Man, that file must be getting clogged

I did another random Kindle search. That's the new face of self-publishing, if you don't know. Or maybe is better to call it "non-traditional publishing." But then, these days even vinyl looks to be outselling CDs...everything is digital and the whole concept of a traditionally published book is rather quaint to many people.

Anyhow, I seem to have goosed the Amazon algorithm and it is spitting out yards of similar stuff now. These are the ebook equivalents of direct-to-video movies, taken in by Kindle with essentially nothing in the way of editor or agent because, hey, electrons are cheap.

Not all of which are bad. I've gotten a good read out of several, I hasten to add. After all, the human race managed to entertain itself with story-tellers around the fire back when there wasn't a gatekeeper system that selected for only one in every thousand. I am not particularly surprised that most people who are willing to take the time to put 100,000 words down on paper in some kind of order manage to do that in a way interesting enough to spend an hour or two in reading. You have to have something more than a nebulous desire to "be a writer" in order to slog through a whole novel.

But anyhow!

The latest focus of Amazon's little elves is to show me book after book with "x crossed with y" descriptions. "Firefly meets 007!" trumpets one. "Like a cross between Star Wars and World of Warcraft!" (yeah, I made that one up.) "The Last Airbender meets Regency Romance." (Actually, that one was mine. Sort of. I actually titled my review of the first book of a not-bad fantasy series, "But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.")

The phrase in fanfiction circles is "filing the serial numbers off." As in, you wrote a Star Trek fanfic, you thought it was a pretty good story, so you changed Kirk to a ginger named Seamus and Spock to a Martian with telepathy and the Enterprise to the Endeavor and then sent it to a publisher as an original work.

These Kindle works are leaving the metal shavings visible. The copy on the Kindle pages is, "Did you like Game of Thrones? This is exactly like it!"



Not like you couldn't tell once you opened the book. The SF field has been decrying the use of what they call "used furniture" for a long time now. Thing is, it is useful. The concept of a mobile and autonomous robot is pretty much orthogonal to how real technology has been going but it is so well established all you have to say is, "robot" (or "droid," or "android," or whatever) and the audience knows what you are describing and can get on with the story.

You don't have to go all "Ralph 124C 41+" about it explaining how, "He next saw a mobile autonomous platform with a self-contained power supply operated by onboard logic that simulated in some basic ways a human-like personality and permitted, through multiple electrical actuators and various machined joints..."

But there's used furniture, and there's used furniture. Asimov contributed something when he added the Three Laws to his robots. Others have engaged in some of the assumptions of the model to make the robots of their own stories interesting, and sometimes even unique.

The problem is the writer who just says, "robot" and moves on. In the old days, at least, they could be stealing from literature, so yes you had everything that tens of very good writers had to say about Asimov's Three Laws. You had a fair amount of thought you could draw on, I'm meaning. Now the sources are primary and visual; what robots look like (and very little of what they might be and mean and imply) in the films and computer games of the most recent couple of years.




I've argued in the past that many visual SF series turn inwards. They stop asking "what is a transporter, in terms of physics? In terms of ethics? In terms of tactics? In terms of the impact it should have had and shared with other technologies, with the society that built it?" They start asking "What happens if you try to transport someone who is already being transported? What if you turn the beam of a transporter on the transporter itself?'

It becomes entirely questions that work only within the framework of the universe. Questions that don't even make sense as questions without the heritage of established behaviors and quirks. The show begins to mine itself for ideas instead of saying anything interesting.

Far, far worse when you are writing an "original" work and you pop "transporters" in. Not the general concept, which you then flesh out with understanding of how they fit within the context of the society and technology and sciences of your fictional society. No, just (functionally) a duplicate of how it appeared in some other media, complete with all the quirks and specifics which arose not organically but from the accreted acts of scriptwriters over the years trying to patch over a plot hole or write themselves out of a corner.

The parts all...work...the way a set of mismatched plastic gears will sort of work if you slam them together and let them grind off all the excess teeth as they try to move. But at the very best, the whole story will then teeter along, able to keep the illusion up only so long as it is moving quickly.



The other interesting thing...and I could be imagining this but I have read things elsewhere that suggests I am not...is that this is part of a unique island ecosystem. The people commenting on these books seem to mostly have read these books; their experience does not range wider. The reviews appear gamed (but then, all review systems will tend to cluster towards full marks for everyone. It is the nature of the thing; over time the average rises until to be marked as less than excellent is to be marked as deeply flawed).

Still, when you get down to it, there are only so many basic stories. For all the works that really are about a philosophical idea or a scientific principle or a nifty gadget, stories move on the backs of people. And people are people. Whatever else is in the book, if it is in the popular press there are probably people working, striving, fighting, loving, and talking. A lot of talking. If you as a writer can handle the mechanics of having people interact with each other then perhaps the other stuff -- those unique insights, those teased-out bits of research, those flights of invention, are frosting.

If the people aren't good, it probably won't be fun to read. I mean you really should have interesting characters, you need dialogue that sounds good and works properly, descriptions that, well, describe. And there is a lot of nuts and bolts in doing this. In forming paragraphs, in being grammatical, in punctuating dialogue. In knowing how to employ tools to lead the eye and control the pacing.

The question is whether this bread-and-butter work -- this boiler-plate that, for all practical purposes, makes up the bulk of the wordcount and the majority of time spent by writer and editor -- is the sufficient minimum...or the minimum starting point.