31 October 2014 Silverthought Online update

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.

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 A Dark and Deadly Valley anthology and stuck around to publish the stunning collection of short horrorDrink for the Thirst to Come. 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 Drink, his Christmas cards and being "chuffed", his Just North of Nowhere--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 Drink for the Thirst to Come 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.

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.

Thanks for reading.

—Paul

How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 3): Justin Cronin's The Passage

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.

The book:

        I wanted to like The Passage, 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 $3.5 million for this book and another $1.75 million for the rights to the movie before the book was even completed. 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 intellectually 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.

​Clichés abound in The Passage, and some of them are real groaners that Cronin (and his editors) should have known better than to let pass. One character is writing a book and the book goes on about writing books and it’s a metabook, isn’t that clever? Yawn. Several characters experience agonizingly long dream sequences during which nothing with a clear relationship to the plot actually happens, despite dreaming and sleep being central themes of the book. 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 belabor inconsequential moments, and serve to drag out the transitions between meaningful scenes.

​The plot itself, regrettably, is a patchwork of genre clichés as well. A young girl named Amy finds herself pulled into a government-sponsored human-weapon program (Soldier, The Manchurian Candidate, Hanna) based on Ebola/Hanta-like virology (Contagion, The Hot Zone, 12 Monkeys). 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 (Mr. Murder). Unfortunately, this getaway involves the virus escaping its containment and bringing about the end of the world as we know it (The Stand, 28 Days Later). Amy and Wolgast flee into rural America to hide and wait out the apocalypse (Earth Abides) and Wolgast slowly dies of radiation poisoning when a last-ditch effort to nuke the “virals” irradiates them (On the Beach).

​The book resumes nearly a hundred years later in a walled post-apocalyptic city (The Road Warrior, Day of the Dead) 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 vocations (Brave New World) in the Last City. Their stronghold persists under an umbrella of massive floodlights at night to keep the vitals away (Pitch Black, Gears of War). The virals are creatures that act like zombies but move terrifyingly fast and drink blood like vampires (I Am Legend, 28 Days Later). The Last City’s inhabitants are led by a council of “household”(Utopia!) elders, including an elderly clairvoyant black woman (The Stand, The Matrix). Amy, still a little girl, is found unarmed and alone and hiding from the monsters (Aliens), having not aged because she is—surprise—now herself a day-walking half-vampire (Blade, Let the Right One In), who despite her childlike appearance is quasi-immortal (Highlander, Interview with the Vampire) and has a number of strange telepathy-like powers (The Shining, Carrie, Firestarter, and basically every plucky young child character Stephen King ever wrote); powers that she herself somehow doesn’t understand despite having had a hundred years to get used to them.

​The virals overrun the Last City through infesting the dreams of weak-minded victims (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and the survivors are forced to make a run for it that includes a journey into the lair of Babcock, the immortal evil antagonist (It) whose influence precipitated the viral outbreak that ended the world in the first place.

​In theory, it looks like what every sixteen-year-old boy on earth would love to read. “Hey dude, check it out, it’s the awesome-est parts of every good 20th century piece of sci-fi, plus pretty much a full rehash of Stephen King’s early career! Sign me up!” Had I been sixteen when I read it, I would have probably even made the argument that it IS good in this respect. Sadly, as an older and more mature reader, I find that when writers jam together enough of these tropes, they start to feel less like their inspirational ancestors and more like a warmed-over, derivative mishmash a la Waterworld or Serenity.

​Most telling, however, is how poorly edited the novel is. Forget for a moment the dozens of plot holes, the continuity errors (my favorite, which stood out like a sore thumb, was a 27-year-old as a full orthopedic surgeon), and the utter predictability of it all; The Passage is agonizingly, brutally, indulgently long. You might think that a book so wholly committed to Cronin’s plodding, flat, Anglo-Saxon single-syllable vocabulary would at least manage to be sufficiently descriptive. You’d be wrong. Dozens of characters exist only as a name, 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 intelligent, Katniss Everdeen variety, and become a subspecies characterized by the bizarre combination of preoccupation with pregnancy 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.

​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. It’s painfully clear why they did it: they wanted the novel to feel outsized and huge, and it does, to some extent. But somewhere along the line Cronin and his editors lost sight of what makes other mammoth epic novels (I’m thinking of The Stand here since the first third of The Passage was so clearly an homage to it, but also of a few others like James Clavell’s Shogun) as great as they are; the profluence of their plots is hidden in vast stretches of originality,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. 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, undeserved chunks of the book, while more interesting relationships, such as the father-daughter bond between Alicia and the Colonel are passed over.

​The walled city trope is such an exciting one that I was surprised to discover how lifeless and low-stakes it felt here. 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 flight East across a collapsing North America via train that was under constant lethal attack from virals. Awesome! I thought. Now we’re cooking! But then, three hundred pages of dull, uninspired prose later, I decided that seeing how well Cronin could write if he wanted to only made me enjoy the book less.

​Interestingly, I detected some hints of More’s Utopia here. The leaders of the Last City are called “households”, as the Utopian enclave heads are referred to, and Cronin (like Huxley before him) attempts to provide a rationale for why a cloistered and sheltered community would and should accept a de facto caste system of labor. It feels as thin as ever in The Passage, sadly, but that is perhaps less Cronin’s fault than it is simply a difficult trope to sell in general.

​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 did manage to more or less completely destroy the world that he spent the first third of the novel fleshing out. Not even Stephen King, in the throes of the Captain Trips outbreak of The Stand—a book which The Passage is so clearly a spiritual homage to—quite managed to do this. In that sense, this book resembles somewhat more closely Neville Shute’s On the Beach or Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, the fingerprints of which are likewise all over the plot of The Passage. But Cronin went a bit beyond these even, to paint a secondary world, the world of the Last City (sometimes just simply called “the camp” or “the colony”), 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 20th and 21st centuries. The connecting threads from the first third of the book to the second are palpable, and Cronin did manage to convincingly end the world, even if only to subsequently bore us to death with uninspiringly-executed warmed-over tropes from what felt like every sci-fi/horror/fantasy book and movie ever made.

What have we learned:

​There are two ways to look at The Passage. 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: never 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 (sheesh Cronin, come on dude), never write filler 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 never invent your own card game, fail to explain the rules to the reader, and then write a five page long scene of characters who have no characteristics beyond their own names playing this game.

How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 2): Lois Lowry's The Giver and Gathering Blue

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.

The book:

One review on the back of the dust jacket of The Giver describes the book as “tightly-plotted”. I’d call it instead “tightly-trope-ed.” The Giver doesn’t surrender to plot tropes as much as it revels in them, but it’s clear that Lowry’s book doesn’t hold up on the strength of its characters. Instead, it jumps from one long-established trope to another, like so:

Once upon a time we’re in a creepily calm dystopia where everyone’s afraid 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 development. Then the protagonist, observes this gray areaand starts to feel anxious about all of these rules despite having lived under them his whole life (groan). He thendiscovers that there’s something (gasp!) different about him! Then the quasi-superhuman protagonist (who is of course also necessarily vulnerable to the 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 confession 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.

​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. It tapped a bit into the simplistic manipulation of the rules of reality and paired that with considered (if somewhat thinly-sketched) characters. I remember more or less the same feeling from other simple but engaging books like Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Jacqualine Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men and Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games. By “simple”, I mean that the casts of 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 novellas or short stories than novels.

​The smallness of them is carefully calculated, I think, and necessary. Who, after all, 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. But consider that this horror only works because the borders of the community in The Giver are finite. The population of the community numbers in the low thousands at most (only fifty new births per year for population replacement), 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; more deeplyevil, perhaps, which is where I got the impression that Lowry might be trying to say something more concrete about her own personal politics.

​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 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 Oryx and Crake avoid: the concept of Elsewhere exists solely for its profluence and not for any other reason. In The Giver this oversight doesn’t fatally damage the reader’s suspension of disbelief, but it does erode the vividness and give the impression that Lowry was unselfconsciously aiming for a timeless, enduring Big Meaningful Point book.

​Other flaws include the lack of potent authority figures in the community (which is a clever but plausibility-damaging workaround of an overly-flogged 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 ignored or glossed-over, that choice somewhat colors the entire story.

​After reading The Giver, I went ahead and read the sequel as well, 2000’s Gathering Blue. 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. The main character was literally (instead of symbolically) orphaned within the first ten pages, and like Jonas from The Giver, Gathering Blue’s 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, and especially their families.
​ 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 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 sort of knowledge. Like Adam in the garden of Eden, he finally takes ownership of the knowledge of good and evil and (instead of ingesting an apple) he stops ingesting the “stirrings” pills.

​Where does Lowry take all of this? Nowhere. 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.

​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 completely disjointed. The equation that the plot satisfies contains no co-efficient of sexuality. It’s like sayingX+Y+Z=maturity/fatherhood where X equals a newfound skill (echoes of adolescence) and Y equals burgeoning sexuality. Where’s Z, Lowry? Where’s the catalyst? It just isn’t there in The Giver.

What have we learned:

          Embrace simpler wording when world-building if possible. Don’t isolate protagonists from their families unless absolutely necessary. “Special” character traits like the ability to disregard mundane limits like customs, laws, chores, and habits with impunity are more exciting and compelling than true superhuman abilities. Take care to avoid repeating the same narrative patterns (and therefore flaws) from story to story.

31 August 2013 Silverthought Online update

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.

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.

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.

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.

—Mark

* * *

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. You're welcome.

Also, Mark is too humble to tell you that he has a new short fiction collection, Long Live Us, being released from CCLaP on September 9. The book is exceptional and you should buy it.

—Paul

How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 1): Sir Thomas More's Utopia

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. 

The book:​

           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 20th century. More than that: it’s a pleasure to read. It’s neither stuffy nor limited by the unimaginative prose that I tend to associate with eras in history strongly controlled and influenced by the Church. The translation I read (Paul Turner, 1965) seems if anything to tone downthe colorful original Latin. I compared passages in Turner’s translation to their counterparts in Burnet’s translation available at Gutenberg.org 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 a simpler, workhorse translation with ample notes and appendices, which I found helpful.

​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 appreciate the secondary story in Utopia. This is where I think the book really shines, as does any good piece of science fiction.Utopia tells two stories: the overt and covert narrative.

​Overtly, Utopia is about 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, all of which were very much a part of ordinary European life in 1516. The New World was a great unknown at the time, but its novelty was starting to give ground. Already explorers like Vespucci (mentioned by name in the story) had begun chronicling it and its strange inhabitants. Some early literature was circulating by then regarding the New World and various voyages to it, 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. In the overt narrative, More takes this partly-plausible story and winds it out in entertaining fashion, detailing a world that is recognizable but nevertheless substantially different than early 16th century England.

​This alone might have made Utopia 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 21st century-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 of metanarrative here as well. He criticizes at length the nature of crime and punishment, the general lackey-ish nature of royal courts, several different social issues of the day such as land ownership and agriculture versus livestock cultivation, divorce (also relevant to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and 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 Castile).

​Perhaps he assumed offhand that a fictional work would be dismissed as the navel-gazing of a philosopher/academic, but it dawned on me slowly as I read it that as the head of a fairly large household he was taking a terrible risk by writing this. He casually refers to the affairs of princes, in frequently critical ways, during thetumultuous reign of Henry VIII, in a book published under his own name, in which he himself is a character. Saint Thomas More; patron saint of, apparently, enormous balls.

​It was refreshing to note a number of familiar narrative strategies in Utopia, despite its advanced age. More begins the novel (or novella, or quarto, or whatever other designations Utopia has carried through the centuries) with an epistolary introduction. Intriguingly, the letters that introduce the story are written (or at least we are led to believe they were written) 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 the 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 the book’s title. Through this tripartite conversation, More manages toavoid coloring too closely within the lines of the structure of Plato’s Republic, a more stylistically high-handed classical presentation of an ideal society.

​In other ways, More does owe much to Plato. He uses a dialectic discourse narrative structure to squeeze in various arguments for and against certain lines of logic. The discussion 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 dissenting bits of logic one by one. I am only a dabbler in philosophy and my knowledge of the classics is incomplete, but this, to me, seems highly Socratic.

​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, a language which I have studied and which lends itself particularly well to the first-person 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 500years later. The overall tone 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. 
​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. There are half a dozen or more moments where More’s logic breaks down and his prose too quickly dismisses parts of Utopia that are thinly plotted. In one example, Nonsenso argues at length regarding the uses of precious metals and gems as chamberpots and children’s toys to remove their facile importance in a capitalist culture, but he conspicuously glosses over a harder-to-swallow explanation of how it is that the Utopians tolerate all wearing the exact same style of clothing. Likewise, More crafts a Utopia 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 eternal bane.

​But there are moments of brilliance, too. Such as this passage in Book Two:

“The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condemnation of pleasure. He may sentence you to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and general 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 jois de vivre, that is, their capacity for pleasure. So why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?”

​In one paragraph, just four compact and coolly rational sentences, in the middle of a conversation about something else, More positively shreds the entire notion of asceticism, and makes it seem like something a thinking person could no more believe in than unicorns. This is one of the more impressive examples of his intellect, but Utopiais full of moments like this.

What have we learned:

​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, have fun wherever possible, take personal risks, and above all: say something important about what’s happening right now.

EDITOR UPDATES: August 2013

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.

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.

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.

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.

—Mark

EDITOR UPDATES: July 2013

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.

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

“Does that mean it’s going to take forever to hear back?” you ask.

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.

“But… But your guidelines say—“

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:

-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, I will respond to every Online division submission eventually. Unless you get an email from me directly, your Online submission is not considered rejected.

-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.

-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?

-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.

-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.

“Wow, you got all serious on us there for a minute,” you say.

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.