“Walking with a Ghost”
by Nick Mamatas

Chakravarty spent at least three months making the same joke about how the AI was going to start spouting, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” and then all hell would break loose — a Singularity with tentacles. Sometimes he’d even run to the bank of light switches and flick the lights on and off. It was funny the first time to Melanie, and she squeezed a bit more mirth out of Chakravarty’s inability to pronounce the prayer to Cthulhu the same way twice. Making the Lovecraft AI had been Melanie’s idea, but it was Chakravarty who tried to keep the mood whimsical. Both worried that Lovecraft would just wake up screaming. 

“ — and he does scream, occasionally,” Melanie explained. Her advisor and a few other grad students were at the presentation, in the front rows, but as these presentations were theoretically open to the public, the Lovecraftians had come out in force, squeezing themselves in the tiny desk-chairs. They looked a lot like grad students themselves, but even paler and more poorly dressed in ill-fitting T-shirts and unusual garments — one even wore a fedora — plus they kept interrupting.

“Can we hear it talk?” one asked, then he raised his hand, as if remembering that he had to. “Ask it questions?”

“Please, leave all questions — for us — until after the presentation. We’re not going to expose the AI to haphazard stimuli during this presentation.” Chakravarty said.

“He’s…fairly calm so far,” Melanie said. “Which is to be expected. We know a lot about Lovecraft. He recorded almost everything he did or thought in his letters, after all, and we have nearly all of them. What ice cream he liked, how it felt to catch the last train out of South Station how he saw the colors scarlet and purple when he thought the word evil. He was fairly phlegmatic, for all the crazy prose and ideas so he’s okay..”

“How do we know that this is really an artificial intelligence, and not just a bunch of programmed responses?” This one, huge and bearded, wore a fedora.

Chakravarty opened his mouth to speak, his face hard, but Melanie answered with an upturned palm. “It’s fine,” she said to him. Most of these talks are total snoozers. Nobody ever has any questions.” Then, to the audience: “I’d argue that we can’t know it’s a bunch of programmed responses, except that we didn’t program all the responses we’ve seen so far. Of course, I don’t know that you, sir,” she said, pointing to the Lovecraftian, “aren’t also just a bunch of programmed responses that are just the physical manifestation of the reactions going on in the bag of chemicals you keep in your skull?”

“I don’t feel like I am!”

“Do you believe everything you feel; do you not believe in anything you haven’t?”

“No, and no true Lovecraftian would,” he said.

“Right. So you don’t believe in the female orgasm,” Melanie said. The room erupted in hoots and applause. Then Chakravarty got up shouted that everyone who doesn’t understand what’s going on should just go home, Google “Chinese room,” and stop asking stupid questions. “Ooh, Chinese — Lovecraft wouldn’t like that room,” someone said. Then the classroom was quiet again.

“Uh, thanks for that, Chakravarty,” Melanie said. She adjusted her watch, thick and blocky on her wrist. “I’ve been walking around the city with him. He likes Boston and Cambridge, it helped ease him in to his, uh, existence. And he knew things, how roads crossed and bits of history, that I didn’t know, that we didn’t program into him. But we did program a lot into him. Everything we had access to, both locally and up at Brown.” Behind her, a ghostly image of the author, chin like a bucket, eyes wide and a bit wild, flickered into existence. He sat in an overstuffed chair in the swirling null-space of a factory-present screensaver image.

“Well, if there are no more questions” — Melanie glanced about the classroom and there were no questions, just some leftover giggles — ”why don’t we have him say hello?”

The room went silent “And none of that ftang ftang stuff,” Melanie added. Somebody giggled, high-pitched like a fife.

Chakravarty leaned down into a microphone that snaked out from the laptop. “Lovecraft, can you hear me? Can you see us? Many people here have read your stories.”

The image blinked. “Hello,” it said, its voice tinny and distant.

“How are you?” Chakravarty asked. A simple question, one with only a couple of socially acceptable answers. A kid could program the word “Fine,” into an AIM buddy chat.

“I do not quite know,” Lovecraft said. “I…” he trailed off, then looked out into the room, as if peering into the distance. “Why have you people done this to me?”

Chakravarty giggled, all nerves. Melanie opened her mouth, but was interrupted by one of the professors, who waved a gnarled hand. Chakravarty clicked off the mic. On the screen, Lovecraft started as if he sensed something, and he began to peer into the distance, as if seeing past the other side of the screen upon which he was projected.

“What sort of internal state does this AI supposedly have?” the professor asked.

“Well, as one of the major problems with developing strong AI is embodiment — ” Melanie stopped herself, and added for the fans and cops, “the idea that learning takes place because we have bodies and live in a social world…well, some of us do. Anyway, Lovecraft, in addition to having left behind enough personal correspondence to reconstruct much of his day-to-day life, was also rather repulsed by the body, by the idea of flesh. Many of his stories involve a brain trapped in a metal cylinder, or a consciousness stranded millions of years in the past. So we decided to tell him that we have a ghost. No body, no problem.”

“Where’s he going?” asked the guy in the fedora.

Chakravarty tapped on the keys of the laptop. Melanie wiggled the projector cable. The chair was empty. Lovecraft had gotten up and walked right off the edge of the screen.

“A non-fat venti misto,” Chakravarty said. That was Melanie’s drink. She made eye contact.

“Oh, hi.”

“How’s life among the proletariat treating you?”

“I’m a manager,” she said. “Watch this.” Off came her cap and apron — ”Tyler, cover me.” She quickly made two drinks and walked around the counter. “See?”

“Great,” Chakravarty said. “Anyway, I have the list.” From his messenger bag he dug out a binder the size of the local Yellow Pages. “Twice as many as last time.”

“And still no idea where he could be?” Then, as Chakravarty pointed to the binder, Melanie interrupted herself, “I mean, where he is.”

“Moore’s law, you know. The longer the AI is out in the wild, the more servers are actually capable of supporting it, plus it’s Alife. It’s been eighteen months, so we can say that the number of nodes capable of holding him has doubled. Plus, who knows what it looks like by now. I’ve been closely reading my spam — ”

“In that case, the misto is on the house.”

“Heh,” said Chakravarty. “Anyway, a content analysis shows that lot of the AI’s utterances and the correspondence documents have been popping up.”

“All his fiction’s in the public domain. Of course it would appear in spam.”

“You’re still doing that, you know — calling it ‘he.’”

“And you’re still calling him it.”

Chakravarty leaned forward, an old and happy argument spelling itself out in his posture. “And you wanted to develop an AI, an Alife, because you didn’t like animal testing and psych exams. But you got too close to the idea of your thesis project being real. Did it need memories of a love life to qualify as sufficiently embodied?”

“Well, you don’t,” Melanie said, snippy. She pushed the book away. “Why didn’t you just email this to me? Hardcopy isn’t even searchable,” Melanie said. She quickly corrected herself: “Easily searchable.” She made a show of flipping through the pages.

“Well, anyway,” Chakravarty said, but he didn’t have anything else to say except that he missed Melanie and wanted her to come back to the lab and that a wild AI was still worth a paper or three and how ridiculous it was to quit school, but he couldn’t make himself mention any of that. So he pushed the book across the table to Melanie. “If you want to follow up, go ahead. I have things to do.” He looked around the coffee shop, all dark tones and shelves. “So do you, I bet.”

Melanie sipped her drink. “If only I did.”

Melanie often dreamed of Chakravarty. Sometimes she found herself back in school, struggling with the final exam of a course she had forgotten to ever attend, only to be granted a reprieve and an automatic A when Chakravarty’s death was announced over the loudspeaker of what was suddenly her fourth-grade classroom. The plastic desktop scraping against her knees felt thick and soft like a comforter, then she’d wake up. Or she dreamt of the bus ride to Providence, the grungy South Station and the long lines of kids in college sweatshirts. The mysterious letter that burned in her pocket. The house on Angell Street and Chakravarty’s body bubbling into a puddle of ichor and rotten-seeming fungi. Or she dreamt of the sort of day a coffee shop manager dreams about — a bit rainy, but warm inside, and the old smell of the bean surging back to the forefront like the first day of work. No lines, but enough customers to keep the store buzzing. And laptops. And then Lovecraft on all the screens. The image, black and white and shot through with static, like that old Superbowl commercial, opens his mouth — its mouth — and screams that he has correlated all the contents of his own mind. And he is afraid.

Melanie woke up one morning and remembered that Lovecraft had, on one occasion, a complete story seemingly delivered to him in a dream. Without the resources of the university, she’d never be able to find a wayward AI hiding somewhere in the black oceans of the net, but she knew she could find a frightened man. First, talk to his friends.

The Lovecraftian cabal was easy enough to find. Melanie already had long experience with being the girl in the comic shop, the girl in the computer lab, the girl in the gaming store. Dove soap and magenta highlights always went a long way toward getting boys to speak to her. The anime club led to the science fiction specialty shop and then to the “goth” store and its plastic gargoyles and stringy-haired vampire cashier which led, finally, to the soggy couch in the basement of the place that sold Magic cards and Pocky. They were there, and the dude in the fedora recognized her. Clearly the alpha of his pack, he swanned across the room, belly and the flapping lapels of his trenchcoat a step ahead the rest of him, and sat down next to Melanie.

“I’m utterly horrid with names, but never forget a face,” he said. He had a smile. Decent teeth, Melanie noticed.

“Melanie Deutsch. You came to my — ”

“Ah. Yes. Now I remember everything.”

For a long moment neither of them said anything. A few feet away someone rolled a handful of die and yelped in glee.

“I know why you’re here,” he said.

Melanie shrugged. “Of course you do. Why else would I be here?”

The man fell silent again, pursed his lips, and then tried again: “I would say that the AI is an it, not a he.”

“Oh?” Melanie said.

“It can’t write. Not creatively anyway.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t feel the need to write — I mean, it’s a goal-oriented behavior and he thinks he’s a ghost.”

“Pffft,” the fedora man said. “He knew he wasn’t a ghost; he doesn’t believe in them. Lovecraft was a pretty bright guy, a genius by some measures. The program realized its own — ” he waved his hands on front of Melanie’s face, too close — ”programmitude right off.”

“And it was his idea to escape, maybe hitching a ride on your iPhone?”

“No. We didn’t find the AI till a few months ago. It sought us out, after finding the online fanzine archive, and our club’s server,” he said. “We even tried to make a copy of it, but the DRM was too — ”

“That’s not DRM,” Melanie said. “He wouldn’t let you. It’s human rights management — ”

The fedora man snorted again. Melanie realized that she didn’t know his name, and that she wasn’t going to ask for it.

“Say…do you want to talk to it?” Fedora asked. He dug into his coat pockets and pulled out a PDA. “This thing has a little cam, so it can respond to you…” he muttered. Melanie held out a hand, but Fedora just held the device up to her face. “No touchie.”

Melanie uttered an arbitrary phoneme. Not quite a huh.

The Lovecraft AI appeared on the tiny screen. He’d…changed. Uglier now, jaw hyperinflated but the rest of his head narrow and his nose flat against his face. Eyes like boiled eggs, hair all but gone. Horrid, but somehow alive. “Hello, ma’am,” he said.

“How are you?” Melanie found herself saying. She was as programmed as anyone else. That realization burst out of her, all sweat.

“Why did you tell me,” the AI asked, “how exactly I died? How could anyone be expected to…persist knowing that? A universe of blasphemous horrors — finger puppets worn by a literary hand. I always knew that my life meant nothing, that all human life means nothing, but to experience it, to be in the void, like a doll cut out of paper only able to think enough just to fear, I-I just wanted to go home, but found myself…nowhere. And everywhere.” The fedora man’s meaty hand clamped over the PDA, so Lovecraft’s screams were muffled.

Melanie reached into her backpack — Emily the Strange, smelled like coffee — and got her phone. It was a very nice phone.

“Not it, he,” she said. “He wants to go back to when he wasn’t afraid.”

Fedora glanced down at the phone. “Oh, so you can make a copy?”

“Don’t talk like he isn’t here,” Melanie said. “And I’m certainly not going to leave him with you.”

“Well, have you ever considered that maybe it …uh, he, wants to stay?”

Melanie gave the basement the once over. “No,” she said. “Plus, it…or he?”

“You know what I — ”

“If it’s an it, you’re in possession of stolen goods.”

“Fine. He. He came to this place! He came to me, he —

“If Lovecraft is a he, well, God knows what that’ll mean. Kidnapping, maybe. Is he competent to make his own decisions? Does he have a Social Security number? Do you want the feds going through your systems and digging up all your hentai and stolen music to find out?”

Fedora raised his PDA over his head. “No, no. You’re just — ”

“And then there are the patents we filed. We trademarked the look and feel of his chair, too. But you can turn him over to me instead of to the district attorney.” She smirked at Fedora, but then tilted her head to speak to the AI. “Not among people, but among scenes,” she said, almost as if asking a question.  A muffled yawp came from the PDA.

Melanie, on wind-swept Benefit Street, venti misto in one hand, Lovecraft in the other. Lovecraft says that he is Providence. That’s programmed. Melanie smiles and sometimes he smiles back. That’s not.

About the Author

Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and over fifty short stories, many of which were recently collected in You Might Sleep… A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.

“The Giving Heart”
by Corie Ralston

Coleman studied the dead heart in the store window, the aorta frozen mid-pump in clear acrylic. 

Julie put a hand over her mouth. “Is this for real?”

“Sandra says it’s all the rage,” Coleman said. “It’s what everyone is doing at weddings these days.”

“Sandra says this, Sandra says that.” 

Coleman glanced over. Could it be she didn’t want him to marry Sandra? He liked the thought.

He pulled Julie inside. A man in a suit approached them at once, held out a hand with perfect, manicured nails.

“Real is the new real,” Mr. Manicured said. “People used to give chocolate hearts, candy hearts, paper hearts. Why not get to the heart of the matter, so to speak? Give your actual heart.”

“I don’t know,” Julie said. “It’s kind-of creepy.”

“How does it work?” Coleman said.

Julie wandered off to a display kiosk and pulled up a graphic demo of heart-replacement surgery.

Coleman concentrated on Mr. Manicured, who was still speaking.

“Our surgeons are the best in the country,” he said. “And with cutting edge surgical techniques, so to speak, there is practically no scarring.”

A holo of a happy couple danced in the corner. Red slogans slid across the walls in laser light. Home is where the heart is, give her your heart. It all seemed very modern.

Mr. Manicured took Coleman’s elbow and leaned in conspiratorially. “Personally,” he said, “I would take an artificial heart over a real one any day. Much more reliable.”

He named a price.

Coleman gasped.

“Do you love her?” Manicured said.

“Sure.” It would take all his savings, the money he was saving for his bookstore.

“There is no cost too great for love,” Manicured murmured.

Sandra said it was about time they get married. She sighed meaningfully whenever they passed the Give Your Heart store. He did want to make her happy.

Coleman looked over at Julie, who stood with eyes narrowed at the kiosk. Julie, on the other hand, didn’t believe in marriage.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Do you, Coleman?” the minister said.

Coleman blinked. “What?”

Sandra’s shimmery veil made him dizzy. The heat wrapped his head like soggy towel. He could scarcely breathe.

“Here.”

Sandra’s nephew, at Colman’s side in his tiny tux, nudged a package into Colman’s hands.

“Do you, Coleman, take Sandra as your wife?”

He knew he was supposed to say something about his heart. Still my beating heart. My heart is breaking? No, that couldn’t be it. There were so many expressions about the heart, he thought in a sudden panic.

Julie had said he shouldn’t get married. Julie was somewhere in the audience.

After a pause that felt to Colman as if it might stretch to eternity, Sandra reached over and took the package from Colman’s hands. The minister began to speak again.

Coleman felt a sudden thump from within his chest, as if his new artificial heart had done a somersault. The surgeon had assured him his new heart was in fine condition. Nothing could go wrong. So why had it thumped like that?

He knew he was now supposed to do something with the ring, but at that point, he lost consciousness.

No one would let him live down the fact that he had fainted; the reception was one long running joke about it. Coleman’s heart, in its acrylic cage, made the rounds of the room.

Colman drank three martinis and wobbled off to a corner where Sandra’s brother Giles gobbled a piece of red heart-shaped cake.

“The problem with weddings these days,” Giles said, since he was an expert on everything, “is that they are so staged and predictable.”

“You mean fainting wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

Giles laughed. “Okay. That was fun. But really, everything else. The dresses, the vows, the flowers, blah blah blah.”

And Julie was there, all of a sudden. She looked at Giles. “They were all exotics,” she said. “Not blah blah.”

Giles smiled and held out his hand. “One thing is for sure. I would never cut my heart out and give it to someone.”

“Good,” Julie said, taking Giles’s hand. “I would never ask anyone to. Have you seen Coleman’s heart in the acrylic? It’s quite gross.”

Giles smiled at Julie. Coleman didn’t like it. Julie smiled at Giles. Coleman didn’t like it one bit. The thought of all those expensive flowers weighed on Colman and sapped all the bravado he had recently acquired through the martinis. He kept thinking that he could have spent that money on a really nice collection of books. 

The thing in his chest thumped again, followed by a faint slithering sound.

“Did you hear that?” Coleman said.

“Hear what?” Julie said.

Coleman took a breath. “Nothing,” he said. It was the stress of the day. The thought of all his savings now gone, and everyone staring at him all the time. He rubbed his temples and wondered if there was somewhere he could lie down.

“You don’t look so good,” Giles said.

“I feel great,” Colman said. “Best day of my life.”

Giles shrugged.

“Really. I’m so happy.” He thought maybe it was the alcohol that made his voice waver.

Julie put a hand on Colman’s shoulder. “Of course you are, Colman. Congratulations.”

I give you my life, my love, my heart. That’s what he had been supposed to say.

“There! Did you see that?” Coleman said.

He stood with his shirt unbuttoned, holding open the flaps so Sandra could see.

The skin of his chest bulged out faintly, like a fast-growing blister, and then just as quickly smoothed out again. 

“See what? Coleman, you aren’t listening to me.”

“I’m listening to you.” Maybe he was imagining it. Sandra didn’t see it, after all. “You said you can’t stand living in the city.”

“It’s killing me,” she said. “The endless rain. This apartment is so crowded. All those stupid books.”

She lay on the couch with her arm draped over her eyes.

“We can’t afford a house here,” he said. “And what about my bookstore?”

“What bookstore?” she said. “We could afford a house in the suburbs.”

Maybe it was just the idea of something alive in there that gave him chills. The sensation of something crawling around in his chest.

“I’m miserable here,” she said. “Don’t you care about that?”

“Of course I care,” he said.

“Don’t you love me?” she said.

“Of course I love you.”

He loved his little apartment; the proximity to bookstores and cafes, the ceaseless pattern of traffic alternately stopping and then pulsing forward like blood through veins. He loved the sound of the rain. And he would be so far from Julie.

“When do you want to move?” he said.

She finally lifted her arm, smiled. “I’ll call an agent right now.”

The tip of the thing poked out his nose, made a small circular motion, and then began to lengthen, sliding smoothly out, long and thin and dexterous.

Coleman wanted to scream but found he was completely frozen.

“Coleman?” Sandra’s voice came from the kitchen. “Have you seen my keys?”

The thin tentacle patted the dining room table, poked under a pile of newspapers. Coleman breathed shallowly through his mouth. He hoped he would faint. Or wake up. This couldn’t be happening.

The tentacle rooted under the newspapers, came out holding the ring of keys like an elephant trick at a circus. It rattled the keys in front of Coleman’s face. He opened his hand, and the keys dropped into his palm. The tentacle slid smoothly back inside his nose.

Sandra appeared in the doorway.

“There they are!” She scooped the keys from Coleman’s outstretched hand. “Everything is so hard to find. We really need to unpack.”

The garage door slammed. Coleman still stood with his hand outstretched, unable to move.

“It does appear to be moving around.” The doctor withdrew the probe from the small hole he had made in Coleman’s belly-button. The local anesthetic didn’t completely cover the sensation of a cold metal slipping around inside him.

“Is this normal?” Coleman asked.

“Well, I’ve read about cases like this, although I haven’t seen it personally. When you remove your real heart it leaves room for a different kind of creature to grow.”

“A creature?”

“We can schedule you for surgery next week,” he said.

Coleman tried to take deep breaths to calm himself. “Do you have any reading material on this phenomenon?”

“Sure. I’ll send you home with some literature. You can think about how you want to proceed.”

Sandra found him on the doorstep, duffel in hand.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“I hate this suburb,” he said. “All the houses look identical. It never rains here.”

“Are you leaving me?”

“I’m going to the hospital. And then I think I might go live in the city for a while.”

“The hospital?”

“I have a thing growing inside me where my heart used to be,” he said. “I’m going to have it surgically removed.”

She gave him a blank look. He handed her the literature.

“This is very strange,” she said finally.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “It says in here the creature can often be very helpful.”

“It’s disgusting,” Coleman said.

“And it says the insurance won’t cover it.”

“Sandra, I need to leave now to make my appointment.”

“Just come inside for a moment and let’s talk about it.”

“What’s to talk about?” he said. His hand on the duffel was sweating. “There’s a fucking creature inside of me!”

“Calm down, Coleman.” She glanced around to make sure no neighbors were out. “Really now.” She leaned in close. “Did you see the cost of the surgery? We can’t afford that.”

“I don’t care what it costs.”

“You’re being selfish. Are you going to take all our savings and spend it on yourself?”

“Well — ”

“You aren’t even thinking about how this might affect me. Remember what we agreed on about making our decisions together?”

He dropped the duffel. Sandra picked it up. “Come inside,” she said. “We’ll work this out.”

The tentacle slid out of Coleman’s ear and opened the door for Sandra.

“See?” she said. “It’s just trying to help.”

The creature was indeed very helpful. Tentacles protruded from Coleman’s nose and mouth and pushed the vacuum cleaner around, did the dishes, found the remote. They picked up his old acrylic heart and put it on the mantel. They protruded out of his pants to unpack boxes, to pick up his piles of dusty old book and drop them in the recycle bin.

 One night Sandra asked Coleman to make love to her, and he watched with a mixture of arousal and horror as the tentacle protruded from the tip of his penis and caressed her, brought her to climax. She made noises he hadn’t heard it quite a while. When it was done, he was still aroused, but he didn’t want to touch her. And anyway, she was already asleep.

The next morning he woke up to the smell of coffee and bacon. Sandra hung up the phone when he entered the kitchen, her eyes bright.

“Giles broke up with Julie.” She shrugged. “About time. I never understood what he saw in her anyway.”

She draped an arm over his shoulders, whispered in his ear. “But we’re so happy, aren’t we?”

“Hmmm,” Coleman said. He opened the paper.

A tentacle emerged from his ear and caressed her cheek. She giggled. He shuddered. Coleman tried not to think about the slithering sensation as he sipped his coffee.

Coleman drank four martinis and then thought about making dinner for Sandra. When the tentacle emerged from his left nostril, weaving back and forth, trying to open the refrigerator door, he grasped it with both hands.

He tugged. It resisted. He pulled and pulled and it stretched out long and thin. It hurt like nothing he had ever felt before as an amorphous sack squeezed out through his nose and plopped onto the kitchen table. It reformed into a translucent blob, pathetic and quivering. Coleman retched. He didn’t feel drunk anymore.

He reached for the phone.

Julie picked up on the third ring.

“It’s me,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I’m an empty old man,” he said. “I’m going to die.”

“You’re not old,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“I love you.”

She was silent a moment. “Why don’t you come over?”

He grabbed his acrylic heart from the mantel and hauled his caved-in body to the car. He managed it somehow, using his own hands and feet on the wheel and pedals, surprised that he still knew how, that he had the strength.

He tried to imagine what would Sandra do when she got home and found the creature quivering on the kitchen table. Maybe she would let it go free. Maybe she would lay down her head and mourn its death. He decided he didn’t care.

Julie met him outside her apartment, squinting through the rain at him. 

The rain dripped down his nose, under his collar.

“Look at me,” Coleman said. “There’s nothing left but a hollow body. I don’t want to live anymore.”

She put a hand on his arm. “What about your bookstore?” she said.

“It’s an unrealistic dream,” he said.

“Is that what Sandra told you?”

He lowered his head.

“I don’t think it is unrealistic,” she said.

He felt the edges of his inside wound tighten just a little, start to pull together. Maybe it would fill in. Maybe the creature had not taken all of him. He stood up a little straighter.

“You broke up with Giles,” he said.

“He was a jerk.”

“I could have told you that.”

The rain pattered lightly on the leaves of the jasmine bush near the walk.

“I’ve missed the rain,” he said.

“I’ve missed the old Coleman,” she said. “That crazy guy who bought dusty old books and piled them all over his apartment.”

“Did I really do that?” he said.

He felt tears on his cheeks. He thought about saving and saving until he could afford the first few months rent on a store, about finding those books he had treasured so much as a child. Maybe Julie would want to help him with the bookstore. It suddenly didn’t seem so unrealistic anymore.

She took the acrylic heart from under his arm. “I wish you could put it back in,” she said.

He smiled at Julie, at the rain, at the city. “It will grow back,” he said. And he knew it was true.

About the Author

Corie Ralston has had an eventful year. She bought a house, got married just before Prop 8 passed, and sold a story to Clarkesworld! In the next few months she plans to relax by running a marathon. She generally works too much and daydreams too little, and she always wishes she had more time. She has been spotted in the pages of Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the She’s Such a Geek anthology.

“The Story Is All: Ten Fiction Editors Talk Shop”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

First and foremost, magazine fiction editors are readers who love stories so much that they’ve made a career out of reading them. They have a not-so-simple job: select, prepare, and present the best stories they can to a specific audience.

Below, ten of the top speculative fiction magazine editors talk about what they do and how they do it. Each of the editors works for a different speculative fiction magazine — print or online (or both), new or long-running (or revived after a hiatus). They seek fantasy, science fiction, or horror stories… or some innovative combination thereof.

Ultimately, fiction editors are the people who mine the slush pile for new voices and who push established writers to grow beyond their previous stories. They read story after story, and more pile up each day. They screen, sort, revise, and reject. They seek the new, the fresh, the familiar, the entertaining, and the weird. They discover and they miss out.

“There is no magic formula,” said Gordon Van Gelder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And this holds true for writing stories, submitting stories, and editing stories.

For, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor.com said, “It’s not about writers and editors; it’s about stories and readers.”

The Editors, Their Magazines & Their Editorial Philosophies

Patrick Nielsen Hayden edits books for Tor Books and short fiction for Tor.com. “I’m not sure I have an organizing ‘philosophy,’ or that I would trust one even if one occurred to me,” said Nielsen Hayden. “I do have a belief, which is that I’m working for the reader. I work with authors, and publishers pay me, but my real boss is the person who’s just looking for something interesting to read.” For more information about him visit his webpage.

Shawna McCarthy is an editor, anthologist, and literary agent. “I believe that genre fiction should be held to a standard every bit as high as mainstream fiction,” said McCarthy, who has been the editor at Realms of Fantasy since the first issue in 1994.

John O’Neill is the publisher and editor of Black Gate magazine. ”I think a magazine becomes successful by finding new, emerging authors and providing them with a stage, helping them launch their careers in your pages, and enjoying the fruits of their success along the way,” said O’Neill.

Cat Rambo is a fiction writer and the co-editor of Fantasy Magazine. “My editorial philosophy is to try to create a magazine that the readers can enjoy and identify with,” she said. Learn more about Rambo at her webpage.

Mike Resnick co-edits Jim Baen’s Universe. He is also a prolific fiction and non-fiction writer. As an editor, he said, “I try to remember that not all readers share my taste, and to select the best stories, regardless of subject matter or approach.” Learn more about Resnick at his webpage.

Stanley Schmidt is a fiction and non-fiction writer, as well as an editor at Analog Science Fiction and Fact. “My editorial goal,” Schmidt said, “is to produce that science fiction magazine I would most like to read if I had to pay for my subscription and could only afford one.” Learn more about him here.

Jason Sizemore is a fiction writer and the founding editor of Apex Magazine. “I’m a hands-on editor who is a stickler for getting the story just so,” said Sizemore. Learn more about Sizemore at his webpage.

Gordon Van Gelder is editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “I subscribe to Maxwell Perkins’s theory that an editor’s hand should be invisible,” said Van Gelder. “I publish works that I think readers will find entertaining, and I do my best to publish them responsibly.

Sheila Williams is the editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction. “I’m excited by a lot of young and up-and-coming authors,” said Williams. “I’m always thrilled when I find the second story that I love by a new author because that shows me that the author may be a new force to be reckoned with.”

Ann VanderMeer is an anthologist and fiction editor at Weird Tales. “I see myself somewhat as a cheerleader for great fiction. My philosophy is to bring the widest possible audience to fiction that I love. The story is all — a big name or previous credits are not important to me, only the story.”

The Questions & Answers

What do you look for in a short story?

VanderMeer: I look for originality, uniqueness and the weird. I especially love work that makes me look at fiction in a new light.  I love to be surprised (not grossed out, please) and completely drawn into a story.  If I start to read a story and do not want to stop, that’s a very good sign. When I do stop reading, if that story stays with me for the next few days, that’s another good sign.

McCarthy: I’ve been doing this for so long now that what I really look for is something I haven’t seen before, which is very difficult to do, but it does happen!

O’Neill: First and foremost, I’m looking for a rousing work of fantasy — an opening that grabs attention, a middle that heightens expectations, and finally a satisfying climax that delivers.

Beyond that, I’m looking for the same things that every other editor is: freshness of voice, originality in setting and character, and a certain skill in creating and building narrative tension.

Resnick: The first thing a story has to do is appeal to me on an emotional level: it has to make me love or hate or fear or laugh — in other words, to make me feel. If it also makes me think, so much the better… but if it doesn’t make me feel, then the author has simply written a thinly-disguised polemic or a fictionalized high-tech crossword puzzle.

Rambo: I look for the stories that come back the next day and make me think about them some more.

Schmidt: Ideally, I would like a story so engagingly written that I forget I’m reading it, with a provocative idea I’d never thought of before so deeply integrated into it that it couldn’t be removed without making the whole story collapse.

Sizemore: Being a web-based magazine, the opening sentence [or] paragraph becomes the most important aspect of your story. Readers on the web are fickle and know that with one simple click they can move on to other things. Compare that to where you shell out a fiver for a magazine of stories, you’re more likely to stick with it since you’ve got something on the line, so to speak.

Van Gelder: Ideally, I look for a story that grabs me with the first line, draws me in, comes alive, and makes me forget everything around me until it all wraps up with a satisfying conclusion.

I also look for my baseball team’s pitchers to throw a perfect game every time out, but since these things don’t happen every day, here are some of the other things I look for in a short story:

Story (too many submissions I receive nowadays are fragments or plotless mood pieces.)

A strong narrative voice and good prose

Compelling characters

An interesting setting

A solid storyline that leads to a conclusion that the story earns (as opposed to one that is tacked on) 

Freshness

[Freshness] is often the hardest, as I see lots of stories that are skillfully rendered but in the end, they leave me feeling like I’ve read them before (or like they’re too similar to something I’ve read).

Williams: I enjoy experimental stories and adventure stories that entertain me. Even a story that breaks a reader’s heart should be entertaining. I love big ideas, but I also need well-drawn characters. I love screwball comedies and stories that fill me with dread — though I rarely enjoy straight out horror fiction.

Nielsen Hayden: The glib (and yet true) answer is that I’m looking for the thing I didn’t know I was looking for. The first SF story I ever bought out of a slushpile was Maureen McHugh’s novel China Mountain Zhang. But if you’d asked me that morning what I was looking for, I probably wouldn’t have said “a picaresque, somewhat unstructured novel of a gay American-born Chinese man in a China-dominated future, filled out with substantial interludes in which the main character is neither present nor particularly relevant.”

I do have a couple of observable biases. I’m very interested in stories that tell me something I didn’t know about how the world works. And I’m actively interested in SF — specifically SF — that speaks to the kind of emotional and psychological issues that are of interest to smart readers in their teens. This is not the same thing as “YA SF,” although it includes a lot of YA SF.

What does “fit” mean for your magazine?

Resnick: Not a thing. Eric Flint and I co-edit Jim Baen’s Universe, and we both have to agree on a story before we’ll buy it. In close to three years we’ve disagreed once, and let the managing editor decide. There is no kind of fiction that can’t fit our magazine if it’s well done.

VanderMeer: “Fit?” It’s gotta be weird, not the usual story you could see somewhere else. The kind of story when you see it you say, “That’s a Weird Tales Story.”

McCarthy: That’s just rejection slip speak. When a rejection slip says your story wasn’t a good fit for the magazine, it just means that for whatever reason, we didn’t like it. I think it means the same thing for any magazine — a story that’s a good fit is one we like and would be happy to publish.

O’Neill: A story that fits is one that has a beginning, middle, and an ending. At Black Gate, we’re not trying to be more “cutting edge” than everyone else, or looking to explore new frontiers of splatter-horror. We like adventure fantasy, especially classic adventure serials, and that’s what our readers are clamoring for.

I once got an angry letter from a reader asking why I didn’t publish more medieval fantasy, with castles, princesses and dragons and the like. I thought it was a bit ridiculous at first. Isn’t everyone as tired of that as I am? How many dragon — slaying stories do we need? But now I think I understand what she meant. Like most editors I respond best to genuine innovation in fiction — the original, truly well-crafted setting, the character with a fresh voice — but there’s a very real hunger for the familiar among readers, especially the trappings of the fantasy of our youth. I think we ignore that at our peril.

Rambo: “Fit” is such a nebulous word, and yet we all seem to use it, it seems. For me, a story that fits is one that has a fantasy element that matters to the story, and is more than a prop. While I like poetic and/or complicated language, too much of it can drag a story down and I want a story where the reader can float through the words, emerging changed from that immersion. I want the stories that stick with a reader, that they can worry over in their head like one of those simple puzzles that manages to be infinitely complex, infinitely challenging.

I like stories that tease at the edges of human experience, that talk about love and sorrow and what it means to be a changing being in an endlessly shifting world. I look for stories that aren’t mainstream, which don’t reflect the consumer-culture cookie cutter images that have been created by corporate-owned media. If I’m succeeding in that a small portion of the time, I’m feeling that I’m doing well.

Schmidt: I’m a matchmaker: I try to get writers who like to tell certain kinds of stories (a much broader range of them than people often assume, by the way) together with readers who like to read those kinds of stories. I’m not looking for stories that are more about rivets than people; I’m looking for stories in which both science and fiction are essential, entertaining, and as well thought out as the writer can make them. And the science doesn’t have to be limited to careful extrapolation of what we already think we know. There’s certainly a place for that, but it’s no less important to explore how we humans might respond to the big surprises the future is sure to throw at us.

There’s a more practical side to “fit,” too, of course. Every issue needs a mix of lengths, subject matter, tone, and so on. So if next month I’m up to my ears in humorous novellas, I won’t be buying many more of those for a while. And the physical make-up of the magazine imposes requirements, too. Novellas between 20,000 and 40,000 words have always been hard for us to accommodate, and it’s even harder with our latest format change — so if you try to sell me a story that size, I’m going to have to really like it, and I still may not be able to find a place for it. So if you can tell it in less than 20,000 words, you probably should.

Sizemore: When we pass on a story and say it is not a good fit, that means that it falls into one of two categories of rejection: not really the type of story Apex publishes or the story is too similar to something else we’re publishing soon or publishing recently in the past.

A good “fit” for Apex are stories that show the reader the dangers of technology to the human condition. It also includes darker themes such as oppressive alien races, dangerous astronomical situations, and other familiar science fiction tropes.

Van Gelder: What’s a good fit for F&SF? I like to think I know it when I see it.

In the header notes of our Oct/Nov 2008 issue, there are some comments about how we can publish a Twilight Zone-ish story next to a Playboy-esque story and also have a story in the same issue that would have been at home in any SF magazine of the 1950s. But all of them felt right for F&SF.

Williams: At Asimov’s, I strive for balance, keeping in mind that the readers and I both prefer science fiction. I do publish some fantasy, although usually not more than one or two (in a double issue) a month. Often one weird and hard to classify story will appear in an issue as well. I don’t adhere strictly to my own rules, though. If I love a fantasy story, I’ll probably buy it.

Nielsen Hayden: As used in rejection notes, it’s basically a weasel word. We use it as a way of closing the door politely and firmly on a submission, and not getting snookered into a back-and-forth about what it would take to make something we don’t like into something we’d buy.

What are some reasons why you’d reject a good story?

VanderMeer: If the story doesn’t fit (see above - there are all kinds of great stories that are traditional, non-weird stories). If the story is too long (sometimes I have space limitations). If the story is too similar to another one I’ve got or just doesn’t work with other stories I am publishing.

McCarthy: A good story, to me, is one that has an interesting setting, and unusual or unfamiliar mythos, an interesting protagonist, and has something to say beyond the surface action of the plot. I see tons of good stories a year but can only publish around 40 of them. So that’s one reason. Another is a good story that has all the right elements but just doesn’t come to life for me.

O’Neill: I’ve rejected some fabulous stories. We published a great piece by Ellen Klages in BG 3, but I turned down the chance to publish the short story that eventually grew into The Green Glass Sea — her fantastic novel that just won the Scott O’Dell Award, and has been nominated for many more. It was a terrific piece, but it wasn’t really fantasy.

I’ve also had to pass on very solid stories that were too adult for our target market (we’ve advertised Black Gate as family-friendly, which means it needs to be suitable for ages 12 and up).

I’ve also returned very solid stories simply because I thought they could be better — and should be better.

Rambo: Too long, not fantasy, too unimaginative. A good story is one worth returning to more than once, either mentally or on the page.

Schmidt: I’ve just given one: It’s a size that I can’t use. Other reasons may be that it’s a good story, but it’s fantasy or mainstream rather than science fiction; or that it’s too similar in theme or flavor to something I already have in the works. That last, by the way, does not necessarily mean you can’t go ahead and sell it elsewhere. It may be too similar for me to want both in my magazine anywhere close to the same time, but different enough that the world will welcome it somewhere else. 

Resnick: The only reason I’d reject a good story would be that I was running something too similar to it — and then I’d probably buy it and hold it for a few issues. A good story is any well-written, well-characterized story that elicits an emotional reaction; everything else is gravy.

Sizemore: Just about every time, I will read a “good” story to completion, even if I know within the first page or two I won’t be buying it.

Why won’t I be buying it? This generally falls into the “not a good fit” category. Jennifer Pelland sent me one of the best short stories I’ve ever read (titled “Ghosts of New York”) but it wasn’t an “Apex story.” It’s heartbreaking passing on work such as that, but you have to stay true to your readers.

Van Gelder: Here are three common reasons:

Story is executed well, but the science fictional or fantastic element is too familiar or uninteresting.

Story is of a sort or in a genre that I already have too much of in inventory.

Story isn’t actually SF or fantasy.

Williams: I may have a story in inventory or recently published that is in some way similar to the story on hand. Not right for Asimov’s — the fantasy is too high or the horror is too integral a part of the story to work for Asimov’s. Story just isn’t right for me, though it could very well be perfect for the next editor.

Nielsen Hayden: Unlike some of the magazine editors here, I’m not currently buying short fiction for a magazine with an established tone or approach. The original stories that appear on Tor.com — a new one roughly every two or three weeks — have been all over the map; we’re still feeling our way into this kind of publishing. I’m sure I’ve turned down good stories; every editor does. Nobody’s sensibility encompasses everything that’s good. And I’ve certainly turned down novels that I thought were very good indeed, because I thought my house wouldn’t be very good at publishing them.

The point is that editors aren’t in the business of adjudicating what’s good; we’re in the business of acquiring and publishing material through particular channels and organizations, mustering the opportunities that actually exist. Of course, every so often in every editor’s career you get something that seems unsuitable for the magazine, or web site, or anthology, or publishing house that you’re editing for, but it’s so outrageously good that you wind up running around with your hair on fire demanding that reality change so that this thing can get published. Sometimes this even works.

How has the magazine business (especially as it pertains to fiction) changed since you started out?

VanderMeer: One of the main changes is the delivery system and how we communicate with each other. Technology has motivated us to change the way we do business. Right now it is more difficult to sustain a hard-copy magazine as the audience is getting more and more of their reading done online or on other virtual devices. Online magazines are getting more sophisticated and garnering more and more readers.

As to communication, most everyone is “plugged in.” We send emails, text messages, update our Facebook status and/or Twitter to stay in touch.  And because of this the expectation for an instant response is very high.  Technology makes our world smaller and allows us to connect more quickly — this is the positive side. And we can reach a much wider audience than before.  Technology also levels the playing field as we all have access to the tools.

But on the downside, we’ve become so fragmented. And we seem to have no patience. Many short fiction venues out there are looking for shorter and shorter pieces, perhaps for space considerations, but I also think for the shorter attention spans of the current readership. And that’s a shame.

Rambo: I’m very much a newcomer. I became fiction editor in late 2007, and before then was a reader. I have always been a bit of a web-head, and so I’m very comfortable with the electronic format.

McCarthy: Gosh, where do I begin with this one? When I started out, magazines made money, were sold on newsstands everywhere and were printed on offset presses after having been typeset by hand!

As far as the fiction goes, I’d like to say that the level of the fiction has gone up over the years, but what’s really changed is the society we live in and peoples’ tastes along with it.

When I started out, the personal computer was a science fictional idea — you knew you were in the future when the protagonist entered his house and said, “Computer, lights on!”

The first Star Wars movie had just come out and rollicking science fiction adventure stories were very popular. When was the last time you read one of those? It doesn’t mean they’re not good anymore, just the times have changed and tastes with them. I’d like to think that everything I published 25 years ago would still stand up today and that the stories I publish today would be just as effective had they appeared long ago.

O’Neill:   Funny you should ask. When I started out in 1995 my day job was at the Internet company Spyglass. We sold our new browser to Microsoft, and they renamed it Internet Explorer. I was pretty convinced the future of the genre was on the Internet, and I started a Web magazine called SF Site and ran that until 1999, waiting for the first wave of readers and revenue.

I may be the only editor to have run an Internet genre magazine, only to give up and switch to print. I’ve watched the current wave of publishers migrating the other direction over the last decade with some fascination. Print has proven much more successful for me than the Internet did — at least in terms of reliable revenue, anyway. Maybe all these publishers headed in the other direction will find the right formula and prove me wrong, but I don’t think it’s happened yet.

How has the magazine business changed? I’ve watched a lot of publishers chasing the dream of revenue on the Internet, without much success yet. There’s still a very real demand for print fantasy, and print fantasy magazines aren’t dead yet.

Resnick: When I was a kid, there were (honest!) 52 science fiction magazines. When I broke in, there were still perhaps a dozen. Today there are 3 (until Realms of Fantasy is resurrected), and all three have circulations that have been on a straight downhill trajectory for well over a decade. I’d be surprised if any of them are around in eight years.

On the other hand, there are currently 17 science fiction magazines paying what SFWA considers pro rates, and 14 of them are electronic, so I don’t think the short story is in as much trouble as it appeared to be a decade ago.

Williams: The fiction hasn’t changed, but there are more ways to deliver it. In addition to print subscriptions and newsstand sales, Asimov’s can now be purchased on Fictionwise and for the Kindle.

Schmidt: This question is much too big for a short answer, but the most obvious changes are the decrease in print circulation and the increase in both electronic publication and electronic connection with the audience. Some older readers have complained that our letter column isn’t as big as it used to be and mistaken that for a decline in reader interest, but what’s really happened is that most of the discussion that used to take place in “Brass Tacks” has moved onto our online forum — and there’s far more there than the magazine’s letter column ever had room for. 

Electronics has also had a big effect on how writers and publishers work. So many writers now take computers for granted that publishers do, too. We now assume we’ll be able to typeset from an electronic manuscript provided by the author, so the author has to be able to provide one — so a computer is now as necessary to a writer as a typewriter was when I started out. We still need hard copy for the initial reading, though; we have no use for an electronic file until we decide to buy a story, and we certainly don’t open e-mail attachments from people we don’t know.

Sizemore: I started in 2005, so my tenure has been short. Unfortunately, it appears that short fiction keeps being marginalized in terms of the magazine market. For the past few years, we’ve seen more and more print markets go online, generally becoming just a small part of a grander site. And the last year or two, many of the best stories have appeared in anthologies and collections. I would expect both these trends to continue as the print magazine market thins out further.

Van Gelder: I started working at St. Martin’s Press (in book publishing) in July of ‘88. Within three months, Tappan King offered me a job as an assistant at Twilight Zone magazine. “I can’t claim that we’re in great shape,” he told me, “But I can promise you that we’ll be around for at least a year.” I was sorely tempted to take the job, but I decided to give book publishing a year. And as it happened, they pulled the plug on TZ in January of ‘89, in spite of whatever Tappan had been told. In that sense, nothing much has changed. The magazine business has always been pretty precarious.

But what has changed since I started working at F&SF in Jan. of ‘97?  Here are a few things:

In 1997, we had one old guy in a back room who wrote the contents of each issue. Moe. Nowadays, we have two people doing the work. Moe writes just as much, but he seems to like having someone around to keep him company.

In 1997, most of the people who told me what we need to do to “save the magazines” talked about the contents. (Several people told me we should run more tie-in fiction, and others suggested that we should serialize Robert Jordan novels.) Nowadays, almost all of the people who tell me what we need to do to “save the magazines” discuss format, medium, and marketing.

The USPS has undergone a lot of changes, most of which are detrimental to small magazines.

The internet has risen and prospered since 1997. (I think F&SF launched its Website in 1998.) And the internet has lots of wonderful features and it has made some great changes. It has also made some lousy changes and it has some aspects I don’t like. One of those aspects is that I’ve found it’s not a good venue for discussions about itself, and since this interview is going to appear in an online magazine, I’m going to skip making general comments about how the internet has changed the magazine business.

Nielsen Hayden: I think the biggest change in SF’s overall readership is that it’s become much less dominated by hardcore SF buffs whose reading consists largely of SF. Compared to a generation ago, a lot more of our readers are just plain middlebrow readers — people who read a little SF along with a little of a lot of other things, and who don’t necessarily regard the SF as alien to the rest of literature, or below the salt, or any of that stuff.

[Today's readers] are probably not connected to the SF social scene, they don’t assess their SF and fantasy reading against a huge backdrop of inside-baseball industry lore, they may not have read all of the classics, but they’re pretty good at making sense of fairly sophisticated SF storytelling because, guess what, in 2009, hundreds of millions of people are good at making sense of sophisticated SF storytelling. The problem for SF writers and publishers today isn’t that there’s not a mass audience for high-end SF storytelling; it’s that there are immense numbers of other diversions on offer for those hundreds of millions of people.

Lastly, any advice for someone submitting fiction?

Resnick: Yes, and this is not just for our magazine: Read the magazine before you submit. You’d be surprised how many don’t. I am sure Stan Schmidt gets his share of fantasy stories, and fantasy magazines get some nuts and-bolts hard science stories.

VanderMeer: Please, be polite when submitting your fiction. Remove that chip on your shoulder. Editors are people, too. And keep in mind that just because we may not take your story doesn’t mean there is something wrong with it. Please don’t ask us to tell you “why” we didn’t take a story after we’ve responded. By the time we get your query, we’ve probably read another 100 stories. Keep writing, keep submitting and again, be polite. Thanks!

McCarthy: Don’t include money, candy, condoms, underwear, stamps, four leaf clovers, photos of yourself, photos of your cat or photos of your kids. We have gotten all of these at one time or another. Send it to the right address. Enclose an SASE. Neatness counts. So does spelling. Don’t copy someone else’s work. Sit up straight. Cover your mouth when you cough. Look both ways when you cross the street.

O’Neill: Probably the best piece of advice I can give an aspiring writer is to pay as much attention to your setting as to your plot, characters, and prose.

When I’m reading an unsolicited manuscript, I’m reading to reject. I need to be done with your piece as quickly as I can, because there’re 20 more in that stack, and my wife is going to bed in 30 minutes, without me if necessary. So you’ve got a few precious minutes to grab my attention, and you better use them.

It’s hard do with plot. If your plot is simple enough to communicate in the first two pages, I’ve probably seen it a hundred times. It’s hard to do with character, for similar reasons.

It’s easy to do with setting. Two pages is more than enough space to paint a picture of your world that grabs my attention, if it’s fresh and intriguing. You can’t compete with my wife when all you have to offer is yet another version of the tale of King Arthur, or a generic medieval setting, or a tavern filled with rangers, dwarves, and a half-orc with a dungeon map.

Of course, if Alice puts on that sheer nightgown before going to bed, God help you.

Rambo: Take the time to look over the magazine and get a feel for what we’re publishing. You can see the online works here. The same holds true of any publication you’re submitting to. If you can read samples online, I don’t really think there’s any excuse for not at least glancing over what they publish.

Schmidt: Read the magazines you’re interested in submitting to, to get a “feel” for how the editors’ tastes run; but don’t try to imitate the stories you find there. That’s what they were buying last year; they’re looking for something new now. The story I most want to buy is one that I didn’t even suspect I was interested in until I saw it, and then it won’t let me go.

Sizemore: When it comes to the basics, we expect the author to have those down. The Apex editors are quick to dismiss stories that might be interesting but lack rudimentary stuff like correct grammar and punctuation. Follow the writer’s guidelines. Don’t get yourself rejected without at least getting your foot in the door. Make sure your story has a good opening hook. Avoid passive voice like the plague.

Van Gelder: There is no magic formula. All the age-old advice has been around for an eternity because it’s still good advice: Write the best stories you can, submit them (I’m amazed at how many people fail to submit their stories), don’t take rejections personally, resubmit stories, persevere.

Williams: Read widely, both in SF and elsewhere. Spend time on a story. It’s often a good idea to populate stories, rather than just write about one character. Keep learning about and perfecting your art.

Nielsen Hayden: Read something other than SF. Do something with your life other than struggling to sell SF stories. Sheila Williams, above, rightly recommends that you populate your stories. I’d say you should populate your life. Do some stuff that not all the other striving writers have done. Go out into the world and discover interesting things about how it works. Report back.

Or, alternately, live in a closet and eat cactus. Emily Dickinson barely ever left her room. It really doesn’t matter how you do it. It’s not about writers and editors, it’s about stories and readers.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Who Were the Celts?”
by Dr Kari Maund

‘Celt’ is a powerful word these days. It evokes images of woad-painted warriors battling the forces of colonisation and oppression, of strong-minded queens leading charges from chariots, of druids steeped in natural and spiritual law, of self-empowered women and bold venturesome men, of mists and bards, harpists and warbands and ancient pagan mysteries. In the popular imagination, the Celts stretched across Iron-Age and Roman Europe, from Spain to the Shetlands, a distinctive people characterised by religion, artifacts, law, social behaviour and language, enduring from the Iron Age to the sixteenth century and beyond. It is an alluring, fascinating picture, long-mined by writers of fantasy seeking a society which can reflect modern concerns with equality, ecology and freedom of religious expression. According to this view, the Celts first appeared between c.800 and c.600 B.C. on the fringes of the Greek world, living in Spain and in the lands just north of the Alps. From here, they spread slowly north and west during the fifth century B.C., becoming the direct ancestors of the people encountered by the Romans in Gaul, Spain and the British Isles.

And yet this picture is one which archaeologists, historians and linguists increasingly question. The ways in which we approach the past, the ways in which we analyse and interpret our source materials, have changed radically over the last thirty years in the face of new scientific methods and new approaches to the creation and transmission of myths, ancient and modern. The image of a vast Celtic monoculture is giving way to one of a dynamic, changeable, network of cultures: not ‘the Celts’, but the Celtic-speaking peoples, each with their own distinctive ideas and practices, their own names for themselves, and viewing each other as neighbour or enemies but not as fellow members of one vast people.

The traditional account of the Celts begins with an expansion of people out from their territory to the north of the Alps into central and eastern France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. This expansion was characterised by a range of cultural artifacts, art and grave types (particularly ‘warrior’ graves) known as the ‘La Tène’ culture. The presence of La Tène artifacts was taken as indicating the presence of invading or colonising Celts at that location. Roman and Greek writers spoke of migrations of peoples from these Celtic areas into other parts of Europe — wider France, the Balkans, Turkey, Spain, Britain and Ireland and archaeological finds seemed to back this up. This combination of archaeology and the writings of Classical observers gave rise to the image of a culture typified by particular art styles, ruled by a war-like aristocracy, with priests and priestesses (sometimes called druids) who operated a religion with a strong emphasis on the natural world — woods and pools and springs. This society valued poetry and music, had a powerful tradition of oral scholarship and tended to live in fortified places (hill-forts, crannogs, strongly built settlements). These are the Celts whose image we find today reflected in film — King Arthur (2004), and in novels, from Rosemary Sutcliff to Marion Zimmer Bradley and beyond.

During the period 300 B.C. — 1st century A.D., the continental Celts were gradually colonised and subjugated by the Roman empire which destroyed much of their way of life, and, after the fall of Rome, France and much of Spain was further overrun by Germanic peoples — the Franks and the Goths. Rome invaded the British Isles in the last century B.C., damaging and destroying the Celtic culture of southern, central and eastern Britain and influencing and threatening that of the rest of the island. Only Ireland remained untouched by Rome. During the sixth century and later, new waves of invasions by Germanic barbarians pushed the British Celts into the west — what would become Wales and Cornwall — and the north — the future Scotland. Further invasions eroded their territories — the vikings, in the eighth through tenth centuries, and, from the last years of the eleventh century, the Normans. Slowly, the Celtic territories were overrun and colonised, but the core of their culture remained.

Our vision of the early Celts has been filled in from references to them in the records left by the conquerors and invaders: the use of war chariots, the collecting of the heads of enemies as trophies, a love of feasting and boasting and a society made up not only of warriors but of equally fierce and independent women. From around the fifth century A.D. the Celts began to produce written records and these too — in particular the prose tales, legends and law codes from Ireland — have been mined to flesh out the image of early Celtic society. Boudicca’s rebellion and the references in Irish saga tales to Queen Medb were drawn upon to back up fragmentary Roman references to fierce Celtic women. Irish law-codes and lives of Saints were used to flesh out the few Classical references to druids, bards and jurists (legal advisors). Folklore and poetry from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries has been drawn upon to support claims about Celtic religious beliefs, social behaviour and philosophies.

This process of defining and discovering the Celts as a people began not in Antiquity, but in the eighteenth century with two scholars: the Welshman Edward Lhuyd and the Breton Paul Yves-Pezron, who both embarked on a study of the languages of their respective ancestors. This was a period of great scholastic activity and curiosity about the past, freed from the shackles of Biblical and Classical narratives. Lhuyd and Pezron were both part of this movement. They were both also ardent nationalists in a period when the languages of their homelands were under great pressure from increasingly centralised and controlling national governments. Lhuyd and Pezron were thus very much concerned with upholding and strengthening their native traditions and culture. Lhuyd chose to label the languages he studied — Scots and Irish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh, which he saw as the original tongues of the British Isles — ‘Celtic’. His work laid the ground for much of our modern interpretation of the nature and interrelationships of the various Celtic languages. He did not, however, label the speakers of those languages ‘Celts’. This term was coined as a result of his work and by his circle. The first occurrences of the word ‘Celt’ used to describe these peoples occurs in the 1720s and by the early years of the nineteenth century, it was well-established as a common descriptor of Welsh and Irish, Scots and Bretons.

Following the coining of the label and the study of linguistic relationships, scholars began to look for further connections and similarities between the peoples now considered Celtic. Lhuyd himself laid out a pedigree of the Celts, tracing their common ancestry from Biblical forebears. Antiquaries and scholars embarked on studying and publishing manuscripts from Ireland and Wales, on collecting folk-tales and on re-establishing traditions. Much of this activity was careful and honourable, but not all of it. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in Wales, the nationalist and free-thinker Edward Williams — better known by his pseudonym Iolo Morgannwg — ‘discovered’ a large body of material, including the system of ancient bardic and druidic teaching which helped inspire the development of a politicised and rediscovered Welsh culture. Iolo was a revolutionary at heart, seeking to liberate and redefine Wales, and where he could not find a source he created one himself. His forgeries were recognised as such by the late nineteenth century, but they had already proved influential leading, amongst other things, to the foundation of the modern Eisteddfod. Similar enthusiasm for things Celtic infected the Scots. James MacPherson found a new corpus of supposedly ancient Scots Gaelic poetry — the Ossian poems — in the 1760s. Like Iolo’s manuscripts, these were meant to strengthen and glorify native traditions. Like Iolo’s manuscripts, they were forgeries. The work of scholars and antiquaries, both genuine and fraudulent, during the nineteenth century, built on Lhuyd’s foundations to create the pan-European view of culturally linked, timeless Celts. His language-based research has also underpinned the way archaeologists and historians used and interpreted their material for much of the twentieth century, and has passed into popular belief.

Modern scholars have issues with Lhuyd’s methods, and not just because of the forgeries of those who followed him. His need to find similarities — however small — between different Celtic peoples, leads to the ignoring of differences and a danger of distortion. It presupposes a conservative and stagnant model for ancient Celtic society. And it sometimes contradicts the testimony of the peoples it claims to describe.

How did the peoples we label ‘Celts’ describe themselves? For the early period — c. 800 B.C. — c. 400 A.D. — this question is probably unanswerable. The names we have for them come from the testimony of their invaders and conquerors, and while these may represent Latinisations of words in use by the people themselves, we cannot be sure of this. (They may also represent the labels used by neighbours of a people rather than the people themselves.)  What we can say, however, is that the Greek and Roman writers did not consider all these peoples as identical in behaviour, organisation and appearance. Rather, they talk of a series of different tribes living across Gaul and Britain — the Atrebates, the Belgae, the Iceni and many more. Though these had some similarities, they are presented also as having differences and, in particular, as having complex and changeable inter-relationships for trade, warfare, alliance and so on. Words like ‘Britons’ and ‘Gauls’ were used as collective nouns, meaning all the peoples of a geographic area without any assumption that these peoples were the same. This sense of distinctions between peoples is reinforced when we begin to have sources written by those peoples themselves. Both under Roman rule and in the century or so following its collapse Britain, Gaul and Ireland were home to many tribes, kinship groups and kingdoms, each with their own names and practices. These peoples possessed a sense of geographical similarity but this was a borrowed notion derived from Roman influence that cannot be shown to predate the Roman period. Sources for the immediate post-Roman period are few and those we have were written in a Romanised context, looking back to an ideal of a centralised authority controlled from outside (usually represented by the church), in a world now made up of fragmented tribal territories.

Early Welsh and Irish histories, prose tales and law codes do not speak about the ‘Welsh’ or the ‘Irish’. Rather, they present us with a society made up of overlapping kingdoms. In Wales, these are described in geographical terms — Dyfed, Gwynllwg, Meirionydd. In Ireland, the descriptors are kinship based, tribal — the Deisi, the Dal Cais, the Ui Maine, the Cenel Conaill. These were often unstable and politically dynamic, and although they recognised their similarities in language and behaviour to their immediate neighbours, they did not consider themselves to be the same. To this day, there are differences in language between different areas of Wales and Ireland. Welsh and Irish are not now, and were not in the Iron Age and early historic period, mutually comprehensible.

The Welsh of the early middle ages considered themselves related to the Bretons in Brittany — but not because of some memory of ancient ties, but because the Bretons were considered descendants of Welsh migrants in the 4th through 6th centuries. The Irish were considered invaders and enemies, rather than kinsmen and allies: during the 3rd through 6th centuries, Irish tribes colonised parts of south west and north Wales, intruding themselves into local kingships. Perhaps as a result of this, Welsh chroniclers viewed the Irish with suspicion: a king from Wales seeking allies was more likely to turn to Anglo-Saxon England, to viking colonies or even to France than to the Irish, who apparently had a reputation for treachery. Neither Welsh nor Irish seem to have conceived of themselves on any large scale as part of a ‘Celtic’ brotherhood before the rise of Lhuyd’s theories in the 18th century.

Modern interpretations of the Celtic speaking peoples aim to work with the differences expressed by early sources, rather than against them. Problems with the old approach have long been recognised, but new archaeological discoveries and techniques and re-examination of earlier finds and sites, new ideas about social development derived from comparative anthropological studies, and new understandings of languages and of the use of written sources are now allowing us to address some of these.

It is now recognised that so-called ‘primitive’ societies, such as those of the Bronze and Iron ages are far more adaptive and changeable than formerly thought. Far from remaining static, tales, pedigrees and origin stories change to reflect changes around their home society and what were once taken as timeless records are now recognised as highly volatile, altering to reflect current political status. Thus ancestors are re-named and even invented to account for changes in alliance patterns or overlordship. Far from enshrining ancient memory, most early Welsh and Irish records speak to the time of their composition. Tales about the wickedness of the Welsh ruler Vortigern in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum reflect the rise of his political enemies rather than a tradition about his character. References in Roman texts to strong-minded women have been reassessed to allow for bias — Roman authors often attributed socially unconventional or threatening behaviour to non-Roman cultures on the grounds of assumed barbarism rather than any direct evidence. The bulk of archaeological and written material we possess from the Celtic peoples themselves tend to show that women held very low, rather than equal status.

In archaeology evidence such as the spread of La Tène artistic styles was once taken to indicate invasion and conquest by a people who used them. However, new work on the artifacts themselves reveals considerable regional variations between them. This is not a monoculture, but a fashion in design, taken up and interpreted by varied peoples who trade with, learn from and imitate each other, adapting new ideas to their own ends. Such changes no more imply conquest than we should say that modern America has been conquered by manga-reading, Hello Kitty-worshipping Japanese. Settlement patterns and types have been re-analysed and again considerable variation in patterns of usage and practice has been revealed. The peoples who lived in these settlements — be they hill-forts or lowland farms — and used these artifacts may have spoken related languages, but it is no longer assumed that this means they were one people, either in their own eyes or those of their neighbours.

So: who were the Celts? The answer is not simple, and for much of Iron Age and early historical periods, we have to say that we may not be able to answer that question fully. When they emerge into the full light of written history what we see is many peoples, some speaking related languages, others not, possessing varied religious and social practices and viewing themselves as separate and distinct from their neighbours, allies and enemies.

Selected Bibliography  

Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: ancient people or modern invention (London 1999)

Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: their nature and legacy (Oxford 1991)

Philip Freeman, War, Women and Druids: eyewitness reports and early accounts of the ancient Celts (Austin, Texas, 2002)

Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth 1990)

Francis Pryor, Britain B.C. (New ed. London 2004)

Francis Pryor, Britain A.D. (London 2005)

Lisa M Bitel, Land of Women: tales of sex and gender from early Ireland (New York 1996)

About the Author

Dr Kari Maund was trained in the Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge and held research and teaching posts in early mediaeval British and Scandinavian history at the universities of Bangor, Cambridge, Leicester and Cardiff and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin. She is the author of six books and many articles on early Wales, England, Ireland and Denmark. As Kari Sperring, she is reviews editor of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association and her first novel, Living With Ghosts, appeared from DAW books in 2009 under the same name. She lives and works in Cambridge, England.

“Short Fiction: One Year Later”
by Neil Clarke

Last year, I wrote an editorial on the state of the short fiction market and given all that has happened in the last year, I thought this would be a good time to revisit the topic. It’s been an interesting year for genre fiction magazines and definitely worth talking about.

I’ve previously spoken about how the subscription and newsstand sales for the “big three” genre magazines had been in decline for several years. This year, that trend continued, though not as steeply. Postal increases continue to hammer at their bottom-lines and all three magazines made significant cost-saving changes this year. Analog and Asimov’s, which share the same publisher, changed their page size, reduced page count and cut about 4k worth of content. F&SF switched to a bi-monthly format and cut about 10% of its annual content. Neither increased the cost of a subscription, but you are receiving less for it.

The number four print magazine (one could reasonably argue number two using the above data), Realms of Fantasy was nearly lost. Their owner, Sovereign Media, shut them down without warning earlier this year. According to Sovereign, the magazine had been profitable. Fans rallied and Warren Lapine, best known as the man behind DNA Publications, stepped forward to purchase RoF. Warren has wisely retained most of the staff and seems to be taking the time to relaunch the magazine properly. A lot of people are watching this one from the sidelines and wondering if RoF will reclaim its place or suffer the same fate that befell Warren’s prior ventures into magazine publishing. I wish them all the best of luck.

Some magazines haven’t been as fortunate. Two casualties of note are Apex Magazine and Paradox Magazine. Apex, a print magazine that had moved online, has gone on indefinite hiatus, but hopes to return someday. Paradox came to an end with the recent publication of their 13th issue. According to their forum, they hope to continue their efforts through anthologies or perhaps a move to online format.

Not all the news of the last year has been bad. Tor.com finally launched after months of speculation and appears to be attracting the attention a project with the Tor name attached should be receiving. Tor.com has the hope of funding their site through advertising and they may just have the numbers to do it. Although they share the Tor name with Tor Books, they are quite vocal about being a separate business with no financial ties to the well-known book publisher. They certainly did benefit from the extensive pre-launch (and continued) giveaway of free Tor Book’s e-books and association with Tor Book’s staff. No doubt this relationship will continue to confuse people. Tor.com is more an online community than a magazine, but it is definitely a short fiction market. This closed (doesn’t take uninvited submissions from authors) market is reportedly paying 20 cents a word for fiction. That makes them one of the best paying markets for genre fiction at the moment.

Tor.com isn’t the only new kid of note. Other professional-paying (5 cents a word) markets that have caught my attention are Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest and Thaumatrope. BCS publisher, Scott Andrews, started publishing his brand of literary adventure fantasy last October. His online magazine was picked as a runner-up for the storySouth’s Million Writers Award for the Best New Online Magazine of 2008 and has been publishing on a bi-weekly schedule. Brain Harvest, the self-proclaimed almanac of bad-ass speculative fiction, is the product of three Clarion West 2008 graduates. BH publishes short online fiction between 100 and 750 words long and has an interest in spreading fiction via cellphone. Even shorter fiction can be found at Thaumatrope, perhaps the first genre twitter-based zine. The brain-child of Nathan Lilly (of SpaceWesterns.com), Thaumatrope is pushing the boundaries of what can be done in under 140 characters. Fiction so short, that no one can complain about the quality of the screen.

I continue to hold the opinion that the short fiction market is moving in a positive direction. We will no doubt continue to see losses in the years to come, but new players come into the picture each year and with them, innovative ideas that make the field stronger for their efforts. It does appear that the distribution issues of print magazines will make their continued existence difficult, but it’s not a problem restricted to genre magazines. Newspapers and other magazines are scrambling to figure out how to survive the combined blows of the increased costs and the digital revolution. Maybe they’ll find something of value among the varied efforts of the online publishers and maybe not. The only thing that is certain is change.

Update: June 17, 2009

In the two weeks since posting this editorial, Talebones and Lone Star Stories have announced that they have shut their doors. The Chicken Littles have once again started proclaiming the end of short fiction, so I did a little more research. A quick look through Ralan.com’s list of dead markets reveals that we have lost roughly 637 venues since 2000. 40 of these have at least occasionally (some very rarely) paid professional rates. If we focus solely on magazines paying professional rates, the number drops to 12. Of those 12, one only produced a single issue. Most of the others were established between 2000 and 2009. During that same time period, 11 magazines that pay professional rates were launched and still exist… and that only counts the markets open to submissions.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.