Friday short fiction #14: the ghost of Jim Theis

 

Robert Crumb  Despair  1971
The article 'Bad Writing Doesn't Matter Anymore' at Self-Publishing Review makes quite a few provocative points (eg. "readers don't care"). The game at SF conventions used to be to see how far you could get into reading aloud Jim Theis's The Eye of Argon before you cracked up laughing, but to achieve that degree of notoriety something usually has to be deemed 'so bad it's good', which is still as subjective a term as any other. I wouldn't waste anyone's time linking to things that are in my opinion just plain awful and an abuse of pixels, but the two more recent items below are thing's I've come across this week that I found myself smirking over and enjoying simply because they feel tailored (okay, one is definitely tailored) to fit the above description. Perhaps it's time to restart that convention game.

Paula Smith, 'A Trekkie's Tale'  (THE MENAGERIE, 1974)
The very short Star Trek fanfic that coined the now widely used literary term 'Mary Sue', most recently applied to Stieg Larsson's character Mikael Blomkvist. But not all Mary Sues are bad: see Roger Zelazny below.

Chris Worth, 'The Great Majoon'  (SCRIBD, 10 JANUARY 2011)
A lot of the self-posted original fiction up at Scribd is simply not a good use of anyone's time, but I read this with a dawning sense of reading something 'other'. Yes it's dreadful, but you're also meant to laugh at it. And Mr. Worth, bless him, writes science fiction that's even more despairing.

Any chapter from Travis Tea's Atlanta Nights  (LULU, 2010)
The full story behind Atlanta Nights can be found here, but it involved quite a few SFWA members penning an 'unpublishable' mainstream book as a sting on the "traditional publisher"/vanity press PublishAmerica. I'm a quarter of the way into this and as a nightly exercise in literary masochism I'm enjoying it immensely (I particularly recommend Chapter 7). There's also a project under way at Kickstarter, which I'm backing, to get the whole Atlanta Nights thing turned into a movie. I really hope they make their target.

Favourite short story of the week: Roger Zelazny, 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes' (THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, NOVEMBER 1963)
Knowing already how much Zelazny grew to hate his protagonist Michael Gallinger because he was very much an idealised version of himself, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to put Gallinger through the Mary Sue Litmus Test. Result: a high-ish 45, but, frankly, so what – 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes' is a gorgeous story. It was ranked #6 among the best SF stories from 1929–1964, included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One and was gushed over by Theodore Sturgeon: "I feel safe in stating that it is one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever." It was certainly one of the more enriching things I read this week.