Asimov's Science Fiction (23 page)

How has your editing helped your writing, if it has? How has it hurt your writing, if it has?

SILVERBERG: I don't think there's any relationship here.

DOZOIS: It can be helpful to see the approaches to writing that other writers have, it can be helpful to see what they do right, and it can also be helpful to see what they do wrong. It has occasionally hurt my writing by making me hypercritical, so that I train my laser eye on sentences as they appear and blow them to bits.

VANDERMEER: To give just one example—coediting
The Weird
anthology gave me an intensive, immersive master class in one hundred years of fiction like what I write. Seeing what was actually pastiche and all of those different approaches, and absorbing all of that in such a short time span, has irrevocably changed me as a writer. I will never be the same, and that's a good thing. I really can't think of a way that it has hurt my writing, except when an editing project has taken up more time than I envisioned and gotten in the way of finishing a novel. On the other hand, people have a hard time seeing someone as more than one thing. So when I have a lot of anthologies out, readers tend to forget I'm a writer first and foremost, which stings a little bit. That's one reason why I'm glad I'm headed into a period of focusing mostly on fiction.

Do you think there are qualities that a writer/editor brings to the work that an editor who has never published does not?

SILVERBERG: Most of the great science fiction editors—John W. Campbell, Horace Gold, Anthony Boucher, Gardner Dozois, Frederik Pohl—had been outstanding writers before they became editors. As writers they had to internalize the standards by which the best SF is measured, and as editors they applied those standards. On the other hand, a lot of perfectly good editors, like Robert W. Lowndes and Larry Shaw, had only modest careers as writers, but they were perceptive editors all the same. And Howard Browne, who hated science fiction, was a good writer nevertheless, but in another field—mystery stories. At the moment, I can think of only one absolutely first-rate editor who never wrote any fiction at all, Alice M. Turner of
Playboy,
though Bob Mills and. later, Ed Ferman of
F&SF
were very good in their way. And Sheila Williams is doing a fine job without any history of writing fiction that I know of.

DOZOIS: Don't know if there is—except maybe an appreciation of how many things can go wrong with a story, and what hard work it is for how little reward.

VANDERMEER: Inhabiting something from the inside out is definitely a different perspective, but I'm not sure it provides an advantage or disadvantage. I tend to be taking off my writer hat and putting on the editor hat when editing anthologies.

What gives you the most pleasure as an editor? The biggest headache?

SILVERBERG: The biggest pleasure was pulling that Dozois story out of the envelope and discovering that although every fifth word was misspelled, it was a masterpiece. The biggest headache involved another story in
New Dimensions
that got bollixed at the printer after I had read the galleys. The author, when he saw the finished book, was irate and demanded that the entire edition be pulped and reprinted. I tried to explain that the botch, which I regretted, had occurred after I had had my last chance to see the pages, and that he stood very little chance of getting the publisher to agree to his request. But he wouldn't shut up, and, since I was going through a difficult patch in my non-editing life just then, I finally told him to go away and leave me alone and never darken my mailbox with a manuscript again. Eventually I made peace with him, many years later.

DOZOIS: Biggest pleasure is finding really good stories, especially in discovering really good new writers that nobody else is appreciating yet and helping them reach a wider audience. The biggest headache is finding a story that
would
be a really good story except that there's something wrong with it—and then figuring out what's wrong with it and how to fix it; that's where the real skull-sweat comes in, but it's also very rewarding when you get it right.

VANDERMEER: I think three things give pleasure: reading and selecting stories, finding unusual and rare material that's brilliant, and the process of then seeing how it all fits together in a useful and interesting pattern. There's also the thrill of the hunt in tracking down permissions, but that is also a horrifying process at times. The biggest headache is probably dealing with difficult estates and degraded estates. We have a ton of horror stories regarding getting permissions for the stories in
The Weird.
That can wear you down mentally.

exit

When I was an aspiring writer, I had a skewed idea of what an editor does. Because the gatekeepers to my dream career in SF were raining rejections on my mailbox, I thought that their primary mission in life was to say
No!
to me and my fellow pretenders. At convention panels, editors would declare that the way to understand their tastes was to read their magazines. But not only had I been reading the magazines, I'd been
studying
them. And you know what? While I could get a general sense of what they might buy from reading, there didn't seem to be any rules. In fact, inexplicable outliers would regularly appear in their ToCs. Another thing editors tell aspiring writers: "Don't try to edit my magazine for me." By which they mean, "Don't decide that your story isn't an
Asimov's
story, or an
Analog
story based on your analysis of what we've been buying. Send it to us and let us decide."

It was maddening! Read to learn the rules, only you can't know the rules!

I realize now that I had a perspective problem. New writers obsess about the many difficulties of breaking into print. Editors and their readers, not so much. Notice that these illustrious editors mention rejection only in passing, if at all. Instead they describe the pleasures of discovering new talent, of working with their authors, and of improving the genre.

Despair not, oh ye unpublished! The editors are eagerly waiting for your best. They really are on your side.

February 2014 leads off with "Schools of Clay," an exciting new hard science fiction novelette by
Derek Künsken.
The action never lets up in this fast-paced tale about aliens whose life cycle incorporates time travel and black holes. First-time
Asimov's
author,
Maurice Broaddus,
wraps up the issue with a thrilling steampunk novelette set in an alternate Jamaica. History is wonderfully re-imagined and explored in the life-and-death struggle for "Steppin' Razor"!

Sarah Pinsker
travels through space to make her
Asimov's
debut with a poignant look at a recently widowed photographer offered the chance to document "The Transdimensional Horsemaster Rabbis of Mpumalanga Province";
Jason K. Chapman
investigates life after "The Long Happy Death of Oxford Brown"; long-published, but new to
Asimov's,
author
Marissa Lingen
lightens our mood with the insightful "Ask Citizen Etiquette";
M. Bennardo
treats us to a wistful "Last Day at the Ice Man Café"; and "Ball and Chain,"
Maggie Shen King's
first story for
Asimov's,
reveals the future of marriage in a gender imbalanced China.

Robert Silverberg's
Reflections presents us with the startling joy of "Rereading Philip José Farmer";
Peter Heck's
On Books muses on the works of Connie Willis, Catherynne M. Valente, Chris Moriarty, and others; plus we'll have an array of poetry that you're sure to enjoy! Look for our February issue on sale at newsstands on December 17, 2013. Or subscribe to
Asimov's
(in paper format or in downloadable varieties) by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com
.
We're also available individually or by subscription on
Amazon.com's
Kindle and Kindle Fire,
BarnesandNoble.com's
Nook,
ebookstore.sony.com's
eReader,
Zinio.com,
and from
magzter.com/magazines!

new stories by
Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Cat Rambo, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Swanwick, Matthew Johnson, Fran Wilde, Mike Resnick & Ken Liu, Sandra McDonald, Ian Creasey, Jay O'Connell, J.M. McDermott, Sylvain Jouty, Karl Bunker, James Patrick Kelly, Jeremiah Tolbert, Peter Wood, James Van Pelt, Genevieve Williams, Dominica Phetteplace, Sean Monaghan, K.J. Zimring, Will McIntosh,
and many others!

Assuredly, "M.C. Planck" is the best name ever for a happening SF writer. It combines a rapper's hipness with scientific laboratory cred. I am going to assume that the possessor of that byline came by it through an accident of birth and parental dispensation, and not by his own invention, and that, having been endowed with such a potent moniker, he was forced by sheer nominative determinism to enter our field.

But all kidding aside, M.C. Planck has the requisite chops his name implies. His debut novel,
The Kassa Gambit
(Tor, hardcover, $24.99, 288 pages, ISBN 978-0-7653-3092-5) is the pure quill, a space adventure solidly planted in the middle of the genre's vast dominant lineage. Certainly not postmodern or "new space opera," it might have come from the pen of Poul Anderson or Gordon Dickson, Keith Laumer or James Schmitz, yet feels contemporary, dynamic, and authentic, not mere vintage pastiche. We might very well be witness here to the start of a career to match John Scalzi's.

Planck starts his novel rousingly. Captain Prudence Falling, merchant trader of the starship
Ulysses,
is bringing a prosaic shipment of farm machinery to the planet Kassa, when she discovers the planet has been recently blasted to flinders. Narrowly avoiding destruction herself, she lands to offer aid to the survivors.

This chapter displays Planck's verve and dramatic abilities. He sketches Prudence and her motley crew with economy and vigor. Particularly affecting is the character of Jorgun, a simple-minded giant with certain idiot savant powers. At the same time, meaty background information on the reigning loosely linked interstellar polity is deftly dropped into the action.

The second chapter introduces Lt. Kyle Daspar, ostensibly a simple cop, but now attached to the military. He arrives at Kassa shortly after Prudence. But Daspar is not what he seems. He's involved in big subterranean political conspiracies up to his neck, centering around a group called the League and their enemies. Kyle and Prudence are quickly thrown together on Kassa, and have some hair-raising experiences that link their fates even after they depart that world and return separately to the human
okimune.
In alternating chapters, the events on Kassa bloom into worlds-shattering consequences with life-or-death fallout for our heroes (including some unlikely, but believable romantic feelings between the mismatched pair).

Besides running his vibrant protagonists through breakneck action, Planck also takes time to offer some great speculations, such as why interstellar empires wouldn't necessarily happen.

"[C]ommunications [between star systems] had to be carried by hand. Radio didn't travel through [FTL] nodes. This had an unappreciated effect on social development. You could get anywhere on a planet in a few hours with a low-orbital flight. You could reach anywhere on a planet with vid comm instantly. People grew up that way, thinking of their whole world as one small place. That made the several-day trip through a node into a hurdle that most never bothered to leap.... Nothing had done more to still-birth stellar empires than this reflexive laziness." It's a kind of galactic version of Simak's famous "Huddling Place" thesis that I don't think I've seen before.

Additionally, Planck's future—set several centuries from now—has the same kind of charming misapprehended sense of history found in Laumer & Brown's
Earthblood:
"Not that anybody even knew what a Tibetan monk was. Half the sources said they were religious zealots, and the other half said they were super-soldiers with magic powers." This kind of thing makes for a light and lively and quirky setting. Finally, the enigma surrounding the politician Veram Dejae brings to my mind one of Jack Vance's great signature motifs, the quest for the queer and deadly secrets of a criminal or parvenu.

Working a central stratum of the genre that others might have marked as played-out, M.C. Planck discovers there are still plenty of riches in them thar stars.

Emma Newman's first novel for adults,
Between Two Thorns
(Angry Robot, trade paper, $14.99, 380 pages, ISBN 978-0-85766-321-4) is a lively, engaging, inventive and robust... portal fantasy. Given that the entire internet has within recent memory concluded that portal fantasies are an extinct and disliked form of imaginative literature, Newman's triumph is all the more noteworthy.

The category of portal fantasy generally involves two worlds: our consensual, normative one, and some adjacent, more magical dimension to which not everyone has easy access. Think of Narnia as the uber-example. The rap against such structural conceits is that all too often the connections between the baseline world and the stranger world are minimal and inconsequential, rendering the subcreation dominant—and so why not just have an untethered fantasy milieu standing self-sufficient by itself? Obviously, there have been plenty of exceptions to this defect. One might cite even good science fictional versions, such as Charles Stross's
Merchant Princes
series.

Newman's book, volume 1 in the Split Worlds saga, does not neglect to yoke her two worlds tightly together, with plenty of cause and effect and consequence. Citizens from each influence their otherworldly counterparts in spades.