Vandana Singh, Suchitra Mathur and I are teaching a three-week speculative-fiction workshop at IIT-Kanpur in June/July this year. The application form is here, and the announcement is here.  IIT-K doesn’t have a web link yet.

There have been other SF workshops in India of course, but they’ve been sporadic affairs designed to teach beginners. Our focus is a bit different. We’re aiming to help the semipro writer get to the next level. We also intend to make this an annual affair. The long-term goal is to create a network of desi spec-fic writers. Right now, there’s a lot of talent, but they mostly work in isolation. We hope to change that.The instructors may be different year to year, but the overall goals of the workshop will remain the same. Sustainability is important here, because it’s probably going to take a couple of decades of effort to make a real difference. But I try not to dwell on that part.

Suchitra Mathur at IITK had to do most of the hard work in setting up the workshop, and now we’ll reap the benefits of her hard work. I know. It is unfair. I know. But look yaar, I didn’t design the Matrix.

p>But this blog is not about the workshop. It’s about putting together a list of spec-fic stories for the workshop. One problem with writing workshops is that the participants are all working off different stories. It helps to have a common pool of stories for discussions about voice, point of view, dialog handling and so on. Making the list is a lot of fun, but it’s also turning out to be a lot harder than I thought. It reminds me of the scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack talks about the art of making a compilation tape:

“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to hold the attention. Then you have to take it up a notch, but not blow your wad, so maybe cool it off a notch, and you can’t put the same artist twice on the tape, except if some subtle point or lesson or theme involved, and even then not the two of them in a row, and you can’t woo somebody with Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and then bash their head off with something like GBH’s “City Baby Attacked by Rats,” and… oh, there are a lot of rules…”

Exactly. So what would be the killer first story?

My bet would be on something by Borges (say, Three Views Of Judas) or maybe a tale from Lem’s Cyberiad. But that means having to work with translations. In that case, why not Premendra Mitra’s The Discovery Of Telenapota? Or if we want to really class it up, why not Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings? Perhaps the trick might be to show what can be done with minimalism, say under 500 words. In that case, A. K. Ramanujan’s retelling A Story And A Song is easily (yes, easily) the winner. Of course, there’s some deep stuff by Karel Capek. I’d definitely have to include J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned Giant and Geoff Ryman’s The Unconquered Country. Have to. Ditto for Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergerson. All right, maybe Harrison Bergerson is not a good fit. Since you insist, I’ll also remove Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin,” said the Ticktockman. But I hope you’re feeling my pain. Quibble further sir, and you can expect my valet with a note regarding time and place.

Truth is, it’s nothing like putting together a compilation tape. A CT is a personal statement. The idea is to give the recipient– always a girl, isn’t it?– a embarrassing little chunk of your soul. Your squishy, moist, topologically-inconsistent SOUL, goddammit. I have no intention of foisting my squishy, moist, etc. etc. soul on the workshop participants. At least, not on the very first day.

In short, our list needs variety. It needs inconsistency. It needs bias. Right now, the list is as mono-opinionated as North Korea. It needs you. I am looking for suggestions. Here are the constraints: the story should be under 5000 words (~ 12 pages in a paperback novel), and it should have a speculative flavor. I’ll be citing you as the recommender, so if it’s a silly story, it’s your reputation, pal. And the deadline’s end of April, please. No pressure.

There is one other constraint. I’m looking for relatively recent stories, stuff that hasn’t sat in the cellar for too long. Spec Fic has a lot of classics, but a Fiction Of The Imagination cannot really rely on classics. Take Asimov’s Nightfall. Most fans will remember that the story was inspired by a quote from Emerson:

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?”

But then, as if to undo the expectations aroused by that fine quote, Asimov starts the story with the following line:

“Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower-lip and glared at the young newspaperman in a hot fury.”

Nightfall is the second most-reprinted story in SF. It’s a damn classic. It’s probably the story most hardcore SF readers, including me, first recall when asked to recall short stories. But the writing is… well, it’s rough. No getting away from that malarial fact. It’s fine for a compilation tape, but for a workshop… probably not. Of course, I’m going to include it anyway.

Or take Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names Of God. The last line in that story, “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out,” still gives me the shivers. This one is the fourth most-reprinted story in SF. But who remembers a single character from it? Buddhist monks approach two western programmers for a program to generate all the nine billion names of god. The software code to list all nine billion names is basically just a few lines in Lisp (although in Java: new XML standard + six startups + two class libraries + an Apache special project + a new quarrel with Microsoft). Why does the story have two programmers? The answer, of course, is that Clarke had to place several info-dumps in the story, and he chose to do it via dialog. A dialog has two ends; ergo, there are two programmers. It’s a rule of the typical SF story that the number of characters is an even rational of the number of distinct dialogs. Needless to say, this story is in as well.

Why? Because a science-fiction story is often like a banana: a great idea wrapped in disposable skin. The core ideas in Nightfall and The Nine Billion Names Of God are so cool, so frikking different, they trump every other consideration: plot, character, writing, depth, dialog… This is the field’s gift and its curse. Might as well have the students deal with it early.

Friends have begun to chip in with suggestions. Vandana Singh wants to include Bob Shaw’s The Light Of Other Days and Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Both are great stories. Ernie Reimer suggested a lot of stories; unfortunately, I neglected to mention that I wanted short stories, so I won’t be able to use most of his suggestions. Still, some of his authors are in the breakthrough Mirrorshades anthology, so that may be a workaround. Meghan McCarron recommended What I Didn’t See, and The Women Men Don’t See (Karen Fowler and James Tiptree, respectively), as well as Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners. Vylar Kaftan has promised a list by mid-April; I’ve promised to harass her if she doesn’t.

Claude Lalumière turned out to be an absolute treasure-trove. His own stories are marvels. The Ethical Treatment of Meat is taught in Montreal high schools, and Andy Duncan uses This Is the Ice Age for his SF class at the Univ. of Alabama. Claude’s story Destroyer of Worlds should be particularly interesting for south Asian readers. His top ten:

1. Campbell’s World, by Paul Di Filippo
2. The Dead Don’t Die, by Steve Niles
3. Jailwise, by Lucius Shepard
4. By the Time We Get to Uranus, by Ray Vukcevich
5. Seventy-Two Letters, by Ted Chiang
6. The Fluted Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
7. Jon, by George Saunders
8. Salt Wine, by Peter S. Beagle
9. Printcrime, by Cory Doctorow
10. Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link

Upon being pressed for more, Claude produced seventeen more stories. I felt like– well, oilmen know this feeling. If only more people would work this hard for me. Are you listening, dear reader? Email/post/share your recommendations.