—1st Person, Past
• “Sauerkraut Station (Ferrett Steinmetz)—3rd Person, Past
• “Six Months, Three Days (Charlie Jane Anders)—3rd Person, Present
• “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers (Katherine Sparrow)—3rd Person, Present
• “The Old Equations,” Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine)—1st Person, Present
• “What We Found (Geoff Ryman)—3rd Person, Present
• “Her Husband’s Hands (Adam-Troy Castro)—3rd Person, Past
• “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son, (Tom Crosshill)—1st Person, Present
• “Movement (Nancy Fulda)—1st Person, Present
• “Shipbirth (Aliette de Bodard)—3rd Person, Past
• “The Axiom of Choice (David W. Goldman)—2nd Person, Present
• “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees (E. Lily Yu)—3rd Person, Past
• “The Paper Menagerie (Ken Liu)—1st Person, Past

Half of the Nebula-nominated short fiction was written in present tense.  That seems to reinforce that present tense fiction is alive and well and (apparently) respected, at least among the speculative fiction community.  Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the writers to correlate the tense used with things like th average age, but that would be an interesting analysis.  I also don’t know if this proportion of stories using present tense is higher this year than last or the what the trend looks like over the past decade or more. Maybe I’ll look at that sometime. 

One final observation on these stories.  I’ve only seen a few stories written in the 2nd person point of view; they’ve all been by aspiring writers, and I can’t recall any of them being any good.  “The Axiom of Choice” is written in 2nd person.  It’s an interesting story and well done story—a take on the old choose-your-own-adventure stories.  I recommend you check it out if you want to see a successful 2nd person story.

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Musings, Revisited: Nebula-nominated Novelettes

Posted on March 15, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

I’ve finished the stories nominated for the Nebula Award in the novelette category.  Like the nominated short stories, the seven novelettes cover an incredible range of topics and settings, but I must admit I was a little disappoint with novelettes as a whole.  I thought they lacked emotional depth compared to the short stories.  I’m not suggesting these novelettes were uninteresting or inferior per se, they just didn’t hit me in the gut quite as hard.  Where the novelettes stories seemed to excel, however, was in their speculative ideas.

I’m still mulling where my Nebula vote is going to go, but I particularly liked Katherine Sparrow’s “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers.”  Ms. Sparrow’s story explored an interesting idea (the cost of species conservation), in an interesting way (genetic recombination within humans), with an unexpected but satisfying outcome.  What more could you ask for from speculative fiction?  For sheer cleverness, Charlie Jane Ander’s “Six Months, Three Days” was a fun read, but the ending felt flat to me, which was a disappointment after a such a good ride.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you check out these seven novelettes.  Links to them can be found here—except for Brad Torgerson’s “Ray of Light,” which doesn’t seem to be available in its entirety online.  If you do read any of these, I’d be interested in your thoughts on them.

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Inspiration: “The Sea Shall Have Them”

Posted on March 13, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

Liquid Imagination published “The Sea Shall Have Them” in their February 2012 issue.  I wrote the original version of this story in the early 1990s after reading an article on the first “Burning Man” gathering in the Nevada Desert (before it became overtly commercialized).  I was intrigued by the gathering as a back drop for a man on a personal journey of self-discovery, and I was also intrigued by the idea of contrasting fire with water and the desert with the ocean.

“The Sea Shall Have Them” went through several early iterations, each draft becoming darker.  The Burning Man idea fell out and the theme of nautical disasters naturally took shape as a central metaphor in the main character’s life.  I finished the original version of the story, a standard first person narrative, and titled it “Nautical Disaster.”  It promptly got it rejected from a few markets, and, losing faith in it, I trunked it.

I rediscovered the story last summer, and realized that it had good things in it, but it also had a serious flaw—the first person narration simply didn’t work.  I’d been wanting to write a story in an “experimental” style for some time, and I realized that this story would be strengthened by an unconventional narrative structure, so that’s what I did.  Instead of telling the story through a first person narrative, I decided to tell the story through a mixture of standard third-person narration, flashbacks, transcripts, and news releases.  The story itself is essentially the same as the one I wrote almost twenty year ago, but the manner in which it’s told is very different and I hope much more effective.  (Perhaps de Kooning was right: ideas are created much the same and it’s mostly about the craft.)

So head over to Liquid Imagination and check out “The Sea Shall Have Them.”  While there, be sure to check out the other stories in the issue.

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Musings on the Nebula-nominate Short Stories

Posted on March 10, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

I’ve finished the seven short stories nominated for the Nebula Award (you can find links to all of them here).  All of these stories are well-written and interesting, and they cover an impressive range of topics, styles, and emotional impact.  I was particularly impressed by the diversity of settings and influences in these nominees: four are distinctly non-western in their characters and/or settings.

While I’ve not made any final decision as to which one will get my Nebula vote just yet, I particularly liked Adam-Troy Castro’s “Her Husband’s Hands” published in Lightspeed Magazine.  Mr. Castro has a talent for using speculative elements to dig into the emotional core of his characters (this story is no exception), and I found this one to be haunting and a little disturbing, which I believe are good qualities.  Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” did something similar, using a fantasy trope.  I also liked how Nancy Fulda handled autism in “Movement.”  This one struck a personal chord for me, because I have a sibling with autism, and Ms. Fulda handled her protagonist’s condition with grace.

If you haven’t read these stories yet, you’re missing out some interesting fiction and fine examples of what speculative can be.  Due to their diversity, I suspect not all of them will appeal to you, but all are worthy of your time.

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The Blurry Edges of Science Fiction

Posted on March 7, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

I recently read “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu at Clarkesworld Magazine.  It’s been nominated for a Nebula Award and is a well-written allegory.  In the comments section for the story, someone questioned whether it was science fiction or not, to which the author responded that the story had been inspired by a research article on the heredity of anarchism in bees and was, therefore, hard science fiction.  That got me wondering (again) about what people consider science fiction.  Is the source of inspiration alone enough to make a story science fiction, and in this case hard science fiction?

I view science fiction as stories that use scientific theory—including extrapolations thereof—to support or explain their speculative elements.  This is certainly a definition with very blurry edges.  How far can you extrapolate away from current scientific thought before a story is not science fiction and become what some people call science fantasy or even fantasy?  Arthur C. Clarke noted that advanced technology would look like magic to a primitive (relatively speaking, that is) individual.  Magic is generally considered the realm of fantasy.

I would have considered Ms. Yu’s story a fantasy—anthropomorphized animals, even if they are insects, fall under fantasy for me.  (Yet oddly, if the wasps and bees had been alien races, I might not have felt the same way, further showing how subjective these lines can be!)  While the heredity of anarchism in the bees appears in the story, I didn’t feel it was the central or even a critical element.  The heredity aspect could have been entirely left out and had little effect on the outcome.  I thought the story was more a political allegory, in the tradition of Orwell’s Animal Farm, than an exploration of the genetics of anarchism.  Perhaps it’s best to simply call this one speculative fiction.

Now all this doesn’t mean I disliked the Ms. Yu’s story.  Quite the contrary; I enjoyed it a great deal.  I think it’s worthy of its Nebula nomination; it’s beautifully constructed and written.  If you haven’t read Ms. Yu’s story, I recommend you check it out.

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Inspiration: “Requiem for Shiva”

Posted on March 5, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

“Requiem for Shiva” was the first short story I wrote as an “adult,” and, as such, I can’t remember specifically what inspired it, but it’s had an interesting history.  Although I can’t say what inspired it, I can say what did not: the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.  While “Requiem for Shiva” contains a terrorist-style attack as an important plot element, I wrote the original version of this story ten years before the twin towers were destroyed.

Originally written in 1991 (with the title “Ashes to Ashes”), “Requiem for Shiva” sat in the “trunk” for nearly twenty years before I rediscovered it in 2009.  I dusted it off, stripped it to is core, and did a significant re-write to clean up several fatal flaws and strengthen Thomas Endahl’s conflict and redemption.  For Endahl’s emotional core, I drew from my personal experiences, and I honed the setting from a year I lived in Jamaica.

I submitted it to the Writers of the Future contest, and it was named a finalist.  Unfortunately it did not place in the top three and was not published.  It went on to collect numerous personal rejections from many of the pro-rate publications, most of which had nice things to say about it, but few that actually told me why they rejected it (I suspect it had to do with some controversial material about religion and terrorism, and possibly the story’s violence, but who can say?).  I nearly lost faith in the story and returned it to the trunk, but I persevered, and I am glad I did.  It eventually found a good home in The Future Fire, a magazine for socio-political speculative fiction.

This is one of those stories that I did not have the world experience to write in 1991.  Nearly twenty years later, I did, and I believe it is one of my strongest stories in terms of its emotional foundation.  Thomas Endahl’s struggle resonates for me on many levels.  It’s a story that is dear to me for many reasons, and I hope you enjoy it.  If you haven’t read it yet, “Requiem for Shiva” is available in the February 2012 issue of The Future Fire.

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Two Days in the Clouds

Posted on March 3, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

Last week, the staff at my day job took a two-day retreat from the ocean and went up into the mountains to do some volunteer service at one of my organization’s terrestrial nature reserves on Hawaii Island.  We spent time retrofitting a mile of pig fence to make it safer for endangered bats—it seems the barbed wire on the top of the fence can catch a bat’s wings as it flies along the fence line, so we replaced the barbed wire with smooth wire.

I’ve never done fencing before, so it was interesting to see how it was done.  We had it easy because the hard work is cutting a fence line for a new fence.  We were retrofitting, so all we had to do was cut off the barbed wire and clip new smooth wire in its place.  Pretty easy work, but it takes time and patience.  We retrofitted about a mile of six-foot pig fence that traversed native cloud forest.

It wasn’t all work, however.  We had a chance to hike through some wet ohia and koa forest.  For the non-islanders, these are native Hawaiian trees, and koa in particular is commercially important because it’s wood is incredibly beautiful (Google it to take a look).  Both koa and ohia are ecologically important in native Hawaiian forest.  While hiking, we saw the world’s oldest koa tree, estimated by the reserve staff to be around 500 years old.  That’s a big tree—those tiny people around its base are me and the crew! 

I find it amazing that this tree was a seedling in 1512.  It’s hard to imagine how different Hawaii—not to mention the entire world—was at that time.  Here’s hoping this incredible tree sees a few more centuries.

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A Little Shameless Promotion

Posted on March 2, 2012 by D. Thomas Minton

Fellow Hopefull Monster, Colum Paget’s story “Love in a time of Bio-mal” is now available for free reading at Electric Spec.  If you like slick, dark cyberpunk, you won’t be disappointed with this story or with most of Colum’s writing.  So head over and check it out.

 

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