Rejected (Again)
Content Warning (click to expand)
religious satire
by Galen T. Pickett
Dear Creator:
Please forgive this “form” rejection letter. I am sure you will agree that the more time we spend evaluating the different creations submitted, the more we can get produced and out there in the multiverse. While your work shows promise, our only editorial advice for you beyond the enclosed reviews is to keep working. We are not requesting a rewrite at this time. We urge you to read through the comments of our team of evaluators carefully. We hope to see your work in the future!
On behalf of us all,
The Editor in Chief
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Report 1
The creator makes a valiant effort in world building here, and there is a lot to like! In the end, this design did not work for me. There are significant structural weaknesses that would need to be addressed on a resubmission.
First, I think the overall strategy of allowing this universe to chug along without intervention is remarkable. The reliance on quantum-scale fluctuations to set the broad initial conditions is interesting, as is the decision to let everything just “run” automatically from that point. Making random chance the driver of the story reminds me of using the Yi Jing to decide major plot developments in, for instance, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” which I am sure the author has read. The problem with this is the creator has made a standard “second law of thermodynamics” world in which the work will eventually wind down, destroying everything here a reader like me might like or begin to care about.
There winds up being a lot to care about! One of the many, many random combinations this work throws up for our consideration is a set of dominant organisms on a small planet. We do have to wait a long time for that subplot to get going — almost fourteen billion years! But when the author gets around to it, there is a wealth of pathos and irony here, more than enough to keep my attention! Getting to that point in the work is a slog, so I would urge the author on a resubmission to cut a great deal of that, and maybe just “poof” the whole thing into existence. I know that means invoking a “Fiat lux!“-ism, but I think it would be justified in this case.
A society of social animated beings, “animals” in the text, are the dominant form in the critical set of passages in the middle of the work. These beings are so finely tuned for irony and gullibility that they actually begin to believe they have been “intelligently designed”. Designed or not, intelligently or not, I am disappointed the author didn’t spend more time telling us about them. Social, but not sociable, they seem to need to gather in groups for the purpose of taking advantage of each other. Maybe the author could describe them as “anti-social animals” which seems closer to the mark to me.
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Report 2
This is not a fit submission for publication in this venue. The author would be well-advised to stick to the broad-brush strokes of the story and not get bogged down in the details of the self-assembled “animals” scattered on self-gravitating masses strewn throughout the work. Using chance to design the world is a poor choice. I prefer the active involvement of the creator, driving the entire design to an established goal. The whole piece is just messy. This is clearly the work of an amateur, and I would appreciate the editorial staff not passing this sort of work up to this level of review in future.
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Report 3
The author of this work is fiendishly clever, and I congratulate them on this achievement. Nonetheless, this will not work at all for this venue. There are some entertaining elements, particularly in the portions that seem at first glance to be driven by random chance. There is a subtle guiding hand, a whisper in the night as it were, that a reader can hardly tell is there in all the noise the author kicks up. There is clearly a grand plan, and the antics of the various animated lumps of matter add to a tapestry that is occasionally hilarious, but generally tragic. The recipe of order and meaning emerging from the interaction of these complex objects marks nothing less than the inauguration of an entirely new genre of universe-building. This sort of wild creativity is better reserved for, frankly, a higher-brow publication than the one I am reading for right here and now.
I really hope that this work gets published — somewhere. There is hope and redemption in there for just about every reader, and I appreciate the care the author puts into intervening in the text here and there. No one experiencing this over the billions of years of the expanse of the work will be unchanged. It takes my breath away to think what could be made with this sort of tool by an experienced creator. This is a remarkable piece for a first-time author, but I hope they learn the craft of world-building a bit more thoroughly before again embarking on something as ambitious as what I have before me here.
• • •
Associate Editor’s Report
I realize this is an unusual step, and that we normally do not provide direct feedback to our submitters from this level of review, particularly for works we are not publishing. But I think it appropriate (necessary?) to make a few comments. It is clear from the bulk of our editorial opinion that this is just not going to be published in our multiverse. I think that is a shame.
Our staff seems mesmerized by the role chance plays in your work. My guess is our screening readers (who are all authors and world-builders themselves) have had their own run-ins with random elements in their own works. The multiverse has many examples of exquisite, but unstable, constructions. Some of these worlds just stop after running out of energy. This is caused by an uncompensated entropic tendency dissipating the initial store of free energy into useless, disorganized thermal motion. The only narrative device we have for countering entropic rundown poses the danger of creating multiple positive feedback loops. The result is an unplanned concentration of the available energy until BOOM. The center does not hold — I am sure you know of many stories and worlds like that.
The traditional response to all this is to overcompensate, creating a lock-step order that leaves absolutely nothing to chance. Even so, such worlds are fragile. Their pristine, crystalline beauty shatters at the first unplanned change. In the interests of full disclosure, this is my own preferred method of construction, but as Report 3 mentions, you have invented a less heavy-handed way to approach this.
While it does take a long while for the work to get going, the layers of theme that you build from the first instants of the initial singularity reinforce and build upon other. Suffused through the work is an (at most times) unuttered but manifest ethical judgement you add here and there. I heard myself saying those words out loud along with the work: “And I saw that it was good.” Time and again — and indeed, it was good.
The spirit of entropy and decay are here, to be sure, but the spirit of decay is countered almost exactly by the spirit of the “whisper” noted in Report 3. Two almost equally matched principles, one causing decay and one continually rebuilding the world, vie throughout the work. The sweep and meaning of the entire effort (as well as your genuine affection for your animated beings) is right there — and you take an active part in the actual world at a critical point, experiencing the worst barbarities imaginable. Rarely does an author claim two roles in a work like this, but in addition to creator and guiding spirit, you actually become one of the characters as well. Three deep roles in the same work … I have never heard of anything so ambitious. The animals regard your eventual reappearance as miraculous, but to my mind the real miracle is that you would submit yourself to this on behalf of these creatures in the first place.
So, as I said, this will not get produced in our metaverse, and that is a real shame. But it is my conviction that the way you point out is a new way, a new truth, and a new life for the rest of us. This is important. There is an example here I am sure some of us would be glad to follow.
And I hope you do manage to self-publish this. Let me know if you do! I would be happy to assist as water-carrier or light-bringer, antagonist or protagonist … in whichever role seems best to you.
About the author and the piece (click to expand)
Galen T. Pickett has been a member of the physics faculty at Cal State Long Beach since 1999. He lives in the greater LA area with his spouse, four grown children, and several canines. His writing is inspired by the grandeur of the physical world and the absurdity of the academic world, in nearly equal measure. He tells us that this piece was rejected more than 20 times, but he thought the theme was a great match for Hell Itself. We agree.
©2025 by Galen T. Pickett. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.