It was this little bit that stuck me like a cool dagger:

James:

There is a lot of information out there on things new authors should not do in the first work—no novels of over a 120,000 words for a fantasy manuscript, …

Did you encounter problems in trying to get published due to these elements?

Pat:

Yeah. Probably. It probably didn’t thrill agents when they read my query letters and it said, “200,000 word epic meta-fantasy.” 

Of course, as luck would have it, I just hit 200,000 words myself today on Draft Two of the novel. There is still a little more to be done so it will continue to get longer at this stage, not shorter.

It should be noted that when I was posting here about this time last year, making all sorts of promises of reviews to come and finishing and whatnot that I probably thought in all likelihood that the story would be wrapping up at the 100,000 marker or there abouts. I did not anticipate the ending taking quite the word count that it did. And when my readers of Draft One came back to me saying they wanted more and that some sections didn’t feel fully sketched out—characters, world building, inventions—needless to say, I was a bit surprised.

At 160,000 words, I figured I had probably said what was necessary. It was only on re-reading and beginning the revision process that I realized how desperately needed many of their suggestions were. I wondered at the time: Is it possible to write a 200k+ word book at “a blistering pace?”—this was the speed of plotting I had originally gone for. Or was I kidding myself?

Furthermore, knowing what I did about publishing, just how in the hell would I go about pitching this thing? [Enter Patrick Rothfuss, stage right, grinning behind his lovely beard and NY Times Bestseller List.]

When I started writing, I fooled myself into believing in the purity of the medium. I told myself that writers have the freedom to shape their art as they like. The novel is the most unencumbered medium. You are not at the whim of a special effects budget. Or a software suite. You do not have a timeslot requirement, no limitations on your expression except the limitations of the story itself and of your ability to say what you intend to say. I thought naively that length was a problem for scriptwriters. But it soon became clear from everything that I read on the subject of getting published that massive length, particularly from a new author, is generally frowned upon. Because publishing, just like everything else, is a business. And paper costs money (more accurately, it is the binding that is the killer.)

All of this wouldn’t be so bad except that, looking in from the outside, one gets the sense that publishing is something of a gradually eroding business as well which means a number of things: 1) Adversity to risk. 2) Need for established authors and material to generate revenue. 3) Diminishing marketing and editing budgets.

These do not strike me as particularly friendly waters for ambitious up-and-comers.

Of course, those of us hungry to be published all hear about the sweetheart deals. Hannu Rajaniemi pulled off probably the most recent one, squeezing a three-book contract out of 24 pages. As Rothfuss might say, he is the aberration, not the average. But I want to believe in the meritocracy of this achievement. Having just finished The Quantum Thief, I can say I think Gollancz made the right move, and perhaps an even more clever one by publicizing their risk as a way of generating hype for a new voice. Perhaps there is room for simply good writing to make the sale, no matter how far outside the established norm it is. No matter how unknown the author.

In Rajaniemi’s case, even this is not an entirely honest argument: he was, if I understand correctly, already somewhat more connected thanks to his involvement with the Writers’ Bloc, which features some other big names in the UK. One imagines that if someone like Charles Stross (part of the group and also the novel’s cover blurb) was vouchsafing his work prior to signing, securing a deal on the strength of a first chapter becomes somewhat less like a fairytale. I don’t mean to demean the man’s accomplishment—I feel his first book truly delivered on all the hype it’s been getting and I’m always stoked to see new, strong voices in the field.

So where exactly does this leave the relatively unconnected and ambitious? Do publishers want to expend the time to properly edit a 200,000 word manuscript anymore? No? (Please feel free to enlighten me here Mr. Rothfuss or any other who has been through the process.)

I feel I should be clear now that I don’t believe my manuscript is excessive. I am fretting only that the number without context will give that impression. But it does not meander. It does not waste time. I wrote to the bare minimum of what I thought I could get away with the first time through, and sure enough my readers thought it was too thin. So I let myself bulk up where necessary. I don’t feel, as Mr. Rothfuss seems to imply later in his interview, that perhaps a great deal of those words are not even getting to the point yet or that I’m needlessly reinventing wheels. Based on the reactions so far, all I got was the point. My readers wanted more of a build up for it. But writing a novel is a neurotic thing. I feel like the pretty girl in middleschool with a mole on her cheek—just different enough to be terrified at the thought.

Normally, we talk about uniqueness as a strength. A strong voice. A particularly unusual character. A set-up or a world unlike others that have come before. Plenty of publishers trumpet these sorts of things about their titles. But look at what’s produced. Why does so much feel recycled in SF if these qualities are supposedly strengths? I am often befuddled by what I find on the shelves in my local Barnes & Noble. Formulaic is often putting it kindly.

I sometimes wonder if maybe we give the wrong impression of SF when we congratulate it on risk-taking. As a whole, SF seems as dominated by its tropes as any other kind of fiction. In many ways, I feel that the neologistic mode it often takes shows just how much is recycled. The shorthanded style of Rajaniemi’s work, for example, I read in two ways: on the one hand, there is a definite inventiveness to his concepts, but on the other, a definite familiarity. Perhonen, the sentient ship, for example, is such a typical idea in space opera that it is afforded only the most cursory of introductions. The ship is talking from the get go. There is no time spent explaining this oddity because the audience is assumed to know it very well already. While the rest of the story certainly brims with originality, I wonder how much these touches of familiarity sealed the deal with those first 24 pages?

These are the anxieties that hound me as Draft Two winds down and the polish is applied. Is SF publishing really as daring as we think it is? Will a 200k manuscript even be entertained as a concept worth looking at? Every cyberpunk novel I’ve read has been of the short and sweet variety—are people going to recognize those elements in my story and then balk at the idea of doing them at this length? I hope not.

As anxious as this all seems, I really do believe in what I’ve written. It is the closest now to what I imagined more than three years ago and I’m proud of finishing my first novel before the age of 26. It was a difficult effort. What concerns me most are the cruel realities of the world of agents and publishers, of those who think that the formula for success precludes my novel ever going anywhere. I’m waiting for that first rejection, “Too Long.” and the inevitable rage to come with it.

Too long? The Name of the Wind was “too long” and it kicked ass and took names.

I need to find a daring agent. How does one do that?

It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do with my life.

Not only has this kept me almost entirely uninvested here, it’s also had a stifling effect on my reading. My shelves are literally full to the brim with cool new science fiction of which I have heard very good things and of which I am very eager to read and yet when I try and pick it up, I find myself unable to commit to the work. Within the first paragraph I am disgusted, overly critical, or simply distracted. It’s like some sick form of ADD that only effects the things I love most to read. Non-fiction has become my relief. Somehow, reading it seems less invasive, allowing me to stretch my speculative wings over the real world concepts elucidated in each page. But sci fi reading is strictly off limits.

Which is disappointing. I think I have some genuinely interesting things to say about Alastair Reynold’s The Prefect as well as Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora but for the time being everything in that realm is utterly unapproachable.

So instead I thought I’d spend a little time here talking about the horror of writing a novel and  what I’ve learned about doing it.

The first thing I’ve learned in writing a novel is that it’s never good enough. Never.

Now matter how much time you spend trying to polish something you’ve just put into the novel, you will never be satisfied. If you somehow cross that threshold and become satisfied, you will forget about it for a week or two and when you come back you’ll see once again just how awful it is.

Which leads me to the second thing I’ve learned and maybe the most important one: as soon as I finish a chapter, I must never go back to revise it. Not until I reach the end of the book.

Had I not put this stricture in place, I’d be talking about my novel here now except I’d be talking about how I had a really fantastic first thirty pages and the most wonderful set of ideas for the next 400. Revision, as far as I can tell, is literally the worst thing you can possibly do on a novel until you’ve reached the end. Even if everything has gone catastrophically wrong and the second half of the book operates on a completely different premise than what the first half has set up, you’re much better off finishing first before attempting surgery on your golem.

Perfectionism is a blessing as much as it is a curse. It keeps my standards stringent enough that I always have something functional by the time I reach the end of a chapter. But it also nags at me like a cocaine addiction whenever I see blemishes in the text I’ve just gotten down or a turn of phrase that annoys me. It dares me to go back and tinker and tinker away. Which would be fine. Except that the lie contained within that temptation is that tinkering achieves something. We tell ourselves we are revising. But tinkering is not revising. It’s noodling around with your love of language. This is the curse of perfectionism. The best cure I’ve found is an attitude of flippancy towards my own text, one that decides that quantity is much more important as quality. The longer I can inhabit this falsehood, the closer I can get to the end. And when I get to the end, I can take the blinders off.

The strange side effect of this is the continual voice in my head reminding me that really, let’s be honest here, most of what you’ve written is garbage, unreadable garbage, and why would anyone ever want to slog through that mire? With adjectives like that? Surely, you must be kidding yourself. You’re not writing a novel anymore. It’s a compost.

This voice comes with the most bizarre disonance because the satisfaction of finishing new text is nothing less then joy which it then consumes and turns into lies. Steven Pressfield in The War of Art (Read it! Good Lord just read it!) calls this voice, this feeling, The Resistance. It’s a very satisfactory definition. It resists. It tries to tell you that what you think to be progress is useless and con you into believing that what is useless (tinkering) is progress. Cheeky little bastard. Perfectionism is a separate thing I think, but it has a dubious relationship with The Resistance. At first, perfectionism will be more than happy to go along with The Resistance’s schemes to satisfy its own insecurities. But once you’ve actually finished something, it becomes a kind of second wind, birthing the story out of the ugly egg you’ve created.

Perfectionism is the little voice that will be my guiding light when it comes time to polish this monstrosity. For now, it is the little devil, whispering inability into my ear and daring me to redo the paragraph six or seven times instead of getting on to the next one. I believe perfectionism to be a necessary quality in every great writer, but it is a quality that must be first overcome in self-denial and then catered to with utmost attention once you have finished.

The third thing I’ve learned is that the best writing I am able to produce comes almost entirely from places of personal vulnerability and negativity.

Many times, I find myself hating my work because of the horrible things it reminds me of in my own life: my own personal failings, shames, egotism, mistakes, cowardice, and on… I wrote all of those into it intentionally because I realized that if I didn’t, they would consume me and I’d wind up destroying myself. While I don’t like them as reminders, if I consider my work to be of any value at all, it is entirely because of the self-hatred it examines and how it has allowed me to express and confront that darkness within myself.

In truth, more and more, I am beginning to notice that I am not particularly impressed by my world building, plotting, or even characters as much as I am satisfied by the honesty of the text at hand and how it has become a personal chronicle of myself. All of this could be seen as vile egotism on my part to which I say: yes, you are correct. But I am sharing these things, these blemishes, unselfishly with the world so I think there is humility in it as well.

I don’t actually think many authors have dared themselves to write in this way in science fiction. We relegate this kind of despair and honesty to places like memoir and literary fiction. But sicence fiction, for reasons I don’t fully grasp, seems to play a game of avoidance with the truth of life experience, either exaggerating it into dystopian parody or ignoring it into pulpy adventure. While I can still enjoy science fiction that avoids this hard terrain, it is a passing fancy. Those works which have really struck me have the unmistakable mark of the personal in them. Without something intensely personal in nature, I can be entertained by a work but never really touched by it. And long ago I decided that the only two important goals in writing were to be honest and to touch someone.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to in science fiction that has the author pouring his or her life into the story, not letting the reader escape into it. So escapism I have come to equate with failure, not because it is unentertaining, but because it does not challenge the reader to confront their own shortcomings. Likewise for the author.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me that this was what I desired out of books. I have had the ultimate example for more than a decade and I find myself coming back to it, time and again, like a moth to its favorite flame. To me the greatest work of science fiction ever produced is Neon Genesis Evangelion. Hideaki Anno, director and creative force behind the TV series, described Evangelion with the following quote:

“Evangelion is my life and I have put everything I know into this work. This is my entire life. My life itself.”

How incredible to be able to say that as an artist about something you have produced. I am not sure I will ever be capable of saying anything as bold about my own work but it is my heartfelt desire to do so.

Soon these words and pages will conclude and I will revise and scramble for an agent and a publisher and royalties and a thousand other incidental things that come with a whole other set of goals. But regardless of whether those other goals are achieved or not, I will feel no accomplishment in any of it if I cannot have some semblance of what Anno grasped in creating Evangelion.

I want to reach the final page and say, “This is my entire life. My life itself.” I will know then that I was honest, at least.

—

Having just finished Bruce Sterling‘s Schismatrix Plus, I have to admit right now that most if not all of my preconceptions going into the book were shattered and then re-shattered like some parody of humanity’s factional fracturing that occurs over the book’s time line.

To begin with, let me just dispense with my judgment: read this book! Read it and then read it again! Like any great work of art, you will find yourself changed when you come out the other end. Following Sterling’s main character, Abelard Lindasy, over the course of his incredible lifespan is a whirlwind ride through the solar system and by the end, just like him, you will find yourself thinking differently about what you’ve come to take for granted.

So can space opera be cyberpunk? I hate to brand it by a subgenre but, the novel has a cyberpunk “feel.” Compact is the proper adjective. I was stunned at the richness of the ideas produced by so few words. That is not to say the book is devoid of long metaphysical ruminations but, think of “long” as relative here. This book packs a plethora of ideas (similar to Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space) into a little over two-hundred pages. Clipped, powerful pace is the name of the game.

And this is ultimately where the book will fail or succeed fabulously based on your willingness to submit to riding shotgun in Sterling’s sprint through his own world. Those looking for long passages articulating the physics of an asteroid’s impact in sublime prose will be disappointed. Grandeur is suppressed. Expect no moral conundrums or intrigues that rack character’s minds for pages on end. Sterling keeps his narrative to a narrow wavelength and the distance from peak to peak can be deceptive.

Jumps between thirty years and three months happen throughout. Each leap occurs with little more than a timestamp at the start of the passage. Whereas I would normally ignore these and dismiss this kind of formatting as a stylistic flourish for other authors, I actually found myself needing to return to a passage’s start to understand how the world had gotten so radically different in the span of a few pages. Then I would discover we had jumped a decade ahead. One can think of this as a weakness on the part of the book or my reading but it was certainly a recurring complaint I noticed in other reviews.

If you have come to relish William Gibson‘s emotional suppression in his narrative and how it brings the clarity and humanity of his characters through in stunning admissions, Sterling’s own nonchalance with the setting and timing will do much the same. In a superb effort of show-don’t-tell discipline, Sterling refuses to let his narrative be awed by its own world or epic span. Instead that is left up to you, the reader, and while this is by no means a familiar tactic to the space opera genre, it is effective.

Unexpectedness is at is the center of this work’s beauty. Sterling paints a humanity coping with its own evolution and displacement in life outside the gravity well. What happens to human beings who grow used to space? This book offers a startling answer.

Competing philosophies are at the heart of the conflict, and don’t be fooled by the blurb into thinking that this is a simple polar matter between Shapers and Mechanists. Both sides have a variety of subfactions that emerge, then die or evolve into stranger things. The line between the two is continuously blurred to show that this is no monochrome war – gray is everywhere, including our protagonist: Lindsay maintains modifications from both sides (along with a slew of identities and alliances back and forth.) Post-humanity (a term I use loosely here as Sterling has his own definition in the book) is very enjoyable to watch and everything from sex to warfare to social nuance becomes a fascinating interplay of intelligence, technical progress, and adaptability to the ever-present future shock.

Future shock is something the front cover quote highlights and I can see why it was chosen for the prominent location. Life in Sterling’s world seems always on the verge of the harshly alien and, one may grow frustrated when ideas introduced in certain eras are not adequately explained until much later when they have already been replaced or gone extinct. This is very much a book that rewards a second reading (one I have neglected to do for this review, so bear with me here.) In fact, my only real frustration with Schismatrix was the glancing nature given to some of Sterling’s factions. While clearly well-developed as thought experiments, their idiosyncrasies are often not given enough room in the narrative to satisfy my appetite. But this is Lindsay’s story, not just the story of an emerging humanity, so I can see why certain creations were sacrificed as being tangential to the main thrust of the plot.

In addition to Schismatrix, you also get a collection of short stories at the end. These are what Sterling first used to flesh out his ideas before writing Schismatrix, and while I found myself less enamored of them, they work as effective complements to leftover mysteries in the novel. I would recommend reading these after reading the novel as they will otherwise spoil the unexpected directions humanity turns in Lindsay’s narrative.

As far as the individual stories go, in “Swarm” I found the ending too typical of the scifi-ironic-twist for my liking. “Spider Rose” had an extremely difficult narrator which made the story less than likable. On the flipside, “Cicada Queen” was a great second romp through the Czarina-Kluster and actually added some unexpected depth to a mystery in the novel. “Sunken Gardens” is set after the end of Schismatrix and is a little too brief in its resolution to do the idea justice. I found “Twenty Evocations” to be more of an outline and fragments of narrative than a full story. Others may enjoy its experiment, but it was a bit too convoluted for my taste.

Schismatrix Plus will leave one spinning in orbit around the ideas Sterling has put forth, coming back to ponder them again and again. While some will be frustrated at its depth (or seeming lack thereof) its breadth cannot be criticized.

At the end of the book’s introduction, Sterling flatly refuses to return to the Mechanist/Shaper world. After reading it I can see why fans would clamor for a sequel – the stories are full to bursting with a wealth of ideas and a future that asks interesting questions about human nature, humanity itself, and the power of ideas. Lindsay’s ideas drive the book forward and outward. As a reader I felt lucky to be along for the ride.

—

I assumed this review would age much worse than it has. I didn’t know a whole lot about criticism back when I wrote this. I had not yet ventured into Strange Horizon’s wonderful archives and learned a thing or two. In my opinion, there is no finer repository of SF criticism available on the web and even though I find myself occasionally in disagreement with an individual’s interpretation, overall, I think they really engage with the work at a level worthy of respect.

I’d like to point out that I didn’t know much about what makes for good criticism versus mediocre criticism. I thought “good critics” used puns to make their points because it was clever repurposing of the content of the book and good critics are about making themselves look clever instead of the material at hand. Yes, shameful as it may be, this was my thinking even as an author. That’s why I cringe at that orbit line in the second to last paragraph every time I read it.

However, I do think I correctly identified the strengths of this book, and gave its weaknesses a fair once over too. I think the point I made about Gibson’s technique as relates to Sterling’s own voice, while a bit imprecise and bold of me, is actually pretty close to what’s going on. It’s funny because I really worried over including that line originally, thinking I was far too much of a little shit to understand the narrative technique well enough to try and classify it as I did. I’m happy to say I can stand by that original assertion.

If I were to do it all over again I’d probably spend a little bit more time on the book’s potential weaknesses. I think in works such as these, it’s only fair to note that while certain techniques may work for you as an individual reader, they are rarely well-regarded by everyone (and the most creative ones never are!) You’ll notice that I said “potential weaknesses” and it’s really not because I’m hedging my bets here. Technically speaking, I think there is very little to fault in Schismatrix. That said, the amount of time covered by the narrative and its condensed style could be considered a lack of detail and overambitious plotting.

And this really is the tricky part of good criticism. Ultimately, it is subjective. An author can do their best to ensure that a particular effect resonates with his or her readership but it’s no guarantee of that outcome. No two people read something identically. We each take to a work our own experiences, including previous works read, our own sense of beauty, and our own preconceptions about the novel at hand. This is not to say that you cannot have some objectivity in this process – I have read things that I haven’t enjoyed but that I have appreciated for their craftsmanship. Instead, I would argue that objectivity is something of a distant shore to be paddled towards but never landed upon.

Preference. Mood. Taste. These are all culprits at various times and they are inevitable, responsible for sabotaging even the most sober of inspections. In order to criticize well, you must remember that these reign over your judgment, tirelessly skewing your sense of direction. Most importantly, I think you can never pretend that you understand a work completely – there must always be the admission that you are only witness to what you were able to discern and that, like all art, this does not define what is actually there.

When I saw that their most recent edition was on anime, I thought I’d chime in here with some observations of the nominations generally and also try and talk a little bit more briefly about how influential Eastern thought and artwork has been on SF as a whole.

First: Miyazaki. Of the 15 contributors, all but two picked at least one Miyazaki film for their top five (and many picked more than one!) Even better, the sheer variety of his films nominated: Laputa, Cagliostro, Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Totoro all got picked. I think that is such an impressive showing of his breadth as a filmmaker. It proves he can really make something that appeals to everyone which nicely echoes how accessible his films are for both children and adults.

Second: Cyberpunk on the top. With the votes totaled, Ghost in the Shell and Akira take the #1 and #2 positions. Serial Experiments Lain is also a finalist which is arguably Cyberpunk, or at least heavily influenced by it. But as much as it pains me to say, I’m not sure this is a mandate for this particular subgenre more than it is a bit of a coincidence. Akira was the most expensive animated film of all time when it was created (costing over a billion yen) and Ghost in the Shell also had extremely impressive production values for its time. Not to mention they are both very SFnal in their plots and presentation – instant appeal for any voracious SF reader or writer. Both have certainly been major influences on myself and my own writing. (I also want to point out how they fly in the face of the Budget to Numbskull Ratio which is a point worth exploring all in its own post.)

Third: It looks like there was a bit of confusion as to whether or not TV series were eligible for nomination or if it was only stand alone movies. Perhaps a second edition is order just for series?

Fourth: Speaking of which, manga is another interesting, related artform and a bit more bookish so perhaps we can see can see another of these in the future focusing on just this medium? In Japan, it is a much more respected medium than television anime. I think there’s a number of good reasons for that but, generally speaking, the sophistication of the stories, characters, ideas, and the overall aesthetic is usually more developed and refined.

Japanese SF has, more or less, had its western reception almost entirely in these two mediums with the written word neglected. I’m leaving aside bigger names here like Haruki Murakami or Ryu Murakami, although in the latter’s case, the novel I most want to read by him, The Fascism of Love and Fantasy, has yet to be translated either. The reason I’m not counting them is that they are exceptions to a much wider rule and a bit more tangential to SF than mucking around in it. (This is not an argument for or against their inclusion in the genre. I would hope it’s made clear by the title of my blog that such ideas are completely inconsequential to me.)

However, the scarcity of Japanese SF looks like it might be beginning to change for bookshelves with the new Haikasoru imprint, a very interesting and exciting move by Viz Media. Viz was, up until their imprint, primarily focused on the release of manga and anime. What’s exciting to note here is that there are a great many anime and manga that derive themselves from SF novels, so there’s certainly plenty of material to work with. Going by Viz’s prestigious manga catalog, there should be a fair share of noteworthy titles coming out.

One precisely in this category of adaptation is Yukikaze which I have heard is a fairly decent anime series. I’m actually very tickled at the thought of seeing the original work that inspired the anime, maybe even doing a cross comparison so keep your eyes peeled for a forthcoming review. I also have All You Need Is Kill sitting on my shelf and waiting patiently, which won me over on the strength of its opening alone. We shall see if the rest can continue to impress in the same manner.

All of this begins to wade into a subject that continues to stir the SF community in fits and starts: the idea of diversifying the field, culturally and/or ethnically. This subject makes me a bit queasy for various reasons but I think the biggest one is the sort of the implicit exoticism of it – I don’t have the impression that Stanislaw Lem would tell you to read his fiction because he is Polish and therefore offers “a different perspective” only because of his Polish roots. Stanislaw Lem, if he should be read at all, should be read because he’s probably the best-selling SF author in history. Which is not to say that this identity would not be influential in the creation of his fiction. But his “different perspective” comes from the sum total of his identity, not just the legal fiction of nationality. Identity does matter a great deal in fiction but the diversity of identity cannot be simplified down to nationality or even ethnicity. There is also age, gender, socio-economic status, not to mention the experiences of a life lived. The diversity of expression available in the best of 19th century fiction (largely European male-dominated) should be example enough of this.

I think what I find perplexing is the sort of exoticism inherent in the arguments I hear put forth around this subject. Is SF from Thailand to be sought after simply because because it’s “other”? What kind of respect does that give to a Thai author exactly – that we have stereotyped his voice and prose down to a category he shares with millions? Isn’t that absurd?

Different, as far as I can tell, has only ever meant different. And that alone is enough justification in my mind.

I agree with those who argue for more diversity from SF publishers. More voices coming from a broader range of cultures will give us a broader range of ideas and fiction. I would say this is a definitive improvement to the field. What I am less comfortable with is this kind of ethno-national classification being made in conjunction with the argument. I would prefer, however idealistically, a world where authors are appreciated on the basis of their individuality, not their ethnicity or their birthplace.

Just as it would be absurd for me to laud those anime films I’ve mentioned on the sole distinction of their “Japan-ness,” I find it equally strange to approach fiction this way. Furthermore, I am dismayed at the convenient pigeonholing that can occur if we start wandering into this “ethnic fiction” territory. The most disappointing turn SF could take would be to smush these new voices into their places of origin and only pay attention to the stories ostensibly about their own culture. It’s very convenient marketing for the publisher and already a real phenomenon in publishing today.

So when it comes time to review Yukikaze, I will try do to so with the intent not steered by the background of the author but by the words on the page. If something about it strikes me as definitively Japanese, of course I’ll be happy to make mention. But I am uncomfortable at the idea of starting from a place of trumpeting “I AM READING A JAPANESE AUTHOR” and moving forward. While Yukikaze‘s relationship to the anime medium is a point of intrigue for me, maybe even a (barf!) “selling point,” the fiction will succeed or fail in my eyes based on its strengths and weaknesses, not in its origin.

Chouhei Kambayashi is an individual, not a category. I think every artist deserves acknowledgment at this level.

What I did not find Avatar to be was a deep, moving, or particularly intelligent movie. It was an exercise in safe mediocrity when it comes to plot, a story imminently predictable from the first trailer on and not one that ever surprised me. For all of its convincing visual alien-ness, Avatar was nothing if not straightforward. And I’m not even sure I’d be willing to say that this is, inherently, a Bad Thing.

The cinematic language of movies allow for certain levels of complexity at the expense (or addition) of certain levels of emotional pallet. A psychological thriller can twist and turn and shock in its unraveling of the story because the central plot motivator is the exploits of a disturbed individual or individuals. In other words, it maintains structural parallelism with its subject. A political drama can move at a much more subdued pace because the power of the story lurks in the import of characters’ words and decisions more than their actions. An action movie simply needs to go. Anything that detracts from this momentum does so at risk to the fun.

So what about a love story? This is ostensibly the thrust of the movie according to Cameron. Romance is a common element to movies because its sugary sweetness can up the palatability of any story and its motivations and outcomes are easy to relate to. The reason boy always gets girl is because that’s a satisfying conclusion and a nice parallel to whatever other structural conflict the characters have triumphed over. A love story though is presumably about that relationship as a primacy in the plot, not an addendum. I think Avatar is arguably in this category, although I’d still say it’s more of an action story.

The start is our young, disabled hero getting introduced to the wider world. I like to think of this as “farmboy out to save his village” with an inversion – Jake Sully’s ignorance of the world he enters is a trait shared with the broader cast, not an exception. So Jake grows and learns, our Karate Kid montage phase. Then he falls in love. Then it goes to pieces. Then he saves the day. These are gross simplifications but effective ones and the basic sort of Hero’s Journey structure that Campbell would identify in an instant. The fact this movie has been successfully compared to so many others should tell you how universal its design is. This is simplicity. It is refined, well-acted, engaging, and utterly straightforward.

What perplexes me are those I’ve read and spoken to who went into Avatar with the expectation of anything more than this. They seem to be under the impression that Cameron doesn’t know how to tell anything other than an underwrought story but I don’t think that’s true at all. Because Avatar is a shining example of the Numbskell to Budget Ratio in effect.

Simply stated, the Numbskell to Budget Ratio is as follows:

The more money (X) spent on the production, the more numbskulls (Y) it must appeal to.

To elaborate, the more money spent, the more risk involved in the venture. The more risk involved, the more measures must be taken to recoup the cost. How does one recoup cost? Get more people to see the movie. How do you get more people to see the movie? Broaden its appeal. How do you broaden its appeal? Simplify, simplify, simplify.

The sad reality is that audiences looking for an SF movie out of Hollywood that both engages their brains and their eyeballs are going to be waiting for a long, long time. The studios tried that once. It was called Blade Runner and it was an un-mitigated disaster (in the short term at least. I don’t think long term success is a viable profit model for studios anyways.)

To put it in more agreeable terms, the 100 million dollar plus special effects extravaganza is never going to go for subtlety or controversy or complexity because it cannot afford to. And to some extent, we are the victims of our own success. Nobody goes into Iron Man expecting philosophical treatises on the nature of just war doctrine because even though that would be well within the bounds of its canon and even – handled well – enjoyable, it would not appeal to the lowest common denominator. And when you start dumping money of that magnitude into a movie, you need the Numbskull audience. You need the guy (or gal) who wants to look at shooty things and cars that go fast and explosions and sex jokes and boy gets girl hooray!

The Avatar is a wonderful example of this because it’s an SF movie and it is monumentally expensive. So I posit this – Avatar could not afford to be anything other than a straightforward action-romance with great visuals because anything more wouldn’t sell enough tickets to make back what was spent. That’s all there is to it folks. There is no conspiracy afoot except the conspiracy of the almighty dollar sign.

If you want a thinking man’s sci fi film, look for those with modest budgets. Look for the Moons and the Solarises and keep your fingers crossed that someone down the line will eventually have the balls to take a risk and buck this trend. Just don’t expect WETA Workshop to be involved when they do.

Which got me thinking.

You see, one of the reasons I decided to abandon that blog was out of pure, terrified self-interest. Being an aspiring writer myself, I considered the consequences of continuing to do serious, no-nonsense reviews of work by authors who would potentially become my peers one day. I considered how I would be co-habitating in our rather intimate ecosystem and what effect a critical voice would have on my future career. I became concerned about how my own fiction would be received as a result of anything I had said about anyone else’s. It seems something of an unspoken rule that authors tread lightly when appraising each other’s work or simply avoid it entirely so as to maintain a safe, Swiss-like neutrality. Having no opinions themselves, they are safe from any potential retaliation that would come their way if those opinions were to offend or incite their peers.

This is not to say there is a particular shortage of offensive material being dribbled onto the net today by these same theoretical authors. I assume (perhaps egregiously) that many agents/publishers/marketers would encourage an author to engage with firestorm topics to drum up debate and get their name parroted around “the right circles.” As the saying goes, there is no bad publicity.

But that’s only true up to a point. Because there is bad publicity. There is devastating publicity. And worse than any political rant, unprofessional screaming match, or even display of true bigotry, for an author it begins with the sentence: “This book is not worth reading because…”

Bad reviews on Amazon or Strange Horizons or any of the other blogs I frequent can damage the livelihood of an author and adversely impact their sales. I know. I have avoided books for precisely this reason because life is short and one shouldn’t have to waste it on a bad book.

I think authors understand this quite well themselves. It’s why I’ve seen scant evidence of any prominent author completely disparaging another. (And I mean this beyond a purely personal level – someone trashing someone else over a vendetta is irrelevant because the opinion is already disingenuous by that point.) Finding an author to say nice things about a book they like is simple. Is this not “paying it forward” in a nutshell? Finding an author publicly dissecting the shortcomings of a major novel from a well-respected voice in their industry? That’s like finding ice cream cones in Hell. Tell me when you spot a mint chip.

“Pay it forward” is a nice bit of advice that gets recycled through young wannabes’ ears enough to know that there is a certain amount of reciprocation expected from their ambitions. It may be as nebulous as karma or as real as industry connections but I think, unwittingly or otherwise, those who wish to participate in the grander system of publishing fiction can find themselves forced to choose between diplomatic silence or cautious enthusiasm.

Or at least this is my own experience thus far, considering this dilemma while looking at the dearth of criticism available from authors I respect. It would seem that the worlds of author and critic are mutually exclusive to some degree – that to participate in one begets your extraction from the other. So while I can find scathing dismemberments from the talented Martin Lewis, I have yet to see John Scalzi‘s furnace-like wit immolate any of his contemporaries’ books. Perhaps this is the informal détente of expected decorum in the world of the published. “Thou shalt not piss in thine own garden” or something along those lines.

And all this is fine and dandy. Except that I want to be an author. And I want to talk about the stuff I read. And I don’t want to diplomatic or cautious or friendly about it. I want to be brutal. I want to examine what succeeds and what fails, even knowing that the entire exercise is subjective and chronically governed by that ephemeral reality that is taste. Even knowing the audacity that is attempting to encapsulate a novel within a few paragraphs.

The problem is that I think these kinds of voices are needed. Separating the noise from the sublime is not something achieved by that supposedly impenetrable fortress that is the publishing house, holding back the black, barbaric tides of the slush pile, like the gatekeepers of civilization. Their wall stands high and daunting, the task of conquering it a monumental exercise of patience, persistence, skill, and luck. But…

Here is the punchline, readers. Here is the terrible truth of it all.

But…

The slush gets in.

It masquerades as other things, as wonders of beauty and delicacy or under the simple coverings of pulpy entertainment and schlocky adventure. It crawls on its belly, slithering past while wearing the benign camouflage of an exciting first chapter or a compelling character. It lurks in the harrowing outline that is executed without the slightest attempt of craftsmanship. Even a disguise as flaky as an intriguing concept is sometimes enough to fool the ever-vigilant watch.

The slush gets in!

And when that happens, there is nothing standing between you, dear reader, and the long, entropic darkness a bad novel conceals. The soul-deadening void of dull writing. Nothing but the placid spruce of a friendly cover, a positive blurb, and an innocuous synopsis.

Even worse, some of our fellow citizenry, rightly allowed passage into these hallowed grounds from beyond the nether realms have not quite shaken the grip of this darkness. In truth, it waits for all of us, for our inattention, or our sloth, or our greed to get the better of us and when that happens, it strikes. Yes, even those select few who scale the wall and are published and published rightly may yet sink into the miring swamps of mediocrity and never return.

There is only one recourse, as far as I can see. Someone has to watch the watchmen.

So, getting back to the beginning, I realized that good criticism is in desperate need. Not easy, casual criticism. Not one paragraph, smells okay to me criticism. Criticism that pokes and prods at a novel, that hunts for the mediocre and decries it even in the works we most cherish. And before I sound too self-important, please don’t take this to mean that I consider myself the only one doing this. All that I’m saying is that, for whatever reason, an obscure blog written by a nobody like me wound up on the front page of google and while all of that may be cosmic chance, I’d like to think it was a sign that there are others out there willing to go to great lengths to find well thought-out criticism and that maybe, despite whatever misfortune it should bring me, I can provide that again. Here.

So in the coming days and months I’ll be reposting that review along with others and beginning to build up a new repository. I’m not entirely sure what it’s all going to look like. I should warn that I don’t want to spend my time entirely on what’s newly released because there are some very great books I’ve read that have a tragic lack of good criticism attached to them and some of them are already quite a few years old. I also encourage anyone with recommendations to email me as I’m always looking for more books to read.

Finally, humbly, I remind that while I will try for diligence, I make no guarantees that this will continue into the future. Writing the novel is still priority uno and it will take precedence above this as I see fit.

With much sincerity,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Watchman

Casey