I’m late bringing this news to The Subway Test–a sign of the recent moribunditude of my blog. But last year I entered the Aura Estrada Short Story Contest at Boston Review and…I didn’t win. But my story, called “Nomenclator of the Revolution,” was a finalist for the award, and that means the story will be appearing in Boston Review soon!
One of the reasons I feel so proud to have “Nomenclator” coming out in Boston Review–besides the obvious, that Boston Review is an excellent publication which has hosted writing from titans like Rita Dove, John Updike, Susan Sontag, and Saul Bellow–is that “Nomenclator” had been rejected by 26 other magazines before it was accepted at Boston Review.
Which is another way of saying don’t invest too much meaning in any particular rejection of your work. When a story of mine is rejected a few times–say, half a dozen rejections or so–I do need to look hard at what I’m sending out. Maybe the piece isn’t ready. Maybe it’s not as good as I would like to believe it is. But once in a while, I scrutinize the much-rejected story and it still looks good to me. It’s hard to assess my own work honestly. But if I really believe the story is good, then I’ll keep sending it out until I find someone who agrees with me.
One of my formative memories as a writer was seeing the great poet William Stafford read at the end of his career. He would have been 75 or 76 years old at the time–a wizened, kindly fellow who I appreciated only later as one of the most important poetic voices in the 20th century. At one point in the reading, he introduced one of his poems by reciting the names of all the magazines and journals that had rejected it. The list was long–I don’t remember how many publications were on it–but, journal names being what they are, the list sounded like a poem of its own. I didn’t have the courage to tell Stafford how important his reading had been to me, and he died mot much later. But thank you, William Stafford, for reading that list when I was 19 years old.
But the novel I’m working on now, Pacifica, begins each of its 74 chapters with an epigraph. Much like the computer game Civilization, each chapter is named after one of the technologies that have made modern humanity possible. And, much like Civilization, each technology is accompanied by an apposite quote. Leonard Nimoy was the gold standard narrator for those quotes in Civilization IV (though Sean Bean has his moments in Civilization VI).
One of the most fun parts of drafting Pacifica has been finding the right quotes for each chapter. I picked from books and poems that I love (as well as a few books that I hated) to put together what I imagined as a kind of collage or mosaic of human knowledge. I imagined the task as something like a literary version of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where The Beatles assembled a photo-collage crowd of their favorite thinkers and artists and goofball influences.
Many technologies were easy to find quotes for. Especially for early technologies like pottery, masonry, and currency, there are a thousand great writers who had something pithy to say. Mostly I would page through books in my office, or CTRL-F through digitized books in Archive.org, to find quotes that spoke to the technology in question and also, hopefully, to the action of the chapter. Sometimes I had to draw the connections myself, in which case the quote turned into something of a writing prompt; other times the quote fit the chapter in deep and unexpected ways that I couldn’t have engineered if I tried.
Some of the later technologies were much harder: for instance, no one from Homer to Virginia Woolf seems to have much to say about the superconductor. Who could I quote for a tech like that?
It just so happened that by the time I got to the superconductor chapter of the book, everybody was talking about ChatGPT. At my college, the discussion revolves entirely around students’ using ChatGPT to plagiarize their essays, an issue which seems to me as trivial, in the grand scheme of dangers that ChatGPT represents, as the crew of the Titanic arguing about a shortage of urinal cakes in the men’s rooms of the Saloon Deck.
So I asked ChatGPT to find me some quotes about superconducting. It suggested some quotes from Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye. They weren’t bad references, exactly–those books do mention superconducting–but none of them resonated with me. So I asked about Arthur C. Clarke, a fave of mine: surely, I thought, Clarke must have written somewhere about superconducting.
According to ChatGPT, Clarke has written about superconducting: of the two references ChatGPT gave me, the one which jumped out at me was this one: “Clarke’s short story ‘The Ultimate Melody,’ published in 1957, briefly mentions the use of superconducting materials in the construction of a futuristic musical instrument called the ‘ultimate melody.'” Now that’s a resonant quote–that would work perfectly for Pacifica!
So I looked up the story and read it (like 90% of Clarke’s short fiction, I had never read it before). Here’s the thing, though: there’s absolutely nothing about superconducting in that story! (For that matter, the futuristic musical instrument is called “Ludwig;” the ultimate melody was the ideal music the instrument was designed to find).
And here’s the other thing, which I discovered later: Arthur C. Clarke did write a short story, called “Crusade,” in which superconductivity is a central plot point. ChatGPT didn’t think to mention it (because ChatGPT doesn’t think yet). I tracked that story down with a simple DuckDuckGo search for “Arthur C. Clarke superconducting.” It’s an excellent story, by the way–very Arthur C. Clarke. And that story had the perfect quote, which fits both Pacifica and the life I feel I am living lately: “It was a computer’s paradise. No world could have been more hostile to life.“
So, for now, I agree with John Scalzi’s excellent assessment: “If you want a fast, infinite generator of competently-assembled bullshit, AI is your go-to source. For anything else, you still need a human.” That’s all changing, and changing faster than I would like, but I’m relieved to know that I’m still smarter than a computer for the next year or maybe two.
I’ve had a long spell away from this blog while I was drafting my third novel, Pacifica. But now that Pacifica is (finally, after a thousand sighs) drafted, and as I prepare for the publication of my second novel, Exit Black, by Blackstone this year, I’m able to give a little more attention to this space. I’ve missed being here, and I’ve missed interacting with you through The Subway Test. I hope to connect with you a little more frequently in the coming months!
So, feel free to call me Mr. Gravity for the rest of 2022. Or Professor Gravity if that appeals to you more. On second thought, don’t call me that: a name like Professor Gravity suggests that I might actually understand gravity, and as my physics teacher said long ago, gravity is harder to understand than you think. Just keep calling me Joe.
Many thanks to Brad and Rob for their fine publication, Center Field of Gravity, which I hope you will check out.
I’m pleased to announce that my story “Before Concord” has been chosen as a finalist for the 2022 Gravity Award by the fine folks at Center Field of Gravity. As they say on the Oscars, it’s an honor just to be nominated.
“Before Concord” is a favorite of mine: it’s my first satisfactory attempt at a hard-boiled detective story (though, because I’m me, it’s set on the University Republic of Mars at the end of the 22nd century). With all the novel work I have been doing lately, I’m very happy to see one of my shorter pieces get picked up.
The winner will be announced this Tuesday the 17th of May, and you can read the story in all its nominated glory here.
I’ve been working on novels for so many months now that having one of my short stories picked up seems as rare as an eclipse. I suppose that when you only have three short stories that you are trying to get placed, acceptances will be rare events by definition. But I did have good fortune with one of my stories recently–a little tale that is odd enough that a few editors didn’t know what to make of it. Sometimes when a story of mine has been rejected many times, I take a long look at the piece and decide that it’s just not my best work. Other times, though, I take a long look after many rejections and I come away thinking this is a good story, and someday somebody will see that.
My latest story, “The Wingbuilder,” fits into the second category. It’s an homage to Borges (especially “The House of Asterion”), as well as a love-letter to video games like The Legend of Zelda and to the classic Jim Henson movie The Labyrinth. Now that I think of it, it’s also a meditation on solitude that might speak to the condition of some isolated, quarantined readers. It appeared in the estimable magazine Aphotic Realm, and you can see it here. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been obsessively trawling through news feeds for more articles about the novel coronavirus pandemic, as though somewhere in the thousandth article I will find some life-saving pearl of advice that I didn’t see in the previous 999 articles. I can see that what I’m doing is a strategy–shared by many, I suppose–to offer myself the illusion of control in a cataclysm which is fundamentally beyond anyone’s control. (Of course, while the pandemonium is beyond anyone’s control, it’s not beyond everyone’s collective control: I’m very happy to see the people in my community of Portland, Oregon, starting to close up shop, hunker down in our houses, and practice social distancing even without explicit direction from our psychically damaged and malignant president).
As I hunker down here at my dinner table, reflecting on scary days ahead, I am reminded of a pandemic story I wrote years ago, one of my earliest science fiction efforts. The piece is called “A Murmuration of Starlings;” it was my first sale to a major sci fi publication (AnalogScience Fiction and Fact). While there are a few elements in the story that I would have handled differently if I were writing it today, on the whole I think it has held up quite well. And there is a lot in “Murmuration” that I anticipated correctly about what a pandemic would be like: the focus on social distancing, the eerie calm in once-bustling places, the bemused emails and phone calls.
Starling, by M. Shattock
But, now that a pandemic is truly upon us, I’m more interested in the things I got wrong about the story, the things I failed to imagine. It didn’t occur to me to write about economic collapse, though of course that’s one of the things that’s easiest to notice about our current predicament. I didn’t think at all about the case fatality rate of the disease I was writing about: in the story, 90% of people who were infected died, though it seems to me now that a disease that deadly would burn itself out very quickly. It never occurred to me how much chaos and misery could accompany an infection with a 98% or 99% survival rate. I wish, now that I’m living through a real pandemic, that I had said something about the dithering and denial of the authorities in the early days.
If you don’t happen to have the June 2012 issue of AnalogScience Fiction and Fact lying around, you can read the story here. I can reassure you that there is a redemptive arc to the story, just the sort of thing a reader might need while hunkering down through a real pandemic.
About ten years ago, I submitted one of the first science fiction stories I had ever written to an anthology called 2020 Visions, published by the now-departed M-Brane Press. The editor, Rick Novy, was someone I didn’t know, but M-Brane had given me my first publication the year before, and I thought I would try with this new story about a plague carried by super-intelligent starlings.
Rick Novy didn’t take the story, but he gave me some excellent feedback–the piece had way too much infodump, and it took a very long time for the story’s action to get going. And he gave me a lead on another publisher: Stanley Schmidt, then-editor of Analog, might be interested in the story if I tightened it up.
Thankfully, Stanley Schmidt was interested in the piece once I had revised it, and “A Murmuration of Starlings” became the first of five stories that I’ve published in Analog. And it was through Analog that my work did get picked up for anthologies, and later how I was approached by an agent to option one of my stories for a movie.
I’ve published a lot more fiction over the last ten years, and I’m starting this decade with more hope (about my writing, anyway) than I had ten years ago. But one of the thoughts I had this morning as I woke to the year 2020 was that anthology, 2020 Visions, that I couldn’t get published in at the beginning of the last decade. I’m grateful to Rick Novy for the kind feedback and the kinder tip.
I was invited recently to join Curious Fictions, a platform for short fiction on the web. And, while I’m likely to keep writing for the magazine and podcast circuit, Curious Fictions does seem like a sweet place for me to drop my stories, especially those pieces that are hard to find elsewhere.
As I was thinking about an inaugural story for my Curious Fictions profile, I immediately landed on one of my favorite first pieces: “So-Sz.” I first sent the story out for publication ten years ago this month. The story appeared in a wonderful little web magazine, 5923 Quarterly , which folded not long after, perhaps coincidentally. “So-Sz” has been out of print and unavailable since then.
I’ve always had a soft spot for this story. It’s one of my earliest efforts at short fiction that struck me as mostly successful. And, while I am a better writer today than I was ten years ago, there’s not a great deal I would change about the piece.
I was also reminded of “So-Sz” by the most recent Laika movie, Missing Link. Hopefully you’ll see some similarities (and differences) as well.
So, without further ado, I invite you to click over to Curious Fictions to see the 10th Anniversary Edition of one of my favorite journeyman efforts: “So-Sz.”
Photo Credit: Steve Rotman; Art Credit: Some Awesome Graffitist
My story “Potosí” recently came out in Analog, and it’s gotten lots of the positive and negative attention that I had hoped it would. In the case of this story, I looked forward to some negative attention, as “Potosí” is a not-so-veiled indictment of the Trumpian worldview, and some readers of science fiction, unfortunately, are also white supremacists. (This is not to say, by the way, that everyone who hated the story is a white supremacist. People could have any number of reasons for disliking the story; however, a few people who hated it had objections which were rooted in a white supremacist worldview).
I’ve also been happy with how the story looks in Analog. Even though the magazine is print-only, it’s still nice in this internet age to see one’s name in print. However, I do have one regret about how the piece looks: my bio was omitted from the end of the story. That’s normally not a big deal at all for me–I suspect the editors left it off for space-saving reasons, and the folks at Analog have done more than just about anyone to promote my work. They were even kind enough to run a full page biosketch on me a couple of years ago. But there was a line in my bio for this story that I really wanted to appear in the magazine. Here is is:
“The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Phil Ekstrom in working out the physics of this story.”
Phil is a friend of mine whose knowledge of physics not only exceeds my own (that’s an exceedingly easy accomplishment), but his knowledge of physics also exceeds my knowledge of any field at all, including writing. He’s a man of great accomplishment in a wide number of fields of physics and engineering; while it’s hardly his greatest achievement, some will recognize his work in the photo below: Phil was one of the people who wired up the young Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first computer.
A teenage Bill Gates looks to the top of an imagined stack of 100 billion dollar bills –Getty Images
“Potosí” involves a decent amount of classical mechanics–most of the story takes place in the microgravity of a small asteroid being pushed this way and that by space tugs, mass drivers, and the imaginary forces of human greed and anger. I’m reasonably good at describing the greed and anger part, but I needed a lot of help with the physical forces. I can tell Phil has years of experience explaining things to undergraduates of varying talent; he certainly needed to call on those skills in order to explain my story to me.
The story has some (I hope small) violations of physical laws, where I did a little handwaving in order to accomplish an artistic goal. But to the extent that “Potosí” is any example of hard sci-fi–as opposed to the science fantasy of Star Wars or the kilomoles of handwavium in Star Trek–I have Phil Ekstrom to thank for giving the story some semblance of rigor. Thanks, Phil.
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