Sunday, July 27, 2003
I did another 1,420 words on Chapter Six yesterday, and could finish the chapter today, if not for the fact that I have gaming at a friends' house at 3:30 p.m. this afternoon. So, instead, I shall work on the editing of the "extras" for the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon. That's something I desperately need to finish.
The need for intelligent, actively thinking art receptors (i.e., readers, audience, etc.) is much on my mind this morning. In part, that's because Murder of Angels is proving so complex and unusual a novel, and, in part, it's because Bonnie Hammer, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Sci-Fi Channel, is such a frelling idiot and continues to find startling new ways to exhibit her idiocy to a world that generally tends to mistake idiocy for other things and reward it at every possible opportunity. As reported in this week's TV Guide, in an article on Stargate SG-1, she's states, "A lot of other science fiction series either become too complicated or start to take themselves too seriously. Sometimes shows are too smart for the audience. Stargate is smart, but it doesn't make people do homework." Hammer's been spouting this sort of nonsense for more than a year now, as she continues to boost the network's ratings by dumbing it down. Her gospel is loud and clear: We at Sci-Fi understand that the average television viewer has better things to do than think, and we're working hard to keep it that way.
I'm not sure if I'm digressing or not.
According to Hammer, Farscape failed because it expected too much from the viewer. She's stated this position repeatedly. In her view, the show's worst crime was asking viewers to follow the threads uniting the episodes into an ongoing storyline. To appreciate "A Constellation of Doubt," for instance, it helped greatly to have seen the earlier episode "Terra Firma" (and a whole lot of other episodes). The one followed from the other, which is, of course, the nature of sequential fiction. Otherwise you get the sort of stultifying "reset button" storytelling that demands that each episode stands alone, always beginning at and returning to point A in the space of 45 minutes. But in television, as in publishing, stultification is a good thing.
Which brings me back around to Murder of Angels. This book is a sequel to Silk, which is, for its marketing and performance, a handicap. I knew this going in. Sure, Low Red Moon is a sequel to Threshold and most of my fiction is interconnected, but this is different. MoA is a genuine sequel, a continuation of the story begun in Silk, with a ten year gap in between. I've worked hard to make it as "stand alone" as I can, but there's only so much I can do. And sure, I know that readers who enjoyed Silk will probably come willingly to MoA, but they're not the ones that I'm supposed to be worried about. I'm supposed to be worried about the readers I don't have, which is almost everyone in the world. I have no doubt that there will be potential readers who don't want to have to read Silk first, and so won't buy MoA.
Oh, fuck it. I'm talking in little circles. Somewhere in all that there's a point, but my head's too fuzzy this morning to draw it forth. I beg your pardon for rambling.
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