Slushing it
Hello and welcome to Adam's Notes for September 13, 2023
Slush Reading
Hello everyone.
For the past two weeks I’ve been slush reading for Fusion Fragment, a science fiction magazine based out of Ottawa. Slush reading (reading submissions to help decide what gets published) is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but have been putting off, worried that it would be kind of a slog, as the name implies. But the truth is I’ve been having a blast.
There’s a total of, I believe, twenty volunteer submission readers this time around, more than Fusion Fragment has ever had in the past, which is lucky because with 791 stories to sort through, the magazine also has more submissions than ever before, too.
Now we’re just about down to the shortlist, though there are a few stories still waiting on a second read.
Most of the stories I’ve read are pretty good, and if they fail to make the cut it’s usually because the emotional hook isn’t quite there or the speculative premise needs a bit of work. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are generally better at writing a story’s ending than its beginning. Outside of the shortlisted stories, one of my favourites was about a person interacting with an extinct megafauna—one of my favourite science fiction subjects. I’m going to keep an eye out for the story in other SF/F mags, because I’m sure it’ll get published somewhere eventually.
There were maybe four stories that I would think of as bad. Two were just sort of plodding in a way that I couldn’t bring myself to read to the end, and two more featured kind of clumsy analogies for modern politics where even though I would agree with the point they were trying to make it was clear they hadn’t really put enough thought into what their story was saying and so the end result was rather crude.
But four clunkers out of the maybe forty or fifty stories I’ve read isn’t bad!
I tried to keep track of who was sending stories in, but I gave up on that pretty fast. I’d guess maybe a third were from Americans, a third from Canadians, and a third from the rest of the world, but I really couldn’t say. Most author bios mentioned previous writing credits, but there were plenty of stories sent in that didn’t have, or at least didn’t, list prior credits, and they weren’t noticeably worse. A lot of stories from people identifying as lgbtq, but I couldn’t even begin to guess at what percentage of the total stories this amounted to.
The best stories remind me of what I love about science fiction, and I’m excited to see how the final product turns out.
Pepys Show
Pepys hasn’t really been up to much these past few weeks. Truth is, I find this to be kind of a low point in the diaries as a whole, with the action picking up again at the end of the year when the cooper Thomas Venner attempts to lead the Fifth Monarchy Men in an uprising against the newly installed Charles II to capture London in the name of “King Jesus.” But until then it’s just Pepys pushing paperwork for the navy, so I thought I’d take a break from the diaries to share the sheer body horror of his famous kidney stone operation.
In 1658, two years before he began his famous diaries, he decided to allow Thomas Hollier to perform a surgery to remove a stone from his bladder. He’d been having trouble with stones since childhood, dealing with a lot of pain and frequently pissing blood. Claire Tomalin describes the surgery in her biography, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self:
he was asked to position himself on a table, possibly covered with a straw-filled bag into which he could be settled while the process of binding him up began. Some surgeons thought it wise to say a few reassuring words at this point, because the binding was terrifying to many patients. They were trussed like chickens, their legs up, a web of long linen strips wound round legs, neck and arms that was intended to hold them still and keep their limbs out of the surgeon’s way. The instructions for the binding alone take up several pages of one manual; and when it was done the patient was further bound to the table. He was shaved around his privy parts, and a number of strong men were positioned to hold him fast: ‘two whereof may hold him by the knees, and feet, and two by the Arme-holes, and hands… The hands are also sometimes tyed to the knees, with a particular rowler, or the knees by themselves, by the help of a pulley fastened into the table.’ Meanwhile the surgeon lubricated his instruments with warm water and oil or milk of almonds: the catheter, the probe, the itinerarium, the specular, the pincers, small hooks and so forth; he also had powder to stop bleeding, sponges and cordial waters to hand. There were no anaesthetics, and alcohol was certainly not allowed to a patient undergoing surgery to the bladder.
The surgeon got to work. First he inserted a thin silver instrument, the itinerarium, through the penis into the bladder to help position the stone. Then he made the incision, about three inches long and a finger’s breadth from the line running between scrotum and anus, and into the neck of the bladder, or just below it. The patient’s face was sponged as the incision was made. The stone was sought, found and grasped with pincers; the more speedily it could be got out the better. Once out, the wound was not stitched – it was thought best to let it drain and cicatrize itself – but simply washed and covered with a dressing, or even kept open at first with a small roll of soft cloth known as a tent, dipped in egg white. A plaster of egg yolk, rose vinegar and anointing oils was then applied.43
Pepys, no doubt by now fainting with shock and pain, was unbound and moved to his warmed bed. … There was no question of getting out of bed for a week. … oil of earthworms was held in readiness against possible convulsions … Fever, insomnia and pain were all to be expected, and above all, you would think, acute anxiety. Was the bladder healing? How soon might he expect it to function normally again? If he moved, would he tear the just healing wound open? Had the surgeon missed the prostate, something the manual worried about? Pepys was the type of patient who is likely to have read it for himself. We know that he sought information and anatomical explanations from the doctors who attended him, as he recalled when he saw a corpse dissected at the Surgeons’ Hall in 1663, and took a particular interest in the bladder and kidneys.
…
Hollier could be proud of his work, especially considering the size of Pepys’s stone, described as ‘very great’ by his medical colleagues; it was as big as a tennis ball, according to Evelyn, who saw it later. Real tennis, the only kind then played, uses very slightly smaller balls than modern lawn tennis, but still with a diameter of about 2¼inches; the stone must have been exceedingly awkward to get hold of and extract through a three-inch incision.
Gruesome stuff, right?
Pepys vowed to hold an annual feast to celebrate his successful surgery. He missed the feast more often than he kept it, but it goes to show what a huge, er, milestone it was in his life. He kept the stone in a special case which cost him twenty-five shillings, and showed it to anyone considering a surgery of their own.
His cousin Jane Turner, at whose house the operation took place, nursed him back to health, and Pepys considered her a close friend for the rest of his life.
An autopsy performed by his friends revealed Pepys’ “left kidney contained seven irregular stones joined in a mass adhering to his back, the surrounding areas including the gut much inflamed, septic and mortified, the bladder gangrenous and the old wound from the stone operation broken open again.”
Links
#Heistwatch: You can’t help but think of Quebec’s maple syrup heists a few years back when reading that thieves stole half a million dollars worth of extra virgin olive oil from a Spanish mill. Apparently olive oil has become ‘liquid gold’ after a bad harvest reduced Spain’s production by 50%. Google translated comments from the original El Mundo article suggest two or three tanker trucks would be needed to transport the 50-60,000 litres of olive oil stolen from Marín Serrano El Lagar, a family business started in 1968. At that quantity, I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a true heist but actually some kind of embezzlement scheme. Still, it always helps to have a guy on the inside.
#Heistwatch 2: Police believe they cracked a 2016 train heist that occurred in Tamil Nadu, India, where thieves were able to cut into the roof of a parcel van loaded on a moving train. The van contained 226 boxes of soiled currency notes. The thieves waited for the diesel section of the journey so that the sound of the engine would cover up the their noise. Unless I’m misunderstanding my crores, they made off with roughly the equivalent of $5 million CDN, but ended up burning a bunch of notes of a denomination that was removed from circulation.
A portrait of Tenochtitlan: take five minutes out of your day to scroll through this 3D reconstruction of the Aztec Empire’s capital city. I knew it was said to rival the biggest European cities at the time, but I don’t think I really considered what that meant until I spent some time staring at these visualizations.
Who says twitter is dead? North Korean hackers have been using it to target infosec researchers working on vulnerable research and development. Per the article: “North Korean threat actors used social media sites like X (formerly Twitter) to build rapport with their targets. In one case, they carried on a months-long conversation, attempting to collaborate with a security researcher on topics of mutual interest. … Once a relationship was developed with a targeted researcher, the threat actors sent a malicious file that contained at least one 0-day in a popular software package.” Oh and North Korea might’ve hacked an online casino, too. More worryingly, it appears US pilots are training to bomb a North Korean VIP. (And I still can’t help but wonder if those ‘seized’ North Korean rockets Ukraine was firing were actually sold to Ukraine, hence the need for Putin to fete Kim Jong Un.)
Shameless self-promotion: I’ve got a short story in the second annual Hellarkey zine from Malarkey Books, out next month.
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, especially if you’ve made it this far. I’m considering taking this newsletter weekly. Shorter, but more frequent. Let me know what you think. Also, I still have a couple of Bluesky invites if anyone wants one. This has been Adam’s Notes for September 14, 2023. My name is Adam, and you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, Letterboxd, and Goodreads.
Have you tried submitting any stories of your own to a sf/f publicatio? And after slushing through 50 stories for FF, do you have any advice for writers looking to have short fiction published?