I’ve been spending some quality time with Gareth D. Jones‘ initial draft of his upcoming novel, Gap Years. I say “upcoming”, because I’m sure you’ll inevitably see the novel on some book shelf at some point. I am now a Reader with a capital ‘R’, according to his blog. It’s a solid piece of fiction. This is just the latest time we’ve reached across the pond and helped each other out. As an aside, I started thinking about the contacts and friends I’ve made in the UK, and that got me thinking about the subtle contrast between fiction produced in the UK and the United States.

Of all the foreign markets to submit my work to, I think I most enjoy those from the UK, and it seems a mutual opinion — my work has always done pretty well in that region. There is a delightful charm to much of the fiction from the UK, an attention to detail. Having read or listened to a lot of work from this region, I guess the best way I can describe the difference between it and American fiction is character development and world-building are allowed time to blossom, whereas on this side of the Atlantic — well, not always.

With our American sensibilities, we might find a more relaxed pace in a story to be a turnoff, and indeed it has been said before that The Lord of the Rings and several other classics would have never been published according to our modern, new-world literary standards. In a way, I view that as an inevitability, a desire by publishers to keep published fiction accessible for the iGeneration. And yet, it saddens me as well. I think we’ve lost something in our desire to forever chase the quick pace and avoid the editor’s infamous “red line of death”.

Of course it is unrealistic to expect the modern fiction audience to readily devour something like 10,000 Years in a Block of Ice, or (for a more contemporary example), even some of Ben Bova’s slower stuff. But we should still take our time and at least make work like this accessible and available to the modern reader. I believe that starts with the fiction markets, but I can’t fault them either way for what they want to accept.

I do worry: have we produced some sort of filter in the United States that is encouraging fiction markets to turn away anything but the most aggressively-paced stories? Has this desire to have the word “rollercoaster” as an adjective describing our work cost us the chance to see what we’re zipping by? I hope that we can get past our attention spans, and occassionally take a chance at a story that takes it time taking us somewhere else. I worry that great work is being passed over as we speak simply because it seems like every piece of commercial fiction has to be paced like a Michael Crichton pulp novel.

Ultimately it is up to us as the reader to decide what kind of fiction we want, and if we’re okay with a pace that isn’t breakneck now and then. So I ask: are we?

Stay tuned.