Pirate Utopia: The Starred PW Review

The Publishers Weekly starred review:

  Pirate Utopia

Bruce Sterling. Tachyon, $19.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-61696-236-4

Cyberpunk progenitor Sterling's alternate history novella is bizarre, chock-full of famous people in improbable situations, and wildly entertaining, even when the worldbuilding seems to go a little off the rails. Lorenzo Secondari, a veteran of the recently ended Great War and forever changed by it, is the head engineer of the titular utopia, the Italian free state of Fiume. He and his compatriots build flying boats and fight communism while dealing with American secret agents, including Harry Houdini and Howard Lovecraft (who's now working as Houdini's publicity agent after going into advertising). Hitler died saving another man's life in a bar fight, [President Woodrow] Wilson was poisoned, and Mussolini's been disabled by a pair of bullets aimed "where a man least likes to be shot," so the Europe in which Secondari is attempting to create his radio-controlled airborne torpedoes and other gizmos is already massively different from ours. An introduction by Warren Ellis and an interview with Sterling sandwich the novel, both bearing an air of false gravitas, but the actual story is wacky and fun what-if-ing at its finest. (Nov.)

You can read the prior posts about my work on Pirate Utopia in my June 10, 2016 blog post and in my July 14, 2016, blog post.

Happy Birthday, George Alec Effinger (Part 3 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 third, and final, blog post, originally published on June 8, 2009, focuses on the book A Thousand Deaths, which contained George's personal favorite, the novel The Wolves of Memory -- and my favorite of his work as well.

* * * *

Since my blogs tend to be more essay rather than random comments, like blogging about my great cup of coffee this morning, they take longer to compose. If you enjoy reading what I write, then I thank you for your time and patience, and I ask that you just keep checking back -- and/or subscribe to this blog's RSS feed -- for my next entry.

At least for now, this will be my final blog post on author George Alec Effinger; one blog entry 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 and Part Two pertained to collection Live! From Planet Earth. I have a couple ideas for possible future projects of Effinger's work, but only time -- and the economy -- will tell if these ever come to pass.

In late 2002, once I had completed Budayeen Nights, and the book was in the hands of the typesetter, and then the printer, I began thinking about the next Effinger collection. During my email communications with George between 2001 and 2002, I promised him that I would do my best to help him bring his work back into print -- and even though George was no longer alive at this point in time, I felt a personal responsibility to honor that promise.

Obviously the second collection published by Golden Gryphon Press was George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth -- but this wasn't the book I had initially intended to publish next.

In the latter part of 2002, I had written Barbara Hambly, executrix of Effinger's literary estate, for a list of her favorite GAE stories. On December 2, 2002, Barb wrote: "I've sorted through George's story titles, cut out all the Maureen Birnbaum and Sandor Courane stories (which have or are getting anthologies of their own) and still have quite a few." Of course, I knew about the Birnbaum collection, but a collection of Sandor Courane stories? This was a complete surprise to me. So I inquired further of Barb about the Courane collection, and later that same day she responded: "There's a fellow in the Midwest who's doing Sandor Courane -- George was working on it with him at the time of his death." Unfortunately, Barb could not recall this fellow's name. Now I was intrigued: during my email communications with George before he passed away, when he spoke so personally about all of his work being long out-of-print, he made no mention whatsoever of another editor working on a collection of his short fiction.

And so my search began.

Eventually my net searching found a website for Wunzenzierohs Publishing Company¹, which noted a "forthcoming" GAE collection entitled A Thousand Deaths. But then the announcement went on to state that the collection was currently in limbo due to Effinger's passing. Using the "Email Us" link on the home page, I contacted the publisher on December 19, 2002. I expressed my interest in seeing GAE's short fiction back in print, and I asked if the publisher still planned to pursue this particular collection of Sandor Courane stories. I also requested a list of the proposed stories to be included in the book. I was thinking that if the publisher was willing to give up the rights to this collection so that it could be published by Golden Gryphon -- and if he had all the stories pretty much ready to go and was willing to share them with me -- then I could get this book into print more quickly than the other collection I was planning (Live! From Planet Earth), which I was having to start from scratch.

Gordie Meyer, Wunzenzierohs publisher, responded to my email the following day. Apparently, WunzPub (to use Gordie's abbreviation) was more of a hobby venture, and he had, in fact, been considering if he really had the time to do the Sandor Courane collection. Gordie wrote: "I've known George from his being online at Delphi long ago, and we'd occasionally touch base via email or meet in person at a con, but I didn't really know him all that well. Mike [Resnick], however, did, and when I mentioned that I thought it was a shame that all of George's work was OOP, he suggested that I consider a collection of...the Sandor Courane stories, as they were an identifiable group to collect and were some of Mike's favorite Effinger stories. So I ran the idea past George at a con, he and Barbara [Hambly] liked the idea..." Evidently this all occurred four years earlier, in 1998. Gordie went on to say: "If you'd be interested in taking over the publication of A Thousand Deaths ([the title of] which both George and I came up with independently -- cue Twilight Zone theme...), it'd make my decision a bit easier.... It was [always] about getting George's work back into print. So if I can make that happen, even without actually publishing it myself, I'd still feel good about the project.... Barbara has already approved having Mike Resnick do the introduction. And actually, Mike threatened physical violence if he didn't get to do the intro. {g}"

Nancy Kress: After...Before...During the Fall

I'm delighted to announce here that I have editorial credit on the recent book by multi Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nancy Kress: titled After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, the novella (38,300 words) is published by Tachyon Publications.

In addition to proof reading, line editing, copy editing, and other such editorial stuff, the manuscript also required a bit of fact checking, given the story's sense of place in the three ultimately intersecting timelines: future, past, and present: 2035, 2013, and 2014.

I submitted the final, edited manuscript to Tachyon Pubs on June 13, 2011. A couple months later, on August 24, I received the following email from Jill Roberts, Managing Editor at Tachyon:

Marty --

From Nancy [Kress], re the copyediting job you did for After the Fall:

"Whoever the copy-editor is, he or she is the best one I've ever had: thorough, sharp-eyed, and willing to be editor instead of a co-author. Please thank him/her for me."

Pretty sure I told her it was you, but I will again. And I totally agree with her. Well done.

Cheers,

Jill

Obviously, at the time Nancy Kress sent that email, she didn't know I had been assigned to her manuscript; but thankfully Jill rectified that fact. When one [me!] is conscientious about a project, makes every effort to do the best job possible, those two sentences from the author can be extremely gratifying. Such praise typically isn't expressed often enough -- I mean, I'm just doing my job, right? -- so when it is, it makes the long hours I spend on a manuscript well worth the effort.

Later, I had an opportunity to briefly chat with Jill and Nancy about the project when we met at Tachyon Publications' "Sweet 16" birthday party at Borderlands Books on September 11, which I wrote about in a previous blog post.

After the Fall... has gotten some great press, and I believe the best way to give readers a taste of this novella is to share some excerpts from those reviews.

The first review (and the longest review) is courtesy of Stefan Raets on Tor.com:

Superstar SF and fantasy author Nancy Kress returns with After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, an elegant novella that combines several wildly different science fiction ideas into a tight package. There's a little bit of everything here: time travel, hard science, environmental collapse, aliens, post-apocalyptic dystopia. It may sound hard to combine all of these in such a short format, but Nancy Kress makes it work.

The novella's slightly unwieldy title refers to the three plot lines described above: the survivors in their Shell in the future, the mathematician trying to solve the "crimes" happening in the present, and the environmental changes. What makes this much more than just another story told from three separate points of view is the time travel angle: as the novella progresses, the stories occasionally connect and weave through each other. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is really a series of interlocking flashforwards and flashbacks that continuously provide new information and different perspectives about each other to the reader.

[...]

The characters eventually lose [the misconceptions built into the story by the author] as everything inexorably works its way to a convergence, but until that happens there's constant tension between the three plot lines. It's this tension that ultimately makes After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall a great success. Expect to see this one on the final ballots of the major awards next year.

Catherynne M. Valente: Remixing Prester John

At Readercon in July, I had the pleasure of meeting -- and chatting with -- Catherynne M. Valente. You might recognize her name as the author of the novel Palimpsest (a city that is also a "sexually transmitted disease"), a finalist for the 2010 Hugo Award. In Palimpsest, November, one of the four protagonists in the story, recalls briefly her favorite book as a child, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. After the publication of Palimpsest, in 2009, when income became a necessity, Cat turned that children's book into an actual full-length, crowd-funded novel, which she published -- one chapter a week -- online. The novel has since been acquired by Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, for publication in 2011.

Meeting Cat Valente at Readercon turned out to be most propitious because shortly thereafter Night Shade Books assigned me the project to proof, line edit, and copyedit her forthcoming novel: The Habitation of the Blessed -- subtitled: A Dirge for Prester John, Volume One.

In 1165, a Letter of Prester John appeared throughout Europe. According to Wikipedia [I know... I know....] the letter was supposedly written to Emperor Immanuel Comnenus of Constantinople by Prester John, "descendant of one of the Three Magi and King of India. The many marvels of richness and magic it contained captured the imagination of Europeans, and it was translated into numerous languages....It circulated in ever more embellished form for centuries in manuscripts, a hundred examples of which still exist. The invention of printing perpetuated the letter's popularity in printed form; it was still current in popular culture during the period of European exploration. Part of the letter's essence was that a lost kingdom of Nestorian Christians still existed in the vastnesses of Central Asia." Cat Valente's novel opens with this letter, and then the author expands upon, remakes, and remixes the essence of this letter into one of the more unique stories -- and uniquely written stories -- that I have had the pleasure to read in a very long time. The fact that I also had the opportunity to work with the author on this book made it doubly rewarding.

The kingdom of Prester John is inhabited by strange beings such as the amyctryae ("whose mouths jut from their skulls and provide a deep bowl in which they brew all manner of things"), the astomii (who "have no mouths, but eat scent from the air itself"), the blemmyae (who "carry their faces in their chests and have no heads as men do"), the cametenna (who "have hands like boulders, but their fingers are deft"), and the panotii ("their great and silken ears drawn over their bodies like mourning veils"). And a great tree that bears books as its fruit, and from the fragments and remains of this fruit, we learn the story of Prester John, as told by Brother Hiob von Luzern, who happened upon this land during his missionary work in the Himalayas in 1699.

In a recent guest blog post on John Scalzi's "The Big Idea," Cat Valente states emphatically that The Habitation of the Blessed "is a science fiction novel." Included among the many points she makes is this one, on science: "It is a story rooted in science -- just not 21st century science. The series takes as a given that every legend and folktale concerning Prester John was true, including the Fountain of Youth, which came into Western myth with this very letter, and the various grotesque monsters which may or may not have been allegories for human failings, but here are given serious considerations as races and cultures with their own deep histories. So too Ptolemaic cosmology is taken wholly seriously, with the Crystalline Spheres a hard fact of the world. How this world changes into and acquired the physics of our own is part of the long game of the series." You can read more on Cat's Big Idea, which also includes a video entitled "Prester John: International Man of Mystery" -- the legend of Prester John as told by action figures. The vid, and more, can also be found on Prester John Online.

I was going to provide a snippet from the Publishers Weekly review of The Habitation, and then point you to the review itself, but it appears that the review tends to shift pages, because the link I have no longer points to the correct page. So, I'll just quote the brief review in its entirety here:

The Habitation of the Blessed:
A Dirge for Prester John, Vol. 1

Catherynne M. Valente, Night Shade, $14.99 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-59780-199-7

In 1165, a letter ostensibly written by the distant Christian king Prester John describing a kingdom of wonders rocked medieval Europe. In this enchanting retelling of the legend, the first volume in a projected trilogy, Hugo nominee Valente (Palimpsest) imagines what might have been discovered by Rome's ambassadors if the letter had not been a hoax. Nothing is quite as fabulous as the pious priests had hoped. Prester John and St. Thomas the Twin married nonhuman women; the Fountain of Youth does not sparkle, but instead "oozes thick and oily, globbed with algae and the eggs of improbable mayflies." Three very different personalities narrate: the brooding Prester John himself; his carefree and openhearted wife, the blemmye Hagia; and maternal Imtithal of the elephant-eared panotii. Filled with lyrical prose and fabled creatures, this languorous fairy tale is as captivating as Prester John's original letter.(Dec.)

As the PW review states, The Habitation of the Blessed is the first volume of a trilogy, and I'm hopeful I'll have the good fortune to be able to work with the author on volumes two and three as well. The Habitation will undoubtedly be one of the most talked about novels in the months ahead, and will assuredly appear on multiple award lists next year.

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George Alec Effinger - Part Three

I have completed and shipped (and billed!) my previous project: copyediting By Blood We Live, a reprint vampire anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, to be published by Night Shade Books. I'm now working on copyediting another reprint anthology edited by JJA for Night Shade, this one entitled The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (approximately 230,000 words). I've also completed the second round of copyedits for Judith Moffett's novel Pennterra, the first reprint title I acquired for Warren Lapine's Fantastic Books, an imprint of his Wilder Publications. The second title, novel Fuzzy Dice by Paul Di Filippo, is now ready for layout and then copyediting. So, that's why I only blog about once per week or so. To paraphrase the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Frank Herbert's Dune: "The work must flow." And the bills must be paid. Since my blogs tend to be more essay rather than random comments, like blogging about my great cup of coffee this morning, they take longer to compose. If you enjoy reading what I write, then I thank you for your time and patience, and I ask that you just keep checking back -- and/or subscribe to this blog's RSS feed -- for my next entry.

At least for now, this will be my final blog post on author George Alec Effinger; one blog entry 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; and Part Two pertained to collection Live! From Planet Earth. I have a couple ideas for possible future projects of Effinger's work, but only time -- and the economy -- will tell if these ever come to pass.

In late 2002, once I had completed Budayeen Nights, and the book was in the hands of the typesetter, and then the printer, I began thinking about the next Effinger collection. During my email communications with George between 2001 and 2002, I promised him that I would do my best to help him bring his work back into print -- and even though George was no longer alive at this point in time, I felt a personal responsibility to honor that promise.

Obviously the second collection published by Golden Gryphon Press was George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth -- but this wasn't the book I had initially intended to publish next.

In the latter part of 2002, I had written Barbara Hambly, executrix of Effinger's literary estate, for a list of her favorite GAE stories. On December 2, 2002, Barb wrote: "I've sorted through George's story titles, cut out all the Maureen Birnbaum and Sandor Courane stories (which have or are getting anthologies of their own) and still have quite a few." Of course, I knew about the Birnbaum collection, but a collection of Sandor Courane stories? This was a complete surprise to me. So I inquired further of Barb about the Courane collection, and later that same day she responded: "There's a fellow in the Midwest who's doing Sandor Courane -- George was working on it with him at the time of his death." Unfortunately, Barb could not recall this fellow's name. Now I was intrigued: during my email communications with George before he passed away, when he spoke so personally about all of his work being long out-of-print, he made no mention whatsoever of another editor working on a collection of his short fiction.

And so my search began.

Eventually my net searching found a website for Wunzenzierohs Publishing Company¹, which noted a "forthcoming" GAE collection entitled A Thousand Deaths. But then the announcement went on to state that the collection was currently in limbo due to Effinger's passing. Using the "Email Us" link on the home page, I contacted the publisher on December 19, 2002. I expressed my interest in seeing GAE's short fiction back in print, and I asked if the publisher still planned to pursue this particular collection of Sandor Courane stories. I also requested a list of the proposed stories to be included in the book. I was thinking that if the publisher was willing to give up the rights to this collection so that it could be published by Golden Gryphon -- and if he had all the stories pretty much ready to go and was willing to share them with me -- then I could get this book into print more quickly than the other collection I was planning (Live! From Planet Earth), which I was having to start from scratch.

Gordie Meyer, Wunzenzierohs publisher, responded to my email the following day. Apparently, WunzPub (to use Gordie's abbreviation) was more of a hobby venture, and he had, in fact, been considering if he really had the time to do the Sandor Courane collection. Gordie wrote: "I've known George from his being online at Delphi long ago, and we'd occasionally touch base via email or meet in person at a con, but I didn't really know him all that well. Mike [Resnick], however, did, and when I mentioned that I thought it was a shame that all of George's work was OOP, he suggested that I consider a collection of . . . the Sandor Courane stories, as they were an identifiable group to collect and were some of Mike's favorite Effinger stories. So I ran the idea past George at a con, he and Barbara [Hambly] liked the idea . . ." Evidently this all occurred four years earlier, in 1998. Gordie went on to say: "If you'd be interested in taking over the publication of A Thousand Deaths (which both George and I came up with independently -- cue Twilight Zone theme . . .), it'd make my decision a bit easier. . . . It was [always] about getting George's work back into print. So if I can make that happen, even without actually publishing it myself, I'd still feel good about the project. . . . Barbara has already approved having Mike Resnick do the introduction. And actually, Mike threatened physical violence if he didn't get to do the intro. {g}"

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...