Richard Dansky

If there are more proper nouns in your back cover text blurb than non-proper ones, you’re probably doing something wrong.

When I worked in a bookstore (yes, one of those quaint things that sold bits of dead tree bound up with black squiggles in them), there was a pretty regular process to the courtship between reader and book. The reader, drawn in by the cover art or the name on the cover, would make several passes by the shelf where the book in question stood, demurely shelved. The reader would then pick it up, and, if the front cover art met muster, flip it over. This was a key moment, as it was the first time the prospective reader would actually, you know, read something to do with the book – the dreaded back cover text. If it’s good – if it’s appealing and it’s interesting and it’s accessible – then odds are, the potential reader is going to do something silly like buy the book. If not – if your back cover text is an indecipherable swamp of capitalized terms that are worth more on a Scrabble board than they are to an uninitiated reader, odds are that text is going to serve as what we in the videogame industry call a Barrier To Entry.

In other words, it should entice the reader, not terrify them. You’re looking to get someone to get to know your kingdoms and monsters and wizards, not give them a Wonderlic test on their suitability to read without resorting to a dramatis personae cheat sheet. So if your book comes back with back cover text that reads like the fantasy equivalent of the President’s morning briefing, complete with strategic analyses, family trees and threat levels, suggest a change for something simpler. Your unminted readers will thank you.

Unspeakable evil probably doesn’t live in your mom’s basement.

Look, I get it. Horror is largely a symbolic genre. The ghosts and vampires and unnameable critters from the vasty plains of Fgg’gtt’btt’tt (or, as I like to call it, Brooklyn) all stand in for something. Unfinished business, sex, giving yourself up to something else, the undefined future – whatever. We get it, and we get it instinctively, which is why we like reading that stuff.

And so, it’s no-brainer that the boojum lurking at the childhood home would be a major player in all of this. Childhood’s scary. It’s when all the deep down frights get hard-wired into you by a big, bad world that you don’t understand. It makes sense that a childhood home would get wrapped up in the scares that hit closest to home, the ones you have to face down before you can move on as a fully integrated adult-type human being.

That being said, it seems odd that every old family home that falls into the hands of every struggling writer on the planet has a gate to interdimensional evil in the basement.  I ask you, does it really have to be the end of the world every time a guy who’s blocked on his second novel goes home? Can it just be town-devouring evil? County-devouring? Hell, is there room for it in the basement with all the bloggers who are allegedly crammed in there?

Because really, what you’re saying when you claim world-destroying evil is seeping out through the walls of the place you grew up is that your childhood fears are the worst and most important ones that ever were. And considering how many novels there are about blocked novelists fighting world-destroying evil in the basements of their ancestral homes, the math simply doesn’t add up. They can’t all be the most uberscariestest things ever, can they?

Try some perspective. Put it in scale. Scale back the ambition, and by doing so, you just might give it a bit more personality, a bit more individuality. I mean, seriously, destroying the world is about as generic a monster motivation as you can get (Besides eating brains. Eating brains is the new beige.) Trying something even a little bit different might make your unspeakable horror a little more interesting to talk about.

If your star-spanning galactic empire doesn’t have working cell phone technology, you may want to rethink things a bit.

Yes, hard science fiction is hard, largely because hard science is, well hard. Look at it. The word “hard” is right there in the name. Also, the hard science stuff tends to get in the way of giant space dogfights, zippity-zoom travel between star systems, and remarkably human-looking green alien ladies who are happy to go reverse cowgirl on any number of Captain Kirk wannabes. It does this mainly by virtue of pointing out that such things are impossible, which is roughly the equivalent of pointing out that Edward and Bella makes Woody and Soon-Yi look like nothing at ground zero of a Sparkly Vampire Online Dating Site Meetup.

So really, it’s OK. Handwave the faster-than-light travel. Make all the aliens want to boink like space is one big rave at Ibiza and Orbital is doing their version of the Dr. Who theme song. Throw in zap guns and nanotech and God knows what else to your heart’s content, if it makes for a better story.

But the moment your intergalactic space cops need to rely on a communications device that can’t do half the crap my iPad does, you lose me. The instant your plot hangs on a mystery that could be solved in fifteen seconds with Google (and I say fifteen only because space cops are lousy typists), you bore me. When your novel of the future has a technological paradigm that was cutting edge at the same time Zaxxon was, I’m putting your book down.

So take ten minutes with one of those newfangled electronic typewriter thingies attached to the intertubes, and check to make sure your science fiction is, in fact, fiction, and not the sort of stuff you see at yard sales. The results might surprise you. And they might interest your readers. Which, as they say, is a good thing.