Electronic OtherRealms #23 Winter, 1989 Part 1 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. Table of Contents Part 1 Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Behind the Scenes: Return to Honor Doug Beason Part 2 Reviewing The Reviewers A Survey of Science Fiction Critics Chuq Von Rospach Part 3 Behind the Scenes: Spirits of Cavern and Hearth M. Coleman Easton Creme de la Creme Alan Wexelblat Part 4 Stuff Received Part 5 The Agony Column Rick Kleffel Part 6 No Prisoners! Laurie Sefton Part 7 Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Part 8 Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Part 9 Words of Wizdom Chuq Von Rospach Part 10 Lots and Lots of Reviews Lots and Lots of People [part 1] Part 11 Lots and Lots of Reviews Lots and Lots of People [part 2] Part 12 Your Turn: Letters Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach If you've been reading OtherRealms for a while, it's probably obvious that it's gone through another metamorphosis with this issue. OtherRealms finally has gotten large enough and expensive enough that I can no longer ignore the budget. Last issue ran me over $1500 to print and mail, and I simply can't afford that. The spreadsheet also clearly shows that my hope of a self-supporting newsletter are extremely unlikely at best, and would have been impossible given the way the page-count and print-runs were growing. So I've spent the last few months making some tough decisions and making some radical changes in the format. OtherRealms is now on a budget, and rather than expand OtherRealms to fit the material, I'm now making OtherRealms fit a given size. When I discussed these changes with my editors and the people who are close to OtherRealms, the first question everyone asked was "Why aren't you going semi-pro? Take in advertising." Why not? Because there are many implications of taking advertising I don't want to deal with. One of them is that taking advertising means that OtherRealms becomes responsible to its advertisers instead of its readers. And the advertisers are going to be the people who publish the books OtherRealms reviews. That creates a potential conflict of interest I want to avoid. Another reason is financial. Without boring you with numbers, two weeks with a spreadsheet building business plans convinced me that going semi-pro was a great way to lose even more money, faster than ever before--unless I got lucky. Then I'd break even. If you care about the details, catch me at a convention. So OtherRealms is a fanzine, and a fanzine it stays. To get costs back where they belong, I've cut pages from last issue's whopping 60 to 32. To try to minimize the damage this implies, I've also gone to a smaller typeface. Switching from a 10 point face to 9 allows me to fit about 75% of the text into the new format. That's the good news. The bad news is that 75% is only 75%. To make up the difference, all the editor's agreed to write to a specific word count, and I've cancelled a some features. The Windows on the Future and Reader's Column features, both announced last issue, are on hold indefinitely. I've also cancelled publishing interviews and bibliographies for the time being, although I hope to bring the interviews back in a couple of issues. I'm continuing the Behind the Scenes series because of its popularity, but otherwise focusing on reviews. After all is said and done, OtherRealms is basically unchanged, I believe. The core is there. I've tried to leave what I think are the important parts alone as much as possible. Only you, the readers, can tell me whether I've succeeded or not. Please do. Another side of the cutback I'm taking a close look at is the complimentary subscription list. I'm a firm believer in the faanish "you show me yours and I'll show you mine" philosophy, so the free copies for "the usual" still apply. So do comps to publishers and people with material or artwork waiting for publication. But my subscription roles have slowly fattened with people who have stopped LOCing, submitting, or giving me any feedback at all, and I'm going to be trimming them severely. Check your mailing label. If the expiration issue is '0' you're on the hit-list and you should Do Something. This doesn't necessarily mean subscribing, but people do need to be active in OtherRealms to deserve getting it for free--whether that is sending me your fanzine, reviews, LOC's--The Usual. The layout had to be completely redone for the new size faces. As usual the first time you do something like this, there are some warts. In general, I'm happy with how it turned out, although it's not close to perfect. Let me know what you think. I know where I think it needs improving, but I want to hear your ideas as well. I was expecting total disaster having to make so many changes across the entire zine this issue. Surprisingly, I really think that this issue of OtherRealms is as good as the last few, and over the next couple of issues will continue to improve. Hope you agree. Schedules This issue is coming out in January, not December as originally planned. As I started working on it, I decided that setting a deadline to fall in the middle of two holidays was a silly thing to do--especially since Laurie and I normally travel to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with family. There are just too many things going on in December to try to publish an issue, so I shifted the schedules a month to make things more realistic. This is, therefore, the first issue of 1989 and not the last issue of 1988, but who's counting? The Optimistic Sturgeon I'm happy to announce the pending formation of a new fanzine. Dan'l, longtime writer for me, is starting The Optimistic Sturgeon, which will emphasize criticism. He's gotten some good people to write for him Jeff Meyer on comics and graphic novels, Dave Bratman on Fantasy, Mary Holstege on Science Fiction, and, of course, Dan'l. It should be interesting, and considering who's involved, definitely lively. If you're interested in reading or writing for it, contact Dan'l at 22 Berkshire Road, Alameda, CA 94501. I can't wait for my first copy. And speaking of Dan'l.... Dan'l and Alan, one of my other editors, are the proud fathers of a winning collaboration. The two writer's were chosen as the winners in the latest quarter of the Writer's of the Future contest. Well done, folks! Nolacon Coverage I know I promised coverage of Worldcon this issue. It's not here, for which I apologize. Part of the reason for this is, of course, the lack of space for it. Another reason, however, is because when I sat down with all the people who were going to write about it for me, I found out we really didn't have much to say about the convention! Fred Bals had a wonderful essay on the city of New Orleans. I was waxing eloquent about the week in Orlando at Disneyworld. Laurie was talking about the problems and administrative fiascos of the hotel and committee. Nobody had anything to say about the convention itself--which is, when you think about it, a strong comment on the convention. See you! Behind the Scenes of: Return to Honor Doug Beason Copyright 1989 by Doug Beason There's more than one way to skin a cat. Or sell a novel. You see, I'm an SF writer. Or at least I thought I was until I started sending my first SF novel around. All the signs were there: I had short story sales to Full Spectrum, Amazing, New Destinies, Endless Frontiers, There Will Be War...and these guys publish science fiction. So when I got the great idea to expand one of those short stories into a novel, I naturally thought I was writing SF. But what the publishers told me was something different. In fact, Return to Honor (Pocket Books, February 1989) is being marketed as a near-future thriller. More specifically, as a military thriller--something I didn't intend to do, but quite fortuitously, has now enabled me to expand out to another genre, whose population just might take interest in my first love: "real SF." So for those of you wondering what this "borderline" SF stuff is--you know, the stories with no aliens, so it can't be SF...but yet it's too speculative for mainstream--then Return to Honor is definitely borderline fiction. But I really should start at the beginning.... The summer of '85 I read The Hunt for Red October and was astounded that Clancy could pull off a best-seller filled with techno-jargon. Soon after finishing Red October, I read the Niven-Pournelle bestseller Footfall. These two books impressed me with their scope--the magnitude of events that they both brought together. I'd only been writing seriously for two years at the time and was fascinated at the premise of having something big happen, placed in a near-future setting. These two books motivated me into writing the novelette "The Man I'll Never Be." (Amazing, May 1987 and There Will Be War, Vol 8). The premise behind "The Man I'll Never Be" came to me while listening to Boston's second album. The song, "A Man I'll Never Be," reminded me of Elton John's "Rocket Man"--a person reluctantly living up to someone else's expectations. I envisioned a person who was expected to excel in a job--a leader who was groomed, primed and cocked--ready to rise to the occasion. This person would fall short of his goal and realize that the people he's leading are actually better suited for doing his job. I wanted it to be more than the typical "Joe Blow grows up and is taught a lesson" story; I wanted the stakes to be sky high. I wanted this guy to confront a situation so critical that it wasn't just his life on the line, but everyone he was leading--with half the free world thrown in as well. That summer I attended a lecture on "Technology in 2001." It featured real live stuff like the National AeroSpace plane (except back then it was called a "TAV," or TransAtmospheric Vehicle), a space plane that could scream into a suborbital trajectory and travel halfway around the world in forty-five minutes. Now take that lecture and mix in the TWA hostage crisis that was peaking about the same time. All of a sudden it hit me: what if the President of the U.S. had been kidnapped and had six hours to live? Hopefully there would be a rescue attempt. And knowing the military, suppose the person who had been put in charge of this rescue team had gotten there not by any measure of competence, but rather because of "political" reasons? So when this guy screws up, it just isn't his life he's endangering. Or even the President's. Conceivably an entire nation could be lit up in turmoil. This set the stage. I wrote "The Man I'll Never Be" as a fast paced rescue mission, relying on twenty-first century technology. The protagonist, Krandel, realizes halfway through the story that he's going to screw up the rescue. Because of his incompetence, Krandel's right-hand-man dies and Krandel has to sacrifice the rest of his men to get the President out alive. The novelette left out enough to make a novel. That, coupled with the fact that I had left Krandel and his men on a runway crawling with terrorists, made the novelization relatively easy. Going back to the earlier influences: The greatest influence that Hunt for Red October and Footfall had on Return to Honor was the use of strong multiple characters. My novelette "The Man I'll Never Be" had one strong protagonist, William Krandel. He's a person that I expect we'll be seeing more and more in the U.S. military: a "whiz-kid" manager with no combat experience. In the novel I tried to show that this is bad. I wouldn't want to be led into battle by a brown-noser who had spent his whole life sitting behind a desk. But paradoxically, I also brought out that that's good, since that means we haven't had any wars for those guys to get that combat experience. The main point is that Krandel is an inexperienced leader, and he realizes (when it's too late to back down) that he doesn't have what it takes. Believe me, that will make you wake up and smell the coffee. In Return to Honor I wanted to contrast three other types of personalities, each one coming to the realization that they are "The Man I'll Never Be," but have them rise to the occasion. Sandoval Montoya is the first Hispanic President of the U.S. Fed up with the politics, he's allowing the government to operate on "auto-pilot" until he can retire...and is forced to restructure his political philosophy when he's about to be executed. Robert Gould is a hot-shot TAV (TransAtmospheric Vehicle) pilot with an ego problem. He has never really grown up, but when tasked to fly the rescue mission, he has his nose rubbed in the fact that there are more important allegiances than to himself. Finally, Hujr Ibin is the terrorist. Motivated by religious fervor, he's devastated when he's double crossed by his superiors. He has to disregard old loyalties in order to survive. Return to Honor proceeds in a parallel fashion, moving from one point of view to another as the story builds. The characters' motivations are revealed as they move toward the President's kidnapping and subsequent rescue--each one grows in his own particular way, and sometimes not for the good. I'm convinced that's why my editor at Pocket wanted me to change the title to Return to Honor: action is the name of the game in this genre, not character change. I guess this is Pocket's way to get to their audience--I was told that including the word "Honor" in the title would boost sales by 30%. So for those of you who may be drooling over a "bang-bang shoot-'em-up" mindless adventure story, sorry to disappoint you. I guess the moral of the story is to never give up. I could have tossed Return to Honor after it made the rounds of the SF houses. But sometimes I feel like the dumb frog who hopped in an urn of milk with his friend, the smart frog: The smarter frog figured that there was no way out of the urn, so he gave up and drowned; the dumb one wasn't smart enough to figure that out, so he just kept paddling until he churned enough butter to sit on until rescued. What I mean is there's a whole world of publishers out there. What I had wasn't quite SF; but it took a year for me to realize that it might fit better in another genre. And a better paying one at that. (Pocket doubled the advance for my second novel.) If I had an agent at the time, he might have saved me time and money. But I didn't, and I had to find out the hard way. So I guess the bottom line is this: I still can't believe my novel isn't SF. After all, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck... ! OtherRealms Science Fiction and Fantasy in Review Issue #23 -- Winter, 1989 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved Editor Chuq Von Rospach Science Editor Laurie Sefton Contributing Editors Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Charles de Lint Rick Kleffel Alan Wexelblat OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. OtherRealms is published in January, April, July and October by: Chuq Von Rospach 35111-F Newark Blvd. Suite 255 Newark, CA 94560 USENET: chuq@sun.com Delphi: CHUQ CIS: 73317,635 Subscriptions A single copy of OtherRealms is $2.85. A one year (4 issue) subscription is $11. OtherRealms is available on a returnable basis to bookstores. Please contact me for details. Complimentary subscriptions are available for arranged trades with your fanzine, at the whim of the editor or for "the usual." Submissions OtherRealms is looking for reviews on Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and related non-fiction. We cover book-length material only. Authors are solicited to write for the Behind the Scenes. This series allows you to describe the background and research that went into your book and the things that make it special to you. We are interested in a variety of feature material about the field and the people in it. Please query on all material except reviews. Submissions can be made in either Macintosh or 5.25" MS-DOS disk, to one of my network addresses by E-mail, or the old-fashioned ink-on-paper format. Please include SASE to guarantee return of material. OtherRealms uses first serial rights. Art I'm always looking for good genre-related artwork, from small clip-art pieces to full-page covers. Originals will be returned after use, but I prefer copies since it is safer for both of us. I request one-time non-exclusive rights on art. Deadlines Deadlines for all material is the 15th of the month prior to publication. Publication date is the 30th of the month. Next deadline: March 15. Letters OtherRealms solicits your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and Science Fiction in general. Letters will be considered for publication unless otherwise requested. Letters may be edited for length or content if necessary. Addresses will not be published unless you specifically permit it. Is this your last issue? The number on your mailing label is the issue your OtherRealms subscription dies. Negative numbers indicate complimentary subscriptions. If the number is zero, this is the only issue you will see unless you Do Something. Book ratings in OtherRealms [*****] One of the best books of the year [****] An above average book [***] A good book. Recommended. [**] Flawed, but has its moments [*] Not recommended [] To be avoided.