Ratbag by Pierce Skinner

— Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

The Earthlight Bright Before Her, Part One by Albert Chu

I was caught, this month, by the stark world of “The Earthlight Bright Before Her”: a society trying to grow in a half-constructed, best-fit escape hatch of a lunar station that’s doing double duty as a metaphor for both personal and communal grief space. It’s a resonant concept with a lot of moving parts that are already working well—and a fair bit of opportunity to improve its structure and underpinning logic. So this month, I’d like to touch a little bit on what structure does with readerly attention, and talk about what we do with our hard science elements and how that makes all the difference to how they’re read.

The space of “The Earthlight Bright Before Her” is, with very little description, quite beautiful: Shihua’s unnamed lunar station—a home she was evacuated to as a child—is stark, lightly drawn, and haunting in its austerity because of those choices. It’s very much a setting of the mind, and that’s made clear very early as Shihua, mourning, is concerned people know emotion won’t overrule her performance. It’s the visible gaps between her years-long, driven crisis-management performances and her visible inner turmoil that drive “The Earthlight Bright Before Her”, until and as she reconciles them: a rather compassionate collision between what was once a reasonable trauma response and the space where it’s outlived its healthiness.

That’s a theme that’s encapsulated on all levels of craft, especially in the prose: the evocativeness of the language when she thinks of Earth, or actually lets herself go (I especially liked “It was a pin, and she wriggled on its end; it was an ocean, and she drowned in it.”) just emphasizes the harsh austerity of her everyday narration. Shihua is clearly not a reliable narrator: emotionally austere, compulsive, and occasionally a little propagandistic, defaulting to the party line over nuances or niceties. It’s a great way to signal state of mind, and the degree of self-repression Shihua’s working under.

The balance of paragraphs show me right away how to read that connection between space and feeling. The author’s notes ask about whether the hard science elements slow the pace, and I’m personally not a reader who’s going to linger over technical details as long as they don’t keep me from a good story, but from the first line, those details are being balanced by emotional content: “date fourteen” spurs a bit of confusion for me, but it immediately pales before the loss of a parent and the encroaching lunar darkness—an obvious, apt, and effective metaphor for grief (reversed quite visibly when Yiye is born, and paid off in the Earthlight). That first paragraph’s juxtaposition of detachment and intense emotion—astrophysics as emotion, engineering as revenge against mortality—tells me clearly that “The Earthlight Bright Before Her” isn’t going to be a story that treats its technical details like a test—and that’s what I need to connect with it as a reader. I’ve been told why they actually matter, and that’s enough.

From that point, the piece has set an expectation with me for how I should read it, and when I read those technical details on a metaphoric level, everything works: What consumes power produces heat, and the heat must be vented somewhere—it’s also an apt metaphor for emotional consequences. The “patches of unnatural smoothness breaking up the rocky, pockmarked surroundings” read perfectly as a description of Shihua’s affect, artificiality amongst a more natural roughness. Under that reading, the quest to build a literal wall of radiators—an emotional barrier sometime described as “a blade”—takes on more resonance for me as a metaphoric solution, rather than a practical one.

I think this tendency is what’s also currently creating the story’s major downsides, however: several occasions when the practical logic gets subsumed in the metaphoric, to the point where it breaks. It’s when these practical collisions arise that I find myself having logic questions about “The Earthlight Bright Before Her.” There are all sorts of motivations—societal, interpersonal, chronological—that don’t always line up, and the attention to technical detail highlights them considerably.

On the surface level, “The Earthlight Bright Before Her” can occasionally get too obvious with its pragmatic-metaphoric connection. Notably, Shihua’s “Didn’t he see the danger in grief?” felt rather on the nose, and the ways Shihua paints Yiye as not just her hope for the future, but the station’s hope can edge into Heinleinian special-child territory. Realistically, there’s no reason a protagonist’s child would be naturally better at things; most of us have our strengths and weaknesses.

This tendency also crops up in the question of the station’s blank white décor, Shihua’s wildly emotional reaction to Yiye’s blue paint, and the timing of their move toward art and comfort. It doesn’t strike me as realistic that, once they knew they’d be there for lifetimes, the inhabitants wouldn’t devote some time and energy to creature comforts—especially if they’re raising children. It works as an extended metaphor for Shihua’s personal emotional austerity and restraint—and the forcible reopening of those emotional channels—but when that metaphor meets the practicalities of other human beings living in a community, not beholden to Shihua’s emotional growth, it falls apart.

Going deeper, there’s a question of how long it took Shihua to perfect her heat radiator design, and whether it was feasibly done in the days between her mother’s death and her pitch. It does sound like a reasonably complex engineering problem, and even working non-stop, tired is stupid; she’s clearly lying about being at her best.

Likewise, while I don’t need to know which nation deployed a genetic weapon against a cast of East and South Asian people, I wondered about the practicality of that: almost every society in the world now has diverse ancestries and bloodlines, and genetics are a deeply variable and idiosyncratic situation. This seems like a plan that would be fraught with unwelcome surprises for the people who launched it, and the black-and-white character of it—alongside calling them the enemy—feels slightly cartoonish.

The discussion around children had me likewise wondering about logistics: How long had they been there, if Shihua was a child when they fled and is of a reasonable reproductive age now? Had no one become a parent in all that time, and what do the differences in radiation do to people’s reproductive capacity? Is there a reason they aren’t doing this the old-fashioned way (people do have sex, after all, in all sorts of circumstances)? Is there a reason Minjae is so puzzled by the idea? He’d surely remember children being around, or a childhood of his own.

It’s for this reason that ultimately the final door into the conflict—Yiyi and her friends ultimately just being teenagers, and Shihua’s rigidness about their refusal to take on her driven crisis response—felt somewhat manufactured to me. Her grieving and repression, to borrow a metaphor, are being written here as the unnatural smoothness, without reference to the rocky, pockmarked surroundings that will still exist in her unprocessed emotional life. Yes, she’s trapped in fight/flight, but crisis is not flat; it’s the flat space people carve out because the rocks are breaking their proverbial ankles. The rocks are there, and as a reader, I cannot feel them in this scene. Her now-sincere lack of understanding isn’t supported by the person we’ve been told she was in the first half: a climate crisis child who dreams in cracking glaciers and would understand Yiye’s despair, an unwilling expatriate, a devoted parent who also went to every length to honour her mother’s death. This is the piece of the story that to me feels the most out of sync with the rest, and the place where I’d suggest the most attention.

There is another way into this question, I think, which I also want to highlight. Part of why I think I’m fixing on those logistics is because “The Earthlight Bright Before Her” doesn’t, as of yet, contain a cohesive full-story arc. It’s building up a series of incidents—which is a thing lunar SF has done and can do!—linked mostly by the development of Shihua’s grief against her changing world (the metaphoric subsuming the practical). But there isn’t a viable external structure linking all these occurrences together; if you asked me what this story was about in two sentences, I could only describe a moving target. The more it reads to me as a series of vignettes in the life of the station, the more I focus on the logic of those incidents. I think there’s a viable solution here in smoothing out some of the overarching structure—building more throughlines from beginning to end—that would stabilize readers’ focus away from the details of each incident.

Longer pieces require more undercarriage work, because we’re holding more in our heads when we write them; it can be a big task. I want to reinforce that there are some very important true things being said here, about the mismatch between trauma response and objective moving realities, about getting stuck, about the time in your life when what you need grows larger and what you can do stronger. This piece feels honest, and it feels important. I think with some considerable work (sorry, it’s structural, it’s going to be heavy lifting) it can cohere, reorganize, get its logic in order, and bring that light through.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

— Leah Bobet, author Above (2012) and An Inheritance Of Ashes (2015)

Maskot: The Novel by David Schwartz, Chapter 1

This chapter works for me as the opening of a novel. The way the protagonist is introduced sets up expectations: we’re going to get John’s life history, starting from his childhood. We find out who he is, where he comes from, and what kind of world he lives in. By the end, we know why he’s been chosen and what he will be trained for—and we’re ready to discover how it plays out.

It’s done deftly, with plenty of detail, but no slackening of the pace. There’s plenty of exposition, but it’s all relevant to that point in the narrative. We’re told what we need to know in order to understand what’s going on.

Over and over again, when I’m editing or critiquing mss., I’ll ask, “Do we need to know this right here and now? Are we getting just the right amount of exposition, or has the story run into a speed bump?” The answer here is, Yes, we do, and yes we are, and the story is moving along as it should. It’s well done.

This has the feel of good old-fashioned alien-invasion science fiction. Andre Norton could have written something very like this, or Heinlein when he wrote for younger readers. It’s retro in a good way, for the most part.

The protagonist is still very young and his character is just starting to take shape, but he tells his story capably. The aliens are nicely weird, and they don’t read as humans-in-costume. Their language of light and gesture is very cool; I’ll look forward to seeing more of that as the story unfolds.

I have a couple of questions about the worldbuilding. One is quite small, just a quibble really, but it’s one of the things that dates the narrative as mid-twentieth-century. The world Oriental is not much in use any longer. It’s been replaced by less Western-colonial-centric terms, notably Asian.

The viewpoint the word implies, the assumption it seems to be based on, is white European. And yet in this world, would humans retain assumptions about race and skin-color discrimination? Would John know or care what an “Oriental” is? His Khin says he “looks like a Seminole,” which implies that he’s probably not white-presenting, either, despite his white-presenting name. (And if his mom is going for simple, what about Juan or Ali or Chen?)

It would seem logical that by this time, the only distinction is human versus alien. Humans come in a range of shapes, sizes, and skin tones, but what they would really notice is that they’re not Khin. For that matter, why would a Khin care what a human looks like? Is there an aesthetic element to the Game, a rule that the human game piece has to look a certain way in order to play a particular role?

I’d like to know, too, whether the rigid gender roles are part of the Khin’s Game, and whether they become less rigid over the course of the novel. Even if it’s the Game, wouldn’t there be nods to female fighters in human history—Viking shieldmaidens, Amazons, the Agojie of Dahomey?

Another question I had as I read had to do with the Khin’s language. It’s unusual in slave societies for the slaveholders to speak the language of the enslaved people. It’s much more common for slaves to be forced to speak the slaveholders’ language.

Humans of course aren’t physically capable of speaking by means of light and color, but would they be expected to understand a rudimentary form of it? Basic vocabulary, names and ranks, and of course commands? Gestures and sign language might be useful as well. Not to mention, the humans might have a secret language, a means of communicating that’s not shared with or made known to the Khin.

I like that this chapter makes me ask questions like this. There’s plenty of room for a novel here, lots of scope in the world and the characters. I’ll be interested to see where it goes, and how it develops.

— Judith Tarr

The Love Of A Mother by Daniel A. J.

One ability all short story writers need is to tell a story in a small number of words. “The Love of a Mother” achieves a lot in 279 words. We get a sense of the setting, descriptions of six characters, an understanding of the situation, and we see the main character make a major decision. That’s a lot. The piece has some vivid sensory details and raises questions in readers’ mind regarding the characters’ situation and what they are urging the mother to do, and those questions create suspense and engagement.

One area I think could be strengthened is the point of view. The POV is unclear to me now, which leaves me unable to settle into the story and experience it from a specific perspective. The first sentence, with the phrase “His mother,” implies that I’m in “his” point of view, which means the POV of the dead boy. I don’t think that’s what’s intended because the rest of the story is not from the dead boy’s POV. The second sentence shifts to calling the mother “her,” making me feel I’m in her third person limited omniscient POV. In the second paragraph, “Tears squeezed past her eyelids, flowed down her dirty, grunge-caked cheeks” shows me things the mother can’t see, so now I think I’m in a third person omniscient POV, hearing from the omniscient narrator. In the fourth paragraph, “Each breath she took filled her exhausted lungs with the warm, shit-and-piss-soaked air” puts me back in her body with her. After that, I think we stay in the mother’s POV until the last paragraph, when the “Dark blood ran down her chin and neck, vanishing into the cleft between her breasts.” That puts me outside of her, in an omniscient viewpoint looking at her. The story seems to end in that omniscient perspective, describing her “hysterical state of satisfaction and guilt,” which seems the way a rather dispassionate observer would describe it, not the way she would experience it. Staying in one consistent viewpoint throughout would allow us to experience the story more strongly, without being jarred or confused by POV shifts. And the story could be presented in a more unified way, from a striking, involving perspective speaking in a strong voice.

The voice right now feels inconsistent. Some word choices feel sophisticated and a bit old fashioned, like miniscule, bosom, and moribund. Other words feel somewhat crude and more contemporary, like grunge-caked, shit-and-piss-soaked, and deadbeat. This leaves me without a clear sense of the voice or the world in which these characters exist.

The other element I’d like to discuss is characterization. It’s not clear why the man and the woman are urging the mother to eat her child. If they are all starving, which is how I interpret the story, then the others should be eager to grab the dead child and eat it. I think they’d actually discourage the mother from eating the child and offer to bury the boy or take him to reduce her temptation. If they’re in some situation in which the mother, for some reason, needs to eat her son to avoid being killed by some unseen jailers, and the others want her to survive for some reason, I think that needs to be clarified.

I think the characterization could also be strengthened with some research. I believe the characters in the story are suffering from starvation. If so, their condition and situation could be described incorporating some realistic details. Research can strengthen most fiction, no matter the genre, since it can provide fascinating details the author would most likely never think of. I’m no expert on starvation, but I believe that people who are deep into starvation—deep enough that they’d become cannibals—would have swollen bellies, not sunken ones. And I think they would not be strong enough to growl or bellow, and the mother would not be able to hold her son up by the ankle.

I think a more consistent point of view and some stronger characterizations could help maximize the impact of this piece. I hope my comments are helpful. I appreciate all that this story did in such a few words.

— Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

I Object by Kate Orman

“I Object” caught my attention this month with its 1930s pulp-style interstellar royal court, a gorgeously breath-held tone, and some thorough thematic thoughts on objectification and agency. It’s also an incredibly good example of how to crystallize a very big story through one particular lens. In these monthly critiques we talk a lot about sensory prose, but this month I want to drill down a bit and look at how we think about which sense we’re basing our science fictional experiences in—and how being deliberate about that can cohere our stories.

“I Object” is, for such a quiet, dreamlike story, very full: an interplanetary cruise gone wrong, a household preparing for its asteroid tomb, a dying teenaged princess and her devoted quasi-sentient robot bodyguard/chaperone—all told from the robot’s perspective. In comparatively few words, it’s creating a fascinating mix of classic space opera pulps, a near-Egyptian burial ritual, and a 1920s country house picnic disaster, punctuated with almost distant, dreamlike murders through the back halls. There’s a lot going on here, and all very smoothly—so well-integrated none of it sticks out or obstructs me. Its air of strange and breath-held waiting is absolute; its grief-laced sexual politics are ugly in a way that rings emotionally true. Its ending is dark and beautiful and says a lot about liberation and limited ambition.

And a lot of this is done through one of the biggest—and least obtrusive—strengths in “I Object”: its prose. There’s solid, inventive work being done on the sentence level to support every other priority the story has—and all that work is mostly grounded in the sense of touch.

Touch is very thematic in “I Object”, and it’s perpetually central. From the first scene, the story’s description of its major speculative element, a quantum travel mechanism, is beautifully textural: “broken glass and pink champagne” in the rugs juxtapose sharpness with softness with bubbliness in the mouth in a way that tells you this was supposed to be soft and ebullient, but it’s gone wrong. “Stuck in the narrow passageway like sauce in the neck of a bottle” stays with that concept of consumption and pleasure being turned inside out, and adds tension, pressure, dehumanization to the situation. Later, “poached in radiation” lands the food metaphor, what’s consuming whom. Outside the bubble, rougher words like “fibers” pull against smooth ones (“sliding”): it’s both extending our idea of touch to how to think about this speculative element and setting up an experience in very few words.

It’s centred around a particular situation, but as readers, we’ve been clued in: look for texture, look for touch, look for things described in those terms to have meaning. Even if we’re not aware of that message consciously, readers pick up on consistencies in a story very quickly; we’re pattern-matching creatures by habit. So now that we’ve been primed, what does “I Object” do with it?

The first way “I Object” uses that idea of touch as a tool is to build in plain weirdness and make it feel comprehensible: the ways quantum travel is described as almost contradictory (“silver oil” against “black water”, the stars peering in instead of peering out at them) are a great strategy for hinting that this experience is uncanny, and should feel uncanny. All this is said without saying it directly on the page; it’s an experience built for readers as the plot and characters move forward.

It’s also showing up in characterizing Zain without having to deliberately or directly state his emotional life, and emotional changes. Part of what makes this story work is Zain’s very matter-of-fact, direct, reportage-style narration. He uses a lot of short, deceptively plain sentences and initially rarely adds much emotional subjectivity: he talks about anxiety as his timepiece swinging rather than a feeling, just before a quite violent intervention. He is not in touch with things, at his base state. It’s a detachment that allows this strategy of working in touch to stand out more clearly, and then one that—as it changes, and he starts thinking in terms of joy, of anxiety, of fear—lets readers walk along with that developing emotional journey without having to be told it’s developing.

The grounding in touch extends into the worldbuilding, thematics, and relationships. The palace as a bubble strung above earth is a physical image: delicate, precious, ornamental, ultimately fragile and ephemeral, tied absolutely but at a distance. It’s an image that absolutely supports the transient quality of this relationship, of the princess’s self-image (I found it really telling that she calls him “silly bauble” affectionately, after critically describing her own social function as basically that), of the household now that the princess is dying. When the princess complains of it as an artificial womb for the womb she is—a barrier—the images are lining up together and reinforcing each other, making the story feel more whole. That lack of contact makes her complaint feel exceedingly real.

In short, that one element—routing most of the important ideas in this story through their tactility—is how “I Object” pulls them all together and makes the story feel whole, and does it almost invisibly. It’s a great, quiet strategy to use to make a world feel emotionally honest, relevant, real, and immediate, and it’s something we can do as writers without too much extra effort: just with extra focus.

That said, in terms of suggestions to improve this draft: I think it’s publishable as is. The only thing I would actually suggest changing in “I Object” is the title. It does highlight what’s at the centre of the piece, but without that context—as the first thing readers encounter—it’s a bit stiff and unbending, a bit too reflective of “I, Robot” to really communicate the depth of what’s going on here. It stands a chance of miscueing readers as to what kind of story they’re about to get, and I think something with a little more texture (ironically! or not!) might serve the story better.

If the author does opt to change the title, however, it may be worthwhile to concretize the ending just a hair more. I understand what it’s saying, about the value of lives, about worth, about souls going through the door to heaven—but a lot of that reading is informed by the title as it is. Taking that clue away does change the mix of what I as a reader am looking for, and so I’d also suggest finding a way to incorporate it into a new title, work it back in somewhere early on, or compensate by clarifying a touch at the end.

But it’s a wonderful, deep, deliberate, balanced, gorgeously disturbing, epiphantic story, and I’m looking forward to seeing it in print.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

— Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)

The Moon Talker by Martin Grace

The concept of this novel is both classic and thoroughly timely. Science fiction since its beginning has been telling stories of a ruined Earth and a last desperate diaspora. The fact that we’re at a tipping point on climate—if we haven’t already gone over the cliff—makes it all the more relevant.

I really like the title. It’s intriguing and evocative. It invites the reader to speculate as to what it means, and how the story will unfold.

I have a couple of observations about the chapter as it’s written. The first is structural. There’s a lot of action here, a lot of story-movement, and the final paragraphs blow everything up spectacularly.

And yet, much of the chapter consists of Harper’s ruminations on the past, descriptions of the other characters, exposition about how they all got to this point. She’s woolgathering while the world collapses—and in fact she’s called out on it.

That calling-out is what I call “Author Id speaking.” That’s the author recognizing that the narrative isn’t quite doing what it needs to do. Instead of focusing on the immediate action, it’s stepped outside and is wandering around the edges.

One thing that might help is rethinking Harper’s character. Not so much who she is or what her role is on the ship, but how she appears in the story. If she’s more directly involved in the action, if she’s concentrating on what’s happening in the here and now, there’s still potential for filling in the background, but it stays in the background rather than taking over the narrative. Action first, backstory second—and if the backstory can be directly related to what’s happening, so much the better.

Think about what we absolutely need to know right here, right now. What the mission is. Why it’s happening. What the stakes are—especially the fact that the planet is about to fall apart. Keep Harper focused on her job and the jobs of the people around her, as they impinge on hers.

A major part of this is the emotional aspect. There’s quite a bit of powerful emotion here, but the draft tends to back away from it. The prose for the most part is flat, expository; it’s full of passive constructions. We’re told about feelings but we don’t quite get below the surface, where the feelings actually live.

More active prose, more sense of what’s going on in Harper’s mind and body, will help. Think through how she feels; what she feels and why. Get into her head. How would you feel if you had been through what she’s been through?

Even if she’s dissociating so she can do her job—that’s one way to deal. Make it clear that’s what she’s doing. Show how she balances grief and fear, desperation, and the need to be calm, strong, efficient. How tightly does she need to hold on? How many layers of feeling can she be coping with, while the top layer focuses on the mission?

Hard SF, which is what this seems to gravitate toward, doesn’t devote a lot of time to feelings, but I think going deeper into Harper’s emotions will make the story stronger. It might be worthwhile too to think about her voice, the way in which she tells her story. The style and cadence of the draft has an old-fashioned feel, somewhere between Golden Age science fiction and an almost Steampunk sensibility, with a hefty dose of techno-speak.

Does the style fit the character? Would it work better if she were a different age or gender? Could she be older? Younger? Male? Nonbinary? What qualifies her, specifically, to be the narrator of this story? In short—why this character, and why this narrative style? Is it just the right one? Or could it be different? What is the best way to tell the story, and who is the best person to tell it?

Best of luck, and happy revising!

— Judith Tarr

Eloi, Eloi, Chapter 1 by James Cooper

This chapter is a pretty definite early draft. The prose loses control of itself here and there, and sometimes I had to stop and go, “Huh?” while I tried to parse the meaning of a phrase. But that’s fixable in revision, with a good line edit and some careful copyediting.

At the same time, there are some stunning bits of imagery. Those show me where the revision can go, and what potential it has. The idea of Satan’s poetry, and a world filled with it. The moonlight moving as if it’s sentient—as if it has volition. The angels’ movement, more math than magic. The way the dream fades, like some great symphony falling into silence.

Structurally I think the chapter could use a little rethinking. The individual memories are poignant, and they’re important to Jacob’s life and character. But the way they’re set up is a bit slow, with the rhythm of exposition rather than active narration. It takes a while to get to the event that actually begins the story, the encounter with Death followed by what appears to be Jacob’s first dream.

Two things stand out to me in the narrative: Satan’s poetry and I do not dream. Is there a way to lead with the latter as well as the former? Is there some connection between them—whether it’s real or in Jacob’s head?

Perhaps a less linear timeline would help with the story’s movement. Start in the church, bring in memories of his mother’s funeral and the life experiences that brought him back here. Could he have seen Death at the funeral, too, or thought he did? Might he feel as if time is slipping off its straight track, and he’s caught in between memory and reality? And that’s what he’s been told dream logic is like?

There’s also the fact that according to science, dreams are essential. If we can’t get that level of sleep, we might as well not be sleeping at all. Actual lack of dreaming (as opposed to just not remembering dreams) can have serious mental health consequences.

Which I’m sure you know, and probably will address later in the story, but it might be relevant here. He may wonder about his own sanity, and interpret the dream as a hallucination brought on by longterm sleep deprivation. Or, and again this may be addressed later, there’s something going on with his immortal soul; it has something to do with Satan. His non-dreaming is a sign that he’s not the otherwise normal guy he thinks he is.

In short, I think the Satan’s poetry theme could be made a little clearer, while the narrative itself uses the church and the Mass as a frame for Jacob’s backstory. Let us dive straight into the present day, with quick flashbacks to fill us in. That will help with the pacing at the beginning, but also give us the information we need to understand where Jacob is coming from.

There’s lots of good story-potential here, and some powerful ideas and images. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves from draft to final.

— Judith Tarr