My passion for books is not simple…I love books.

Little books that hardly trifle the mind and are consumed like candy; Heavy books that draw you down into the deep places of the heart and soul; Surprising books that seem to be one thing and achieve loftier things all together before they finish.  I love old books.  I love old styles of storytelling.  I love things that revel in the best parts of past times, and the worst parts of the past peoples that breathe life into the pages.  And I love the fantastic; the “beyond the horizon”, “over the edge”, “the stuff of dreams and nightmares” kind of fantastic.

I’ve felt frustrated recently, that the last crop of fantastic fiction stood on the promises of prior works and forms and did very little to actually find a new voice.  While there have been many exceptions (like Gaiman and De Lint and Valente), there seems to have been an overall dearth of voices with something new to say.  While there is nothing wrong with revisiting proven styles, and capitalizing on well worn (and obviously popular) paths, there was something wearisome in the last crop of stories being offered.

“Oh, look, another vampire novel.  I wonder if that one features ghosts…why yes, yes it does.  Not-Quite-Buffy the Secret Agent/Super Hero/Vampire Slayer meets the-dark-and-brooding-embodiment-of-angst-who-might-be-but-isn’t-really-evil.  Again.”

If you’re going to create something new from the old, at least try to make something compelling.

Which brings me to my most recent read, less than an hour from my fingers; I have just closed the cover on Johnathan Barnes “The Somnambulist” and I find myself delightfully conflicted.

Either this book is the single best expansion of a genre by parody of, tweaking, teasing and generally robbing wholesale from that genre with the delighted earnestness of a child turned loose in a chocolate factory…

…or it was the worst Frankenstein’s monster of stitched together plagiarism ever perpetrated on the literary world at large.

The fact that it leaves that question in doubt is probably a testament to the sheer power and quality of the book as a whole, and of Mr. Barnes as an author.

Also, I assure you the entire “Frankenstein’s Monster” allusion is a compliment.

As a lover of Victoriana in almost all of its forms, and especially its literature, this book held the promise of swimming, no drowning, in a celebration of the delights of fiction from the 19^th century.  From Conan Doyle to Dickens, Poe to Prescott, and From Shelly (Mary) to…well…Shelly (Byce Percy), this book covers an almost impossibly wide spectrum.

Almost every element of this novel is taken from somewhere else.  If you’ve read the fiction that it idolizes, then you’ve likely read EVERY SINGLE SENTINCE in this book before.  Not in this order, perhaps not with these exact spellings…but at its core it is the literary embodiment of Mary Shelly’s titular protagonist:  It is hulking, brooding, made of dead things, easily misunderstood, and with a pure heart and a wonderfully unusual execution.

It begins with a self effacing authorial note, a declaration that the narrator is unapologetically unreliable, and then introduces a set of characters stolen IN WHOLE from the most famous stories in its genre’s heyday.  The protagonist, one Edward Moon, is less a homage to Edwin Drood and more a repurposing of him for a new tale.  The titular character is lifted directly, name and all, from “The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari” and even the minor character of “Mina the bearded whore” is clearly drawn from the sideshow freaks popular in 19^th century traveling shows (and the fiction written about them).

Mina, like every character presented in the first two thirds of the book, is a bit of a nesting box puzzle.  She’s a complexly rendered character who is both sympathetic and villainous without being something so cardboard as “merely evil” in the typical sense, nor is she a sympathetic damsel-in-distress female archetype ether. Like so many things in this book, she is a disconcerting mixture of both.

And this is where the narrative device will get you, as the narrator is professedly unreliable from the beginning with an abject hatred of the hero; you never really know what parts of the story are intentionally misrepresented to present the hero in the worst possible light.  Nothing here is cut-and-dried, nothing is easy to follow.  Yet, the book is as engaging and involving as anything I’ve read in ages.

Because the book makes no attempt to paint the hero or his companions in a positive light (and in fact goes to great lengths to convince you that everyone is equally undesirable and driven by unsound motives) you often get conflicting pictures of the characters and their actions from chapter to chapter.

The whole literary device is built up and suspended like a masterful house of cards right up until the final sequence plays out.  The close of the book is a kinetic, chaotic, confusing sequence of catastrophes and cataclysms that play out in Victorian London in a sequence of events that you can’t trust the narrator to render in either proper order or even with functional descriptions.

Much of the resolution point of the story is revealed as a fait accompli catalyzed by a pair of deus ex machina (dis ex machina?) who’s motivations are so poorly defined that they undermine the already unhinged narrator beyond any hope of even minute believability.

Which might well be the point of the whole work, that chaos begats chaos, and that as our society becomes more and more inclusive and chaotic and dependant on things beyond our individual control, society itself becomes the monster.

Or…Johnathan Barnes has completely lost his ever loving mind and let Rhesus Monkeys on crack write the last chapters while blindfolded, dictating the whole thing to a text-to-speech system with the language recognition system set for “Ugaritic” instead of “English” (or even “Monkey” for that matter).

The ultimate question is “did I like it?” And the answer is “no.”

On the one hand I loved it.  It was challenging and yet compellingly readable.  Great characters, a wonderful literary device, and overall execution of both “a book” and “a story” that was excellent on multiple levels.

On the other hand, I’d have a hard time recommending it to anyone.  The content is so genre specific, if you don’t love the source material, you won’t enjoy the resulting effort.  Also, the ending is a challenge.  It challenges logic, patience, and one’s ability to afford an author the privilege of telling his story in his own way.

This was an experience where I got to the end and immediately had to ask myself “what in the ever-loving-FUCK was that?!?”  Not a negative thing by any stretch, but not something that can easily be recommended to someone else either.

For myself, it was wonderful and I’ll read it again; and I look forward to Johnathan Barnes next book with great anticipation.  For anyone else, I simply invite you to read at your own risk.

This is a new thing made from old things, and a complex thing made from simple parts.  It has a heart and a soul, but like so many delicate things, it meets its end in a disturbing, sudden, and somewhat difficult way.

Long ago and far away, I was a regular reader and poster to the rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan newsgroup. Of all the people who participated there, none were more insightful than TNH and PNH; mysterious acronyms who seemed to have some kind of inside scoop on the goings-on happening behind closed doors at Tor Books, Robert Jordan’s publisher.

Soon it was revealed (or at least publicized more widely) that TNH and PNH were known in the “real world” as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (yes, their name is double unhyphenated, and if you want to understand that better please read more about it here).

Patrick and Teresa are MAJOR names in the SF-F publishing world.  Patrick is a Hugo Award wining editor for Tor, and Teresa is a sort of editor-at-large for Tor who seems to operate on a slightly more freelance basis…from her office…in the Flatiron Building…with the rest of the Tor employees…so…yeah.  I don’t really get how that works either.  Anyway, they are both inextricably linked with Tor publishing. Patrick seems to edit more “hard SF” stuff and Teresa edits more “fantasy” related material; although there are many MANY exceptions to that little rule-of-thumb, and they both have incredible relationships with MANY major names in publishing on both sides of the table.

Together they represent well more than half a century of publishing experiance, writer education, fanzine publishing, and just general love of the SF-F genre and tireless work furthering the genre’s exposure to more and more fans.

Did I mention that they’re really nice people?  It’s always easier to take really tough advice from nice people, and they are really good at dishing out the really tough advice.

Years ago, they each had individual weblogs up and running before weblogs were the cool thing to do(tm).  A few years later they consolidated their individual blogs into the new and improved (and quite possibly all powerful) Making Light.

Lots and lots of different things pass across the front page of Making Light.  You want politics?  Making Light has got you covered. Want to know everything there is to know about emergency response best practices?  They’ve got you covered.  Want a collection of the funniest and/or weirdest links EVER?  Making Light’s particles have TOTALLY got you covered.

But, at the end of the day, the best posts and comment threads are the ones that touch on the actual industry of publishing. For your reading pleasure, and industry elucidation, I direct you to the post entitled “Slushkiller” and the incredible trove of knowledge encapsulated therein.

Yes, the post is a long one.  Yes, there are more than 700 comments.  Yes, there’s more industry knowledge contained in that one page than some people can get in YEARS of college and industry employment.  Take a quick scan of the names in the comments section…yes, that John Scalzi…yes, THAT Elizabeth Bear…YES, THAT Jo Walton.  And yes, that REALLY IS Niel Gaiman.

Additional names that might not ring a bell but are of note none the less:

Melissa Singer - Prominent Editor.
Beth Mecham - Prominent Editor.
Charlie Stross - Author.
Jim McDonnald - Author and prominent member of the SFWA.
John M Ford – Author, Poetic Genius, Man of Great Thoughts; and a man sadly missed.

I can assure you that there are several (dozen?) other names that are notable that I just haven’t made the mental connection with while writing this post. Off the top of my head there’s about a half-dozen Hugo/John W. Campbell/Locust/Mythopoetic awards involved in the conversation. There are major international conventions that can’t put together a panel with that many notables discussing the basics of “getting published” in the industry today.

Everything starts with a discussion of rejection letters. More specifically, the nature of author reactions to rejection letters.  Which leads to a discussion of the whys of rejection letters, which leads to a truly wonderful discussion of what editors are looking for that will climb off of the slushpile and into the ranks of the published.

I should make a confession here, due to truly random and fortunate circumstances I have never received a rejection letter. Yet.

My submissions so far have resulted in publications, the few that I have. I don’t really think this means anything other than I haven’t submitted very much. I anticipate rejections by the metric ton. Not because I think poorly of my writing, but because I recognize that first,  more material is rejected than published; and (almost by direct corollary) second, even otherwise publishable material might not fit the buying needs of the editor it was submitted to.

Publishing is a business. It exists to make money for a few people by getting (hopefully) many people to pay their own hard earned money for publications containing the writings of authors paid a percentage of the anticipated money up front. Publishers make money by finding material that the maximum number of people want to pay money for. It doesn’t matter if you write the most unusual, innovative, unexpected or avant-guard string of words ever produced if publishers can’t reliably take a risk on it. And let’s be clear, all publishing is a risk. What might seem like a bestseller-in-waiting may never find an audiance. What might seem like a concept destined to reach two people and thier cat could end up being the next Harry Potter. Publishers are always taking a risk. Publishers hire editors to find and develop authors that can write books/magazines/whatever that will actually SELL to people with money.

(Editors develop relationships with agents who are also in the business of finding and representing authors, but that is a whole different ball game that I will save for a future post).

An editor’s job isn’t easy by ANY stretch of the imagination. Many thousands of people every year want to be writers. Only a tiny fraction of those people write well enough for publishers to be able to sell thier writing to others. Of that tiny fraction, there is the incredible difficulty in matching the right story to the right publisher. The job of matching those two falls to the editor. Sometimes the right book will go to the wrong publisher, and get rejected.  Sometimes the wrong book from the right writer will cross the desk of an editor at the right publisher, and it too will be rejected. Rejection happens. A lot.

Imagine if you will, what happens when a perfectly good short story crosses the desk of an editor at a major mothly magazine. Imagine that the story features aliens meeting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.  It’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s PERFECT for the winter double issue. Unfortunately, the editor just closed the book on this year’s winter double issue last week and he already bought a story with aliens and another story featuring Santa vs. an autonomous stealth fighter. There simply isn’t any room for this perfectly good story.

But the editor takes it upon himself to send a personal rejection letter explaining that there’s no place for this particular story, praising the merits of the story and encouraging the author to submit it to other markets, AND indicating that he’d like to see something else from the author.

As a writer, I can assure you that I would LOVE to get a rejection letter like that. Unfortunately, there are countless many writers out there who would take that letter as a devastatingly personal blow.  See the Slushkiller post for the sad proof.

For those writers, it has stopped being a business; it has become a calling. In the last few years, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who honestly believe that there is simply NO ONE in the universe qualified to “judge” their immaculate conceptions. Not their friends and peers, not money grubbing agents, and certainly not some ivory tower ensconced editor who thinks they can dictate the value of ART from on high.

If you think professional writing is anything other than performing a job for a business, you are barking mad. When you want to write “for pay” you need to realize that someone else is writing the check. Quite simply, that means that you are performing a job. You are not, in fact, providing a service to posterity. When you have a job, you have a boss; when you have a boss, you should listen to them. Generally, they’re the boss for a reason.

Slushkiller pretty much explains the entire editor perspective in detail from some of the most powerful editors in the SF-F publishing world. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all really nice people?

If you have ANY desire to write SF-F, or even just a desire to understand the publishing industry better, I can’t recommend Making Light enough. There really isn’t anything else like it.