Short Stories – Page 16 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Some updates

Just a few quick updates before I go to bed:

My short story, Decision LZ150207, is getting published in The Leading Edge! Hooray! This will be my first publication credit. It certainly won’t be my last!

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, I’ve started work on draft 2.2 of Ashes of the Starry Sea, the novel that I finished back in April of 2008 (my first “finished” novel–and the project that spawned this blog). My goal is to finish this draft by August 1st, 2009.

It is a beast of a novel–I’m predicting it will be at least 150,000 words. The draft is currently at 158,000 words, but I’m going to have to add several scenes as well as vigorously trim out the bad writing.

And boy, is there a lot of bad writing in this draft! I knew, when I wrote it, that I wasn’t that good, but holy cow! Way too much introspection, way too much “tell”-iness, not nearly enough concrete details. Too many adverbs, too much wordiness, especially in the scenes with the action. This is going to be a deep revision.

BYU’s writing conference was a blast! I’ll try to post more about it in the near future, hopefully tomorrow if I can get around to it. The three editors who attended are open to submissions from the conference, and one of them prefers full manuscripts to partials, so on Saturday I printed up the full 2.0 draft of Genesis Earth.

Holding the full manuscript in my hands was surreal. It’s one thing to write it out digitally and see it on your screen, but it is something else entirely to hold the tangible, physical thing in your hands. I just…keep wanting to hold it. It feels so real.

But yeah, I’m kind of uneasy sending the full manuscript off to this editor, especially since she hasn’t asked me for it specifically (she just told all the conference-goers that she prefers full manuscripts). I don’t want to get in trouble sending my full ms out to multiple places, so my game plan is to send this to her ASAP so it can get rejected within the next 1-4 months (what she claimed was her turnaround time).

Because of that, I’m sending her a draft which could be more polished, but oh well. Anything could be more polished–eventually, you just have to send your stuff out. Besides, as pessimistic as this might sound, I do think that my mss has a fighting chance. We’ll see what comes of this.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Welcome to Mars, a magical world of ancient ruins like giant glass chess sets and canals of wine and sandy desert seas. A world inhabited by golden eyed people who can telepathically project hallucinations–some of them still live up in the hills. A desolate, empty world, the next frontier for a new generation of pioneering spirits, each with different dreams, different reasons, different goals and outlooks on their new life in the new world. Some come with respect and reverence to the ancient world, while others come to exploit it. But no matter why they come, everyone is deeply and profoundly changed. Some never return.

Ray Bradbury is one of the biggest names in science fiction, and this book is one of his greatest works. A lot of my friends really love Bradbury, but strangely, I haven’t read a lot of him (Fahrenheit 451, way back in Middle School, and a few essays, but that’s pretty much it). After putting this book down, all I can say is wow. Now I know what my friends were talking about.

The Martian Chronicles is more of a collection of short stories than anything else. That’s understandable, when you consider that science fiction began with short stories, not with novels. Keep that in mind as you read it, too. This is not a book you can read all in one go; you have to take time between the chapters to let each one soak in, otherwise your mind will just get overloaded. Bradbury delivers a bang! ending to just about every story in this book, and some of them are really deep. My favorite one was the one with Sender, and how the fourth rocket discovered that all the Martians were killed off by the chicken pox. There are some really profound ideas in that one, and I loved reading it.

A lot of hard sf purists tend to call Bradbury a writer of fantasy disguised as science fiction, and I can see where they’re coming from. There’s nothing really scientific about this book; the Mars of Bradbury’s stories is a purely fantastic invention (even for the 50s). I remember the story about the third rocket, and how it landed on a grassy green lawn, and all the crew stepped out and found themselves in a little Ohio town, and all I could think was “what??” It was very fantastic, very surreal and even trippy at parts, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad. And really, I’d argue with the whole “Bradbury = fantasy” thing–I think some of the ideas in these stories definitely blur the line between fantasy and science fiction.

One thing Bradbury is fantastically good at is infusing all of his writing with passion. There wasn’t a moment in this whole book when I couldn’t envision Bradbury himself, his eyes wide and bloodshot, gripping me by the shoulders and shaking me. His imagery was amazing, and his twist endings were incredible. You really read Bradbury for his prose and for his ideas; everything else takes a back seat, but he does so well with the first two that that’s ok.

These are the kinds of stories that stick with you long after you’ve read them. They might not be consistent with each other or follow in a coherent, logical order, but they will deeply and profoundly move you.