“And yet, it fails to inspire affection.”
12 o'clock, February 9, 2004
Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s post on slush (noted last week) has spawned considerable discussion, much of it interesting, some of it depressing. What’s depressing is the apparent imperviousness of a certain mindset to the Clue Stick. No matter how well or how often you say it, some people just seem to be incapable of understanding that getting published is not a game of chance.
But for the rest of us, here’s Teresa again:
The higher truth is that you can’t create a good book just by avoiding the errors of bad ones. . . . I think of novels as medium-size mammals. They’re complex creations: skeleton, specialized internal organs, muscle tissue, surface integumentation. It’s quite an achievement to build one at all. When you’re talking about a book I’d put in category 11, “Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us,” what the author can see is that this time he got the eyes in the right place, and remembered to give it a rectal opening, and that the overlapping attachments of the muscles to the bones are really quite artful: a nice piece of work. What we can see is that it neither moves nor breathes nor opens its eyes. Or maybe it manages that much; even gets up and wanders around. And yet, it fails to inspire affection.
(This crystallizes, by the way, my worst fear — and no insult to our many fine contributors is intended; I haven’t read your stories yet, so this isn’t about you, it’s about me — with regard to All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories: I no longer worry that too few stories will have mouths and ears and pelts and limbs, but I do still worry that too few stories will inspire affection, and that the resulting book will be an example not of the animal trainer’s art but of the taxidermist’s.)
(The first time I typed that last sentence, I substituted inspire rejection for inspire affection. Subconscious, there’s a call for you on Line Two . . . )
That's a really lovely way to describe the problem of the short-fiction editor, David, the fear of displaying taxidermy. We go through this every week at Strange Horizons, looking over the stories under consideration and trying to imagine which of them will be the stars. It's nerve-wracking. All of our "under consideration" options are perfectly adequate, but is that enough? And when you're reading twenty or thirty at a time, it's even harder to tell.