Imagine, if you will, a future in which I'm editing an anthology.<\/p>\n
Now imagine that for some reason beyond human ken, in writing the little about-the-author and about-the-story blurbs that precede each story in this anthology, I decide to offhandedly remark on the details of the central surprise revealed in the climax of the story.<\/p>\n
I hope that should such an unfortunate event come to pass, someone will have the courage to take away my computer before things get out of hand.<\/p>\n
Luckily, I long ago learned the trick of avoiding reading such introductory material until after I've read the story. I learned even before that to avoid reading the Introduction to an anthology; most of the time those don't contain spoilers per se, but they do usually contain more of a thematic description of each story than I want to know in advance. But that's a publishing convention—the Introduction is designed to tell you about the anthology, of course, and sometimes to convince people browsing in a bookstore to buy it—so I expect it and it doesn't especially bother me. But I just read a story in a science fiction anthology, and then went back and read the about-the-author-and-story blurb, and at the end of that blurb the editor very explicitly and directly says \"This [is a] story in which [X does Y] to ensure [Z]\" where Y and Z comprise the surprise that's at the core of the story, not revealed until a couple of pages before the end. It's possible that it wouldn't be a surprise to people who'd read the author's other work set in the same universe, but I haven't, and it would've ruined the story for me if I'd read that blurb.<\/p>\n
It's even worse when the blurb gives spoilers that are incorrect—the previous story in this anthology has a blurb that describes a background event that I'm pretty sure didn't actually happen in the story.<\/p>\n
Grumble grumble when I<\/em>'m in charge grumble editors grumble spoilers grumble let the story stand on its own grumble grumble.<\/p>\n In unrelated and much better news, I think I got upwards of 8 hours' sleep last night, for the first time in some weeks. Very pleased.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine, if you will, a future in which I’m editing an anthology. Now imagine that for some reason beyond human…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}