Pretty good crits from the Fairwood crew last night for “Planet of the Amazon Women”. Only one objection to the misleading title, and only one reader (professing to be, or admitting to be) completely confused. Some folks felt misdirected by the early ambiguity, deceived; it’s not important enough to be worth alienating those readers, so I may tone it down a bit, make it look a little less deliberate. Got corrections on some of my Chinese. (Much appreciated; wouldn’t want to embarrass Wang Laoshi. This gimmick of mine of dropping cultures is trickier than Gibson’s gimmick of dropping brand names, I think.) Couple of motifs that either need to mean more or get dropped. Couple of good suggestions on how to bring back in some stuff that gets dropped mid-story. Comparisons to Stross and Miéville; thought that was pretty astute, those two being probably the strongest recent influences on my ideas of what’s possible in SF fabula, if not syuzhet.

And — I can’t say I’m surprised — they totally caught me on my failure to adequately figure out what the protagonist was trying to do, how it was supposed to be accomplished — and, for that matter (though no one actually said this), whether it succeeded or failed.

(In many respects this story is some sort of fantasy masquerading as some sort of science fiction. What I need to figure out is whether that’s what I want, and if it is, how convincing the masquerade has to be.)

All in all, a pretty good session. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with a story that’s less obviously flawed.