So this week I consulted the Gods of Randomness and they instructed me to reach into my big file of rejection letters and pull item #9 out of folder “F”. There aren’t a lot of papers in this folder, and there would be even fewer if I had decided to file rejections from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under “M” instead of under “F”, but for whatever reason I went into the prepositional clause to sort this one. I know I sent a lot of stuff to F &SF (none of which was accepted) and there are only three rejection slips from them under “F”, so maybe I was inconsistent and there are more under “M”. We’ll find out at some point I guess.
Anyhow, this particular rejection letter is for a short story called “The Light”:
In this story, a scientist, having suffered a near-death experience and seeing the light, the tunnel, etc., sets about trying to arrange an experiment. The short story leads off with a quote from Carl Sagan:
… Every human being, without exception, has already shared an experience like that of those travelers who return from the land of death: the sensation of flight; the emergence from darkness into light … There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.
Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain
So you can maybe guess where this story is going; Dr. Marten harvests a woman’s eggs and grows a baby in a vat so that there’s no birth experience and then, years later, shows up to abduct the now-grown child and attempts to induce a similar experience by killing him. Just temporarily, of course. Oh, and did I mention that the woman whose eggs he harvested committed suicide not long before he showed up with his equipment? Needless to say, the boy, Ian, comes back wrong in the aftermath of the experiment.
Now, normally with a Random Rejection I post the story, but reading this one from a distance of 20-odd years, it’s, uh, not one of my better ones, so I’m exercising editorial control and not reprinting it. Except for this one line at the very end. I do kinda like that one.
“If you’re going to play God, Dr. Marten,” Ian said, smiling at last, “sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the Devil.”
James V. Viscosi, “The Light”
BTW, in case anyone was wondering, I didn’t see any lights or tunnels or whatnot back during The Event, which was still a relatively distant-death experience, bad odds notwithstanding.
Viscosity 
even if the story wasn’t one of your favorites, it’s still quite original. and it really goes to show that so many things can just be beyond their time. when you were describing the story, I immediately thought of that netflix show where the guy was doing that brain scanning machine as proof that there was an afterlife. if they could execute that, they can certainly execute a plot like the one you wrote here.
i do like that line about god and the devil though. it resonates with me.
i sometimes wonder if the only thing we see after we cross over is a whole bunch of people wailing that it was all fake and there’s nothing here.
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That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Like the waiting room from “Beetlejuice” except you never get out!
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HUH!!! I would have LOVED to have read “The Light” James! It sounds very sp00ky & very intruiging to me.
And the last line of your story REALLY is a BANGER!
Those Rejection letters make me shudder. They seem so cold & impersonal. And rude!
Thanks for sharing your experiences. It reminds me why I gave up publishing…… lol…..
🙂 Sherri-Ellen (BellaSita Mum) & ***purrss*** BellaDharma
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That sounds like a story with a great premise. Very intriguing. I don’t know why these agents don’t accept them, but everyone have their own perspective and they don’t represent everyone. I would think some other agent would accept it.
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Rejections stink, but try not to take them personally. Some editors are just full of themselves.
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Oh I never took them personally (except once), I just filed them and kept going. The exception was a long story called “Suicide Corners” that I spent a few weeks whittling down (cutting words, changing sentences, etc.) to get it into the maximum word length for a publication called “Crossroads” that was taking stories set at, you guessed it, crossroads. Crossroads being places where they used to bury suicides, I thought this story would be a good fit. I got back a pretty nasty letter basically accusing me of lying about the word count to make it seem like the story didn’t violate their guidelines, and since I had spent so long reworking it specifically to MEET their guidelines, I was annoyed enough to shoot a rather strongly-worded letter back defending myself. But it all worked out in the end; we ended up apologizing to each other and “Suicide Corners” was ultimately included in “Crossroads”. (Check it out, a happy ending ― not something you see a lot in my stories!)
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I liked the premise for your (declined) story. You have to remember that with fiction, it has to READ like typical fiction or it will be rejected flat-out. That’s my greatest failing as an author — excessive originality. I don’t like to be pigeonholed.
Come visit my website and leave some comments, if you like
http://www.catxman.wordpress.com
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Ha, yeah, if I had a dollar for every rejection letter I got that said something to the effect of “We really liked this but we have no idea how to market it” I’d have … Well, at least $10 maybe.
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Thanks for commenting at my site. Continue to do so.
My reply:
There is room for originality within established formats & tropes. I think Stephen King is (early Stephen King) a good example of how to do this. When King wrote of vampires in SALEM’S LOT, he infused his personal slant STRONGLY into the narrative and it came off better, not worse, for it.
That’s the ticket.
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Hey do you live in Oneida County, NY? I used to live on the same street as a Viscosi family. I grew up in Rome and now I live in Utica.
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Well hi there! I’m originally from Oneida County (I grew up in Oriskany), but we don’t live in New York anymore. My dad and aunt grew up in Rome. If you lived on the same street as a Viscosi family there it could have been my grandparents or maybe some of my cousins. There aren’t a lot of Viscosis so we’re all related one way or another! 😁
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The story sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing the rejection letter too. Very interesting.
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