Author: aoyebanj

As a coping mechanism for the endless lockdown that is Covid, I have taken to alternating genre books that I like with pieces of literature which are “good for me.” Such is my excuse for having a crack at The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Written toward the end of the 14th Century, they are a collection of stories told in (mostly) rhyming verse, the conceit being that a bunch of (not necessarily sober) pilgrims gathered together in a London pub agree to a competition to tell the most entertaining story during a trip to Canterbury and back. Nowadays, London to Canterbury is about an hour and a quarter in light traffic. But in Chaucer’s time it was a five-day journey on a gently-ridden horse. Needless to say, the pilgrims’ tales are not flash fiction.

As you would expect from a medieval tome, there’s a fair bit about beautiful maidens, modest and chaste. Chaucer on wives, though, is a bit more interesting. Chaucer’s wives have minds of their own, don’t take nonsense from their husbands, and are not above the odd dalliance should it take their fancy. They also expect to be properly provided for. Chaucer has one wife, while telling a tale, say the following.

“The silly husband always has to pay,
He has to clothe us, he has to array
Our bodies to enhance his reputation,
While we dance round in all this decoration.
And if he cannot pay, as it may chance,
Or won’t submit to such extravagance,
Thinking his money thrown away and lost,
Then someone else will have to bear the cost”

Think of that what you may, it isn’t dry and it isn’t boring. What it is, though, is a crass editing error. The speaker here is clearly a wife, but these lines appear in The Shipman’s Tale, a (very male) sea captain’s story about a merchant’s wife and an amorous monk. Chaucer, in all probability, originally intended the story to be told by a woman but then changed his mind. And, having changed his mind, he missed this in his revision. Rookie error! At least my editing is better than Chaucer’s!

Except it isn’t. Having sent off my final edits of Braking Day to the redoubtable Leah, I have turned my attention to the V______ R___ manuscript. Having not looked at this for months and months, I thought I’d give it a complete read through before tackling the edits suggested by my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant, James.

Not having read it for so long, it was almost like coming to it as a reader. And, even if I say so myself, it’s not a bad read. Unlike Braking Day, V______ R____ is told from two points of view rather than one. In the middle of the book, D is working with M on a project. M tells D to go home and D does so. End of scene. I then cut to a different point of view and return to M, still working on the project an hour after we last left him. Shock horror, D is still there! Even worse, M tells D to go home. Again!

On the plus side, I’m in good company. Neither Brady nor James nor any of my beta readers picked up on this. So, this egregious error will be our little secret. Besides, doesn’t this make me a tiny, tiny, little bit like Chaucer?

“In matters of taste,” said the Roman orator, Cicero, “there is no point arguing.” Taste, style, whatever you want to call it, is a subjective and changeable thing. When I was a young (male) lawyer, wearing brown shoes was a fashion crime. Then it was a fashion. Nowadays we barely wear suits. Needless to say, none of these clothing choices said anything at all about whether you were good at the job.

Style, too, is a form of personal expression, a way of telling the world who we are, or, at least, what kind of mood we’re in. “Buttoned-up” isn’t just an expression describing someone who is formal and a little rigid: it is a description of how formal, somewhat rigid people choose to dress. If we describe someone’s clothing as “rumpled” we are also describing a person who is not “buttoned up” at all, but, quite possibly, a wee bit disorganized.

What style is not, however, is an unbending, unchanging law. Back in the day, I had a lawyer colleague who wore brown shoes in a world of black. Disapproval was expressed, but no one stopped him from doing his job and he was absolutely, positively, not carted off to jail. My big sister’s desires notwithstanding, “fashion police” is not actually a thing.

Unless, of course, one is a writer. We don’t call the authors of style guides fashion police, but that’s what they are. They lay down vast tomes filled with the “rules” of good writing, which most of us do our best to follow because we are good literary citizens who don’t want to be seen breaking the law.

Except these are not laws. They are, for the most part, subjective expressions of taste. If you’re American, “onto,” like “into” is usually a single word. In British English, “onto” is the mark of an illiterate. And yet does it really matter when I say that “Ahmed jumped on to the table” as opposed to “onto the table?” Of course not. Either way, the meaning is perfectly clear. Come to think of it, in the previous two sentences, I’ve put punctuation (a comma and a question mark) inside the quotes – and used double quotation marks to boot – the American practice. If I had banished the punctuation to the outside and used single quotation marks like the British, would an American reader have found what I had written incomprehensible? I certainly hope not. (Confession: even when growing up in Britain, I used double quotation marks unless my English teacher objected. I just like the way they look!).

Which brings me to “all right” as opposed to “alright.” The style guides are virtually unanimous in stating that “alright” is a vulgarism and that the correct form is “all right.” I have never understood this. Or rather, if we’re going to be pedantic, I understand this perfectly well. I’ve just never found it very persuasive. I think “alright” is perfectly all right.

As with all matters of taste, this is a largely (but not entirely) subjective preference on my part. To me, when I say “alright” out loud meaning “OK,” it sounds different to when I say “all right” meaning “everything is correct,” so I like to use different spellings. And (this is not subjective) if you write something like, “Your answers on the test were all right,” do you mean that they were 100% correct (all right) or merely that they were sufficiently OK for a passing grade (alright)? Using the “vulgarism” here would remove the ambiguity. On top of that, we already say “already” and “altogether,” so why not “alright”? Finally, according to the OED, alright’s etymology stretches back over 1,000 years, which ought to be enough of a pedigree to allow it into polite company.

I don’t get upset when I see “all right” written in circumstances where I would use “alright.” It is, as I have said, a matter of taste. But when my agent suggests, as he has, that I correct “alright” to “all right” in the manuscript of Braking Day because it’s a “pet peeve” of his, I did raise an eyebrow. And I’m not going to do it!

Well, I’m not going to do it voluntarily. My final edits to Braking Day are now done (yay!!!), which means the manuscript will soon be sent off for copyediting. I doubt the publishers will let this slide. When they finally pull me over, I will exit the vehicle quietly with my arms raised in surrender. Because in publishing, as opposed to haute couture, fashion police are totally a thing.

Science fiction is fiction. It is not true. But because, at its best, it contains a healthy dose of science, sometimes you read things that feel uncomfortably like prophecy. Consider the following:

“Despite the situation [Labrador] and the time of year, which was October, the temperature was sticky warm due to the hothouse effect of the carbon dioxide in this Earth’s dead atmosphere.”

This is not a quote from some modern piece of speculative fiction. It’s a quote from the Isaac Asimov short story, Living Space, first published in 1956. The story has nothing to do with climate change or global warming, it’s just a throwaway paragraph from an author who was also a chemist by training. An author who understood, like other scientists at the time, that carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the planet.

Asimov, like all of us, was a product of his time. A lot of his short stories feature men who wear trilby hats, and smoke pipes, and who are married to mousey housewives who wring their hands on the periphery of the action. (Although, in fairness, he did also create one of the first great female characters in all of SF: the formidable Dr. Susan Calvin. If she were really out there, Dr. C. would now be 39). Nonetheless, reading those mid-twentieth century words on an idle afternoon in the twenty-first, there is a hammer blow of recognition. Followed by the depressing realization that we’ve known about the warming effects of carbon dioxide for a very long time. And that we’ve failed to do anything about it.

Unlike Living Space, The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi, is a modern piece of speculative fiction, penned in 2015. It portrays a “wild southwest” of the United States, where a catastrophic shortage of water has impoverished the entire region. Semi-autonomous, heavily armed states face off (and commit murder) over water rights. In this overheated dustbowl, the Colorado river has shrunk to a trickle, the Central Arizona Project has almost no water, and the states with the most senior water rights do the best. California is the Promised Land, Las Vegas, Nevada is holding its own, and Arizona, holder of the most junior water rights, is royally screwed: there is frequent reference in the book to a fictional twitter hashtag, “#PhoenixDowntheTubes.” It is a compelling near-future thriller, and had I read it back in 2015, I would have enjoyed it immensely.

But I didn’t read it in 2015. I read it last week, and it was terrifying. With wildfires raging in the west, triple-digit temperatures in “temperate” Oregon, and the first ever “shortage” on the Colorado requiring “junior” Arizona to sacrifice more water than its neighbors, it felt to me like The Water Knife was coming true in real time. We weren’t paying attention in 1956, we weren’t doing enough in 2015, and if The Water Knife (or worse) is to be avoided, we will have to do significantly better moving forward.

At bottom though, I remain an optimist. I have faith in science, and I have faith in human ingenuity. And if SF can sometimes identify problems coming down the pike, it can also highlight solutions. To that end, I look forward to a near-future thriller involving the removal of gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere. With olive farmers in Scotland and Alaska taking desperate measures to preserve the status quo.

Stranger things have happened.

So, as discussed in my last post, I took some “vacation.” Now, in fairness, I did actually travel (fully masked), and I did meet up with friends (outside at all times), but I also got some writing work done. E_________, my hoped-for third novel is now outlined; The Wrong Shape to Fly, my short story for the Baen anthology, Worlds Long Lost, is completely finished; and I have made a big dent in the final revisions for Braking Day. This latter, though, has got me to thinking about that great Steven Spielberg movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spoiler alert! If you have never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, stop reading this right now, go stream the movie, and come back to this when you’re done. You will thank me later.

Spoilers follow….

In Raiders, Harrison Ford’s intrepid archaeologist/treasure hunter Indiana Jones struggles mightily to prevent evil Nazis from capturing and making use of the lost (but now found) ark of the covenant. It is one of the great adventure movies: high jinks, near death experiences, thrilling escapes, the lot. A non-stop roller-coaster from start to finish.

But here’s the thing. Indiana Jones fails to prevent the Nazis from capturing the ark and attempting to use it. At the movie’s climax, the victorious bad guys open up the ark and discover that the ark doesn’t care for Nazis at all. The contents of the sacred chest emerge, take one look at the fascists in the room and kill them all. End of story. If Indiana Jones had stayed at home drunk out of his skull on whisky and tequila, the story would have ended in exactly the same way. Indiana Jones had nothing to do with the outcome.

People who study this sort of thing for a living would say that Indiana Jones lacked agency. Being a simple soul, I find it easier to say he couldn’t get stuff done. Indy killed a few folks, saved a few folks, and got himself pretty banged up. But he was unable, when the chips were down, to stop the bad guys getting what they wanted. He couldn’t affect the outcome.

Wrestling as I am with the Braking Day edits, I find myself confronted with a distant cousin of the Raiders’ plot problem. I could have my bad guy create a situation which results in the desired ending for the book. Or I could have my good guy maneuver the bad guy into that same situation. The former would be easier to write, with snappy dialog and some easily achieved tension. But it would also deprive my good guy of his ability to affect the outcome of the novel. The novel’s ending would be brought about by someone other than the hero. The wrong person would have gotten stuff done. As I am by no stretch of the imagination a Steven Spielberg, I don’t think I can get away with that.

Get me Rewrite! Indy kills the Nazis! Saves the Ark all by himself! It’s a wrap!

It is that time of year in my day job when I start getting emails from Europe saying , “Hola/Bonjour/Hallo, I am out of the office for the rest of the summer and will be returning in late August/early September. Do not expect me to answer my emails, return calls or do a lick of work until that date. Good luck.”

The British part of me is happy for them and slightly envious. The American part of me is outraged – although this, I admit, is almost certainly a by-product of envy. Who do these Europeans think they are? Don’t they understand that the work will still need to be done and that I will have to do it while you are sunning yourself on a beach, alpine lake, or casino terrace? To which the European answer would be: “Adam! You sound so angry. Perhaps you should take a vacation.”

In all honesty, with the delta version of Covid still at large, I have not felt the slightest urge to go away on holiday. Even though I’m vaccinated, I don’t want to expose myself to the (reduced) risk of getting sick, or the (reduced) risk of getting someone else sick. Knowing myself as I do, worry about both those things would suck the joy out of any leisure travel I might otherwise have planned, so why bother?

Except….

I think I may need to free up some time for the writing gig.

I never really thought about the consequences of writing. I would write, I would get rejected, I would write something else. Not a problem. For me, writing is fun and relaxing: a de-stresser from my (in theory only) nine-to-five.

But when the stars suddenly align and you are not rejected, other things happen. All at once you have what my corporate colleagues would call “deliverables”. Someone has put their faith in you. You can’t let them down. You have to produce, well, product. “Write” now I have the following on my plate:

1. Finish the outline of E________, my proposed third novel. I need to do this now because the threads will fall apart otherwise on account of the need to….
2. Complete the final edits for The Wrong Shape to Fly, a short story that the wonderful folks at Baen asked me to contribute to their upcoming anthology, Worlds Long Lost. The deadline for this is the end of the month. Which is also when I am required to….
3. Deliver the final draft of Braking Day, as requested by my editor at DAW, the redoubtable Leah. And once I’ve done that….
4. Work on edits for V______ R___, my already written second novel, as suggested by my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant James. I don’t want to hang about with this either, because the sooner I can get that done, the sooner I can….
5. Settle down to writing E________. See item 1, above!

So: a lot to be getting on with – and much easier to do if I take some time off work to… work.

The more I think about it, the better this idea sounds. I can take vacation! I won’t need to travel! It’s a win-win!

How very American of me.

So Leah, my redoubtable editor at DAW Books, has just sent me her suggested final edits for Braking Day. “Polishing” she calls it. She has a couple of asks. Both are small in terms of words to be written, but one is significantly trickier to accomplish than the other. Doing edits gets harder as a book progresses. It’s like dressmaking, I suspect. When you just have a bolt of cloth you can cut it pretty much anyway you like, but when you’re taking needle and scissors to something that’s practically ready to wear, you are very much constrained by what you’ve already done. You don’t want your last piece of work to look like your last piece of work: like something you just tacked on at the end. It has to look seamless. Not easy!

On the other hand, like virtually all of Leah’s suggestions, I have no doubt it will make Braking Day a better book. I remember the first time I spoke to Leah how shocked I was at how deeply she’d read it. She’d given far more thought to the words I’d written than I’d ever given – or could have given – to writing them in the first place. It was a genuinely enthralling experience. Followed by four months of heavy lifting.

I also remember telling her that while I was presently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plans were afoot to move to Edinburgh, Scotland, on account of the day job, at which Leah mentioned she was working with two American women who now lived there. I thought no more about it until I was browsing the SF section of my local bookstore the other day and I came across a DAW hardback with two female authors from California who had settled in the Promised Land. Clearly, sunlight can have no appeal for either of them. Further digging confirmed that Leah had indeed edited the book, which has the following opening line:

“Eris got the call from her commander while she was killing a man.“

How can you not buy a book that starts like that? Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, is an unabashed, fast-moving space opera, chock full of some very angry women, who, believe you me, have a lot to be angry about. It’s published by DAW here in the US and by Gollancz, I think, in the UK. It has a very high body count. Honestly, I had no idea the redoubtable Leah was so bloodthirsty. Did she suggest that the authors kill more people, or less, I wonder? Enquiring minds want to know!

Chatting with Jo Fletcher, my UK publisher, about Braking Day. More particularly about what to put on the back cover. What, she wants to know, is the book about? More accurately, what do I, the author, think it’s about? Fortunately, because I am a simple soul, there is a simple answer: it’s an adventure/mystery set on a sub-light starship. Thrills! Spills! Suspense!

Yes, of course. But what’s it about?

And there’s the rub. Because with SF, perhaps more than any other genre, there’s always something else going on. It’s not simply about the story, it’s about the other stuff: the thread forever woven through our fireside tales of vacuum-stranded souls, alien princesses, and starships. SF has the power to make readers think about stuff they would otherwise refuse to, because you can take it out of the everyday context. It’s a wormhole for the mind. A shortcut to a completely different perspective.  One of the underlying themes of BRAKING DAY, for instance, is what it means to be “other”. The “other” here has nothing to do with the here and now.  But we could just as easily be talking about race, or gender, or religion: whatever tool the natives of Sol III need to turn their fellows into “them” and not “us”.  This SF tradition, this let’s-talk-about-something-else-so-we-can-talk-about-this, is an old, old tradition that goes back pretty much to the beginning of the novel in the 18th Century. I’m thinking about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu. A war that begins with disagreement about the correct way to crack open an egg.  I’m pretty sure Swift’s point had very little to do with, you know, eggs.

Which still doesn’t help with the back of the book….

“Deep Space is getting shallower by the light-year.…” Thrills! Spills! Suspense!

Was chatting on the phone yesterday with my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant, James. They were providing feedback on the manuscript of what I hope will become my second novel. Like most writers, I guess, I have received literally hundreds of rejection emails with pro forma best wishes and anodyne phrases like, “just wasn’t for me,” or “I couldn’t connect with the main character” (ouch!). While you have to be professional, take these things on the chin, and move on, part of me is desperate to know why it just wasn’t for her, or why he couldn’t connect with the main character. In short, I was desperate for feedback. If you don’t get it, how can you get better? So when professionals like Brady and James take the time to read something I’ve written, think about it hard, and then give me the results of that thinking, I gorge on it like manna from heaven. Ninety percent of what they had to say will undoubtedly make for a better book and I can’t wait to apply it to a new draft. Just between thee and me, that’s probably true of the remaining 10 percent also, but I’m not telling them that!

As always after calls like this, I wandered about the house on an energized cloud nine, going over what had been said and thinking about the most elegant way to execute. But then, after a while, my steps grew leaden and I found myself sitting on the front porch staring mindlessly into space. Brady’s and James’s enthusiasm had made it real. I had written a second book. There is a decent chance that I will sell a second book. I might actually become, you know, a “proper” writer. I felt like the dog that had caught the car. I want this. I’ve wanted this for years. But now that I’ve got it, can I handle it? Am I good enough to handle it? What if I’m not?

Fortunately, tea arrived and cloud nine returned. Either I can, or I can’t. Only the future will tell, so why worry? It’s not like I’m going to stop writing, whatever happens. And in the meantime, having sunk my teeth into a shiny piece of chrome, I’m going to hang on for all I’m worth.

Sometimes you think you know all there is to know about something, and you don’t. I thought I’d read Robinson Crusoe as a child, when it turned out I’d read a sanitized kids version. As an adult, reading the original by Daniel Defoe (first published in 1719), I discovered that Mr. Crusoe was a slave-dealing chancer, who kind of deserved to get stranded on a desert island.

Similarly, I recently finished reading another novel I thought I’d read as a child: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (who was bi-racial BTW). If like me, you associate The Three Musketeers with old-world gallantry and swashbuckling adventure (“all for one and one for all!”), it’s a bit of a surprise to discover that the musketeers are little more than spendthrift, womanizing gamblers, who are constantly in debt and mooch off other men’s wives to keep their financial heads above water. The most eye-opening chapter for me was the one titled, “At Night All Cats Are Grey” in which D’Artagnan, knowing that a particular young woman was expecting her lover to visit her after dark, takes the lover’s place, fools her into thinking he’s the man she was expecting, and has his way with her. Dumas, writing in 1844, did allow that D’Artagnan’s behaviour was a bit shady. Here, in the 21st Century, it would be rape. Or, if you are a follower of English criminal law, burglary. The Three Musketeers remains one of the great early adventure novels, but it’s “heroes” are not heroic at all.

Taking time out to revisit The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. It’s over 40 years’ old now and one of the great SF novels of all time: multi-layered, thoughtful, and beautifully written. And nearly all the major characters are female. I remember picking it off the bookshelf as a teenager: and I remember why. I had never come across a SF novel written by a woman. I was curious.

Of course, I had read SF books written by women, I just didn’t know it. They hid themselves behind initials (C.J. Cherryh, for instance) because publishers felt that readers (young men like me, in particular) would not pick up a book that had a female author. Of course, it was the 80s, so everyone was sexist, right? But moving forward in time we have the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling, who was apparently advised to use initials for exactly the same reason. And right now we have triple Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin, not to mention the recently published (and totally excellent) The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes. I don’t actually know whether fear of reader sexism prompted these latter two to take the initials route, but I strongly suspect it had something to do with it. So, two things: first, kudos to Joan D. for not being J.D. and opening my eyes to a new realm of possibilities; and second, shame on the rest of us for tolerating a situation where too many female SF authors still feel the need to camouflage their gender when they should be free to shout it out from the bookshelves.