Just so you know

This blog is officially 1/3 evil.

My obsolescence, let me show you it

Instead of waxing poetic about all the really cool things I got for x-mas, I thought I'd collect all the stuff sitting in my office that used to be really cool. Remember, eventually that iPhone's going to join this little montage:

We got here on top, the Ultimate Doom, which needed 5 whole disks to install. We have the first iPod, pre-windows, with 5 gigs of storage and a firewire connection that will fit no current iPod accessories. In the middle there we have two flash drives 32MB and 128MB. On the right there we have one of the first smart phones, a Nokia 3650, with a Symbian OS that had a Commodore 64 emulator on it before it died. On the bottom there we have the last word in 20th Century unreliable mass storage, a couple of Iomega Zip disks that hold a whole 100 Megs.

Ready, Set. . .

Well, Christmas is upon us and for me it means something in addition to the birth of Christ, feeding ham to the in-laws, and sacrificing a tree on the altar of capitalism: This year it's the start of my semi-annual writing vacation. (No, not a vacation from writing.) Like a lot of novelists out there, probably the vast majority, I have a day job. So, I have to work the writing in around the job, usually in the early morning.

However, one of the perks I do get is four weeks of paid vacation a year. So, I use half of it for actual family vacations (like my trip to Germany this year) and the other half I use for intense work on whatever project is on the front burner. Sort of a micro NaNoWriMo where I'm aiming a lot higher than 1600+ words a day. A one person writer's retreat that, this year, is going to run from Christmas to Jan 1st. I'm hoping I'll be able to sprint to the finish with Prophets and have it done for the new year. (Which, if my estimate of the word count for the novel's right, will require something under 3400 words a day for a week.)

Wish me luck.

But if it's that easy, wouldn't everyone do it?

Again, some Smart Bitches have led me to yet another choice example of web ludicrousity (I'm a writer, I get to make words up) where a website lists "romance novelist" as a possible home-based business for stay-at-home moms. While certainly upbeat and well-meaning, anyone who's had to actually expend effort to make money from their words has to look at this and just sadly shake their heads.

If you like writing, have a great imagination and knack for storytelling, have self-discipline, are a romantic, are willing to sell your finished novel, and are persistent, then being a romance novelist may be the home business for you!

Sort of reminds you of the old ads that asked "can you draw this picture?" I mean, yes, this is all sort of true, but it does sort of downplay the amount of each you need to be successful. I also suspect that, if you strike the references to "romance" you end up with an assertion that even the post's author might have found a little silly. The whole idea of recommending this to someone looking for a home business on the same level as, for instance, selling Hummels on eBay or running a day care center, I think arises from the pernicious idea that anyone can write a romance novel.

As a romance novelist you should be writing everyday. Many successful romance novelists look to everyday life, or historical events to generate ideas for a story. Your job is not only to write your book but it will also be to sell it! If you self publish you will be in charge of printing, marketing, selling, and fulfilling orders of your book. If you don't want to self publish, you will need to find a publisher to do all those things for you for a percentage of your book's profits.

All I can say is holy batcrap. Again, on a literal level you could say this is an accurate paragraph, but it shows the understanding of a Martian reconstructing the economics of the publishing industry based on the badly translated back cover of a single Harlequin Romance.

Merry Christmas from Videogame Hell

Asshat of the day

Oh the things you find online when just clicking around at random. The man's name is Tad Safran, he's from the UK, and I do not think he gets laid enough. He has an article at Times Online (which I found via a post at the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog) that is essentially one long rant about the shortcomings of British women, who are apparently lazy and unkempt, as opposed to American women who are vain, crass, materialistic and "take themselves too seriously and are annoyingly confrontational."

Old episodes of the Man Show were less misogynistic than this guy. Hell, Girls Gone Wild is less misogynistic than this guy. I mean, here's a choice little quote:

Sophie tumbled into the house looking like a refugee from Hurricane Katrina. She smelt like the R&D lab at Philip Morris. Her outfit was about as sexy as a half-pound of ground meat. And, surely, the only time she’d seen the inside of a gym was to ask directions to the nearest pub. I was hurt that my friends thought I’d be remotely interested in Sophie. Even more insulting was when my friend’s wife pointedly said: “Tad, I hear you just sold a screenplay to the producers of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” I could not believe it. She was selling ME to HER!?

Actually, Mr. Safran, I am pretty sure that Sophie once did your friend's wife some grave unforgivable injustice and sadly the only way she could effectively mete out any revenge was to arrange a suicidally painful evening with you.

Another choice bit of ugliness:

I remember dancing with a really lovely English girl. She was gorgeous. Things were going well until I took her hand. I actually recoiled. Her palms were rough and leathery like a tree-climbing monkey’s. Years of working around horses had given her the hands of an 80-year-old Siberian coalminer. Surely some sort of moisturising routine would have been a simple and inexpensive remedy. (It was more shocking than the time I took a girl’s hand after chatting her up for an hour and discovered she was missing the two middle fingers on it.)

That last line is the kicker, ain't it? Got a really sensitive new-age guy here. Frankly, I really feel bad for the girl with the missing fingers. I mean you go though life, self-conscious about something like that, you meet a guy that seems cool, talk for an hour thinking he doesn't care and in a single gesture realize A) he was too busy staring at your tits to notice your hand in the first place, and B) when he does notice, he freaks out like a clown-phobic kid at the Ronald McDonald house.

Of course, my favorite line of his:

I’m sure other women will be incredibly impressed by your new Jimmy Choos or Blahniks. But, ladies, the only time a man will notice your shoes is if your feet are wedged on top of his shoulders bouncing either side of his head.

You better hurry and snap this guy up girls, he's still single. I bet he wonders why.

GLoLw Cat

Now, some breaking news from those wacky Korean scientists:




Of course, these genetically-engineered fluorescent cats were created to deal with the epidemic of fluorescent mice.

Advice from Mark Twain

I have suggested in a comment that beginning writers should all read Mark Twain's essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences. (This is the third time I've posted about it in this blog.) However, for the caffeinated ADD sufferers out there, I'd thought I'd post Twain's rules here. (i.e. the ones Mr. Cooper violated.)

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. These eighteen require:

• 1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
• 2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
• 3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
• 4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
• 5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
• 6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
• 7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.
• 8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
• 9. They require that that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
• 10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
• 11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These
require that the author shall:

• 12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
• 13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
• 14. Eschew surplusage.
• 15. Not omit necessary details.
• 16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
• 17. Use good grammar.
• 18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

25%

Well I've hit the first landmark in the Apotheosis Trilogy I've felt worth posting about. I have reached the quarter mark on the trilogy as a whole. Word-count subject to change, as I've assumed that book #1 is going to be a little longer than the next two. Speaking of book one, I'm a little past the 2/3 mark, and I'm hoping to get the first draft wrapped up sometime in early January.

BTW- here's a good rule of thumb. The more fragmented your POV, the more characters and settings, the more tightly you need to adhere to an explicitly linear time-line. If you have events separated by several light-years that converge and diverge as the players move about-- you better draw up a literal time-line(s). I have an Excel spreadsheet with columns for various characters so I can track when stuff happened.

Why I Hate Self-Appointed Literati

In the Guardian there's an article about the 100th Anniversary of Mills & Boon romances. In their article they've fallen into the pathology of having to include a pro and a con segment to the article. (What? Someone has an opinion? We must have an opposing viewpoint, the force must remain in balance!)

It is the "con" portion that really torques me. Julie Bindle pulls no punches in her article unambiguously entitled "Detestable Trash." The first two lines:

Fifteen years ago, I read 20 Mills & Boon novels as research for a dissertation on "romantic fiction and the rape myth". It was the easiest piece of research I have ever done.

Can you see the warning signs already? When you set forth the ease with which you've come to your conclusions in the second sentence of your argument, you are admitting the shallowness of your thoughts on the matter. Much like certain wannabe European literati who were publicly spanked on other, more popular, sites in the SF blogosphere, this article advertises the lack of depth of the writer, waves it like a flag, and pretends it is a trait held in common by people whose opinions matter.

Now I don't take lightly arguments about "novels that perpetuate gender stereotypes... [which] feed directly into some women's sense of themselves as lesser beings, as creatures desperate to be dominated." However, I think a lot more thought went into the deconstruction of the misogyny of Larry Niven's Known Space oeuvre on the Feminist SF Blog than went into this article, which allegedly considers a much longer and broader body of work. Not only does the author condemn a century worth of text on the basis of twenty-some examples, read fifteen years ago, but condemns the current crop simply on the basis of back cover copy. That's just lazy. When you are too intellectually dishonest to read the subject of your critique, you undercut your arguments no matter how easy the target might be.

The final insult comes at the end, with the following enlightened bit of criticism:

[...] Heterosexual romantic fiction promotes the sexual submission of women to men. M&B novels are full of patriarchal propaganda. I can say it no better than the late, great Andrea Dworkin. This classic depiction of romance is simply "rape embellished with meaningful looks".

Thus we come to condemn an entire genre, hetrosexual romantic fiction. I can understand a feminist critique of Mills & Boon, of category romance, and of romance in general, is probably not going to be favorable. But even as someone who's only brushed the genre, I can see that this is over the top. Way over. This is the same thing as a blanket condemnation of SF because you read a couple dozen bad Perry Rhodan novels in the 90s. Worse, the deliberate qualification, making it heterosexual romance, makes it appear that the portrayal of homosexual rape fantasies is somehow a morally superior exercise.

ADDENDUM: Teach Me Tonight has begun an in-depth critique of this article.

This Is Not the Blog You're Looking For.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Meme Ahoy!

Caught this from Maureen McHugh’s blog.
Meme: Post the first line of your first journal entry of each month for 2007.

(One thing strikes me doing this, how quickly Wolfbreed went from idea to sale.)

January, I'm Back. . .

• And actually moderating comments.

February, New Blogger

• Well, I just spent a good two hours updating this blog to the new Blogger layout, and if I've done everything right, you'll probably notice no difference at all...

March, Copies are in!

• Yay!

April, Still Cranking

• Hit 40,000 words on Wolfbreed yesterday.

May, Two Thirds. . .

• I hit the two-thirds point, and plot-wise it's all downhill from here.

June, O frabjous day!

• Ladies and gentlemen, Wolfbreed is complete!

July, Agents Is Win

• My search for a new agent has borne fruit! I have secured the representation of Elanor Wood at the Spectrum Literary Agency.

August, A Non-SF Novel Every SF Writer Should Read

• People trolling in the genre mines of Science Fiction and Fantasy often harbor some resentment towards "mainstream" authors who manage to write books with heavy genre elements and get them to be taken seriously by people whose job it is to take books seriously.

September, Kirk Lives!

• For Star Trek fans who thought James T. should have gone out in more of a blaze of glory...

October, But, then, how can you go around freaking the Mundanes?

• There is a movement afoot, complete with manifesto, called Mundane SF.

November, I is playing wit mai toyz

• I added a new little feature to the blog here. In the lower right there's now a widget that's keeping track of writing posts I flag on RSS feeds I'm subscribing to with Google Reader.

December, Guess What I Got in the Mail Today?

• This is my prize for winning Scalzi's LOLCreation contest.

Apparently, Furries Drink Lots of French OJ.

I guess this means that it's a shade more likely that Forests of the Night might make it to the big screen. I don't know if that's exactly a good thing.

Microsoft, the Beast That Cannot be Fed

You may have heard of the non-profit initiative called “One Laptop Per Child.” It is essentially an attempt to bridge the technology divide between the technological west and the developing world. OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with the goal of producing a laptop as cheaply as possible and provide it to schoolchildren all over the world. While development goal was a laptop under $100, they’ve managed a production model at under $200, which seems quite in line with the group’s mission. The XO is being produced and distributed as we speak.

Now, of course, since the hardware takes up most of that $200 cost, the XO runs a Linux OS and associated open source software. And we all know that when someone actually distributes an inexpensive flash-based Linux laptop, God kills a Microsoft Marketing VP.

Funny thing is, whenever someone opens a market, Microsoft wants to stick its 800 lb gorilla foot in it. Doesn’t matter how much sense it makes, they want some of that hot Third-World computing action and they’re asking OLPC to beef up the hardware so the XO has half a chance of running a suitably crippled version of Windows XP. Wow. They’re whining about being locked out of hardware when they’ve gone out of their way to dictate terms to hardware vendors that would make it impossible to run a non-proprietary (i.e. non-Windows) OS— and incidentally making sure the same hardware doesn’t even work with Vista a fair bit of the time.

Apparently, SFWA doesn’t have a lock on irony.

Successfully Clawing My Way Up From the Bottom of the Midlist

At least that’s how it’s looking. With help from my kick-ass agent, Eleanor, I’ve sold Wolfbreed and a subsequent novel to Anne Groell at Bantam/Spectra for an advance a bit more than three times what DAW was giving me. Contracts are being written as we speak, and by this time next month, I will be the newest author at Bantam. Or, at least one of me will be. We haven’t talked bylines yet, though Eleanor thinks that Wolfbreed may be an S. A. Swiniarski book.

We will pause this blog post for an important message:
WAHOOO!!!!
We now return to your regularly scheduled blog.

We can add to this news the amusing wrinkle that will probably make a few friends of mine’s head ‘splode:

I’ve become a romance author.

Ok, it’s dark paranormal historical romance (and how deep can we subclass a genre?) but still. Now, from earlier posts you might have gathered that I was expecting this. I was. But I don’t think anyone else was. This includes Anne at Bantam who approached the subject of genre very gingerly; in her words “Some boys are scared by the label.” She obviously expected some resistance on my end. Frankly I am the last person to look down on anyone’s genre, and given the way SF has been treated historically, I think any SF writer that peers down his nose at romance writers is an arrogant twit.

Watch This Space. . .

By the end of the week I expect to have a big announcement.

And in the interest of equal time. . .

Christians can be stupid too.

The minister with the stuffed pig is really on the same moral level as the idiots in Sudan who were demonstrating to have that teacher executed over a teddy bear.

I have the really sad feeling that the ultimate apocalypse will be waged over something this idiotic.

The Problem When a Politician Lacks a Sense of Humor. . .

. . . is they don't realize they're being unintentionally funny until it's too late.

Guess What I Got in the Mail Today?

This is my prize for winning Scalzi's LOLCreation contest. Just showed up today. In case you can't read the inscription, it says:

"To Steve, who does not do logic wrong."

On looking stupid, clueless, and unprofessional. . .

SFWA is becoming an on-line spectator sport. I'm not going to go into too much depth here, as the bandwidth expended on this is already reaching critical mass. I'll only comment by posing the following rhetorical question:

If the chair of your e-piracy committee screws up so bad that it makes your whole organization look like of bunch of myopic Luddite fossils and causes you to throw said committee under the bus, and then you impanel a bunch of respected writer-type folks to draft recommendations on how to fix the problems, is it a wise move to then, to all appearance, just take said recommendations, file them, and re-constitute the same e-piracy committee with the same leadership with the same obsessions?

I make no comments on the merits, but I'll just make the observation that in some situations, making yourself look as if you're stupid, clueless, arrogant and unprofessional is tantamount to actually being stupid, clueless, arrogant and unprofessional. Appearances count, and this looks really bad.

How *not* to sell your book

You may have read my earlier post on how not to query agents. Here’s a follow up, using another spam message I got recently.

I am genuinely mystified at the thought processes that produce things like this. Spam in general is only effective because it only requires .01% of the recipients to respond and order their genuine Nigerian Viagra stock enlargement cream. That's a model that doesn't translate to universes as small as the publishing industry. And even if it did, do you actually want responses from people gullible enough to respond to it?

Anyway, as case in point, I present the suitably annotated spam e-mail. (Remember: if you send me personal e-mail I treat it as confidential, if you send me spam, it’s fair game.)

My snark is in green.

Subject: Like Science fiction? The newest and most genuine saga is now availible!
[SWANN: A genuine saga? Is it in the original old Norse? And while I’m a sloppy-ass typist in my personal e-mails, if you’re advertising your WRITING you might actually try to keep typos out of your subject line. Just a thought.]

From: <xxxx@xxx.com>
Cc:<webmaster@xxx.com>, <soles@xxx.net>,
<webmaster@xxx.net>, <bud_sparhawk@xxx.com>,
<walter.spence@xxx.net>, <normanspinrad@xxx.com>,
<demonlord07@xxx.com>, <edstack@xxx.com>,
<justinvs@xxx.net>, <jimmy@xxx.com>, <bexstarr@xxx.com>,
<dave@xxx.com>, <jim0052@xxx.com>, <evenmere@xxx.com>,
<deb@xxx.com>, <dave@xxx.com>, <psicom@xxx.org>,
<swann_website@xxx.net>, <info@xxx.org>,
<webmaster@xxx.org>, <mattea@xxx.com>, <picpal@xxx.com>,
<enquiries@xxx.co.uk>, <email@xxx.com>,
<rsheckley@xxx.com>, <quaglia@xxx.com>,
<mop15870@xxx.pt>, <1@xxx.asu.ed>,
<sarahsingleton@xxx.co.uk>, <smartin@xxx.com>,
<theworldsofrobertsilverberg@xxx.com>
[SWANN: Never heard of BCC, huh? And unless it has to do with the latest SFWA implosion or Marty Greenberg anthology, I have trouble imagining a legit reason for sending me, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad and Robert Schekley the exact same e-mail.]

If you want real science fiction we recommend this story to you.
[SWANN: You realize you just pummeled 32 professional, published SF authors with the blatant implication that they AREN’T writing real science fiction?]

It can’t get anymore real than this!
[SWANN: Unless you write non-fiction. Oh, and yes, it says “anymore real,” which might make a cool postmodern character name, but doesn’t do so well as part of an English sentence.]

We are excited to offer you this great narrative detailing real material for the next era in human history.
[SWANN: “Real material?” Does that even mean anything? And don’t you just love the royal “we?” It adds just the right amount of pretension to the cluelessness. Finally, given the nature of most of my other spam, please keep your excitement to yourself.]

From new, fantastic yet satisfyingly available technology to accurate alien biologies, provided in our new cosmic work is what your hungry sci-fi mind has been yearning for.
[SWANN: “New, fantastic yet satisfyingly available technology” is a phrase that belongs in badly-translated Russian Viagra spam. We’ve also gone from “great narrative” to “our new cosmic work.” This is not an improvement. Also, the writer is so in love with modifiers that they forgot to have the sentence make grammatical sense. “From … technology to … biologies, provided in our … work is what your … mind has been yearning for.” Arrgh, this e-mail has hurt me in my brain.]

Visit www.xxxx.com in your Internet explorer browser and see for yourself!
[SWANN: Damn! I use Firefox. And the exclamation point? Nice touch. PS: Bill Gates’ legal team is sending you a letter for failing to capitalize “Explorer ™”]

Feel free to contact us with the information at the bottom of the page and we can discuss how to get you your book.
[SWANN: As I said with the query spam: Good idea to make it a non-intuitive multi-step process to have people get back to you.]

We hope to hear from you soon!
[SWANN: No, I really don’t think you do.]

Whew!

Let me get serious here for a moment, because what this spammer is doing is actually a little less offensive than what the query spammer was doing. This person is obviously trying to get some buzz for their (probably self-published) book by getting other authors to read it. This person apparently tried to focus who they were spamming to. And there isn’t any reason why you can’t send a bunch of writers promo material for your book— but this is not the way to do it.

First off, they’re your peers (and I'm giving the author the benefit of one hell of a doubt here), and you need to treat them as such. I am assuming that this person is offering comp copies (if they’re actually expecting Norman Spinrad to go to their website and BUY a copy based on this, they are insane) but they’re offering them with a high-pressure ill-worded sales pitch that smacks of a deadly combination of arrogance, ignorance and desperation.

You want to ask authors to read your book, fine, but ASK them. Nicely. Something like, “Dear [author name here] I respect your work and would really appreciate it if you would read a comp copy of my latest book. Please let me know if you’re interested.”

And in the name of all that is holy, send individual personal e-mails! Sending the same e-mail to 32 authors shows a lack of respect that will be reciprocated, if the recipients bother to pay attention to you at all. If you follow these guidelines, you will probably still get near zero responses, but at least you will not actively piss people off and have snarky writers deconstructing your efforts in a public blogging.

Why Mixing Religion and Government is Bad

Sudan doesn't like your teddy bears.

Britain's foreign secretary said he was "very concerned" about the case of a UK teacher who was in court Thursday, facing charges of offending religion by allowing a teddy bear to be named "Mohammed."

Not only is is an appalling case of "let's persecute the westerner" but by their own laws the children in the class should be getting arrested because they're the ones who named the effing bear.

And frankly the "she should have known" apologists should realize that, just because you know a State is going to be intolerant, abusive, arbitrary and totalitarian doesn't excuse the State's behavior.

Stupid for Sale, 3 cents a word

(Scalzi @ Whatever alerted me to this.)

Note to aspiring writers:

Don't submit stuff to Dragon Magazine, just don't. They are paying a whopping 3-6 cents a word for all rights.

ALL RIGHTS.

ALL!!!!

This means you can't re-sell it, you can't put it on your website, podcast or whatever. You can't translate it and publish it in Germany. You can't write a screenplay based on it. And they can probably sue your ass if you write anything in the same universe and sell it to someone else.

IMO anyone who submits there is too stupid to write publishable fiction.

Bonus Kitty

This homeless waif accosted us while we were unloading groceries a couple of weeks ago, rubbing our legs and mewing incessantly. Since there're coyotes in the neighborhood (I had seen two crossing the street earlier that evening) we took the creature in and placed her on the sun porch, segregated from "our" cats. We posted flyers all about advertising "FOUND CAT" knowing in our hearts that a creature this sweet and friendly had to be missed by her owners. (Anyone who read my eulogy to Lil Dog knows where this is headed.)

No response after the fliers and Craig's List postings and we spent another week in denial ("but we don't want another cat") even as we paid a vet $125 for Feline Leukemia/AIDS tests, as well as getting vaccinations and testing for parasites. After all, the poor thing couldn't stay on the sun porch forever, and we had to give her a clean bill of health before she interacted with our other cats. Of course, we told ourselves that if we adopted her out, (by now we'd given up on her old owner showing up to claim her) her new owner would reimburse us for the vet bill.

Then a friend of my wife sees the flyer and gives us a call. She knew where the little vagabond lived. So we could finally take her to her rightful owner, right. Ah, sort of.

It seems that the old woman with a horse stable two houses down from us had kept this little creature as a barn cat. Two months ago, this old woman passed away, the trainers came and took the horses, and this poor thing was left to its own devices. So, now we have a new cat.

10 Things I learned this Thanksgiving

1. When you put 2 leaves in our dining-room table it doesn't fit in a 10x11 dining room.
2. The standard 8 pc. place setting that most of us get for a weeding gift will be inadequate once you start hosting the extended family for holidays, it is good to have a spare one.
3. Despite what it says on the tablecloth, a 144-inch table can only comfortably seat 10 people. If you have more than that, break out the card table.
4. One thing conservatives and liberals can agree on: Pumpkin Cheesecake. Mmmmm.
5. Even if you plan on people being late, they will show up later.
6. If at all possible, get your Chocolate Lab a 12-year old girl.
7. A 23lb turkey is at the outer theoretical limit of our roasting pan.
8. A 23lb turkey is a effing huge bird.
9. Carving on a card table is not recommended procedure.
10. When she can get enough time off of work on a holiday, my wife can cook one kick-ass turkey.

LOL is Win!

Wo hoo! I won Scalzi’s LOLCreation contest with the following entry:





If you’ve read my earlier post on Science <> Religion you probably know why, though I’m respectful of people’s belief systems, I find the concept behind the Creation Museum eminently mockable. Here’s the point:

Faith = The belief in a spiritual or moral truth without need of empirical proof.
Science = a systemic method of using empirical data to explain observable phenomena.

Please note the problem with mixing one with the other. By necessity, the scientific method is open to continual challenge by new data. Creation “Science” by definition is not open to any challenge, because it disregards data that contradicts the proponent’s particular interpretation of scripture. Rhetorical tricks invoking “starting points” and “differing theories” a just that, tricks just to make scripture sound scientific— “because the bible said so” might be the basis of a philosophical axiom, or a moral code, but isn’t a good basis to explain empirical data because, in the end, if you observe empirical data that contradicts your axiom you are forced to disregard the data. (This is the same reason mixing political “truths” with science is an equally bad idea.)

As corrupting this might seem to science, I think it has an even worse effect on religion. The Creation Museum is a temple to people’s lack of faith. Think about this: The creator is omnipotent, and is easily capable of creating a universe that’s 5 billion+ years old in seven days or so. In fact, those seven days could take an arbitrary length of time if God was in a reference frame traveling significantly close to the speed of light. There is no need to shitcan everything we know about biology, geology, plate-tectonics, physics, stellar evolution, down to the half-life of carbon-14, for someone to have faith in God and believe in the redemption of Jesus Christ. But the Creationists are so insecure in their own faith that they can only believe in a God that presents them with significant, definitive worldly proof of His existence. It’s a faith that’s so timid that it is threatened by any sort of inquiry, and crumbles at the slightest challenge.

I guess I knew this

A blog post elsewhere led me to an online political philosophy quiz where I scored thusly:

Progressive/Conservative score: 8 - Moderate Progressive ("You think the progressive movement is usually well intentioned, but is sometimes too extreme in its ways")

Capitalist Purist/Social Capitalist Score: 6 - Economic Moderate ("You support an economy that is by and large a free market, but has public programs to help people who can't help themselves or need a little help.")

Libertarian/Authoritarian Score: 0 - Anarchist ("You think that the government is making way too many unnecessary laws that are taking away our innate rights. You believe that the government's job is primarily to protect people from harming other people.")

Pacifist/Militarist Score: 8 - Moderate-Militarist ("You think that in very rare occasions, the United States should invade a country in order to make the world better by spreading democracy or ending a tyrants rule. You also think that defense is very important, and we shouldn't lower the defense budget.")

I am Libertarian, along with 14.5% of the folks who took this test. I probably would be a Hardcore Libertarian, but the Yes/No/Maybe format doesn't allow terribly nuanced answers.

Turns out I'm closest to Joe Biden, of all people.

Don't ask quesions, just click the link

MOO.

Worldbuilding Essay

Is now on Scribd, after being on my website for ages, I made a PDF of it and released it to the world. Plot will follow at some point.

Aliens and Sexual Politics

There's an interesting post on the Feminist SF Blog about aliens in Larry Niven's Known Space series. Essentially it points out how both the Kzinti and the Puppeteers both have what amount to non-sapient females, and how this amounts to a stealth misogyny. An interesting point that I think goes a little off the rails when the argument turns to objections to the biological justification of the Kzinti's sexual dimorphism:

I presume Niven had been asked earlier why all the kzinti who we ever met in Known Space were all males, and he was trying to come up with a backstory to excuse this other than “I’m a sexist git, what can I say?”

Actually, it's more like Niven mentioned the Kzinti sexual dimorphism in an early Known Space story and was pretty much stuck with it whenever he wanted to return to the species. But the point isn't the biological rationale, but the authorial rationale. Now I'm not going to try and step into Niven's head here, but he did offer up a case study in how world-building (and by extension, alien-building) is a political statement, whether you want it to be or not.

This isn't to say you can't play with reproductive issues with your aliens, after all, changing the way a species produces young is one of my top three ways to make a species feel alien. (The other two are altering the primary mode of sensory input, and changing how they communicate.) The thing you need to bear in mind (to minimize the possibility of a feminist SF geek calling you a sexist git) is the fact that when you change aspects of reproduction, and the society that results from the change, you are making implicit statements about how human reproduction affects society. When you create gender roles for an alien species, you are making statements about gender roles in general. If you aren't aware of what you're doing you could end up being blindsided by people making interpretations of your text (maybe even you) that you didn't intend.

Eddie Vader Lego

Everyone's doing it. . .
SF Signal, Big Dumb Object, Whatever. . .
. . . so I have to post it too. Eddie Izzard, Lego, Darth Vader.



Just to be different, here's a bonus Eddie Izzard Lego video about movies. (Bet you didn't know that was an actual subgenre) Warning, language not work safe.

Mary Who?

I recently responded on a thread on Whateveresque about the term "Mary Sue," its use and misuse and its drift from fanfic circles into more mainstream criticism. To review (for those who didn't just click and read the Wikipedia link I provided) the term "Mary Sue" originated in Star Trek fan-fiction circles to identify fan fiction that centered around new non-cannon characters that were generally better/smarter/more capable than the existing cannon characters, as well as being able to hurdle story problems without trying, as well as having the coolest hair/eyes/psychic powers/angsty backstory. Such characters can be wish-fulfillment and sometimes even authorial inserts.

Domini, the author of the thread, took exception to the use of the term beyond fan-fiction, because:

But...the term Mary Sue creeps into people criting original fiction, because many SFF readers wade in both worlds. (I do!) And that's where I REALLY get my feathers ruffled. Because it only takes a quick glance at some of our SFF classics and not-yet-classics to dredge up LOTS of main characters that fit the Mary Sue Don't List. The Hero archetype--Superman is an example of this--is chock-full of things on the Mary Sue Don't list.

And so I think, very strongly, that terming a character in an unpublished...or even published...original work a Mary Sue is terribly incorrect. It's not an issue of Laser Eye Beams...readers will happily believe your Laser Eye Beams...IF you are a good enough writer that you can get them to suspend their disbelief in general.

Which is true, I think, as far as it goes. But I happen to disagree and think the term "Mary Sue"/"Gary Stu" has a place in critiquing original work. A good example of this is in the hilarious recap of the movie Eragon on the Agony Booth. The reason is because the prototypical Mary Sue isn't a checklist of character traits, those character traits are merely a symptom. It also isn't necessarily the fact that the Sue is overshadowing characters from an existing cannon, it's the fact that the Sue overshadows any and all other characters in the work.

To come to a workable general definition of a Mary Sue, we can ignore all the specific character traits (weird hair and eye color &c.) and get to the meat of the issue: how does our potential Sue interact with the rest of the story?

Here's my Mary Sue checklist.

1. Is the character the most capable/talented person in the story's universe for a given area of expertise, and solves major story problems because of that expertise?
2. Does the character easily solve story problems outside of his or her established area of expertise? Possibly with a neat new surprise talent we're just now hearing about?
   
3. Is the character rewarded with position, fame, riches with little effort/consequence?
4. Do secondary characters like/love/respect/fear the character with little or no established reason?
5. Does the character easily pick up new talents/skills/magical powers with little effort/consequence? (see #2)
   
6. Is there one or more secondary characters that should, by dint of training, experience, or simple logic, exceed the main character's capability is some area, and are eventually overshadowed by the main character's mad skillz?
   
7. Is there any instance where the main character "solved" a story problem by luck alone?
   
8. Are the society's rules in this universe bent or broken to accommodate the main character? i.e. youngest to command, first human on the szantar council, only woman to ever join the Scarlet Rangers?
   
9. Does the character break the rules/law/societal norms, but suffers little or no consequence? Is even rewarded for daring?
   
10. Is a villain redeemed simply by changing attitude to the main character?

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, if your character suffers from one or more of these symptoms, they might be a Mary Sue.

ADDENDUM: Here's the original Mary Sue.

I be Scribd

First off: I've added "The Heavens Fall" to my Pixel-Stained Technopeasantry. It originally appeared in the DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Anthology, and was subsequently reprinted in Apex Online. It is a little sf/horror/crime drama.

Also, it may be my penchant for irony, but I've uploaded my two fictional trial balloons to Scribd, which you may or may not know as the epicenter of the last significant SFWA oops. In addition to throwing them out onto a larger venue than my lil blog here, it does a number of automatic conversions, as well as allowing me (and others) to do neat things like this:

Psssst, bud, wanna short story?

Well, I'm starting a little experiment here. I am going to start releasing some of my short stories under a creative commons license. I'm a little bit of a latecomer to this, and I'm not Cory Doctrow or Rudy Rucker, but let's see if throwing free stuff out there gets any buzz going for ye olde midlist writer. First up, my real short time travel tale, "The Long View" which appeared in Amazing Stories back in 1995. Links to the stories will appear to the right.

Inside the front cover

Well, I am just about halfway done with the first draft of Apotheosis: Prophets. I have reached a point where I am willing to hazard a prediction. You know most books, in addition to the (usually badly written) back cover copy, there's almost always some edited snippet of the actual text inside the front cover. I strongly suspect that I've just written the scene that DAW's going to use for that snippet in Prophets.

Minor spoiler warning, as this is a big reveal midway into the book. But that doesn't change my opinion that they're going to use this bit as a teaser:

There wasn’t even a sound to mark the jump, just an abrupt shift in the star-field shown in the holo.

Another twenty light years, Nickolai thought. Here we are.

“We’re still nominal on all systems,” Parvi said. “Drives are cold.”

Wahid didn’t say anything. After a long pause, Mosasa said, “Navigation?”

“Hold on a minute.” Wahid shook his head, and for all the trouble Nickolai had in interpreting human expressions, even he could tell something was seriously wrong.

“What’s the problem?” Parvi asked. “Are we off-course?”

Nickolai knew that the Eclipse was fueled for multiple jumps at this distance, but even so, the thought of taching twenty light years in the wrong direction tightened something in his gut.

Could what I did have affected the engines? Nickolai began to realize that there was no particular motive for Mr. Antonio to keep him alive. Mr. Antonio wasn’t like Nickolai. He was a man, and had no honor to keep, even to himself.

“No. We’re right where we’re supposed to be.” Wahid said slowly. It almost sounded as if he didn’t believe it himself. “All the landmarks check out. . .”

“What’s wrong then?” Parvi asked.

“Look at the damn holo!” Wahid said, thrusting a hand at the display as if he wanted to bat it out of his face.

“What?” Parvi looked at the holo of stars between them, and her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “No. . .”

“Kugara?” Mosasa snapped.

“I’m ahead of you. Mass scans out to the full range of the sensors. No sign of anything bigger than an asteroid for 100 AU. We got background radiation consistent with interstellar media—”

One of the scientists, the female with yellow hair, spoke up. “What happened? Is there some sort of problem?”

“Bet your ass there’s a problem.” Wahid spun around on his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo display. “We’re missing a whole star.”

“What?”

“Xi Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”

Random Thoughts

There's a cottage industry out there for various random plot/name/whatever generators out there on the interweb. Want a plot? A title? How's bout a name for one of your characters? Maybe you need the whole story? Working on a TV series or a movie, you can get your own random log lines. Maybe you just need the right prompt to get your story started. Or, maybe you don't want all that surfing and you just want random everything on one convenient site. There, now you don't have an excuse. . .

Time Marches On. . .

. . .and provides an example of a point I was making over ten years ago. You may or may not have visited my home page, which predates this blog by about a dozen years or so, if you have, buried in the writing portion are a couple of essays I did on plot and world-building when I taught some classes on those subjects way too many years ago. While such writing advice, when it isn't market-specific, isn't prone to become dated (one of my favorites in my collection of writing books is a little compilation of essays entitled Of Worlds Beyond which was originally published in 1947. And Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses are as offensive today as when Mark Twain wrote about them in 1895.) it is true that specific examples used in such advice may date badly, especially if you are talking about SF and technological change.

Exhibit one from "Worldbuilding: Constructing a SF Universe" by your's truly:

Unintended consequences are especially rife when talking about technological change. Every piece of technology will eventually find niches other than what its developers intend. (Consider the identification of pagers with the drug culture.) [emphasis added]

I mean, wow. You can now add, "consider how short that identification was." Or, "and aren't those obsolete yet?"

But more germane, and what got me thinking about this, is a quote earlier in the same section:

Making your world different can be as simple as locating it in that vast unknown territory, "The Future." But for every element of difference you introduce in a story, there will be a multitude of consequences rippling out from the point of difference. Consider one example: Once computer animation becomes cheap and detailed enough that a lone hacker can produce a feature film, what will this do to the major movie studios, television, advertising, intellectual property laws, politics, culture, and the nature of celebrity?

I wrote that over a decade ago. Now think about the fact that I just posted a Muppet re-mix of a Pulp Fiction trailer. Now think about the fact that the RIAA and the motion picture industry are having trouble just getting their heads around file sharing, I doubt it's even possible for them to respond rationally to this kind of "fair use." Then we have advertising like so:





And when it comes to celebrity, we now live in a world now where this guy is famous:





If you think about this as an SF writer, you have to conclude that it is a lot less likely that your future is too weird, and a lot more likely that your future just isn't weird enough.

The Internet is a Strange Place

What do you get when you cross muppets with Quentin Tarantino?





My favorite parts? Bunsen Honeydew, and the Fraggle Rock characters in the background.

I is playing wit mai toyz

I added a new little feature to the blog here. In the lower right there's now a widget that's keeping track of writing posts I flag on RSS feeds I'm subscribing to with Google Reader. Google Reader not only lets you share items from a feed on their own public page, but gives you a new RSS feed along with it. Now Blogger has a feed-reading widget, but it's limited to 5 items, so I routed the feed from Google Reader through Feedburner which will script you a Blogger widget with 15 entries. . .

ADDENDUM: Checked out del.icio.us and realized it has RSS feeds as well, which can be fed through Google Reader and combined with the feed from the various blogs. . .

Singularity Happens

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. wrote a long post on his blog on why he believes the singularity won't happen. [via SF Signal]

According to Modesitt, it won't happen because such visions are based on technology, not on humanity and they're based on a western European/North American cultural chauvinism.

He goes on to explain:

One of the simplest rules involved in implementing technology is that the speed and breadth of such implementation is inversely proportional to the cost and capital required to implement that technology. That's why we don't have personal helicopters, technically feasible as they are. It's also why, like it or not, there's no supersonic aircraft follow-on to the Concorde. It's also why iPods and cellphones are ubiquitous, as well as why there are many places in the third world where cellphones are usable, but where landlines are limited or non-existent.

All in all I think he makes a well-reasoned and cogent argument that completely misses the point. The point of the singularity is the premise, which I think is valid, that it is possible that a technology can arrive that completely overturns the basic assumptions we use to model the future. AI and nanotech are the oft-used sfnal examples, but history is already filled with basic advances that remapped the entire world to fit them: agriculture, sewage treatment, the printing press, anesthesia, automobiles, air-travel, television, the internet, cell phones.

But my main problem with Modesitt's argument is that it is primarily an economic one, based on the assumption that the basic economic rules are somehow set in stone and aren't manipulated by technological change. That's only true if you're very broad in defining your terms. A product's value is less and less defined by the cost of the materials and labor required to build it, more and more the impetus to distribute technology is to get the end user to buy into an associated service (psst, wanna free cellphone, how's about an inkjet printer, brand new DVR, just sign this contract) and as fabrication becomes more and more efficient, "things" become more like intellectual property where the cost has little to do with the physical object, counterfeits become ubiquitous, and theft starts meaning some basement entrepreneur is making something that looks too much like what you're selling. The labor theory of value breaks down in a replicator economy. Even his points about energy becoming more expensive is one good fusion reactor away from being moot.

Like I said, IMO his argument is basically why the Singularity won't happen. . . right now.

When book covers do it right

Working on Apotheosis (going well, thank you for asking) I've found myself digging in my old notes for Hostile Takeover. And I found a little sketch I made of the character Flower, when I was figuring out what the Volerans looked like.

Now I'm not a very good artist (I was a lot better before I decided to concentrate on writing some 20 years ago) but I thought it was a neat example of how sometimes a cover artist can actually tap into what the author was thinking. (Opposed to my prior post on book covers.)

Here's my little sketch:


And here's a detail of the cover of Profiteer, (one of my favorite book covers after the one for Dwarves) showing the same character:


The cool thing, Jim Burns never saw the sketch I made, he was going off of my description in the book. That was pretty cool.

I just wish he hadn't made Tetsami (a short Asian woman) look like a pissed of Sigourney Weaver.

Picture of the Alpha Dog

New Space Opera

There seems to be two main "movements" in science fiction (and I'm talking about science fiction, not the broader speculative fiction/fantasy etc.) at this point in time. Both were mentioned in the editorial in the October '07 issue of Asimov's. The first is the manifesto-wielding vanguard of Mundane SF that I've mentioned in an earlier post. The second movement has been called "New Space Opera," which has no manifesto I know of, or a website for that matter.

The name "New Space Opera" seems to have come into currency with a 2003 edition of Locus (a role that an upcoming issue of Interzone seems to be planning to play for Mundane SF) and has not had a terribly clear definition, but my favorite one is by Paul McAuley from that same Locus issue.

There are neither empires nor rigid technocracies dominated by a single Big Idea in the new space opera; like cyberpunk, it's eclectic and pluralistic, and infused with the very twenty-first century sensibility that the center cannot hold, that technology-driven change is continuous and advancing on a thousand fronts, that some kind of posthuman singularity is approaching fast or may already have happened. Most of all, its stories contain a vertiginous sense of deep time; in the new space opera, the Galaxy is not an empty stage on which humans freely strut their stuff, but is instead a kind of junk yard littered with the ruins and abandoned wonders of earlier, more powerful races.

The mention of the singularity is key IMO, as it seems one of the main differences in content between the "Old" and the "New" Space Opera is the whole concept of a "singularity." New Space Opera takes the singularity as a given and either goes with it, or establishes some explanation of why AI/Nanotech/Etc. isn't completely warping the setting beyond explanation.

I mention all this because the Apotheosis Trilogy I'm working on may, by the third volume, fit into this description-- closest I've ever been to being part of a literary movement.

I had to do it....

The End of Magazines. . .

Following upon my post about the oft-predicted demise of the printed book, and my opinion that it ain't going to happen any time soon, I come across a blog post by Warren Ellis (via SF Signal) about the tumbling circulation figures of the major print SF magazines, a term that seems to be becoming an oxymoron. The figures have inspired reactions from John Scalzi and Cory Doctrow, and has provoked some hand-wringing about how these magazines can save themselves.

Unlike printed books, it seems to me that printed magazines are being displaced by their electronic counterparts in a way that seems unlikely to happen to the book-length form. Why? Several reasons I think. First, unlike e-books, e-mags just require a web browser. No dedicated hardware or software. Second, it is easy to mirror the established economics of print mags (subscriptions and advertisements paying for content) on-line. Third, magazines are, like web-pages, blogs, forums &c., ephemera comprised of relatively small nuggets of information generally between one and ten thousand words. Lastly, on-line mags offer advantages over and above traditional print subscriptions, the major one being that if you subscribe to an on-line mag you get instant access to everything that magazine has ever printed-- not just 12 issues.

My solution to the plight of F&SF, Analog and Asimov's would be simply to adopt an on-line subscription model in parallel with the print one.

Ok, I Think Everyone Needs to Get a Grip

What the hell is going on here? J. K. Rowling makes an aside about the backstory of one of her characters-- something that's not mentioned, or even evident in the text of the book-- and people start freaking out.

Right now there are like 40+ comments on two separate posts on Whatever. There's nearly 150 comments on a post @ Making Light. It's making news at E!, Fox, Newsweek and the Washington Post.

What really annoys me is this quote from the AP story with the equally annoying headline "Dumbledore’s outing gives text new meaning"

“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site The Leaky Cauldron, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”

Yeah, I would buy that-- if it was part of the effing books! It wasn't. Dumbledore's sexual orientation is so peripheral to his character that it didn't merit a mention. That means that every single person who reads these books from now until the end of literacy as we know it is only ever going to read the character as gay if they've heard about Rowling's aside. Most of the people who have read the books, I daresay most who will ever read the books, aren't going to read about someone "so respected, so talented and so kind, who just happens to be also homosexual." They're going to read about somone "so respected, so talented and so kind, who's sexual orientation is beside the point."

What's more annoying is that if Rowling intended to make some sort of positive message out of Dumbledore's sexual orientation, rather than having it as a background character trait, I don't doubt she would have explicitly spelled it out in the books.

This hubub is saying a lot more about the folks hububing than it is about Rowling, Potter or Dumbledore.

J. K. Rowling Throws the Slashfic Writers a Bone

Well J. K. Rowling has confirmed that Dumbledore was gay, and you know something is very strange when the sexual preference of a fictional character is a major story on CNN. I'm just saying. . .

I just hope things go well for the headmaster of Hogwarts. After all, we all know how badly things went for Tinky Winky when he was outed. I can only hope that we have grown a little more tolerant as a culture since then.

The Great Internet Echo Chamber

Well, predictably, there's a thread on Whateveresque (not to be confused with Whatever) that delves into the Doctrow/Le Guin mess in all its retarded glory, and does so in flametastic eloquence I couldn't even begin to match. . .

Disney Explains Fair Use & Copyright

Haven't posted a clip here in a while. Here's one I found via the SFWA blog. (Irony again.) Here we have Walt Disney characters explaining the concept of fair use and copyright. Made by professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. For added fun, count up how many of the characters are based on prior work.

If it ain't broke, fix it anyway. . .

Just a note that the blog will be undergoing sporadic, unannounced, and random formating changes as I play around with the layout.

Well, this is ironic. . .

Sometimes you come across news that so twisted in recursive levels of self-parody that you cannot even express an opinion on it, you just have to sit back and say, "gee that's f__ked up."

Case in point, this series of events, the latest of which I found thanks to a post on the SF Site blog:

The SFWA e-piracy committee overreaches in demanding a laundry-list of items taken off a website because of copyright violations. Some items turn out to be perfectly legit, including some work by Cory Doctrow released under a Creative Commons license. Can you say oops?

Doctrow gets predictably medieval on SFWA's ass in an internet dust-up that essentially ends with SFWA throwing the current incarnation of the e-piracy committee under the bus.

Then we find out that Doctrow reprints an essay by Ursula K Le Guin under the Creative Commons license. Problem? The essay wasn't printed under any such license, which means Doctrow was guilty of exactly the reverse of the mistake that SFWA had made.

What this all means to me?

A) IP law is broken. (But we knew that.)
B) Everyone is capable of being stupid, and the current IP law facilitates such stupidity.

Insert the obvious pun here

And now presenting cats, and a bag.
Please make up your own joke.

The End of Books?

According to The Guardian, ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstore is not long for this world. According to a survey at the Frankfurt Book fair [from SF Signal]:

Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057 while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete.

Just a cursory reading of that stat sort of invalidates the scare headline "Short shelflife for booksellers, industry figures claim" , i.e. something less than 25% of industry figures claim. And that 11%? Yep, that's overwhelming. . .

I have a problem with printed book obsolescence. Information delivery technologies are only made obsolete by technologies that do exactly the same thing. Illuminated hand-written manuscripts were made obsolete by the printing press, but hand-drawn illustration was not made obsolete by photography. Not the same thing. CDs made LPs obsolete, but didn't kill cassette tapes. It took CDRs and MP3s to do that.

eBooks will not kill printing because

1. books are cheap
2. books do not require software maintenance
3. books are permanent and stable storage devices that will be readable indefinitely
4. books have no power requirements
5. books can be transferred without concerns for hardware platforms or DRMS
6. books are simple and straightforward to use without any training beyond basic literacy
7. books do not require another, more expensive, device to read them
   

An eBook technology would have to overcome all these advantages of the printed book in order to make the printed book obsolete. IMO, some of these may never be overcome by the current model of eBooks, i.e. a device that plays something from storage media. That model works for music and movies, because that's the model that existed before. (i.e. I have some film, or a recording, and I stick it in some sort of player.) But books were never like that, they've always been a unitary device, self-playing. Adding a machine to "read" a book for you imposes a level of complexity that is not worth the trouble either economically or practically.

In order for eBooks to make the printed book obsolete, they would have to be comparably priced, self-reading (i.e. you purchase one object, you have the book) and free of most of the issues of obsolescence and power requirements of "traditional" eBooks.

Frankly, that might have to wait until after the singularity. . .

Zoë

Yes, our cute little kitten has a name now, Zoë. Here are two obligatory kitten pictures.

But, then, how can you go around freaking the Mundanes?

There is a movement afoot, complete with manifesto, called Mundane SF. You may or may not have heard of it, but it does seem to be gaining a little traction to the point that Interzone is doing a Mundane SF issue. If you're unfamiliar with the movement, there's a post on the Mundane SF blog that encapsulates Geoff Ryman's idea pretty well. In a nutshell, to quote from Mr. Ryan's post:

Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth.

Or, from the Interzone Mundane Guidelines:

Today there is no --

• Faster than light travel
• Psi power
• Nanobot technology
• Extraterrestrial life
• Computer consciousness
• Materially profitable space travel
• Human immortality
• Brain downloading
• Teleportation
• Time travel

-- And maybe there never will be!

In a nutshell, it is Dogme 95 for speculative fiction. It also seems to be doing a good job of what manifestos like this should do, which is to provoke reaction. So what's my take?

(Note: this is a reaction to Mundane SF as a literary movement described by Geoff Ryman. I am explicitly not commenting on any of Geoff Ryman's fiction, which I have not read.)

First, I'll say, it can be a worthwhile artistic exercise to place limits on yourself. Especially if said limits keep you from using a device or techniques that you're comfortable with or prone to overusing. In that respect, I think a lot of SF writers might benefit from producing a Mundane SF story or two, myself included. (Though my attempt might not sync with Mr. Ryan's goal, as I'd try to do a complete gonzo post-singularity story in his Mundane sandbox. It'd be a challenge.)

However, I think the purpose behind the Manifesto, as described by Mr. Ryan, is not an artistic one. It seems to me that the "Mundanes" are of the opinion that SF-- at least SF of literary merit-- should serve a particularly narrow purpose, the illumination of possible, or even more restrictively, probable futures. In this view, entertainment is not something to aspire to, and escape is a childish impulse. To this view "good fiction," like medicine, needs to be "good for you."

I hate that shit!

It is a self-serving philosophy that allows wannabe literati to pat themselves on the back and say they're doing something worthwhile even if they write something no one wants to read. They can say that it is "literature" and the public just doesn't "get" it.

Bullshit!

Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, Hemingway, they were all populists. Any writer who looks down on entertaining their audience, who places some higher purpose above telling a good story, is doomed. IMO, if someone practices Mundane SF for any other reason than the thought that doing so, playing with these rules, will produce a better told tale will, instead, produce turgid, boring crap.