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 The writers were warning unpublished writers that PublishAmerica was not what it claimed to be.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.