Steven Utley's Silurian Tales

In the latter part of 2002, as an acquiring editor for Golden Gryphon Press, I was happily working away on a second collection of George Alec Effinger stories. To that end, I had contacted George's fellow writers, editors, and friends for their favorite GAE story (and once they named their favorite, I then cajoled and begged them into writing a brief introduction to said story for the collection). ¹

Gardner Dozois was one of the editors whom I contacted, and he responded to my query via email on December 24, 2002. After recommending a number of Effinger stories in his email, including the pseudonymously written "O. Niemand" stories (which he did, in fact, introduce in the collection), Gardner wrote:

Cheeky as it may be of me, I've also been meaning to write to you and suggest two other worthy collections that are floating around out there and which don't seem to be able to find a home anywhere in the commercial publishing world.

The first collection Gardner recommended was for "Avram Davidson's wonderful and as yet uncollected stories about Jack Limekiller, and his adventures in an imaginary but vividly detailed Central American country drenched with magic, strange creatures, and supernatural menaces." ²

As to the second collection, Gardner went on to write:

The other collection I'd like to recommend is Steven Utley's collection of Silurian Tales, which have been appearing in venues such as ASIMOV'S, F&SF, SCI FICTION, and elsewhere over the last decade or so. This probably will never appeal to the big trade publishers, since there are no dinosaurs in it, Steve somewhat perversely having decided to take us back in time to the Silurian Age rather than the dinosaur age, when the biggest things on land are segmented worms. But [the stories] have maintained a sustained level of brilliance all these years, with many of them making one or another Best of the Year collection, and I think a collection of them would make a worthy book.

After the new year (2003), I tracked down a number of Steven Utley's Silurian Age stories in my copies of Asimov's SF and elsewhere, and was intrigued enough to contact the author. And a few months later Steven submitted a full collection of his Silurian tales.

At the time, Golden Gryphon Press was publishing eight hardcover titles per year, but unfortunately that level of production didn't last. Some months later I received an email from the publisher informing me that he wanted to reduce the number of books per year to a maximum of six titles. Given my current commitments, that meant my half of the schedule was already booked through the next two years. Consequently, were I to acquire the collection of Silurian tales, it wouldn't see publication for at least three years. I didn't feel that was right, to hold up the publication of Steven's collection for three years, when he might find another press who could publish the book sooner.

My rejection letter to Steven Utley is dated November 26, 2003, and concludes with the following paragraph:

If you’re up to it, I would be most grateful if you would keep me posted on your efforts to have the collection published. And, as I said, I would be pleased to put in a good word for the collection with another publisher, and explain why, given Golden Gryphon Press's current schedule, we're not publishing the book instead. In fact, I would like to know by whom and when the book will be published so that I may place an order myself for a copy!

Steven did keep in touch, at least for a while; I recall receiving group emails from him with links to this and that, whatever he felt might be of interest to his contacts. At some point the emails stopped, and I never did hear anything further from him regarding the publication of his Silurian tales. (Though I will admit that I hadn't been actively searching for information either.) And then early this year, on January 12 -- or maybe it was the 13th that I actually read the news -- Steven Utley passed away.

Happy Birthday, George Alec Effinger (Part 2 of 3)

In memory of author George Alec Effinger (January 10, 1947 – April 27, 2002), who would have been 66 years old this month, I am reprinting a series of three blog posts I published in the first half of 2009. This second blog post, originally published on May 12, 2009, focuses on the book George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth, which I helped a wee bit through publication.

* * * * *

This is the second of three essays on author George Alec Effinger -- one for each of the three collections of his work that I acquired and edited for Golden Gryphon Press, between 2001 and 2007. Part One of this series focused on Budayeen Nights, a compilation of all of George's Marîd Audran and related stories.

Once Budayeen Nights was complete and in the hands of the typesetter, I began thinking about the next collection of Effinger's work. But now that George had passed away, I didn't have his input on this second book as I did for BN. All I had was my commitment to him to help bring his work back into print, and his email of August 30, 2001, in which he suggested a collection featuring "a hefty selection of my 200 stories, with introductions to each one, and calling it GAE: The White Album or GAE Live! At the Village Gate or...GAE: The Prairie Years." When George and I were communicating by email (albeit sporadically, due to his health and domicile issues) between 2001 and 2002, I had asked him to put together a list of the stories he would like to include in a "best of" collection, but time just wasn't on his side. And George wasn't kidding when he referred to his "200 stories" -- I know, as I've tried to track down a goodly portion of them! In fact, I probably have the largest "collection" of George Alec Effinger short fiction, only second to Barbara Hambly, who now has all of George's files and books in her possession.

The Concept
I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, considering it was six years ago [2003], but if ye olde memory still serves me, I came up with the basic idea for the second collection during a telephone conversation with author George Zebrowski. Unlike archived email, I'm not able to replay and quote six-year-old telephone conversations, so memory will have to do. (Maybe AT&T has the conversation archived in some illegal-wiretapping file? GeorgeZ and I may have mentioned the words "Budayeen" or "Islamic" or "Arab" in the course of our conversations about GAE!)

I had worked with GeorgeZ on his short story collection entitled Swift Thoughts (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002). During that project, and for some time afterward, we spoke quite often on the telephone. George had unlimited long distance at the time and enjoyed calling and chatting with his many author friends and editors. It was the "author friends and editors" that gave me the idea. Since GAE was no longer with us, to select the stories for his next collection, I decided that I would ask his peers -- his friends and fellow authors, and editors -- to select their favorite GAE story. And then, once they told me their favorite story, I would ask them -- as a tribute to GAE -- to write a mini introduction to the story. I wanted to first hook them on the story suggestion, and then seek their cooperation to write an intro. GeorgeZ wholeheartedly agreed to contribute, as did many others.

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

Pat Cadigan's Story Is Again One of the Best

I am once again pleased to announce that Pat Cadigan's short story, "The Taste of Night," originally published in my co-edited anthology Is Anybody Out There? (with Nick Gevers, from Daw Books, June 2010), will be included in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection, forthcoming in July 2011 from St. Martin's/Griffin. The Dozois volume is available for preorder, but it's still too early in the publishing process and thus no cover art is as yet available.

"The Taste of Night" (along with five other stories from IAOT?) has previously been posted on this blog in its entirety. The following link will take you to the main IAOT? page, from which you can access all six stories as well as additional details on the anthology. If, however, you just wish to read Pat Cadigan's story at this time, you can click here: "The Taste of Night."

I do hope you'll take the time to read this wonderful story, if you haven't already done so.

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Is Anybody Out There? -- First Review

From the April 25 edition of the UK's Sunday Times Online: "The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out" -- or so says Stephen Hawking, a British theoretical physicist, who, in 2009, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. More from the Times: "[Hawking] has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist -- but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact." These "suggestions" are from Stephen Hawking's Universe, his new documentary series on the Discovery Channel, which began its broadcast run earlier this month. Hawking goes on to say that making contact with extraterrestrials is "a little too risky. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

So, whereas we're all hoping that our first contact with alien races goes something like E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hawking portends a scenario that is more on the order of Independence Day. As he says elsewhere in this Times article: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Sort of gives you those warm fuzzies all over, don't it? But, until such time as we actually experience (if ever) that first contact with an alien life form, we can only use the tools available to us to extrapolate (or, best case, guess) as to what that encounter may be like.

Which brings me to the fifteen stories -- from seventeen authors -- included in my forthcoming anthology Is Anybody Out There? (co-edited with Nick Gevers) from Daw Books. The official publication date is June 1, but I hope to have copies available at BayCon, to be held Memorial Day Weekend. And please excuse this shameless self-promotion: If you click on the Is Anybody Out There? book icon on the left, you will be painlessly transported to the realm of amazon.com, where you may purchase a copy of said book, if you so choose. [End shameless self-promotion.]

In 1950, Enrico Fermi postulated a contradiction (aka paradox): If there are uncountable galaxies within our universe, each containing uncountable planets, and some percentage of those planets are habitable (by our human definition of "habitable"), then why is there no evidence -- at least none that we have found and understood so far -- of alien civilizations? And it is those eleven words that I have set off by em-dashes and placed in italics that are the key to this paradox. The evidence may be out there, but our scientists and researchers simply do not understand it¹. The stories in this anthology attempt to answer the Fermi Paradox. Some of these stories utilize current science; others bend and twist that science; and more than one story is pure SWAG².

In previous blog posts I have waxed poetic on the genesis of this anthology; on the contents of this anthology; and on the cover and back cover text. And in this blog post I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the first review of Is Anybody Out There?

The review -- by the inestimable Gardner Dozois -- appears in the May 2010 issue of Locus Magazine. Just on the extremely rare chance that you are not familiar with Mr. Dozois, let me quote a few lines from his entry in Wikipedia: "...best known as an editor, winning a record 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor (having won nearly every year between 1988 and his retirement from Asimov's in 2004)....[and] the editor of the anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, published annually since 1984."

Copyediting Par Excellence

I attended MidSouthCon near Memphis earlier this month, to help launch and promote Andrew Fox's new novel, The Good Humor Man from Tachyon Publications. MidSouthCon planned a "writers track" this year, and the programming staff asked if I would do a workshop, lasting one and a half hours (in addition to a few other panels). I agreed, and then had to think of an appropriate subject. Something that author Mark Teppo had said, when he and I were laying the ground rules for working together on his novel Lightbreaker last year, came to mind. I edit on hardcopy -- that's just how I work; however, when I work directly with an author, I then re-enter all my edits and copyedits from the hardcopy into the author's formatted manuscript file using MS Word's Change Tracking; with Change Tracking the author can easily see both the before and after, and I can enter comment boxes where needed as well. Consequently there is no hardcopy to photocopy and mail (and thus no added expense); the author never sees my hardcopy, only the marked-up e-file. When I explained the process to Mark and asked if he was okay with this, he responded: Track Changes is perfect, and I’m glad that I don’t have to actually go figure out what copyediting marks are. :) [The smiley face was included in Mark's response!] [Note: more blogging to come on Mark Teppo's Lightbreaker, tentatively scheduled for publication from Night Shade Books on April 20.]

So, for MidSouthCon, I proposed a workshop entitled "Learn Copyeditting four Fun and Proft" (typos intentional), with the following description:

You've just received the marked-up galleys of your novel from the publisher. You have less than a week to review these pages and provide feedback. There's so much red ink on the galleys that it looks like the copyeditor was hideously attacked during the editing process! Just what do all those red lines and characters mean?

I created a three-part, sixty-five-page computer presentation, that included ten hands-on exercises for the workshop participants, along with real examples taken directly from the books I have edited over the years -- all of this, as it turned out, for four and a half people (the "one-half" being the person who arrived a half-hour late and left a half-hour early). That was the extent of my workshop participants. So, I thought that I would salvage some of the work I put into this workshop by sharing the finer points of my discussion with readers of this blog.