By Kendra Hibbert
February 27, 2004
Like most industries the publishing world is run by bestsellers – those writers who write one or two titles that make it onto the coveted New York Times Bestseller list and thereafter they’re guaranteed a lifetime publishing contract even if every novel they write thereafter is hackneyed and uninspired. Your Grishams, your Clancys, your Stephen Kings pump out a novel a year regardless of whether or not they’ve got anything new to say. The big names in publishing may have no problems getting their stuff in print today but for the unpublished writer, however, it’s a lot more difficult and there’s a lot more pressure on you to be good, to say something new and to get word out on the street about your book so you can build up an audience - even if it’s a really small audience. For the authors that are outside of the book club audience (be it Oprah or The Today Show) it can be even harder. While I’m not usually one to necessarily subscribe to the punk theory the more obscure an artist the better his work, I do think that there is something to say for the smaller books and the lesser known writers. This week I’ll be taking a look at two relatively obscure authors and their relatively obscure books (and hopefully make them a little less obscure) in order to prove a point – that’s there no reason why anyone should be wasting their time and $40 of their hard earned money reading the latest big name writer’s hardcover ‘bestseller’ when there are a lot better writers out there publishing under smaller presses that will cost you a lot less money to buy (or not have to buy as the case may be).
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Take Scott O’Connor’s AMONG WOLVES for instance. Put out by Swannigan & Wright it’s eight bucks and while at only 92 pages that might seem a bit steep, the quality of writing overwhelmingly makes up for the relatively small quantity. Think back to the first Chuck Palahniuk novel you read before you realized that he was writing the same novel over and over again. Reading this book is like discovering that world all over again but with an author who tends not to repeat himself so much and with a less depressing world view.
AMONG WOLVES is O’Connor’s debut (after working as an actor, meat cutter, garbage man, newspaper reporter, comic book store clerk, public relations flack, tour guide, video editor and graphic designer according to his bio) and it’s an auspicious one. The story begins in a lesser known theme park where our hero is smoking inside his character costume to help pass the time in the stifling heat. Unfortunately he’s distracted by a man he sees at a phone booth – a man he’s sure was the imposter brought in to replace his Father - and his cigarette lights his costume on fire. The contents of the novel take place on that day as he’s getting reamed out by his boss and later standing in the stifling heat in a costume that smells like burnt dog and thinking back to a monumental childhood trip and the later discovery that his parents had been replaced.
What’s great about the writing of this novel is that’s styled and precise and doesn’t feel like he’s trying to stretch a 92-page novella into a 500-page over-hyped novel. It’s like Palahniuk only better, like reading a good short story that goes on for precisely as long as you want it to. And if you don’t believe my praise of his writing you can go to the publisher’s site and read the first 10 pages (here) and see for yourself. Conveniently you can also buy the book at the site while you’re still drooling with anticipation or, if you prefer, at Amazon.com or you can harass your local book seller into ordering it for you since, because it is a relatively unknown book, it won’t likely be in many bookstores.
This is, of course, the major problem with obscure writers. Because they are so obscure bookstores don’t carry their novels but if they don’t carry the novels how are you supposed to get your hands on a copy of the books? Cory Doctorow’s new novel EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE has beat this often career killing problem of distribution with his decision to make this novel available to everyone online for *free* via his site. As with his first novel DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM (which I reviewed last year) Doctorow is sticking his money where his mouth is and not just writing about the digital revolution where information is readily available and free of charge. As he writes in the introduction to this book rather than sit back, chewing his fingernails worrying about pirated copies of his book being distributed around the internet, he’s helping to forge the non-tree killing future of ‘books’ (in which case I’d probably have to change the title of this column – maybe “Cluster of Used 1s and 0s”?).
As for his writing, it’s far more interesting and relevant than anything else happening in the Sci-Fi publishing world. Last summer when I wrote about Cyberpunk in this column I got a couple e-mails telling me that cyberpunk is dead. I now have an argument against that statement and that argument is Cory Doctorow. This new novel even has the blessing of the Grandmaster Cyberpunk himself William Gibson. Purists of cyberpunk may disagree with my placing this novel in their beloved genre but they certainly can’t deny the influence cyberpunk has on Doctorow. His obsession with code and an interlinked network in which all information is available at all times places him high on the candidates of the keeper of the Cyberpunk torch. The fact that he himself is so vocal a supporter of free information flow (although he does admit that he wouldn’t be opposed to actually getting paid for writing the book which, incidentally is also available in hard copy form from Amazon.com here) just makes him all the more informed and enthusiastic about the subject matter. There are entire passages in this novel only a coder could love.
The story is a self-described work of propaganda – a simplified view of the universe that takes one specific point of view and uses the events of the story to argue the point. He states his theme right up front – ‘a story about choosing happiness over smarts’. A kind of Faustian theme set in a near future world where an underground society exists consisting of Tribes who refuse to exist on any other time zone but their own preferred one (our hero Art prefers to exist in Eastern Standard hence the title). It’s a story for the internet culture and so he has made it readily available to the intended audience and in a way that conforms to the internet sensibility, except instead of pretending his audience is not going to download pirated versions of his text off Kazaa, he’s saying ‘Here, enjoy with my blessing’.
And I did. My prediction is that several other people will too and the name Cory Doctorow will one day go down as one of the forefather’s of the next literary revolution, either through his novels or through his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And that’s something you’ll certainly never get reading a novel by Tom Clancy.
Next Column: Surprise! More books.
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