William
Sanders
Senior Editor and Mean Old Bastard Emeritus
Take no prisoners
Tell no lies
No pretty songs of compromise
— Janis Ian
Back again with another issue of outstanding speculative fiction to amaze and delight you — and, if at all possible, shake you up at least a little.
Or in some cases maybe piss you off...we've been a bit surprised in the lack of outrage at some of the things in the previous issue. What's it take to qualify for a simple little fatwa, anyway? What's Salman Rushdie got that we haven't?
Well, try again. Check out Terry Bisson's offering in this issue. If that doesn't bring them out with the torches and pitchforks and wooden stakes, I give up.
Speaking of surprises, there have been some pleasant ones. Let me pause here and extend our thanks for the generosity of the many donors who gave to help support the premier issue and made it possible to pay our writers decently. (Remember, though, it's all gone to pay the contributors and the operating expenses for last quarter. As of October 1, we're broke again. So once again we're passing the hat. Get used to it; that's how we operate.)
One surprise was both pleasant and disturbing. Pleasant in that I was able to find so many excellent stories for this issue (and the next, and into next year; you're going to love some of the stuff we've got for you) with so little difficulty. I had been worried about that, and in fact that was why the first issue contained so many staff-written stories; I wasn't sure we'd be able to get contributions, given our highly idiosyncratic payment model.
So it was a pleasant surprise that I was able to do so — but, as Lawrence remarked, it's also been rather disturbing. It shouldn't have been that easy; there shouldn't be so many first-class stories lying around unpublished, rejected by everybody in the business. There shouldn't be so many first-class professional writers with stories they couldn't sell because they took too many chances.
I knew the stories were out there. Clear back in 1999, a lady named Peg Robinson showed me an incredibly beautiful story which she had been unable to get anyone to publish. Then I went off to Europe the next year and we lost contact. One of the first things I did as editor of this magazine was to track her down and see if she still had it. She did, and you can read it in this issue.
But Christ, I had no idea there were so many...I knew the situation was bad, but I didn't know just how bad it was.
It's not getting any better, either. If anything it's getting worse. Just about the time we published the first issue of Helix, a certain well-known SF writer reported a really outrageous experience: the editor of a certain major SF magazine had accepted a story by him, only to have the publishers overrule her decision and order her to kill the story.
I contacted the writer and asked to see the story. It turned out to be a work of outstanding quality which would be a credit to any magazine. There was nothing pornographic, "indecent," or otherwise legally risky — even in the current repressive atmosphere — and while the subject matter was disturbing, it was handled with impeccable taste. I offered to publish it, and would have been proud to do so, but the author elected to go with another publication.
Why was it killed? I can't say; no reasons were ever stated to the public. But the publishers had shown a worrisome timidity in the recent past, so I can only assume they simply were afraid it would upset somebody.
Which is despicable — but, I'm afraid, all too typical of the way the traditional publishers think nowadays. In fact the publisher of another major SF magazine expressed agreement with his competitors' decision to kill the story.
I'm sure some of their readers would have been unhappy. Some would have taken serious offense. Some would have cancelled their subscriptions. And you could say (as many have) that if too many people cancel their subscriptions the magazines will go under.
To which the obvious answer is — as Robin Bailey, President of Science Fiction Writers of America, has said — the ones who cancel their subscriptions because of a disturbing story may well be outnumbered by those who let their subscriptions lapse, or never subscribe at all, because the stories the magazines do publish have become safe to the point of irrelevancy.
My own answer is: so what? The magazines are going under anyway. They're doomed. No matter what they do, they've had it. Indeed science fiction, as we have known it, very likely has had it — it may succeed in reinventing itself (partly through experiments like ours) and there will probably always be a market for fantasy in some form, but the digest-format magazines that have for so long defined the form are heading off to nowhere in their Barbaloot suits.
So why can't they at least go under with some class?
Hell, we're all doomed. Anybody who reads the news and keeps up with current events knows that. The Fundies are right, in their loony-tunes way: we are living in the End Times. We have seen the future, and it is Somalia — only hotter.
I won't live to see that, of course. I may not even live to see the final establishment of a full-fledged totalitarian state in this country — despite the best efforts of the current administration, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way, though it wouldn't take much to reverse that — when writing and publishing stories that offend the wrong people, or even reading them, becomes dangerous indeed. Long before that, chances are the Sergeant will have called on me for a little private doom of my own.
But that's the other part; even if I'm wrong about all that doomsday shit, we're still fucked. Winners and losers, big-shit publishers and starving writers, we're all going to die some day one way or another, and either that's the end or else we go to Hell. (Because either there is or is not a life after death, and if there is then it must be Hell, because life is by definition Hell and even God cannot make it otherwise.)
And dead men sell no tales.
One of my favorite stories from history is that of the Spartans at Thermopylae. The Emperor of Persia was coming down through Greece with the biggest God-damned army in the world — maybe the biggest there had ever been — and all that stood in his path, blocking a narrow mountain pass, was a handful of Spartans under their King Leonidas. (Because the Spartans didn't hold with leadership from behind. Spartan kings didn't sit back in safety and send men out to get killed while they held press conferences.)
Legend, reported by Plutarch, has it that the Persian Emperor sent a message calling on the Spartans to surrender their weapons; and that Leonidas replied, "Molon labe!" — "Come get them!" The authenticity of the story is a trifle dubious — for all we know he may have said, "Eat shit and die!" — but never mind.
According to Herodotos, the night before the battle a Persian scout reported that the Spartans were sitting around combing their long hair; and the Persian emperor said something about how a bunch of sissies like that ought to be easy to whip.
But then this Greek defector stood up and said listen, Your Majesty, you've got these people wrong. You've never fought anybody like them before. I'm not sure there is anybody like them. They've all decided that they're going to die tomorrow, so they're going to go out looking good.
This magazine is probably doomed. Oh, I'm sure we'll put out a fair number of issues, maybe last a couple of years or so; but over any but the short run we're dead. But so are the big magazines, as far as I can see. So, for that matter, is intelligently written fiction in the English-speaking world; any world in which the Left Behind books are blockbuster best sellers and Martin Amis is taken seriously is probably beyond hope.
And at another and even more troublesome level, this is not a good time for literature or any other form of self-expression. The forces of repression and censorship and ignorance and superstition are running wild; the best are silent while the worst are filled with something brown that smells bad, the wire is down and the claymores are exhausted and the sixteens are starting to jam, and the people who should be leading the fight are dancing up and down frantically waving white flags....
But if it comes to that, at least we will be able to know with pride that a few of us stood up and said:
"You want to kill our stories? MOLON LABE, MOTHERFUCKERS!"
And doesn't our hair look great?
Lyrics from "Take No Prisoners" by Janis Ian — used by permission.
Lawrence
Watt-Evans
Managing Editor and Freelance Pedant
Writers and Readers
Once upon a time, poetry was a thriving and profitable enterprise. In the 19th century a person could, with luck and talent, make a living as a poet. Families would buy books of poetry, read them, and recite their favorites to one another. People would pay to hear poets read from their work. Everyone knew the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the like, and could quote them extensively. Poetry wasn't just something you read in school, or something morbid teenagers fooled around with; it was a popular art, something ordinary people read for fun.
When I was starting out as a writer in the 1970s, on the other hand, I was reliably informed that many poetry magazines found they were getting submissions from more people than they sold copies — that is, a mag that sold 200 copies could expect to have maybe 250 would-be poets send them stuff. That meant that even some other poets didn't read poetry, let alone casual readers. Even some people researching markets couldn't be bothered to buy the magazine they were trying to sell their work to, to see what was in it; they just found the listing in Writer's Market and sent in their verses.
There's plenty of room to argue about what brought about this sad state of affairs, whether poetry had committed commercial suicide by becoming too esoteric, or whether it had been murdered by competing forms of entertainment such as song lyrics and television, or whether it's just a sign of the continuing decline of western civilization, but it's pretty clear that it happened.
Which had me wondering, back in the '70s, why anyone still bothered trying to publish poetry. If no one's going to read it, if no one's going to take pleasure in it, what's the point?
Poetry had gone from being a legitimate part of the entertainment business to a cultish game of status-seeking, where the goal wasn't to bring pleasure to readers, but to be able to say, 'I am a poet, with work in these prestigious markets!' And the prestige involved usually had nothing to do with sales, but with the perceived academic ranking of the market in question.
And why am I telling you this? Because it appears that short stories may be going the same way as poetry. Which would suck.
I like short stories. I don't want to see them become irrelevant, an arena for penny-ante poseurs to display their egos rather than a popular art. (I like poetry, too, but that's been largely a lost cause since before I could read.)
I would have thought that every short story writer would want to see short fiction remain popular, but we here at Helix have discovered that there are some who have already written it off. Since our first issue appeared, the loudest and most numerous complaints we've received haven't been about the stories, but about our submission policy — which, for those of you who haven't bothered to look at it, amounts to, "Don't call us, we'll call you."
We haven't really been attacked for the content of the fiction, or the quality of the fiction, but we have been attacked for refusing to read unsolicited submissions (known in the business as "slush"). At least one person said outright that this was stupid of us, since would-be writers make up most of the readership for short fiction these days, so we were antagonizing our customers.
We are happy to report that this isn't true. We have web-counter stats that show most of our readers here at Helix do not bother with the submission guidelines; they read the stories. (They mostly don't read these editorials, either, so if you're reading this, you're one of the select few; thank you, Will and I appreciate it.)
Still, it's a worrisome attitude, this idea that only writers read.
What makes it even worse is that some of the people complaining about our refusal to read slush admitted they didn't read the stories in our first issue. They came, read the submission guidelines, then went away and wrote us nasty e-mails or posted in their blogs without bothering to see what we actually published.
Wouldn't you want to know, before complaining, what sort of club it is that's refusing to let you in?
If you like short SF enough to want to write it, wouldn't you want to read it?
Apparently not. Apparently it's not about reading and writing stories for fun and profit, but about scoring status points and validating oneself as a writer, just like the poets with their literary mags.
It's very reassuring to look at the counter numbers and know that these people are, contrary to what they believe, a small minority of our satisfying-large readership. What worries us, though, is the possibility that they may be the wave of the future, that short stories really are going the way of poetry, even if we're not as far along as some people think.
So why do they think that? What makes them believe only other writers read short fiction?
Well, let us suppose you're a would-be writer, trying to find out how the whole "writer" thing works. You go looking for advice, and when you find it you find yourself becoming a part of "the writing community," attending workshops, hanging out with other beginning writers, and so on. And you look around one day, and realize that everyone you know who reads short fiction is a writer of one sort or another. The other people you talk to at school or work don't read short stories, and your writer friends do, so it must be that only writers read them, right?
Well, no. Admittedly, most people don't read short fiction these days, but the reason that all the people you know who do are writers isn't because those are the only ones out there, it's because you went looking for writers, not readers.
This is what's known in the statistical community as "sampling error."
It would be nice to say that it's a harmless misconception and unimportant, but I worry that it may be pernicious. If most beginning writers think they're only writing for other writers, it may well affect what they write and how they write it. One of the things that did in poetry was when poets began writing to impress other poets, no longer worrying about whether the casual reader would get all the references, or understand the clever gimmicks, or appreciate the nifty technique. They didn't care about casual readers.
And the result was that before long, casual readers didn't care about them.
A few places — including Helix — do still publish poetry aimed at readers, but it's pretty much always a sideline, not the main feature, because nobody makes an effort to find poetry anymore. We've had decades of experience telling us it isn't worth the time and effort.
I really, really don't want to see that happen to short fiction. I consider writers who try to please editors, or to impress their fellow writers, rather than to entertain ordinary readers, to be seriously misguided. A good story should have the potential to appeal to everyone, not just experts in the fiction field.
This is a problem I see with huge swaths of the so-called "writing community" — it's inbred, incestuous, caught in a feedback loop where beginning writers are trying to learn their craft from other beginning writers, instead of from the whole world around them. That way lies elitism, decadence, and irrelevance.
There are hundreds of eager "writers" out there (some deserving the quote marks, some not) who can turn out competent prose that passes muster with their workshops, and who can get it published in unpaid or low-paying markets, but who have no real flair for storytelling. Their creations fill slushpiles across America. They consider themselves real writers because they're active in the writing community, and their fellow beginners say they're good. And some of them think it's completely unfair that any potential market, such as Helix, should shut them out; it's just not done. It's unmutual. It harms the community.
Frankly, we here at Helix don't much care. We aren't aiming at the writing community. We're aiming at the much larger, much more scattered, much less coherent reading community. Because if short fiction is to have a real future, it's readers that matter. There's no shortage of people who want to write, but people who read for pleasure are getting dangerously scarce, and we think the best way to keep their numbers from declining further is to give them stories they can't find elsewhere, can't find in the outlets that do cater to the writing community.
Our intention isn't to find up-and-coming new writers, though we wouldn't mind stumbling across a few; what we're trying to do is publish good stories that other fiction outlets won't touch for reasons unrelated to quality. We want to be the market for stories that have already been rejected, not because they weren't good enough, but because other editors didn't dare publish them.
We really don't think we'd find those in the slush. I've read slush, and have no desire to repeat the experience. Most slush isn't dangerous or daring, it's just dull.
So we rely on the rumor mill and personal connections to find stories that good writers couldn't sell, and so far that's been more than enough.
If it ever isn't enough, well...we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.