In November, Amazon opened a beta program for Kindle Direct Publishing authors called Virtual Voice. It may be the biggest upheaval to independent publishing since Amazon launched KDP over a decade ago.
Virtual Voice uses synthetic (i.e., computer) voice technology to produce audiobooks. On first blush, that sounds like a pretty crappy experience—who wants to listen to a robot narrate a book? Know that automated voice technology has advanced tremendously in recent years, to the point that people have trouble distinguishing between it and a human voice.
It’s tempting to go into my thought process over the pros and cons of synthetic voice audiobooks. At this moment, I’ll just say I find the possibility alluring.
I’ve done audio in the past. I recorded Everywhere Man at Fantasy Studios, a dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was quite expensive and exhausting. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to hire a voice actor to record Bridge Daughter. I was put off by the terms dictated by every actor who responded to my call for bids. Both experiences impressed on me the risks of producing my own audiobooks, risks of both cost and rights.
Synthetic voice audiobooks eliminate a lot of the question marks. If I’m reading the Amazon announcement correctly, a KDP author chooses a voice from a catalog of voices, previews a sample, and names a sale price. My guess is, the final audiobook will be ready in a few hours. Audiobooks created with synthetic voices are labeled as such on the Amazon market and may be previewed, so the buyer knows what they’re getting.
It sounds like a no-cost, risk-free offer for independent authors. I’m more than curious. Unless Amazon botches the roll-out—a possibility, they’ve botched things before—I predict we’re going to see a Cambrian explosion of audiobooks on the Amazon market soon enough.
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Honestly, I did not foresee this. The stories a year ago about an upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of William Gibson’s masterpiece seemed more than promising. As I wrote:
The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”
I’m not an avid follower of the Hollywood sausage grinder. Perhaps the project is still being developed, or an incredibly secret production shoot is happening as I write this. All I know is, over the past twelve months I’ve occasionally tried Internet searches hoping to find some evidence of progress. So far: nothing.
As I wrote last year, the number of failed starts on a Neuromancer adaptations are legion. The Wikipedia section on the topic does not do justice to the number of aborted starts reported over the years. Someone should make a gallery of fan-produced movie posters. Chalk up this latest disappointment as another virtual corpse to throw on the digital pyre. What’s a reader to do?
What-if film poster for a nonexistent production of Neuromancer (Peter Stults)
Here’s what you should do: Go and read the book. Don’t wait for a director’s vision, or a big-budget green light. Go straight to the source.
Neuromancer is marketed as Book One of the Sprawl Trilogy, a series which also encompasses Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Gibson’s near-future Sprawl is also the setting of several of his earlier short stories, including “Johnny Mnemonic.” (Many of these stories are collected in Burning Chrome.) Thus, Gibson had the advantage of mapping out Neuromancer‘s territory well beforehand. It was in these stories that he honed his subjects and style, the street hustlers with colorful handles and underground operatives rewiring high-tech for subversive means. His work has a streak of the computing counterculture, mirroring the early days of the Homebrew Computer Club and phone hacking, where computers were not merely a technology, but liberation.
The story centers on Case, a console jockey and professional hacker-for-hire. An entanglement with a prior employer has left him unable to connect to the virtual world of cyberspace, an analogue to our Internet that users connect to mentally, rather than via screen and keyboard. Crippled by this punishment, Case scrounges on the streets of Chiba City, Japan, living in coffin hotels and getting by trafficking in stolen tech.
Things shift when he meets Molly Millions, a punk street-smart mercenary who sports several body modifications and tech implants. (Molly wound up being a Gibson fan-favorite, and is featured in several other stories and novels.) She introduces Case to the shadowy Armitage, who offers to re-wire Case so he can join cyberspace once more, on the condition he perform illegal hacking work against megacorporations and the military. Thus, the novel is many things at once: Future noir; a dystopic exploration of a decaying world saturated with computer technology; and, at its core, a heist story.
Published in 1984, and set in the 2030s, the novel has a couple of howlers, such as the protagonist trying to fence “three megabytes of hot RAM.” That was on the high-end of computer memory in PC-compatibles when I first read the book in 1988. Gibson later admitted he used the word “modem” without knowing what it meant. “I was working from the poetics of an emergent language,” he explained. These problems are not important and should be set aside.
While you’re setting aside the anachronisms, also set aside some of the hype, such as William Gibson supposedly predicting the Internet (which he’s never claimed). A lot of people inside the technology community had foreseen the rise of a worldwide information network before Gibson published. Believe it or not, some also predicted mobile, wearable, and even implanted devices. Once the early computer pioneers figured out how to connect two computers to exchange data, it wasn’t a great leap of imagination to picture the logical conclusion. (Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos” was not about mice and hypertext, but about collapsing the distance between man and computing technology.) Even Gibson has admitted that “wet tech”—direct-connecting a human brain to a computer—is probably a non-starter in our immediate future. And, whenever an interviewer has asked Gibson why he chose the 2030s to set his story, he’s always insisted that he was actually writing about the 1980s.
Instead, focus on Gibson’s imagery and rich settings. He took computers out of the realm of men in lab coats standing over coffin-sized boxes in dust-free rooms. He put tech on the street, in the pockets of skate punks and the ears of all-night sushi line cooks. Phone phreakers and blue-boxing from the 70s and 80s—an early hacker culture where the phone company was the dreaded megacorporation—offered Gibson a clear-cut model to scale up from. Instead of a single domineering power to #Resist, he described hundreds of megacorporations colluding to run the world. Instead of an obscure nerd subculture, he gave exotic tech to everyone, even folks sleeping on mattresses on rain-soaked streets. Neuromancer is a book set during a perpetual war between the haves and have-nots, and the battlefield is cyberspace.
Brazilian edition of Neuromancer
Focus on Gibson’s language and linguistic style, which blends the technobabble of computer programmers with Japanese idioms into a kind of poetry, interwoven with the colorful Chandleresque prose of hard people doing hard things. To pull choice passages from the first chapter, two of countless throughout the book:
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologogies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.
And this:
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to a let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi–Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand.
Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.
Gibson humanizes the exotic technology without the tedious tendency of other science fiction authors to try and explain it in a calm, reasonable fashion. This world gone mad abandoned rational discourse decades prior. His characters are at utter ease in the trappings of this disjointed world, and even a bit blasé about it. That three megabytes of hot RAM? It’s stored in a Hitachi deck. Later, Case stays in a luxurious Hilton hotel drinking coffee from a Braun percolator. So often science fiction relies on defamiliarization (technology familiar to the characters seeming magical to us). Gibson reverses that polarity. He uses consumerism to his literary advantage, rather than to make some clumsy ironic comment the way DeLillo and David Foster Wallace feel the need to do.
Neuromancer puts forth a fragmented society that is at odds with the other major science fiction dystopia, 1984. Contra Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, Gibson lays out a world of emaciated nation-states muzzled by constipated corporate power and incestuous multi-billionaire families. Meanwhile, the population hides in the shadows, barters on the gray market, and, of course, jacks into cyberspace for fun and profit.
It’s a potent brew—one part hard-boiled cityscape noir, one part philosophical science fiction, and one part a pessimistic vision of unfettered capitalism’s endgame, all told in a gritty, poetic tongue that matches the rain-mirrored, neon-iridescent streets of Chiba City.
Don’t wait for the movie. Don’t wait for the streaming series. If you’ve not read Neuromancer recently, pick up a copy and read it again. And if you’ve not read it at all—what are you waiting for?
A little more than a week ago, I wrote a review of an art show by the artist and TikTok sensation Devon Rodriguez, best known for live drawing subway riders. He is, by some measures, the most famous artist in the world, with many millions of social media followers. He did not like the review.
It went up on a Friday. On Saturday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of anger from Rodriguez on Instagram, tagging me across scores of posts. Hundreds of his followers went on the attack.
Davis gives a more nuanced and thoughtful analysis of his hellish situation than should be expected from someone who received death threats over, of all things, a review of an art show. He reasons
the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in…
In the past, artists had to pass through the gatekeepers of museums and art galleries before becoming well-known to the public. Even Basquiat had to break through the establishment before securing his place in the art world. In today’s digital world, it’s possible, even desirable, to hurdle over the gatekeepers and go straight to the masses with one’s output.
A similar dynamic is at play in the world of publishing, as I’ve written about a fewtimes. This desire to stand above criticism is, in my mind, the root motivation for dysfunctional narratives. The tenor of the attacks Ben Davis withstood sounds much like the way dysfunctional narratives are defended, such as the Rodriguez fan who snapped at Davis, “What if he was your son??”
Davis links this reaction to the notion of “parasocial relationships,” that is, “the imaginary, one-sided friendships people develop with celebrities and influencers in their heads.” This cuts to the “transitive logic” I wrote in 2019 about an all-too-similar event involving Sarah Dessen and her followers when they attacked a college student who posted a relatively innocuous criticism of Dessen’s work: “The logic magnified an innocuous criticism of a single YA author to an attack on all YA fiction and its readers. Thus, the logic went, if you’re a reader of YA fiction, it’s a personal attack on you.”
Author Sarah Dessen
“Parasocial relationships” is the best term I’ve seen to describe how Dessen’s followers rose up and hounded the college student offline. Much of the outrage seemed rooted in the feeling that Dessen was not merely a YA author, but their friend. Any why not? These new, online super-authors are
not merely authors, they’re brands. Many of these YA authors have crafted an online persona of a confidant and sympathizing mentor. You don’t merely read their books, you hear from them everyday. You see their vacation photos and learn about their pets. You share their ups and downs in the real world.
Wikipedia says that the term parasocial interactions was first coined in 1956, no doubt in part inspired by the rise of television in the United States. The researchers described them existing prior to mass media, such as people emotionally bonding to gods, supernatural spirits, or saints. They are telling examples.
It requires no divination skills to predict these social media brouhahas will continue so long as artists and writers can organically grow their followings. Certainly I don’t see these kerfuffles as justification for returning to the pre-digital way, where editors and publishers decided over Negroni lunches who got published and who got to languish. But being thin-skinned to criticism, and using one’s followers to “cancel” the critic, is a bad choice no matter how you look at it.
As Davis predicts:
If there’s no criticism of [Rodriguez’s art], here’s what I think will happen: All the marketing companies and PR people looking to piggyback on Rodriguez’s popularity will stuff his feed with more and more cringe celebrity content and half-baked promo ideas until his social-media presence is bled dry of whatever charm it has.
Illustration from Erotic Review for “At the White Sands Motel, 1956”
I once wrote erotica by accident. Writing and getting the story published is a wild tale.
If you know of anything of my output—my novels, my interactive fiction—that might surprise you. You’ve probably never read anything by me that remotely involves the sex act: No kinky sex, no ho-hum sex, not even missionary style. Generally, I shy away from that kind of thing. Getting a story published in an erotica magazine still tickles me to this day.
The story-behind-the-story begins in a creative writing class. The instructor offered us a list of writing prompts. We were to select one and write an opening.
The first speed bump in this tale is that these prompts were communicated to us orally. The prompt I selected regarded a teenage lifeguard named Hamke. Years later, I learned I had misheard the details. The prompt did not include the name “Hamke” or anything about a lifeguard. How I managed to screw up so much remains a mystery lost to the shroud of time.
In any event, the name and occupation stuck. I assumed it was a German name, as I’d never heard of it before. (Apparently, I’m not alone.) While I enjoy swimming, I’ve never known a lifeguard nor worked as one. Why this prompt caught my interest, I do not know. Over the following week I roughed out a first draft about a teenage Hamke standing guard over a motel pool in Nevada. In need of a title, I jammed one onto the front page of the manuscript: “Living It Up at the White Sands Motel.” (I believe it was a riff on the quip about a cheap lodging being a “low-rent Shangri-la.”)
Around this time, I dated a woman also enrolled in the creative writing program. She was experimenting with poetry about the body. She read many of my stories, which is generous—even when you’re dating a writer, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually read your output. She called my work cerebral, and noted that my characters seemed “detached” from their physical nature. She challenged me to write a story where the main character’s physicality is centered.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean “write about sex” or “write about someone with a smokin’ bod.” It could mean the main character is physically challenged, or has suffered some grievous physical damage they’re recovering from. It could mean some aspect of their body defines them in a material way (which is something I had in mind as I wrote my Bridge Daughter series of books.)
In this case, I went for the obvious: Hamke would have sex. More than that, he would lose his virginity.
I poked and prodded at the manuscript—draft after draft—trying to tune all the off-key notes. In workshops, peer writers would scratch their heads trying to figure out what to make of this strange story. There was a lifeguard with a flat-top and a weird name, an empty motel in the desert, and an older couple from New Jersey who invites him to their air-conditioned room for an afternoon romp. By this time I’d renamed it (still flailing for a proper title) “At the White Sands Motel, 1956.”
I submitted to the usual literary magazines, searching high and low for a place to land it. The rejection slips came back a bit more quickly than the other stories I’d sent out. Perhaps the complaints I heard in in the workshops (“‘Hamke?’ Is that Jewish?”) was now confounding editors. The sex was not graphic, but it was on the page and not merely alluded to. The wife was acidic and domineering, and her husband frustratingly passive. Wide-eyed Hamke, who was simply “along for the ride” (so to speak), was not a character to stand up and cheer for.
Enter London-based writer Saskia Vogel. By chance, she came into the bar I tended while working through graduate school. She was working on a study of kink; I despaired over a short story about a lifeguard losing his virginity. We swapped email addresses and kept in touch after she returned to England.
Around this time, fellow grad student Lizzy Acker mentioned off-the-cuff she was developing a new San Francisco reading series with the theme “funny / sexy / sad.” The work writers presented had to feature one of those elements.
“You know,” I said, not entirely innocently, “I have a story that’s funny, sexy, and sad.”
It’s true: Hamke’s fumbling and awkward loss of innocence is funny. The wife impatiently orders Hamke across a tour of her body as though teaching him to drive a stick shift. It’s sad, too. As one workshop instructor remarked, the boy is robbed of a positive formative experience.
Lizzy included me in the series’ opening night line-up, and the reading went uproariously well. Maxfield’s House of Caffeine was packed. The audience reacted with every twist and turn of Hamke’s awkward journey. They burst out laughing at all the right moments. Red-faced parents held their hands over their children’s tender ears. People were moved by the ending, and a couple of tears were shed. The applause knocked me off my feet. It was, by every measure, the best reading I ever gave.
How the hell could I not get this story published?
Then, an interregnum. I separated from the girlfriend who challenged me to write about the body. I separated from my appendix, and a few months later, I busted up my right shoulder. I separated from graduate school. (Well, a degree was conferred, how’s that.) Hamke’s story remained a magnet for rejection slips. Meanwhile, medical bills ate through my meager bartender savings.
With no more excuses, I returned to full-time employment. The first year with my new company, the sector we were involved in hosted their annual conference in, of all places, the Canary Islands.
La Palmas de Gran Canaria. (Photo by the author.)
That’s how, six months after staring down bankruptcy and unemployment, I found myself on a semi-tropical island in the Atlantic a mere 500 miles from Marrakesh. I rented a cheap open-air room overlooking the Las Palmas promenade and a pristine sunning beach. After the conference concluded, I stayed for another week to explore the island and write.
During this vacation I received an email from Saskia Vogel in London. She heard from an editor friend that the UK-based Erotic Review was in need of fiction. Didn’t I have a story about a guy having sex for the first time?
In that low-rent Shangri-la, the couch doubling as my bed and the drapes billowing from the breeze coming off the beach, I hustled one more edit pass out of my aging Hamke story. Thankfully I brought my writing notebook computer with me. This was not a time when Wi-Fi was a sure thing in a rented room, especially in an out-of-the-way place like Gran Canaria, but I in this case I was set. I emailed my little story to editor and publisher Jamie Maclean.
Before I did that, though, I used the Wi-Fi to study up on just whom I was submitting to. My search revealed I was not soliciting some amateur outfit. ER had been around since before 1995, and had published numerous erotic books on top of a monthly subscription-based magazine. Their readers spanned the UK and North America. Not only had I never published a work of erotica, I’d never been published by a magazine that survived solely off subscriptions.
With a healthy taste of self-doubt in the back of my mouth, I pressed the Send button. Then I did what I usually do after submitting a piece to a magazine: I got my mind off things. I went downstairs. I walked the promenade. I had a couple of drinks at a beach bar, and got my toes in some sand.
When I returned to the room, I of course checked my email, fully expecting to find nothing. Instead, an acceptance email waited in my inbox. Compared to the usual turnaround times for literary magazines—one sent me a rejection two years after submission—this was lightning fast. Later it dawned on me that my accidental vacation spot had contributed to the quick response: I was in the same time zone as London, where ER was published.
Three months later, a contributor’s copy of Erotic Review and an international money transfer arrived at my apartment in California. My Hamke story was out there.
And that’s how I became a writer of erotica, scribbler of filth and peddler of smut.
Postscript:
My tale might be seen as a reversal of Ray Bradbury’s strategy to seek out unusual places for his work (such as Gourmet publishing his “Dandelion Wine”). I sought out unusual places to publish an erotica story, and eventually found a natural home for it.
Being published in an erotica magazine has become a point of pride for me. I never set out to write erotica, and I’ve never considered pursuing it since. I once read that no one writes erotica under their real name. Well, I did, although when you have as generic a name as “Jim Nelson,” perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Erotic Review is a class act. They continued to stay in touch. I received editorial updates and invites to ER parties (which, sadly, were all in London). They even sent digital Christmas cards, such as the one above.
Recently ER changed hands and is now retooling under a new editorial staff. If you’re interested in supporting the relaunch, visit them at ermagazine.com.
This morning I learned that my interactive fiction game According to Cain was selected for the 2023 Interactive Fiction Top 50. This is a poll run by Victor Gijsbers every four years since 2011, and generally attracts interactive fiction enthusiasts and authors (most of whom gather now at intfiction.org). The goal of the poll is to determine the fifty (or so) best interactive fiction games of all time. According to Cain placed 21st in the latest incarnation of the list, which is posted on The Rosebush, a new online journal dedicated to criticism of interactive fiction.
It’s been a good year for Cain—it placed 6th at the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition (taking first for the Miss Congeniality contest, which is the best game chosen from the votes of all entrants), won Outstanding Game of the Year (Player’s Choice) and Outstanding Game Over Two Hours in the 2022 IFDB Awards, and now this.
Cain started as a short story I began drafting in 2010 (or so). It was the kind of short story that I could never quite figure out, just a collection of scenes with no beginning or straight-ahead story line. (About the only thing I knew was that, when you’re telling a story about Cain and Abel, a murder would have take place at some point.) There was even a time when I toyed with turning it into a novella. I abandoned and returned to the project several times over the course of ten years until, in the midst of the lockdowns, I wondered if I could make it an interactive fiction parser game.
And it worked out. As I said in the Fediverse, if you’re creating something and truly believe, stick with it, even if you have to walk away from it for a while. If you’re committed to the concept, you might be surprised where it takes you.
More information about Cain is available at its home page.
Wearily, I started his essay expecting more of the same, and lo, finding it: Computers and the Internet, he contends, has done much to destroy literary fiction. By this point, I’m surprised any writer pursuing such a thesis would bother fortifying their argument with examples or statistics. Blythe does not fail on that count either: Other than some “c’mon, look around, you know what I’m saying,” the argument is made sans corroborative evidence. Of course the Internet has wrecked American literature. Why bother denying it?
It’s telling, then, that Blythe opens with the usual barrage of accusations about digital distractions—”Can you read anything at all from start to finish, i.e. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?”—and then, to prove how things used to be so much better way back when, he segues to life as an Esquire editor in the 1980s and 90s:
[Rust Hill] and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). … Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual.
The jokes about fiction editors at a national magazine choosing stories to publish after a three-cocktail lunch write themselves, so I won’t bother. (Although I should, since, as an early writer, I had high hopes for placing a short story with a publication like Esquire. Perhaps I should have mailed a bottle of Bombay with each of my submissions.)
The dichotomy Blythe illustrates is telling: The hellish “after” is the mob writing Amazon user reviews and him not knowing how to turn off iPhone notifications; the blissful “before” is editorial cocktail lunches and not having to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks.
One counterpoint to Blythe’s thesis: The 1980s had plenty of distractions, including the now-obvious inability to silence your telephone without taking it off the hook. Another counterpoint: If you want to drink Negronis and argue literature over Reubens, well, you can do that today too. A third counterpoint: A short story printed in the pages of Esquire was sandwiched between glossy full-color ads for sports cars, tobacco, and liquor—most featuring leggy models in evening gowns or swimsuits. Distractions abounded, even before the Internet.
But none of these are what Blythe is really talking about. What he bemoans is the diffusion of editorial power over the past twenty years.
Blythe throws a curveball—a predictable curveball—after his reminisces about Negronis and schmears. Sure, computers are to blame for everything, but the real crime is that computers now permit readers to make their opinions on fiction known:
Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one.
I don’t actually believe Blythe has done a thorough job surveying the digital landscape to consider the assortment and quality of reader reviews out there. There are, in fact, a plenitude of readers penning worthy critical insight over fiction. Just as there are so many great writers out there that deserve wider audiences, there also exist critical readers who should be trumpeted farther afield.
Setting that aside, I still happily defend readers content to note a simple up/down vote as their estimation of a book. Not every expression of having read a book demands an in-depth 8,000 word essay on the plight of the modern Citizen of the World.
Rather, I believe Blythe—as with so many others in the literary establishment—cannot accept readers could have any worthwhile expressible opinion about fiction. The world was so much easier when editors at glossy magazines issued the final word on what constituted good fiction and what was a dud. See also a book I’m certain Blythe detests, A Reader’s Manifesto, which tears apart—almost point by point—Blythe’s gripes.
When B. R Myers’ Manifesto was published twenty years ago, a major criticism of it was that Myers was tilting at windmills—that the literary establishment was not as snobbish and elitist as he described. Yet here Blythe is practically copping to the charges.
Thus the inanity of him complaining that today’s readers hold the power to “inflict economic power” when, apparently, such power should reside solely with critics and magazine editors. I don’t even want to argue this point; this idea is a retrograde understanding of how the world should work. This is why golden age thinking is so pernicious—since things used to be this way, it was the best way. Except when it’s not.
Of course the world was easier for the editors of national slicks fifty years ago, just as life used to be good for book publishers, major news broadcasters, and the rest of the national media. It was also deeply unsatisfying if one were not standing near the top of those heaps. It does not take much scratching in the dirt to understand the motivations of the counterculture and punk movements in producing their own criticism. The only other option back then was to bow to the opinions of a klatch of New York City editors and critics whose ascendancy was even more opaque than the bishops of the Holy See.
That said, it’s good to see a former Esquire editor praise the fiction output of magazines that, not so long ago, editors at that level were expected to sneer down upon: Publications such as Redbook, McCall’s, Analog, and Asimov’s Science Fiction all get an approving nod from Blythe.
But to cling to the assertion that in mid-century America “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike” is golden age-ism at its worst. Sure, a few writers could make a go at it, but in this case the exceptions do not prove the rule. The vast sea of short story writers in America had to settle for—and continue to settle for—being published in obscure literary magazines and paid in free copies.
No less than Arthur Miller opined that the golden age of American theater arced in his own lifetime. Pianist Bill Evans remarked he was blessed to have experienced the tail end of jazz’s golden age in America before rock ‘n’ roll sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Neither of those artistic golden ages perished because of the Internet.
What caused them to die? That’s complicated, sure, but their demise—or, at least, rapid descents—were preceded by a turn toward the avant-garde. Which is to say, it became fashionable for jazz and theater to distance themselves from their audience under the guise of moving the art forward. The only moving that happened, though, was the audience for the exits.
Blythe then turns his attention to a third gripe in his meandering essay. Without a shred of evidence, he argues that the digital revolution of the last twenty-five years metastasized into a cultural Puritanism in today’s publishing world:
Perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families… Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.
I cannot deny that there appears to be a correlation between the rise of the Internet in our daily lives and the shift over the last decade to cancel or ban “problematic” literature. What I fail to see is how pop-up alerts or a proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots is to blame for this situation.
If Blythe were to peer backwards once more to his golden age of gin-soaked lunches, he would recall a nascent cultural phenomenon called “political correctness.” P.C. was the Ur-movement to today’s sensitivity readers and skittish editors. Social media whipped political correctness’ protestations into a hot froth of virtuous umbrage—a video game of oneupsmanship in political consciousness, where high scores are tallied with likes and follower counts. Using social media as leverage to block books from publication was the logical next step. But blaming computers for this situation is like blaming neutrons for the atom bomb.
After a dozen paragraphs of shaking my head at Blythe’s litany of complaints, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in agreement with him:
The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. … Good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness.
At the risk of broken-record syndrome, I’ll repeat my claim that Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives” (penned twenty-five years ago, near the beginning of the Internet revolution) quietly predicted the situation Blythe is griping about today. Back then, Baxter noticed the earliest stirrings of a type of fiction where “characters are not often permitted to make intelligent and interesting mistakes and then to acknowledge them. … If fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.” He noted that reading had begun “to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” and that this type of fiction was “pre-moralized.”
Unlike Blythe, Baxter did not fret that literary fiction would perish. Baxter was a creative writing instructor at a thriving Midwestern MFA program. He knew damn well that writing literary fiction was a growth industry, and in no danger of extinction. What concerned him was how much of this fiction was (and is) “me” fiction, that is, centered around passive protagonists suffering through some wrong. He noticed a dearth of “I” fiction with active protagonists who make decisions and face consequences.
As Blythe writes:
Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical.
If Blythe is going to roll his eyes at the glut of reader-led cancellations and moralizing editors, perhaps he could consider another glut in the literary world: The flood of the literary memoir, with its “searing” psychic wounds placed under microscope, and its inevitably featherweight closing epiphany. These testaments of self-actualization may be shelved under nonfiction, but they are decidedly fictional in construction. In the literary world, stories of imagination and projection have been superseded by stories of repurposed memory, whose critical defense is, invariably, “But this really happened.”
It was not always so. Memoir was once synonymous with popular fiction. Autobiography was reserved for celebrities such as Howard Cosell and Shirley MacLaine, or a controversial individual who found themself in the nation’s spotlight for a brief moment. It was not treated as a high art form, and perceived in some quarters as self-indulgent. No more.
There remains an audience for great fiction. Readers know when they’re being talked down to. They know the difference between a clueless author being crass and a thoughtful author being brutally honest. They also know the difference between a ripping yarn and a pre-moralized story they’re “supposed” to read, like eating one’s vegetables.
The death of literary fiction—especially the short story—will not be due to iPhone notifications and social media cancellations. Perhaps the problem Blythe senses is the loss of a mission to nurture and promote great fiction. The literary world has turned inward and grown insular. Its priorities are so skewed, I’ve witnessed literary writers question if fiction can even be judged or critiqued. The worsening relationship of class to literary fiction should not be overlooked, either.
If Blythe laments Asimov’s Science Fiction, perhaps he should check out the thriving Clarkesworld. Substacks of regular short fiction are regularly delivering work to thousands of readers. I don’t know if these publications’ editors are gulping down Negronis during their daily Zoom meetings—but as long as they’re putting out quality fiction that challenges and questions and enlightens, maybe that doesn’t matter, and never did.
