Out-of-this-World Editor

By Pat Cody

You've written a science fiction story and you need writers' services. Maybe you want help with critique, revisions, or market readiness. You get a couple of bids, one from an editor who mentions personal Sci-Fi reading and one who admits little exposure to this fare. Which bidder will more likely do justice to your mind-matter?

A good book is a good book, no matter what the genre. Basic elements of fiction structure remain the same whether the tale is mystery, romance, spy fiction or science fiction. Characters can walk off the page and into readers' mind-movies, or lie embalmed in print, whatever a book's fictional type.

Yet every genre, even sub-genre, has its conventions by which it's recognized. Unconsciously, readers buy books of various genres with different expectations for each. Readers might not be able to verbalize all the elements, but they expect to find them within the specified genre.

For Sci-Fi, readers expect to suspend disbelief more than while reading other genres. An extra eye or three on a character in Sci-Fi doesn't interrupt the story flow for a reader; but in a mystery, any extra eyes had better be flatfoots.

The Sci-Fi reader expects to be challenged beyond present knowledge, stretched beyond present limits of science, transported into nearly impossible territories, sublimated above the ordinary. The author creates a world that exists only in his mind and invites readers to live in it from cover to cover of his book.

Writing effective science fiction is creating an unanticipated mixture of childhood's imaginary friends, even nightmares, with dreamscape surroundings. The author is tour guide to a place no one has ever visited, to meet beings beyond present comprehension. Yet links to our present understanding keep these leaps into the unknown within the readers' realms of possibility.

Because the familiar fiction techniques operate in foreign territory in Sci-Fi, an editor must bring a more flexible mind to writer services for this genre. Because breaking into this market is rare for newcomers, new writers need editorial help from someone familiar with the market. The mental leaps between fictional world and editorial mindset are a further distance in Sci-Fi, over a deeper chasm.

Sci-Fi worlds are more fantastic, less familiar, than those of most genres' fictional worlds. An editor who often explores unbounded space might more easily enter your created world and help you with techniques to keep readers comfortable within their expectations of your science fiction stories.

Choose an editor who's out of this world and, more important, into yours.