For five years, I worked for two different publishers in the Holtzbrinck Group, Tor Books and St. Martin's Press. I moved upstairs (from the 14th floor to the 18th) to SMP after two and a half years at Tor. My career was going exactly nowhere and I was getting burned out on the whole science fiction thing. It's not like being a reader and only paying attention to the stuff you like; working at a place like Tor means day after day having to work on a lot of wretched crap in order to very occasionally being able to squeeze in something good, and being paid poorly for the privilege. I mean, all the big publishers are that way now, in all fields, to varying degrees, but I found Tor to be especially limiting because of the very narrow editorial focus.

At SMP in theory at least I should have been able to do more, but in fact ended up doing less. Almost every time I tried to buy a book, I'd be outbid, sometimes by a pretty wide margin, by some other publisher. Which was pretty frustrating, but to be fair (to my former overlords), it must be said that some of those books have been published and probably have not earned out those higher advances.

In any case, at least some good books did occasionally happen, and I want to mention some of the high points.

RADIANCE, by Carter Scholz. Published by Picador USA. I won't go into here the whole saga of getting this book published, but I will say that in the end it was worth the effort. It's a dense, literary novel about a nuclear weapons lab in California working on components of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") missile defense system. The novel explores the complex relationship between the practice of scientific research and the need for funding, and how scientists and their work can be corrupted by money and politics. I should warn though, that the book is stylistically complex, some of the issues are fairly technical, and the characters are all revealed to be unsympathetic or even downright loathsome. Personally, however, I found it to be brilliant, compelling reading, revealing in a way that much contemporary fiction is just not, and fortunately, Picador's publisher agreed with me.

SUPER-CANNES, by J. G. Ballard. Published by Picador USA. I wouldn't claim that this is the best Ballard novel by any means, but probably the best of his relatively recent work. It's set in an advanced corporate enclave in southern France, a place known as Eden-Olympia where people work and live in an antiseptic luxurious isolation; Eden-Olympia is practically an autonomous city-state unto itself. Ballard, of course, goes right for the dark underbelly of the operation, a bizarre scheme cooked up to vent the dark psychological pressures and keep the surface appearance of a healthy community. It's, well, Ballardian.

A SHORTAGE OF ENGINEERS, by Robert Grossbach. Published by St. Martin's Press. Before I got into publishing, I actually spent two years in an engineering school, in the electrical engineering program. I basically flunked out, for spending too much time working in the coffeehouse and not enough working on my differential equations homework. So I couldn't resist a funny novel about the sort of people I went to school with. And this book is in fact very funny. A young guy just out of school has just taken a new job with a big aerospace defense contractor, and discovers that life doesn't always go according to a spec sheet.

KING RAT, by China Mieville. Published by Tor Books. This was one of those instances when I was moved as much by a sense of the author's potential as I was by the book itself. When I read the UK proofs for King Rat, I thought, this guy is going to be a major new voice in fantasy. And it appears that I was right. Too bad I'd already left Tor by the time Perdido Street Station was done.