What is it about a story that catches my attention and convinces me to continue reading? What is it about the opening of a story that tells me I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing and where they are going and that there’s a good chance I’m going to enjoy joining them on their literary journey? Several times a month, I sit down to read through dozens and dozens of stories. These tales sit in large stacks on my office bookcase and they represent the unknown. Some of these stories are going to blow me away, but the trick is always to find those tales. The physical work of producing Asimov’s ensures that there is never enough time to give each story submission the attention it deserves. Yet, from these stacks, with clockwork regularity, will come the material that will constitute upcoming issues of the magazine.
Over the years, other editors and I have given writers the glib advice that they must grab us by the throat with the first paragraph or all is lost. The truth is that because I have so much material to read, a story must get my attention early and manage to hold onto it, or I’ll put the manuscript down and proceed to the next one on the pile. While passing this information along was meant to be helpful, it has also meant that I’ve seen an overabundance of stories that start off with exploding spaceships and then dump me into the pandemonium that ensues. Of course, I have nothing against stories about stricken spaceships—“Marooned off Vesta,” Isaac Asimov’s first published story, continues to hold a warm place in my memory, and I loved Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Readers’ Award-winning novella “Diving Into the Wreck”—but our magazine can’t survive on one type of story alone.
I know I see some of these stories because I’ve indicated that a story has to be exciting to keep me reading, and there are few situations dicier than an accident in space. Still, even exploding spaceship stories can become predictable. Pondering this conundrum has led me to the realization that it’s not just excitement that I’m after when I’m perusing the first few paragraphs of a new story. Last spring I was chatting with the highly respected author Barry N. Malzberg, who has been an editor and a literary agent as well, and we both concluded that in addition to looking for an intriguing opening, the editor is looking for a sense that the writer is in total control of his or her material and has a sure hand on where the story is going. While not all of these stories will be right for me, this confidence is a characteristic of the stories that I do publish.
To improve my own understanding of what works for me, I thought I’d take a look at the openings of a couple of the stories that have leapt up and grabbed my esophagus. One such tale, “To the East, a Bright Star” by James Maxey, appeared in the same issue as Kris Rusch’s aforementioned story. James’s writing was completely unknown to me when I read the following:
There was a shark in the kitchen. The shark wasn’t huge, maybe four feet long, gliding across the linoleum toward the refrigerator. Tony stood motionless in the knee-deep water of the dining room. The Wolfman said that the only sharks that came this far in were bull sharks, which could live in either salt or fresh water, and were highly aggressive. Tony leaned forward cautiously and shut the door to the kitchen. He had known the exact time and date of his death for most of his adult life. With only hours to go, he wasn’t about to let the shark do something ironic.
Clearly a shark in the kitchen is an unusual situation. It may even be a life-threatening one, but the author has also managed to show us that something even more dire is lurking in the pages ahead—and he does so with a bit of wit as well. One has to read further to figure out what the clues mean, but these are the sort of cues that make me want to turn the page and find out what’s in store.
In this very issue we have a couple of stories by brand new Asimov’s authors. Derek Künsken’s tale of life “Beneath Sunlit Shallows” begins with the following:
Vincent dreamed again that he swam behind a child-like Merced, out of the cold dark, rising toward an unknown sun. He didn’t see the sun, which could only penetrate two hundred meters of water. He wanted, the way one does in dreams, to see it, ignoring the fact that if he saw even its depth-attenuated blue light, he would already be dead.
These lines immediately introduce me to a character with a human name who seems to be in a nonhuman situation. Why is he under water? Why would he be dead if he saw the sun? Looking for the answer to this question definitely convinced me to plunge into the rest of Derek’s story.
Felicity Shoulders’ “Burgerdroid” begins more quietly:
“I don’t want to go!” Henry said, pushing his lunchbox out of sight behind the sofa to gain time.
“I don’t want to go either. But I am subject to the tyranny of capitalism, and you are subject to the tyranny of me.” I fished out the lunchbox and closed Henry’s fingers over the handle.
“It isn’t fair,” Henry said. “Other people have weekends on Saturday.”
“Of course it’s not fair. That’s why it’s called ‘tyranny.’ ”
This beginning is not as exciting as an exploding spaceship, but it does start off with a fascinating voice. The exchange between mother and child rings true, and the dialog made me want to find out more about this “tyranny.”
This editorial is too short to fully resolve what it is that makes a story work for me, but I hope these snippets have provided a little insight into what it takes to grab my attention. Why these tales kept me reading after their initial assault on my tender throat is another story. Perhaps it is a tale best resolved by looking for the rest of these latter two stories (which begin on p. 77 and p. 49) and seeing for yourself.
