Tag: books

A perspective on Seveneves

I’ll write my own review of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves soon, and it will have very little in common with this one:

As my co-reviewer discusses elsewhere: on page one the moon blows up for no reason, and Earth is doomed. All life on the surface will be dead within a year. There’s barely any hope – the only conceivable path forward is, basically, to start launching rockets as fast as we can, and that won’t be fast enough to put more than a few hundred people with minimal survival infrastructure into orbit. It’s a rough situation, but I’m sure we can trust that Humanity will all come together as one in the face of this disaster and put aside our petty ahahahaha.

This story more than any other features a direct, explicit conflict between characters espousing pro-freedom/democracy/egalitarian principles and others defending order/security/hierarchy/meritocracy. Two teams shall enter a nightmarish swarm of tiny orbital habitats, one shall leave. So where does the literary simulation lead us?

The authoritarians consist of scientists, engineers and ex-military. They’re the guys who you would want in charge of a risky space mission. Note that Red Team don’t identify as authoritarians, they just want to accomplish the mission – a dangerous rendezvous with the fragmented core of the moon – and they think doing it right is more important than achieving consensus. Humanity is at stake, after all.

The collectivists consist of everybody else who was shot into orbit for various other reasons. Their plight is understandable. They mostly lack the technical skills to contribute to the mission, but that doesn’t stop them from having opinions on what needs to be done. Many of them don’t agree with the lunar rendezvous plan, for example, yet that mission requires that all available resources be devoted to it. Would you like to be dragged along on a dangerous Moon mission when you would prefer to try burning for Mars instead? Don’t you want a vote?

So naturally the two ideologies can’t cooperate. The collectivists retreat into a scattered swarm of tiny habitats, the authoritarians take the retrofitted International Space Station up to the lunar redoubt.

Both teams do pretty badly at the task of survival. The odds are stacked against them. The collectivists fly off in one direction and the authoritarians fly off in another and when they meet again, neither group is really too far behind the other in terms of body count.

It’s interesting that in light of the reviewer’s statement that Stephenson’s “most interesting and subversive contributions lie in his sociological and political thinking” that he completely leaves the book’s very strong socio-sexual elements out of this review.

I have to admit, I have seldom been more interested in interviewing an author, simply because I cannot tell if Stephenson is writing with a straight face, or, as I strongly suspect, taking the piss out of Pink SF. I mean, if I wrote exactly the same novel, word for word, there would be no question of the latter.

Protecting the competitive edge

Apple loses, E-book decision stands:

In a major decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 margin, has affirmed Judge Denise Cote’s 2013 finding that Apple orchestrated a scheme to fix e-book prices.

“We conclude that the district court correctly decided that Apple orchestrated a conspiracy among the publishers to raise e-book prices, that the conspiracy unreasonably restrained trade in violation of the Sherman Act, and that the injunction is properly calibrated to protect the public from future anti-competitive harms,” wrote Debra Ann Livingston, for the court. “Accordingly, the judgment of the district court is affirmed.” Judge Dennis Jacobs, who made headlines with his tough questions at oral arguments, dissented.

In addition, the court also upheld Cote’s final injunction, rejecting an appeal by Macmillan and Simon & Schuster which argued that the final order illegally amended their consent decrees.

This is good news for independents and self-publishers, as it prevents the major publishers from ganging up against them to protect their margins.

As we’ve seen from Tor Books, some publishers believe they are too big and too important to be held accountable. But unless Citi or Goldman get into publishing, that’s unlikely to be the case.

Locking and loading

Given the false defense presently being offered by Tor’s senior executives, which is that they are not being contacted by large numbers of unhappy science fiction readers but are instead being spammed by a bot-net at my disposal, their response to a prospective boycott is entirely predictable. If Macmillan does not act on the basis of the considerable evidence it will have acquired by now and we find it necessary to proceed to the boycott that Peter Grant and others have contemplated, Tor’s senior executives will undoubtedly claim that those threatening a boycott are not customers of Tor Books.

There is, of course, an easy way to anticipate and disprove their expected lies.

As you can see in the photo to the left, I currently have 38 hardcovers and 15 paperbacks published by Tor Books that retail for a cumulative $1,019.64. Some of them were sent to me by Tor, many of them were bought by me. This does not count any of the Tor ebooks that I have purchased, or any of the many Tor paperbacks I got rid of in a move some years ago, which I recall included at least six Wheel of Time books and a number of Orson Scott Card novels, among others. I figure that I would be wise to not lay claim to have had any books that I cannot prove I presently possess, but I estimate that I have probably spent an additional $500 more on Tor books than I can demonstrate today. As it happens, I have been a Tor Books customer since 1986, when I was still in high school and I bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Edge of Tomorrow from B. Dalton’s. I still have it; you can see it third from the bottom on the right.

I can’t pretend to be a Tor Books fanboy. In rooting through my collection, I learned that I appear to harbor a very strong predilection for Del Rey, as I have more than 1,000 Del Rey books. But I have probably bought more than 100 books from Tor Books over the years, which should suffice to demonstrate that something happened at some point in time to turn me against the organization. If you look closely at the titles, you will be able to discern that the newest copyright date on any of the books is 2005. I wonder what might have happened in 2005 to turn a loyal customer of 19 years standing against Tor Books and its editors?

If you happen to own any Tor books, I recommend that you gather them together and take a similar picture. Then add up their total retail value. Go through your Amazon account and list how many Tor ebooks you have purchased, calculate the total retail value, and then add the print and Kindle totals together. And do it now, so that you’ll have everything prepared to preemptively counteract the likely lies of Tor’s SJWs if events proceed in the way that some are anticipating.

UPDATE: Tor Books author Mary Robinette Kowal tempts fate on Twitter:

Mary Robinette Kowal
‏ @RizziWorld @ClaireRousseau @jimchines @torbooks Fair enough. I do want to be fair here and say that I have inside info. She won’t be fired.
5:20 PM – 10 Jun 2015

Mary Robinette Kowal
‏ @RizziWorld How about this. If they fire Irene, I will return the advances on my next two books and pull them.
7:23 AM – 14 Jun 2015

Day vs Sandifier: the transcript

Upon reading this, I think I made a better case against THE WASP FACTORY than for ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, but on the whole, I’m content with how the debate turned out.

Day: And this also touches on my third part, which is: this is an idiot plot. I mean, this is what Roger Ebert described as – you know, he said that “the idiot plot is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot.” So, you’ve got somebody who literally has never looked in her pants to discover that she’s got a vagina, you’ve got the father who is beyond idiocy with the whole story about the dog and the creation of the fake genitals just in case she ever asks, and then of course you’ve got Eric, who apparently never figured out that his sister was actually his sister either. I mean, this is an idiot plot. There’s no way around that.

Sandifer: This is grotesque, it’s a grotesquery. I think that the ludicrousness of it is a joke in the same spirit as “killing three people was just a phase I was going through.” I don’t think it’s an idiot plot so much as it is a parody of rural grotesquery that is deliberately at the absolute limits of what is even remotely plausible.

Day: I personally think it’s well beyond those limits, and, you know, I’m not saying that there’s no humor to it, but, you know, I didn’t find it funny, for the most part. The occasional one-offs, like you mention, you know, those were mildly amusing, but just to wallow in that depth of depravity and violence and murder, you know, it’s literally disgusting, and I didn’t find it funny, I didn’t find it edifying. Like I said, the plot is a literal idiot plot. Whether you want to say it’s because it was parody or not, it’s still an idiot plot. I’m not one of those people who finds… What’s that show, the guy from The Office…

Sandifer: U.S. or U.K.?

Day: Ricky Gervais.

Sandifer: Yes.

Day: He has that television show where he pretends to be retarded or something, and every ad he’s gurning, you know what I mean? It’s a relatively new show. I don’t find that funny either. And so, maybe the fact that it’s got an idiot plot but it’s a parody, therefore it’s supposed to make it intelligent, but to me, the plot is still what the plot is, and so I found it very, very disappointing, because the whole plot is totally dependent on the three major characters being and behaving like complete idiots.

And the problem I have when you talk about the whole psychosocial aspect of Frank is Banks, in my opinion, gets the characters completely wrong. Frank is not convincing in any way, shape, or form as a girl who believes she’s a boy, and that sort of thing. I’m pretty sure that Iain Banks never had any daughters, because if you’re a parent, and you’ve got both boys and girls, there is not a chance in hell that a little girl, even if you raise her as a boy, is going to behave like a boy.  This is where I think it goes beyond parody and is a level of absurd that is not credible. I would have found it much more credible if Frank had some female attributes and characteristics in his thinking that he couldn’t explain. But instead, like you said, he’s more of a parody of a hyper-male, and that to me makes no sense whatsoever.

Sandifer: I agree that there’s an element of extreme implausibility, obviously, to some of the plot elements. I do think, going through, I note that Banks takes care to find some explanation for pretty much all of the elements of it, so that he at least has a sort of nice Aristotelian unity, where everything is either made necessary or likely by some other event, even if the characters are certainly very extreme. But it seems to me like your objection is less that you don’t believe that Frank would have physically figured it out – because there is the explanation, for instance, of the male hormones enlarging the clitoris so that it looked like the stump of his penis.

Day: Yeah, I get that, but where did the vagina come from?

Sandifer: I would assume that Frank just assumed it was the mutilated and tattered remnants of the wound.

Day: Well, except for the fact that the urine is not coming of the stump of the clitoris. And the fact that it kind of goes pretty deep. I mean, we’re dealing with somebody who is literally retarded, which we know from his behavior he’s not.

Mailvox: favorites in A GAME OF THRONES

AL is curious about the characters in A GAME OF THRONES:

Who is your favorite character? Would you be interested at all in a discussion on that on your blog? Maybe you discussed it before but after searching through your posts I couldn’t find who you thought your favorite character is.

I think one has to distinguish between the characters as written in the books and the characters in the TV show. For example, I think Roose Bolton is creepy and disgusting in the books, but I rather like him on the show. The former is The Leech, the latter is not.

On the show, easily my favorite figure is Littlefinger, Lord Peter Baelish. He might occasionally overreach himself, but I like his ambition, his ruthlessness, his confidence, and his style. I don’t like the Littlefinger of the books as much, as that Littlefinger is more of a self-conscious social-climber who tends to lack the confidence and style of the TV Littlefinger.

In the books, I liked the two Starks, Ned and Robb, although I found their cluelessness about the nature and behavior of evil, untrustworthy men to be as frustrating as it is realistic. I see them in many a conservative who is determined to lose as nobly and graciously as possible. I liked Tywin Lannister of the books and absolutely loved Charles Dance in that role – how could you not – although I found his hatred for Tyrion to be somewhat inexplicable given that he has no other heirs. I also found it highly implausible that he didn’t free Jaime from his Kingsguard oath; these are not people who respect oaths, priests, or gods.

The female character I find most attractive is Myranda, the psycho little daughter of the kennelmaster. The female character I most disliked was Caitlyn Stark, in the books and on TV. She was nasty to Jon Snow and kept trying to interfere, ineptly, in things of which she knew nothing. The showrunners were wise to leave her undead version out of the TV show. And the Sansa of the TV show is much more interesting and complex than Martin’s Sansa, who appears to exist mostly to absorb Martin’s Gamma hate for female innocence and hope.

ONE BRIGHT STAR vs THE WASP FACTORY

Or, if you prefer, Phil Sandifer vs Vox Day. This is the Pex Lives podcast featuring the interview-debate I previously mentioned concerning the perceived merits and demerits of John C. Wright’s Hugo-nominated novella “One Bright Star to Guide Them” and the late Iain M. Banks’s much-lauded debut novel The Wasp Factory.

You can also download an MP3 of the nearly two-hour interview (94MB). I understand a transcript will be forthcoming.

The descent of literary criticism

Natalie Luhrs will be live-tweeting her feelz about THE WAR IN HEAVEN, beginning June 11. I wonder if she’ll like it?:

Before Theodore “Vox Day” Beale was the central figure in the Sad/Rabid Puppies Hugo Awards hacking, he wrote a series of religious-inspired fantasy novels for Pocket Books. And blogger Natalie Luhrs is going to live-tweet his debut novel, Eternal Warriors: The War in Heaven, for charity.

Here’s how it works: You donate money to RAINN, a charity that operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline. (Or to a similar organization in your own country.) You send proof of your donation to Luhrs. And for every $5 you donate, Luhrs will livetweet a page of the book, starting June 11 with the hashtag #readingVD. She will also republish her tweets, with additional commentary, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, on her site, Pretty-Terrible. If people raise $2,000, she’ll do the entire book. (She is currently at $920.)

Yeah, probably not. I’d be considerably more impressed if she’d chosen A THRONE OF BONES instead. And it’s kind of a pity that she didn’t choose THE WORLD IN SHADOW, I would have been genuinely interested to see her reaction to that. I’m rather dubious that 300 tweets that alternate between snarking about how bad the writing is and how stupid the author is will prove to be very entertaining for long.

Publishing: the negative-sum game

It is both amusing and a little tragic to see the brave face that the File 770 wannabes put on when contemplating the state of the traditional publishing world. They keep insisting that it is not a zero-sum game, which is true in a sense, because it is actually a negative-sum game.

The most difficult problems are negative-sum situations, where the pie is shrinking. In the end, the gains and losses will all add up to less than zero. This means that the only way for a party to maintain its position is to take something from another party, and even if everyone takes his or her share of the “losses,” everyone still loses in comparison to what they currently have or really need. This type of situation often sparks serious competition.

However, negative-sum disputes are not always lose-lose because if the parties know the pie is shrinking, it is possible their expectations will be low. A perfect example of a negative-sum dispute is the allocation of budget cuts within an organization. In this case, each department expects to have some funds taken away, but whether the outcome is a win or loss depends on how much money a particular branch gets in comparison to what they expected to have cut from their budget. So, if a branch was expecting to get a 30 percent cut and they only got cut 20 percent, which would be a win, even in a diminishing resource situation.

The present negative-sum situation was probably inevitable, not only due to the primary factor of men’s increasing preference for electronic forms of entertainment, but there is also the secondary factor of changing ethnic demographics. In the USA, for example, Hispanics don’t read as much as Anglos and they don’t buy as many books.

Among all American adults, the average (mean) number of books read or
listened to in the past year is 12 and the median (midpoint) number is 5. The White average is 13 and the median is 5, the Black average is 12 and the median is 4, the Hispanic average is 7 and the median is 3.

Throw in the number of non-English speakers into the mix and it should not be a surprise that prospects for the traditional publishing world were not good despite a growing population even before the SJW invasion of genre publishing is taken into account. But that doesn’t mean that the advocates of Pink SF haven’t made the situation worse, as the corporate masters are apparently beginning to understand. “Tor’s editorial director Julie Crisp has left Pan Macmillan following a
review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing.”

Does that mean that Castalia has stupidly entered a declining market in the hopes of carving off a slice of a shrinking pie? Not at all. Because we have no intention whatsoever of becoming a traditional publisher, our cost structure will keep us competitive despite the higher royalties and lower prices we offer, and we know there is still a significant market for the Campbellian science fiction created by beardy, middle-aged white men in which the traditional SF publishers are aggressively disinterested.

Moreover, as the Brainstorm crowd knows, we are developing the technology to massively expand that market by reaching the young men who have, quite reasonably, abandoned the traditional SF market. I started reading Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Seveneves, and it is truly depressing. Less because nearly everyone on Earth dies than because he appears to have gone full SJW with a Gamma sauce. It’s the first time I’ve found it necessary to force myself to keep reading one of his books, and the first time one of his books has struck me as being proper Pink SF. Female presidents, token ethnic melanges, you name it, he’s got it to such an extent that were it not for Stephenson’s past gamma markers, I would almost suspect an epic, master-class trolling of the current genre.

On a tangential note, as Aristotle has informed us, some people are simply incapable of learning.

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
So I’ve had a lot of submissions in recently. And do you know how excited I am to see how many of those are SF novels written by women?!!

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
The answer is VERY!! 🙂

Her doubling-down on her enthusiasm for female SF authors is intriguing in light of this news report from 2011:

But with the hiring of Bella Pagan away from Orbit, Tor UK does hope to grow — and diversify — its line. Crisp explains:

With Bella joining us, we’re looking to grow our list in size, direction and selection. While, as of yet – everything is still under wraps concerning the new innovations we’ll be putting in place (watch this space!) I can tell you that Bella has a particular interest in urban fantasy and paranormal romances – an area that Tor UK hasn’t explored to its potential previously. So that’s one area we’ll be looking to expand into.

It doesn’t look like that strategy worked out all that well, does it. I’ve even seen some rumors floating around that Pan Macmillan is in the process of shutting down Tor UK altogether. Meanwhile, Tor.com is abandoning the novel in favor of the novella:

When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation.

Enter the novella, an old form with a new lease on life. We expect that the reader who has to fit their reading into their daily commute will appreciate a novella they can finish in a week, rather than a year. We’ll be releasing books that can be begun and completed on just one of those rare evenings of uninterrupted reading pleasure.

Apparently they believe Pink SF is more digestible in smaller doses.

Tanith Lee, RIP

British writer Tanith Lee passed away on Sunday May 24th, aged 67.

Lee was the author of over 90 books and 300 short stories, as well as four BBC Radio plays, and two highly-regarded episodes of the BBC’s SF series Blake’s 7 (Sand and Sarcophagus). She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013 and the Horror Writers Lifetime Achievement Award this year, which joined her British Fantasy Award from 1980 for Death’s Master, and her World Fantasy Award for her short story “The Gorgon”.

I was very sorry to hear this since Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys and The Secret Books of Venus are two of my favorite fantasy series. I’ve been re-reading them over the last month or so, and it’s sad to know that she won’t be writing any more.


Like many a British writer before her, she loved Italy and her love for the country shone through in her writing.  Based on her books, Venice must have struck her in much the same way it struck me, a dark, watery, and mysterious place of beautiful decay.

If you haven’t read her, you really should. If you like Poe, you will enjoy her work.

A lesson in con artistry

I thought John Scalzi’s new book deal to lock in his retirement was an interesting indication of his intrinsic insecurity as well as the practicality that distinguishes him from most of his SF colleagues.

John Scalzi, a best-selling author of science fiction, has signed a $3.4 million, 10-year deal with the publisher Tor Books that will cover his next 13 books.

Mr. Scalzi’s works include a series known as the “Old Man’s War” and the more recent “Redshirts,” a Hugo-award-winning sendup of the luckless lives of nonfeatured characters on shows like the original “Star Trek.” Three of his works are being developed for television, including “Redshirts” and “Lock In,” a science-inflected medical thriller that evokes Michael Crichton. Mr. Scalzi’s hyper-caffeinated Internet presence through his blog, Whatever, has made him an online celebrity as well.

Mr. Scalzi approached Tor Books, his longtime publisher, with proposals for 10 adult novels and three young adult novels over 10 years. Some of the books will extend the popular “Old Man’s War” series, building on an existing audience, and one will be a sequel to “Lock In.” Mr. Scalzi said he hoped books like “Lock In” could draw more readers toward science fiction, since many, he said, are still “gun-shy” about the genre.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the executive editor for Tor, said the decision was an easy one.

I imagine it was a very easy one. Scalzi is, nominally, Tor’s big dog. He’s not a proper big dog, as he isn’t one of their ten annual biggest sellers or even a bestselling author, but he’s their most important SF figurehead author. Who else do they have? Of their better-selling authors, Frank Herbert is dead, Robert Jordan is dead, Orson Scott Card is hated by their core audience, and they can’t control Microsoft or the game companies whose tie-in novels are their biggest sellers. They have Scalzi and Brandon Sanderson, both of whom appear to have more or less peaked in terms of their careers. It’s not as if the award-winning Jo Walton or the award-winning Catharine Asaro or any of their other award-winning authors sell enough books to support all the SJW non-SF they keep trying to push on an unwilling public.

So to be gifted the opportunity to lock in one of their top authors for a decade at little more than 250k per book at an initial cost of $1 million up front is an absolute no-brainer. Scalzi is a hack in the positive sense of the term; unless he’s dead there is no chance he’s not going to be able to churn out the sort of mediocre material he produces. To break even on the initial advance, (the payments are usually divided into signing, delivery, and acceptance these days), Tor only has to sell an average of about 15k books each. Assuming all 13 books are delivered and paid for, they have to sell around 40k copies apiece, which should be doable considering that Redshirts sold nearly that many ebooks alone in the first eight months of its release. It’s a great deal for them, especially since they likely have the ability to get out of it down the road without paying two-thirds of it if they wish.

NB: The mainstream publishers now pay book advances in thirds. One-third on signature, one-third on delivery, and one third on either acceptance or publication. So, the contract is most likely $1 million up front, with two payments of $75k for each book upon a) delivery, and b) acceptance or publication.

This isn’t a bad deal for Scalzi, it is merely a very conservative deal. What Johnny Con is attempting to do is to secure his retirement and look for any upside to come out of the various media deals he’s got going. It’s a perfectly reasonable strategy, particularly in these uncertain economic times. The bolder strategy would have been for him to go into self-publishing, where as I’ve demonstrated, there is considerably more upside to be had. But Scalzi is neither a self-confident man nor an entrepreneur, so it is entirely in character that he’d prefer to give up the equivalent of about five birds in the bush in favor of the one in Tor’s hand.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And since he has a reasonable shot at other upsides, I think it’s an entirely sensible deal on his part. Lock in the base, then see what you can leverage elsewhere. It’s a conservative move, but not one that I would criticize him for making. Everyone has different appetites for risk. Indeed, as I have often said, McRapey has an unusual talent for self-promotion. The fact that a mediocre and derivative hack without any discernible talent beyond self-promotion and petty snark could turn 300k monthly pageviews and a color-by-numbers Heinlein ripoff into a near-guaranteed $250k per year is borderline astonishing. If he’d somehow managed to do it without repeatedly lying his ample ass off and consistently misrepresenting himself, I’d consider him to be downright brilliant.

What is much more important is what the deal indicates for science fiction publishing, and that is where I see problems on the horizon. If one of the best-known authors in science fiction can only command $260k per book from the biggest science fiction publisher, then conventional publishing does not appear to be long for this world. Which is, in fact, exactly what I believe to be the case.

Of course, I was genuinely amused to see McRapey omit making any traffic claims for the blog that made him “an online celebrity”. I wonder why he doesn’t brag about those two million monthly pageviews or 50 THOUSAND DAILY VISITS to reporters anymore?