Fantasy Author's Handbook

FANTASY AUTHOR’S HANDBOOK

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    PERRY RHODAN’S “BENIGN” FASCISM

    Every novel ever written, from the most ancient epic poems to today’s new releases, is as much a historical document as it is a work of fiction. Because novels are written by humans, and humans—all humans—are in various ways products of their time and cultures, the culture of the time in which that novel is written will shine through. Or, depending on how you feel about that time and/or culture… ooze through. And because novelists are and always have been human (and no, an AI approximation of a novel is not a novel—period) sometimes what oozes through eventually feels old fashioned, and often enough “problematic.”

    I’ve talked here about my struggle with Ian Fleming, for instance, and continuously work through my love of the work of H.P. Lovecraft while I feel sorry for the man himself, very much a product of his time and specific (affluent white New England) culture.

    I read a lot of older books, especially old science fiction from the pulp era through the struggling-to-try-to-be-progressive 1970s, and have written a lot about the baseline sexism and racism that pervades 20th century genre fiction, precisely as it pervaded 20th century American culture. Sometimes, like Ray Bradbury’s sadly prophetic Fahrenheit 451, or Ron Goulart’s bizarrely relevant Hawkshaw, authors of those bygone eras might have actually seen into a future dystopia currently deploying across the social media and dying journalistic landscape of 2026.

    Litigating every instance of old fashioned ideas in vintage fiction would be a full time job for an entire law firm, so let’s not fall into that lest we decide all books before… well, we’re still waiting for the next Enlightenment, so… whenever that will be… are to be ignored. That’s a version of failing to learn from history and being doomed to repeat it.

    But that said, I want to talk about a series I’ve already used as an example of how not to write well, but look deeper into it to confront the subtext of at least the first four books in the series: the unsettling fascist leanings of the eponymous “hero” of the Perry Rhodan series—a subtext that’s only barely “sub.”

    The thread of “benign fascism” was easily detectable in the first book, and plays through at least the next three, but, as with my startlement at Hawkshaw, the “current moment” made that element of the fourth, book, Invasion from Space by Walter Ernsting & Kurt Mahr, push out of the subtext for me.

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    For those of you just coming in, the capsule history of Perry Rhodan:

    Perry Rhodan is the hero of a long-running series of space opera novellas that began publication in then West Germany in 1961. They were released in sixty-six page weekly digest-sized magazines and sold like crazy. According to Wikipedia, the series’ “first billion of worldwide sales was celebrated in 1986,” which is crazy. That’s a lot.

    The series was picked up by Ace Books in the US in 1969 and translated by Wendayne Ackerman, edited and presented in an increasingly magazine-like mass market paperback form by her husband Forrest J. Ackerman and later editors including Frederick Pohl. It’s these Ace books, 126 in all, that I’m collecting and reading.

    Okay, so then yes, the culture: a divided post-war Germany stuck like no other country in the world literally between the massive superpowers of the day—the United States and the Soviet Union—rebuilding physically and psychologically from the devastation of the war and the immense evil of the Third Reich. That obvious context forms the basis of the (then) near-future world Perry Rhodan inhabits, a world divided into three power blocs that mimic the Cold War reality of the day: the Western Bloc (America/the West), the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union), and their separate but allied fellow Communists in the Asiatic Federation (Red China). We first enter this world, more or less as it was—or at least felt like—in 1961, ever hovering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Not a good situation in any world, real or fictional.

    In the first book, astronaut Perry Rhodan is the commander of the first American mission to the Moon. There he finds a crashed alien starship, befriends one of the two surviving Arkonites (the other seems to be a slow-burn “enemies to lovers” character, but we’ll see) and brings their advanced technology back to Earth.

    Then Perry decides all on his own that the Western Bloc isn’t smart enough to handle that tech without destabilizing the world, and neither of the Commies can trusted with it, so he lands his rocketship in Mongolia and unilaterally declares himself an independent nation—with the super-advanced alien tech to back that up. The first two books detail the world governments’ attempts to reign him in before finally giving in to Perry’s “simple” demands… which is where even a story that on the surface is about a smart guy with the resources to stop World War Three from happening stopping it from happening somehow… goes bad?

    Here’s Perry himself, from Invasion from Space, addressing the three world leaders on the pressing issue of an invasion attempt by the Mind Snatchers: insectoid aliens taking control of the minds of strategically placed personnel:

    “Unless we proceed to act at once we are lost. Fortunately for mankind a union of our world has been accomplished, and thus Earth can finally be called Terra. All frontiers have practically been removed. You, gentlemen, are ruling the world, apart from myself, representing the Third Power and the might of the Arkonides. Also, in the field of economics, our efforts are being coordinated.

    “I request that my agents and all authorized personnel may move unhindered in your countries. They must have free access to all government offices and especially to those of your defense systems. My people have been ordered to place all important personalities of the world under strict surveillance in order to become aware at once if any of them have been invaded by the M.S. For this purpose I need unrestricted power of attorney. I must request you to give me complete authority.”

    Okay, the Mind Snatchers are a real problem, and all this goes to a common Cold War era SF theme: the only thing that will unite the world is a common threat from space. Fearful of both the M.S. and Rhodan’s own superior technology, the leaders of the world governments have no choice but to immediately acquiesce.

    I don’t know, man…

    I really don’t want to be that guy, but what if we replace Mind Snatchers (M.S.) with, say… Jews?

    Now I start to wonder about what a hero looks like.

    Perry is also stealth-building a fleet of FTL warships in different factories, each of which are only making incomprehensible parts not knowing what they’ll eventually do when assembled. This has Perry crowing:

    You see what undreamed of potential can be put into reality by mankind once they forget their differences. Of course, the world does not have any idea about all this, and it might be wise to keep this information to yourself for the time being.

    Because, I, Perry Rhodan, and only I, Perry Rhodan, knows what’s best for every single person on the planet Earth, and thank God for me, y’all can rest easy.

    I don’t know…

    Is this Perry Rhodan guy a hero or a villain? He has prevented World War Three, which is good, but then, do the ends justify the means?

    And what does this say about the culture of West Germany a scant sixteen years after the fall of the Third Reich? Is that what they—what we—were imagining as a solution to the existential threat of nuclear war? That some smart, dedicated, serious-minded military officer would take charge of wildly advanced weapons of mass destruction and unify us all against a common enemy that’s infiltrating our institutions and perverting them from within… pretty much exactly the way Perry Rhodan is also doing at the same time and now tells everyone he’s going to keep doing except now right out in the open?

    I don’t know…

    —Philip Athans

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    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    best of

    Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

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    YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

    I promise you I will improve; I will no longer, as has ever been my habit, continue to ruminate on every petty vexation which fortune may dispense; I will enjoy the present, and the past shall be for me the past.

    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

    You don’t have to be on social media of any kind, ever. It simply is not a requirement—not even for authors (believe it or not).

    All over… well, social media I’ve been seeing videos and reading essays about how people are doing twenty-four hour or weekend-long “digital detoxes” in which they turn off their phone (except for the video camera they use to record their digital detox video, apparently) and all other screens and spend the weekend reading (which I applaud) or “touching grass” (which is the dumbest possible way of saying “go outside”) or maybe doing hobbies, work around the house… all the things I need to spend more time doing myself. Some of them get some writing done—at least journalling. That’s great! And almost universally the reports come back overwhelmingly positive, infused with dumbfounded surprise at feeling marginally better not being barraged by news feeds and social media notifications.

    What a shocker!

    Do you really need me—or anyone—to tell you that social media in all its pernicious and sometimes camouflaged forms is the root of all evil in the contemporary hellscape of a country we’ve descended into? If so, here it is:

    Everything bad happening right now is happening because of social media.

    Weird that it turned out crowdsourcing journalism, science, and medicine made everything measurably worse, isn’t it?

    No, it isn’t.

    Of course it made everything measurably worse.

    Of course getting “the news” from an unknown source that could be anyone with any unknowable agenda “who” is almost definitely a bot is going to pollute the minds of innocent people trained by generations of actual journalism to believe what they see or read if it’s put forward as “news.”

    Of course idiots with no conception of how anything works but who suddenly have a “theory” are not worth listening to about anything—especially when those amateur theoreticians are, again, bots.

    Of course someone who hasn’t spent one actual second studying actual medicine will tell you that the COVID vaccine contained tracking devices and is absolutely going to make us all autistic, or that if you drink apple cider vinegar you’ll live forever, immune to all diseases including homosexuality and other things that aren’t actually diseases. Saying something doesn’t make it right, and having something to sell doesn’t make it worth buying. And also, fake medical advice can fucking kill you. Oh, and these alternative medicine influencers are also mostly bots.

    And what are “bots”? Bots are fake social media accounts created and operated en masse by some unknown someone or someones out there with some unknown political, financial, and/or cult agenda.

    And unknown people with unknown agendas are never good guys.

    A long time ago, for my own mental health, I stopped watching or reading the news—from any source. When I get a new phone the first thing I do is delete the News app.

    Did you even know that was possible?

    Seriously, do you know it’s possible to not have have your phone beep every time another idiot does something idiotic?

    It is.

    I walked away from “the news” because of my pathological impulse to attempt to solve any problem presented to me. You can’t tell me something terrible happened at some far remove, a situation over which I have no control or ability to fix, without me descending into some kind of impotent rage cycle.

    That’s me, of course. You might be able to shrug shit off, understand that there are some things that are out of your control except to offer your thoughts and prayers. Good for you…?

    I don’t know. I’m actually asking.

    That said, I still have a Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Substack account.

    Why?

    I’m seriously questioning that.

    One thing I have done recently is delete those three apps from my phone, so in order to access those accounts I actually have to go to the websites. I have to be intentional about my exposure to social media. I have also placed the links to those sites on my browser in a folder called “Monthly,” so I have to walk through a warning sign of my own creation that is me asking myself “Do you really need to go here today?” And sometimes I answer myself, “No, Phil, thanks for that. Never mind.”

    That has been helping.

    Bluesky is still better than X. Substack is… actually something I barely ever look at. LinkedIn…? I recently tried to reach out to contacts to help my daughter get a job, but beyond that, I’m not looking for a job, and besides my two dogs Athans & Associates Creative Consulting has no employees so I’m never going to hire anyone either, so really, that account just needs to go.

    There are some smart people writing smart stuff on Substack. That feels like a place that, used carefully, will continue to yield ideas of value. Of course, the majority of Substack is articles about how to make a living writing articles about how to make a living writing articles on Substack.

    Bluesky?

    Is “it’s not a steaming cesspool of reactionary AI-generated propaganda with the explicit goal of destroying the global economy like X and Facebook” enough to keep me there?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I can tell you with perfect certainty that I don’t need it.

    And the ridiculous nonsense generators like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest…?

    Watching videos of teenage girls trying on new clothes is creepy no matter how you slice it, but if, like me, you’re a sixty-one year old man, that just has to be a no.

    So then that leaves me maybe flipping through Substack once a month to see if maybe Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oats dropped something interesting.

    I’m fine with that, and encourage literally every single other human being on the planet to be okay with that to.

    Social media was an “if you build it, they will come,” proposition for the end-stage internet, and it worked.

    What people (and corporations and political action committees and cults) actually did with it when they got there was a wildly successful proof of the concept that power corrupts by attracting corruption, and no one needs absolute power to fuck up entire nations.

    They built it, we came, it’s terrible, time to go.

    —Philip Athans

    P.S. Wait… does GoodReads count as social media? I’m kinda all over that.

    And now please note the wildly hypocritical moment to follow…

    Join our group on GoodReads!

    Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

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    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    If you’re doing a digital detox this weekend, buy a paperback copy of this and read it, then write a monster story—maybe about an evil  internet app that destroys the world.

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    WRITING THROUGH TIME

    One is frequently asked whether the [writing] process becomes easier with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious—Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time.

    —Joyce Carol Oates

    True… at least to a certain extent.

    It’s long been held as a truism that our creativity declines with age, and as Ms. Oates would seem to indicate, it declines alongside everything else. I wear reading glasses to read, and did not when I was in my twenties. I have aches and pains caused not by some challenging outdoor adventure but because I “slept wrong,” carried the hamper downstairs to do the wash, or for no apparent reason at all. I have always had weird sleeping patterns—at least according to what I still hold to be the abject myth of the eight-hour nightly sleep cycle—but for me “a night’s sleep” is more like three to six periods of sleep spread over maybe seven hours. I think I’m actually asleep on average three hours in every twenty-four. When I’m terribly exhausted after carrying the hamper around that can go up to five hours.

    This is what we mean when we say nothing gets easier with the passage of time.

    As for the creative decline, I’ll point you in the direction of Dean Keith Simonton’s Scientific American article “Does Creativity Decline with Age?” for a more considered and expert opinion on the subject.

    Though there is an underlying thread in that article that backs up Joyce Carol Oates’s and my own experience, there is indeed considerable hope for continued creative output into our Golden Years.

    Really this depends on the sort of creative work you’re doing, when you first begin that particular creative endeavor, what age you are when you do your “best work,” and the pace of your output along the way.

    It is indeed true that young artists—pretty much every rock star inhabits this category—fall into the early peak group. How many rock stars in their 60s and 70s are out there on the tribal casino circuit playing forty year old hits? I took my wife to see Rick Springfield and his opening act Lou Graham of Foreigner at a casino down… I think it was around Olympia… I don’t even remember the name of it. Rick Springfield was smart enough to run through his hits, and the audience of predominantly women in their fifties loved every second of it. Because, seriously, all the rest is just jivin’, honey. Lou Graham of Foreigner (I think that’s his legal name now) apologized for performing one song from his new CD, which was available to purchase from a folding table near the bar.

    So then when did you achieve your “best work”? Your “Jessie’s Girl” or “I Want to Know What Love Is”? In your twenties? Thirties? Forties? Fifties? Later? Even rock stars may not have been as young as all that. Rick Springfield was thirty-two when “Jessie’s Girl” hit number one, and Lou Graham was thirty-three when Foreigner recorded “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

    A lot of this seems to depend on how much you keep working. Authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Williams, and certainly Joyce Carol Oates, just keep (or kept) writing, regardless of their age. Mick Jagger was only nineteen years old when the Rolling Stones first started playing together. They kept recording through at least 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, and toured for sixty-four years, with their farewell tour planned for this year. Mick Jagger is currently eighty-two years old. His “best work” might have been when he was thirty-five…? I’m a fan of Some Girls, anyway.

    At least according to Simonton, there’s something to be said about continuing to do the work…

    A person’s single best work tends to appear at roughly the same age as their output peaks. But their expected creative productivity at 80 will still be about half of what it was at that high point. Whether you view that as a significant drop or not depends on whether you see the glass as half empty or half full.

    Writing doesn’t require youth the way pop stardom does, or… I don’t know… super modeldom. Joyce Carol Oates (87) herself is proof of that—as is Stephen King (78), and other authors who kept writing well into their seventies, eighties or, like Jack Williamson, who died in 2006 at the age of 98, well into their nineties. Unlike, well, at least pop stardom, writing doesn’t require youth. Same as any successful musician, succeeding at writing requires talent and a respect for the craft, but talent and a respect for the craft is all a writer needs—the blush of youth is of no consequence for us.

    Want your creativity to still be active, want to still have your “best work” (in quotation marks because what even is the definition of that…?) ahead of you?

    Keep writing.

    —Philip Athans

    Join our group on GoodReads!

    Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

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    Check out my eBay store…

    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    So far, this is my “best work,” begun in my early thirties and published in final form when I was sixty years old.

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    READING AS AN AUTHOR

    In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote:

    Then in one of the Dr. Fu Manchu films, I noticed something the others hadn’t seen. In an exchange between goodies and baddies, one egregious villain on Dr. Fu Manchu’s side was picked off on a rock. He tumbled down into the depths, turning over and over. Twenty minutes later, something peculiar happened: in another fight, we saw all kinds—good and bad—meeting their ends. A few had taken refuge in a gulch between rocks, and I saw the same villain plummeting to his doom. It was maybe done a little quicker and took only a couple of seconds this time, but the man took off into the air in exactly the same way, with one foot out. No one else saw it, but I was convinced it was the same shot. For me, that was the moment I understood there were shots and cuts in a film. From that time on, I watched differently. How was story told, how was suspense created, how was a film constructed? To this day, I can learn only from bad films. The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid. The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma.

    I’ve said before and will say it again that the most important continuing education for any author in any category and genre is to read the work of other authors. Anything and everything about the art and craft of creative writing can be learned in that manner. Just as Herzog learned about the language of cinema from simply paying closer attention to movies—including “bad movies—we can learn the language of prose fiction simply by paying closer attention to novels and short stories—including “bad” novels and short stories.

    This week’s exercise is to tell yourself:

    From this time on, I read differently.

    Then follow through with that in everything you read from now on.

    Notice what other authors are doing: how they construct a scene, how and where they are using em-dashes or ellipsis, where the commas are and how that sentence would read without them or with one more or with one moved from here to there; how a chapter ends and how the next chapter begins; how scene breaks indicate a shift in time and/or place and/or point of view; how and why I’m using semicolons in this sentence…

    And anything and everything else that might catch your eye like the same stuntman falling off the same rock. This will be a long list, so don’t be afraid to write stuff down, like, for instance, I did with that paragraph from Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which I pasted into my “commonplace book” file along with things like: “of all your crystalline totalities,” a line from Pablo Neruda’s “The Great Ocean”; “There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity,” from The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe; or this, from “The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie” by Harlan Ellison:

    He had to ask her to repeat her answer, she had spoken so softly. But the answer was nothing, and she said good night, and was about to hang up when she called him.

    To Crewes it was a sound from farther away than the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a sound that came by way of a Country of Mildew. From a land where oily things moved out of darkness. From a place where the only position was hunched safely into oneself with hands about knees, chin tucked down, hands wrapped tightly so that if the eyes with their just-born-bird membranes should open, through the film could be seen the relaxed fingers. It was a sound from a country where there was no hiding place.

    When a book is open in front of you, class is in session!

    —Philip Athans

    Join our group on GoodReads!

    Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

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    Get into other stuff at Substack…

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    Check out my eBay store…

    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

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    CALM DOWN

    In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin wrote:

    Patience is required for the nuanced development of your craft.

    Patience is required for taking in information in the most faithful way possible.

    Patience is required for crafting a work that resonates and contains all that we have to offer.

    This is a message the community of authors—certainly genre authors—are not hearing in the current moment. More and more I work with authors who have set deadlines for self-published books to be on the market, for how long they’ll try to find an agent… and I try my best to work with them on those things.

    If, that is, I fail to talk them out of it.

    As an author, if you want to produce something quickly and get immediate feedback from the publishing world, write a poem. Or flash fiction. You can finish quickly, submit them online without an agent, and often get a yes or no in a few weeks, maybe a few months.

    But if you’re writing a novel and expect it will be finished in the next few weeks and published in the next few months, if you’ve heard and believe the terrible advice that the almighty algorithm demands you publish multiple books in a year in order to be “noticed” so your writing becomes a product you need to just get through and get out into the marketplace, well…

    Best outcome is you do manage to get that rushed “product” out there—and maybe you make more money than you thought you might. And then maybe everybody hates it and it follows you around for the next quarter century and counting like it’s some kind of criminal record.

    Or hell, maybe you crack it right out of the gate and write a classic that stands the test of time.

    Statistically speaking, of course, either of those outcomes are wildly unlikely to occur.

    I don’t have control of the global economy, the publishing and bookselling business, trends, influencers, critics, librarians, AI slop, or book-banning domestic terrorist organizations.

    And neither do you.

    But what we do have control over—if we don’t intentionally cede that to the algorithm or the self-imposed production schedule—is the quality of our own work. And quality takes time. Time spent writing, spent honing our craft, learning how to write better, spent gathering lived experience, reading, rewriting and revising and maybe tossing it in the garbage, to killing then resurrecting our darlings, to getting two-thirds of the way through a 100,000 word novel and realizing you have nowhere to go and no idea who these characters are and what the hell was I thinking with this—oh, wait, no… I know, they need to have a friend who can pick locks. Okay… note to self: go back and add a thief…

    That’ll take some time, and might just mean this book doesn’t meet its self-imposed algorithm-driven deadline. So now you’ve painted yourself into a corner: blow that deadline, or make the book better?

    Please, always choose the latter.

    Always.

    “Impatience,” Rick Rubin tells us, “is an argument with reality.”

    It’s how you, even with the best of intentions, destroy your career before it even starts.

    Both the act of writing and the business of publishing move slowly—or, we could say, at their own pace. You can force that—sometimes. I have and lived to regret it, but the money really helped when my kids were little, so…

    It’s your life, your novel, your career, but let me leave one more quote from Rick Rubin to wrap this up:

    If there is a rule to creativity that’s less breakable than the others, it’s that the need for patience is ever-present.

    Yeah, calm down and focus on the writing.

    —Philip Athans

    Join our group on GoodReads!

    Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

    Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…

    Send me a book from my Amazon Wishlist? 

    Join me on Bluesky…

    Get into other stuff at Substack…

    Link up with me on LinkedIn…

    Find me at PublishersMarketplace…

    Check out my eBay store…

    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

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    BE DIFFERENT

    Hey, y’all…

    There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different.

    Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing.

    That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.

    —DIANE ARBUS NOVEMBER 28, 1939, PAPER ON PLATO, SENIOR ENGLISH SEMINAR, FIELDSTON SCHOOL

    from Diane Arbus Revelations (2003)

    There are books like Save the Cat that will tell you there’s no such thing as an original idea then force you into a baseless formula to “guarantee” your success as an author of fiction. There are LLMs that will do the writing for you by plagiarizing pirated books by authors who actually sat down and wrote something, which is what you should be doing. There’s advice and hacks and cheats all over the internet to help you gain a huge audience for your indie book, none of which actually do that or there would be a million indie publishing millionaires out there—and there aren’t. You can force yourself to write to some kind of algorithm, which, alas, you’re never actually going to have any visibility to, so that’s another lie—or, best case: a wild guess. Why would you think such a thing exists when even the biggest and oldest and best established publishing companies in the world lose money on 90% of the books they publish? You don’t think they aren’t paying people six-figure salaries to crack the Amazon algorithm? And yet they have not cracked it yet.

    All of this is about capturing the magic formula for “success.”

    Let me tell you something I learned the hard way:

    You can fail as a sellout just as easily as you can fail as an artist.

    But you have to trust me when I tell you it’s better to fail as an artist.

    So, fuck formulas and algorithms, and LLMs, and marketing tags disguised as “subgenres,” and instead dig into yourself and write something only you could ever possibly write. Be different, because being the same comes with no advantages.

    Yes, learn your craft. Adopt techniques that help your readers understand what you’re trying to say. Follow at least the three rules of genre writing.

    But then launch yourself fully into the unknown.

    It’s not as scary out there as you might have been led to believe.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    I wrote Completely Broken with no sense of story- or character-arcs or sub-genre or algorithms or anything but just… writing it. And I’m more proud of this book than anything I wrote for the money.

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    THEY’RE NEW, AND I’M SCARED TO DEATH

    Let’s start with this passage from the science fiction novel Babel-17  by Samuel R. Delany…

    She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. “What I want to say, what I want to express, I just…” Again she shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

    “If you want to keep growing as a poet, you’ll have to.”

    She nodded. “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.”

    “Every young writer who’s worth anything goes through that. That’s when you learn your craft.”

    “And now I have things to say that are all my own. They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They’re new, and I’m scared to death.”

    “Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that.”

    I think this is almost entirely true.

    The “almost” comes in the form of young writers who do indeed have new ideas, something new to say. I feel like that happens more often than Mr. Delany seems to assume here, but still, yes…

    Writing is something we get better at, and not because we age, or as we age, but as Delany said, as we mature—if, that is, we allow ourselves to mature. Unfortunately not everyone does. That makes the idea of “a mature writer” a tricky one.

    Is it as simple as an accumulation of wisdom—whatever that word even means anymore? Or is it simpler than that? In her essay “The Power of Detail” in Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg wrote:

    Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.

    Might a more mature author simply have a bigger set of lived experiences to draw from? A larger group of friends, acquaintances, coworkers, brief encounters… children and grandchildren… from which to draw upon for characters, for offhand remarks, for slang, for jokes, anecdotes, and tragedies? Hirose Tonso seemed to say as much in the 19th century…

    People nowadays love writing up the smallest, most vulgar details, thinking these are what “real” is all about. What I take to be “real” though is something else: the actual situations and real emotions of people narrated with no ornament. Young writers today will sketch out the hazards of infirmity and old age, or concentrate on representing mountain landscapes even while they toil daily as public officials.

    What results is something they have neither seen with their own eyes nor felt within their hearts: nothing more than rote imitation of words by the ancients. In such cases, even if they’ve represented a scene precisely as if one had seen it, the effect is no different from an actor dressed up in costumes. How can you say this is what’s “real”?

    If we can call all the accumulation of real life experiences, books read and written, tragedies endured, as so on “wisdom,” is that actually a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much wisdom? In “Poetry has lost its violence,” Justin E. H. Smith wrote:

    Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen.

    I can relate to that. My life is definitely “less eventful” now than it was in, say, my twenties—and you couldn’t pay me to go back. I’d hate to have to gather all that wisdom all over again.

    But hey, younger writers, never fear—you will gather wisdom whether you damn well like it or not. If you keep your eyes and ears and mind open and keep reading, living, and writing, you might just hit that terrifying place where you realize you’ve got something original to say. How old will you be when that happens?

    I haven’t the slightest idea. But didn’t Fran Lebowitz say it best?

    Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

    And yeah, I will turn sixty-two this year so I think about shit like this now.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    Oh, and remember to do whatever you possibly can to stop the Republican party from burning books. At the very least…

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    THE THREE RULES OF GENRE FICTION

    I’ve been working hard to stop using the word “rules” when it comes to creative writing—especially fiction, and including genre fiction. I’ve used that word in connection to two things in particular: one scene, one POV and show, don’t tell, but both those things aren’t “rules” at all but techniques.

    You can do whatever you want with point of view if the mood strikes you. You could write a fantasy novel in the guise of non-fiction… whatever you like. Those techniques, though, are seen most of the time in contemporary fiction because they work to heighten reader engagement and are important parts of the craft of fiction writing that we all need to learn, pay attention to, and bring to our work—at least most of the time.

    So then what, if any, actual rules are there when it comes to writing fiction—and especially genre fiction?

    I submit that there are three…

    Rule Number One: Don’t be boring.

    Rule Number Two: Make us care.

    Rule Number Three: Make it worth it.

    This is the compact we have with our readers, and woe be unto us when we break or ignore these three rules.

    When we sit down to write a fantasy novel (or science fiction, horror, romance, etc.—in whatever combination) we want, as authors, to be read—and not just read but understood. We want our readers to feel something, to be scared or wrapped up in the suspense of the moment or to fall in love along with our characters. We want them to feel immersed in our worlds. Being careful with POV and avoiding info dumps are ways in which we can do that. These three rules tell us why we should.

    Let’s take them one at a time.

    Don’t be boring.

    If you’re writing an instruction manual or text book your first and maybe even only goal is to be precise and informative. But if you’re writing genre fiction, your first and maybe only goal is to entertain. That, of course, does not mean you have to be frivolous or pandering in that effort. You absolutely still must have something to say, some themeyou’re after, but if all you’re doing is writing, say, and anticapitalist manifesto—then write that only. Leave the fiction out of it. But if you want to—I’ll just say it: seduce your readers into that (or whatever other) idea, you better wrap that in an engaging story.

    This is where show, don’t tell comes in. If your story stops for the manifesto, that will always and only read as an info dump. If you show your characters living in a world struggling with that thing you’re fighting against, show them fighting against it and winning and losing and losing and winning against it in the actual moment they come up against this thing you’re warning us about, that message will be conveyed in a stronger and more memorable way. We (your readers) will have lived the reality of this, being caught up in an entertaining story that inserts the ideas along the way. The second you fall into didacticism, stop showing and start telling—even if there’s no “message” behind it and it’s just covering your exhaustive worldbuilding—readers will start to drop away. And why wouldn’t they? After all, they bought a novel, not a text book. They came for a story, not a speech.

    Entertain your message into their heads with action, suspense, atmosphere, plot twists, magic or sci-fi tech, monsters or wizards, but entertain us, first and foremost.

    Make us care.

    The real reason behind the things I just listed above: action, suspense, atmosphere, plot twists, magic or sci-fi tech, monsters or wizards, and everything else we love about the genres we love, is to make us care about the people (the characters) who lend humanity to the theme and story. In 1984 we are Winston Smith, a person alive in that grim dystopia. In the great Robert E. Howard stories we are Conan, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth. We are Harry Potter, Bridget Jones, Sam Spade… We care what happens to these people because we’re inside their point of view, living in the world they live in, and we understand what they need, what they want, what they’re scared of, how in love they are… One scene, one POV and show, don’t tell work together to get us, your readers, into this headspace.

    Make it worth it.

    And then Sally woke up and realized it was all a dream…

    No. Right?

    Horror might be the only genre where it’s actually encouraged to get to the end and everybody’s either dead or hopelessly insane. All other genres are going to need to get us somewhere. Does that mean some kind of Star Wars-style total victory and everyone literally gets a medal? Of course not, but this speaks to the well-known importance of a satisfying ending.

    Wherever we get to, however happy or sad, that ending must feel earned. Your protagonist has earned the win, your villain has earned defeat, your story has earned the time spent to read it.

    If the hero just sort of wanders through some plot point then kinda sorts things out, I guess, but, y’know, real life rarely has any sense of satisfaction at the end, so…

    Well, fuck real life. This is a fantasy novel. This is a romance novel. Real life…? No one is buying a genre novel to experience “real life.”

    According to the first rule you’ve been working to never be boring. Most people’s real lives are mostly pretty boring. A fantasy novel about an insurance salesman who spends most of his morning in meetings and then thinks about where to go for lunch then a few more meetings, a couple telepathic connections with clients, then he stops at the tavern on his way home for a couple flagons of ale, and ultimately falls asleep staring at the fire in his fireplace… sucks as a fantasy story! No one wants to read the real life story of anyone—unless their real lives are in some way extraordinary.

    And genre fiction begins, operates, and ends with some version of the extraordinary.

    Harry Potter didn’t get into AP math, he got into wizard school.

    Winston Smith at least tried to stop being a complicit functionary of an evil state.

    Sam Spade didn’t drop the whole thing when the bad guy tried to buy him off.

    These are stories that have lasted and continued to resonate because what the people inside them were trying to do was worth it—win or lose.

    So there they are, the three rules of genre fiction, and here they are again, so you’ll never forget:

    Rule Number One: Don’t be boring.

    Rule Number Two: Make us care.

    Rule Number Three: Make it worth it.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

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    SUSPENSE VS. EXPLANATION

    I’ve been oh so slowly working my way through the old Perry Rhodan books, and made it to #4: Invasion from Space by Walter Ernsting and Kurt Mahr. The quick history of Perry Rhodan: a magazine series of space opera sci-fi stories published in Germany and brought to the U.S. by super-fan and Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest Ackerman, translated by his wife Wendayne, and published by Ace through the 1970s. Even back in the day these books were not highly regarded, but they were popular enough to sustain the series through well over a hundred books. I love old school pulp SF and fantasy and have nurtured the ability to smile through “bad” writing as long as the story is fun.

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    I’ll admit to a bit of a struggle with Perry Rhodan, but that’s a story for a different day.

    In any case, as I’ve done with another long running series I’m oh so slowly working my way through (Doc Savage) I’ve used the Perry Rhodan books as examples of what not to do in terms of the writing, and alas, here we go again with that.

    Invasion from Space, like all the earlier Perry Rhodan books, actually contains two separate novellas: Invasion from Space, and Base on Venus. The offending passages are from the latter work.

    Before Perry and his intrepid crew travel to Venus they make a stop at the Moon to see if they can salvage more high tech equipment from the crashed alien starship that kicked off the first book. The Arkonides are an ancient and dying species of technologically advanced aliens, and Perry has befriended two of them (though really only one is a friend at this point). Perry has used this technology to basically seize control of the world—also a story for another day.

    Anyway, Perry does have some Earthbound enemies, but in the previous story he’s been battling the evil alien Mind Snatchers, who take over people’s minds to put their nefarious schemes in motion. Having dealt with that threat in Invasion from Space, Perry is now free to expand his mini empire to Venus.

    Okay then, so Perry and a small crew are aboard his spaceship and prepare to land on the Moon when they spot another ship, one they don’t recognize—really still just a blip on their radar. Assuming the worst, they track the “alien” ship and prepare to defend themselves. Of course, that ship fires on Perry and they retaliate, causing the alien ship to crash on the surface of the Moon. It’s only then, as they’re landing nearby, that they realize the ship they just downed was from one of the two major powers on Earth: the Western Alliance. These stories were a product of the Cold War era, so that’s the US, UK, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Of course. For a story written and published in what was then West Germany—these are the good guys.

    Perry rescues the crew of the Western Alliance ship but warns them against trying to salvage any Arkonide tech because Perry Rhodan is cooler and smarter and better than any of the world governments so it’s all his.

    Again, a story for another day.

    Okay, then so what’s so bad about this? There are alien enemies out there, we have a case of mistaken identity, but it’s more or less put right in the end. What do we learn from this as authors of genre fiction?

    The lesson comes in the impossibly clunky way in which this scene is presented. I can’t help thinking the authors felt they were being terribly clever in this, but it simply did not come off. Here’s how it plays out.

    First we’re in Perry’s POV, on his ship, preparing to land. They spot the unknown ship, track it, then it fires on them, reported by one of Perry’s trusted men, Reginald Bell:

    Bell’s eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. “But this can’t be! They are shooting at us!”

    That’s immediately followed by a scene break, after which is the offending sentence:

    A few hours earlier the following events had taken place.

    If you ever find yourself considering writing that sentence in your own works of fiction, please do whatever is necessary to stop yourself. Like, bite your hands or something.

    First, the question:

    Who is saying this? Who knows what happened a few hours earlier?

    This sentence has no point of view (POV) character attached to it. This is the author himself slipping in to report on what’s going on, not to show the story unfolding, but to explain how we got to this strange ship firing on our hero.

    News flash: No reader of genre fiction cares what the author thinks.

    At least not in the moment. Indeed, if readers care about who the author is at all it’s usually because that author has the ability to immerse them in a story, to make them feel along with the characters, and feel alive in that moment, in that time and place, as that POV character—however fantastical the fantasy world or SF future. These are the authors readers come back to, not because those authors intrude on their stories but because they know not to.

    What follows then is a perfectly workable and entertaining scene from the POV of the captain of the Western Alliance ship Greyhound, who thinks the blip on his radar is a Mind Snatcher ship and fires. This then plays through the Greyhound being hit by the unknown invader’s weapons and crashing. The crew scrambles into spacesuits and abandon ship on the dangerous wasteland of the lunar surface. But they still have operable missiles, so they fire at the still unknown ship.

    Another scene break and back to Perry a little time before the firing of the missiles—then they see the missiles but their forcefield deflects them and the story goes on from there.

    Besides the lack of POV in that one sentence, what’s wrong with this?

    By dislodging Perry and the Greyhound from each other in time, the authors bypass an opportunity for suspense.

    I’ve said before that suspense comes from an imbalance of information. We (your readers) know something the POV character doesn’t and so we see her walking into a trap thinking, Oh no! Don’t open that door! Because there was an earlier scene from the villain’s POV where we saw him boobytrap the door.

    The order in which these two things happen matters.

    If she opens the door and there’s an explosion, that’s a paragraph of terror. Maybe followed by a chapter of explanation as to how that door blew up. But if, in the previous chapter, we see the door being boobytrapped, we have two chapters of suspense. The latter tends to make for a more compelling read.

    The imbalance in information in the Perry Rhodan example is clear. Neither crew knows the true identity of the other, and there has been a previously established villain so a reason to be on alert. There is a reasonable motivation behind their willingness to shoot first and ask questions later—but instead the authors show them shooting first then asking questions earlier.

    If we knew before Bell reports that the unknown ship is firing on them that this unknown ship is crewed by the good guys (and the Western Alliance is always going to be better than those dang commies!) we know—as the scene plays out in real time—that there’s this lack of specific knowledge on both sides. As readers we’ll be on the edge of our seats hoping they won’t blow each other up before realizing they’re (ostensibly) on the same side, and anyway neither of them are evil Mind Snatchers.

    Instead, we get a short bit of Perry not knowing who they are, then a long passage from these new characters’ POV, then the resolution of that, all in large clumps, disconnected in time.

    If, instead, the authors switched back and forth between those two POVs—and a scene break is all you need to indicate that—we’d be seeing the thinking behind what both sides are doing, and cringing through their rash decisions in real time.

    This is the definition of a story: characters in conflict.

    And sometimes that conflict is based on mistaken identity—but it’s still conflict. And immersive writing means this conflict is happening right now, with immediate consequences to immediate decisions. Going back to “a few hours earlier” to report on the fact that “the following events had taken place,” explicitly removes immediacy from three scenes.

    So then this week’s lesson: Never remove the immediacy from any scene.

    —Philip Athans

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    AM I THE CADILLAC LADY?

    My last retail “day job” was managing a record store in suburban Chicago. This would have been late 1994 or early 1995, before I got the job at TSR in September ’95. I had outgrown that job by then—and I mean really outgrown it—and most of that last stint in music retail was entirely forgettable. But this one customer has never left my consciousness, and that’s because I made a mental effort to fix her there.

    One weekday morning when the store was typically really dead an older woman wandered in. I guessed her to be maybe in her seventies, and I could immediately tell she was a fish out of water. Of course I approached her to ask if she needed any help and, relieved, she said she’d just bought a new car and wanted to “get some music for it.” She quickly added that she liked “the old timey stuff, like Tony Bennett.” Not at all surprised, I happily walked her over to the Easy Listening section and, it being 1994-5 asked the obligatory question: “Do you want CDs or cassettes?”

    The look that descended over her face almost made me gasp out loud. It was as if I’d asked her to compare Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to his Special Theory of Relativity, citing sources no older than three years, and only from peer-reviewed journals.

    Her answer: “Its a Cadillac.”

    Okay, now, again, this was 1994(ish) so at that point I still needed a specific answer. Not wanting to prolong the confusion I asked if she had the car with her and she did, so we walked outside and I looked at the dash and found a cassette player. Mystery solved, we walked back in and she happily picked out a few groovy easy listening tapes and went on her way smiling.

    God only knows if she figured out how to play them.

    But that interaction left a deep impression on me. In that moment, right after she left the store, I told myself:

    Never be that lady.

    And not because she was a bad person—she was super nice, actually—but because, at least I felt then as a young and vibrant thirty-year-old, that she had chosen to be left behind. She didn’t have to be some kind—any kind—of audiophile or tech first adopter, but I felt as though she should at least have had a general working knowledge of the world around her. CDs and cassettes were not today’s disruptive new technology. They had both been in operation for a long time. I really felt she should have known at least which format her fancy new car required.

    So I made the promise to myself that no matter how long I lived, and no matter how the technological landscape changed around me, I would at the very least know the difference between a CD and a cassette.

    And you know what? I’ve kept that moment in mind lo these thirty and more years, and indeed I have not been left behind. You’re reading me on the internet right now. I’ve rolled along with social media, streaming television, upgrading computers and phones along the way. I know what an app is. I know I have an iPhone and how that’s different from an Android phone. I’m not on TikTok or Instagram but I know what they are. I know the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo and have chosen the latter. Though I don’t use every single new thing, I live in the present moment.

    And then we get to AI.

    Because that new technology attacked me directly by going after writing and editing, by going after artists, my shields went up and I will have none of it. And now, because of that, every instance of those two initials makes my skin crawl and I’m ready to defend myself. The fact that my son graduated with a degree in computer science and works in a super market because the once massively job-rich Seattle area tech scene has been laying people off since the end of the pandemic, which coincided with his graduation… well, that doesn’t help. My daughter is currently unemployed because her career looks to be on the AI chopping block, too.

    I understand what things like ChatGPT and Copilot are and what they tell us they’re supposed to do, and how it’s a good thing, but being aware of the technology means I’m also aware of the death toll ChatGPT is now dragging behind it. I’m seeing Amazon flooded with AI generated “books” that are doing enormous damage to the already unfairly negative reputation of indie publishing. And I’m also keenly aware of the abusive relationship I’m now trapped in with Amazon. How do I sell my books without them, even if neither of those books are actually selling very many copies? I’ve gotten used to just clicking on the app and things I need appear in a day or two like magic… though very few of the things I order arrive in good condition or are made with the tiniest eye on quality, so…

    And then, because of the obvious and undisguised evil of Jeff Bezos, am I supposed to get a full list of Amazon Web Services’ clients then boycott them too? That would be—trust me—a lot of companies big and small. I just said I’ve been keeping up with technology, and in fact my livelihood now depends on being online. I can’t just find a cabin somewhere and live off the land.

    I don’t know what to do… and I can feel myself fading into depression even as I write this.

    I don’t think I’m the old lady with the Cadillac when it comes to AI. It’s attacking human creativity, it’s stealing intellectual property, and it’s pushing skilled white collar workers out of the workforce literally tens of thousands at a go. And it is infected with racism, conspiracy stories, pseudoscience, propaganda…

    But then we still keep hearing things like, “Oh, no, there might be growing pains, but this is a miracle. It will take away all the little tasks that keep you from…”

    Doing what?

    Making art that AI has completely devalued?

    Working at my non-existent job?

    I know the difference between a CD and cassette, and I know the difference between a figurative killer app and a literal killer app.

    Or am I just an old fart who’s been left behind by a world that not only doesn’t give a shit about old farts—and that’s been true of America for at least fifty years—but doesn’t give a shit about anybody.

    I don’t know, man, point me to the punk rock section of Spotify and leave me there to cry while I try to get it to play “California Über Alles” in my Ford Fiesta.

    Does that have Spotify?

    —Philip Athans

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    Please help Jeff Bezos recover from his bad investment in the Washington Post by buying this book…

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