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Atlanta Nights was a collaborative novel written by a group of around 40 authors organized by James D. Macdonald, mostly science fiction and fantasy authors, under the pseudonym Travis Tea. The novel was deliberately made to be as awful as possible, as in the case of its spiritual predecessor Naked Came the Stranger, and was submitted to the vanity publisher PublishAmerica as a hoax in response to comments posted by PublishAmerica on its website authorsmarket.net (http://www.authorsmarket.net). PublishAmerica claimed that
- "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.... [Science fiction authors] 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 claimed to be more selective in choosing what works to publish, so Atlanta Nights was submitted to test their standards. The book was officially accepted for publication on December 7, 2004, but the hoax was revealed on January 23, 2005, before the book went to press. PublishAmerica retracted its acceptance the next day.
The authors subsequently published the book through print on demand publisher Lulu.com (ISBN 1-4116-2298-7), with all proceeds designated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund.
Among the distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights are a duplicate chapter written by two different authors from the same segment of outline, a missing chapter, and a chapter "written" by a program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters.
The authors of the chapters of this book include:
- Chapter 1 - Sherwood Smith
- Chapter 2 - James D. Macdonald
- Chapter 3 - Sheila Finch
- Chapter 4 - Charles Coleman Finlay
- Chapter 5 - Julia West
- Chapter 6 - Brook West
- Chapter 7 - Adam-Troy Castro
- Chapter 8 - Allen Steele
- Chapter 9 -
- Chapter 10 - Mary Catelli
- Chapter 11 - Andrew Burt
- Chapter 12a - Victoria Strauss
- Chapter 12b - Shira Daemon
- Chapter 13 - Vera Nazarian
- Chapter 14 - Sean P. Fodera
- Chapter 15 - Teresa Nielsen Hayden
- Chapter 16 - Ken Houghton
- Chapter 17 - Charles Coleman Finlay
- Chapter 18 - M. Turville Heitz
- Chapter 19 - Kevin O'Donnell, Jr
- Chapter 20 - Chuck Rothman
- Chapter 21 - N/A, chapter missing
- Chapter 22 - Laura J. Underwood
- Chapter 23 - Jena Snyder
- Chapter 24 - Paul Melko
- Chapter 25 - Tina Kuzminski
- Chapter 26 - Ted Kuzminski
- Chapter 27 - Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb
- Chapter 28 - Danica and Brook West
- Chapter 29 - Rowan and Julia West
- Chapter 30 - Derryl Murphy
- Chapter 31 - Michael Armstrong
- Chapter 32 - Pierce Askegren
- Chapter 33 - Deanna Hoak
- Chapter 34 - Computer generated
- Chapter 35 - Catherine Mintz
- Chapter 36 - Peter Heck
- Chapter 37 - M. Turville Heitz
- Chapter 38 -
- Chapter 39 - Brenda Clough
- Chapter 40 - Judi B. Castro
- Chapter 41 - Terry McGarry
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