It has occured to me, from time to time, that antagonizing the big science fiction and fantasy magazines is a bad idea. That perhaps, in a moment of extreme and utter boredom, one of the assistants that reads my submissions decides to google my name (yes, it is the first google hit, even above an African-American self-help author with the same and very scots-irish name (curse him for taking Brianmcclellan.com before me)). And that this assistant will read one of my "bad magazine" posts and I'll end up on a magazine's blacklist. Because they do have them.

And that would be a real pity. But apparently it hasn't deterred me enough. Besides, I like to think of my posts as educational. And helpful.

My writing is getting better. As usual, I have confidence in my latest piece, this time "Sassa Hin." It goes out tomorrow to the usual place.

F&SF February Issue

I read the February issue of F&SF today. I don't really read them in order... I have a stack of magazines on my tv stand that I'm trying to work through.

The first story, "Brain Raid," was pretty good. I give it 3/5. A future Earth science fiction with no clear reference to when it occurs, it gives us a day in the life of a repo-type investigator tracking a rogue AI and its acolytes.

The book reviews were a bit drab, and none of the books reviews caught my attention.

"Stone and the Librarian" was alright, but confusing in an annoying way. It just didn't connect. I gave it a 2 and a half out of 5.

I didn't last more than a couple pages through "A Helper and His Hero." I can't even give it a ranking. I just don't get most contemporary esoteric science fiction.

"Red Card," about a society in which random people are issued government red cards that let the user kill anyone they choose, was alright. Well written, interesting. I give it 3.5/5.

Finally, "Fool" was the best thing in the issue. It was a quality story about the life of a disfigured man who finds a little dark magic and rises up through the ranks of society to be the advisor of a noble and the guardian of the noble's grandchildren. I quite enjoyed it, and it's the only story in the issue that kept me anticipating the next page. 4/5.

"Scharling Lew" has been rejected by F&SF. The up side of this is that, while the last two stories have been rejected by the Assistant Editor, this one was rejected by the Editor. I have it on good authority that that means I made it past the first round but, well, didn't quite cut it.

Plans:

Finish "Sassa Hin" and submit it to F&SF.

Submit "Scharling Lew" to Glimmertrain.

Begin the untitled British historical fantasy.

Quiery IGMS by the end of January about "Hero Kyros." If I get a response/ rejection, then I'll submit it to the BYU short story contest. (By the way, if anyone knows the etiquette for sending a story to both a magazine and a local contest at once, let me know)

Tonight is the second meeting of Brandon’s Science Fiction and Fantasy writing class. We meet once a week for two and a half hours (half the time is lecture, half the time is workshopping). Brandon has put me in charge of a writing group for the semester, just as kind of an arbiter and submitter. I asked for people who were familiar with workshopping and with plenty of writing experience.

Right off the bat, I have a problem. Brandon wants us to each begin something completely new and write a 24,000 word novella during the course of the semester. This is a fantastic learning exercise because it, hopefully, forces us to finish something. He’s being kind of lenient with the idea though, and that’s where I face my first problem.

One of my group members is submitting to the workshop half way through a novel. She’s included an incredible amount of back-information, including a list of terms we need to know.

Hopefully tonight I will remedy this. I want my entire writing group to start from scratch. If we toss in half way through a novel, it jumbles and confuses things rather quickly and starts us off at a huge disadvantage. It will kill a lot of our time trying to sort it out and frankly, I think the class and its workshopping exercise will be completely useless to said member. The purpose of the exercise is to learn and accomplish and hopefully completely finish something by the end of the semester. If we don’t stay on target, we’ll have lost the integrity and usefulness of the class.

I will post a lesson on workshopping sometime in the next few weeks, when my own new one is well underway. I’m a bit rusty as it is, as I have not had the time nor inclination to be in a writing group for a while.

Sassa Hin is still in the works. I’m beginning an untitled Indo-British historical fantasy for Brandon’s class. I hope to finish at least 3 different short stories over the course of the class. I may work with old ideas of mine, but all of the writing will be completely new. I don’t want to waste my time or the time of my group members by tossing out old stuff.

Review: Battlefield Earth

Battlefield Earth is one big read.

I don’t really consider it a “devourable” book, but rather one you would want to read over the course of a few weeks. It’s somewhere between hard and soft SF— Hubbard doesn’t take too long to explain the principles of the future technology (thankfully sparing his readers) but does give us some explanations when we need them.

Issues I had with it: The dialogue comes off a bit dated, and therefore stilted. In one way it fits into the book, because it’s set one thousand years in the future and we have no idea how an almost-extinct human race would interact, but on the other hand, the advanced alien civilization of conquerors spoke (while in another language) almost identically to the humans.

On some levels the speed with which the heroes advance and learn technology and civilization is unbelievable, even with the teaching machines that they use. I found myself repeatedly saying, “heh, wow, this is ridiculous.” But it wasn’t enough that I couldn’t suspend disbelief.

Despite the fact that I couldn’t read it for more than an hour or two without taking a long break, BE is packed with action and is continually on the move. He gives a lot of setting description, especially during the second half of the book, but it doesn’t kill me too much.

Don’t mistake this for the really bad movie made a while back of the same name, starring John Travolta. I mean, the thing was awful. It was based off of the book, yes. But only loosely, as one would find out by reading a few chapters. The book has a much broader, epic sort of plot than the movie does.

Overall, I had a good time reading it. It’s certainly a single read—I won’t be picking this back up off the shelf anytime in the next few decades. And it was kind of like a time capsule, experiencing a science fiction epic written a while back. In some ways, it was quite novel (excuse the pun).

I give it 3/5 stars.

The problem with modern science fiction and fantasy magazines is that they’re, well, bad.

I know that I’ve been over this before. At length. But I can’t stress it enough. Especially when I get back to reading the stack of Azimov’s, Analog and F&SF that’s been piling up on my TV stand.

I had the opportunity to talk to Brandon Sanderson and Dave Wolverton about this phenomenon a few weeks before Christmas when they were doing a book signing with L.E. Modesitt at Provo mall. A large issue, they said, was that the editors of aforementioned magazines were attempting to find validation in the literary world.

Literary, in this context, is defined as such by our friend dictionary.com: “characterized by an excessive or affected display of learning; stilted; pedantic.”

The words ‘stilted’ and ‘pedantic’ are not two that any good creative fiction writer wants applied to their writing. In fact, ‘stilted’ is a downright insult. It means “this sounds like it was written by a sixth-grader with a good vocabulary and access to too much daytime television.”

Pedantic? If you write hard Science Fiction where most of your content is concerned with the minute details of the technology of your universe, then pedantic fits you just fine.

I’ve been overly worried lately about the content that we put into Leading Edge. While I do enjoy working on the magazine and reading new and interesting things, I find that a good portion of our published work is sub-par.

Hear me out. At least two stories in each issue are fantastic and make it well worth the read. Our contributors are mostly amateur and we don’t have the funding to pay nearly as much as the big pro-zines. We’re not even professional editors. It’s not an excuse. It’s a reason.

But while I think a lot of our content is sub-par, I enjoy reading it nonetheless. The plots tend to be well thought out and enjoyable. This is where I become furious with the big speculative fiction magazines. Their published work tends to be well written (though that is open to debate), well thought out and not in the least enjoyable.

I love Ghostbusters the movie. It is fabulously written and brings together an incredible cast of comedic actors and still leaves me in stitches despite being over twenty years old. It is a comedy. And part of the comedy is how thick they lay on the cheese. This is a line from Louis, played by Rick Moranis, who has been possessed:

“Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!”

Doesn’t that give you a headache just reading it? It sounds like an information dump from one of the early Dr. Who episodes.

The reason I bring this up? The first story in December’s Fantasy and Science Fiction, called “Bye the Rules,” sounds exactly like this. The entire story!

Now, I really couldn’t figure out if it was a satire or a comedy or a straight up science fiction. It could have been a bad satire, an unfunny comedy, or a really stilted science fiction. Either or, it wasn’t a pleasant read.

And I’m finding that far too much in these magazines. Readership is falling, interest is waning, and the editors seem to be on some sort of quest to gain acceptance of a collegiate few. The message doesn’t seem to be getting through to them— that the public doesn’t want to read the type of overbearing crap that they’re publishing. They want entertainment.

I could go on talking about the pros and cons of mass produced literature and what makes writing good and bad and how important it is to write to a lower level of sophistication—if you want to make money— because those points have a lot of bearing on what I’m saying.

Unfortunately, I can’t go on forever tonight. I simply beg that something be done about the type of writing stuffed into today’s magazines. Because when the magazines suffer, so will the entire science fiction and fantasy publishing industry. We’re in a whole new world, competing with awesome special effects and crack writers being paid infinitely more than we are. We can’t fall behind because of the distracted efforts of a few high and mighty.

I’m piping up for winter semester of my junior year at BYU. Building momentum. Getting ready to do a lot of work.

I’m in for a lot of writing this semester, and research and reading on top of that.

News:

I don’t find out about my grant proposal until the end of the week.

I’m taking a class about the history, context and mythology of King Arthur.

I start an editorial internship on Wednesday, 10 hrs a week.

I haven’t made any progress on “Sassa Hin,” but I plan to over the next week.

I’m going to audit Brandon Sanderson’s class every Thursday night.

I will be getting back to Leading Edge now that all the vacations are over.

I think that’s about it. I’m reading Battlefield Earth right now by L. Ron Hubbard. I guess that could go in news, but I wanted to talk about it a little bit. It was on the New York Times bestseller list and received cover quotes from Neil Gaimen and other prestigious authors. I’m about a quarter of the way in, and yes, it’s much better than the movie. The movie was terrible. But it also condensed an epic into two hours with a hackneyed script and bad actors.

So it’s a decent book. It doesn’t keep me riveted by Steven Erikson, but I don’t mind hitting it every day for an hour or two. Learning the different styles of epic-style writing is certainly interesting, especially because one is SF and one is fantasy. I only compare the two styles, of course, because they are the last two readers I’ve been reading.

I saw Children of Men last night. It was very good. I probably won’t ever watch it again. It just wasn’t a movie that lends itself to repeat watching. But it was definitely worth a theater visit. Twas well done, fast paced, intense, bloody and thought provoking.

Now, a movie like V for Vendetta I enjoyed simply for its entertainment value, but many people were critical of its political agenda and overt commentary of governing bodies. Children of Men was a very similar setting, surprisingly, with the world in chaos in the near future and Britain closed off as a fascist state. Don’t worry, other than the setting, there is absolutely nothing in common between the two.

In Children of Men, the world is in chaos not because of political maneuvering, but in response to the cataclysmic inability for mankind to reproduce. Women have become infertile. So that takes the political agenda out of it, which is cool, letting us concentrate simply on the craziness of the plot.

Good movie. See it.