William
Sanders
Senior Editor and Mean Old Bastard
Summer is once again upon us; as it usually is, you might have noticed, around this time of year. We here at Helix hope you're having a pleasant one. (Unless you're one of that small handful of not unturdlike individuals out in Darkest Blogistan who make a practice of dissing us, in which case may the season bring you tick bites, heat rash, a persistent throbbing headache above the left eye, and numerous humiliating incidents of incontinence in public situations. And I don't say that in any bad way, you understand.)
Of course even the best people, such as our friends and supporters, have bad luck sometimes. Eddie Cochran declared, memorably, that there ain't no cure for the summertime blues...but perhaps this new issue will at least provide a welcome distraction from whatever bummers may be your lot.
As usual, we've got quite an impressive lineup of literary talent for your perusal. This time, as it happens, several previous Helix contributors are back for encores. In fact two are making their fourth and third appearances, respectively, in this magazine: Jennifer Pelland, whose first Helix story was recently a finalist for the Nebula Award, returns with a wickedly funny satire, while Samantha Henderson demonstrates that nothing livens up a story like a bit of necrophilia. Melanie Fletcher takes time off from running this website to favor us with another bit of inspired outrageousness; and Vylar Kaftan contributes a story so original that when I first read it I could only exclaim, "Holy shit!" New to our pages are Leah Cypess and Tina Connolly, each of whom in her own way deals powerfully with youthful pain and desperation.
I don't usually say much about the poetry section, this being Bud's department; but I do want to note that Helix is once again honored to present the work of world-famous author Jane Yolen. I'm damned if I can see why she bothers with us — her standing in the field is such that she can write her own ticket; she certainly doesn't need us — but I'm deeply gratified that she has done so.
So read already, and enjoy. Maybe print these pages up and take them out and read them by the pool while you're working on your sunburn.
Recently, in the course of a motorcycle trip, I spent the night at a state park in central Oklahoma. It was a warm and rainless weekend, and there was a big college town nearby, so I wasn't expecting to get all that much sleep; and I was right, but for once it wasn't loud radios and players that made the night hideous, but rather a live performance. A group of youngish men and women had brought along a couple of guitars, and beginning at dusk they favored the rest of us with an informal but very lengthy recital.
(Very impressive musical talents, too; each of them had his or her own key — or sometimes as many as two and a half keys in a single song — with none of that cheap business of everybody having to share the same pitch.)
They were of course drunk, and getting more so — a good thing, too, I'd hate to think anybody could sing that badly sober — which may have been why they kept going almost until midnight, when the rangers finally showed up and distributed a generous supply of Shut The Fuck Up.
Still, the whole thing might not have been quite so awful if they had shown a little better judgment in their selection of material. Ambition is all very well, but when ambition is not matched by ability the results can be excruciating. And I found myself reflecting, as so many times in the past, that in particular there ought to be warning labels on Creedence Clearwater CDs:
Warning:
Before attempting to sing any of these songs, ask yourself this question: "Am I now or have I ever been John Fogarty?" If the answer is no, please consider shutting up before you make a total putz of yourself.
All of which may seem irrelevant in the present context; and I suppose it is, but there is a parallel with a problem that has come up again and again ever since the founding of this magazine: people who submit, or ask to submit, stories of extreme brevity — stories that in most cases are not really stories at all, just little vignettes.
I got quite a lot of this sort of thing early in the existence of the magazine. Later on, I added a request, in the submission guidelines, that queries include story length, and that let me save a lot of time and trouble all around; and for the last year or so I've made it generally known that I wasn't in the market for anything under 3000 words. But there are still those who haven't gotten the word (or, one suspects in some cases, simply assume I can't possibly mean them) and so I still get the occasional query about somebody's 1200-word masterpiece.
And I can understand why they write these things; most of the online magazines seem to prefer the shorties, for reasons I can only guess at. But I have been told that there is another reason: the wide prevalence of "workshops" and "critique groups" and the like, in which very short pieces are favored because they take less time to read aloud and discuss in detail. (There also seems to be a kind of vogue or fad at work, but I don't even try to understand that sort of thing.)
To be sure, a few writers have made it work. I've even published a 1600-word piece in this magazine: Terry Bisson's "Put Up Your Hands." But it wasn't written as a story in the usual sense, but in another format; and Terry can do a lot of things I wouldn't advise anybody else to try.
(And yes, I'm aware of Hemingway's little gag with the baby shoes. Ernest Hemingway was the greatest American writer of the 20th century, but he was also, on occasion, full of shit as a Christmas turkey, and this was one of those times — assuming he was being serious rather than flippant; I suspect the latter.)
Be all that as it may, there's something I want to say to new and aspiring writers who are trying, or considering trying, to write what is now called "flash fiction" and which we used to call "short-short": First, ask yourself whether you are now or have ever been Fredric Brown. If the answer is no, you probably ought to drop the idea.
And if you do not know who Fredric Brown was, I direct your attention to Bud's column in this issue. See, I was going somewhere with this....
Now, of course, we come to the part where I exhort you to send us money so we can pay these fine writers you're getting to read for free. Right?
Wrong, Starbucks-Breath. We've been beating that drum for two years now;
either you get it or you don't. Chip in or continue to freeload; nothing
I say is going to make any difference, is it?
Lawrence
Watt-Evans
Managing Editor and Freelance Pedant
The Future Isn't What It Used to Be
I've recently been reading Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels (highly recommended, by the way), and something occurred to me.
In those stories, Dresden has a recurring problem with the fact that technology doesn't work well around wizards. At first I took this as just a bit of world-building, something to give the character's universe a little flavor and to explain why magic isn't more widespread, but after awhile I realized it was more than that. It's a way of handicapping Dresden, so that he won't have too easy a time solving mysteries and battling his foes. He can't just google for the information he needs. He can't carry a cell phone to tell his allies where he is or summon aid. It gives the author more flexibility, lets him make things harder for Dresden.
It's not unique to Jim Butcher; I've heard other writers talking about how when they're writing contemporary settings and want to put their characters in peril, they need to find some way to eliminate cell phones — low batteries, lost phones, poor reception, or whatever. It's not just in SF or fantasy; I've heard this from romance writers and mystery writers, as well.
This wasn't a problem twenty years ago. Back then, a hero wouldn't have a phone in his pocket. He couldn't log onto the net at the local library and find any obscure fact he might need. If he needed an expert on Etruscan hieroglyphs he might have to fly to Italy, providing lots of opportunity for plot complications; now he can just find an appropriate website. It's made things tougher for writers in many ways.
Of course, it's made things easier in other ways — now it's easy to explain how your hero learned everything he needed to know about African fetish dolls or Ukrainian politics. I'm not sure whether it's a net gain or a net loss, but it's certainly different.
One thing it's done, though — a lot of old science fiction stories look kind of stupid now. Maybe not to the old fogies like us who remember living in a world without home computers and cell phones, but to people who have grown up in the computer age, it's gotta be downright quaint.
I wonder whether this is one reason for the decline in the popularity of serious science fiction, and the rise of fantasy — as our own world has gotten more complex and interconnected, it's become harder to write about an extrapolated even-more-complex future, and more tempting to imagine a simpler, more magical world.
It's harder for readers to cope, too. In a world where a large part of the population can't cope with the technology we have now (how many of you can't figure out half the features on your phones?), why would we expect them to be entertained by stories about far more advanced technology?
Old-time fans talk about the sense of wonder that drew them to SF. It's pretty hard to evoke a sense of wonder about technology for readers for whom airliners and iPhones are everyday equipment.
It's also interesting to see how poorly SF has done, historically, at predicting the world we live in. In general, Golden Age SF foresaw a world where everything was bigger, faster, more powerful — and for the most part, not one of instantaneous access to unbelievable amounts of data, virtual communities, and pocket gadgets that do things that were unimaginable fifty years ago.
Present-day SF writers talk about cyberspace, bioengineering, nanotechnology — and does anyone believe for an instant that they're even close to guessing how these will actually be used? What new revolution have we missed that will be as transformative as the Information Revolution? Remember that many of the authors who wrote about sliderules on starships lived to see laptop computers and the end of the space race. In the introduction to Jack Vance's first novel, a juvenile called Vandals of the Void that was published in the 1950s, Vance predicted that his readers would live to see an interplanetary police force; that looks pretty ludicrous now. Technology and society went in directions no one expected.
It's a heck of a lot safer to just write fantasy.