Sheila's LiveJournal

I just submitted my first professional book review, something I'd never particularly yearned to do. I wouldn't even have considered it, except old friend Dave Truesdale asked me, in the interest of getting new blood into the reviewing process at Tangent Online. How hard could it be, really? Having been on the receiving end of both smarmy and snarky reviews, I thought perhaps I could breeze through the assignment if it was something I'd be reading anyway. So I said yes, reluctantly, but only if he sent me material that had something to do with language. And I sat back, secure in the knowledge that only a tiny handful of short stories a year would fit the bill.

Fat chance. The book Dave sent me – immediately – was Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology just published by Tachyon Publications..

My first reaction was panic. I hadn't read any cyberpunk since Mona Lisa Overdrive and I hadn't enjoyed Gibson's work in any case. I'm not a techie (Anyone who knows how inept I am with my own computer can vouch for this.) My second reaction was to reject the assignment indignantly as a breach of (unwritten) contract. Cyberpunk is definitely not linguistics.

But I've had one rule since starting to take my writing career seriously: Never say No. This has frequently landed me in very hot water, as you can probably guess, forcing me to do graduate level research into fields I knew absolutely nothing about to begin with, going out onto dangerous limbs to support various opinions I didn't actually hold, writing advice on subjects where I was a beginner myself. Say Yes and have the heart attack afterwards was my motto.

So I didn't send the book back. Instead I procrastinated for most of the first two weeks, glowering at the book as it lurked on my bedside table trying to lure me into reading it before falling asleep. I'm a reading junkie: I absolutely have to read before I sleep, even if I go to bed at 2 am. In order to avoid Rewired, I read – in no particular order – the latest book about Mother Teresa, a book about ravens and crows (research for the next novel, honestly), Out Of Africa by Karen Blixen (because I'd just visited her house in Nairobi) and another book about a lovable, free spirited Labrador retriever who gets into comical situations – followed by a book about dog training by that “dog whisperer” who's all the rage these days.

REWIRED continued to lurk. Finally I ran out of excuses and picked it up gingerly. It was hard going at first. (What can you expect when you try to read the likes of Sterling and Doctorow and Gibson right after absorbing the happy adventures of undisciplined dogs? Especially at 1.58 am.) I figured I'd be on safe ground if I read all the female authors' stories first, and there are four of them in the anthology. How difficult could it be to understand a female perspective on the future – even if it's post Vernor Vinge's singularity and is written in a language apparently designed to make the reader cross-eyed with confusion?

Aha! Dave's secret was out. One of the obsessions of cyberpunk, as the book's editors admit, is “cultivating a crammed prose style,” which translates as “jargon-laden, grammatically tortured, idiosyncratically spelled, and all-around mysterious to the non-techie.” Exactly the kind of stuff a self-proclaimed lover of alien languages should enjoy decoding. With that mystery solved, I settled down to read the stories. And, you know what? I found myself enjoying them, some a great deal, others less so, a couple not at all. But that's what would happen with a collection of stories about linguistics,  or anything else, for that matter. I learned something about my own fiction preferences in the process. It's not the subject matter, or the style, or even the genre that matters to me. It's the theme. I prefer serious work to glib or comic work, but more than that, I expect the author to have something important to say about the human condition. I want to meet characters who resemble real people, who show some depth, and who wrestle with real problems against interesting backgrounds – even when I don't totally understand the jeopardy because it's beyond my technical experience. I don't expect all stories to end well, or even to be optimistic about the future, but I don't want the author to stack all the odds against them in the first place so their only option is to give up in despair.

Those are my criteria for fiction. They're probably not everybody's. What do you judge a story by? I'd be interested to hear.

Which stories did I love and which did I hate? I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few days until my review's posted then zip over to find out: http://www.tangentonline.com