Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

Lately I've noticed an increase in submissions to Aoife's Kiss.  At first I thought perhaps some other genre magazines had closed down--this happens much too often for comfort--but I checked Ralan's Market and discovered that, on the contrary, there are now more genre magazines than I recall ever having seen before.  I then attributed the increase to more writers trying out their literary wings--we do like to publish beginning writers, you know--but again, this does not appear to be the case.  Oh, we're receiving pieces from cherry writers, some very good pieces indeed, but we're also receiving multiple pieces from more familiar names, and therein, apparently, lies the increase.

I'm seeing a lot of speculative stories, and fantasy stories, and sword and sorcery stories.  I'm not seeing much science fiction, soft or hard.  Maybe it's a fad, a temporary down cycle.  I hope not.

What I'm especially not seeing a lot of, are stories relevant to human exploration and settlement in space.  The operative word here is "relevant."  Before I explain that, let me go over a few minor points of human history.

As a species, we're continually trying to solve the same problems within a very slowly evolving context.  Take housing in the United States, for example.  When America was young, individual dwellings were the very general rule, inhabited by extended families.  As industry became more centralized, the extended families declined and were replaced by the nuclear family--mom, dad, children--because the nuclear family was more easily able to move around wherever the work popped up, but again the nuclear families inhabited individual dwellings [in way too many cases, the dwellings were hovels at best, but that's not the point].  As cities developed and grew, people flocked to them in search of work . . . and they began to live in duplexes and apartment complexes--the brownstones of New York, for example.  Those with a bit more money to spend began to live in condominiums [condominia?].  Note that it is less expensive to erect a large structure subdivided eight ways than to build eight single-family residences . . . and the large structure occupies less land, which is usually at a premium in the cities.

The lessons, then, are that overcrowding leads to reduced living space.  That a mobile labor force tends to rent rather than own.  That a landlord who gathers rent from one large building subdivided eight, sixteen, sixty four ways, is going to profit far more than the man who gathers rent from a like number of houses.  That people flock to any site where they have an opportunity to find work.

But these lessons signify when there are boundaries:  city, county, state, country.  Given a finite labor force within a set of land coordinates, a particular set of social and economic circumstances will obtain.  And so it was in the United States--until, roughly, the onset of the last decade of the previous century.

Nowadays, circumstances are reversed.  With the dissolution of international borders, one less often sees the movement of labor forces to the places of employment [yes, there are still migrant workers--perhaps even more so today], and more often the movement of the places of employment to the location of the less expensive labor force.  The exodus of American jobs to India and Mexico is but one example.

But what does this have to do with the exploration and settlement of outer space?  Practically nothing!  And that's my point.

See . . . more than a few of the stories I receive deal with the problems of contemporary Earth--in outer space in the future!  But future circumstances, and future settlements, are much more likely to be different from those we know today, here on Earth.  It's unlikely we will erect brownstones on Titan, or on Beta Centauri Six, metaphorically speaking.  Yet more than a few writers seem to think the circumstances, the problems, the milieu, will not change appreciably from what it is now. 

Now, I won't deny that there is a universal human condition, as defined by our literary masters from Dickens and Dostoyevsky to Silverberg and Simmons.  But, broadly speaking, if you are going to go to the trouble of creating future protagonists and other characters, you might want to give them a whole new set of circumstances and conditions, rather than recreate contemporary ones and inject them into the future.

Here's one example.  On Earth, in the respective countries, provinces, counties, shires, and townships, there are laws, statutes, and regulations.  These are enforced, with various degrees of success, by police officers, constables, sheriffs, and reeves.  To capture an offender, one usually has to go no further than the city limits, and less often across international borders.

But I ask you:  wouldn't law enforcement be different if you had to travel 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles to effect the detention of an offender?  For that matter, wouldn't warfare be conducted somewhat differently?  Wouldn't commerce?  Entertainment broadcasts?  Mining and smelting?  Golf?

So I'm not seeing a lot of stories that are relevant to the human exploration and settlement of outer space.  What I'm seeing, are stories relevant to the circumstances of Earth, but set in outer space.

That's not to say the stories I'm receiving are bad or unpublishable--far far from it.  But if you want to see an editor's eyes light up, don't impose the present Terran milieu on a future outer space setting.  Create instead a future milieu.  Yeh, it's difficult, complicated, and time-consuming.  But worth the effort.

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On a final note:

Currently Sam's Dot Publishing is open to submissions for two anthologies of short stories, to be published late this year or early next as trade paperbacks.  One of these, Ecotastrophe, is themed on the issue of global warming--but not necessarily on this planet.  There's a creative opportunity for you.  The other, Bondage, is themed . . . well . . . um, themed to ways in which we are connected to some physical object or some aspect of existence, or even obsessed by it.  Bondage wants to see alien civilizations involved . . .  and surely that means creating whole new problems.

So get cracking!  Show us what you've really got in that keyboard!

Past Tuppence:
December 2004
September 2004
June 2004
March 2004
December 2003
September 2003
June 2003
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 4

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2