Friday, 18 December 2015

Closing Contact

A few weeks ago I turned up this typescript, which was my first submission to Interzone, and indeed my first submission to any kind of paying market. The story was written at the end of 1985, and submitted at the start of the new year of 1986, making it almost exactly thirty years old. I make no claims for the quality of the story; indeed - as you'll see - it was rejected, and its flaws were obvious enough to me even then, sufficiently so that I made no effort to rework it. But hopefully it's of some interest as an early effort, and scholars of Revelation Space will find one of the character names significant. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in how not to format a short fiction submission ....

 (Edit - struggling to find a good way to both display these images and have them appear at a useful size for reading. Bear with me...)













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9 comments:

  1. project cassiel18 December 2015 at 12:57

    Slightly off-topic, but I'm trying to work out whether you'd have been an undergraduate at Eustace Percy the same time I was a subwarden there...

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  2. Al R18 December 2015 at 15:32

    85-86 and again 87-88.

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  3. Dave19 December 2015 at 01:19

    Actually, that wasn't too bad! Maybe a little wordy, but like you said, 30 years ago and you've obviously used the criticism in a positive way!
    Still not a patch on Computa Two! lol

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  4. Unknown21 December 2015 at 09:54

    Maybe it's because I know what you went on to become, but I quite like this also - at some stage you should include this in a collection - maybe do a revision and print both 'before' and after' versions.

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  5. Vasily16 January 2016 at 18:55

    Assuming Blogger supports embedded iFrames, you might want to look into uploading the doc in PDF format to Scribd and inserting the code Scribd generates for it as described here: http://support.scribd.com/entries/21790502-embedding

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  6. pauljacobson24 January 2016 at 00:46

    I like it, even if it wasn't published. The tone reads a little like Revelation Space. Thanks for sharing that!

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  7. Unknown18 February 2016 at 12:40

    Would that I had produced anything of such ambition in my time in Eustace Percy! Thank you for sharing.

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  8. Troy19 February 2016 at 03:51

    Seeing other writers' v0.5 work is pretty nice for aspiring writers. It lets you see how someone gets from their early work to published novels, and what changed to make their stuff more readable, paced etc. Heck, at this stage I would be jazzed just to get a rejection note!

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  9. Troy19 February 2016 at 11:46

    Having a prototype writing style and a developed writing style to compare is really useful for novice writers. I found reading through this to be quite insightful into my own writing as well. It's also quite encouraging - thanks for putting this up!

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