SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about Magic Carpets, by Leslie What.
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Tribeless
Regular reader
Reged: Mar 15 2004
Posts: 26
Loc: New Zealand
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mmm. Far be it from me to criticise, which means I'm going to criticise, but I thought Strange Horizons was about show casing new works (note, not necessarily new authors, but new work). I haven't read this story yet, but note that it is a reprint of a 1995 Realms of Fantasy short story.
What gives?
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PickyBastard
New user
Reged: Jul 18 2004
Posts: 21
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I thought this was a lovely story. I also thought this was the perfectly wrong market for it. There is arguably no speculative element in it whatsoever (perhaps the ending, but perhaps not).
As a story, I thought it was mostly well-constructed. I rather liked reading it. It wasn't unlike anything I've ever read before, however, as the concept has been done. Really, the only thing that differentiates this story from the legions of others like it is the author's style in expressing the POV character's thought and analysis of what was happening -- but then, that can really only take you so far.
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Lodestone
New user
Reged: Jul 21 2004
Posts: 13
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Yup, I'm with what you've said. Nicely executed, but still a rather hackneyed concept; and this is a mysterious market for it.
Here's an interesting thing: Pammy corresponds very closely to a character in John Grisham's A Painted House (and I'm not to sure of this, but I think that that character was called Tammy!), and the boy that she runs away with also happens to be Mexican. I'm not suggesting plagiarism (on Grisham's part, as his was published after this, I believe), of course, but it's a nice example of parallel evolution of stories: of the way certain ideas become imprinted in social consciousness.
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Susan Marie Groppi
Editor-in-Chief, Fiction Editor
Reged: Jun 04 2003
Posts: 52
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Tribeless-- this story appears as part of an Author Focus issue on Leslie What. We've been doing Author Focus issues every three months (more or less) since the magazine's launch in 2000, and the Author Focus always includes a fiction reprint.
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 151
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Some further information:
As Susan noted, we do three Author Focus issues a year, in which we look at the work of a particular author and publish a reprint story by that author.
We've also published one non-AF reprint, and we expect to publish more in the future, perhaps two or three a year. When choosing reprints to publish, we try to select stories that are not widely known or widely reprinted, and that aren't currently in print, and that we'd like to bring to the attention of our readers; in other words, they're ideally stories that will be new to most of our audience.
For a list of all the reprints we've published so far, see our archives, though some of the stories are no longer available in the archives.
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 151
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The question of what constitutes a speculative element is a slippery one, and different people draw the line in different places. The following is not meant to suggest that you must agree with me about where to draw that line, certainly; just some thoughts and opinions sparked by your comment.
In "Magic Carpets," I felt that there were fairly definite speculative elements. One such, for example, is the neighbor's reconstruction of the broken crystal glass; subtle, but definitely magical. It's somewhat uncertain whether some of the other speculative-like elements are literal or metaphorical, or perhaps both, but this story seems to me to fit pretty clearly into the category of speculative fiction. Shawna McCarthy seems to have felt that way about it as well, since she published it originally in Realms of Fantasy.
As a lifelong reader of sf, I sometimes do feel a little betrayed when I read a story in a speculative fiction magazine that doesn't have any overt speculative elements. But sometimes there are factors other than speculative elements that may qualify a given work as belonging to the genre. See my 2001 editorial Where Does Genre Come From? for a look at some such factors.
One such factor may be what Ellen Datlow has called "speculative sensibilities"; there are stories that feel like speculative fiction, or that use sf genre conventions and approaches, even though they don't contain overt speculative elements. There's been a great deal of argument in other forums about whether such sensibilities are sufficient to qualify a story as sf. Such magazines as Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and SCI FICTION have all published stories in the past few years that had no definite speculative element at all, and there's been argument about all of those. There was an extremely long and rather vituperative debate about one of those stories, Karen Joy Fowler's "What I Didn't See," on the Tangent Online newsgroup a while back; the story went on to win a Nebula award. Another arguably non-speculative story, Andy Duncan's "The Chief Designer," was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo.
And although we at SH generally come down on the side of publishing only work that contains definite speculative elements, sometimes we do stretch the boundaries. We've published at least a couple of stories that arguably have no such elements, and we've got another story coming up in the next couple months that definitely has no speculative elements at all. But we liked it enough to publish it anyway, and we hope you'll like it too.
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Jeff Connors
Unregistered
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Jed, I think sometimes we complain because we care so much about SH. We don't want to see it go the way of so many others, putting out mush and then folding. You have to agree with me on this, that to stand out you've got to be different. I'd like to comment on Magic Carpets, but to be perfectly honest, and if I lied now I'd have no integrity, I found it too boring to finish. That doesn't happen often, because I like most stories I read in SH. This one, however, I just couldn't finish it. The only reason I can give for this is that something must be lacking in the story, as I did not feel compelled to find out what happened next, and the author's style wasn't sufficient to keep me interested either. Like those above, I didn't feel I was reading anything new, exciting or original, and so I simply stopped reading it. Sorry I can't give you a more positive response or be more specific about any element of the story. I can only suggest you steer well clear of reprints in future, especially ones so old and hackneyed in plot/theme as this.
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Tribeless
Regular reader
Reged: Mar 15 2004
Posts: 26
Loc: New Zealand
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Thank you for your explanation of why the story was published Susan: being a relatively new reader I was not aware of this policy.
Jed, your comments on what constitutes speculative fiction were interesting. What about the notion of 'slipstream'. Even after an Internet search I'm still confused about what this means as a genre? Although I suspect its just a notion for saying that really, anything goes, so long as it has a speculative element (or sensibility vis a vis Datlow).
Still have not read this story (next two weeks on holiday so I'm transferring it to my PPC to read away). Jeff has got my interest up though :) I've been finding the stories appearing in SH of very high calibre on the whole, despite the fact that personal preferences will always mean some stories work or resonate better than others.
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PickyBastard
New user
Reged: Jul 18 2004
Posts: 21
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I just assumed, while reading it, that any borderline speculative elements were simply the interpretation of a very young/naive child. The replacement of the glass could be anything, really. If the lady really was a witch, there was no other evidence of it. The ending could have been a child's daydream or wish. Who knows!
I do respect your prerogative to publish whatever you want, but frankly -- these types of stories are why I read Atlantic and Harpers, etc.
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