Making Conversation

By Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Twenty-two years ago, there was Making Book. It was a finalist for the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Nonfiction Book, but lost out to the dead guy. It's been through three printings and is still available from NESFA Press. Now: Making Conversation, selected from TNH's writing since 1994, will be first available at MidAmeriCon II, and afterward from NESFA Press in softcover and e-book form. 222 pages, 59 essays (long and short) about time, space, genre, editing, gardening, saints, libraries, food, democracy, drink, insanity, fear, hamsters, chaos, moderation, palimpsests, fanfic, clichés, books, slush, spelling, scams, sleep, fantasy, policing, infundibula, trolls, writing, knitting, fandom, habaneros, exposition, management, Selectrics, Brooklyn, literary agents, pygmy mammoths, and the true cure for scurvy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NESFA Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021

Book preview

Dispatch from Staten Island

Before we moved to Brooklyn, we lived in a hilltop 19th C. house on Staten Island. From the GEnie SFRT, 1 Sep 1994.

My tomatoes go on imperturbably tomatoing. Meanwhile my single tomatillo plant has turned into a many-tentacled monstrosity, with huge branches that droop down to rest on the ground and send out lots of rootlets and further branches. I’ve seen more compact melon vines.

I have made a great discovery in the field of weed control: concrete.

I don’t know why this never occurred to me before, but it turns out my local building supply store will sell me anything, even stuff like Liquid Nails™ adhesive, and aerosol squirt-’n’-puff polyurethane insulation, that no sane society would let me have without a license certifying that I know not to use it to fix that leaky pressure valve on my water heater, or to discipline the cat if it’s been really, really bad.*

Nope, no such thing. And this is in America, a country in which more than one normal, intelligent adult has had to spend time examining the question of whether, for the last decade and a half, I've been faking narcolepsy—including all the high-tech inpatient testing procedures and scary medical bills—in order to be allowed to drive up into the Bronx once a month to purchase my prescription stimulant drugs, instead of buying them from a local street vendor like normal people do.

I think they should worry instead about how any idiot—me, for example—can walk into Rickel Home Center and buy bags of premixed quick-drying concrete without anyone so much as asking whether I know the difference between cement and Hamburger Helper. Instead, the employees ask whether I know they’re having a special on bricks. This strikes me as gross social irresponsibility. A few hours after you take them, drugs are history, but masonry can be a semi-permanent error.†

So far I’ve contented myself with cementing the spaces between my flagstone and brick pavers. I was tired of weeding in between them. I figure this constitutes Appropriate Use of Technology. But I keep thinking about all that copper pipe in the plumbing department at Rickels. It wouldn’t take much work to construct a tennis-ball cannon capable of dropping flaming tennis balls off the bow of the Staten Island Ferry, or maybe just the Borough Hall complex. It’s all downhill from here.

Notes

* Or muriatic acid. It's easy to buy and use. The problem is safely getting rid of the leftovers. I fed mine broken seashells until they stopped dissolving.

† To quote a relative of mine, Love may come, and love may go, but a molly bolt is forever.

On Time

Written sometime in late 1995, possibly on the GEnie SFRT.

Our best guess for Jesus of Nazareth’s actual birth date is 4 B.C. So forget that impending two-triple-ought impostor; if the US Post Office is planning to issue Jesus a bimillennial commemorative, 1996 is the year to do it.

The turn of a millennium can’t help but be distracting: Look, it’s the Twenty-First Century! Bring on the blasters and personal hovercars! A pocketful of plastic credits for everyone! (Actually, a lot of us already have a pocketful of plastic credit. All the scientifictionists got wrong was that they used the plural instead of the singular.)

I hereby predict that about five years from now there will be a really dire run of of magazine articles about how the year 2000 (ditto 2001) doesn’t match up to all our fears and expectations. I further predict that the authors of these articles will think this confirms everything they already believed anyway, and that they will, as a result, think themselves very profound.

The future will take us by surprise. It always does. I’m a professional science fiction editor, and I say it’s so, so neener. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t remember any of those pricey mediagenic ‘80s futurologists having much to say about the Internet, or many other major developments of the last several years. (Ever notice how few prophets, psychics, and asst’d visionaries have long-lasting careers?)

It’s just as well. I wouldn’t want to live in Tomorrowland, where the social patterns and infrastructure are all so spiff and modern and well-designed and rational that any remaining problems must needs be insoluble, and so a cause for despair. And I’m not any fonder of the idea that we’re living on the tattered, weary, played-out edge of postmodern time.

My own theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We’re hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, barely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times. Anything can happen.

Anatomy of a Sale: The Fortunate Fall to Tor Books

Writers’ Digest commissioned me and Patrick to write this for the second edition (1996) of their Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Sourcebook. Patrick says I wrote more of it than he did, and…yeah, it sounds like me.

For all the talk of worldbuilding you hear at conventions, SF doesn’t build worlds. Rather, it builds the similitude of them, with hints and fractional bits of data and odd sidelong references, so that while the readers are being introduced to the characters and setting and action, they’re also imaginatively constructing the larger context in which the story takes place.

It’s a huge expository burden: SF narrative must make the world, while telling a story set in that world, in the course of which story the world will be explicated, thereby creating the context wherein we understand the significance of the actions that make up the story. There is no single starting point. Everything must go forward simultaneously. And this same prose must also flow naturally, in some recognizable version of the speaking human voice, and parcel out its strangeness so that the reader can assimilate one bite before swallowing another.

We call SF a literature of ideas, but if it is to coax those ideas into existence on the page, it must also be a literature of techniques. We have seldom seen a first-time novelist with a firmer grasp of this than Raphael Carter.

Ashes to Ashes, the first chapter of The Fortunate Fall, begins with two unidentified voices talking about familiar, concrete smells: roses, grapefruit, horseshit. Then one voice says Olfactory systems are go, and you discover that the two people who are talking are a thousand miles apart (one in Kazakhstan, one in Leningrad); that they’re Keishi, a screener, and Maya, a camera (think film editor and cameraman), who are running a preliminary check on a direct mind-to-mind link; and that they both work for something called News One. Which—aha!—anchors you again: strange technology but a familiar situation, like a reporter shooting a little test videocam footage before the main event. (Blessedly, the characters don’t talk about how this is like 20th Century TV news reporting.)

It helps that there is none of the awkward, forced-sounding futuristic slang so common in manuscripts we reject, no hazmat hardsoftpackage wetwilly scuzzware, just normal English turned to new meanings: When she had finished, she would slide herself into my mind, like a rat into water. Where we don’t stumble over the language, we’re less likely to balk at the idea.

Having gotten us this far with the mind-to-mind link, Carter develops it with Maya’s observation that after a half-hour as someone’s screener you know them better than if you’d been friends for decades, so cameras are constantly having their screeners conceive passionate, nearly instantaneous loves and hates for them. It’s believable; and because we believe in the emotional reaction to the technology, we believe in the technology itself.

The system check goes on. Maya is worried about Keishi being her screener—they’ve never worked together before. Buried in Maya’s ruminations about the perils of broadcasting live with an unfamiliar screener are further bits of worldbuilding. Then Keishi says it’s time for the broadcast to start, there’s some last-minute nerves and fluster, and Maya starts talking to her audience.

Two more things help us over the threshold of belief here. First, we’ve followed these characters as they’ve prepared for this performance, and now we’re inside their heads as they perform. We don’t have the slight automatic defensiveness of people who are being Told Something. If the book had started with the broadcast, giving us no role except passive audience member, we wouldn’t accept the information as readily as we do. Second, Maya’s temporary shift of tense into second person singular is vivid, involving, and a useful distraction. By the time we assimilate that second person—"You said it with me," "we strode forward up the hill"—we’re hooked into this broadcast. There’s no time to argue. We’re coming along for the ride.

Raphael Carter starts pushing the accelerator towards the floor. This is what’s left of Square-Mile-on-Chu, Maya says, near some crumbling ruins in an otherwise idyllic setting. As she talks, we become increasingly uneasy. These chimneys, she says, were typical Guardian (Guardian?) construction: slave-labor-intensive, to denote status. (These Guardians were bad guys.) She reminds her audience that there was once a time when the word Guardian meant a good thing. (Very bad guys indeed.) Then Maya wades out into the cold muck of the lake and says, It is a beautiful day in Kazakhstan, and you are standing calf-deep in the ash of human bodies.

Boom.

This was a death camp, a killing ground. This world that we’ve been absentmindedly compiling as we read contains an an entire Holocaust. We can’t assimilate that, not right away; and it is in this moment of stunned confusion that Carter introduces the Unanimous Army.

At first we have only the sound of their marching feet, which Maya conjures out of the white noise of the river. It’s a wonderful, imaginable detail, this sound of running water that turns to feet marching, and when Maya sculpts the hillside grass into the Army’s soldiers we imagine, and see, that transformation as well. Carter is tactful here, neither pointing out that the white noise of a river sounds like a great many marching feet, nor calling the Army innumerable as blades of grass, but we get the feel of huge numbers just the same.

And now that we’ve been completely set up for it, the Unanimous Army comes pouring over the hill. It is transcendentally strange. It works. Read it and see for yourself.

Another reason we bought the book is that we really like the way Raphael Carter has constructed this world and its history. It has a very satisfactory breadth and complexity and variety, none of which seems contrived (aside from normal human contrivance) within this history.

The careful build-up to the line, It is a beautiful day in Kazakhstan, and you are standing calf-deep in the ash of human bodies, isn’t just there for the aesthetic effect. It gives the moment the terrible moral weight it has to have, and shows us that it has that weight for Maya and Keishi and their audience as well.

Here’s a hot tip: you can’t write good science fiction—that is, you’re unlikely to get past the slushpile—if the only thing you read is science fiction. You can’t make other worlds if you’re not acquainted with this one. For example, reading history will teach you that human beings don’t lightly forget cataclysms. This may strike you as obvious. Nevertheless, we’ve seen a great many SF novels in which characters casually refer to some megadeath war or plague or famine that happened in the middling-recent past...then just as casually move on to another topic.

Real people sometimes do things like this in the real world when they’re talking about recent history. But the attitudes under the surface are complicated—tendentious in one case, emotional in another, thoughtful or analytical in a third. Major episodes in our own recent history—Hiroshima, the space program, the Sixties, the run-up to the Gulf War—have weight, gravity, presence for us, even when we’re trying to distance ourselves from them.

It’s hard to replicate this sense of weight and consequence in a hypothesized future. It’s even harder to do that while keeping a story moving forward. Carter’s parsimonious initial exposition lets her dole out bits of it later, when it’s needed and is interesting. The novel’s pace of revelation is tantalizing, which is not a drawback as long as the reader has a sense of being in strong, reliable hands. We never know quite as much as we want to—but we always know as much as we need.

The trick with science fiction is not to prove that something—a machine, a technology, a history, a new way of being—would be possible. It’s to temporarily convince us that it already exists.

While it’s interesting and instructive to go through a chunk of prose like this and see how it works, readers shouldn’t have to be consciously aware of all these little mechanisms operating under the surface the first time they read the book. (Unless they enjoy reading that way, which is not our problem.) We don’t read analytically like that either, at least the first time through.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. We and all the other readers know whether the technique works. Even readers who will never in their lives think about expository prose know that some writers just read more easily and clearly than others, and that the ground they write about is firmer underfoot. They may entirely lose track of the fact that they’re reading a book, and be conscious only of the story as it unfolds.

As editors, how aware are we of this kind of technique? We can’t speak for all the other editors out there, but it shouts at us from the moment we look at the manuscript. It’s the basic fabric from which the book is made. Structural plot problems can often be addressed by rewrites during the editing process, and surface glitches like spelling can be fixed in production, but if the mechanisms of language don’t work, there’s no recourse; it’s going to be bad in every paragraph.

One sometimes hears from indignant writers who want to know how anyone can possibly judge a novel without reading the whole thing. Truth is, for many manuscripts, three chapters and an outline are more than enough. The words in which a story is told are integral to the story. We could have written this article about the second or third chapters of The Fortunate Fall, rather than the first. The qualities that made us like it are present throughout.

One last word on this subject: technique is not the point. It doesn’t exist for its own sake. It serves the story and the ideas. Without it, you can’t tell the story or get the ideas across, but on its own it’s inert, like a noun without a verb.

Why did we buy this novel? Because we loved it. Because we were fascinated by it. Because it made us want to wave copies of it in the air and yell Here, read this! Because in our editorial heart of hearts, there’s a nine-year-old reader who likes big, adventurous stories about good people and interesting places, and a twelve-year-old with an insatiable desire to know how the world works, and a teenager who likes slick maneuvers and snappy comebacks and other cool stuff, and is relieved when books aren’t stupid or embarrassing, and an internal reader of indeterminate age who’s grateful when a new author obviously has style and storytelling nailed, because it means they can relax, sit back, and enjoy it.

Because we have faith that at bottom, we’re not all that different from the readers who buy our books. There’s no sense in buying and publishing a manuscript you don’t like, just because you think someone else ought to like it. No reader ever buys a book because it strikes them as being the kind of thing somebody else might like.

And that’s why we bought this first novel. Send us more like it.

Extratextual influences

Ruminations on book packaging, marketing categories, and the actual words on the page, and how those are three different things. Making Light, 11 December 2001.

I’m on a mailing list that’s full of people who work in SF publishing. A couple of days ago, one of our list members wrote: OK, gang, I have one for you. The term ‘speculative fiction’ has been used a lot lately. I find that it has a different definition depending on who you ask. What do you consider to be the definition of ‘speculative fiction’? I responded:

Speculative fiction is a more genteel term for science fiction that means more or less the same thing, but escapes some of SF’s vulgar old Gernsbackian pulp-magazine connotations.

It’s attractive to those who are predisposed to like science fiction, and more attractive than the older term to those who find the idea of science offputting. It sounds similar enough to science fiction that persons not previously familiar with the term will likely understand it to refer to something resembling but not identical to science fiction. And it has the same initials as Science Fiction, which means you can use it without having to teach a new abbreviation to booksellers, distributors, librarians, etc.

It allows a greater range of respectable old authors—Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Bierce—to be identified as ancestors of the form, in spite of their near-total lack of scientifictional content.

It frees everyone concerned from the last vestiges of any obligation to furnish stories with scientifictional content, while allowing the use of such content if the author happens to come up with a good scientifictional story idea; and it enables anthologists to buy stories that would otherwise be outside the scope of the original proposal used to sell the project to a publisher.

I’m not cynical; I just know how often such labels are flags of convenience. I’ve found myself explaining to the young that there was once a time—back before Tolkien was a smash hit, before Ian and Betty Ballantine published the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, and doughty infighters like Don Wollheim and Judy-Lynn Del Rey did so much to establish fantasy as a publishing category—when epic fantasy was not considered one of the natural subdivisions of literature.

In my own time I’ve seen the technothriller broken out as a category. Books that at one time would have been near-future action/adventure hard SF, a subspecies of Our Beloved Genre, are now published as a technothrillers, a.k.a. books like the ones Tom Clancy wrote, and are classified as mainstream. It’s a natural process. A lot of readers enjoyed Clancy’s novels and wanted more just like them, so the increasingly strong gravitational field in that area of literary space started pulling in books that resembled Clancy’s.

It’s an oversimplification, but you could view technothrillers as books for people who’ve run out of Tom Clancy, Regency romances as books for people who’ve run out of Georgette Heyer, gothic novels for people who’ve run out of Daphne du Maurier and the Brontës, and Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe novels as methadone for Patrick O’Brian fans.*

When the pull of the reading market’s desire is very strong and there aren’t enough sufficiently similar works hanging around that can be rechristened, strange things can happen, like C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros trilogies being sold as just like Tolkien. (I was twelve, the bookstore cozened all my birthday money out of me, and those trilogies were nothing like Tolkien. I was