"Some readers may find themselves thrown off balance by the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness—"

As a follow-up to the Green Man Review of Slow Bullets that I posted on June 8....

Let me repeat a brief paragraph that I wrote at the beginning of that June 8 blog post: If you are unfamiliar with the various works of author Alastair Reynolds, then Slow Bullets would be the perfect starting point. If you read Alastair Reynolds already, preferring his longer novels and series work -- still, don't deny yourself the pleasure of reading this story, as Slow Bullets has more ideas than some novels that are twice its length.

And if you doubt, or question, my words, here's a few excerpts from the very lengthy review of Slow Bullets from the Los Angeles Review of Books. The review, by Stan Hunter Kranc, is entitled "The Persistence (and Failure) of Memory":

Alastair Reynolds's Slow Bullets opens with poetry and a war crime.

The poet is Giresun, the fictional poet laureate for the Central Worlds, one side in a bloody sectarian conflict. Although the novel's narrator, a former soldier called Scur, fought instead for the Peripheral Systems (where reading the enemy's "propaganda" was illegal), the poet was especially meaningful to her family and to the soldier herself as a link to long-lost loved ones.

The war crime is perpetrated at the conflict's end: Scur grimly reports her own capture and subsequent torture by a group of renegade soldiers, led by the infamous war criminal Orvin. Though the details evoke a rape, the instrument of Scur's torment is technological: the slow bullets that give the novella its name.

Readers unfamiliar with the larger body of the Reynolds's work — a dozen novels and an impressive number of short stories, novellas, and collections — may be startled by the prose, which is disarmingly clinical, punctuated by instances of visceral phrasing. Some readers may find themselves thrown off balance by the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness — or by the abrupt shift in circumstances that immediately follows: Scur awakens on an apparently derelict ship, surrounded by feuding soldiers from both sides of the conflict, and with no memory of how she came to be there. Readers familiar with Reynolds's work, however, will know that these two threads must be intertwined. Reynolds is practiced in tying together apparently unrelated elements, and by the end of the story, the text irrevocably links bullet and poet.

...

Slow Bullets, however, marks a development in Reynolds's writing. As a storyteller, we see him experimenting with both the form and manner of narrative. We come to understand that the text's "flaws" (that it is often repetitive and sometimes obtuse) are deliberate artifacts of its narration, a glimpse into the inner workings of Scur's mind and motivations. As a writer, we see a more overtly thoughtful work examining the philosophical, technological, and social issues of memory. Most immediately, Scur is haunted by memories of lost family, Giresun's verse, and Orvin's torment. The war criminal is hiding somewhere aboard the ship, and Scur's quest for vengeance quickly draws in others. However, Orvin is not the only such criminal. With the exception of the hopelessly outnumbered ship's crew and civilian population, all aboard are dressed identically, and although it is known some are honest veterans and some are prisoners, the ability to distinguish friend from foe and good from wicked is a separate problem of memory.

...

Like so much of Reynolds's other writing, the message of Slow Bullets is ultimately ambivalent. Although Reynolds excels at weaving different threads together, his knots are convoluted, difficult things. Again, were this an "old" space opera, Scur's exploits in unifying the crew and forging a tentative peace would be heroic. Instead, a twist or two at the end reminds the reader that Reynolds is too pragmatic to write anything so unequivocal. Slow Bullets is a story of revenge and redemption, high-tech problems and low-tech solutions, and the preservation of memory through surrendering the past — the failure to forgive but the possibility to forget.

Please read the full review at the Los Angeles Review of Books online. And, you can also read of my work on Slow Bullets in my "Editing in Process" blog post.

Two Holes-in-One and a Bogey

This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with golf -- sorry, golf fans... -- I just happened to like this title that I came up with to represent the three recent reviews for my anthology Alien Contact (Night Shade Books).

I'll start with the two holes-in-one because we always want to boast first about the best -- our best golf swing, the humongous fish we caught, stealing home....

This first review is courtesy of Bob Blough, and published on Tangent online on January 30. After providing readers with the complete list of stories included in the volume, Bob opens his review with the following:

Alien Contact is an intelligently edited anthology of 26 first contact stories. And thankfully, Mr. Halpern has decided to mine the last 30 years for his selections, eschewing more well-known and oft-reprinted old favorites from earlier decades. So, this is a huge anthology favoring more contemporary SF and it acquits itself wonderfully. I do not agree with all of the editor's choices and can think of others I would have preferred, but so many terrific stories are gathered together in one place that everyone who likes this theme or is interested in learning more about it will perhaps find some new gems.

In the review, Bob focuses on "a few of [his] favorites." In particular, he singles out Pat Cadigan's story "Angel," which he refers to as "the best story of the batch (and one of my top SF stories of all time)."¹ Bob's other faves include stories by George Alec Effinger ("a story with the perfect title"), Neil Gaiman ("read it and revel"), Mike Resnick ("a sadly moving tale, albeit a joy to read"), Michael Swanwick ("a complex and beautiful novelette"), Molly Gloss ("bravura performance"), Robert Silverberg ("a terrific read"), Nancy Kress ("clever and a delightful entertainment"), and Stephen Baxter ("the final story is one of the best").

Bob concludes his lengthy review with this paragraph:

These are but a double handful of my favorites; others by Paul McAuley, Bruce McAllister, Jeffrey Ford and a number of others serve this anthology well. If you are new to most of these stories or want to reacquaint yourself with some favorites – get this book. I thank Mr. Halpern for his knowledgeable selections. Alien Contact was a kick to read.

Grasping at Aliens

In previous blog posts I've mentioned the significant role that book review bloggers play in today's publishing wars -- by bringing titles that aren't always reviewed by the mainstream press to the attention of book readers and buyers. Take Alien Contact for example: it's an all-reprint anthology from independent press Night Shade Books, and even though the book contains stories by such "name" authors as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name only three, it hasn't gotten a great deal of attention amongst mainstream publications, with the exception of Library Journal and The Guardian.

That's why book review blogs are so important to an anthology like Alien Contact and to a publisher like Night Shade Books. A typical reader doesn't have access to Kirkus Reviews or Publishers Weekly -- mostly because these publications are designed for libraries and bookstores and are far too expensive. But what a typical reader does have access to are the hundreds (thousands?) of free online book review blogs, such as John Ottinger's "Grasping for the Wind science fiction & fantasy news & reviews" blog.

I mention this blog specifically because John recently reviewed my Alien Contact anthology.

What I appreciate in particular about this review is that John addresses each of the twenty-six stories in the anthology. He doesn't necessarily like, or even understand, all of the stories, but he gives equal attention to each, which allows the reader to assess the overall content and quality of the book as a whole. As the book's editor, I'm gratified to see every author mentioned, not just the most popular or well-known authors.

Here are just a couple (well, maybe three) of Ottinger's individual story reviews:

Karen Joy Fowler's "Face Value" is a tragic story of a man and wife team sent to an alien planet to make contact with the moth-like intelligence found there. Taki is the xenobiologist and Hesper, his wife, a poet. Taki thrives, but Hesper becomes more and more depressed until even her poet's soul is lost. Fowler's sad story is about transcendence and the place where beauty comes from. It's about relationship too. Taki and Hesper's inability to understand one another has its echo in Taki's inability to communicate with the natives. There is a haunting beauty to Fowler's story that will leave you pondering long after you read it.

I have to admit that I don't really get "Guerrilla Mural of Siren's Song" by Ernest Hogan. The story appears to be about a street artist who encounters sirens deep in the winds of Jupiter. It's also a love paean to a dead woman. Art and experience combine in an experiential tale of whirling emotions and unreliable narration. It's likely to be the favorite story in the anthology of people with a less analytical and more artistic bent than myself, but for me it was rather confusing.

"If Nudity Offends You" by Elizabeth Moon is another story I have read before. In this one, a court secretary, living in a trailer park, finds that her neighbors have been illegally tapping into her electricity. Most of the story is about her confrontation with these odd foreigners who wear no clothes in their trailer, talk funny, and seem slightly off. The whole story builds up to a surprise ending that makes you wonder if these foreigners were not just from a distant land, but from a different planet entirely. It's a close encounter that is discovered only after the fact.

John concludes his review with the following observation:

Alien Contact is a title that might be slightly misleading. This is not an anthology of first contacts but rather a collection of encounters with the other, what we choose to call the alien, the ineffable, the different and unknowable. Halpern's anthology is an excellent collection of tales that share a theme in common, but that manage to postulate widely different scenarios

As I said, these are only three of the twenty-six individual story reviews; you'll find John Ottinger's complete review on Grasping for the Wind.

Alien Contact Gets the Silver Treatment

When I posted the first review of my Alien Contact anthology, I noted the importance of online book reviewers/book bloggers and book review sites such as Goodreads: all critical resources to those who read and purchase books. There will be no shortage of reviews of Stephen King's 11/22/63 this holiday season. I even found copies of King's book at Costco. But what I want to learn more about are the lesser known indie/small press titles, and authors, and so I am especially grateful to those who review and support these types of books.

One such book reviewer is Steven Silver, who publishes his reviews under Silver Reviews, hosted online by SFSite. In Steven's most recent review, for Alien Contact, he writes:

...In 1898, H. G. Wells described that first contact as a Martian invasion of England's Horsell Common resulting in death and mayhem until the aliens are brought low. Murray Leinster wrote about a less dire alien contact in 1945, in which humans and aliens worked to ensure they wouldn't destroy each other. Editor Marty Halpern has now brought together twenty-six stories of alien contact in a book called, appropriately enough, Alien Contact.

[...]

Karen Joy Fowler is responsible for writing one of the strangest first contact stories ever published, the novel Sarah Canary, so the inclusion of her story "Face Value" is quite fitting, and quite different from her famous novel. In this story, as with so many other first contact stories, part of the puzzle that needs to be solved revolves around finding a means of communication between two different species, a theme which dates back to Leinster's "First Contact."

[...]

The stories Halpern has selected not only demonstrate the different slants authors can take on...alien contact, but also explore what it means to be alien in different ways and also depict numerous writing styles, with humor, drama, military, and nostalgia all playing a role. As these stories demonstrate, the science fiction genre provides a playground in which authors cane use the tropes and styles of a wide variety of other genres in crafting entertaining, as well as insightful, stories.

In his review, Steven mentions a number of other stories in the anthology, in addition to the story by Karen Joy Fowler. Please head on over to Silver Reviews for the full review of Alien Contact, which has been published by Night Shade Books.

The Guardian Aliens

If you happen to reside in the United Kingdom -- and if you were to read the reviews section in today's issue of The Guardian -- you would have seen Keith Brooke's review of Alien Contact.

Keith Brooke is the mastermind behind infinity plus. Though the site hasn't been active since 2007 (it was launched in August 1997), the archives remain online, and if you are a fan and/or student of science fiction and fantasy, you need to have this site bookmarked for reference. As the website itself states: "more than 2.1 million words of fiction, 1000 book reviews and 100 interviews." And now, under the infinity plus banner, Keith is publishing infinity plus singles -- "science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime ebooks for Kindle, Nook and other e-readers."

Of course, not everyone resides in the U.K, and even those who do don't necessarily subscribe to The Guardian. So, the Alien Contact review can also be found on The Guardian online. Keith's review is short, but sweet, and concludes with: "As with any collection, it's easy to debate the editor's choices, but in most cases the selections are spot on, making this an anthology which, restrictive as the theme might appear, serves as an excellent snapshot of modern SF."

I like that: "serves as an excellent snapshot of modern SF."

Alien Contact -- Another Giveaway, Another Review

During the past three weeks, speculative fiction blog SF Signal has hosted a series of guest blog posts and interviews with some of the Alien Contact authors. I've been posting the links here on More Red Ink, but if you're just learning about this now, or you think you may have missed one of the guest posts or an interview or two -- SF Signal has graciously posted a recap, with links, of the entire series.

And, for the denouement, SF Signal is currently hosting an Alien Contact giveaway: a signed (by me) copy of the print edition for the winning U.S. resident, and a copy of the ebook edition (MOBI or EPUB) for the winning non-U.S. resident. The giveaway ends on November 22, so readers still have four more days to add their name to the proverbial hat. Details.

* * * *

Here's a recent review of Alien Contact that appeared in Library Journal:

Alien Contact. Night Shade. Dec. 2011. c.500p. ed. by Marty Halpern. ISBN 9781597802819. pap. $15.99. SF

From Paul McAuley's lyrically somber tale of zombielike aliens ("The Thought War") to Stephen Baxter's story of the last alien message to Earth ("Last Contact"), the 26 tales collected here demonstrate both the variety of alien-contact literature and the enduring popularity of this sf subgenre. VERDICT With strong stories from Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Mike Resnick, Pat Murphy, and other sf luminaries, this is a choice volume for sf fans and a good introduction to extraterrestial encounter stories.

— Library Journal Reviews, November 15, 2011

I'm hopeful that, with this positive review, my anthology will find its way to a lot of library shelves throughout the U.S.

Alien Contact was reviewed in LJ with a gaggle of other science fiction and fantasy titles, including two other anthologies also published by Night Shade Books. The reviews can be read in their entirety online on Reviews.LibraryJournal.com.

Gardner Dozois Investigates Alien Contacts

Writer, editor, anthologist, reviewer -- Gardner Dozois is all of these, and more. If you read science fiction, and short stories in particular, and you are not familiar with Gardner's many (many!) anthologies -- specifically The Year's Best Science Fiction series, now in its twenty-eighth year -- then I would be compelled to ask you: What planet are you from?

So I was thrilled to learn that Gardner Dozois reviewed my anthology, Alien Contact (along with other short fiction titles), in the November issue of Locus magazine.

The review clocks in at a brief 139 words (according to MS Word), but brief is good, as long as the review says what it needs to say, and mentions so many great authors and stories in the process.

There's no confusion about genre classification in Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern—it's just what it says that it is, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction, and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot-'em-up Alien Invasion movies we got over the last year or so. This is another really solid reprint anthology, and another excellent value for your money. The best stories here are probably Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," Michael Swanwick's "A Midwinter's Tale," Bruce McAllister's "Kin," Molly Gloss's "Lambing Season," Pat Cadigan's "Angel," Paul McAuley's "The Thought War," and Nancy Kress's "Laws of Survival," but there are also good stories by Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others.... there's really nothing bad here.

— Gardner Dozois, Locus, November 2011

Writing 101: Don't Respond to Negative Reviews

I had just begun my month-end Links & Things wrap-up when I realized that the following item would take quite a few more words and space than a single paragraph, so I'm going to post this one point, and then follow with the monthly Links & Things blog post.

The major editing/publishing controversy this past month surrounded author Jacqueline Howett. The controversy began innocently enough when BigAl's Books and Pals website reviewed Howett's self-published novel The Greek Seaman. The entire review, including the title and author of the book, and the fact that it received two stars, only came to a total of 355 words... But those 355 words generated almost as many comments -- 309 before the blog owner cut off comments. The reviewer stated that readers would "find the story compelling and interesting"; it was the caveat that upset the author so much: "the spelling and grammar errors, which come so quickly that, especially in the first several chapters, it’s difficult to get into the book without being jarred back to reality as you attempt unraveling what the author meant."

The author posted multiple comments to the review, accusing the reviewer of not downloading the correct/current version of her eBook. She accused him of not responding to her personal emails. She accused him of not understanding her writing because she is, and writes, British English. She even went so far as to post other, positive reviews of her book in the comments section, I assume to prove her point and to counteract his review. The reviewer, in turn, posted a couple of the author's more egregiously written sentences as examples -- you judge for yourself:

"She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs."

"Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance."

And then the ultimate sin: when other readers began commenting as well, in support of the review, which was, as I said, positive except for the negative grammar aspects, the author, Jacqueline Howett, told everyone to "Fuck off!" Not the best way to make friends and influence readers to purchase your book. After that, the blog went viral, and the comment section became little more than an author pile-on. After seeing a photo of the author on her blog, and reading about her worldly travels, one would think that her life experience would have yielded more maturity than what she displayed in the comments section.

The lack of quality in her writing unfortunately supports the generalized notion that most self-published books are crap -- and a lot of them are, so we have to rely on reviews like those from BigAl's and other review sites to sift the wheat from the chaff. There are also a lot of lessons to be learned here: It is not the reviewer's responsibility to find/track down the current/correct copy of the book to be reviewed. The book that the reviewer is sent, or the one the reviewer buys off the shelf, or online, is the book that gets reviewed. If you, as the author, do not want a lesser quality book to be reviewed, then don't put it out there! And, as an author, you must learn to accept the good reviews with the bad; you don't necessarily have to like it, but you absolutely must learn to accept it, or shine it on as one bad reviewer's personal opinion, or whatever it takes to get past that negative review. Enjoy the positive reviews when you can, and try to learn and improve your writing and/or the quality of your book from the negative ones.

The link above to BigAl's will allow you to read the review and comment section at your leisure. I doubt that most will read more than the first 50 or so comments; after that, it really does become tiresome. But you'll get the point: Writing 101 -- Don't respond to negative reviews. Simply grin and bear it (and try to learn from the review if you can).


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Rightly Reconsidering (Book) Reviews

Are book reviews (and by default, book reviewers) so sacrosanct as to be above reproach?

Authors -- and yes, editors and publishers as well -- are taught at a very young age in their professional careers to ignore reviews, to not take them personally, to turn the other cheek, so to speak. And why is that? Why can't we respond to reviews?

Because we will give the impression that we are unprofessional, that we are whiners. At least that's what our peers -- and possibly readers of the review -- may think. But from our own perspective, we also have to worry that we'll piss off the reviewer by our response, and then that reviewer will take it out on us a hundredfold in the next review, if in fact there even is a next review. And then others may not want to review our work for fear of receiving such a response as well. And as Cheryl Morgan (a book reviewer and critic) just pointed out to me: "...if an author challenges a review, his fans will go after the reviewer, whether he wants them to or not."

Reviews/reviewers and authors are sort of like the separation between Church and State. Yet the incoming president takes the oath of office with his hand upon a Bible; and the coin of the realm all proclaim "In God We Trust."

So where does that leave us?

Some authors I know truly don't care about reviews, reviewers, or what others think of their stories. Once they've completed a work of fiction and it's been accepted by the editor, they then move on to the next project and never look back. While other authors are deeply concerned -- and affected -- by reviews and what others think of their fiction.

I worked with an author on her short fiction collection, and after the book was published we stayed in contact with one another for a bit. The following year her next novel was published, and it was reviewed in Locus magazine -- a mediocre review at best, but at least it wasn't blatantly negative. (Locus, though, doesn't typically publish blatantly negative reviews; I assume if the book is that bad, they simply choose not to review it, so a mediocre review in Locus, when all is said and done, is definitely not a good review.) What upset the author the most, however, was that the reviewer missed a key element of the story -- and that key element would have explained the reviewer's primary issue with the novel (and maybe then the review wouldn't have been mediocre). Locus, at the time, was considered a highly influential publication (though not so much anymore, now that we are solidly in the digital age, and readers, book buyers, and book collectors get the majority of their information and reviews online), so even a mediocre review could have a strong, negative sales effect on a book. But we'll never know, will we: missed opportunities -- aka sales -- cannot be measured.

But the question(s) remains: Did the reviewer blow it big time by missing that key element of the story? Or, did the author -- and, let's be honest, the book's editor shares responsibility in this as well -- blow it big time by not communicating that key element more effectively to the reader/reviewer? If every review of the novel contained this same "omission," then yes, we could agree that the fault lies with the author, and the author's editor. But if only one review were guilty of this oversight, then the finger would indeed point to the reviewer. If the review was on Joe's Friendly Neighborhood blog, then I don't think the author (and editor and publisher) would be particularly concerned; but when that mediocre review shows up in the Washington Post Book World or Publishers Weekly (before Reed Business Information tried to sell the publication, and, to reduce costs, began paying freelance reviewers $25.00 per review; read more about PW's freelance fees), then we know sales will most likely be affected.

Unfortunately, given the Church and State dichotomy, the author has no recourse but to grin and bear it -- or to hit his [the generic use of "his," implying both male and female authors] head against the wall and scream, if he tends to not be the silent type.

And yet, I'm encountering more and more reviews of late where the reviewer just doesn't seem to get it! Why is that? [Notice I keep asking this same question a lot.] Is it the reviewer's lack of experience and knowledge in the genre? It's difficult to say, unless one knows the reviewer personally, or the reviewer provides a professional bio alongside the review. And all of this places even more pressure on the author who cares about what others say of his work.

Here's my take on the three main issues with genre reviews; they are like the plague, and they are spreading...