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I am now spending my days peering carefully, line by line, at the copy of the copy-edited manuscript (on the left) and the page proofs (on the right.) These two stacks of paper, and the “completed” pages of each (to the right of the right stack and the left of the left stack) take up a significant portion of the kitchen table. So far I’ve found only two errors. One where my correction of the CE’s change wasn’t picked up (same change was picked up elsewhere) and one where both the CE and I missed an original error. This is good, and I may skim a little faster later on, even though I know there’s a late change to watch out for.
Kitchen table set up for page proofs: from top to bottom, checked copy edit, copy edit, page proofs, checked page proofs. Pages sticking out toward camera have errors. Instruction letters from publisher to the right, with pencil sharpener, also 3×5 yellow card w/notes.
It’s hard work, though it probably doesn’t sound hard, because my eye and brain want to focus on the story, not on the word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark sequence of meaningful marks on the paper. I keep losing focus and discovering that I’ve zipped past three or four paragraphs on one or the other stack without doing the careful comparison. I’m very glad there’s at least one other proofreader involved.
Just before these came in, I finished up an essay for a collection of essays by people honoring Anne McCaffrey. The changes the editor asked for have passed muster (at least mostly–we’ll be visiting it again in February) but there were some intense days on it. When you care a lot about a person, writing about that person can be very difficult. It was in this instance, too. I had submitted some possible topics (naturally, the editor didn’t want everyone to write about the same thing) and due to email mixups did not receive the editor’s pick of my suggestions until fairly late.
Anne was not only a writer I had read and admired for decades before I met her, but as the senior writer in our two collaborations, she was both a model of professionalism and a warm and helpful friend. Generous with her time and with her expertise–I learned a lot from her.
Anyway…I’m head-down in the page proofs, and so far pretty happy with the text, beyond the “word, comma, word, word, word, word period. Open quotes, Word, word, word, comma, close quotes, word word period…” proofing. There are bits I’d forgotten, that I’m thinking “Hey–that was pretty neat, that little bit right there.”
I hope to finish them this week. (I’d better–they’re due back the 13th and shipping this close to the holidays gets weird. I will keep notes on any errors found and be ready to email those with page numbers if necessary.)
The page proofs as they are will be the basis for the ARCs. The corrected page proofs are what should be on the page.
And now….back to the kitchen table. Anyone want to start making suggestions on what our contest for an ARC should be this year?
LATER EDIT. Thought you might enjoy a picture of the workspace. Clearly, we are not eating at the table for the duration. Copy edit and page proof work both take up the only large flat space in the house. For copy editing, the Chicago Manual of Style and a dictionary are also on the table, though only two stacks (unchecked, and checked) of paper. I had a photocopy made of the copy edits I returned, and it’s very useful, both for transferring the copy edits to the computer file (when I have time–hasn’t happened yet) and for checking the page proofs against the CE’d version. It also allows me to reference the pages on the CE where the page proofs do not agree, and see what might have caused the confusion.
Comment by Daniel.Glover — December 4, 2012 @ 6:54 pm
Just give one to me!
But of course everyone wants that!
Maybe something about number of pages (which version?) or word count would be mundane but low stress on the author. 🙂
Comment by Adam Baker — December 4, 2012 @ 7:06 pm
Glad to hear things are progressing smoothly!
The essays on Anne McCaffrey, will these be put on a website somewhere, or made into a book? I’d be very interested in reading them when they are released. Ms. McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy was both what got me into the DRoP series, and into Sci-fi/Fantasy as a whole. I think I was 10 or 11 when I first read them, and, as they say, the rest is history. I have so many books that I love, but the Sassinak series ranks very high on my list of books that I love, and have read many times.
Comment by Rowanmdm — December 4, 2012 @ 11:23 pm
I’m very excited to hear you’re in the page proofs stage, and I sympathize with the process.
Please, more details on the McCaffrey essays! Her books got me hooked on SFF and I loved McCaffrey so much that I wrote my thesis on Dragonflight. She’s how I got introduced to you as well 🙂
Comment by iphinome — December 5, 2012 @ 4:07 am
ARC contest, hmmm, Paksworld based anagrams? Best taig themesd haiku? open a case of Andressat wine and the last one standing wins? Everyone mails you chocolate which you place into a bag, whoever sent the first one you blindly pull out wins? Or, wait for it, EVERYBODY LIMBO.
Comment by Naomi — December 5, 2012 @ 5:36 am
Would grovelling and begging work? how about limericks instead of haikus…
Comment by Annabel — December 5, 2012 @ 10:14 am
Definitely limericks or haiku!
Comment by Jenn — December 5, 2012 @ 1:05 pm
Elizabeth,
I would never consider going through 500+ pages to ensure that all errors are caught would be easy work. I am praying for your eyeballs.
For the ARC:
Who would you most like to be in Paksworld and who would you most likely be in Paksworld.
Also…
The employee break room is having a potluck for the mid winter feast and everyone is invited. I would caution you not to bring Jello (in any form). The Verrakai children find this food fascinating and tend to play with it. A lot.
Comment by elizabeth — December 5, 2012 @ 2:03 pm
I don’t have many details yet. (Or my memory has stuffed them in a back corner and I’ve forgotten them.) As soon as I do, I’ll post it here, there, and everywhere. It’s an invitational collection of essays, commissioned last summer (early summer as I recall, but…) and in order to provide variety, we were asked to submit something we might be interested in writing about concerning Anne, her work, our relationship to both, and then the editor and Todd McCaffrey (I think both of them) chose among them. At any rate, I’m not sure there’s a publication date set yet, but I’ll definitely let you know here.
Comment by elizabeth — December 5, 2012 @ 2:04 pm
This will be a book, though I’m not sure of the format. Given the importance of Anne to the field, I would suspect they’ll go for a limited hardcover edition and then maybe trade pb.
Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — December 5, 2012 @ 6:37 pm
I have mild dyslexia, and cannot proofread without using a ruler or sheet of paper to force me to scan line by line. Pretty much incapable of it. So I don’t envy you your stack of page proofs.
ARC: everyone is invited to submit a limerick or haiku (you decide which; limericks are more fun, haiku more elegant). You pick a handful you like best. Put them up as a WordPress poll for a few days. Most votes for favorite(s) wins.
Anne McCaffrey: a writer who grew into her craft. Her very early books are pretty rough; some of her later stuff is genuinely excellent. And she seemed to really enjoy the process, over several novels, of pulling Pern from quasi-fantasy to pure science fiction. Great fun. But, in your case at least, the pupil has surpassed the master.
/WC
Comment by Rolv — December 6, 2012 @ 7:45 am
Only two errors so far? That’s impressive!
(I deduct from the rest of the post that you’ve gotten past page one … :-))
Good luck, and take your time. It’s kind of boring, but satisfying in the long run, thinking of all the errors you spotted, and would have missed by skimming. And, of course, for us, the joy in receiving the final product in top shape far surpasses any misgings over delays.
Comment by Ginny W. — December 6, 2012 @ 7:58 am
Sympathy for the page proofs. I think the hardest thing in the world is proof-reading something I have written. I get caught up in the text, and miss the punctuation and spelling, etc. I notice something that I hadn’t quite thought through and want to change it. But it is worth it! And I find that there are an increasing number of obvious typos that are creeping into printed books. So slog on, knowing that this reader appreciates the effort.
I would love to read essays on Anne McCaffery. I read the initial “Pegasus” stories in Analog/Science Fiction as a child and was fascinated. I read the Harper Hall trilogy as a young adult, and was encouraged. I read Dragonsdawn as an adult, and was captivated by the melding of fantasy world and science fiction. It would be fascinating to hear what other writers think about her contribution to a field of literature that has done alot of maturing since I first encountered it.
Most of all, I am greatly encouraged at the prospect of page proofs. Limits of Power is really coming! Hooray!
Comment by Genko — December 6, 2012 @ 11:55 am
Ah, page proofs. I know you’re way past this stage, but I still remember as a typesetter when I used to input books from manuscript (before we could capture keystrokes), we had a temporary (very temporary) proofreader come in who handed me back 5 galleys of text with NO errors marked. I handed it back to him and said, “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Try again and proofread this.” My usual score was 2-5 typos on a 17-inch galley of type (again, back in the days when we went to galleys firt, before page proofs). Sure enough, he got it back to me with an appropriate number of errors marked.
I do think some people are just better at proofreading than others. I’m middling good, but I’m like you — I get caught up in the meaning / story / noticing the writing style, etc., and miss things.
I have also enjoyed Anne McCaffery’s books. I return over and over again to the Harper Hall trilogy in particular. Actually, there are some echoes of it in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, when I think of it. And I have to agree that the student has surpassed the master.
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 12:04 pm
I’m now farther along. Nine errors worth marking in 224 pages. (If someone adds or subtracts a comma that–on reflection–doesn’t bother me, I don’t mark it. One or two of those.)
Comment by GinnyW — December 6, 2012 @ 12:09 pm
Jenn: Your comment about the Verrakai children reminded me of a long ago occassion when I was staying for a few hours with my Junior Choir Director (I was still junior). She had made jello, but something odd happened and her husband and grown son were bouncing it off the table, the floor, and ceiling. We were all laughing…
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 12:17 pm
Ginny W. (and others who saw a melding of fantasy & SF)…I think I’m older than most of you, and I clearly remember reading the first Pern story in ANALOG. I read it as SF from the first, not just because it was in ANALOG, but also because–in that day–the great rise of fantasy hadn’t happened yet. There were other SF stories about space colonied that devolved culturally into various levels of what would now be considered typical fantasy cultures. They were written as SF, and read as SF. Ditto Norton’s “Witch World” books and several other “gate” connections into alternate realities. The existing fantasy (available in, say F&SF and other fantasy magazines) was not much concerned with dragons, and were mostly very closely tied to this planet. So, to a college-age reader in 1966, the “dragons” were instantly recognizable not as fantasy creatures, but as a familiar name given to “something else.” Just as another group of space colonists might refer to a long-eared hopper as a rabbit, even if it was green with orange spots, had a pair of tentacles instead of front legs, and ate insects instead of carrots. I was reading some fantasy by then (I hadn’t liked it as a child, and avoided it) and what I found had a completely different set of conventions, tones, and so on.
So initially, the Pern books were read–as they were written–as science fiction set in a far-future space colony. Later, they were caught up in the rise of fantasy, and particularly in the denigration of “female fantasy writers” by men who felt they/we were contaminating their nice clean science fiction control room. Because there were “dragons” and a feudal society, the assumption was that this must be fantasy. But no. Science fiction from the get-go. I recall some of the letters of comment in ANALOG, discussing the engineering and astronomical side of the first stories.
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 12:28 pm
keidogenko: I’m not that hot at proofreading, though I do multiple passes to make up for that. Or sort of make up for that.
Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — December 6, 2012 @ 1:30 pm
Like you, I first read “Weyr Search” in Analog. And I wrote one of those letters you mentioned discussing the physiological requirements of Pernese dragons. For me, the idea of a flying, warm-blooded animal, 40 feet in length, carrying a 200 pound rider, bags of rocks, and sometimes passengers crossed the line from science fiction to fantasy. It probably didn’t help that I am a passionate birder and know a little bit about the anatomical trade-offs for flight.
I loved the story then and I love the story now, but it is fantasy. (Poul Anderson, I believe in his in his short story collection, “Earthbook of Storm Gate,” discussed and dealt with the problem of the intelligent flying Ythri, giving them a high-oxygen atmosphere and what amounted to a turbocharger. But Anderson was one of OWM you properly chastise.)
/WC
Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — December 6, 2012 @ 5:23 pm
PS. Amazon has Limits of Power listed, with a release date of June 11:
http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Power-Paladins-Legacy-Elizabeth/dp/0345533062/ref=pd_ys_sf_s_283155_b1_11_p
Comment by Roberta — December 6, 2012 @ 10:53 pm
One of my favorite Anne McCaffrey books is Restoree,one of Anne’s first books. I found that long before i found and pirchased Dragonflight.
My first Elizabeth Moon was Hunting Party. Riding a horse on a space ship with a disgraced military captain just blew me away.
For me the science in the science fiction both of you wrote intrigued me so much, I just had to find more books by you both. Your worlds were real, the people like so many people I knew,or even better, wanted to know. Your science was sound and didn’t get in the way of the storytelling. Too many writers forget that and shove quasi-science in the middle of the story so you have to wade through it or ignore it to get back to the story that you bought the book for in the first place.
Too bad I can’t remember how to write haiku, and never learned how to write a limerick.
I hope you get your proofreading done well before the due date.
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 11:17 pm
Wickersham’s Conscience: We’re just going to have to disagree. It hinges on your definition and mine of “science fiction” and that’s a quarrel that can go on forever. Many things were written as, published as, and accepted as science fiction–some of which have since reached reality and some of which never will and some of which may (though personally I don’t see it happening.) Some science fiction has always been implausible and unbelievable–that does not, to my mind, make it fantasy. It may to yours, and I have run into other fans who–if something isn’t believable to them–insist that it’s not real science fiction (including FTL space travel or communication.) In courtesy, we could each agree that our individual definitions are accurate for ourselves–and not universally accurate because there are many other fans who have a different definition. Can we meet on that ground?
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 11:17 pm
So we hope, indeed. And I had best get back to those page proofs.
Comment by elizabeth — December 6, 2012 @ 11:44 pm
Roberta: Thank you. There are variant approaches to writing science fiction, all valid for a particular readership. There’s the SF story about how the science was found, and the one about how the technology was developed/improved, and the one about how the new discovery or technology shapes the society that has it. I’ve played with several of those, but my greatest interest is in the interface between the society and its science/technology…how they influence each other, by way of the individuals in the story. Which sounds all theoretical and also pretentious, but…years ago, a friend and I were chatting in the car on the way someplace, and I suddenly realized that every noun and verb we’d just used had a very different meaning when I was a kid. Words with one meaning–that I’d used then–had, because of a technological advance–acquired new–and now more common meanings. I said so, and there was a long moment of silence, and then we went on talking. But…it fascinates me. The tools we no longer use; the new ones we learn (slowly or quickly, depending) and how that changes us.
Comment by pjm — December 7, 2012 @ 7:30 am
I still have Weyr Search in Analog (and the Analog serialisation in 5 + 3 parts of Dune). I agree the story belonged in Analog. Simple test – to me the Pern universe feels closer to Asimov’s universe than to Tolkien’s.
Back then Analog’s editor John W Campbell was pushing psionics as a possibly legitimate area of scientific study. This meant that mental or other psionic/magical abilities might be allowed as science for sf purposes. For me, being concerned with the mechanics of dragon flight while accepting their ability to move “between” is straining a gnat and swallowing a camel.
This attitude to psionics persists. Look at David Weber’s Honor Harrington’s communication with her treecat.
I suspect the difference is that if a being has mental powers and flies a spaceship the story is science fiction, but if he/she/it has the same mental powers and wields a sword the story is fantasy.
Question. There are plenty of SF stories with magic, but are there any fantasy stories with no magic at all?
Peter
Comment by elizabeth — December 7, 2012 @ 8:44 am
pjm: (partial quote) “I suspect the difference is that if a being has mental powers and flies a spaceship the story is science fiction, but if he/she/it has the same mental powers and wields a sword the story is fantasy.” Definitions were always somewhat fluid and the consensus changes over time. Sword-using “devolved” cultures were at one time fairly common in SF. Campbell’s definition was “If I say it’s science fiction, it’s science fiction.” He was, as the saying goes, the man who buys ink by the barrel, and so he had the final say—where ANALOG was concerned, at least. For me, the tone and “feeling” that distinguishes fantasy from science fiction made sense…some worlds, as you said, “feel closer to Asimov’s universe than Tolkein’s.” Part of that is characterization, I think.
Whether there are fantasy stories with no magic at all depends heavily on the speaker’s definition of both fantasy and magic. If you classify fantasy as “Any story about a lower-tech culture–especially set in an imaginary medieval-to-Renaissance milieu and containing feudalism and swords” then yes. In fact, I wrote one (more than one, but they didn’t all get published.) “My Princess” in the fantasy anthology Warrior Princess is magic-free. Yet in the market (going back at least to the late 1970s) the setting alone made it fantasy, and it was sold and read as fantasy. It was written more as if it were historical fiction. Any story written in an established fantasy universe will be considered fantasy even if the story has no overt magic in it. (I wrote a few of those, too, but they also didn’t sell. My agent said he understood why.) They were stories about various mercenaries–since most of the time, most people don’t come in contact with magic, there was none.
Comment by Mike D — December 7, 2012 @ 9:38 am
@24 pjm
Full length works published as fantasy
No magic or non-humans.
The Paladin C J Cherryh
sample chapters
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200507/0671318373.htm?blurb
Harald David D Friedman
All recommended
Mike D
Little Egret in Walton-on-Thames
Swordspoint Ellen Kushner
Comment by elizabeth — December 7, 2012 @ 10:05 am
Thanks for the references. I thought of Cherryh, but could not remember whether The Paladin had any magic or not (I knew her Russian stories did) and couldn’t find my copy. And so on. I really need to take a break between books and get the house better organized.
Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — December 7, 2012 @ 12:16 pm
Sit inter nos pax. You are a fine person, and I find it painful to disagree with you.
/WC
Comment by Dave Ring — December 7, 2012 @ 3:59 pm
Thinking about page proofs, I realized I don’t how books are printed today. Are the pages still printed with metal type? Is there still a typesetting process that can introduce errors not present in earlier stages of editing?
Comment by elizabeth — December 7, 2012 @ 5:07 pm
Dave: I don’t think pages are still printed with metal type–you can’t feel any indentation from the metal, as you used to. But yes, there’s a typesetting process that–although it doesn’t set type–creates the software that the printers use.
And yes, it can introduce errors. An example from this book: the copy editor made a change to a sentence. I agreed that the sentence needed clarification, but did not agree with the CE’s fix (as often happens, because CEs don’t have time to read a book for tone, etc., it was just not right.) So I stetted the CE’s version and inserted my own change. In the proofs, two important phrases (one that I’d added) have been transposed, leading to a sentence that…makes no sense and is also funny. I looked at it carefully in the copy of the CE and am not sure why the person who did that misunderstood the marks. The CE’s mark is a bit messy, but my deletion of the CE’s fix should be crystal clear, and my insertion mark is at the right place.
I don’t want to quote it to you–it will then snag your attention when you get to it–some of you anyway–and you’ll be trying to figure out what the wrong version was (and if you get it, you’ll laugh out loud. My husband did, reading it in proof) instead of feeling the close of that scene as I hope you do.
Some software also introduces errors between the word processing produced manuscript and the typeset (right term, though different process) pages. Early on in direct computer-file-to-production years, I had to watch out for dialog that spanned a page break. Weird things of several kinds happened.
Comment by Abigail Miller — December 7, 2012 @ 6:05 pm
some data — From Sharon Lee’s blog:
“First, we have the Publishing Schedule, which, to the best of my current understanding, looks like this:”
[several items snipped]
“August 6. . . . . . . Dragonwriter (essays honoring Anne McCaffrey & Pern)”
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — December 8, 2012 @ 8:31 am
Proof reading what you wrote yourself is hard, I know. You see what you meant to write, not necessarily what you did write. Trying to proofread that much… I do not envy you.
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — December 8, 2012 @ 8:40 am
I doubt ordinary publishers use it, as its advantages are mostly for scientific and maths use, but I use electronic typesetting software. Started using it for academic purposes, when studying subjects where it makes sense, and I now use it for just about anything that matters, because it just looks nicer than word-processed output (not worth it just for letters, though).
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — December 8, 2012 @ 8:46 am
Would another example of “devolved colony that reads (today) like fantasy” that was written and read as sci-fi be Darkover? Not read them, myself, but my OH loves them. Some of them have absolutely overt SF elements (interaction with the wider galaxy after being re-contacted), I gather some really don’t.
Comment by Mollie Marshall — December 8, 2012 @ 9:38 am
One series I rate highly is that of Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman novels. The ‘magic’ is gradually revealed to be the advanced technology retained by a small group when the rest of the society of the ‘devolved colony’ has regressed in the face of the planet’s hostile environment.
Also enjoyable is Melissa Scott’s universe where alchemy actually works and space ships are powered by Pythagorean elemental harmonies.
All these, plus Darkover and Pern started out on my ‘fantasy’ shelves but pushed me eventually to merge the fantasy and sci-fi, as answering the same mood question ‘what sort of book do I fancy reading next?’
Comment by elizabeth — December 8, 2012 @ 10:06 am
They do use electronic typesetting software but it wasn’t perfect in rendering what’s in a word-processing file into exactly the right format. The problem with dialogue crossing page breaks was one of the problems early on. I see it less often now. Running paragraphs together still happens occasionally (not, so far, in this book.) One of the difficulties, I understand it that writers use different kinds of WP software, in different editions, and use them differently. Some of the things I do automatically are now considered no-nos by some publishers (luckily mine hasn’t fussed at me yet) and are invisible to the working writer, but imposing code in the file that bothers the typesetting software. (For instance, if I hit “enter” and Word fails to do a “carriage return” with the next paragraph indented–which it sometimes does for no reason I can figure out, since I set it up to do that–I then have to hit “Tab” to get the indentation. But this produces, I’ve been told, different coding in the file. I can’t see it, and I don’t see any way around it when Word is being a pill, which it sometimes is.)
Comment by elizabeth — December 8, 2012 @ 10:13 am
Sam: Yes, I think Darkover falls into that category–it’s clearly set in an SFnal universe, is a devolved culture (and perceived as such by the modern people who visit it)–and though some books don’t deal with the cultural conflicts when the two meet again, that’s just a matter of telling an embedded story rather than a contact one. I don’t know the pub dates; I’ve read only a few of the books and wasn’t really grabbed by them as much as by Pern. (Didn’t like the characters as much.) Back in the ’50s and somewhat into the ’60s, it was still acceptable to have humans originating here and humanoid aliens elsewhere be interfertile, allowing for cross-breeds with abilities not found here. Now that’s highly suspicious–too many people know too much about DNA (though artificial DNA, now being developed, may change the parameters of storytelling again.) Instead, we accept serious genetic manipulation of the existing human species in future-SF stories, including the production of humans who look like aliens.
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — December 8, 2012 @ 12:01 pm
When I used the software I’m used to (LaTeX) to typeset the first two annual member anthologies for my uni Writers’ Guild (after I left, they changed the name to Writers’ Society, which is less fun to me, but that’s an aside), I had people sending me their contributions in a mix of RTF, OpenOffice and Word formats. There’s a tool to automatically convert RTF to LaTeX, and OpenOffice can open its documents and Word’s and turn them to RTF, but a lot of the time I had to redo a lot of typesetting by hand.
I’d hope that publishers have better software for automatically copying to what they use, but the difference between a typesetting program and a word-processor are such that it would always involve a fair amount of manual intervention.
LaTeX is all about worrying about content and organisation over appearance – with a few cues, it takes care of appearance details. You need to change a load of default settings for writing fiction, due to the different nature of the use of paragraphs, so you need to tell it to do orphans differently, but it still works. It’s built on top of something called TeX, which is far more truly electronic typesetting – it controls everything very precisely.
LaTeX is particularly great for academic and non-fiction writing, as it can take care of indexes, contents pages, bibliographies & reference lists, with very little intervention. It also has some great stuff for mathematical notations and the like. I’d hope that fiction typesetting had some specific tools available more appropriate for that!
Comment by pjm — December 9, 2012 @ 7:34 am
I have read “The Paladin” and “Harald” some time ago, and I think you are right. “Harald” btw is in the Baen free library.
It is a while since I read any of the Darkover stories too.
Another devolved society series (in a very different way) is John Ringo’s “There will be dragons” and sequels. Applying Clarke’s Law!
Elizabeth, I agree about characterisation. Usually I think SF characters have a more analytical feel, although there are some great stories written in a fantasy world where at least some characters think scientifically about magic. The Lord Darcy stories (Randall Garrett) and Sprague de Camp’s work are classics.
Peter
Comment by Richard — December 10, 2012 @ 2:18 am
In UK bookshops, “sci-fi and fantasy” is usually one department (from which vampire and werewolf fiction is separated out, at least in larger stores).
Comment by Rolv — December 10, 2012 @ 5:07 am
As far as I remember, C.S. Lewis said that if a story takes you to another planet, it’s SF, while if its takes you to another world, it’s fantasy. I found that a good rule of thumb.
But definitions and classifications are not that important. The real difference is still between good stories and those not so good …
Comment by Genko — December 10, 2012 @ 4:27 pm
I’ve always thought that “speculative fiction” covers it all, though I suppose you could argue that all fiction is speculative. I do like the distinction between another world and another planet. Though it does seem to me that fantasy could happen on another planet. I’ve appreciated all sorts of ways that the two genres mix and match and sometimes fuse. For me, it isn’t about which is which but more about whether the writing is good enough to take me there. And that isn’t a matter of which genre, where it’s set, story outlines, or anything else that you can really define.
I appreciate all the book recommendations (and gnash my teeth at all the time it takes to read them — just spent 6 hours this morning in the Liaden universe, and consider the time well spent).
Comment by Genko — December 10, 2012 @ 4:37 pm
About metal type. There is still letterpress, usually used for specialty small jobs by those artisans who value such things. But typesetting pretty much all went to computerized “cold type” before even I got into it (in – let’s see, early 80s). I worked at a shop in the 90s in Buffalo, New York, where they had a couple of hot metal machines that they still used occasionally for certain small jobs. That company has gone out of business, as have most typesetting companies.
Having been out of the biz for several years now, and not exactly knowledgeable about the wide world of type, not sure whether there is still any hot metal out there or not. I don’t imagine they would be printing large-run books on it, though.
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — December 10, 2012 @ 4:53 pm
ISTR being told that even before we got computer typesetting, printing moved to doing an initial run with metal type which was then duplicate en mass by photolithography, being as how that’s quicker and less prone to bits falling out.
Comment by Ginny W. — December 12, 2012 @ 9:41 pm
I have to confess that I was young enough when I first encountered Anne McCaffery that the distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy had not yet occurred to me.
There was a strain of science fiction that engaged a kind of reverse evolution. Mankind achieves space flight and encounters a technologically superior (or superior in some other way, as in the Darkover novels) and it turns out that Earth was a “lost” colony of that culture. So humans could interbreed with the aliens, even though they were very different socially and culturally.
Personally, I liked the “alternative culture” aspects of science fiction more than the “technology aspects.” As a result, many of my favorites belong to the borderline cases. Dragons as advanced technology are a case in point, partly because the technological crisis is in the (mostly forgotten) past of most of the series. Most of the novels deal with the way that things that “are needful for the wise to know” are remembered (or forgotten) and the consequences. It is a plot that can occur in either genre, or both.
Comment by Genko — December 13, 2012 @ 10:02 am
Interesting, Ginny. I agree with you about what interests me in a book like this.
I’m put in mind of a recent work by Andy Ferguson about trying to track down Bodhidharma in China (Tracking Bodhidharma is the name of the book). Part travelogue, part history, part hard-to-say, I enjoyed the book partly because I had traveled with Andy as he led a group to China a couple of years ago, and was reminded of some of the places we visited and could hear his voice.
In the book, he’s looking for clues, and finds a lot of them missing. There are some structures standing, and some stories about structures that were burned down and/or converted to other uses, fragments of poems, myths and stories, etc. But trying to track down the past (this would have been around 500 CE) is not easy, even looking for a figure who is recognized as the founder of Zen.
It’s easy to see from this account how things get lost. We’re trying to put together some history of our own mere quarter-century-old Zen Center, and it’s a worthwhile project, everyone agrees, but no one seems to be able to find the time. Events press forward.
Comment by Ginny W. — December 13, 2012 @ 5:24 pm
Genko: Events do press forward, and things change. But somehow in pressing forward, the same mistakes get made over and over again. It can be good to go back and remember. Especially it helps to sort out what mattered, and what seemed important at the time, but wasn’t.
Elizabeth: Nice tablecloth (under the papers).