My kingdoms for a copy editor.

Mostly I do not name the books I quit reading, but I am halfway through this copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Volume I, and I can't bear it any more. It's not the book, it's the production of it. It's the Tuttle Classics edition, translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, and I don't know whether they got an incompetent copy editor or whether the author overused the stet stamp to the copy editor's chagrin, but there are so many bits that are wrong and so many more that aren't even wrong. Misplaced commas. Completely misspelled English words. Entendres that leave "you are hot, my prince" in the dust.

And this is important to me because I do not know the characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms very well--I didn't grow up hearing these stories the way some of you did--so if I run into a place where it says Cho where it should say Ch'u, I will not be able to spot it. Hard enough to keep track of characters in an unfamiliar epic with real names used. (With fictional names, the editor can say, "You know, Cho and Ch'u are awfully close, especially since you have Ch'ieh and Chang as well. Maybe one of them could be named Frank or something?") Still harder when you don't have faith that the text has been edited properly. So I'm done with this version, and I'm recommending that any of you interested in this material should read a different translation. Uff da.

(I already got to the bit with the eyeball and the bit with the...er...wife and dinner, let's say. Oh, alecaustin, you look all sweetness and light now.)

What We Did to Ask Your Opinion

Please note that I am aware that most of you have not read this book, so you are not being asked to comment on whether the title works well for the specific book I've written. (Although if you have read it, feel free to e-mail me with opinions on how the title worked for you.)

[Poll #1294645]

Also, if you ran across a book called What We Did to Save the Kingdom, what, if any, preconceptions would you have about it? (Funny, serious, high fantasy, swashbuckling, sword-wielding protagonist, lots of boats, whatever.)

Futures from Nature: 100 Speculative Fictions

This is another book sent to me to review, and the editor of it, Henry Gee, has published two of my stories. I think that's all the disclosure I have here.

Honestly, I know that serious publishers don't tend to market serious books as bathroom reading, and for reasons incomprehensible to me, the US doesn't have the same level of book marketing in subways etc. as in the UK. But I think this book would be good for that general purpose: something you want to be able to pick up and put down readily, without losing too much thereby. The stories in it were all the back page Nature Futures stories, so they're a certain set length (about two and a half pages of trade paperback), and they're completely unrelated to each other except that Dr. Gee liked them enough to print them, and except that they're SF.

Obviously when you get 100 stories from 100 authors, there will be some you like more and some less. I found that there were two categories of story I didn't like all that well: the ones that referenced Nature Futures itself, and the ones that were the extremely bare sketch of hundreds of years of a future history with a punchline/tagline at the end. I know it's hard to fit a story into 970 words; I've done it, so I know how hard. But it's worth doing. There were a great many stories that did manage that, and I was glad of them. The ones that didn't--eh, they were only two and a half pages long! There's something else coming around the bend by the time you're sure whether you like the one you're reading or not.]

A few years back, a friend asked me for Christmas present advice for his father-in-law, who had seen his attention span drop dramatically and frustratingly, interfering with his ability to read SF. If this book had been out then, it would have been perfect for him. It still would be, so if that's you or someone you know, now you know what to do.