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OtherRealms Issue 23 Part 01
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.
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The number on your mailing label is the issue your OtherRealms
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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.
