[Redacted] – [Redacted]

Ok, I am not trying to be cute with the title. I may be attempting to be click-baity, but frankly I don’t actually think a lot of people actually bother to read things on WordPress anyway.

I recently read two works of fiction by amateur authors. Reading through them gave me a whole lot of thoughts on them, and thoughts about writing as a whole. But we live in a time where people seem to make a big deal about “punch up” versus “punching down”, and despite the fact that I consider myself grateful if this blog gets 5 views, I decided to be the nicer person and leave the authors names and works out. There was an aspect of ‘punching down’ to writing this review that I am not altogether comfortable with. At some point, I will have my own written piece out (soon, actually. I have gotten a short story of mine published in a minor upstart publication. Soon as of the time of writing, likely out by the time of this publication. If anyone would like to give me my just deserts, do let me know and I will point you to it), and I won’t give to shits about the criticism I receive. But as regard these two authors, I wanted to be helpful, and I don’t think I had a whole lot to say that would fall in that category.

The backstory to all this is somewhat important. I have for the past few years been reading the short stories of various sci-fi and fantasy magazines, as well as many “best of” collections. I am also subscribed to a number of their podcasts as well. Frankly, I find many of their stories to be pretty bad as well. Most irritatingly (and here I see myself jump with both feet into the gatekeeping controversy), many of them were just barely speculative fiction at all. I truly get the impression with one of the larger sci-fi publishers that they are merely trying to be a covert literary journal. Reading one of these short stories feels like a 50% of being greatly disappointed. It would be like walking into steakhouse that used D&D rules, and if you roll a 1, 2 or 3, you get seitan instead.

And so I bought some books to support ‘independent’ writers. Also, I wanted to see what the hell else was out there.

“Both books were simply bad” would not be constructive to anyone, but it about described how I feel. One, a novel, was what in cinema would be referred to as a “creature feature”. The other was a collection of speculative fiction short stories. Both of them seemed to have the same problem. Mostly, they don’t seem to understand story structure very well. The first 70% of the novel can be more or less skipped, and it wouldn’t impact the story much. It does a lot to build up the character, but so much of the work it does could have been done more elegantly and economically later on in the story with just a line or two. Case in point, one of the initial chapters is pretty much nothing but an excuse to have a ‘save the cat’ moment in the guise of the protagonist being nice to a child on a bus. It is so overwrought that one fully expects child and mother to be integral to later parts of the story.

They aren’t. You never see them again.

Truly, the first 70% of the book is useless. It all could have been a short story.

The short story collection did this nearly every damn time, but this time with a scope of world building, which means you get a page and a half of a character looking at purple waves before going to talk to the character that starts the actual story. In a couple of cases, the story started and ended with different characters who had nothing to do with each other, and left me wondering how this was even a short story and not just two vignettes. Many of the stories also had that ‘made for the twist ending’ M. Night Shyamalan quality.

I hate that quality.

Over the past few years, I have joined numerous writing groups, an experience that has consistently left me disheartened. At every damn one, there is always one or more person there who is writing a novel despite the fact that they hate reading and haven’t read a novel since completing mandatory education, if ever. These people constantly produce absolute drivel, which they defend passionately and inform me that I would get it if I were only smarter. Those works too same to lack a sense of structure and pace, and I always blamed it on the lack of literacy of the authors. As to the authors of the books I am reviewing here, I have no idea. The depth and breadth of what they have read might knock me over. But some how I doubt it.

The short story collection deserves special merit for having a noticeable, and irritating, number of typos. I have left more than my fair share in here on this blog, but some of the ones I caught in that book were detrimental to the reading. A big difference though is that I am not charging anyone for the pleasure of reading this stupid blog. I paid for that book, and on top of the writing I would like to hope I paid for some proofreading. Or maybe just a little more attestation to detail. In one instance, the title in the table of context differed from the title of the short story at the top of the page where the story started. I get that this person wants to be a writer, but throwing a careless first attempt out into the world won’t help you.

The virtues of the two books I read? They were more unabashedly and unapologetically speculative fiction than the vast majority of what I had read on some of the big publishers since the year began. The stories from the big publishers were always structurally excellent and engaging. The content was merely boring.

I really don’t want to be one of those goony internet people moaning about how they don’t like the state of things in their industry. And there is a lot of good sci-fi out there. And to be very fair to the big publishers, a lot of the stories they put out are very good. But there is also a lot that isn’t. I was wondering if the solution wasn’t to start churning things out on the massive network of self publishing platforms that exist. Maybe that isn’t the case.