Tag: books

Top 10 SF/F lists

Ryan and a few others requested lists of my favorite books. You can read a top 50 list I put together a few years ago on Black Gate, although it’s limited to SF/F.   But I thought about it a little, and upon further review, I don’t think it makes sense to put science fiction and fantasy on the same list; one might as reasonably compare romance and mystery.  So, here are two top ten lists, one science fiction, one fantasy. I’m limiting myself to one book, not an entire series, and one book per author.

Top 10 Science Fiction novels

  1. Dune, Frank Herbert
  2. The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  3. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury 
  4. Count Zero, William Gibson
  5. Anathem, Neal Stephenson 
  6. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
  7. Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
  8. Embassytown, China Mieville
  9. Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein
  10. VALIS, Philip K. Dick

I suppose can quibble with whether Das Glaspernspiel is truly a science fiction novel or not, but it fits much more comfortably in the SF subgenre than in fantasy or anywhere else. I consider it to be a better and more important book than Dune, but Dune is the best pure science fiction novel and thereby merited the top spot. In the same way, Dandelion Wine is the better book, but The Martin Chronicles are more purely science fiction. As for Heinlein, one could just as easily have put three or four other novels there, from Starship Troopers to Stranger in a Strange Land, but Tunnel in the Sky is the most purely Heinlein at his best, in my opinion. (Although I regard either “The Man Who Sold the Moon” or “The Menace from Earth” as the pinnacles of his fiction.) And while Foundation is Asimov’s best series, I think Robots of Dawn is the best single novel.

Top 10 Fantasy novels

  1. The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien
  2. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
  3. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  4. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  5. A Game of Thrones, George RR Martin
  6. The Book of the Damned, Tanith Lee
  7. The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander
  8. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
  9. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
  10. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

The Two Towers was actually my first exposure to Tolkien, at the age of 10 at a Boy Scout slumber party. While everyone else was running around, I picked up a book belonging to one of the other Scouts and was instantly transfixed. Even after several re-readings, it remains my favorite volume of the trilogy; Gondor and Rohan have always interested me more than Mordor, Rivendell, or the Shire.  Again, Watership Down is a book that many might not consider fantasy proper, but it is an astonishingly great book that is in a class of its own. And the greatness of A Game of Thrones only underlines the disappointment of the way in which the series has plodded steadily downhill. There are a plethora of books I would have preferred to put in the place of Interview with the Vampire, but both the concept and the execution were excellent and only Tolkien has proven more influential over time.

Not everyone is going to agree with everything on these lists, but if you’re at all interested in the genre, I think you are unlikely to regret reading any of them.  There are obvious omissions too. For example, many writers adore Jack Vance; Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth are clearly inspired by Vance’s Tales from the Dying Earth, but despite his inimitable style and enormous influence on the genre, I find that his stories tend to leave me a little bored. I had The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke on the list, but I couldn’t possibly leave off PKD and VALIS is the best of his vast contribution to the field.

Later this week, I’ll post two more lists, one of the best non-SF/F novels, and one of the books that have most influenced my writing. Needless to say, a number of these books will be on the latter list.

UPDATE: Speaking of fiction, I belatedly noticed that Amazon is giving away free copies of The Last Witchking today.

Bonfire of the self-publishers

I can’t say that I’m too concerned about the news that the bushwhackers at the bookstores attempting to clean out the erotic filth have been cutting too wide a swath. It’s their right to sell what they want, to whom they want, and if the leading digital bookstores won’t carry self-published books, they’ll soon find themselves being replaced by new retailers who do. But what I don’t understand is why 50 Shades of Gray, or 120 Days of Sodom, for that matter, all considered acceptable simply because a publisher could be found who was willing to sell it.

The ebookstores are sweeping a wide broom in the process, with WH Smith even going so far as to shut down their website. They have replaced it with a holder page that explains that:

    Last week we were made aware that a number of unacceptable titles were appearing on our website through the Kobo website that has an automated feed to ours. This is an industry wide issue impacting retailers that sell self published eBooks due to the explosion of self publishing, which in the main is good as it gives new authors the opportunity to get their content published. However we are disgusted by these particular titles, find this unacceptable and we in no way whatsoever condone them.

Their statement ends with the conclusion that the website will be operational again “once all self published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available.” When that will be, they did not say.

Update: It appears that WH Smith wasn’t exaggerating when they said that all self-published ebooks were going to go; there are numerous reports that Kobo is removing most if not all of the self-pub titles in their UK ebookstore.

But if you think this is bad, just wait until the bookstores figure out that what passes for YA and Sci-Fi are mostly vampire and werewolf erotica.

McRapey’s Top 10 SF/F novels

The mundane nature of this list explains a lot about the man’s literary mediocrity. That being said, he doesn’t have particularly terrible taste, it is merely pedestrian. Well, except for the Sheri Tepper. And THAT Heinlein novel? Seriously?

1. Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin

Ye cats. Seriously, number one? Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness is quite good.  Everything else I’ve read of hers has been well-written, tedious tripe. It’s not that she’s a bad writer, it’s just that she has nothing particularly interesting to say that you haven’t heard since the age of six if you’re under fifty.

2. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper

This truly astonished me.  Susan Cooper is fantastic, I’m just amazed that McRapey not only read them, but didn’t dislike the books due to the author’s obvious respect for pretty much everything that McRapey is seeking to destroy.  On the other hand, Cooper is presciently pre-PC on race, so perhaps that explains it.  The “Paki” insult is a just little less troubling than the rape gangs presently preying on white and Asian girls alike in England these days.

3. Dune, by Frank Herbert

Well, yeah.  It’s only the greatest science fiction novel ever written.

4. Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

I quite liked Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion myself.  The succeeding novels, not so much. There are some thoughtful, interesting spins on religion in space, among other things. But they wouldn’t make my top ten, although the Shrike is considerably awesome.

5. Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper

Ye cats squared. A feminist with religion issues. That’s new. Does McRapey not know the feminists are already as in his corner as they’re ever going to be?  He really doesn’t need to keep catering to them.

6. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Very good book. Very good author. But Embassytown is better.

7. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Very good book. Very good author, almost certainly the best of our generation. But Anathem is better. So is Cryptonomicon. And Reamde. And, arguably, The Diamond Age.

8. Speaker For the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

It’s solid. Wouldn’t crack my top 25. Maybe not my top 50.

9. Time Enough For Love, by Robert Heinlein

And this pretty much explains all you need to know about McRapey and his twisted psychosexual issues.

10. Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin

No idea. Haven’t read it. But on the advice of one of the readers here, I will put it on my to-read list.

I posted my top 100 SF/F novels on my old site, but as that is long gone, I’ll see if I can dig up the HTML somewhere. And if I can’t find it, I’ll simply have to write a new one. Needless to say, my list will without question begin with the maestro of maestros himself, JRR Tolkien.

It is acceptable for an SF author to leave Tolkien and Lewis off their top ten list, although I can’t help but notice there is no Asimov and no Clarke. But for a fantasy author? Unforgivable.

Tom Clancy’s legacy

Now, this is rather cool. Number two and Number three of the writers named as the Top 10 Living Authors to cary on Tom Clancy’s legacy of military technothriller happen to be our own Standout Authors Tom Kratman and Larry Corriea:

(3) In the world of Larry Correia,
there are werewolves, vampires, and monsters of every shape and size.
Why on Earth would Correia’s writing rank so high on a list about
spiritual successors to Tom Clancy? The reason is that in Correia’s
novels (especially the Monster Hunters series), there is an accuracy
demanded in everything that has a human element. The places are real.
The guns down to the make, model, and ammunition are real. If there ever
was a Zombie Apocalypse,
the novels of Larry Correia should be required reading as a field
guide. It is that type of accuracy in the real world leading to a
confrontation with a fantastic situation that are really the best part
of the Tom Clancy experience in novels. In Clancy’s work, there may not
necessarily be a renegade sub, but the information about the sub had
absolutely better be technically correct. In that aspect, Correia
absolutely gets the detail right.

(2) Tom Kratman was a
native of Massachusetts. Kratman served with the 101st Airborne
division in Panama. Kratman also served with the 5th Special Forces
group during the Iraq War. Kratman is also a lawyer
in addition to being a militaristic science fiction writer. Kratman
often writes in a type of futuristic universe of war based on real
principles. If Tom Kratman had written about the Space Marines in the
movie Aliens,
he would have probably written a training manual and put the actors
through basic training. Kratman will often use futuristic settings to
address issues of the day. The difference is that Kratman will often use
it to espouse conservative views such as in his Polseen War sidestories
of the Legacy of Aldenata series by John Ringo. Try to think of Tom
Kratman as kind of an anti-Gene Roddenberry. If Tom Clancy had been born
in about 200 years, he would be Tom Kratman.

  Big shoes? Perhaps. But the feet are pretty big too.

To wereseals and beyond

I give you the obvious frontrunner for the 2014 Hugo Award!

Dinosaur erotica looks set to be the latest niche craze in the world of sexy fiction as a trio of books on the topic is released to buy for the Kindle. The naughty novels, with titles such as Running From The Raptor and Taken by the T-Rex focus on the fantasy of helpless young women being attacked and seduced by dinosaurs.

The dinosaur porn imagines a world where humans and dinosaurs existed together. For the tale of In the Velociraptor’s Nest the protagonist Azog is a cavewoman, under appreciated in her tribe.

The synopsis says: ‘The cavemen treat her like a piece a meat. Azog cannot resist unless she proves herself as a hunter. When she goes out in search of fresh meat, she discovers a clutch of baby velociraptors and decides to kill them and triumphantly bring them back to her tribe. That is, until their father shows up and blocks Azog’s way out of the cave. Azog must use all of her womanly wiles to get out of the cave, which includes doing things she had never dreamed of.’

You might think Taken by the T-Rex is unlikely to catch on, let alone win awards. And then, it occurs to you that these are the sort of people who gave an award to McRapey for Redshirts.

Equality is the reason you can’t have good books.

Red Storm Setting

Tom Clancy has died. The best-selling author died in a Baltimore hospital on Tuesday night at the age of 66, according to his publisher.

Sic transit gloria mundi. I wasn’t a huge Clancy fan; I started reading his books with The Hunt for Red October until he lost me with Clear and Present Danger, but I still remember reading Red Storm Rising on the way back to my sophomore year of college and not going out that first night back because I absolutely had to finish the book first.

And I appreciated the little joke that he put in The Sum of All Fears with the two teams in the Super Bowl being the Denver Broncos and the Minnesota Vikings. It doesn’t work so well post Super Bowl XXXII, but it is still pretty funny. Somebody just HAS to win, right? Yeah, not so much.

Amish Vampires in Space

Marcher Lord celebrates its 5th anniversary with the release of Amish Vampires in Space by Kerry Nietz.  Yes, that is an actual title of an actual novel presently for sale on Amazon. Publisher Jeff Gerke explains how the unusual title came to be.

It was March 2010 and Amish fiction was all the rage in Christian publishing.

Entire novelists’ careers were being made in the “bonnet and buggy” genre. Publishers were telling writers, “If you don’t write Amish, don’t bother contacting us.” What had seemed like a fad a few years ago was looking more and more like a subgenre that was here to stay.

And it just cried out for a roasting.

I mean, I’m quite sure that many, maybe most, Amish folks are delightful, genuine Christians. But the way readers were flocking to novels about them, and the way Christian writers and publishers were all but worshipping them, was overblown.

I have a theory that the reason Amish fiction and TV shows about detectives exploded in popularity at the same time was that people were feeling overwhelmed by the complexities of modern life. They valued detective shows because detectives are good at seeing through the smoke to what is really happening, and that helped them feel that their own lives could be made comprehensible. Similarly, people flocked to Amish fiction because it represented a simpler, more easily understood way of living.

Whatever the cause, Amish fiction was everywhere, and it sort of frustrated those of us who didn’t love it. So I came up with the comical title Amish Vampires in Space just to poke fun at it all. I even whipped together a mock cover for my invented book. If you’ll look closely, you can maybe see the sleeping Amish vampire in the SF crate—with a nice handmade quilt draped over him. I made up the author’s name, the series title, and the painfully awesome book title. Then I showed the cover around to a bunch of my publishing friends, just for yuks.

Fast-forward to August 2012. One of my Marcher Lord Press authors, Kerry Nietz, who had already written four novels for me at that point, contacted me and said that he’d come up with a plot idea for Amish Vampires in Space and did he have my permission to write that book.

I reserved the right to not publish it until I could read it, but I told him to go for it.

To my surprise, Kerry played the idea straight. Despite the humor implicit in the title, he created a fantastic book with an altogether believable scenario in which Amish people might find themselves in space, confronted with vampires.

Then we got the real cover design, and we were blown away. This cover is by Kirk DouPonce, the same genius behind the covers of A Throne of Bones and Summa Elvetica. In fact, that’s Kirk’s “dead” body in the background. Even more than the title itself, the cover of this novel has gotten us all kinds of, um, attention.

Indeed, this book has brought much attention to Marcher Lord Press. Indeed, we have encountered more resistance to this book than we did when publishing books that examined Islam or contained obscenity and sexual content. [shrugs] But if these wacky Amish vampires manage to gain Marcher Lord Press a few new fans, a wider awareness that we’re out here making terrific Christian SF and fantasy, it’s a win!

Enjoy this suspenseful ride, dear reader, and . . . don’t take it too seriously.

Falling prices, failing publishers

As I demonstrated previously, falling ebook prices means additional pressure on mainstream publisher profits:

The average price of a best-selling ebook hit a new low last week but ticked up this week for the first time in a month. This week, the average price of a best-selling ebook is $5.81, up $0.40 from last week’s all-time low of $5.41. For the past four weeks, the average price of a best-selling ebook has been below $6.50.

A confluence of factors have been driving ebook prices down: Discounting by retailers; success of lower-priced self-published titles; and experimentation by publishers.

This is really remarkable.  Back in July, I noted the probable result of Apple being found guilty of collusion concerning ebook prices: “The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more
economically sensible levels.  And the power of the gatekeepers is going
to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to
fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from
independent publishers and self-publishers.”

But I never imagined that prices would fall so far, so fast. Not only have prices fallen below the $9.99 point that the colluding publishers were attempting to raise to $14.99, but only one of the top 50-sellers has a price in the $8.00 to $9.99 range.  And since October 1, 2012, the average price of an ebook bestseller has been cut nearly in half, falling from $11.37 to $5.81.

You may recall that the clueless president of the SFWA was very excited about the idea that publishers should pay the same $4.20 in ebook royalties to the author that they were paying on hardcover royalties.  How, one wonders, are they going to do that when at an average price of $5.61, (taking the average of the two most recent prices), they are dealing with a gross revenue per ebook of $3.93 after Amazon takes its 30 percent cut.

Assuming the conventional 25 percent ebook royalty, this means the author is going to make $1.40 per ebook and the publisher is going to make $2.53.  So, just to tread water, a mainstream publisher has to sell 2.24 ebooks to make the same $5.67 profit per book it was making previously. This is why the publishers fought so hard, and were even willing to break federal antitrust law, to get the price up to 12.99; at that price, they were making $6.82 per ebook, which was an actual improvement on hardcovers.(1)

Very few businesses can survive their profit-per-unit being cut in half. Don’t be surprised to see layoffs at the major publishers, contracts being cancelled, and imprints being closed. If you’re an independent, this is great news as the gatekeepers are dying and you’ll be able to compete on increasingly even ground.  But if you’re still hoping to break into conventional publishing, forget it. It’s all rapidly going the way of Random Houses’s Hydra, which is nothing more than an imitation of all the independent publishers, with zero advances and 50-50 royalty splits.

The guy responsible for it is my old editor at Pocket, who gave me my break into the business and was one of the first to recognize the potential in video-game tie-in novels. He’s a smart guy who is always ahead of the curve, and the fact that Random House is moving to this model means that all the other major publishers will soon be following suit. And I very much doubt he’s doing it because he wants to do so, but because it is the only way they can expect to stay in business.

(1) There is a trivial omission in this calculation which I left in for the sake of simplicity and means that the situation isn’t quite as bad as these numbers make it appear. But the consequences of it are fairly minor and don’t change my point in the slightest. Bragging rights to the first person to correctly identify it.

A lesson in channel

Ilya Somin doesn’t appear to understand how distribution and retail prices work:

This is a request to readers who may have contacts at Amazon, or
work there. Amazon recently inexplicably raised the price for the
Kindle version of my book Democracy
and Political Ignorance from the initial $15.37 to
20.19, even though (judging by Amazon’s own rankings) the Kindle
version was doing well at the initial price. The new price is way
too high, relative to the Kindle prices for comparable books. It
is in neither Amazon’s interest nor mine to charge a price so high
that hardly anyone will buy the Kindle version.

I have tried to contact Amazon about this. But it seems
impossible to reach anyone in authority through their website for
authors. I suspect that among our intrepid readers there could be
some who have contacts at Amazon who may be able to help. All I
need is to speak to a person who has the power to lower the price
for as little as 10-15 minutes or even just exchange e-mails with
him or her. The case for lowering the price is strong enough that
it won’t require any more time than that to explain it. However,
the issue does need to be addressed relatively quickly because the
official publication date for the book is approaching. 

I took a look at the book.  The issue is immediately apparent:

Digital List Price: $27.95
Kindle Price: $20.19
Print List Price: $90.00
        
Somin’s actual problem is that his publisher has set the list price too high.  Amazon has the right to decide whatever discount it wants to set below the list price; if Somin wants the price to the consumer to be around $15, then he should set the price around $17.99.  It’s simply not any of his business what Amazon’s margin is; since Amazon is trying to get their margins up, it should come as no surprise that they are not offering discounts quite as steep as they have historically offered.

And it’s ridiculous for him to complain that Amazon should be decreasing its profit margin while he and his publisher refuse to reduce their own.  If the case for lowering the price is strong, then he should be asking his publisher to lower its price, not expecting Amazon to slash its margins.

Featured on Faceout Books

The illustrious cover designer, Kirk DouPounce, is interviewed by Faceout Books.  It’s a fascinating technical insight, complete with step-by-step illustrations, into how the veteran cover artist goes about creating covers. In this case, he describes how he went about designing and developing the cover for A Throne of Bones:

Were there any constraints from the client? 

Yes, which actually got me into some trouble.

A couple years earlier I had designed and illustrated the cover for Summa Elvetica, a prequel of sorts to this series. It had an ecclesiastical feel to the story, so I digitally painted a medieval tapestry, a la Umberto Eco. The author and publisher were expecting the same treatment for this cover. However, after reading the rough manuscript, that direction didn’t seem as appropriate. This story was much more gritty and epic in scope. I wanted to keep the medieval ornamentation, but instead of painting a 2D tapestry I decided to create a 3D relief sculpture. Also, in place of the elf that was on Summa, the author had requested a heroine for this cover, one of the nine major characters from the story.

Because they were expecting a variation of the Summa cover, the first draft was not well received by the author or publisher. Not wanting to ditch this direction entirely, I asked the author if he would be willing to post it on his blog for feedback. And feedback he was given, over a 160 responses.

He posted the two covers side by side and asked his fan base which direction they preferred. It was pretty much split down the middle. For the most part, the criticism against the new cover related to the woman’s face. They essentially said that she made the cover look too teen YA. The author suggested putting a skull in place of the heroine. I don’t get a lot of requests to put skulls on covers, I was more than happy to comply.

Kirk is giving me a bit too much credit here.  My suggestion wasn’t just a gilded skull, but a gilded skull on the end of a post from the back of the chair, as per the description of the Sedes Ossi which serves as the Sanctal Throne and is constructed of the bones of the Four Apostles. I even sent him an image of a gilded skull stuck on top of a leg bone, which looked for all the world like the world’s most disgusting Pez dispenser.

Fortunately, Kirk was able to look past my ridiculous attempt to visually explain my idea and identify the useful elements underneath it. This is why I really enjoy working with him, because he is one of those rare artists who can understand what you want much better than you can articulate it.