As I’ve mentioned here before, my story “Fixing Hanover” from Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers, was picked up by three year’s bests: Rich Horton’s Science Fiction: Best of the Year (now being bundled with the fantasy volume), Jonathan Strahan’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Infinivox’s The Year’s Top 10 Stories of SF (audiobook). Awhile back, I also posted about changes in the story from first to second drafts, as well as some first draft material.
Recently, Rima Abunasser, who teaches at Furman University, let me know that her first-year college students were studying the anthology, and in particular “Fixing Hanover.” None of the students had read any SF before their semester in her class (”Science Fiction and Reality”).
Rima and the students were kind enough to allow me reproduce their discussion points below–thanks very much to them for that. If you haven’t read the story, you’ll discover lots of spoilers and, er, it might be incomprehensible in places. I found it interesting in the larger context of readers’ first contact with SF. I also found it personally interesting, of course–you don’t usually get this much feedback in one go on a short story, let alone, in reviews, anything approaching analysis.
Student (10) touches on something I worked hard on in the story, re Rebecca. Some of the others mention the isolated vision of the village, an issue that would preclude the story being turned into a novel–i.e., the relationship of the village to the hill people, and both to the empire would have to be mapped out. Debatable whether you have room to do more than paint in some details in a short story. There’s actually significant room for further discussion here re the relative importance of characters, how you modulate a story to bring some things into the foreground and leave others in the background, as well as issues of compression through nonlinear techniques, and how when you do so there has to be simplicity in other areas to offset the stress of that. The engine that makes the story work is the central relationship between three characters, but this is not actually what the story is about, if that makes sense, which would probably be a useful starting point for discussion in the context of a writing workshop. In fact, the material below has made me think about using “Fixing Hanover” in that context. Besides, it would be in keeping with the DIY/maker part of Steampunk subculture: let’s take the pieces of this story apart, see how it works, and put it back together again. I could even call it “Breaking Hanover.”
This is a good time to buy the anthology if you haven’t already, of course.
Everyone have a great weekend. I’m bogged down in final Finch/Booklife edits until Monday.
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Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer has just finished the final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch. With his wife, he recently edited Fast Ships, Black Sails and Best American Fantasy 2. His short fiction has or will soon appear in Black Clock, Tor.com, and two year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The Believer, the B&N Review, the Huffington Post, and many others. He also co-edits fiction anthos with his wife, Ann VanderMeer (fiction editor of Weird Tales), and The Church recently completed a song cycle based on his last novel, Shriek: An Afterword. If you like the blog, please consider 
