THE GOOD FAIRIES OF
NEW YORK
by Martin Millar

Soft Skull Press, $13.95

ISBN: 1933368365

Whether you call it evolution or devolution, SF publishing has changed rather radically from what it was, say, a decade ago. Most of the changes have been negative in terms of accessibility to potential readers and income to writers. However, perhaps there will turn out to be a small improvement or two in terms of literary freedom as the center of gravity, to coin an entirely paradoxical metaphor, moves to the fringes.

For, among other things, more of the most interesting fiction in the extended genre than not seems to be found, at least by those able to find it, in the lists of the so-called small presses, and in the list of a publisher like Pyr, which seems to straddle, or perhaps in the end will erase, the distinction between such lists and the so-called major SF lines.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose, as Bob Dylan had it. And when you’re forced into, or choose, small press publication over the SF lines of the major corporate conglomerates, where it may not be a question of nothing to lose, but no realistic hope of a large enough readership to garner significant economic advantage, there may be something to gain in terms of literary freedom. Writers like Liz Williams, Martin Millar, and Carol Emshwiller may be rather invisible now, but they sure do have secrets left to reveal.

Here are three novels published by three different small presses—Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York, published by Soft Skull Books, Emshwiller’s The Secret City, published by Tachyon Press, Williams’ The Demon and the City, published by Night Shade Books. All of which certainly have sufficient literary merit to have been published by the so-called major SF lines if that were still their determinative criterion, none of which have been, and probably only one of which could have been marginally commercially viable in their bottom-line terms.

Which is to say that without the small presses none of them would have been published at all, and the writers, who would have had to have been smoking some really strong stuff to believe that they would be, might not even have written them in the first place. And things of absolute literary value, whatever that may mean these days, would have been lost.

After all, how many copies of a novel called The Good Fairies of New York could a bottom-line oriented SF line hope to distribute and to where? Well, there’s gay high fantasy fandom, a sales manager who hadn’t read the book might tell the editor mournfully after three martinis in the bar and a long snort in the powder room at a Worldcon. We might sell a couple thousand copies there.

But even that would be very wrong.

For one thing, Millar’s fairies are no more homosexual as a group than a general cross-section of humanity, and for another they are literally, not metaphorically or pejoratively, fairies—little people from the British Isles, and as it turns out from China and Africa and Italy too, among other places, either long term denizens of their more or less ethnically assorted immigrant ghettos in Manhattan, or plunked down in the Big Apple from the Auld Sod by adventure or misadventure.

Nor are Millar’s fairies all that good by the conventional moral standards of the conventional genre in which such fey flying personages are generally found. A good many of them are drunks, most of them are not above petty thefts and swindles—not to mention angry musical rivalries—and two of them are would-be punk rockers and obsessive fans of the New York Dolls and the Ramones.

Most of the action takes place in the more or less contemporary East Village, with side trips to Central Park, Harlem, Little Italy, and Chinatown, for some converse with talking animals and faerie ethnic gang warfare.

And speaking of warfare, one of the reasons some of the fairies find themselves refugees in New York has to do with a guerilla war among the fairies back in Britain, between the libertarian more or less hippie traditionalists and a fairy king and his evil Iago who have established a modern corporate capitalist fairy fascist state and who eventually invade New York fairyland with fairy mercenaries from Ireland.

Oh yes, there are three human protagonists mixed up with the doings of the fairies; a Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side and a fat slob obsessed with TV porn channels who find fairies crashing in their pads, and a crazed bag lady who believes she is a general in an ancient Persian army.

As you have perhaps surmised, The Good Fairies of New York fits not at all into an existing commercial genre, nor could any spinmeister conceivably create one to contain it. Nor does it even merely cross or break genre boundaries; it’s written as if Martin Millar was entirely ignorant of such apparatus, or if he wasn’t, that he just didn’t give a shit.

And the style in which Millar has written the novel, the angle or angles of attack, even the moral slants, fit no easy expectations, conventional consistency or consistent literary conventions. This is a fantasy novel and a piece of “street fiction,” a comedy and a political novel in fairly angry earnest, full of the lore of British, Scottish, and English folk music and hardcore punk.

The Good Fairies of New York deliberately defies and blows riffs on any number of expectations of any number of genres, from the title on in; a defiantly but rather gently humorous piss-take on them.

You either like this sort of thing—or rather this novel, since there is really no sort of thing that The Good Fairies of New York is one of—or you don’t. Or some aspects please you greatly while others make you groan, depending on your individual constellation of literary tastes. The point is that this is a very individual novel, a boutique novel, if you will, highly unlikely to appeal to a mass audience of McFantasy fans or those who buy their reading matter in literary Wal-Marts.

Can there be a place for such a novel in a commercial SF line? Meaning an imprint of one of the handful of corporate conglomerates that dominate the racks in the chains? The major bookstore chains whose orders dominate their distribution expectations, which control their pro-spective print runs, which determine unit cost and whether there is any hope of turning a profit?

Which determine their decision as to whether to buy a novel or not, irrespective of literary quality?

Crank something like The Good Fairies of New York through this accounting software and the answer comes up No Way. Leaving it to the small press, whose commercial expectations are modest, whose advances are therefore minuscule, to buy according to taste and instinct, as was the industry norm in days of yore, throw a hail mary from inside the twenty-yard line, and hope for the best.

Liz Williams’ The Demon and the City, on the other hand, is something that might have been publishable in a major commercial SF line, and all the more so since Williams has been published in two of them, were it not the second novel in the Detective Inspector Chen series, the first of which was also published by Night Shade Books, with a third announced as forthcoming in the “Other Books by Liz Williams” page.

I ordinarily loathe this sort of thing, and more or less give an automatic bypass to the second volume in a series I’ve never heard of that promises to be open-ended, by a writer I’ve never heard of, and whose first volume I haven’t read.

However. . . .

However, the publisher’s description gave the fictional locale as “Singapore Three,” whatever that might be. I had fairly recently been in Singapore itself, where my interest in researching a possible novel, or, heaven help me, a series of novels, about the incredible but true exploits of the fifteenth century Chinese admiral Zhen He was rekindled. I am generally fascinated by things Chinese, so despite all of the above, I gave The Demon and the City a more careful look.

And was hooked.

What hooked me was not so much the story line, which, being that of a detective novel, is at least nominally that of a murder mystery, but the characters, the terrific job of world-building that Williams has done, and beyond that, the world she has built.

The Inspector Chen after whom the series is named is mostly on vacation during The Demon and the City, and the most prominent, if hardly the only, viewpoint character is his assistant cop, Zhu Irzh, a demon on loan to the Singapore Three police force from Hell.

The McGuffin is, of course, a murder, not of a particularly prominent personage, but of a somewhat demonic nature, which casts suspicion on Zhu himself even while he is investigating it. The case leads him deeper and deeper into the cyber, political, and religious machinations and struggles for dominance and/or the very continued existence of Singapore Three among humans, the gods and goddesses of more than one Heaven, and the forces of various factions of Hell, so complex and arcane that I will not even bother to make a futile attempt at a plot summary.

Where or when Singapore Three is or whatever happened to Singapore Two and Singapore One is never gone into in The Demon and the City. For all I know it might or might not be explained in Snake Agent, apparently the first Detective Chen novel, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. And the fact that it doesn’t matter, and that The Demon and the City would and does work quite well without any reference at all to anything outside itself and its Singapore Three is part of the charm of the novel—a central part, at least for me, and I would imagine to most readers who come to it cold.

Williams’s Singapore Three and the heavenly, hellish, and cyber realms that surround it and interpenetrate it are a self-contained literary universe unto themselves. And an exceedingly complex and multi-layered one.

On a horizontal level, Singapore Three is a technologically and, particularly netwise, advanced version of the Singapore in our continuum, and like our Singapore it is an interpenetrating mélange of Chinese, Malay Muslim, and Hindu Indian populaces and subcultures.

On a vertical level, various celestial beings and hellish demons not only mingle with the human population but, like Zhu, can hold jobs, have their own bars and hangouts, and can be captains of industry.

And it’s even more complex than that. In the literary universe of Singapore Three, not only are gods and demons quotidianly real, not only do heaven and hell do economic and political monkey business with the human level, it’s really heavens and hells in the plural, for every pantheon—traditional Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, whatever—is a reality that can interact with any other reality.

And however uncomfortable I may feel blowing my own horn in this regard, here it’s necessary to say that I am rather conversant with these Eastern religions, mystical systems, cultures, and so forth, so that I can tell you that Liz Williams does a wonderful job of making all of it real down to the plethora of small telling details, and then extrapolating from it.

Here then is an open-ended series that could go on successfully endlessly, with each novel standing on its own and easily enjoyable by readers not conversant with what has gone before, because all that connects the episodes is not back story but the detective, in this case Chen, and the milieu in which he operates. Indeed, in The Demon and the City, “Detective Inspector Chen novel” or not, Zhu is the main character, and Chen does not even appear until late in the novel. So it is Singapore Three which is really the essential connective element.

THE SECRET CITY
by Carol Emshwiller

Tachyon, $14.95

So here we have, like The Demon and the City, an unusually well-written and interesting episode in a detective novel series in terms of form and protagonist, with a strong fantasy element. Another cross-genre novel, but one that found a home not in small press publication, but in a commercial SF imprint without a hint of SF packaging.

Why No Dominion and not The Demon and the City? And give that Char-lie Huston has published “straight” hard-boiled detective novels under the Ballantine imprint, why in the Del Rey SF line where he is a newcomer? Because a hard-boiled vampire detective was deemed to have violated the parameters of the detective novel genre, whereas a vampire protagonist made it ipso facto “SF”? And if so, why package a Del Rey book as “non-SF”? Does not seem to compute.

Thus the ins and outs and ups and downs of major commercial SF publishing marketing strategies versus small press. But there is a third path, taken by all too many so-called “literary” writers, but very few writers of speculative fiction—the path that winds through the groves of academe, grants, endowments, teaching gigs and so forth, and into small press or academic press publication. Commercial seppuku in terms of the economics of publishing, maybe, but a path that does lead more or less to the freedom to write whatever you damn well please if you know how to play that game.

Carol Emshwiller is one of the few writers of speculative fiction who has more or less successfully followed this path through a long, literarily distinguished, but popularly not all that visible, career. The “Works by Carol Emshwiller” in the front of The Secret City says it all. Six novels and five short story collections are listed, but they are outnumbered by thirteen assorted awards, fellowships, and grants, some of them familiar genre awards, but more of them not.

Now, a half century after her first publication, Tachyon Press has published The Secret City, a new novel that I at least would contend is her chef d’oeuvre, a kind of small-scale work that is damn near perfect, and the sort of thing that just about has to be in order to work. Emshwiller has always been more of a short story writer than a novelist, and The Secret City, though unequivocally a full scale novel in terms of length and form, relies for its successful effect on the control and precision that she has developed and relied upon in her long career as a writer of short speculative fiction.

Decades ago, after reading Bug Jack Barron or The Iron Dream or something of mine like that, Thomas Disch said to me something like “That’s good stuff, but don’t you ever deliberately try for an accumulation of small effects?”

I answered with a rather bemused no, not really getting it, but now, though that’s still not my sort of thing, at least I understand it, thanks in no small part to a novel like The Secret City. The set-up here is that an alien tour group got stranded on Earth a generation ago. Some of them chose to blend in with the “lowly” natives in order to survive, cleverly, or at times not so cleverly, disguised as perpetual human tourists, down to the cameras and Hawaiian shirts, while others sequestered themselves in their Secret City deep in the high mountains, all of them yearning for, waiting for, hoping for, rescue and return to their “superior” planet and culture.

But that’s the first generation, and now—and Emshwiller sets the novel in our now—there’s a second generation, born on the Earth, raised on their elders’ tales of the home planet, longing for its wonders on the one hand, but skeptical on the other, and sometimes just wishing to integrate into human society more fully.

And then an alien rescue mission finally arrives. . . .

Okay, this sort of set-up is plenty of material for a wide-screen epic science fiction novel or even a trilogy, many of which have already been written. But that’s not at all what Carol Emshwiller has done.

The Secret City is unequivocally a novel by the length standards of the Nebula and the Hugo (and certainly deserves to be nominated for them), but not by very much. Literarily, one could make the argument that rather than being a short novel, it’s a very long novella, a dialectic that could go on far into many a night, and which I will mercifully refrain from getting too deeply into here.

There are two viewpoint characters and the whole novel is narrated by them in alternating first person segments.

The male is Lorpas, a young second generation alien with dim childhood memories of the Secret City, but brought up afterward within, or more precisely embedded in, human society. Taught to maintain his distance, he has lived more or less as an occasional day laborer, bum, and petty thief.

The female is Allush, a young second generation alien whose parents took her in the reverse direction, from an earlier childhood among humans to the Secret City, which, far from being an alien super metropolis or Shangri-La, is a small, weird, carefully overgrown, culturally isolated and technologically primitive village. She alternates between the approved longing for rescue and return to the home planet and the unapproved desire to return to the land of TV, cars, human technology and society, a life she has known firsthand and remembers as better than the life she’s living now.

Lorpas gets in trouble with the law, and decides his only recourse is to retreat to the Secret City, along the way spending time working as a cowboy for a rancher and his teenage daughter, and eventually reaching the Secret City and meeting Allush. They begin to fall in love, there’s a violent rival for her affections in the Secret City, they decide to descend together to the human realm. At which point, an alien rescue expedition finally arrives, snatches Allush, and returns home. But one of the rescuers gets left behind, and is taken by Lorpas back to the ranch, while Allush has bewildering experiences on the alien home world, and then—

But that’s enough plot summary, the point here being to demonstrate that this is not your usual first contact, aliens among us, hugger-mugger, or action-adventure story. There are only two central characters, and really only four other important ones. Most of the action takes place in small towns and countryside where the Rockies meet the Great Plains, with Allush’s relatively brief side-trip to the alien home world, which she herself finds as weird as does the reader, and probably more distasteful.

The Secret City is secondarily a kind of more or less conventional love story, and primarily a story of complexly conflicting identities, and their resulting levels of alienation.

Both Lorpas and Allush have been indoctrinated to see the alien world they’ve never known as superior to Earth and themselves as superior to the humans from whom they’re supposed to remain aloof, so they’re alienated from the planet of their birth. But since they’ve never known the alien homeworld at all, and the only bit of alien culture they’ve had any contact with is the pathetic pale shadow of the Secret City, they’re alienated, in effect, from being alien too.

Emshwiller chooses to set this story mostly in rural areas, small towns, or wilderness, and with this quite narrow and precise focus on character, and thereby has written maybe the most convincing novel of what it would really be like to be an alien among us. Alienated. Touchingly and complexly so.

In a rather cynical way, the literary nature of The Secret City argues for it as a long novella rather than a short novel in commercial genre terms—something that would easily find acceptance in a magazine such as the one you are now reading or its remaining small handful of comrades, or in an original SF anthology—but which as a novel can these days only find a home in the genre small press or its academic literary kin. [Editor’s Note: A short story about Lorpas was originally published in Asimov’s January 2006 issue.]

But what, you may well ask, as I certainly am, is a novel like Sagramanda, by a writer with the credits of Alan Dean Foster, doing being published by even a more or less flagship genre small press like Pyr? Foster has hit the national best-seller lists any number of times with Star Wars novelizations, and novelizations of all three films in the Alien series, among others, and has had lesser but not commercially negligible success with SF novel series of his own. And Sagramanda is by far the best thing he’s written thus far, a chef d’oeuvre for sure, and what’s more, colorful, exotic, and reasonably action-packed, too.

The Sagramanda of the future is an enormous and enormously overpopulated city of some hundred million people in a relatively near-future India—not an actual Indian city of today extrapolated into the future, but a made-up city, a kind of composite, say, of Calcutta, Mumbai, and Bangalore juiced up with high tech methedrene and the results of an ongoing population explosion.

Taneer is a scientist who’s stolen a recording of some designer DNA code from a major corporation, which, for reasons not revealed until the very end of the novel and which I certainly will not reveal here, is worth billions. He is on the run from its agent, the mercenary corporate assassin Chal Schneemann, a half Indian who loathes the country, with his lover Depahli, an “untouchable.” The caste system, though long since illegal, still has social power, and Taneer, a higher-caste Hindu, is also being hunted by his father, who is determined to kill him for this disgrace to the family.

Sanjay Ghosh is a former dirt farmer from the countryside who’s made a modest success in the city as a tourist junk merchant, purveyor of some higher value legitimate stuff and contraband, and sometime fence and go-between for upscale dealers who gets involved with helping Taneer sell his goods for the commission of a lifetime. Jena Chalmetre is a French lunatic serial killer doing her stuff in what she conceives as the service of Kali. Kenshu Singh is a Chief Inspector out to get her before she becomes a media star. And there’s a tiger escaped from a nature preserve come to the big city who’s learned that its humans are premier prey.

All these threads start separately and stepwise weave together to come to a quite satisfying plot, theme, and character apotheosis at the very end, and along the way Foster paints a very detailed, sensorily vivid, culturally and technologically convincing, portrait of his extrapolated India via characters who come alive with psychological depth.

What more can you ask of a science fiction novel?

So what the hell happened?

Not to put down Pyr, which has published much worthy stuff, but given Alan Dean Foster’s track record, why wasn’t Sagramanda the coveted object of a hot auction to the highest bidder?

I can think of only two possible answers, one politically reprehensible and ominous, and the other in its literary way just as bad or even worse

Pyr was also the American publisher of River of Gods, Ian McDonald’s truly great novel set in a future India. Which begins to lead to the unsettling conjecture that major American science fiction publishers have come to believe that science fiction novels set in a non-American extrapolated future with non-American lead characters—and particularly Third World lead characters in a Third World county like India become high tech and at the very least co-dominant—will not appeal to a sufficiently large American readership to be commercially viable.

Bad enough if editors, publishers, marketers, and bean counters believe this is so. Truly horrible on a political and cultural level if they are right.

Be that as it may, on a literary level, or more precisely where commerce and literary values collide in a writer’s career, there would seem to be some grim lessons here.

When film and television show novelizations began to invade the SF racks, first written by SF writers for light advances and minimal royalties or none at all, the pitch made by editors and publishers to those writers was that this would be a way to build readership—later to be known as “fan base”—for their own freestanding more heartfelt personal work.

Later, as these media novelizations not only became dominant, but, thanks to the Star Trek and Star Wars media franchises and what followed, landed tie-in novelization writers like Kevin Anderson and Alan Dean Foster on the national overall best-seller lists, big money became involved, if not what the writers would garner from selling the same number of copies of a novel where the lion’s share wasn’t going to the media franchise.

Very few, if any, SF writers seemed to benefit more from this more than Alan Dean Foster. Mucho dinero from those media tie-in novelizations and the building of sufficient commercial fan base for his own self-created SF novel series, and perhaps his free-standing one-offs, too. Foster has racked up great sales figures for the media novelizations, which would seem to have led to good numbers for his own personal science fiction and particularly for the series that built fan base from one novel to the next. Not in the same league as the novelizations, of course, but quite commercially viable.

But now it would seem that, with Sagramanda, his commercial success in the BookScan numbers has revealed its paradoxical dark side, namely the anti-literary trap of “order to net.”

The major bookstore chains, all two of them, which dominate retail sales, have software that tells them exactly what a writer’s last book sold, and that’s what they order of the next one, plus maybe 10 percent if the writer’s numbers have been rising, minus 10 percent if they are not. And since only a handful of human buyers are responsible for the annual ordering of tens of thousands of titles, this is pretty much an automated process.

What the chains order in turn determines the publisher’s print run and therefore initial distribution, which pretty much determines sales, and entirely determines unit cost, which determines whether a title has a chance of being profitable or not, which determines whether or not it will be bought in the first place, since BookScan, a subsidiary of the Nielsen TV rating outfit, can more or less tell them what the chains will order in advance by tracking what the author’s last book sold.

The self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-maintaining circle jerk.

Needless to say, this is extremely detrimental to the careers of mid-list writers with diminishing BookScan numbers, but Sagramanda is an example of what it can do to a commercially quite successful writer like Alan Dean Foster.

Because this is the way the publishing business now works, a writer like Foster is taking a big risk by writing a more literarily adventurous novel than what has put up the big numbers—even if it turns out to be his masterpiece and still commercially viable, too, but with a diminished natural audience—because careerwise he cannot afford to have the numbers for one novel drop very hard. Neither can his commercial publisher lest the orders for the one after that take a plunge no matter how much larger a readership for it might be out there.

We are not talking about literary judgment here, we are talking about mindless computerized number-crunching. If Sagramanda were to sell significantly less than previous Alan Dean Foster product, the orders for his next novel—even were it a return to the more time-tested stuff—would go down, and his major commercial publisher would not want that, and so would not want Sagramanda.

I suspect that Foster has been around long enough to have enough publishing street savvy to know this up front, and therefore must have felt a strong literary and perhaps even political commitment to write Sagramanda come what may. For all I know, he or his agent might not have even tried to place the novel with a major SF line, but deliberately chose a smaller press as a kind of hopeful statement to the chain software that this was a sidebar that should not figure into the marketing numbers, as Sylvester Stallone chose to work for scale in Cop Land for much the same reason.

It is certainly a sorry commentary on the state of American publishing that such a strategy may have been necessary, but a positive commentary on Alan Dean Foster’s idealistic commitment to something greater than the commercial bottom line. And it should serve as a cautionary tale for writers against the very bad advice many writers were given in the past and are still given by cynical editors and media mavens today.

Contrary to what writers have been conned into believing, the readership that media tie-ins build is primarily a readership for more of the same, though it may give something of a boost to your other stuff. And the current nature of the biz then all but traps you into the continued production of the aforementioned more of the same, probably to the detriment of your literary development.

But while I’m castigating the publishing industry for this situation, truth-telling compels me to cast a stone at myself. I must confess that all the media novelization tie-ins that Foster wrote, as well as some of his rather sci-fi titled personal series novels, prejudiced me against his work as a critic and caused me to disregard him as a lightweight, more or less a commercial hack. For all I know, having paid no previous serious attention to his work, I may have been right.

But Sagramanda is certainly no lightweight novel and anyone reading it is not likely to ever consider Alan Dean Foster a lightweight novelist again, even if he should produce subsequent lightweight work in the future.

Mea culpa for that one.

But maybe not entirely.

My critical attention or lack thereof may not be the be-all or end-all of anything, but I find it just as hard to believe that there aren’t quite a few potential readers out there with a similar prejudgment.