Info-dump and world-building

I spent the last three hours weeding through new submissions to M-Brane SF, and I realize that the number one reason that I pass on a story--even over clumsy writing--is probably the way a lot of writers choose to lay in the information about their world, the way that many of them (probably feeling a need to get a lot of details in front of the reader) fall into dropping in a big fat info-dump rather than finding less intrusive ways to insert these details.

In science fiction, it's probably an easy ditch to fall into since, of course, the writer wants to present the awesome new world that her story is set in and make as clear as possible what cool or weird circumstance is driving the story. But what I see happening again and again in submissions are long scenes (sometimes even entire stories) that consist of characters sitting across a desk from each other discussing a situation in way that is entirely contrived to convey a lot of information to the reader but which doesn't ring very true as far as how real people would behave. It's the old "As you know, Bob," problem. As in, "As you know, Bob, ever since the founding of the Terran Douchebaggery, access to android porn has been severely curtailed." And while that may be an important bit of info to get out there, there must be some way to do it without making one's characters sit in an office rehashing information that they themselves certainly must know already.

Another variation on this that I see a lot of is where the story is going along swimmingly and the all of a sudden a giant info-dump shows up in the form of a secondary character revealing to the protagonist what's really been going on all along. I just read one where the writer had managed to set up very evocatively a great setting and had suggested a strange mystery and shown some clues toward its possible meaning, when suddenly about three-quarters of the way into the story..."I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this earlier, Bob, but actually you've been assigned to our new project of breeding half-human/half-android beings. Which you never heard of before, nor had any reason to suspect. But still. Sorry." I read another one like this a couple weeks ago which I enjoyed so much through most of the length of it that it was almost heart-breaking when it all went to hell in this fashion right at the very end. It's almost as disappointing as "It was all a dream."

I'd be interested in hearing what other writers have to say about ways to lay in rich detail in their stories but avoiding the info-dump. Or even ways to use an info-dump effectively so it's not dull or distracting, because it can be done sometimes.

New trailer for THE AETHER AGE!

This is some fine work by T.C. Parmelee and Paul Rothchild, with the spectacular music by the Chameleon Chamber group. The visual component consists largely of the interior artwork that will accompany the stories. Spectacular, all of of it!

2020 VISIONS briefly open to submissions: send positive outlook, near future sf

Rick Novy, editor of 2020 Visions, an anthology forthcoming later this year from M-Brane Press, reports that he has received a lot of excellent stories. The tone of them, however, has been overwhelmingly dark and pessimistic, so he would like to balance this with some material that has an upbeat, positive outlook on the very near future.  This was previously an invitation-only book, but we are briefly opening it to unsolicited submissions in hopes of getting some more optimistic selections. Here are the details:

2020 Visions: Speculative fiction set ten years from now, to be published as a print book and in several ebook versions.
Needs: Stories with an optimistic outlook or positive outcome for the near future. For this submissions call, please do not send dark, bleak, dystopian, or negative-outcome stories. Rick wants to see some ideas for how things could actually turn out well.
Word count: open
Send submissions in standard manuscript format as attached RTF files to ricknovy at gmail dot com. In the subject line of your email, say "Submission: 2020 Visions" and the title of your story.
Payment: Token advance on publication (probably something in the $10-25 range), plus a copy of the print edition of the book, plus royalties paid as a pro-rata share of book's profit (We have a few "name" authors lined up already, and have a credible expectation that the book will, in fact, earn royalties for its contributors). Acquiring First World English Rights, print and electronic.
Deadline: July 17, 2010

Yes, that deadline is in just a couple weeks, so this submissions call may be good for writers who have something finished or in process that fits the theme and tone, or for those who get inspired soon and can write it quickly.

M-BRANE #18 PUBLISHED

The new issue released moments ago, with astounding new work by Patty Jansen, Joyce Chng, Damon Lord, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mary E. Lowd, Rick Novy and Jaym Gates. It's a fine night on the Brane.

Announcing M-BRANE #18 writers and TOC

M-Brane SF #18 will appear on July 1 with these fine new stories:

"Prototype" by Patty Jansen
"Lux Perpetua" by Joyce Chng
"Weekday" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
"The Ambi-Cognitive Man" by Mary E. Lowd
"Return to the Moon" by Rick Novy
"Lord of Heaven and Earth" by Jaym Gates

And a poem by Damon Lord titled "Cryo-Hell."


The new issue's writers are far-flung, with representatives from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Singapore, and it is a majority-female group, which pleases me because the previous couple of issues had an extreme gender imbalance in the other direction. I don't apply any sort of gender quota when I select stories, but nor do I want to be one of those male sf editors who seem to always end up with all-male TOCs. I've been actively encouraging submissions from female writers or ones about female protagonists, and I am glad to notice more such items appearing in the in-box.

This month's authors include a couple of familiar names to M-Brane readers. Rick Novy has appeared in the zine many times previously, and he guest-edited our twelfth issue, released as a trade paperback titled Ergosphere. He is also editing a new anthology of near-future sf called 2020 Visions, which M-Brane Press will publish later this year. Patty Jansen, a recent Writers of the Future finalist, appeared in M-Brane last fall and she is also on the staff of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Silvia Moreno-Garcia appeared in our pages a few months ago, and this month offers a science fictional take on vampirism set, like her previous entry, in a future/alternate Mexico (a place that I have come to really like as a location for speculative fiction). Jaym Gates, my co-editor on Little Death of Crossed Genres, appears the first time in M-Brane SF (though she has two entries in the forthcoming The Aether Age). She and Joyce Chng lend a steampunkish flavor to this issue with their highly imaginative tales. Also new to M-Brane is Mary E. Lowd, offering a story about some unusual brothers and sisters on a distant world. Finally, while I don't believe I have published poetry in M-Brane SF before, I am presenting a science fictional poem by British writer and good friend of M-Brane Damon Lord.

M-BRANE #18 ToC late but forthcoming

I'm seriously late on announcing the contents of the July issue...because I haven't actually finalized it yet. The last few weeks have presented an unprecedented volume of submissions and it has been quite difficult to make some rather close decisions. But the issue will be on time and it will be excellent. Also, the July issue may be the last one that has its own print edition since I plan to go to a new quarterly plan (though monthly releases will still happen in the electronic versions). Occasionally, when I am at a loss for anything else to present, I dig up from the bowels of YouTube a "theme song" for the impending issue:

Probable change to print edition impending

In addition to some planned changes with the electronic editions of M-Brane SF and the upcoming online edition, I am considering a major change in the print edition. While the electronic forms will remain monthly, I may move to a quarterly schedule for the print version. The new quarterly version, as I envision it, would be an omnibus of three months of the electronic fiction content and possible some "premium" content not available elsewhere. It's possible that a less-frequent print version might draw more attention than the current monthly facsimile of the PDF version, and it would be possible for me to get it into more distribution channels that what I can with the ways it's been done so far. Also, a quarterly schedule for the print version might be more compatible with other M-Brane Press operations such as the  forthcoming stand-alone books still on the docket for this year and our new fantasy zine, Brandon Bell's Fantastique Unfettered, which we plan to launch in high style later this year.

New site!

As regular readers can see, I've started a make-over of the M-Brane site. This new M-Brane SF-dot-com site will eventually house online much of the content on the regular zine, though the PDF subscription option will continue to exist, as will a new epub version. A new M-Brane Press site (also under construction) will be the place to order these zine subscriptions, buy print editions of M-Brane SF and find news and order information for M-Brane Press books, current and forthcoming.

Cesar Torres reads from THE 12 BURNING WHEELS

Writer Cesar Torres posted this link which goes to an approximately twenty-minute video of him reading before a live audience a couple of stories from his collection The 12 Burning Wheels, published in February by M-Brane. While the audio quality is not perfect, it's entirely listenable, and I was absolutely thrilled to see and hear it. I am very proud to be the publisher of this fine little book, and this was the first time that I got to see someone do a public reading of something from my little press, and I was so happy for Cesar over the evidently positive reaction of his audience.  In case I have not said it enough in the past, Cesar Torres is brilliant writer. His work is beautiful, memorable and achingly good, and if I never have another notable success as a small press publisher, I will always be very happy that I had a hand in showing off his work to the world with The 12 Burning Wheels. The book is available in print from Amazon and in electronic formats from M-Brane (option 4 on that list).

M-BRANE #17 released today

The new issue went out moments ago with great new stories by Aaron Polson, Margaret Karmazin, Jason Sizemore, Edd Howarth, Charles Muir, Joe Jablonski and Lawrence Dagstine. It also contains some interesting news about M-Brane's exciting future, and I'll be posting more about that here on the blog within a few days.

The print version of the new issue is available in the Lulu store. Also, I updated the single-issue PDF order button on Page 2, but it only goes back as far as issue #9. A better storefront system is on the way soon, but in the meantime, if anyone wants a single issue predating #9, one can just order one of the later ones and specify in the Pay Pal note which one they really want.

New office, new color

Today Jeff and I repainted the room of our new home that I call alternately my office or my library, and which is the new M-Brane SF "World Headquarters." Previously it was, like most rooms in the place, a weird blueish gray that seemed to suck away all light and life. Gradually, Jeff has removed this color from the entire place, and today I assisted him with this room. It's a smaller room than the office in the old place, so all the book shelves don't fit into it, but there was plenty of room elsewhere in the place for some of them, and I think it's quite agreeably appointed and cozy now. These pics, taken a few minutes ago, show off my new room's lovely reddish glow:

I guess that's all I have to report right now!

Good review for CROSSED GENRES 18 (Eastern theme)

Philippine Online Chronicle has an overall very nice review of the recent "Eastern" issue of Crossed Genres, which included my story "I Will Come Home." I consider valid the one criticism of my story--that it seems to end too abruptly "as though it were simply an introduction to a longer narrative." In fact, the world in which it is set was mined from a "future history" that has been percolating in the back of my brain, occasionally spilling out into lots of mostly unfinished stories, for quite a number of years.

If I were to ever write all the stories that comprise this world, they would span many centuries and this particular one would be set very early in chronology. There exists an outline and some written chapters of a novel that I started several years ago which details an epic struggle for control of Earth and Mars waged among some of the descendants of the characters in "I Will Come Home." Then, set much later is the story that's closest to actual completion, my oft-mentioned novel Shame, which deals with a dying, post-apocalyptic Earth and a powerful human-inhabited Mars that rose to dominance over human affairs sometime centuries after the events of "Novel 1." Then, set even later in time, is an extensively outlined but unfinished space adventure epic that my friend Pat and I were intending to collaborate upon but have let sit idle for many months now. That project was not originally conceived as being part of this larger world, but as I developed characters and situations for it, it started to make sense to link it. So if the new story seems like a set-up for a bigger story, then that is probably an effect of me having all this other stuff churning around in my head.

Weird Asimov dream

Of possible (though not probable) interest to M-Brane readers is a new post on my Live Journal where I describe a strange dream that I had about Isaac Asimov, and also recount the time when he sent me a note (in real life). In the dream, he looked much as he does in this picture.

Announcing M-BRANE #17 writers and TOC

I am excited about the upcoming issue of the zine. Here's the cover image and the table of contents for #17:

Edd Howarth: "The Moon Man"
Aaron Polson: "One-Tenth of One Percent"
Margaret Karmazin: "I'll Be Leaving"
Charles A. Muir: "Smoke Nurse"
Lawrence R. Dagstine: "The Girl Who Dreamt Portals"
Joe Jablonksi: "Tremoik"
Jason Sizemore: "For the Sake of Pleasing"

With the exception of Dagstine, who returns to M-Brane's pages with his charming Orphan-Annie-meets-sf tale, all these writers are new to this zine. Edd Howarth (who claims to have written his first short story in crayon on his mother's kitchen walls...at age twenty-one) leads the issue with his thoughtful and amusing "The Moon Man." Aaron Polson, whom I suspect is well-known to a lot of this zine's followers as a result of his many appearances elsewhere, offers a grim item inspired by the films of The Thing and the Campbell story, "Who Goes There?" upon which they were based. Prolific writer Margaret Karmazin delivers a sensitive tale about a marriage and a husband's strange secret. Inspired by dreams and legends of ghostly bedside visitors, Charles Muir's "Smoke Nurse" fascinates and chills. A cult on an alien world and its inevitably lethal trajectory is the subject of Joe Jablonski's "Tremoik."  Stoker Award-nominated writer and editor Jason Sizemore of Apex Publications concludes this issue with his spectacular sf adventure novelette "For the Sake of Pleasing." It contains, among other things, exploding heads.

Second-Person POV/ Theodore Sturgeon

On Twitter, most of the people I follow have some kind of interest in or involvement with fiction writing and publishing, but I have gradually weeded out of the stream nearly all of the literary agents that I was monitoring during the early months of my Twitter era because I grew bored with the endless tips and advice on how to write queries and also the constant lists of "bad" things writers shouldn't ever NEVAR! do with their prose. The former is simply not interesting to me since I am not in the business of writing queries currently, nor do I require them as an editor. The latter is actually pretty annoying because it's obvious to anyone who reads a lot and with discernment that much of the best stuff that's been written and published contains one kind or another of never-do-it, top-ten-mistakes-of-writers rules breakage. 

A few months ago, I noticed a mini-trend of agents and editors tweeting about the use of second-person point-of-view on their lists of things they hate and that they never want to see again. You know, it's that POV where you are sitting here typing on your MacBook. You are working on a post for the M-Brane blog, which you have been neglecting. You want to write about Theodore Sturgeon, but you have gotten sidetracked, digressing about agents and  POV. You wonder if you ought to instead being posting the ToC for issue #17 (your fellow editor and comrade Jason Sizemore will have a story in it!). Your cat Maus sits atop your desk and shrills at you. You wonder if he is out of food. [He was not out of food.]


Granted, second-person is the least common narrative mode in literature in English (though it's all-pervasive in song lyrics for some reason) and possibly the most difficult to use effectively and perhaps the easiest with which to annoy someone, but I really dig an effective use of it when a writer manages it. Last month I published a novelette by new writer Bob Labar called "Wake," which is told principally in second-person and which also employs several other unconventional methods. When I started reading it for the first time, I wondered if the point-of-view was going to be a "good" use of it or a "bad" use of it, but then when I got deeply enough into the story to understand what was going on, I decided it was maybe a borderline-brilliant choice of POV, one where the technique itself helped illuminate the main character's situation in a way that would have felt very different in third-person.


Then, just a few days ago, I read for the first time Theodore Sturgeon's fantastic short story "The Man Who Lost the Sea," also told largely in second-person. I read it in a paper book, called The Golden Helix, that's been in my collection (mostly unread) for years but fortunately it is also online, recently reprinted here by Strange Horizons (originally in F&SF). It's just spectacular all the way through and especially at the very end when one "gets" what's going on. The copy on my shelf includes a foreword by Sturgeon in which he describes that it came out of period of low productivity, then turned into a 21,000-word novella which he then chopped down to a 5000-word short which was then hailed as one of the best stories of 1959. As I read Sturgeon now, with the perspective of time and the evolution of the sf genre, it's even more obvious what a fine writer he was. He not only told compelling stories, he did it with great style and literary panache in an era where a lot of sf was still pretty crude. A lot of less-well-remembered sf writers in the 1950s could have told this same story, but not many could have told it as well. 


Sturgeon is one of probably too many great sf writers that I have not read enough of, and I've been trying to correct that deficit lately. As a kid, I knew his name because he wrote the teleplays for a couple of memorable episodes of the original Star Trek series, "Amok Time" (the one where Spock succumbs to the Vulcan seven-year mating cycle) and "Shore Leave" (where an idyllic planet produces physical manifestations of one's fantasies as a sort of amusement park). He wrote a third unproduced episode called "The Joy Machine" which was later adapted by James Gunn as a novel with the same title for Pocket's Star Trek line. In my childish Trek fan way, I would often sample books and stories by writers whose names I recognized from the Star Trek credits thinking that they must be great if they wrote that show. With Sturgeon, I tried and failed with Godbody, his last book, posthumously published the year of his death. At fourteen or fifteen years old, I wasn't an experienced and sophisticated enough reader to get that book. I found that I didn't like it. It bored and confused me and I gave up on it less than halfway in (and it's not very long). I did hang on to my book Science Fiction Book Club edition of it over the years, however, and went back at it as an adult and got a lot more out of it. 


But since that book was Sturgeon's last and had an odd feeling of being a coda to his career, I wanted to find some other stories that were more typical. What I discovered is that none of his work was "typical" but a lot of it was very daring and transgressive. The tres creepy short novel Some of Your Blood, for example, told in epistolary style like Dracula, lingers in the back of the mind long after it's been read. Sturgeon's contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" probably offends more readers than it delights, but it is exemplary of Sturgeon's way of putting questions to readers and pushing them along toward interesting possible answers. Now I am working my way through the stories in a couple of neglected collections that have been sitting here waiting for me for years, and am enjoying them very much. Has anyone reading this page read Sturgeon, and if so, did you like his work? Are there other writers of that period that you like that don't seem to get enough attention anymore?

Fan fiction?

I haven't been very looped in on the discussion, but evidently a debate has been happening in the interwebs over the value--or not--of fan fiction. 

Here's an item by George R.R. Martin in which he denounces the idea of fan fic and basically says writers are dumb to let fans play in their sandbox. He cites as examples the famous case of Marion Zimmer Bradley getting threatened with a lawsuit by a fan who was writing Darkover fiction that Bradley had read and encouraged after Bradley wanted to write a novel using a premise similar to something in this fan's story. He also talks about Lovecraft and how he died a pauper supposedly because he didn't protect his copyrights, while Edgar Rice Burroughs made himself a millionaire off his Tarzan and Barsoom properties.

Here's an item by Nick Mamatas rebutting Martin's piece and contending that the comparison between Lovecraft and Burroughs is invalid, and making the case that the only reason Lovecraft has a legacy and is so well known and highly regarded now is that he encouraged his fellow writers and fans to play with the Cthulhu Mythos which, in turn, helped keep Lovecraft's own work alive so many decades after his death. 

This is an item by Corinne Duyvis in which she ascribes a lot of value to fan fiction as a way for writers to practice the craft and get feedback from readers. 

And there are many other such posts around the world dealing with this general topic. What do M-Brane readers think about it? Does anyone who reads this blog or who has written for the magazine read or write any fan fiction, or have you in the past? I used to when I was a kid and had a lot of fun with it, and I think it may have had some of the benefits that Corinne describes. I even self-published a lot of it in my Star Trek fanzine under a variety of pseudonyms. My co-editor and I probably wrote ourselves over half of all the content that we ever published over 21 monthly issues, so we certainly got some practice at writing a lot of stuff. That's not to say that any of it was any good, but it was probably a useful exercise for a young kid nonetheless.

Move completed; New story published!

I'll indulge in some bragging about the appearance of my short story "I Will Come Home"  in this month's issue of Crossed Genres. My pride in this publication comes not from satisfaction with my own work, but from the fact that Crossed Genres is such a fine publication and the fact that I appear alongside such talented people. As I have mentioned here before, I rarely finish any fiction and haven't gone so far as to submit any for a long time until this story, so it feels great to be back at it.

In other news: Jeff and I successfully completed our move to St. Louis Thursday afternoon. TV and internet was blessedly restored to us yesterday evening, and we are very happy with the new place. We do still, however, have a great deal of unpacking and setting up to do. This image will give you an idea of the current condition of the new M-Brane SF office.

#16 RELEASED

M-Brane #16 PDF edition was distributed to subscribers this morning. The print version is available in the Lulu store. Thanks again to the writers for their great stories, and to the zine's many readers for their continued support. I will be mostly offline for the next couple of days as I relocate.

M-BRANE #16 COMING...this week sometime!

Sometime between tonight and Saturday May 1, I will release the terrific sixteenth issue of M-Brane SF. Sorry to be so indefinite about it, but I am now (finally) in the midst of the move back to STL and will need to fit in this project where I can. It's basically ready to go, just doing a bit more proofreading on it. It will feature amazing work by Glenn Gillette, Kay Holt, TJ McIntyre, Michael Andre-Driussi, Sean Eads and Bob Labar. In the meantime, here's a video to watch:

M-BRANE #16 contents announced

M-Brane #16 releases in a few days with an exciting and unusual assortment of stories. Here's the table of contents:


"Why Look Down?" by Glenn Lewis Gillette
"Pieces of You" by Kay T. Holt
"This Electronic Life" by T.J. McIntyre
"Passion in the Year 2090" by Sean Eads
"Mad Dogs of Mercury" by Michael Andre-Driussi
"Wake" by Bob Labar

Glenn Lewis Gillette is the author of this zine's first story ever, appearing last year on page one of M-Brane #1, while T.J. McIntyre appeared in M-Brane #3. Michael Andre-Driussi has appeared twice recently in M-Brane. New to our pages are Kay T. Holt, co-editor of Crossed Genres; Sean Eads, a reference librarian and writer from Colorado; and Bob Labar who makes his print debut with his unusual and experimental story.