Well…this essay isn’t really dated. When I search for the Dated Essay of the Month and I’m in a hurry, like this month, I just go back to an F&SF editorial from the same month, only years (and years! Ack!) ago. I clicked on this one, and was a bit stunned at how fresh it is.

But that’s another essay. Here’s this month’s old essay, from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1993.

Editorial

I keep looking for the hidden camera. Someday Allen Funt will jump out of the shadows and shout, “Candid Camera!” The rest of us will grin, reassuring ourselves that we knew it was a hoax after all.

It has to be. I mean, how can anyone say these things with a straight face. Did you know that we no longer exercise? We now participate in physical activity. The word “exercise” is pejorative, according to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “Physical activity” makes us feel better about…well, exercising.

And at the time of this writing, in California, the Board of Education has decided to ban an Alice Walker story from a 1994 state-wide English test. The story, “Am I Blue,” is “anti-meat eating.” These are the same folks who pulled an excerpt from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard because a description of a snowball fight was too violent.

The test is given to 10th graders to assess their writing and reading comprehension skills. Marion McDowell, president of the Board, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Walker story “could be rather disturbing to some students who would then be expected to write a good essay while they were upset.”

Huh? Excuse me? Many people write good essays when they are upset. It gives them something to write about.

But Ms. McDowell’s attitude upsets me for a more basic reason. Good fiction draws an emotional response from the reader. Devaluing a story because it upsets someone — in any circumstance — devalues literature.

Literature must run the gamut of human emotion from whimsy to terror. Cool intellectual thought should be represented alongside raw animal emotion. I have this fear that we will soon be reading only what I have termed “happy fic” — bland, emotionless fiction about superficial events — because happy fic upsets no one. And in this country, we suddenly have a phobia of upsetting anyone.

When I put an issue of this magazine together, I try to pick stories that will run through as many human emotions as possible. I try to balance humor with horror, upbeat science fiction with downbeat fantasy (or vice versa). I figure an issue is a success if it makes one person understand a new viewpoint or feel an emotion rarely felt. Sometimes I fail — an issue will be one-note (such as the issue I thought was light until someone pointed out that every story (even the funny one) was about death) — and sometimes I succeed. The successful issues get the most letters. For each angry letter, we receive one letter of praise.

But we aren’t careless. I believe that each word, each event, each character, in a short story should be essential to that short story. Writers have revised material as many as four and five times before the work has seen print. We strive for the best fiction we can publish — fiction that should make us laugh, cry, and think.

Some of the stories we publish disturb me. Sometimes I finish reading a manuscript and find that I am done reading for the evening because the experience in the story was so powerful that I cannot go to something different. I must think about the story or let the emotions it aroused in me fade before I move on. And contrary to what Ms. McDowell thinks, such a reaction is good. If I were required to write an essay at that point, the essay would be top-notch because I had an emotional response, not in spite of it.

We are so afraid of upsetting other people that we are afraid to think. We are afraid to express opinions. We are afraid to be ourselves. I don’t expect anyone but me to like every story in this magazine. But I do hope that our subscribers, and science fiction and fantasy readers in general approach literature with an open mind. We are, after all, the literature of the future, the literature of change. If we can’t accept stories that present a plethora of viewpoints, then how can we accept our funny-looking neighbors down the street? How can we march with confidence into the next century if we are afraid of every word we speak?

I am still searching for Allen Funt. I still want this fear and political correctness to be a joke. Because if it isn’t, then I can no longer exercise at the local rec center. I can’t publish powerful stories because they might upset someone.

Is that something glinting in the corner? Please excuse me while I go investigate. I am hoping to find a hidden camera.

Copyright 1993 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Well, The Disappeared is no longer available for free on Audible.com, although it is now available for a small fee (hint, hint). Audible did this free promotion to get y’all to sign up for their newsletter and to buy audiobooks. They were hoping for a few thousand. By the end of the first weekend, 10,000 of you downloaded the audiobook, stunning all of us–including the Audible folks. They’re happy and I’m happy. The final numbers aren’t in yet, but they will be higher than that.

I know that not all of the 10,000 will like the book, but both I and Audible are hoping that a significant number of you will–enough to download the remaining audiobooks in the series. I’ve been getting some wonderful private feedback, which I thank you for.

The fact that so many folks were willing to take a chance on the book surprised and pleased me. Thanks, folks. Hope you enjoy the rest of the series, too.

Another midnight show, a completely different crowd. Our small band of local writers went to the six-plex (yes, we only have one) at midnight July 17 (July 18, official opening day) to discover the movie was sold out. (Fortunately we had our tickets from earlier in the week, when we saw Hellboy 2.)

Now, you have to understand that in our little coastal town, we often have private screenings in the winter. We’re a tourist town of less than 7000 full-time residents and the idea of a sold-out film is laughable. The night the six-plex held its private grand opening for the people with “special invitations,” the entire town showed up and there were still seats to spare in the theaters.

But it’s the middle of the summer and we’ve been invaded by the tourists who keep our little town alive and well by giving it so much money during three months, we make it through the remaining nine. A lot of those tourists were at the movie. A lot.

So was half of the local high school. I told Dan Duval when he arrived that we couldn’t stay because we didn’t have a Taft Tigers letter jacket. I never had a letter jacket–they didn’t give them to the debate team and the forensics team and the drama team in my day and had only just started giving them to girls a few years before (she writes, sounding like a cranky old fart)–but if I did, it would have said Superior Spartan. (I went to Superior Senior High. I kid you not.) And instead of being orange and black like those Taft Tigers, it would have been Columbia blue and white (don’t know why it was Columbia blue as opposed to blue, but there you go).

The letter jackets were the only costumes in the theater. Apparently, our little town is too small or too conservative for the locals–or even the tourists–to don Batman togs and go to the opening. I’m geeky enough to miss that.

We had the usual problems–too many talkers nearby (until Dan scared them off; Steve York [our usual enforcer] was leaving for Comic Con and couldn’t join us), a crying baby (!), and cell phones ringing off the hook. All of which ended when the movie started.

The movie: Let’s see if I can do this with no spoilers (although the media is dedicated to spoilers, those supervillains). I think it’s the movie of the summer. It’s dark–too dark for young children (seriously)–and disturbing and thought-provoking. Heath Ledger is actually better than the hype, which was a pleasant (if terrifying) surprise.

The movie is too long by about a half an hour, but I wonder if that’s not due to Ledger’s death. Nolan’s films are usually tight; I wonder if he didn’t put Ledger’s entire performance into the film instead of leaving any of it on the cutting room floor. That would have been my inclination.

Still, it was riveting enough to keep me in my seat–and I’m the person who sits at the end of the row because I usually get up twice in a two hour movie. (I have never been able to sit still for long.)

Dean and I actually debated about whether this was the movie of the summer. I declared it as we stood up at 2:45 a.m., when the credits had finally finished rolling, and he loudly disagreed with me. Dean (my husband Dean Wesley Smith, for those of you who don’t know; writer [who has done a number of novels based on comic books characters, including Spider-Man], former comic store owner, comic collector) thinks Hancock was the movie of the summer.

I actually forgot that it had even come out this year–two weeks after going to the film. Not that I thought it was bad–I liked it when I watched it; loved Will Smith and Charlize Theron–but apparently, it made no lasting impression on me.

I’ve been twisting the Dark Knight around and around in my brain since I saw the film. I plan to see it again, maybe even back to back with Batman Begins.

Maybe I just like dark. But more than that, I like stories with stakes. By stakes I mean the idea that when the world is threatened, it is truly threatened. Good people can (and do) die, the bad people could triumph. The hero succeeds, but often at great cost. That story often doesn’t find its way into films made from comic books (it was there in the first Spider-Man) even though the comics themselves usually have stakes.

Yes, I go for the ride–I was there for the first show of last summer’s Die Hard movie–but I prefer something in which I can have an emotional investment.

Batman gave that to me, along with a discussion of what heroism really is. (A lot of critics didn’t like that; I did.) I thought the movie was brilliant, if flawed, and that made it stand out from all this summer’s noise for me.

The tourists and teenagers in the audience liked the movie as well. When it ended, the entire theater burst into applause. That’s my favorite part of opening night. The audience lets its opinion be known, even though there’s no representative of the studio there.

Applause. Yep. And I joined in.

I write a regular column for Aeon Magazine online. The new issue is out with the new column. You can find it here. Then take some time to read the fiction and the rest of the magazine. It’s quite good.

I didn’t have a lot of leisure reading time in June, and what I did read disappointed me greatly. For a while, I thought I’d only have two entries in the June Recommended Reading. Fortunately, the last two weeks of June provided an abundance of great stories and books, so much that I stayed up late several nights in a row, finishing not just the novels, but the non-fiction as well.

June, 2008

Crais, Robert, Chasing Darkness, Simon & Schuster, July, 2008. When I first picked up my copy, I was disappointed at how thin this book was. I shouldn’t have been. Bob packed a lot of story into a small area. The sparseness of the tale reflects the horrors he’s dealing with.

The book also feels very current, since it’s set during a California wildfire. Extremely well done, tense, Chasing Darkness is vintage Robert Crais.

Deaver, Jeffrey, The Broken Window, Simon and Schuster, June, 2008. You know you like an author when you know the release date for his next book. I made sure I was in a bookstore on the Tuesday this book was released (and had to ask a manager why the book wasn’t up front where it belonged. He literally paled, went to the fiction section, removed 20 copies [leaving at least 20] and took them up to the front of the store).

The problem with loving an author’s work, particularly in a series, is that you, the reader, have expectations. And the writer must meet those expectations to give you a satisfying read. To give you a great read, the author has to exceed those expectations.

Deaver didn’t exceed my expectations here. He wrote his usual excellent novel, which I blew through in just a few hours. On the recommended reading, though, I want to recommend stellar books—books I’d hand out if you were a friend, and I realized when I was done, I wouldn’t hand out this book.

So I considered: Why not? Simple. There are better introductions to the Lincoln Rhyme series. This is a good mid-series book. It’s not the place to start.

But the book is scary. The characters are fascinating and true to themselves as usual. And the hot topic this time—data mining—is true to my science fiction soul. Nicely done. Terrifying. I want to go off the grid now. Really. That’s why I’m posting this on-line.

Didion, Joan, Where I Was From, Vintage, 2004. One of the best book I’ve ever read is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. I’ve been reading Didion since college, when I discovered her Slouching Toward Bethlehem abandoned in the UW-Madison’s Rathskeller. (Why anyone would abandon that book is beyond me.) I savor Didion’s work, because I like it so very much.

Where I Was From is marvelous, a mixture of personal history and real history. She blends essays I’d previously read in such places as The New Yorker into a seamless whole, one that winds up being touching. This short book is about change, about loss, about family, but most of all it’s about California and the West. I’m not sure I would have understood this book when I was in my twenties, living in the Midwest, having never been to the Left Coast. But I’ve lived here for twenty-three years now, and I see my home in this book, even though I live in that state north of California, the one everyone forgets, Oregon.

Beautifully done, exquisitely rendered. Didion at her best.

Jensen, Beverly “Wake,” Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. I spent most of the month avoiding this book, after a few short stories met my habitual low expectations of lit’rary fiction. Since the mid-1980s, lit’rary fiction (and I call it that to distinguish it from true literary fiction) became a place to impress rather than one to entertain. In other words, it became about the writer, not the reader. The writers worked at letting me (the reader) know just how very brilliant they are. I don’t care about brilliance. I care about a good read—whatever that means. So needless to say, I approached the Jenkins story with great trepidation.

The story surprised me. Not only was it well written, not only was the voice stellar and the characters fine, but the plot was just plain charming.

The story begins as two hapless adult siblings lose their father’s corpse on a journey to his funeral in 1956. The tale goes back and forth between the siblings’ journey and the reactions of the mourners waiting in the church. The wake is impromptu and marvelous, the journey harrowing, and the story worth every single moment.

Beverly Jensen wrote this story and several others about the main characters before she died. Her husband is marketing her work. I’m disappointed that her oeuvre is limited, but pleased to have discovered her. And kudos to her husband, venturing into the strange world of publishing to keep his wife’s memory—and her exceptional writing—alive.

Kim, Stellar, “Findings and Impressions,” Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. The very next story in the volume after the Jensen restored my faith in the book. This is also a piece of debut fiction, quite different from the Jensen which is a straightforward piece.

Kim’s story has medical entries woven throughout the prose, which is a difficult technique. It only serves to enhance the story which, in her bio at the end, Kim calls a romance. She’s right. It’s touching, sweet, and heartbreaking. Worth the price of the book right there.

Mahler, Jonathan, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of a City, Picador, 2005. Sometimes I learn about books from friends, sometimes from reviews or from wandering through a bookstore, and sometimes from television or the movies. Television helped me find Mahler’s book.

In the summer of 2007, ESPN ran a wonderful miniseries called The Bronx is Burning, starring Oliver Platt as George Steinbrenner and John Tuturo as Billy Martin (of the New York Yankees, for those of you who don’t know your baseball). The miniseries focused mostly on the 1977 Yankees and the Son of Sam killings, using a lot of real time footage, and allowing excellent actors to chew up the scenery. In the credits, I saw a small notice that this miniseries was based on Mahler’s book.

The book is, as books usually are, different from the miniseries. The book is truly about New York in 1977. Son of Sam gets a chapter. The Yankees (not the Mets, sorry, folks) become a microcosm for the changes going on in New York at the time. Politicians like Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, and Bella Abzug get almost as much space on the page as do Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, and the Yankees.

The book is a joy to read. It’s well written. Mahler’s voice is strong and authoritative, filled with wry humor. The narrative is compelling—or at least it was for me. But I remember that year very well, even though I didn’t live in New York, and I found myself routinely startling the cat by saying, “I remember that!” in a tone of wonder.

I bought the book because I thought it would be about baseball, which I love. The book is about baseball. But it’s also about New York (which I also love) and a time now almost completely gone, although its remnants echoed through American life, politics, and sport for the next thirty years.

Nicholas, Lynn H., The Rape of Europa, Vintage, 1994. I have no idea where or when I got this book, only that it has sat on my to-read pile for a very long time. Of the book, the Washington Post said, “A scholarly work that reads like a gripping adventure story,” and that’s exactly right.

Countless books have recounted the horrors of the Holocaust. Others talked about the changes in Europe before, during and after World War II. This is one of the few that covers the wholesale theft of art and possessions that the Nazis managed.

Even though I knew the outcome of the war, I would often find myself reading with my fist against my mouth, worried about some priceless artifact or the person sent to rescue it. I read the book in two sittings, fast for me with a history volume.

Peretz, Evgenia, “James Frey’s Morning After,” Vanity Fair, June, 2008. This one’s on here for my students. So often they worry about making a mistake—getting an editor’s name wrong, mailing a manuscript to the wrong house—that it freezes them. They don’t write or they don’t mail what they write.

I tell them that mistakes happen; editors understand; publishing is a large, large industry, and you’ll survive, pretty much no matter what you do.

The Clifford Irving movie, Hoax, proves that. But the hoax happened in the 1970s and means nothing to these modern writers.

So now they have James Frey. Frey, who published a memoir that embellished, sparked countless lawsuits and some memorable Oprah invective, has a new book out. A reporter at Vanity Fair managed to interview the now-reclusive writer, and learned exactly what his life was like during the hell years (and his side of the story as well).

He said he went back to writing, “one word at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time,” which is, in the end, the only way to do it.

It’s an inspiring article for writers, and anyone who wants to come back from a mistake or, in this case, a massive public humiliation. Dunno if I would have survived as well as he did. Dunno if many people could have.

Rankin, Ian, Exit Music, Little Brown, 2008. This book isn’t out yet in the States, but will be soon. I almost bought a copy when I was in England last fall, but didn’t want to have the weight of a hardcover on my flight home. So when a friend gave me a copy, I read it immediately.

Rankin is doing a gutsy thing here: He’s retiring his most famous character, John Rebus. Rebus ages in real time. Since the series started twenty years ago, when Rebus was forty, Rebus has aged those twenty years as well. Apparently in Scotland, police detectives have a mandatory retirement at age 60. Otherwise, Rebus would never have retired. The man (and yes, he’s real to me—that’s how good this character is) has no other life.

The novel is a balancing act—several important cases, as well as Rebus’s trademark bad attitude toward authority, and the impending retirement. Rankin also has to deal with Big Ger Cafferty, the long-time villain of the series. It all fits together in “fuss, mess, and blood” as he says. It’s a worthy retirement novel for Rebus.

Makes me wonder what Rankin will do next. Unlike Rebus, Rankin is in his forties, with decades of work ahead of him. It should be interesting…

Waxman, Sharon, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, Times Books, November 2008. Like the Rankin, the Waxman isn’t out yet. A friend who went to Book Expo America handed me his galley when he finished it, since he knew I had an interest in the topic.

Loot looks at the art world through the practices of four museums—three of the greatest in the world, and the Getty Museum, which had to be included, since it’s involved in the biggest scandals.

The Getty, which I’d read about before, is the least interesting of the museums. The fascinating stories belong to the Louvre (which is one of my favorite places in the whole world) and the British Museum, where I had a marvelous experience as a teenager. The fourth museum covered, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York isn’t quite as interesting to me, probably because it doesn’t carry the weight of its own history, unlike the other two.

This book is a good introduction to the topic. The author is a reporter, so her breezy style makes for a fast read. The book lacks depth, which is fine. I read it for the overview, and that was wonderful, pointing me in some new directions in this part of my leisure non-fiction reading.