New from Metrocles
House (my personal publishing operation, which I figured to be SEO‑optimized
for anyone searching with the combination ancient, cynic, and fart):
The Quiet Guy It Always
Was.
This story is about five
years old. It never found a home in the science fiction or the mainstream
literary magazines, so here it is, a world premiere. People sometimes seem
surprised that I’ll put out an often rejected story (about a third of the
fiction in Apostrophes
and Apocalypses had been
turned down all over the landscape and not been published elsewhere), but if a
story seems to your eyes to work and to do what it should do, there are three
possibilities:
a) something is wrong with your eyes or your
definition of what a story should do,
b) it hasn’t been to the right editor yet, and the
right editor may not have a job yet. Perhaps she’s still finishing eighth
grade, or serving out one more tour before she goes Reserve and takes the
college benefit. Or maybe you just haven’t happened to see the market listing
for Ablating Stories, or
c) you’ve written a good story that is one way or
another in an uncomfortable corner for the current market. If that happens,
you’re apt to get a number of notes from editors to the effect of “I like this
but …” followed by some non‑quality consideration, such as “my mother reads the
magazine” or “the insurance doesn’t cover angry mobs.”
Now, if you have a chance
to publish or self‑publish, if the problem is a)—quite possible if you’re a beginner, but less so
after a decade or two of writing—then you might as well put it out there,
because chances are everything else you’re doing has similar problems, and you
need to keep trying until one of two things happens: you learn to perceive and
fix the problems, or it gets really dark and they start throwing dirt over you.
Till then, you keep putting it out there, to editors or audiences, and just
hope enough people will see it your way, until your perception develops enough
to tell you what the matter is, or it sells. If a story has really been everywhere, and you think it’s great and really can’t see a
thing wrong with it, and the story is very important to you, you might look for
a developmental editor or book doctor; for a fee, they’ll tell you the truth as
they see it, and that may clear up the mystery. But frankly, ten submissions
will cost you a tiny fraction of what one book doctor’s assessment would, and
is apt to do you more good.
If the problem is b), it will only find the right editor, or in
the indie world the right audience, if you keep putting it out there, so you do.
And do. And do.
And if the answer is
c), well, here we are with my
little problem child.
Editorial comment overwhelmingly
boiled down to “too much of a science fiction story for us” at mainstream
places, and “cool story but not science fiction” at sf places. It always seemed
very sfnal to me:
medical and surgical technology are tech and therefore
“scientific”, are they not?
Applications of new and existing tech, so it’s even
hard sf, check?
The possibility that tech may lead to new kinds of people, new
ways of being, new feelings or different expressions of old ones—this is not
science fiction?
The thing is, the tech in The
Quiet Guy It Always Was is very
close to present day, and it has to do with sex and gender and identity, which
gets some people all squirmy (I should probably say this might not be bedtime
reading for your younger kids). And probably not least, it has to do with the
idea that medical technology is enabling new definitions of gender, preference,
and desire—not just adjustments with respect to old definitions, but the
gradual emergence of people who aren’t quite like anyone who existed before systematic
reconstruction was possible.
Right now that possibility
is pretty much unexplored in the real world—just try to imagine convincing the insurance
company that you would be better off as something no one has ever seen before,
than you are with a more conventional birth body and ordinary preferences aimed at other peoples' birth bodies.
But
the change is coming. Surgery is getting cheaper and better and more reversible, and the psychology
of human sexuality keeps turning up surprises. There are going to be some new
kinds of people, who have new kinds of bodies and like to do new kinds of
things with them. It’s about time to start exploring that in science fiction.
This is a story about the
possibilities now opening up, and to my surprise, it came out … well,
exuberant, if you like the idea of human beings discovering new things they
like and getting them. (Vile, I guess, if you don’t like the idea of perverts
discovering new perversions, but if that’s your reaction, let me just say:
Pbbbbt.) I just can’t see that as a problem; when it comes to genders and preferences, the more the merrier. But of
course, science fiction, especially hard sf, is traditionally about problems,
not about exuberance.
Anyway, in more
traditional SF you usually mess with the tech or with the kinds of people
or—rarely—with both as long as one is distinctly subordinated to the other.
(Gibson’s Idoru
and Delaney’s Stars
In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand
are about as far as I’ve seen it go).
In general, in more
traditional science fiction, wonder is kept under control (and the story is
kept comprehensible) by changing the tech a lot and the people very little, or
vice versa; in the more daring stuff, the tech change explains the people
change or vice versa. So either people who are pretty much like us are waving
their zdarkas around, or people who practice fn’tang (note the apostrophe or
extra skiffy goodness) are very
strange but they are interacting with our world or a very familiar fictional
one. More rarely, the story is about how the zdarka explains the fn’tang or
vice versa. The Quiet Guy It Always Was takes things about one more step, I think, than a science fiction
editor is usually comfortable with, though not a very big step—it’s a new world
where people can be rebuilt to be able to pursue what they didn’t even know
they really wanted, and wanting new things and getting them turns out to be fun.
I regard the ending as the
happiest I’ve ever written.
Around 5700 words, if that
makes a difference. Priced at 99 cents at my e‑junkie store (which
has both mobi and
epub)
and at Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble (no relation, by the way, since every so often people ask, I
guess because they think I’m noble).
If I’ve intrigued you, check it out and
drop me a note. You’re going to spend so many dollars in your life, what are
the odds that this will actually be the most foolish one?
