I’ve blogged before about my difficulties writing satirical fiction, and in recent months I’ve discovered how hard it can be shopping it around, too. Before it was accepted at the redoubtable online sci-fi magazine, Kasma SF, I submitted it to a few other markets, including one where I’ve had some success.
It got the sort of rejections I thought were five or ten years behind me – out-of-hand, total disinterest. I began to wonder if I had misjudged ‘Our Most Esteemed Scientists’, if perhaps it required a rethink or should just be retired. But when it sold on just its fourth submission (about the same number as what I regard as my best story, ‘Teething Problems’), I stopped to wonder how responses to it could be so wildly different.
A satirical story is not about what it’s about, if that makes sense; the plot is just a vehicle for the underlying message. I didn’t twig to the subtext in M. Night Shymalan’s Signs the first time around, and I still cringe when I recall how I dismissed it as creepy but ultimately clichéd alien invasion movie. If a long-suffering slush reader – who has probably read half a dozen stories that day, most of them terrible – doesn’t pick up on a story’s subtext, then it can appear derivative or amateurish.
Anyway, to paraphrase Stephen King (back when he said things worth quoting), a story that can’t serve as its own defense attorney probably doesn’t deserve to be published, so you can judge ‘Our Most Esteemed Scientists’ for yourself when it appears on the Kasma SF site in October. I’m very interested to see how Kasma’s resident artist, Joe Baetas, visually interprets the alien world I’ve created.
