Teeny-Tiny Techno-Tactics
by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
Illustration by Laura Freas
I could barely see my desk beneath the manuscripts. There were about three dozen universes sitting on my desk—universes that I had no desire to visit—and I had to pick one of them and put it into production. I sighed heavily, took another gulp of coffee, and started to hack my way through the slush pile.
I quickly rejected a universe inhabited by talking cats who went on a magical quest to find an enchanted scratching-post. I eliminated a universe occupied by flying unicorns and singing dragons; the unicorns flew and the dragons sang, but nobody did very much. I obliterated a water-planet inhabited by telepathic lesbian dolphins. I rather spitefully nixed a universe which (its author informed me in a portentous cover letter) was Book One of a forthcoming trilogy. The author had written only Book One of the saga, and it consisted entirely of plot setups and character developments that were intended to whet my appetite for the impending sequels. No such luck.
Next came a science fiction novel that wasn’t really science fiction, but the author obviously thought it was science fiction because he had stuck the prefix “cyber-” on every noun in his novel. It was something about a cyberboy and his cyberdog who went on a cybertrip to… that’s as far as I got. Then came a load of sword-and-sorcery drivel from an author who evidently thought that her prose would sound exotic if she transposed all her nouns and adjectives. The book was about a Sorceress Enchanted who went on a Quest Perilous to a Fortress Invincible to fight a Wizard Malevolent. I gave her a Slip Rejection.
My assistant readers, as usual, were no help at all. Tucked inside the cardboard box with every manuscript was a typed report by whichever one of my underlings had done the first read-through before kicking the manuscript upstairs to me. I didn’t bother reading the reports; I knew from past experience that most of them boiled down to a four-page essay on the theme of “THIS STINKS.”
Adding to my agony was the memo I’d received this morning from our VP of production. I was trapped in the publishing world’s version of “We don’t want it good; we want it Tuesday.” One of the mass-market imprints in our glutcorp had missed a deadline. Our spring list was about to go to press with a gaping chest-wound where a new title should have been. The editorial board had decided to jump on me to pick up the slack for someone else’s lapse. They made their position painfully clear, we ve got a business to run here; we ship product on schedule, and we meet that schedule even if the product is hackwork. The editorial board gave me a direct order: my division had to acquire a novel by 5 P.M. today, no backchat. Get it into production and get the author under contract by the end of the week.
Some other time, I would have jumped at the chance to make one extra editorial acquisition above my usual quota. But right now, none of the slush pile manuscripts in my inventory deserved to see the light of day. I took another look among the driveclass="underline" I would be genuinely ashamed to ship any of these novels into bookstores with my imprint’s logo on the spine. I’d worked hard to build a top-quality imprint, and I didn’t want to betray my readers by slipping a stinker into the midlist just to keep my bosses happy.
I took another gulp of coffee, just as Wendy came in to empty my OUT basket and refill my IN basket. The latest arrival was a 9-by-12 brown manila envelope, about an eighth of an inch thick. When I was editing short stories for the magazine markets, I got a lot of brown manila envelopes in the mail. Now that I’m a book editor, my mail comes in only two forms. I get legal-size windowpane envelopes for contracts and royalty statements, and I get humongous big cardboard boxes containing book-length manuscripts or the galley proofs from same. I seldom get anything else. But now here was a flat manila envelope on my desk. There couldn’t possibly be a novel in there, but I recognized the logo on the return address labeclass="underline" Scott Richards was one of the best literary agents alive and out of jail at the moment, and he was also an old friend of mine. Anything that he saw fit to send me in a manila envelope was bound to be more interesting than the unagented junk that came over my transom.
I slit open the envelope eagerly, reached inside, and… ouch! Paper cuts are an occupational hazard for editors, and Scott’s letter had sliced open my thumb. The blood wasn’t much; I pressed my thumb against the paper napkin from my coffee cup as I tore open the manila envelope.
What the hell was this? Scott had sent me a one-page letter, handwritten under his letterhead. So why didn’t he just fold it and stuff it into a legal-size envelope? For some reason, Scott had paper-clipped his letter to one of those white cardboard stiffener sheets that some people use when they want to send mailings out flat, so the edges don’t get bent in the mail. The edge of the cardboard was what I’d cut my thumb on; I glanced at the cardboard accusingly, and…
What the double hell was this? Somebody had actually typed on the sheet of cardboard; neat typewriting, double-spaced. I keep up with the new desktop hardware, but I don’t know any brand of typewriter or printer that can output text on a piece of cardboard without curling it. Even a sheet-fed printer couldn’t handle it. As I picked up the piece of cardboard, I turned it over and I saw more typing on the back.
That did it. Plenty of amateur authors who don’t know any better will type their manuscripts on both sides of the paper, but what kind of idiot manages to type on both sides of a sheet of cardboard? And why was Scott Richards, who had a dozen bestselling authors on his client list, wasting his time (and mine) with cardboard amateurs? I would have chucked the thing into my dumpfile, unread, if it hadn’t come from Scott’s agency.
My thumb still tingled from the paper cut. I put the cardboard aside, and I picked up the cover sheet bearing Scott’s familiar letterhead and handwriting. It was addressed to me:
Dear Sam: I enclose Nano Nanette, a brilliant new science fiction novel by Max Porlock, my agency’s newest client. You’ve never heard of him, but he’s got the goods. Let’s do lunch some time. There was the usual sign-off, and that was all.
Something was wrong. Scott’s note was obviously intended as a cover letter, to be sent out with the manuscript of a novel. One of his assistants must have clipped his letter to this cardboard thing instead, and mailed the cardboard to me by mistake. Whatever this sheet of cardboard was, it sure as hell couldn’t be the manuscript of a complete novel… even though the author had typed on both sides of the cardboard. I picked it up and glanced idly at the first line:
NANO NANETTE. A novel by Max Porlock.
Oh, hell. This was a two-page synopsis of a novel, very unprofessionally presented. Did Scott Richards seriously expect me to offer a book contract to an unknown author, on the basis of a two-page synopsis? Typed on cardboard?
Just for a break in my routine, I picked up the sheet of cardboard in my right hand and started to read the typing on its upper surface.
It wasn’t a synopsis after all. It was the start of a novel; the opening page. The author’s narrative and dialogue were adequate. The typing was crisp and legible, without any errors. I read the first side of the sheet of cardboard effortlessly, then flipped it over with an easy clockwise motion of both hands and started reading the second page. The second page was better than the first; I got to the end, then flipped it over to read the third page. At the bottom of the third page, I flipped it over again to read the fourth page…