:(

Response to The Cautioner’s Tale by R. M. Wilburn 

I put the book away at eleven PM and tried to sleep. No luck. There was a tightening in my chest, my body kind of refusing to release, and I couldn’t get my thoughts under control. Just live with it, I told myself. Grow up and fucking relax already! I kept tossing and turning. The buzz in my head might’ve been audible. The book was so unpolished, its politics so unsubtle yet so tame and predictable, the plot so convoluted, the characters were less than cardboard signifiers, the humor forced and scatological and unfunny, the graphics amateur and unpleasant to read, the world-building unconvincing… This book was a hoax, starting with the bogus awards on its cover (vanity competitions with expensive entry fees that award nothing other than the right to use the label for promotion). It was a sad confirmation of publishers’ bias against self-published work. As a twelve-year-old, I had been a pretty forgiving reader, tolerating puns and wordplay without a problem. If the thing had bored me, I’d just ignore it altogether and copy a book report from the internet. But now at grad school when I was committed to being a good student—to think that I would need to write about it, quote from it, labor to critique something that’s not worth a second glance, talk about it for two hours, that I would be expected to treat this as an example of the kind of craft I should produce, and that a whole semester of this might conceivably follow….

It was already one AM when I finally flicked on the light and picked up the nearest Margaret Atwood to calm down.

I carried the unhappiness and the remnant exhaustion for the past couple of days, all the while berating myself for not coming to terms with it (Just suck it up! Everyone else can do it, why can’t you? What’s so special about you?!). Why was my reaction so strong? I’ve been trying to guard my time. Any waking moment of clarity not dedicated to basic survival and to writing my own work should be invested in reading books that are undeniably good, to inspire me and so that I know what to aspire to (thousands of books meet this criterion; even high school curricula are littered with masterpieces). I went back to school with the hope of finding a structure that would support this ambition, and overall, it has. Why now can’t I have the flexibility to take classes with syllabi that align with my creative goals? Why would I need to bang my head against work that is so remote from what I want to do? Am I in the wrong place? I feel so alone with this. Should I leave? And so on.

That’s it for my self-pity, for now. Here’s some evidence:

World building. The book purportedly takes place towards the end of the first half of this century. The aesthetic, however—created almost solely with very basic Photoshop templates—aligns with a sort of Victorian-ish maybe fin de siècle maybe towards the mid-20^th century max (my partner said it looks like Pirates of the Caribbean). It’s unclear how a regime that has advanced technologies of repression as well as time travel (did they seriously evoke the trope of the Time Travel Taboo to just leave it hanging…?) and fossil fuels has lost all electronics (as well the mountains of salvageable and usable electronic waste) and reinvigorated a robust postal industry; but don’t count on this author to put any rigor into world building (or proofreading, for that matter)—self-promotion takes too much time (they remind the readers to review the book at least twice).

In terms of the history of this world, the author dumps info with stylistically unjournalistic newspaper clips (I guess that in addition to electronics, norms of syntax, basic non-second grade cryptography, and correct Russian, the centuries-old journalistic standard has also disappeared in this post-apocalypse) and, in the very beginning, with a “NOTE” that explains what happened (another Great War (very original) won by a generation of “warriors” (ditto)). Never mind that all this explaining breaks the journal form, it also raises the suspicion that Wilburn hasn’t read much so-called genre fiction, or at least hasn’t internalized the first lesson: Reveal everything, explain nothing.

One highlight of many: “I was devastated! To think I’d sent Bumbly Snaxx, a world-renowned middle-grounder, to his death was heart-breaking. But rather than regretting my hand in this, I allowed this great loss to motivate me toward another solution.” Truly devastating. Such loss. Human tragedy captured in written form. I feel it.

But for real, perhaps this author thinks that “genre” fiction allows shallow emotions and flat characters. Not true. You’d think they’d privilege plot instead, which, despite taking most of the book’s real estate, doesn’t really seem attempted. This is most mind-boggling when Comey takes over and Trump’s reign ends with no preface from one page to the next. Twists and conclusions aren’t led up to, they’re simply announced, not allowing the reader to follow the investigation. This is done in a poor, convoluted way. For example: “Of course! I studied the note closely but did not find a key to decipher it. Under these conditions my fellow spy and I had decided that we were to always use the number 5 as the code key. This meant I needed to replace each letter with the one that came 5 letters later in the alphabet.” How easy: the struggle is finished with no transition from one sentence to succeeding bewildering sentence, and suddenly everything’s figured out. They didn’t even bother to think up or research sophisticated cryptography (try a One Time Pad). At least they saved us the tedium of actually figuring it out. The one merit of this book: brevity, accentuated by its lack of numeration. Cheers for that, more time for me to tie my rope.

Others: “My first order of business was small but mighty…” followed by: a quaint letter with a button enclosed and a couple of exclamation POINTS! Mighty indeed.

“I was not ready to take on a new name.” Seriously? This is the most elementary form of underground organizing. Then again, their politics are not about organizing decisively for collective liberation, but about praying for impeachment to magically happen from one day to the next. (If only the deep state could take over and save the spineless liberals of the unpresidential farce that produces books such as these….)

Reading this book is like being locked in a room with my in-laws with no way out and no possibility of opening my mouth to talk back. It almost makes me re-question my anarchist politics in favor of a totalitarianism that would curb such publications.

I’d beg for Faulkner. What were your previous students thinking? Please, please just give me Faulkner.