tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31546287904254023692024-03-05T05:21:41.351-05:00Silverthought Pressan independent publisher of fine speculative fictionPaul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-4978059024427869862014-11-01T00:44:00.002-04:002014-11-01T00:45:25.775-04:0031 October 2014 Silverthought Online update<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The October 31, 2014 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction from John Brown Spiers, Javier Cabrera, Jill Corddry, Robert Earle, Iain Ishbel, J. M. Strasser, and David Wright, and an excerpt from Counselor, the forthcoming novel by Victor Giannini that Silverthought will be publishing in limited hardcover, paperback, and digital editions in early 2015. These are some remarkable pieces of writing and it is my pleasure and honor to present them to you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is in many ways difficult to write this summary of the update because so much has changed since our last. The Silverthought community recently lost a cherished friend in Lawrence Santoro, who came to us as a participant in the moonshot <em>A Dark and Deadly Valley</em> anthology and stuck around to publish the stunning collection of short horror<em>Drink for the Thirst to Come</em>. His warmth, kindness, and raw talent, his willingness to take a chance with a nobody like me with a project of that magnitude, his polite decline of the shitty cover I mocked up for <em>Drink</em>, his Christmas cards and being "chuffed", his <em>Just North of Nowhere</em>--one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read a few--and that voice, that voice. I wanted to include a tribute, a short story of his, a link to a podcast, an anecdote, a something, but nothing can summarize. What I can do is give you <em>Drink for the Thirst to Come</em> for free this weekend, available in a Kindle edition on Amazon right now, all yours if you want it. People like us don't just leave books, we leave the stories of how those books came to be, and it is my honor to have had the opportunity to work with Larry Santoro and count him among my friends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In putting together this update there was a sense of finality in it, in that I know Mark has academic obligations that severely reduce the amount of time he can devote to Silverthought, and with my family adding a third child next spring in addition to the exhausting flux of academia, I know that I won't be able to devote my full attention to this endeavor. We will be closing submissions to our online division for the time being, just as we stopped accepting print submissions earlier this year. But digging through the slush pile, reading the work entrusted to us, reaching out to writers, that is one of the hearts of me, and I know I'll return to it. So think of the coming changes not as an end but as a pause--Silverthought still has several books ready to publish next year, and 2015 is the twentieth anniversary of the completion of my first novel. Although for a time we're not going to accept unsolicited writing, we'll be working behind the scenes to make this site better and follow the mission we laid out in 2001: to provide readers the finest intellectual, experimental, and speculative fiction we can.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thanks for reading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">—Paul</span></div>
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Paul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-87365302250778339072014-01-15T16:01:00.000-05:002014-01-15T16:01:59.828-05:00How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 3): Justin Cronin's The Passage<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Z9Utyjl_6mBL_LHcFm84vSa0aQkFjZYbR7iAcH-zKEsUj7zpdaP0i7Pg1JZrfklsmjptcRot89Fj4FaBHtXctNQklHON0BPlplfKe-p8gaDX9QqcZ01bZnAzl9ZHWAwtwIUIOlMIi-U/s1600/Just_Cronin_The_Passage_book_cover_book_THIS.263w_350h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Z9Utyjl_6mBL_LHcFm84vSa0aQkFjZYbR7iAcH-zKEsUj7zpdaP0i7Pg1JZrfklsmjptcRot89Fj4FaBHtXctNQklHON0BPlplfKe-p8gaDX9QqcZ01bZnAzl9ZHWAwtwIUIOlMIi-U/s320/Just_Cronin_The_Passage_book_cover_book_THIS.263w_350h.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><i>How to Write Dystopian Fiction is a ten-part series written by Silverthought Press editor Mark R. Brand during a two-month independent study with Miles Harvey, Assistant Professor of English, DePaul University. The series attempts to analyze what works in a variety of new and old speculative fiction texts with utopias and dystopias as central themes, and to offer advice to writers about how to use these narrative strategies most effectively. This is part three.</i></div>
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<b>The book:</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2"> I wanted to like </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2">, I really did, but it’s a mess, and I’m just going to say that right up front before I plunge ahead. Recommendations and their inevitable subjectivity aside, I found myself wishing I hadn’t read online that Justin Cronin was paid $3</span><span class="s2">.5</span><span class="s2"> million for this book and another $1.75 million for the rights to the movie </span><span class="s2">before the book was even completed</span><span class="s2">.</span><span class="s2"> I’m not, as a rule, against popular fiction authors getting paid exorbitant amounts of money for their work. Mario Puzo’s work, right off the top of my head, was</span><span class="s2"> intellectually</span><span class="s2"> deserving of both the praise and money it garnered him. But there is a world of difference between Puzo and Cronin and it starts with originality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Clichés</span><span class="s2"> abound in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2">, and some of them are real groaners that Cronin (and his editors) should have known better</span><span class="s2"> than to let pass</span><span class="s2">. </span><span class="s2">One character is writing a book and the book goes on about writing books and </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">it’s a metabook, isn’t that clever?</span><span class="s2"> Yawn. Several characters experience agonizingly long dream sequences during which </span><span class="s2">nothing with a clear relationship to the plot</span><span class="s2"> actually happens</span><span class="s2">,</span><span class="s2"> despite dreaming and sleep being central </span><span class="s2">themes of the book</span><span class="s2">. Cronin describes these dreams in mind-numbing detail as he does the actions of every person and object in the book, down to the smallest “and then he dipped the rag into the water and placed it gently against his own skin”. These sorts of sentences </span><span class="s2">belabor inconsequential moments, and </span><span class="s2">serve</span><span class="s2"> to drag out</span><span class="s2"> the transitions between meaningful scenes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">The plot itself, regrettably, is a patchwork of genre clichés as well.</span><span class="s2"> A young girl named Amy finds herself pulled into a government-sponsored human-weapon program (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Soldier, The Manchurian Candidate, Hanna</span><span class="s2">) based on </span><span class="s2">Ebola/Hanta-like virology (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Contagion, The Hot Zone, 12 Monkeys</span><span class="s2">). Wolgast, one of the two black-ops federal agents who pursues her comes over to her side and helps her escape from the program and his own partner (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Mr. Murder</span><span class="s2">).</span><span class="s2"> Unfortunately, this getaway involves the virus escaping its containment and bringing about the end of the world as we know it (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Stand, 28 Days Later</span><span class="s2">).</span><span class="s2"> Amy and Wolgast f</span><span class="s2">lee into rural America to hide and wait out the apocalypse (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Earth Abides</span><span class="s2">) and Wolgast slowly dies of radiation poisoning when a last-ditch effort to nuke the “virals” irradiates them (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">On the Beach</span><span class="s2">).</span><span class="s2"></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">The book resumes nearly a hundred years later in a walled post-apocalyptic city (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Road Warrior, Day of the Dead</span><span class="s2">) inhabited by tough Mad Max-like survivalist types who keep their children segregated and communally raised until the age of eight, at which time they are brought forth into a caste system to determine their </span><span class="s2">vocations (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Brave New World</span><span class="s2">) in the Last City. Their stronghold </span><span class="s2">persists under an umbrella of massive floodlights at </span><span class="s2">night to keep the vitals </span><span class="s2">away (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">P</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">itch Black, Gears of War</span><span class="s2">). The </span><span class="s2">vir</span><span class="s2">als</span><span class="s2"> are creatures that act like zombies but move </span><span class="s2">terrifyingly </span><span class="s2">fast and drink blood like vampires (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">I Am Legend, 28 Days Later</span><span class="s2">). </span><span class="s2">The Last C</span><span class="s2">ity’s inhabitants are led by a council of “household”</span><span class="s2">(</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2">!)</span><span class="s2"> elders, including an elderly clairvoyant black woman (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Stand, The Matrix</span><span class="s2">). </span><span class="s2">Amy, still a little girl, is found unarmed and alone and hiding from the monsters (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Aliens</span><span class="s2">)</span><span class="s2">, having not aged because she is—surprise—now herself a </span><span class="s2">day-walking half-vampire</span><span class="s2"> (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Blade, Let the Right One In</span><span class="s2">)</span><span class="s2">, who despite her childlike appearance </span><span class="s2">is quasi-immortal (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Highlander, Interview with the Vampire</span><span class="s2">) </span><span class="s2">and </span><span class="s2">has a number of strange telepathy-like powers (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Shining, Carrie, Firestarter</span><span class="s2">, and basically every plucky young child chara</span><span class="s2">cter Stephen King ever wrote); p</span><span class="s2">owers that she herself somehow doesn’t understand despite having had a hundred years to get used to them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">The virals overrun the Last City through infesting the dreams of weak-minded victims (</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span><span class="s2">) and the survivors are forced to make a run for it that includes a journey into the la</span><span class="s2">ir of Babcock, the immortal evil antagonist</span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s2">(</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">It</span><span class="s2">) whose influence precipitated the viral outbreak that ended the world in the first place.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">In theory, it looks like what every </span><span class="s2">sixteen-year-old </span><span class="s2">boy on earth would love to read. “Hey dude, check it out, it’s the awesome-est parts of every good 20</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">th</span><span class="s2"> century piece of sci-fi, plus pretty much a full rehash of Stephen King’s early career! Sign me up!” </span><span class="s2">Had I been sixteen when I read it, I would have probably even made the argument that it IS good in this respect. </span><span class="s2">Sadly, </span><span class="s2">as an older and more mature reader, I find that when writers</span><span class="s2"> jam</span><span class="s2"> together enough of these tropes, they start to feel less like their </span><span class="s2">inspirational ancestors</span><span class="s2"> a</span><span class="s2">nd more like a warmed-over</span><span class="s2">,</span><span class="s2"> derivative mishmash </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">a la</span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Waterworld</span><span class="s2"> or </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Serenity</span><span class="s2">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Most telling, however, is how poorly edited the novel is.</span><span class="s2"> Forget for a moment the dozens of plot ho</span><span class="s2">les, the continuity errors (my favorite, which stood out like a sore thumb, was</span><span class="s2"> a 27-year-old as a full orthopedic surgeon)</span><span class="s2">, and the utter predictability of it all; </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2"> is agonizingly, brutally, </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">indulgently</span><span class="s2"> long. You might think that a book so </span><span class="s2">wholly committed</span><span class="s2"> to </span><span class="s2">Cronin’s</span><span class="s2"> plodding, flat, Anglo-Saxon single-syllable vocabulary would at least manage to be sufficiently descriptive. You’d be </span><span class="s2">wrong. Dozens of characters exist</span><span class="s2"> only </span><span class="s2">as </span><span class="s2">a n</span><span class="s2">ame, while Cronin describes the young women in embarrassingly fine detail. What’s worse; in the middle of the novel the women cease to be of the int</span><span class="s2">elligent, Katniss Everdeen variety</span><span class="s2">, and become a subspecies characterized by the bizarre combination of preoccupation with pregnancy </span><span class="s2">and safety, while at the same time wielding crossbows and knives and swinging (literally, I’m afraid) into the middle of the action like Jane of the Jungle to rescue their post-apocalyptic Comic Book Nerd Tarzans.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Cronin’s editors seemed content to let him ramble on when they should have been hacking and slashing this down to the 450 page size that it deserved. </span><span class="s2">It’s painfully clear why they did it: they wanted the novel to feel outsized and huge, and it does, to some extent. But s</span><span class="s2">omewhere along the line</span><span class="s2"> Cronin and his editors lost sight of what makes other mammoth epic novels (I’m thinking of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Stand</span><span class="s2"> here</span><span class="s2"> since the first third of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2"> was so clearly an homage to it</span><span class="s2">, but also of a few others like James Clavell’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Shogun</span><span class="s2">) as great as they are; the profluence </span><span class="s2">of their plots is hidden in vast stretches of originality</span><span class="s2">,</span><span class="s2">peppered with a few signposts like romantic relationships or reversals of fortune to keep the reader comfortable. Cronin’s book features a number of these, but they become drowned in the endless transitional segments between plot shifts. </span><span class="s2">Relationships that don’t feel genuine for a moment (with the single exception of Amy’s relationship with her mother, over before the book even really begins) take up huge</span><span class="s2">, undeserved</span><span class="s2"> chunks of t</span><span class="s2">he book</span><span class="s2">, while more interesting relationships, such as the father-daughter bond between Alicia and the Colonel are passed over</span><span class="s2">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">The walled city trope is such an exciting one that I was surprised to discover how lifeless and low-stakes it felt here.</span><span class="s2"> There was a wonderful section of the book, no more than twenty or thirty pages out of 900, that talked about a couple of the main characters taking a terrifying f</span><span class="s2">light East across a collapsing N</span><span class="s2">orth America via train that was under constant</span><span class="s2"> lethal attack from virals</span><span class="s2">. </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Awesome!</span><span class="s2"> I thought. </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Now we’re cooking!</span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s2">But then, three</span><span class="s2"> hundred pages of dull, uninspired prose later, I decided that </span><span class="s2">seeing how well Cronin </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">could</span><span class="s2"> write if he wanted to only made me enjoy the book less.</span><span class="s2"></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Interestingly, I detected some hints of More’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia </span><span class="s2">here. The leaders of the Last City are called “households”, as the Utopian enclave heads are referred to, and </span><span class="s2">Cronin (like Huxley before him) attempts to provide a rationale for why a cloistered and sheltered community would and should accept a </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">de facto</span><span class="s2"> caste system of labor. It feels as thin as ever in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2">, sadly, but that is perhaps less Cronin’s fault than it is simply a difficult trope to sell in general.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">I read quite a bit about this book and its author, and some reviews of it (a surprising amount of which was absolutely glowing), and one thing that came up again and again was true: Cronin </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">did</span><span class="s2"> manage to more or less completely destroy the world that he spent the first third of the novel fleshing out.</span><span class="s2"> Not even Stephen King, in the throes of the Captain Trips outbreak of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Stand</span><span class="s2">—a book which </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2"> is so clearly a spiritual </span><span class="s2">homage</span><span class="s2"> to—quite managed to do this. In that sense, this book resembles somewhat more closely Neville Shute’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">On the Beach</span><span class="s2"> or Cormack McCarthy’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Road</span><span class="s2">, the fingerprints of which are likewise all over the plot of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Passage</span><span class="s2">. But Cronin went a bit beyond these even, to paint a secondary world, the world of the Last City</span><span class="s2"> (sometimes just simply called “the camp” or “the colony”)</span><span class="s2">, where it’s almost as if the city’s residents are on a different planet altogether, with different rules and logic that’s tied only tenuously to a world we recognize from the 20</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">th</span><span class="s2"> and 21</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">st</span><span class="s2"> centuries. The connecting threads from the first third of the b</span><span class="s2">ook to the second are palpable, and</span><span class="s2"> Cronin did manage to convincingly end the world, even if only to </span><span class="s2">subsequently bore us to death with </span><span class="s2">uninspiringly-executed </span><span class="s2">warmed-over tropes from </span><span class="s2">what felt like </span><span class="s2">every sci-fi</span><span class="s2">/horror/fantasy book and</span><span class="s2"> movie ever</span><span class="s2"> made</span><span class="s2">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2"><b>What have we learned:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;">There are two ways to look at <i>The Passage</i>. If you want to make a truckload of money, by all means just rehash the coolest sci-fi you've read and make sure you cover all the bases; nubile young girls, vampires, Mad Max, nuclear explosions, telepathy, dreams, all of it. Stir until shaken and call your agent. If you want to write a worthy book, however, one that will be more than a minor blip on the cultural radar and forgotten as soon as Michael Bay or Joss Wheadon directs the terrible adaptation, the list is different: n</span><span class="s2">ever write about writing books, never write about dreams, never write about the mundane bodily functions and day-to-day unremarkable entertainment of your characters, never re-write scenes from famous movies and insert them whole into your novel, never characterize only the young, nubile female characters and ignore adequately characterizing everyone else (</span><span class="s2">sheesh Cronin, come on </span><span class="s2">dude)</span><span class="s2">, never write </span><span class="s2">filler </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=25813004" name="_GoBack"></a><span class="s2">scenes just to extend the page-distance in the novel from one major plot point to another, never mistake an abiding love for genre tropes for genuine originality, and for God’s sake </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">never invent your own card game, fail to explain the rules to the reader, </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">and then write a five page long scene of characters who have no characteristics beyond their own names playing this game.</span></span></div>
Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-37979026602996928702013-09-16T11:57:00.000-04:002013-09-16T12:16:40.632-04:00How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 2): Lois Lowry's The Giver and Gathering Blue<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"><i>How to Write Dystopian Fiction is a ten-part series written by Silverthought Press editor Mark R. Brand during a two-month independent study with Miles Harvey, Assistant Professor of English, DePaul University. The series attempts to analyze what works in a variety of new and old speculative fiction texts with utopias and dystopias as central themes, and to offer advice to writers about how to use these narrative strategies most effectively. This is part two.</i></span></span><br />
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<b style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The book:</b></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2">One review o</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3154628790425402369" name="_GoBack"></a><span class="s2">n the back of the dust jacket of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver </span><span class="s2">describes the book as “tightly-plotted”. I’d call it instead “ti</span><span class="s2">ghtly-trope-ed.” </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2"> doesn’t surrender to plot tropes as much as it revels in them, but it’s clear that Lowry’s book doesn’t </span><span class="s2">hold up on the strength of its characters</span><span class="s2">. </span><span class="s2">Instead, it jumps from one lon</span><span class="s2">g-established trope to another, like so:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Once upon a time</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;"> we’re in a creepily calm dystopia where everyone’s afr</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">aid of breaking rules that are very different than our own, and something happens that gets our attention because it breaks those very rules. And then something happens where the rigid black-and-white thinking prevalent in our dystopian community is challenged by a necessarily gray-area concept or plot developme</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">nt. Then the protagonist, observes this gray area</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;"></span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">and starts</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;"> to feel anxious about all of these rules despite having lived under them his whole life (groan)</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">. He then</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">discovers that there’s something (gasp!) different about him! Then the quasi-superhuman protagonist (who is of course also necessarily vulnerable to the </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">crushing, unfair and now increasingly obvious dystopian regime) is sent to learn more about himself from a wise old sage. The wise old sage was once just like the protagonist, but some past failure has broken his spirit, and he must be made whole by the </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">confession</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;"> of this secret. A betrayal happens from a character we least expect, the protagonist decides to take drastic action and a spirited flight/chase/fight-for-survival ensues. The end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Lowry’s construction, the tropes I mentioned above and their interplay, was all quite obvious on the page, but it nevertheless managed to be a highly enjoyable and gripping read. </span><span class="s2">It tapped a bit into the simplistic manipulation of the rules of reality </span><span class="s2">and </span><span class="s2">paired </span><span class="s2">that </span><span class="s2">with consi</span><span class="s2">dered</span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s2">(if somewhat thinly-sketched)</span><span class="s2"> characters. I remember more or less the same feeling from other </span><span class="s2">simple </span><span class="s2">but engaging </span><span class="s2">books like Ayn Rand’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Anthem</span><span class="s2">, Jacqualine Harpman’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">I Who Have Never Known Men</span><span class="s2"> and Susan Collins’ </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Hunger Games</span><span class="s2">. By </span><span class="s2">“</span><span class="s2">simple</span><span class="s2">”</span><span class="s2">, I mean that the cast</span><span class="s2">s</span><span class="s2"> of </span><span class="s2">these novels are small, intimate, and they inhabit only a small part of the greater world in which they exist. In that way, they are perhaps more like novella</span><span class="s2">s or short stories than novels.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">The smallness of them is carefully calculated, I think, and necessary. Who, after all, </span><span class="s2">could read the description of a newborn being given a lethal injection in its forehead and not be utterly horrified? Lowry pulls no punches here with her language, and so much so that I expect there may even be an undertone of anti-abortion political agenda at play in this book.</span><span class="s2"> But consider that this horror only works because the borders of the community in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2"> are finite. The population of the community numbers in the low thousands at most (only fifty new births per year for population replacement)</span><span class="s2">, and so the death of a child becomes a thing of outsized, isolated horror the way it would be if this were the child of a post-apocalyptic story in a community trying desperately to repopulate a dying species. In a healthy, fully-realized fictive world, such behavior would be barbaric, but here it seems somehow worse</span><span class="s2">; more deeply</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">evil</span><span class="s2">, perhaps, which is where I got the impression that Lowry might be trying to say something more concrete about her own personal politics.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">A number of small flaws dogged the book (as they do any book, even good ones) such as the emphasis put on Elsewhere. Elsewhere becomes a sort of standard Shangri-La/Promised Land construct in the minds of the characters, but</span><span class="s2"> it lacks definition or description on the page, and indeed the borders of these utopian communities are also ill-described. The effect is one that shrewder novels such as Margaret Atwood’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Oryx and Crake</span><span class="s2"> avoid: the concept of Elsewhere exists solely for its profluence and not for any other reason. In </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2"> this oversight doesn’t fatally damage the reader’s suspension of disbelief, but it d</span><span class="s2">oes erode the vividness and give the impression that Lowry was unselfconsciously aiming for a timeless, enduring </span><span class="s2">Big Meaningful Point </span><span class="s2">book.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Other flaw</span><span class="s2">s include the lack of </span><span class="s2">potent </span><span class="s2">auth</span><span class="s2">ority figures in the community (</span><span class="s2">which</span><span class="s2"> is</span><span class="s2"> a clever</span><span class="s2"> but </span><span class="s2">plausibility-damaging </span><span class="s2">workaround of an overly-flogg</span><span class="s2">ed trope) and the minimalizing of technology in the story. Authority and technology are at the heart of every utopian/dystopian idea, and when they are </span><span class="s2">ignored or glossed-over, that choice somewhat colors the entire story.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sYX_f4BpL3bSt301UaGluz5lw-7IHbihHfiKD0rFNC3ZFGMeWevQNUvOcjMuFmCj3bArWkG-IxO-pD3dgtuk-Aw7i_TmggfY0Dr4za9fYQE5s6exTKbWT90N-cjAb9x-w96ue7BIfp0/s1600/Lowry_gathering_blue_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sYX_f4BpL3bSt301UaGluz5lw-7IHbihHfiKD0rFNC3ZFGMeWevQNUvOcjMuFmCj3bArWkG-IxO-pD3dgtuk-Aw7i_TmggfY0Dr4za9fYQE5s6exTKbWT90N-cjAb9x-w96ue7BIfp0/s1600/Lowry_gathering_blue_cover.jpg" /></a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">After reading </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2">, I went ahead and read the sequel as well, 2000’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Gathering Blue</span><span class="s2">. Many of the same strengths and flaws were present in both books: the story’s characters were tightly tied to the action on the page with digressions and background kept to a minimum</span><span class="s2">. The main character was literally (instead of symbolically) orphaned within the first ten pages, and like Jonas from </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2">, </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Gathering Blue’s</span><span class="s2"> Kira seems very emotionally isolated from anything like a traditional family structure. Kira’s mother Katrina doesn’t betray her in quite the same way that Jonas’s father does, but it’s clear that Lowry’s dystopian vision for the future depends on characters who are emotionally disconnected from their immediate social circles</span><span class="s2">, and especially their families</span><span class="s2">.</span><span class="s2"><br /></span><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s2">And herein lies a flaw I’m not willing to overlook: Jonas is becoming a man, but Lowry dances frustratingly around this fact instead of tackling it head-on. She mentions </span><span class="s2">an erotic dream that he has early in the story, then goes into some detail about the pills he must take to quell his emerging sexuality. He is put into close proximity with a female member of the community whom he likes, and then he is given access to thousands of forbidden books full of every conceivable </span><span class="s2">sort of knowledge. Like Adam in</span><span class="s2"> the garden of Eden, he finally takes ownership of the knowledge of good and evil and (instead of ingesting an apple) he </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">stops</span><span class="s2"> ingesting the “stirrings” pills.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Where does Lowry take all of this? Nowhere. </span><span class="s2">Instead, Gabriel (another aspect of the story that exists purely for plot profluence and not because his presence has self-propelled importance) is threatened and Jonas decides to flee the community, his family, his newfound job of utmost importance, AND his new symbolic father, the Giver. This is an exciting development, and one which, again, is tightly trope-ed, but it makes little sense from a narrative perspective.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Is this really the best Lowry could do to tackle the subject of sexuality? Jonas running away from everything with a baby? All plausibility aside, the message she is sending to her reader with this plot choice is </span><span class="s2">completely disjointed. The equation that </span><span class="s2">t</span><span class="s2">he plot satisfies contains no co-efficient of sexual</span><span class="s2">ity. It’s like saying</span><span class="s2">X+Y+Z=maturity/fatherhood</span><span class="s2"> w</span><span class="s2">here X</span><span class="s2"> equals a newfound skill (echoes of adolescence</span><span class="s2">) and Y</span><span class="s2"> equals burge</span><span class="s2">oning sexuality. Where’s Z</span><span class="s2">, Lowry? Where’s the catalyst? It just isn’t there in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">The Giver</span><span class="s2">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2"><b>What have we learned:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2"> Embrace simpler wording wh</span><span class="s2">en world-building if possible. D</span><span class="s2">on’t isolate p</span><span class="s2">rotagonists from their families unless absolutely necessary. “Special” character traits like the ability to disregard mundane </span><span class="s2">limits</span><span class="s2"> like </span><span class="s2">customs, laws, chores, and habits</span><span class="s2"> with impunity are more exciting and compelling than true superhuman abilities. T</span><span class="s2">ake care to avoid repeating the same narrative patterns </span><span class="s2">(and therefore flaws) </span><span class="s2">from story to story</span><span class="s2">.</span></span></div>
Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-10991537962127463582013-08-31T09:04:00.003-04:002013-08-31T09:04:55.546-04:0031 August 2013 Silverthought Online update<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The thing you're really going to hate me for, after reading how good the stories in this update are, is the fact that I accepted the earliest of these about a year ago. It's been a very, very busy year at the Chicago desk of Silverthought, but here they are in all their sci-fi glory. We're very pleased to bring you new stories by Marcus Day, Brenda Kezar, Steven L. Peck, and Blake Ervin. If the July update was all about social science fiction, this one is all about fear: a vicious time-stopping cyborg is caught in a trap and will kill anyone and anything to get away, a space cruiser to Mars finds itself the subject of an unpleasant infestation, a meteorite brings terrifying visitors to your hometown, and the new store across the street knows what you need, and what you'll do to get it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Some new exciting things are happening at Silverthought as we move toward the Fall: our intern Mickey Kellam, who assisted with editing of this latest round of online fiction, will also be helping us conduct a long-awaited reading period of the full-length manuscripts in our submissions queue. If you've sent us something in the past 12 months and still haven't heard back from us, stay tuned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">I've also written a column called "How to Write Dystopian Fiction" that I'm going to be sharing with you over the next few months. It consists of a 10-part series of explorations of several lesser-known dystopian novels, fiction collections, and writers, and how their books can inform (or not) sci-fi writers that are creating new work today. Some of it is very new, and some is very old, and plenty of it falls somewhere between. These will be posted independently of our major site updates, so check back at Silverthought or follow us on Facebook and Twitter for details. Likewise, there may be rolling updates to our website and backend happening between now and our next update that will make Silverthought.com easier to browse, read, and submit stories to.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">That's about it for this update, though more new projects and updates will follow as soon as time allows and the projects take shape enough to share with you. Keep writing, and we'll keep reading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">—Mark</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And the thing you're really going to love me for, after reading how good the stories in this update are, is that this update contains only one reference to twerking, and this is it. Now go enjoy the voodoo curses, alien exterminators, space bugs, and cock fights.</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">You're welcome.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Also, Mark is too humble to tell you that he has a new short fiction collection, <em>Long Live Us</em>, being released from CCLaP on September 9. The book is exceptional and you should buy it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">—Paul</span></div>
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Paul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-68980413662979661322013-08-31T08:21:00.000-04:002013-08-31T09:12:12.380-04:00How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 1): Sir Thomas More's Utopia<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJggTYKREzKiDee7c4l5-nmW_Y-XKt7yQWHfyj-HaIuGmtnAOFUyYS3NIPHjE5DPjOaIG_Bv-qRYU9JLiwytbP7_J-y-dodAoVYLOLgfHJ-6GhyPdOTgXtkLdsuXx3fH52_TxvFRGNhs/s1600/utopia-thomas-more-audio-cover-art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJggTYKREzKiDee7c4l5-nmW_Y-XKt7yQWHfyj-HaIuGmtnAOFUyYS3NIPHjE5DPjOaIG_Bv-qRYU9JLiwytbP7_J-y-dodAoVYLOLgfHJ-6GhyPdOTgXtkLdsuXx3fH52_TxvFRGNhs/s1600/utopia-thomas-more-audio-cover-art.jpg" /></a><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i>How to Write Dystopian Fiction is a ten-part series written by Silverthought Press editor Mark R. Brand during a two-month independent study with Miles Harvey, Assistant Professor of English, DePaul University. The series attempts to analyze what works in a variety of new and old speculative fiction texts with utopias and dystopias as central themes, and to offer advice to writers about how to use these narrative strategies most effectively. This is part one.</i> </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><b>The book:</b></span><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span></div>
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<span class="s2"> I was delighted to discover that this text, which in 2016 will celebrate its 500-year anniversary of publication, is more or less a template for all of the great social science fiction of the 20</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">th</span><span class="s2"> century. More than that: it’s a pleasure to read. It’s neither stuffy nor limited by </span><span class="s2">the </span><span class="s2">unimaginative prose that I tend to associate with eras in history strongly controlled and influenced by the Church. The tr</span><span class="s2">anslation I read (Paul Turner, </span><span class="s2">1965) seems if anything to tone </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">down</span><span class="s2">the colorful original Latin. I compared passages in Turner’s translation to their counterparts in </span><span class="s2">Burnet’s translation available at Gutenberg.org </span><span class="s2">and found this to be generally true. Burnet seemed willing to let the Latinate phrasings and vocabulary seep more fully into his English prose than Turner, who opted instead for</span><span class="s2"> a</span><span class="s2"> simpler, work</span><span class="s2">horse translation with ample notes and appendices</span><span class="s2">,</span><span class="s2"> which I found helpful.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Likewise, knowing a bit about the reign of King Henry VIII and his immediate court (Thomas Cromwell and Hans Holbein came up in the notes, but not in the text) provided me with enough context that I could </span><span class="s2">appreciate</span><span class="s2"> the secondary story in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2">. This is where I think the book really shines, as does any good piece of science fiction.</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2"> tells two stories: the overt and covert narrative.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Overtly, </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2"> is abou</span><span class="s2">t a world somewhat like our own with benchmarks of familiarity, that extends itself fantastically into the world of the plausible. There are sailors and ships and voyages to strange, exotic locales</span><span class="s2">, all of which were very much a part of ordinary</span><span class="s2"> European</span><span class="s2"> life in 1516</span><span class="s2">. The New World was a great unknown at the time, but</span><span class="s2"> its novelty was starting to give ground. A</span><span class="s2">lready explorers like Vespucci (mentioned by name in the story) </span><span class="s2">had begun chronicling it and its strange inhabitants. Some </span><span class="s2">early</span><span class="s2"> literature was circulating by then regarding the New World</span><span class="s2"> and various voyages to it</span><span class="s2">, though I imagine the breadth of stories regarding it at the time were often wildly inaccurate or—at the very least—impossible to vet or confirm.</span><span class="s2"> In the overt narrative, More takes this partly-plausib</span><span class="s2">le sto</span><span class="s2">ry and winds it out in entertaining fashion, detailing a world that is recognizable but nevertheless substantially different than early 16</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">th</span><span class="s2"> century England.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">This alone might have made </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2"> one of the notable books of its time, but More further complicates his construction of it with the covert narrative. It’s easy to see this as predictable from our 21</span><span class="s4" style="vertical-align: super;">st</span><span class="s2"> century-</span><span class="s2">sensibility, informed as it is by London and Zamyatin and Huxley and Orwell and Atwood and dozens of other social science fiction writers, but More pulls off all sorts of interesting (and harrowing) moments o</span><span class="s2">f metanarrative here as well. He criticizes at length the nature of crime and punishment, </span><span class="s2">the general lackey-ish nature of royal courts, several different social issues of the day such as </span><span class="s2">land ownership and agriculture versus livestock cultivation, </span><span class="s2">divorce (also relevant to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and </span><span class="s2">the petty wars and uprisings in which England was involved and had fared badly (the Cornish massacre is mentioned, for example, as are the various needless feuds between Henry VIII and Charles of </span><span class="s2">Castile</span><span class="s2">).</span></span></div>
<div class="s2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Perhaps he assumed offhand that a fictional work would be dismissed as the navel-gazing of a philosopher/academic, but </span><span class="s2">it dawned on me slowly as I read it that </span><span class="s2">as the head of a fairly large household he was taking a</span><span class="s2"> terrible risk by writing this. </span><span class="s2">He </span><span class="s2">casually refers to the affairs of princes</span><span class="s2">, in frequently critical ways, during the</span><span class="s2">tumultuous reign of Henry VIII, in a book published under his own name, </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">in which he himself is a character</span><span class="s2">. Saint Thomas More; </span><span class="s2">patron saint of, apparently, enormous balls.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">It was refreshing to note a n</span><span class="s2">umber of familiar narrative strategies in </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2">, despite its advanced age. More begins the novel (or novella, or quarto, or whatever other designations </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2"> has carried through the centuries) with an epistolary introduction. Intriguingly, the letters that introduce the story are </span><span class="s2">written (</span><span class="s2">or at least we are led to believe they were written</span><span class="s2">) by non-fictional people. This might be seen as gimmicky today, but I’d be fascinated to know whether the same was true in 1516. Nevertheless, it’s a very accessible entrée to the story, and it proceeds to a chapter that details a lengthy conversation between t</span><span class="s2">he narrator (More) and his friend Peter Gilles, who introduces a third man (echoes of the eternal “a stranger comes to town” trope), Raphael Nonsenso. Nonsenso is the conduit of information regarding the Utopia of t</span><span class="s2">he book’s title. Through this tripartite conversation,</span><span class="s2"> More manages to</span><span class="s2">avoid coloring too closely within the lines of</span><span class="s2"> the structure of Plato’s </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Republi</span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">c,</span><span class="s2"> a more </span><span class="s2">stylistically </span><span class="s2">high-handed classical presentation of</span><span class="s2"> an ideal society.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">In other ways, More does owe much </span><span class="s2">to Plato. He uses a dialectic</span><span class="s2"> discourse narrative structure to squeeze in various arguments for and against certain lines of logic. The discussi</span><span class="s2">on between Raphael, the lawyer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding the topic of widespread thievery is one example of this. Since More was himself a legal scholar (and he points this out even in the text of the story), it’s easy to imagine him carrying on all three parts of this conversation by himself, already knowing where he wants to go with it and patiently addressing the dissentin</span><span class="s2">g bits of logic one by one. I am only a dabbler in philosophy and my knowledge of the classics is incomplete, but this</span><span class="s2">, to me, seems highly Socratic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">I was surprised overall at the extent to which More included himself in the story and kept the narrative very speakerly, intimate, and informal throughout. I suspect this is a combination of More’s classical influences and having written the original text in Latin, </span><span class="s2">a language </span><span class="s2">which I have studied and which lends itself particularly well to </span><span class="s2">the </span><span class="s2">first-p</span><span class="s2">erson perspective. I think this closeness reaches out to the reader a bit more than a flatter, more matter-of-fact presentation would have, and it remains effective even 500</span><span class="s2">years later. The overall tone</span><span class="s2"> of the book is quite playful and clever, despite, as I mentioned before, the underlying danger inherent in writing and publishing it where and when he did.</span><span class="s2"> </span><span class="s2"><br /></span><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">As a long-time writer of futurist speculative fiction, I was amused to find that even 500 years ago, More struggled with some of the same issues every sci-fi and spec-fi writer does. T</span><span class="s2">here are hal</span><span class="s2">f a dozen or more moments where</span><span class="s2"> More’s logic breaks down and his prose too quickly dismisses parts of </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2"> that are thinly plotted. In one example, Nonsenso</span><span class="s2"> argues at length</span><span class="s2"> regarding the uses of precious metals and gems as chamberpots and children’s toys to remove their facile importance in a capitalist </span><span class="s2">culture, but he conspicuously glosses</span><span class="s2"> over a harder-to-swallow</span><span class="s2"> explanation of how it is that the Utopians tolerate all wearing the exact same style of clothing. Likewise, More crafts a Utopia </span><span class="s2">that is fastidiously—even laboriously—humanistic, and yet there are several minor transgressions which nevertheless merit the death penalty or a life of enslavement. Contradiction and continuity, it seems, are the sci-fi writer’s</span><span class="s2"> eternal</span><span class="s2"> bane.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">But there are moments of brilliance, too. Such as this passage in Book Two:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2">“</span><span class="s5">The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condem</span><span class="s5">n</span><span class="s5">ation of pleasure. He may sentence </span><span class="s6" style="font-style: italic;">you</span><span class="s5"> to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and </span><span class="s5">general </span><span class="s5">discomfort, but he’ll also tell you to do your best to ease the pains and privations of others. He’ll regard all such attempts to improve the human situation as laudable acts of humanity; for obviously nothing could be more humane, or natural, for a human being than to relieve other people’s sufferings, put an end to their miseries, and restore their </span><span class="s6" style="font-style: italic;">jois de vivre</span><span class="s5">, that is</span><span class="s5">, their capacity for pleasure. So why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?</span><span class="s5">”</span></span></blockquote>
<div class="s2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">In one paragraph, just four compact and coolly rational sentences,</span><span class="s2"> in the middle of a conversation about something else,</span><span class="s2"> More positively </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">shreds</span><span class="s2"> the entire notion of asceticism, and makes it seem lik</span><span class="s2">e something a thinking person c</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=25813004" name="_GoBack"></a><span class="s2">ould no more believe in than unicorns. This is one of the more impressive examples of his intellect, but </span><span class="s3" style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span><span class="s2">is full of moments like this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s2"><b>What have we learned:</b></span></span></div>
<div class="s2" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="padding-left: 36px;"></span><span class="s2">Much of what I would steal from More for my own work are the same things I would steal from his literary successors: connect early with the audience, keep the point of view narrow, intimate, and empathetic, use the edges of real-world knowledge to extrapolate logically into the future, </span><span class="s2">have fun wherever possible, take personal risks, </span><span class="s2">and above all: say something important about what’s happening right now.</span></span></div>
Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-68516551346188476272013-08-31T08:20:00.000-04:002013-08-31T08:20:24.091-04:00EDITOR UPDATES: August 2013The thing you're really going to hate me for, after reading how good the stories in this update are, is the fact that I accepted the earliest of these about a year ago. It's been a very, very busy year at the Chicago desk of Silverthought, but here they are in all their sci-fi glory. We're very pleased to bring you new stories by Marcus Day, Brenda Kezar, Steven L. Peck, and Blake Ervin. If the July update was all about social science fiction, this one is all about fear: a vicious time-stopping cyborg is caught in a trap and will kill anyone and anything to get away, a space cruiser to Mars finds itself the subject of an unpleasant infestation, a meteorite brings terrifying visitors to your hometown, and the new store across the street knows what you need, and what you'll do to get it.<br />
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Some new exciting things are happening at Silverthought as we move toward the Fall: our intern Mickey Kellam, who assisted with editing of this latest round of online fiction, will also be helping us conduct a long-awaited reading period of the full-length manuscripts in our submissions queue. If you've sent us something in the past 12 months and still haven't heard back from us, stay tuned.</div>
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I've also written a column called "How to Write Dystopian Fiction" that I'm going to be sharing with you over the next few months. It consists of a 10-part series of explorations of several lesser-known dystopian novels, fiction collections, and writers, and how their books can inform (or not) sci-fi writers that are creating new work today. Some of it is very new, and some is very old, and plenty of it falls somewhere between. These will be posted independently of our major site updates, so check back at Silverthought or follow us on Twitter for details. Likewise, there may be rolling updates to our website and backend happening between now and our next update that will make Silverthought.com easier to browse, read, and submit stories to.</div>
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That's about it for this update, though more new projects and updates will follow as soon as time allows and the projects take shape enough to share with you. Keep writing, and we'll keep reading.</div>
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—Mark</div>
Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-80113315670579248082013-07-31T20:52:00.001-04:002013-07-31T20:52:40.501-04:00EDITOR UPDATES: July 2013<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I’ve just sent out happy news to six short fiction submitters
for our summer updates. As always, I received a few emails from accepted and
declined submitters and a couple of people said something like, and I’m
paraphrasing, “Seriously, dude, what the hell took you so long?” I kid,
everyone was generally polite about the long wait time for responses, but hey, they’re
not wrong and maybe it’s time I said a few words about what I’ve been up to by
way of explanation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I’ve just completed an M.A. in Writing & Publishing at
DePaul University. For the first year I was able to keep up with it all fairly
well, but I was offered an assistantship the second year and a job in the
administration of the University Center for Writing-based Learning (one of the
largest peer-tutor writing centers in the world). So this was all awesome; free
tuition! Fame! Fortune! Well… free tuition at least. But there were some
predictable side-effects: I was forced to take a hiatus from producing more
episodes of Breakfast With the Author, and the Online portion of Silverthought
has been subordinate to the academic calendar since then. I ended up reading
submissions mostly during breaks from classes in the summer and winter instead
of every month or two like I did before. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Silverthought has gone through a number of iterations over
the years, but currently Paul and I run the show ourselves and we’re both busy
dads with day jobs. Many companies have “reading periods” and “submissions
periods” that are essentially strict windows when these things happen, or they
farm out their reading to associate editors, or they charge reading fees to
make it worthwhile for the (usually unpaid) editors to sort through the
enormous piles of submissions. We agreed that rather than make any radical
changes to Silverthought to adjust, we’d just keep on doing what we’ve always
done: reading and accepting the best new work we can find, and bringing it to
you, the reader, all for free and the highest quality we can make it, no matter
how long it takes us. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Well good,” you’re thinking. “Now that you’re done with all
your fancy book learning, you can get back to promptly accepting my short
fiction submissions!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Er… sorta. Here’s the thing: I graduated with distinction
from DePaul’s M.A. program and in the process I was accepted to the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s PhD program, which I will start in the Fall. The setup
is a little different; there’s not a desk-job that comes with my funding, but I
will be commuting from Chicago to Milwaukee 3-4 days per week and I’ll be
teaching introductory English as well while I complete the degree.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Does that mean it’s going to take forever to hear back?” you
ask.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I’m not sure, to be honest. I’d like to think that I’ll have
loads of time between the homework for three courses per semester and teaching
my first non-internship classes, but I’ve got to level with you: my reading
times for your work are probably going to continue being on the slow side for
the foreseeable future. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“But… But your guidelines say—“<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I know, they’re out of date, and we’re working on that.
Here’s some easy things to remember about our Online division, as we update the
info on our main site:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Short fiction subs are all read and responded to by me
personally. If you’ve sent something a long time ago and haven’t heard back,
there are two possibilities: (1) I haven’t had time to read it and respond yet
or (2) I’ve read it and decided to delay responding because I may be interested
in publishing it. Let me say that again, so we’re clear: No matter what
Duotrope or WriteCafe or any other site says, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I will respond to every Online division submission eventually. Unless
you get an email from me directly, your Online submission is not considered rejected.
<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-We accept simultaneous submissions and it doesn’t hurt my
feelings a bit when someone withdraws because they get a story placed
elsewhere. In fact, I even send out congratulations emails occasionally when
it’s a story that I liked but had to sit on for too long. Someone mentioned
that even though we accept simultaneous subs, other places don’t and this delay
affects their submissions to other places. Silverthought has always been a
company that champions the writer first, and in that sense, companies who don’t
accept simultaneous submissions are kidding themselves if they think their
submitters aren’t sending work out to anyone and everyone who might publish it.
If you’re feeling nervous about it, remember: if Daily Sci-Fi or whoever wants
the first shot at your story, all they have to do is read their submissions
faster than me.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
-I got a lot of submissions this time around that were sent in .rtf file format. I CAN HAS DOCX, YES? SMEAGOL? YES? Seriously, I know you well-meaning cheapniks like to stick it to the Microsoft Man, but it's time to put on our big girl and big boy pants and send in your manuscripts in .docx. If you must use .rtf, we understand, but when your work gets accepted, we're going to start asking everyone to go through the editing process in .docx so we can track the changes from revision to revision. An editor that has to read two versions of your story in two windows is an unhappy editor, and you don't want me to be unhappy when I'm editing your work, do you?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-I recieved a few earnest submissions recently with cover
letters that said things like “would you comment on the quality of my fiction?”
by way of letting the submitters know what’s good or bad about their work and
even if they should continue submitting their fiction to other sites. While I’m
flattered that you’d ask such a thing of me, I unfortunately don’t have time to
respond to these in depth. I occasionally offer comments on work that I accept
or reject, but I try to keep this relevant to the process of either publishing
it or telling the author why it was almost-but-not-quite accepted so they can
hit the mark the next time around. If you ask for a response like this and get
a form decline email, don’t be offended. It’s not personal. Advising you about
the publish-ability of your work is the job of an agent, but there are easier
ways to get some feedback. Having just been a coordinator of one, I’d suggest
contacting your undergraduate university and asking if alumni can use their
writing center. Even most small colleges have writing centers, and their tutors
are trained to offer advice about how to strengthen and evaluate writing
objectively. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Read our most recent short stories and this blog to get a
sense for what we want. I’m still getting a lot of faux-detective stories and
vampire-premise stories, and I think it’s my job as editor to make sure you
understand: I will say no to these almost the instant that I realize what they
are, no matter how well they’re written. It’s just not the way we want to go
with our fiction these days, and as a sympathetic writer, I’d rather you send
them to someone who will actually publish them than to wait through my
submissions queue to hear the disappointing inevitable.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Wow, you got all serious on us there for a minute,” you
say.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know. It’s like that time Dad sat you down and told you
where condoms came from. Above all, we’re working hard to do what we’ve always
done, and we appreciate your patience. We’ve got a great lineup of short
fiction coming your way including awesome new stories about space travel,
aliens, men and women in the future, dystopian medical experiences, supernatural
shopkeepers, hilarious drug-peddling idiots, and a cyborg that can halt time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-31988468282685531722013-07-31T20:52:00.000-04:002013-07-31T20:56:56.275-04:0031 July 2013 Silverthought Online update<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Silverthought Online's July 2013 update includes short fiction by ST newcomers Tara Campbell, Nik Klima, V. Moody, and J. Rohr and features longtime contributor Victor Giannini (contributor to <em>Silverthought: Ignition</em> and <em>Thank You, Death Robot</em> and author of <em>Scott Too</em>) in two videos: a Q&A from the Writers Speak series in Manhattan, and a reading of an excerpt from <em>Scott Too</em>. If you haven't picked up a paperback or Kindle edition of our latest print release, check it out.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With Mark now finished with his MA and heading on to PhD land and Paul off waging endless battle against the wholesale corporate pillaging of our educational system, we've been working closely with our summer intern Mickey Kellam from Keystone College in PA to clear out our various slush piles and streamline our submission/update process. Mickey has been a tremendous help and we can't wait to show you some of the great stuff we've been working on. Our August update will introduce some new features and we'll announce some upcoming publications, site changes, contests, and maybe even free books. Stay tuned.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="left" style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://online.silverthought.com/">http://online.silverthought.com</a></span></div>
Paul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-61258387958116298192012-11-24T10:56:00.000-05:002012-11-24T10:56:28.562-05:0024 November 2012 Silverthought update<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The November 2012 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction by C.R. Esaryk, Steven Grassie, R. A. Harris, Regan W. H. Macaulay, and Samuel Piccone, interviews with Michael Gold, author of the Silverthought Press release <i>Suicide Sons</i>, and Jim Bainbridge, author of the Elm Ridge Books poetry collection <i>Cloud-Glazed Mirror</i>, a new episode of Breakfast with the Author in which Mark R. Brand interviews Patrick Somerville and Kyle Beachy, and an excerpt from the upcoming horror novel <i>The Mills</i>.<br /><br />Since our last update, we have released trade paperback and Kindle editions of <i>Suicide Sons</i> by Michael Gold and <i>Cloud-Glazed Mirror</i> by Jim Bainbridge. In December, we will be releasing the novella <i>Scott Too</i> by Victor Giannini, described by Roger Rosenblatt as "fiction of the highest order" and by Kaylie Jones as "a tour de force that echoes the best speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick and the magical realism of Jose Saramago." That sounds good. I'll have that. Soon we'll be giving you a sneak peek of some upcoming 2013 releases including <i>The Beauties</i> by Lauryn Allison Lewis and the risen-from-the-grave <i>Nightblind </i>project.<br /><br />You can expect an announcement soon in regard to our intentions of beginning to produce a yearly compendium of the fiction we feature in our online division.<br /><br />And it's that time of year again. Which time? Oh, just time for our 75th Annual WIN EVERY SILVERTHOUGHT BOOK EVER giveaway. How do you enter? Just buy a book from our Silverthought Bookstore from now until the end of 2012 and you'll be automatically entered into a drawing to win a copy of every Silverthought book ever released, past, present, future, AND BEYOND. That's currently a retail value of just about $451.<br /><br />So please enjoy this update. The shorts are fresh, the breakfast is delicious, the interviews are compelling, and the books are dynamite. Spread the word, tell your friends, buy some books, leave some reviews, and above all, you keep reading and we'll keep giving you things to read.<br /></span></span>Paul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-84414959806134949022012-06-28T23:04:00.000-04:002012-06-28T23:05:23.986-04:00June 2012 Silverthought updateThe June 2012 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction by Bryan Carrigan, Alexandra Fresch, M.R. Jordan, David McAodha, and Curtis Waugh, an excerpt from Silverthought's upcoming print and digital release Suicide Sons by Michael Gold, and a new episode of Breakfast with the Author in which Mark R. Brand interviews James Tadd Adcox and Rebekah Silverman.<br />
<br />
Since Silverthought's last update, we've released paperback and digital editions of The Damnation of Memory by Mark R. Brand, Drink for the Thirst to Come by Lawrence Santoro, Blood: The New Red by David S. Grant, moon chalk by David LaBounty, and I'm pleased to announce that Suicide Sons by Michael Gold will soon be available in paperback—and while I was writing this, it became available in Kindle edition. You can check out the pre-order page for the paperback and read an excerpt of the book. A decidedly darker turn than Michael's previous Silverthought publication, Horror House Detective, Suicide Sons is a compelling story of religion gone wrong.<br />
<br />
Back to Kindle editions, the majority of Silverthought's back catalog is now available in Kindle format. Don't have a Kindle? Download the Kindle app for your computer, mobile device, or tablet, or you can use Amazon's Cloud Reader to enjoy our titles. We've had some surprising successes in the e-book arena—Jim Bainbridge's 2010 novel Human Sister has quickly become the best selling and best reviewed book in the history of Silverthought, both designations the book richly deserves. To follow up Human Sister, our Elm Ridge Books imprint will be releasing Jim's poetry collection Cloud-Glazed Mirror in July. It is a collection described by Paulette Bates Alden as "fresh, vital and precise. Whether tender, playful or meditative, the poems are fully engaged with the world of the senses, nature, emotion and consciousness, calling us to a deeper level of awareness of what it means to feel and experience life fully. Beguiling and luminous, these are poems to savor and return to." The collection includes the Pushcart-nominated "Blood" and eponymous second-place winner of the LaNelle Daniel Prize in Poetry.<br />
<br />
Another surprising success in Kindle format has been my Silver trilogy, which were the genesis for this little web site. Without Enemy, An End, and Broken, there wouldn't be a Silverthought. I've received so many encouraging responses to these books, which have gone largely ignored for the greater part of a decade. I've also learned that apparently a lot of reviewers hate my books, hate me, and think I should stop writing and all copies of my books should be burned. I guess that's what I get for rejecting many, many tens of thousands of writers over the last decade. But after my feeling stopped hurting, I redoubled my efforts and now have a horror novel, a scifi collaboration, and the conclusion to The Grange on my writing to-do list. Take that, reviewers! In related news, thanks to the speed and ease of Amazon KDP, my next three books are already available for download, and I haven't even written them yet. And hey, they already have a slew of one-star reviews! Go figure.<br />
<br />
I'm also working frantically to ready books for print including The Beauties by Lauryn Allison Lewis—whose fantastic scifi work solo/down is now available from our friends at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography—and Scott Too by Victor Giannini, a novella Roger Rosenblatt described as "fiction of the highest order. Giannini uses his device of confused identities to get at basic questions of what it means to be one's self, to be human. In spare, restrained prose, he gives us a taut, intense novella at once mysterious and moving. This is a work of humane imagination."<br />
<br />
On the structural and logistical side of Silverthought, avid visitors will note that the forum has been deactivated. In terms of simple practicality, we must follow our community to the social media sites they use and let the older forms of interactivity go for now. We may resurrect the forum at some point, but Facebook and Twitter will receive the majority of our attention, so like and follow Silverthought if you haven't already done so. We have also incorporated a new (old) Silverthought blog into our main page. Mark has already posted some great suggestions for submitters there, and we intend to use this blog as a place for quick posts between major site updates, giving you all the Silverthought news and minutiae you can bear to read.<br />
<br />
And speaking of bearing to read, we're going to be shutting down submissions to our Silverthought and Offense Mechanisms print divisions for the rest of 2012. Submissions to our online division will continue as usual. We have a considerable print submissions queue and it must be shoveled out before we can take on any more. Thank you for your patience. If anyone wants an unpaid internship rejecting vampire books, let me know. Not kidding.<br />
<br />
And oh yeah, Mark has been included on CBS Chicago's list of "Five Indie Chicago Authors And Publishers For Which To Watch Out" or something like that. So congratulations to Mark—and WATCH OUT FOR HIM. Seriously.<br />
<br />
I hope you enjoy this update, and stay tuned for more books, more shorts, more breakfasts, and more snarky responses to one-star reviews. Viva la guerra!<br />
<br />
—PEHPaul Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11831153893869724140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-49578616823133746872012-06-06T21:28:00.000-04:002012-06-19T22:58:55.481-04:00EDITOR UPDATES: A new featureThings are changing at Silverthought Press this summer, and one of the big changes involves retiring the forums that have been a part of our site from the beginning. A hundred years ago (or 2001, if you want to get specific about it) Silverthought lived mostly on a board hosted at illout.com. We were disorganized, unseasoned, and about as green as a granny apple, but our little community was one of the most fun things I've ever experienced online. We moved to our own dedicated board shortly thereafter, and it's with a bit of sadness that we let this part of Silverthought go, since Facebook and Twitter or whatever you kids are using these days really don't carry the same sort of specificity that a dedicated message board does. On the bright side, social media platforms like Facebook have let us share our books and our work with more readers than ever before, and we've made the transition right along with the rest of our writers, readers, and friends.<br />
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One part that couldn't be replicated by social media, though, was the staff interaction that made the forums so fun in days past. With that in mind, and in order to communicate a bit more directly with the hundreds of short fiction submitters that I read regularly, I've decided to revive a periodic blog feature to talk about whatever is pertinent at the moment to my editorial duties. Because I also regularly submit work to dozens of short fiction venues, I know firsthand how important it is to be kept up on what a publisher is looking for and how they're doing in terms of working through a submissions queue. There were a few terrific threads on the forum about generally what we like and don't like, and I'll try to recreate those here so that even when the forum is gone, you can still have access to them. I can also answer any questions at length here that readers, writers, or submitters might have about who we are and what we do.</div>Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-16776521433291462372012-05-25T01:00:00.001-04:002012-06-19T22:58:55.448-04:00How to Send Me a Story I'll Publish: Know thy editor<i>All right, Mark</i>, you say. <i>Now that I've gone through this little exercise with you and read your self-important little turd of a blog about how much you hate everything that wasn't written by Ray Goddamned Bradbury, and I've gotten one or two of your "oh man I really liked this story it just got narrowly edged out by a few other pieces" emails, I still inexplicably want you to publish one of my stories.</i><br />
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</i><br />
<i>Seriously.</i><br />
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<i>What's a submitter got to do to get some love, here? I'll bribe you. I'm not above bribing. I want to see my work in print and I'll send you stories until I'm three hundred and eighty years old if that's what it takes. I'll send stories back into the past from a distant future ruled by cyborgs if it means you'll put this story that I've written, which I know for a fact is great, on your site.</i><br />
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All right. I feel your pain. I've got a few more hints and then I'm done with this portion of the blog because I've said all I needed to say and then some about submitting fiction in general and certainly to us specifically. Here's the icing on the cake. The little courtesies that I'll remember when I see the fourth or fifth piece of yours and remember your name, and maybe go rip someone else's story a new asshole and press that green "accept" button for yours this time.<br />
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1) When you send me a manuscript, put it in Standard Manuscript Format and then make the following little tweaks: 12 point Times New Roman or Cambria 12, either one single spaced. I like single-spacing because I can get a better sense quickly of how long the story is, and it's easier for me to read on the other end of the Submittable system if I don't have to flip forward and backward pages as much. Regular garden variety Standard Manuscript Format is perfectly acceptable, but I can't fucking stand Courier anything, so please for the love of god, just delete that hideous font from your font folder. I'd rather read something in Papyrus or Comic Sans than Courier. It's like sandpapering my corneas.<br />
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2) If you simultaneously submit, that's completely okay. Just let us know with the Submishmash system so I can clear it from the pending pile if it gets accepted elsewhere or if you want to send it somewhere else that doesn't allow sim-subs and we're just taking too long. You can always send it back later if they say no.<br />
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3) If I ask you for a re-write, it's because I saw or thought I saw the potential for something superb in a story, but that it wasn't quite ready yet. This does not mean feverishly push out a revision in 12 hours. I can count the number of writers I know that can actually do this well on one hand and not use all the fingers. Take your time. If it comes back to me too fast, there's a good chance it's going to come back to you even faster.<br />
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4) If you happen to know us, or know something about us that you've heard or enjoyed, or in particular if there's a story of ours that we put up that drew you to us, just tell me in your cover letter. I don't mind chatty cover letters, and I do read every one with interest. We're a publisher built on community, and we like to know who's sending us work. It's one of the most fun things about the job, actually.<br />
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5) We accept material of almost every length limit, but it bears mentioning that the vast majority of our accepted stories fall within a somewhat narrower range. I find our readers tend to prefer stories in the 2500-3500 word size, as do I personally, and unless your writing just floors me, your chances will dwindle steadily the farther you deviate from this.<br />
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6) When I say <i>send me more</i>, I'm not just being nice. Chances are, you've got a better than average chance of seeing your stuff get accepted with us. Just keep trying.<br />
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7) To every guideline, an exception, and strong writing trumps it all. I published a terrific story last year called "Poseidon's Million Crowns." This thing looked like trouble from the first moment. It was choppy and full of little subsections that seemed too small to be proper chapters. It was almost long enough to be a stand-alone novella, and it was formatted in some sort of difficult two-column document formatting that made it a pain in the ass to read. This story, though, is one of the very best I've ever said "yes" to. It just completely ensorcelled me. If you can write like that, you can safely ignore everything I've just said and just send me whatever you've got.Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-82071406334727106592012-05-25T00:06:00.001-04:002012-06-19T22:58:55.484-04:00How to Send Me a Story I'll Publish: The subtle pitfallsSo you've managed to beat the odds. You're in the second-look pile and I'm going over your story like a drug sniffing dog looking for weaknesses to decide who gets published and who gets a disappointing rejection email. Here's what I look for:<br />
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1) Don't put action in your dialogue tags. I'm going to say you can get away with this once or maaaaybe twice in the space of a 2500-5000 word short story, but not more. It stands out too much. Here's an example:<br />
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"Oh, my goodness," says Janey, <b>as she stands and puts the flowers in her hair.</b><br />
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Do this instead: "Oh, my goodness," says Janey. She stands and puts the flowers in her hair.<br />
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2) Make sure your verb tenses match. If you're writing a story in past tense that suddenly switches verb tenses in a secondary phrase, it slows down my eye and weakens the prose. Observe:<br />
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"Here are some flowers, my love," David <b>said</b>. It was four in the afternoon and the sun <b>hung</b> heavy against the horizon.<br />
"Oh, my goodness," <b>said</b> Janey, <b>standing</b> up and <b>putting</b> the flowers in her hair.<br />
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Do this instead: "Oh, my goodness," said Janey. She stood and put the flowers in her hair. Not only did we eliminate that pesky dialogue tag run-on, but we also now have nice, smooth, agreeable verbs.<br />
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3) Don't overuse or misuse Em dashes. We know "(insert trendy beloved author here)" uses them like a Get Out of Semicolon Free card to tack random phrases onto the end of sentences but, as <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_caseplease_hear_me_outagainst_the_em_dash.html">The Slate</a> and <a href="http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/dashes-everywhere/">Philip B. Corbett</a> point out, this is an irritating and amateurish habit to get into. Em dashes can be used unobtrusively as commas in a parenthetical structure--like this--or they can be used like a strong ellipsis to indicate a speaking person being abruptly cut off, but they are not and should not be used interchangeably with semicolons. Once I started seeing these, I couldn't un-see them and seeing them pop up in otherwise good writing is like watching gnats land on my cake frosting.<br />
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4) Passive voice and past perfect tense. If you're using Word, just hit CTRL+F and type in "had" and then "were" and also "being". Find all examples of these and if they're being used to modify other verbs, check and make sure you couldn't make that sentence clearer. Sometimes it can't be helped and past-perfect tense creeps its wheezy, clunky way into your story, but realize that these are moments where your story doesn't shine as well as the punchier, faster, smoother ones I see. Be merciless with your prose.<br />
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5) Minimize use of the infinitive and rhetorical questions in the narrative or dialogue. I can stand a little of both, but not a lot of either.<br />
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6) Don't box your dialogue in. If all your characters ever do is question and answer each other, it makes for really, really dull reading. Declarative sentences or having characters talk but not listen to each other is a hundred times more interesting to me than deliberate or didactic hand-holding in uninspired dialogue.<br />
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7) Don't miss the chance to show off. This is speculative fiction! We're like the Sparta of the literary world. We don't just tell Xerxes' messengers to fuck off, we <i>fling them down a bottomless pit</i>. Think of every great speculative fiction story you've ever read. What stuck with you? Names, places, dates? Nah. It's images. Ideas. Set-pieces of epic proportions. Someone did or said something that made you wish you were there. You looked up and saw the sky blotted out by something that you couldn't quite comprehend. Don't miss the chance to exploit this aspect of the genre. It's a big part of what makes science fiction and other speculative stories so persistently popular and entertaining.Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-42039612717600186852012-05-24T22:41:00.001-04:002012-06-19T22:58:55.474-04:00How to Send Me a Story I'll Publish: Things I shouldn't have to say, but I doWe all remember High School sports, right? For basketball there'd be the starting five, the best of the best, and five more that were almost as good waiting to step up if one of them dropped out. After that there was the bench; guys or girls good or tenacious enough to make the team but each with a weakness or two that made them less than ideal. And then there was everyone else. The people that showed up for that first day of try-outs, maybe came to the second day, and vanished by the end of the week or were cut.<br />
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As it happens, my submissions queue is a little bit like this. There's the top three or four stories I find each month that really just blow me away. They're the strongest stories I've got, and I feel confident that if I put them up against the best that other publishers have, they'll do Silverthought proud. Then there's a second string. Three or four more stories that are equally strong and show plenty of talent but may be either flawed in some mild way or don't work as well together for us as my first choices. These stories do frequently still get published by us because sometimes the first-choice writers withdraw their stories or they get accepted somewhere else or they just plain don't respond when I accept their stories. If this happens, you're in and we're glad to have you. If it doesn't work out, chances are you'll get a very apologetic personal note from me about it because I hate, hate, hate turning down good work.<br />
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Then there's everyone else. Chances are, if you can even be in the second string, you've got a decent shot at seeing us publish your stuff. The trick, then, is mostly to not be "everyone else". And the best way to do that is to know what everyone else does. Here's a partial list:<br />
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-Sending stories with persistent obvious grammar errors. If your eleventh-grade English teacher wouldn't have stood for it, you can bet your ass I won't either.<br />
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-Sending stories in strange fonts or with unnecessarily complex formatting. More on this later, but I have to be able to at least read it.<br />
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-Sending stories with one or zero distinct characters, little or no dialogue, or massive chunks of descriptive info-dump exposition. We liked table-top RPG's in high-school too, we're not too big to admit it, but no matter how interesting that type of writing is, world-building alone is not a <i>story</i>.<br />
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-Sending a story that's too much like a single-note punchline. If the thrust of your story is to play out a joke, cliche, urban legend, or SAW-like contrived gruesome death scene for your thinly-sketched generic protagonist, I'm going to pass.<br />
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-Sending a mystery, erotic romance, cop story, ancient myth, or especially 40's style noir detective story gussied up with a light dusting of mostly meaningless and non-central sci-fi details. I get where you're coming from, but I hate these. Yes, I've read good examples of all of these stories but 99.99% of them are contrived crap and just insufferable after the thousands I've had to read. No type of story here (even the ones with grammar errors) gets auto-rejected faster than these by me.<br />
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-Sending fan-fiction or very close emulations of other more popular mainstream stories. I don't judge people that do this because on some level almost every serious writer starts in a place of emulation or even outright copying in order to learn, but I think it's possible to not judge and at the same time acknowledge that I personally tend to seek out the most original, highly-skilled presentation I can find in my stories, and that most of the time these aren't that.<br />
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-Sending too many stories or sending multiple very long stories. We accept virtually all lengths here at Silverthought Online, but if you're shoveling five 15K+ word novellas at me all at once, I'm probably not going to read any of them. I'm a human being and my poor eyeballs have to last me another forty years. Just try one and see what I say. I'll probably tell you what I liked about it even if I decline it, and ask for more if your style fits us. Just not all at once, please. (NOTE: poems, flash fiction, and very short fiction I actually prefer to read in batches. Don't be afraid to send me three or four at once if you've got stuff that's 1500 words or less.)<br />
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-Sending stories that fall too far outside our general scope. I don't mean sending us a brilliant cowboy apocalypse tale told from the point of view of the protagonist's gunbelt leather, because I'd probably publish that. I mean sending us lukewarm Anne Rice-style vampire porn set during the Roman Empire. Our masthead says speculative fiction, but it's more helpful to think of us as "sci-fi plus". Our imaginations undergo a regular stretching and exercise regimen, but there are some things that just clearly aren't for us because they're too cliche, they have a better, more appropriate home elsewhere, or they're just not what turns us on.Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3154628790425402369.post-89477590657340444932012-05-24T15:05:00.001-04:002012-06-19T22:58:55.492-04:00How to Send Me a Story I'll Publish: Introduction and RetrospectiveOkay, so you've got a killer short story that we should absolutely read right this minute and publish for the world to see. Wow. Okay then. All we need to do is click the little green "accept" button and send you $40.00. Am I following? Great. All right, let's see this badass. Spaceships... check. Zombie apocalypse... check. Something even fresher and more creative... ooh, check! Oh. Oh wait. Oh God. N- No. Don't-<br />
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*Sound of your manuscript going in the reject pile*<br />
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Don't let this happen to you, friendly, awesome, talented, (dare we say, sexy?) submitters.<br />
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<i>But how? </i>you ask. <i>You used to be so accepting; so warm and welcoming to everything I ever wrote.</i> <i>How am I supposed to publish with you anymore when you're so... so... reject-y</i>.<br />
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It's not you, baby, it's us. We're different than we used to be. We've come a long way from the old days of blogging and community building and because we've had a decade to discover exactly where we fit in the bigger scheme of things, we now operate quite similarly to most other established small presses. This includes lots of great bells and whistles that early-2000's Silverthought didn't have and that a lot of other small seat-of-their-pants presses still get wrong. Silverthought now has decent semi-pro payment for stories (yay!), no reading fees (double yay!), a submissions queue that's rarely deeper than 90 days (be still my beating heart!) and according to Duotrope an astounding 61% personal response rating for submissions (I need some paper towels, I just peed myself!). We have a dedicated submissions system that assures your work isn't lost or buried so deeply in a pile that it'll never be read. We still get hundreds and hundreds of submissions, and there are still only a couple of us reading them, but now we can work through them chronologically and the process of getting a verdict on your story is faster and more responsive than ever.<br />
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A few other things have changed. Paul and I are both fathers now, which means we've had to learn to do more with less. And by less, I mean less time and energy, not less Kraft macaroni and cheese and microwaved chicken nuggets. We've got just acres of those. We've had to re-envision Silverthought's Online component as a sleeker, better, easier-to-manage department. We can't update as often as we used to, and when we do, we accept fewer pieces than we once did.<br />
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One thing hasn't changed, though: we still get just piles and piles of short fiction; much of it beyond excellent. If we only publish 10-15 short stories per year at most, from often 100+ subs every month... well, my math gets hazy here because I didn't gradate from the fifth grade, but it sounds like our acceptance rate is hovering right around 1%.<br />
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Let's just confirm that with Duotrope... Astonishing. It says <i>zero</i> percent.<br />
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<i>Holy shit, are you telling me you accept literally </i>nothing<i> anymore?</i><br />
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No, no I'm not. It's just that we haven't transmitted the acceptances to people whose stories we've green-lit because we're busy trying to pull the rest of the material for the update together to go with them (just as an aside, if you've submitted to us before April 11th 2012 and haven't heard back from us, congrats, you're in the second look pile-and it's a very small pile). Once we start accepting the pieces we're going to take, our acceptance rate will be right around that 1% I mentioned earlier.<br />
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<i>So how in the hell am I supposed to beat the other 99%?</i> you ask.<br />
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Well, I'm glad you asked. That's the whole point of this blog. I'm going to tell you.Mark R. Brandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08213170759888797981noreply@blogger.com0