Planet of the Babes

I have a busy life. It's true. I'm never done until at least 5pm. Classes on editing, work as an editor, doing my editing homework. I'm living, eating, and breathing editing. (Gee, it's a good thing I like it, isn't it?) And recently I've decided to add yet another commitment to my list: I'm volunteering as an editor for the sci-fi student journal on campus called Leading Edge. It's actually pretty fun, despite the very high nerd-factor. I view it as a unique opportunity to let the inner geek in me stretch her legs a little. I keep her tied down most of the time, since life typically requires someone infinitely more practical than the sci-fi geek.

Well, to clarify: I thought I was a geek. Hahahaha. Nope. There were so many jokes that went way over my head. I'm not sure how to react to this revelation. For now, I guess I'll take it as a good thing.

Anyway, to the point. Because I ramble. It's fun sometimes.

We're currently in the reviewing-for-acceptance-or-rejection stage. Basically, we don't do any substantive or copyedits. At all. We just read through the story and decide whether or not we like it enough to give it a pass and let it go on to the next phase of story submissions. Naturally, in this early stage, you get a wide range of quality. Some of it is not so good.

For example, I read a story called Planet of the Babes. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's been done before. Astronauts explore and land on a foreign planet. Unsure of what to expect, they disembark and look cautiously around. All of a sudden, before their eyes, they behold a group of stunningly beautiful, and apparently single/abandoned, women. To their disbelief, the women welcome them into their homes, feed them wine and good food, and give them a place to sleep for the night. The three (lucky) spacemen stay up late talking about their extraordinary good luck in landing on this planet, but before they can get too caught up in their raptures, one of them cautions that things may not be as they seem. What if the women are shapeshifters who are really reptilian monsters that will slash them to death as soon as they get them alone and vulnerable? The others blink slowly a few times. Naaah. That's not possible. Dude's been reading too many science fiction stories. The cautionary spaceman chuckles sheepishly and accedes. Right on cue, one of the women comes into their room, bats her eyes flirtatiously and, of course, all three spacemen run like mad to the closest woman for some good old fashioned alien lovin' (never fear, the author did have the tact to keep it PG-rated, thank heavens). AND THEN! Suddenly the ravishing women transform into hideous reptiles and slash the spacemen to death! The spacemen realize before they die (because, you know, you have time to think about things like this as viciously sharp claws are tearing into your flesh) that the cautionary spaceman was right. Whoops. The end.

Seriously. That was the story. Except that I managed to tell it in 250 words, with complex sentences and relatively good diction. Our dear submitter took 700 words, lots of dialogue with "..." _____ said speaker tags (not even kidding: we had a party when we found the ONE "..." ____ asked tag) and painfully cliche phraseology to tell the same story.

And yes, we all read this story. Sometimes, you just stumble upon a gem that's so appalling in its quality that you simply have to share it with everyone else. So the whole group took a break from editing their various manuscripts to listen to the story as someone read it aloud.

I feel slightly honored to have been the one who discovered this little gem.

In context of this and other awful submissions, we got into a discussion about the "camp classic" phenomenon, where something is "So bad it's good." One of the guys even drew a graph on the board that looked something like this:

I nabbed this off a blog about the Star Wars Holiday Special (which, incidentally, also came up in our discussion -- they agreed with this guy: it's not even "so bad it's good." It's just plain horrible)

Now, myself, I tend to dislike camp classics, even the ones of the so-bad-it's-good variety, so I didn't relate as well at first. But after taking said story into account, I began to understand a little bit of their appeal. The enjoyment comes less from any quality (or lack thereof) of the work than from the opportunity of unleashing our snarky sides and ripping into it afterward.

Poor guy. There was no way he was making it past the first cut. So I had to wonder if he really honestly thought it was a good story, or if he'd done it as a dare. For his sake, I hope it was a dare, because that restores my faith in good writers out there. Either way, it gave me a kick.