by Nir Yaniv
Katzenberg pushed a big stack of paper in my direction. “Those are the stories we received last week,” he said. “You can start.”
I remember thinking to myself, That’s it. Now you’re a member of the editorial staff of a science fiction and fantasy magazine. And not just any magazine, but the famous Starlight, no less. It was a dream come true.
I wanted to smile crazily, but I didn’t dare. I pulled from the stack a packet of stapled pages and started reading.
The Alien
By Rami Arbel
One evening I’m sitting like this on the porch drinking, like, some whiskey, you see, and suddenly I hear this noise outside. So OK, so I’m used to all sorts of noises because here, in the Karney Gil Kibbutz, we always have weird stuff happening, like when Shula the cow ran away from the barn and there was one crazy mess, and all sorts of stuff.
So anyway I hear this noise and I’m telling myself Haim this doesn’t sound like Shula running out of the barn, so I ran out and just as I run I was seeing lights which look like a big spotlight you know, lighting up the whole area and the haystack I got ready for tomorrow, and there’s this big vvvoooom like a tractor with a defective motor and before I know what’s going on I’m flying in the air and there’s this huge flying saucer above me which is pumping me up! So ok, so I’m flying like this and I’m so in shock that I even don’t scream or anything, even so I go very high, and then I’m in this white room, like. So somehow, I don’t really know how, I’m lying in a bed now and then I see him coming—the alien!!! Now, as you know I’m not really gay or anything, but I have to tell you that I was scared shitless even so he looked really small but is totally white with huge eyes and with no mouth. And then something opened in his belly, like this very scary hole, and he says to me—
“Well? Is the story good?”
“Eh, not really,” I said. “That is, really not.”
“You seem fascinated,” Katzenberg said. “You’ve read more than a few sentences.”
“I thought I was supposed to read every story from beginning to end, in order to know whether it has the potential to be published.”
Katzenberg smiled. “Maybe initially you should do so,” he said. “But after you gain some experience, you’ll notice the quality of a story immediately. In fact, you’ve noticed it right now, but you still do not trust yourself enough. That is no problem. Continue reading.”
“Shouldn’t we give a chance to a story with a good idea, even if it’s written badly?” I asked. In fact I never believed that myself—I was always a horrible snob as far as style was concerned—but I believed, without any supporting evidence, that this was a standard editor’s approach.
“Do you think that the story you are reading now shows any sign of a good idea?” Katzenberg said.
“Eh, no.”
“Read the rest of it and let’s see whether you were right.”
~
“Take me to your leader,” the alien commands the protagonist. The hero—heroically, of course—resists. The alien threatens him, but our hero is fearless, and gives up only after the alien threatens to hurt his family. Using this important information, the saucer flies towards Jerusalem, hovers over the Knesset building and destroys the parliament, but the alien is unaware that there’s no one inside due to the late hour—the hero kept that vital information to himself. Then the hero manages to get free of his restrains, fights the alien, overcomes it and forces it to return to the Kibbutz and land there. At this point the Israeli Air Force interferes, some fighter jets attack the saucer, and the hero is saved at the last moment when he jumps from the burning spaceship straight into the haystack he has prepared for tomorrow.
The End.
~
“Were you right?”
“Almost,” I said. “I kind of liked the idea of jumping from a flying saucer into a haystack.”
“Is this your idea of a good idea?” Katzenberg said, and one of his eyebrows rose reproachfully.
“Well, no, it’s not a real idea,” I hastened to say, “but it made me laugh.”
“It is my opinion at this stage, that it doesn’t take much to make you laugh. Never mind, though. In fact, I even envy you a little.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but didn’t dare say anything.
“Fine,” he said. “Read more stories. Let’s see if you can find something worthy of publication.”
~
No one knows how Heavens Publications Inc. survived to the middle of the nineties. The science fiction and fantasy genres were almost totally dead, from a publisher’s point of view, and the theoretical science books were never that profitable—at least, the kind of books that Katzenberg published. But while the publishing house’s survival is slightly surprising and somewhat improbable, what happened later is on the verge of impossible: in ninety-four Katzenberg decided, just like that (or due to some vision of the future to come) to establish a new magazine for science fiction and fantasy. He called it Starlight. It looked like commercial suicide, and indeed it would have been, except that somehow Katzenberg found a sponsor to finance the magazine. Maybe this sponsor planned to use it as a tax write-off, or a money laundry, or maybe just a conversation starter at parties. Whatever the reason was, as far as he was concerned, and as far as many science fiction fans were concerned—many more than anyone had realized, at the time—Starlight was a dream come true.
I was one of those fans. By some strange coincidence, that was the year in which I finished my obligatory service in the Israeli Air Force, left my parents’ house and moved to the big city, to Tel Aviv.
The first issues of the magazine contained translated stories, never original Hebrew ones, and articles which Katzenberg wrote himself. At the same time, a community of fans and lovers of the genre started crystallizing, growing more and more as the internet made its appearance in Israel, making it easier for them to find each other. Katzenberg started receiving original Hebrew stories by mail. Some writers tried to send him stories by email, but he refused to accept them. “I read only from paper,” he said. Science fiction or not, Katzenberg never agreed and will never agree to read a story from a computer screen.
But that wasn’t the major problem he had with the stories he received.
Starlight, Issue 12
Editor’s Note
Dear Readers,
Recently we have begun receiving science fiction stories written by Israeli authors. We are pleased, of course, when science fiction enthusiasts attempt to hold the writer’s pen, and are sure that in the future we shall have Israeli writers of a stature no less than that of the giants of the genre, such as Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Ellison and their peers. However, since the field of local science fiction is still in its infancy, we found most of the received stories to be lacking in several respects. Therefore we allow ourselves to exploit this editor’s note, as opposed to our usual custom, to give some basic advice to the beginning writers.
First, it is vitally important to have excellent knowledge of the Hebrew language. Nothing is so repulsive to our editors as the inferior use of language. After all, language is the writer’s tool of the trade, and there is simply no two ways about it.
Secondly, avoid clichéd and obsolete ideas. We’ve seen a fleet’s worth of flying saucers, and the same applies to laser guns and aliens which are human in every respect except for a few odd bumps on their faces. Be original!
Thirdly, we shall ask you to abstain from sending us story ideas. We publish good stories and will continue to do so, but mere ideas are (forgive the expression) a dime a dozen, and we do not employ full-time writers to convert ideas into stories. Therefore, if you fancy publishing a story in our magazine, please write it yourself, and let go of the idea that we will write it for you.
In this issue you will find some stories which will demonstrate how the science fiction giants do it. Read them, study them, learn their lessons. Let us hope that soon we shall receive for publication a story by one of you, which wi
ll not fall short of them.
Enjoy this issue,
N.K.
~
Anyone who thinks that you can make a living by writing science fiction must be living in a fantasy world. Not in Israel, anyway. Therefore, even before I went to work for Katzenberg in the evenings, I found a part time job in a software company, and that’s where I spent my mornings.
The job of a junior programmer is just the opposite of prose writing: there are strict rules which you cannot break, and the amount of creativity and imagination required is dangerously close to zero. You do what you’re told, and that’s it. That was exactly what I needed—a way to make money that wouldn’t interfere with the really important stuff. The ideas. The stories.
One of my ideas consisted of a story-writing software. The thought popped into my head while I was fixing a particularly stubborn bug in some piece of code written by someone else. I started by imagining a piece of software that could fix Bugs in Pieces of Code Written by Someone Else, but quickly decided it wasn’t interesting enough to serve as a base for a story. I moved on to consider a piece of code that could write pieces of code—or itself—but I knew that some people were already toying with such an idea in the real world, and also remembered a story or two which dealt with it, and which weren’t particularly good. And also, I didn’t feel like doing the research required in order to make the story seem believable, so I abandoned the idea and moved on.
A mind that writes itself, that programs itself—that looked promising, but I couldn’t figure out any plot that could fit it. That’s a common problem among beginning writers—many ideas, no idea what to do with them. Then I went on to consider a mind/program that could write stories, and while trying to think of a plot to fit this idea, I suddenly realized: the story-writing software isn’t a story idea—it’s an idea for the real world. And I can write it.
~
“I have a question,” Katzenberg said suddenly, turning to look at me over his own paper stack. It was the second week of us working together and I, imagining that the relative silence in which we worked was a sure sign that Katzenberg and I were slowly becoming colleagues—no need for unnecessary conversation between two professionals—almost fell out of my chair.
“Yes?” I said, and my hands tried, distractedly, to order the pages of the manuscript I had been reading up to that moment.
“Do you consider all of the stories that you’ve read so far to be of an insufficient quality?”
“I...” I said.
“Yes?”
“Most of them are terrible,” I said.
“But not all of them.”
“No.”
“Why, then,” he said, “haven’t you passed on to me even one story so far?”
Because I was afraid, and justly so, that he wouldn’t accept those stories. That my literary taste wouldn’t be good enough. That a quick dismissal would follow. I was also afraid to mention any of this. I hung there without an answer, staring dumbly at Katzenberg for some time.
At last Katzenberg, who probably understood this very well, took mercy on me. “Your duty here,” he said, “is to perform the initial filtering of the stories. I will not accept every story that you pass on to me, but I’m sure that every story that you don’t pass is indeed unfit for publication.”
I lowered my head and mumbled something.
“Having established that, is there any story you’ve read here lately that struck your fancy?”
I opened the single drawer that I had, on my side of the table, took out a bundle of pages and handed it over to him. Katzenberg pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, lifted the first page and started reading aloud.
Elijah nagged us the whole way.
Throughout the flight from Earth he yammered and chattered and gabbled and nattered about his VegeScan, about how it was an unbelievable bargain at the Duty Free, about how he won’t be fooled again, about how he was now prepared for the whole shebang otherwise known as Life.
“Yes?” I said.
“An invention of some sort, I assume,” he said, “which distinguishes between vegetarian and non-vegetarian foodstuffs. This, I suppose, is incorporated into a Jerome-K-Jerome-like story about three Israeli explorers, one of whom is a vegetarian, and who probably ends up doing something really silly.”
“Oh? So you’ve read it already?”
“No,” Katzenberg said. “I said ‘I assume’ and ‘I suppose’ and ‘probably.’ Had I read the story, I should not have...”
“But that’s exactly what’s happening there!” I said.
“So I assumed.”
“But how did you know?”
Katzenberg didn’t answer, he just smiled. After a moment another question occurred to me. “So, are you going to read it anyway?”
“For you, this time only, I shall read it. Usually there’s no need for such drastic measures.”
He read it, incredibly fast.
He didn’t accept it, of course.
~
To write a piece of software that performs a certain action, you have to understand exactly what this action is and what separates it from other actions, and which sub-actions it’s made of and what separates these from other actions, and which sub-sub-actions every sub-action is made of, etc., etc. But how do you define a story? It’s made of paragraphs which are made of words which are made of letters, but so are non-fiction articles, essays and the phone directory. It is made of a beginning, a middle and an end, but what does a beginning consist of, what are the sub-parts of the middle and what separates the end from other actions? The action of adding imagery is relatively easy for a computer, but a metaphor is as complex as it can get. So what was I to do?
Two weeks of condensed effort didn’t result in any progress on the computerized writing project. The only result was an automatic curse generator. It was very simple. It included an internal dictionary of several dozen words, ordered by their roles—verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—and also several sentence templates, e.g., “Your [relative] is a [insulting adjective] [silly noun]”. After several days, during which I flooded my friends’ email inboxes with complex and subtle messages such as “Your mother is a smoked camel” and “Everybody knows that you’re a horny llama” —for some reason the dictionary included many animal names—I had had enough. Such a mechanism can’t write a true story. I know because I’ve tried.
Menachem woke up in the morning. It was a nice day. Paths glowed in the distance. An aircraft carrier landed upon him at lunchtime. The sky was red.
“You are a duck on a stick,” his mother said. Then he drank a beer. Then he drove a baby.
Et cetera. I must admit that I fancied the idea of the aircraft carrier and saved it for a future story, but except for that, it was an absolute waste of time and printer paper.
~
During the first month of my employment with Katzenberg I passed him four stories out of the thirty-something which had been submitted to the magazine. The first story began thus:
The End of Everything
By Kfira Tidhar
Abandoned and empty, such were the days at the trailing end of the last war. The sun, blood-red and bloated, never to return to its glory of days past, feebly illuminated the wilderness in which no one would recognize the green grass of its youth. Not even an insect moved on the slopes of the mountains, now reduced to mere hills, or in the new valleys, coin-round, coin-shiny. And over all that great big beaten earth ruled only the sound of the wind, like the last breath of...
Et cetera.
~
“Why did you pass me this story, in particular?” asked Katzenberg after several seconds of reading.
“Because it’s obvious that whoever wrote it knows how to write.”
“I cannot say that I’m as sure as you,” Katzenberg said. “The first paragraph, for instance, covers most of the first page.”
“Is that a problem?”
“How much interesting informa
tion can you find in that paragraph?”
“Well, she mentions a war right on the start,” I said. When I was in second grade I received my first encyclopedia, a children’s edition which nevertheless consisted of about twenty books, and, since no one told me that I wasn’t supposed to do it, I read them all, beginning to end. My favorite was the W volume: it had all the Wars in it.
“Indeed,” Katzenberg said, “but all the rest of it deals with the scenery.”
“And that’s done very well!” I said, defensively.
“It isn’t bad,” he said, “but not on the scenery alone shall the reader live. Not to mention the fact that this takes most of the first page of a three-page story.”
“But the rest of the story—”
“Nothing new there,” he said. “New creatures appear out of the remains of the war, wondering who their predecessors were. For a much better treatment of the same theme, read City by Clifford Simak.”
“I’ve read it,” I said. “But hey, when did you manage to read the whole story?”
