Book Review: "Atlanta Nights" by Travis Tea

Atlanta Nights is awful from the very first page, and even worse if you start in the middle. It's deliberately, gut-splittingly hilariously so bad I can't even describe it. If it were a music CD, it would be an untuned bagpipe quartet playing Pink Floyd, Bach, and Brazilian rap music ... simultaneously.

I enjoyed looking for a plot all the way from Bruce Lucent's awakening in the hospital run by government spooks through the obligatory "it was just a dream" scene (which should have ended the book but somehow the characters staggered on) to the Kafka-esque or maybe Joycean ending. I'm sure I saw a plot or at least a sub-plot in there somewhere but it's hard to be certain. I lost track when the gender changes started happening.

The Writing of Atlanta Nights

The short, sordid history of Atlanta Nights began when PublishAmerica, a vanity press well-known for its lenient acceptance threshold business model that seems to be based on accepting anything that resembles English text from a live author and making a profit when those authors buy their own books back, insulted the wrong writers. The writers were warning unpublished writers that PublishAmerica was not what it claimed to be.

PublishAmerica claimed, on a page they later removed from the net, "As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.... [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home." It described them as "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters." PublishAmerica also bragged about how "picky" they were about accepting manuscripts.

The power-armor gauntlet had been thrown onto the plasteel decking.

Instigated by James D. McDonald, a well-known writer, a group of published authors and others decided to test how low the acceptance threshold was at PublishAmerica. Each participant was given a small amount of information about setting and characters and told to write a chapter. A bad chapter. A chapter so bad that no editor could possible mistake it for publishable work unless under the influence of large quantities of bad drugs. After the chapters were collated into semi-coherence, and any taint of good writing expunged from the text, they submitted it using the real name of a conspirator.

PublishAmerica accepted it, in an e-mail saying "PublishAmerica has decided to give Atlanta Nights the chance it deserves." At any trade publisher, it would have reached the trashbin it deserved, but PublishAmerica even included a contract. A few weeks passed, then a few hours after news of the spoof reached the internet, PublishAmerica withdrew their offer. The ostensible reason was that they had discovered a chapter of machine-written gibberish - the infamous Chapter 34. This indicates that they sent the acceptance and a legally binding contract before they read the entire manuscript. It decisively proved that PublishAmerica was not reading submissions the way real publishers do.

Why is this significant? As one writer explains, "If Publish America were a true traditional publisher, like Tor, their acquisitions team would reject the bogus ms., having actually read the manuscripts submissions. If Publish America were an honest vanity publisher, like LuLu.com, there would be no shame in them publishing the bogus ms., because there would be no claim of editorial review to belie. An honest vanity publisher claims only to publish your book, not validate it as well-written and marketable."

Because of the demand from its fans, Atlanta Nights has been released by an honest vanity publisher, LuLu, and not a single word of that amazing text has been changed.

Author: Travis Tea
Printed: 299 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", perfect binding, black and white interior ink
ISBN: 1-4116-2298-7
Copyright: © 2005
Language: English
Country: United States