Revised: Bodies for Gods Chapter 1 by James Cooper

I did something for this Editor’s Choice that I’ve only done once before: I read the original version as well as the revision. I’m glad I did. It’s always interesting to see how a draft changes from one version to the next.

In this case, the goal was to be clearer about what is going on in the chapter, and to reduce confusion. I think the revision does this. It certainly pares down the prose and focuses on the characters and the action.

There are a few things that might help the chapter become even clearer and even more focused. One is quite basic. The revision is much less prone to passive voice and word echoes than the original, but I think another pass would be even more effective. Try the Kill Challenge: kill all the passives and the repetitive phrases, then see how it reads, and whether any of them needs to go back in.

I understand why the revision gave up on the attempt to convey different viewpoints within the same character. It’s a great idea but a serious challenge for both the writer and the reader. Better to go simple, stay in one viewpoint and let the story unfold through that pair of eyes.

The revision works hard at this, and maybe goes a little too far in the direction of making sure we know exactly whose point of view it is. There are frequent viewpoint tags; we get multiple repetitions of words and phrases that emphasize which version of Signy is telling the story, words like know, remember, watch. At one point we’re told in no uncertain terms that the Signy-viewpoint is the adult, and she’s in the time of the child:

If any looked her direction at all, it was as if she wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t. They looked right through her. Occasionally, they even walked through her.

I think it’s clear enough that she’s not physically there. One iteration of that is all the narrative needs; then it can move on to meet the child Signy.

TOnce it’s established that Signy is having an out-of-body experience, the tags become a distraction. It might help to run another Kill Challenge. After the first couple of tags, delete the rest and see if the narrative makes sense. Then just restore them where it’s absolutely necessary to clarify the meaning.

One more thing I think might help with clarity. I get from the context as well as the author’s note that viewpoint-Signy has had large portions of her memory eaten by the god that’s taking her over. There are references to what’s missing, and we’re told that she can’t remember who the people are that she sees. I’m still not absolutely clear on how the process works.

There’s another layer or two of worldbuilding to be done here, I think. I feel as if I’m wanting a bit more on how she knows what’s missing, and how she feels about it. Does she build new memories through these visions, or is that also taken from her? Can she form new memories and process them into longterm memory, or has she lost that capability? How aware can she be of what’s happening to her, and will that awareness erode as the damage progresses?

Those questions are probably answered in the novel as a whole. I just find myself wanting a little more at this opening chapter, a hint of what it all about, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come. Asha will give us some of that, but maybe there could be a little more here.

It’s an intriguing concept, for sure. The loss of Signy’s memory and self is both epic and tragic, and at the same time, it’s deeply personal. That comes through even in this short chapter.

–Judith Tarr

Two Versions Of Flash Fiction Using Same Elements by Tim W. Burke

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

Eerie Appendages, Part 1 of 2 by William Broom

“Eerie Appendages” caught my eye this month with its uncanny, shadowy science fiction narrative, a whip-smart set of thematic ideas, and a careful deliberation in its clues and word choices. It’s a piece alluding to about four subgenres in SFF, but integrating them all into a cohesive—and unsettling—whole that uses every inch of its material. So this month, I’d like to discuss another way to think about thematics, and what unifying our elements of craft through them can do for our work.

If “Eerie Appendages” has a major shining strength, it’s efficiency and a thorough commitment to its core question. Each of its elements does something to further at least two story goals; everything works together, without a moment wasted. And everything runs through the mental lens of the question it’s exploring: the Uncanny Valley, what precisely is wrong on this planet, what feels wrong, what we’re told is wrong but feels right, and the whole idea of false consciousness.

That commitment begins immediately: “Eerie Appendages” derives a lot of its narrative tension from establishing and exchanging threats, and it wastes no time in setting up the disjuncts that power that sense of dread. The first line—that Harwen “feels he must want for nothing”—immediately bounces off the grotesque implications of being “mostly” free from parasites, setting up that core question of something is wrong here, and building it through individual elements that each approach a compromised reality: mind-controlling aliens, pheromones, trans-dimensional space travel, an unacknowledged queer relationship, colonialism, dissociation, and the gap between the professional and personal.

Even though that’s a quite disparate collection of elements to put in one story—never mind one this short—that question of false consciousness refracts ruthlessly through each one of them and ties them together into a Mieville-esque colonial Age of Sail narrative that’s smart, creepy, and narratively riveting.

What’s doing the heavy work here is the thematic level. Themes!

There can be a tendency when we’re first building our storycraft to think about theme as an allegory or a message, but it can be more constructive to think of it as how these things are each like the other—and then arrange those elements of story so they’re all catching the same proverbial light and sending it in the directions we want readers to look.

“Eerie Appendages” is flat-out great at this job. Thematic implications lurk under the surface constantly—but are confident enough to not make themselves too explicit, trusting readers to put them together ourselves, as every piece of thematic information is also doing plot or atmospheric work.

The true bodies’ composition as mounds of flesh that don’t move or sense, only consume and discard from the same holes, is both a huge foundation for the grotesque atmosphere and visible as a comment. The way those bodies play off readers’ sense of the Uncanny Valley—while reversing that perspective to show Harwen feeling that same disgust for human bodies—is a looping resonance that’s bluntly brilliant work. It generates buckets of tension and conflict without ever having to explain a thing.

“Eerie Appendages” is also making absolutely the most of its pseudo-historical trappings. Harwen’s period costume, the “feverish air of a foreign land” on-planet, live animals imported from faraway colonies immediately evoke a genre of colonial literature that’s inherently fairly brutal and bodily—a genre of bought and sold bodies, flogged bodies, rigid hierarchies—and bring all that brutality into play for readers without saying a word. It’s a very interesting subgenre in which to set a piece that plays with the Uncanny Valley like this; a story about false selves eating real ones and whose bodies are identifiable-with—whose bodies are real. Both are obsessed with bodies in a way that feeds each other, nourishes each other, and makes the material richer by bringing in whole other frames of reference, smashing them together, and going look, these are the same.

Harwen’s dismissive colonialist attitudes toward the planet’s Indigenous people fits into the Age of Sail ambiance perfectly, and is well-counterbalanced by Viltrand’s more functional, cooperative relationship with them—Harwen’s natives versus Viltrand’s locals. There’s a puzzle piece in this too: how Harwen’s inability to identify with them robs him of the social narrative he’d need to withstand the trauma of having his sense of self shaken.

Harwen’s obviously a complex character, even though we’re seeing him filtered through the lens of a possession—one that has him declaring “He is a simple man” in ways that are, every single one, proved a lie afterward. Harwen and Viltrand’s half-obscured romance puts the lie to him being just a husband and father; his increasing inability to master the situation and ultimate salvation through interreliance on his crew complicates the ideas in captain. His moment of startling compassion before the water drags his consciousness under gives me a glimpse of how he got his captaincy, his love triangle, and his liminal identity: a blink of the true person before he’s snuffed out.

These are all fascinating ideas to cluster around the core of a planet where you can be parasitized into self-destruction by who you identify with. They are all visible puzzle pieces readers can put together when reading into how “Eerie Appendages” thinks one’s instincts can be co-opted by systems not in your best interests. And they all worked well for me, because all these elements move in the same direction: from a false, grotesque simplicity to a more honest complexity. None of them fight the others, merely inform each other. Those themes—that question of identifying, false consciousness, and risk—becomes a steady organizing principle through which a half-dozen ideas can be compared and explored, and “Eerie Appendages” grown from the rote horror of losing control to something textured, deliberate, emotional, existential, and ultimately really very tragic.

The author’s notes mentioned clarity as a challenge; while I find myself having to reframe my idea of where objective reality sits as I start “Eerie Appendages” and move through to Viltrand’s explanations, it’s not creating confusion. There are enough clues—Nicolas’s very human name versus that alien body, his protestations of simplicity—that I’m comfortable riding that wave, knowing the disjuncts have been pointed out to me as something to follow. And I’m personally all right with the physics of the Linear Sea being weird in a story about unstable realities; the point of the solid clouds on the first page is the crushing on the last one, so I don’t personally need to understand the mechanics behind them.

There aren’t a great many suggestions or notes in this critique, but on the whole, I think this is fabulously done: smart, subtle, horrifying, wildly imaginative, and absolutely making the most of itself. And I think it stands a strong chance of finding an excellent home.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Avenni: The Tower Of Music, Chapter 2 by Meaghan Haughian

–Judith Tarr

Cold Binary by Kate Ellis

There’s some strong writing in this piece, some lovely images and memorable lines. I like the grittiness of it, the noir undertones of Joss’ life and the worlds she lives in. Character and setting fit together nicely.

I do think the braided timelines need work. The interweaving of past and present has the potential to be really effective, but in this draft, the shifts can be confusing. I had to read and reread to figure out who was doing what and when.

Part of this is a small but mighty prose blip: a tendency toward pronoun confusion. There may be two or more she’s in a clause or sentence, and it’s not always immediately clear which character each identical pronoun refers to. The reader has to stop and untangle the meaning.

Transitions can be a bit complicated as well. When Joss flips from Annie and the bar to the aftermath of the explosion, the flip happens in the same sentence. That actually comes close to working, but as we shift back and forth from the explosion to Alice to the investigation to the aftermath on the station, there’s not always a clear demarcation between each timeline. Characters and events tangle rather than intertwining. It’s sometimes hard to be sure which past or present the narrative is in.

The paragraph about Mathieu Severn is a good example of what I mean here.

They were the motive for Mathieu Severn, just 22. Younger brother of Radke Severn who’d been buried with the others. It was easy enough to whittle down the suspects. Miners rarely came with family. They said their goodbyes, put in their three years, and floated home with fat paychecks to show for cheating spouses and disaffected children. The miners on KM-427 made enough to retire. They were extracting Kyrenium, a rare and priceless substance that could power up an Alcubierre drive without the need of a nearby gas giant. Severn had hacked the blueprints for the tunnel in his datapad, found evidence for Zofia’s cost-cutting. He’d confessed eagerly enough. 

The paragraph segues out of the casualty count for a mining accident. We get Severn’s age and that he had a motive—presumably the dead in the previous paragraph. Next we get a snippet of his relationship to one of the dead, followed by a quick shift to, apparently, Joss’ viewpoint, a bit of exposition about the miners, who they are and why they are and what they’re mining, followed in turn by a shift back to Severn, and finally another shift to the crime and his confession.

It’s all information we need to know, but it’s organized almost randomly. On one hand it does reflect the process of free association, as if we’re following Joss’ thought process point for point. On the other, the shifts and jumps make it hard to keep track of what’s going on from one sentence to the next. By the time we get to the end, we’re far enough from the beginning that we aren’t entirely sure how we got there.

Cleaning up and clarifying the transitions between timelines will help. So will organizing details and actions a little more consistently.

It can be as simple as giving each set of ideas its own paragraph. In the paragraph above, if a new one began with It was easy enough, it would be clear that the train of thought is shifting. Then maybe rethinking the progression from retirement to Kyrenium, and how we get from that to Severn’s hacking and the cost-cutting, and from there to his confession. There are connections missing, links between the concepts, as well as sense of why they follow each other in that particular order. If we have those pieces of story-data, we’ll be able to follow the narrative more easily.

–Judith Tarr