Tag: books

É dia de Português

O planeta independente Rhysalan oferece Asilo para 1.462 governos
exilados. É responsabilidade do departamento de Xenocriminologia e
Relações Alienígenas da Divisão Militar de Investigação de Crimes manter
a rédea curta com as centenas de milhares de xenos residindo no
planeta. Assassinatos, revoluções, guerras civis e tentativas de
genocídios planetários fazem parte da rotina de trabalho do Subtenente
Comandante Graven Tower, da DMIC-XRA.

Em acréscimo a um aerovar armado com mísseis, à sua confiável Sphinx
CPB-18 e às políticas extremamente liberais da DMIC com relação a danos
colaterais e vítimas civis, o Comandante Tower é estimulado por sua
extrema xenofobia, assim como por uma inteligência de máquina com
aumento de realidade de categoria militar que acredita que encontrou
Deus. No meio deste cenário, quando os restos desintegrados do herdeiro
legítimo de uma casa real alienígena são descobertos nas ruas de Trans
Paradis, a questão não é tanto se no final os assassinos serão
encontrados, mas se são os criminosos ou os investigadores criminais que
vão contribuir mais para a soma total de mortos.

QUANTUM MORTIS é a série de mistério de Ficção Científica Militar
repleta de ação de Vox Day – indicado para o prêmio Hugo e autor da
série de fantasias épicas As Artes da Escuridão e da Luz – e Steve
Rzasa.

Thanks to Israel and Daniel, Castalia House has released its second and third books in Portuguese today. Two QUANTUM MORTIS books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal, have joined Uma Magia Perdida in our Portuguese language catalog. This should be useful for those, like The Perfect Aryan Male, who are brushing up on their Brazilian Portuguese. Please note that both Gravidade Mortal and Uma Magia Perdida will be free downloads tomorrow and Thursday.

And in other Castalia House news, we’re pleased to announce the first of our new bloggers. Jeff Johnson of the Space Gaming Blog will be posting on Mondays. Yesterday he got off on exactly the right foot with a review of the first of the new Traveller novels from Marc Miller, Fate of the Kinunir. The Castalia House blog is rapidly becoming a destination in its own right, with four new bloggers joining Daniel, Mascaro, and Anson in posting essays, book reviews and interviews of independent and established authors alike. So, if you’re interested in following the Blue SF revolution as it proceeds, you’ll want to check it out on a regular basis.

Why Amazon are the good guys

Hugh Howey makes many of the same points I have concerning the Amazon-Hatchette battle, only in more detail, and he reminds everyone that the behavior of the Big 5 publishing cartel from which Amazon has liberated authors is worse than most people know:

The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself, a group so entrenched with one another and indistinguishable from one another that they simply go by the collective moniker: The Big 5.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

When members of the Big 5 do compete (truly compete, not just offer varying marketing promises and sizes of advances), the offender needs to be reigned in quickly. When Simon & Schuster innovated with print-only deals—thereby landing bestselling authors who were otherwise never going to sign with any major publisher—the resulting press on these deals (and likely pressure from other publishers) caused an immediate retreat. The poor publisher who stepped out of line dutifully pulled back into rank. Print-only deals were no longer on the table. Contracts snapped back to their immutable and noncompetitive form.

Or what about the “most favored nation clauses?” These pernicious contractual entities stipulate that any authors who get higher royalties in the future will trigger a retroactive match in royalties for select existing authors. This is like a sports contract that simply stipulates “I’ll always be the highest paid player.” It hamstrings all the publishers in a knot of anti-competitiveness. Where is the outrage or the reporting? Once again, we have a hardening of the monoculture where dissent is impossible and innovation stifled. Instead, the major publishers play Monopoly like my boss used to.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

Another point that I have not seen anyone touch upon is that unlike the Big 5, Amazon gives authors direct access to international book-buying markets. Tomorrow, Castalia House will be releasing its second and third Brazilian Portuguese books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal. That simply would not have been possible if Steve and I were publishing through a traditional publisher.

However, this is the core point: “Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.”

There are two reasons. The first is that authors are conditioned to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers. The second is that authors who are doing well under the current system are terrified that they may not be able to compete as effectively without being the structurally favored sons – and daughters – of the gatekeepers. And given what the gatekeepers have been favoring for the last two decades, I suspect their fears are well-justified.

One final note: it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that the conventional publishers aren’t leveraging their one area of historical expertise by doing print-only deals. It’s the one thing they can do very well that the independents and self-publishers can’t as easily do, and in many cases, that the two groups won’t even bother doing. Instead, by insisting on being granted both print and ebook rights, they’ll usually end up with nothing.

Speaking of Amazon, the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna” is a free download from Amazon today and tomorrow. Not only do the Big 5 publishers give away only a small fraction of the free books that Amazon does, but they junk their unsold stock rather than let anyone read them.

UPDATE: The Amazonians are voting with their downloads.

Lady Astronaut of Mars: #1,942 Free in Kindle Store
Opera Vita Aeterna:
#628 Free in Kindle Store

(Relax, I know the rankings are dynamic. This is more of that strange and unfamiliar concept called ‘humor’.)

Three Hugo reviews

Technically four, actually. Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog is reviewing this year’s Hugo nominees. He’s reviewed three in the novelette category so far, one of them being the Puppinette’s The Lady Astronaut of Mars:

The story begins with the confused ramblings of an elderly woman. We
know there’s something about Mars and Kansas… but we’re left collating
hints and scraps of information given to us by what is possibly an
unreliable narrator. If this actually is serious science fiction… then
it must be some sort of alternate history because we are shown some kind
Mars Mission from the fifties that was engineered with punch card
programs. And yet, the doctor from Kansas is named Dorothy and has an
Aunt Em and Uncle Henry… and this is so outrageous I can’t tell if this
is satire or a some kind of a joke.

If you keep reading, you soon discover that it isn’t some kind of drug addled hallucination. There is
a bit of science folded into the story: a domed colony on mars, an
asteroid impact on earth, an inhabitable extrasolar planet…. It’s not a
bad little premise there, really… but it is entirely smothered in the
details of particularly uninspiring elderly couple. The images and
situations are as far from those depicted in Frank Frazetta covers as
can possibly get. Instead Dejah Thoris, you get a sixty year old woman’s
flabby arms. Instead of gruesome sword fights and pulse pounding
action… you have a couple of bureaucrats coaxing a former astronaut to
come out of retirement.

The tone of the work is very even… almost elevated. It’s hard not to
read it in the cadence of an open mic slam poetry routine. Sometime like
this could be on NPR– it seems to hit all the right notes with a bit of
panache– but the story ends up grinding on into more and more graphic
and disheartening details.

He has also reviewed Brad Torgersen’s Lights in the Deep, which includes not one, but TWO Hugo-nominated works:

I remember the last couple of stories I’d
read in magazines like that. Back in the early nineties, I dipped into
several of them hoping to find the next Robert A. Heinlein. One story
was about a scientist running experiments on computer simulations of
pigs and chickens or something. If they passed, he might get to test his
drugs on a computer model of a human! (No aliens or explosions there.
Heck, I can’t even remember any conflict.) In another story, a painter
that specializes in portraits always ends up romancing the women he
paints. He’s a real Lothario. Then he gets a gig to paint an alien on
Mars or something… and his work just isn’t coming out right. Then it
dawns on him that he needs to get freaky with the alien in order paint a
good picture of it. Twist ending: the alien with incomprehensible
anatomy turns out to be a dude!

Perhaps  somebody else can confirm this for
me, but maybe the magazines have continued to be as godawful as I
remember. (I’m afraid to check, honestly. What if they’re worse…?)
Maybe “real” science fiction with aliens and space ships and laser
beams and exploding planets just isn’t done so much anymore…? Maybe the
fans that are deep in the science fiction scene are actually starving
for the sort of thing that I would recognize as, you know… being science
fiction. Maybe the way that Brad Torgersen’s collection combines
apocalyptic catastrophe with a sense of hopefulness really is having an
impact.
That he does this while straining to meet
editorial expectations and bending over backwards to not offend the
readership’s political and religious sensibilities is perhaps the most
obvious constraint holding back these stories. 

 He also reviewed The Last Witchking:

There’s nothing like a good pogrom, fatwā, book banning, congressional committee, or concerned citizens group to pique my interest in something. The greater the moral panic, the better the advertising. It was inevitable the hand-wringing surrounding the Hugo nominations this year would be just enough to get me to see what the fuss is about. I dove in to a book by the infamous Vox Day just hoping to be scandalized. (It’s the least I can do after growing up in the shadow of B.A.D.D. and the PMRC.)

I almost didn’t finish it. The first few pages consisted of two star-crossed lovers saying their last goodbyes to one another. I just about gave up right there, but the depiction of elves shortly after that held my attention. They weren’t the stereotypical tree-hugging types, but had a bit of an edge to them. Before long I was caring about the main character and clicking the page down key. My eyeballs were glued to the monitor and I couldn’t stop reading. (I’d picked up the Kindle edition that was free the other day because of the third story’s controversial Hugo nomination.)

Now, I’ve been hooked on page turners before that ended up making me feeling disappointed afterwards. You might know you’ve been had, but you keep buying books in the series because you have to know how it ends. This wasn’t like that. The main characters here are all so different from each other: an evil witchking, a goblin warrior, and elvish “seeker.” What’s intriguing to me is the extent to which I became immersed in the perspectives of each one. I really want to see each one to succeed… even when I maybe shouldn’t such as in the case of the titular character…. I’m glad for this brouhaha over the Hugo nominations, because this
book would have never crossed my radar otherwise. It was well worth the
few hours it took to read it, but I’m skeptical of the idea that a book
set in this world could go toe to toe with George R. R. Martin’s epic
fantasy series.

I don’t know Jeffro and he’s clearly not a reader of this blog, but I find it telling that his perspective as a genuine science fiction fan is so vastly different from that of the self-appointed “fan writers” who have been loudly pronouncing the intrinsic terribleness of my nominated work. Now that the Hugo packet has been made available to the voters, it should be fascinating to learn how many of them share his perception of these works in comparison to the usual suspects. It will certainly be more than a little amusing to hear the shrieks and the popping sound of five hundred heads exploding like Red Viper skulls if there turn out to be more Jeffros than Damiens among the voters.

In any event, I sent him a copy of A THRONE OF BONES to review, so that he could see for himself how well, or how poorly, it goes toe-to-toe with Mr. Martin’s ever-expanding trilogy.

UPDATE: Since some of you apparently weren’t aware, the Hugo Voter’s Packet is now available from LonCon and can be downloaded here by registered voters.

Book Eight

I think this marks the point at which George Martin has officially lost the plot. I never thought he was likely to finish all seven books, but now they’re talking about stretching the series to eight? I assume they’ll end up enlisting Joe Abercrombie, or one of the HBO screenwriters, to finish them after Martin goes the way of all Starks in Westeros, but I think that Martin should instead consider pulling an epic literary prank that would dwarf the HBO campaign featuring Sean Bean that misled all the viewers who hadn’t read the books.

What if everything that has “happened” is just a terrible nightmare of the Mad King, Aerys II Targaryen? How AWESOME would that be? After A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, it would probably be considerably more entertaining than whatever perversions and grotesqueries Martin, or his successor, attempts to gin up in order to prod his torpid readers into feeling some sort of emotional reaction to the events in the books.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.

Tears of the major publishers

Amazon is cracking down on the ability of major publishers to rip off authors:

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict: “We are determined to protect the value of
our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and
marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president.
“We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are
sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

What is hilarious is the authors and publishers crying about how Amazon is “raising the prices” of their books. It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books.

Castalia House has no issue with Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t discount its prices on our ebooks much because they are already in the price range that Amazon expects: 2.99 to 4.99. But publishers that price their ebooks at $15.99 are in trouble, because no one wants to pay actual retail price for them on Amazon. Compare the price of two John C. Wright books. We sell AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for a digital list price of $4.99. Tor sells JUDGE OF AGES for a digital list price of $26.99. Tor is counting on Amazon being willing to offer the customer a 45 percent discount, thus allowing Tor to collect $12.15 (assuming the standard 55 percent distribution discount) on an ebook compared to the $3.50 that Castalia receives. But Amazon only makes one dollar more from the 5x more expensive Tor book than it does from the Castalia book, which means a 17 percent operating margin instead of a 30 percent margin.

And Amazon sells more copies of the lower-priced books. At $4.99 AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is #18,816 on Kindle. At $27.99 reduced to $12.99, JUDGE OF AGES is #41,075. Ebook prices are elastic, so if Amazon can sell 2 low-price ebooks for every 1 high price ebook, it not only makes a) about twice the margin, but also b) about fifty cents more.

No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue the conventional arrangement. Amazon can only successfully sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!

By the way, this showdown between Amazon and the major publishers is a development that I predicted would be taking place soon during my campaign for SFWA President. The possibility was pooh-poohed by the business geniuses there, including the eventual winner. Nevertheless, the outcome will likely have a huge effect on authors with major publishers because the reason the publishers are fighting this uphill battle is their inability to support their current overhead structure without the additional revenue they receive from their inflated retail prices on ebooks. If either Amazon or the author were to receive a more equitable share, no major publisher could survive in its current form.

What the publishers should do – what they should have done a long time ago – is to set up a joint online store and then stop distributing books through Amazon. But they didn’t have either the nerve or the foresight, so now they’re faced with trying to develop some sort of alternative as Amazon begins to dip its toes into its own publishing line. Their best bet, in my opinion, would be to buy the Nook Store from Barnes&Noble, embrace a truly open standard, and go into competition.

However, they won’t embrace the open standard, and in doing so, they are giving up one of their two advantages over Amazon.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT free on Amazon

In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, or despite the many excellent reviews you still have not been moved to put John C. Wright at the front of your reading list, today opportunity knocks as today and tomorrow, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT is free on Amazon.

The novella was included in the Years Best Science Fiction anthology published in 2004. It makes for an marvelous introduction to the terrors of the Night Land, as well as to the dark beauty of Mr. John C. Wright’s pen.

In not entirely unrelated news, I would like to thank you all for an astonishingly successful launch of Mr. Wright’s TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN. I expected it to be of significant interest to many of you, but I can’t honestly say that I expected this:

  • #1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > History & Criticism
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Good & Evil
  •  #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory

Opera Vita Aeterna

I’ve been informed that it is customary to make Hugo-nominated works freely available to the public during the voting stage, so here is “OPERA VITA AETERNA”, a nominee for the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Click on the title link or on the cover image to download the free epub. If you prefer Kindle format, there is also a mobi version available for download.

There has been a fair amount of discussion of the novelette online, almost entirely by people who not only have not read it, but know absolutely nothing about it. I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in excellence in SF/F literature simply read the work and judge it on its merits. And for those who are more interested in thought-policing the genre, they can simply do as some have suggested, “rank a nominated work below “No Award””, and thereby provide us with an accurate measure of the degree to which SF/F fandom is influenced by the politically correct Left.

From the Amazon reviews of THE LAST WITCHKING:

  • The masterpiece of the trio, though, is Opera Vita Aeterna. At its core
    is the dialogue between an aging monk and a long-lived elven sorcerer in
    unwitting search of his own salvation. Day again employs both allegory
    and tremendous subtlety as the more experienced and intelligent elf is
    perplexed and impressed by the power of eternal truth. Aeterna is both
    clever and touching and might be the best story Day has produced to
    date. 
  • Opera Vita Aeterna: This is a brilliant, five-star story, and the
    best in the book, in my opinion. For me to rate a story as brilliant,
    it must be beautifully written, have complex characters, and leave me
    with a note of lingering intangibility. The elf Bessarias is on a quest
    for God, whom he doesn’t necessarily find. Through his searching,
    though, he leaves an important legacy behind him. There lies the
    intangibility–no personal, cathartic moment, but, instead, a glimpse of
    something far greater.
  • Opera Vita Aeterna is a deeply catholic work of the height of beauty,
    the power of events long after the events are forgotten, and the
    complexity and density of the Christian model of hope. Its most elegant
    turn is its ability to transform a deft and intriguing story about a
    strange sorcerer’s encounter with a rural cloister into a meditation on
    the nature of eternity. It is rare to describe a story as both
    restrained and florid, but its details are so rich and believable and
    its voice is so even. Read it, then read it again after reading Summa
    Elvetica.
  • All too brief, it balances the darkness of this book’s title story with a
    reminder that though darkness may engulf the world and seem to triumph,
    within the light there is a power that endures, which darkness cannot
    comprehend. All together, The Last Witchking is a significant offering by Vox, one I am still digesting and will read again.

RIP Andy Robertson

I received this news today concerning the great champion of William Hope Hodgson’s masterpiece, Andy Robertson:

It is with deep regret and much sadness that I must inform you that although we expected Andy to return home from hospital today, he suffered a heart attack and stroke last night and suffered extensive bleeding on the brain.  We are told that he would have felt nothing.  He remains on life support but has been declared brain-dead.

I did not know Andy well, but I very much enjoyed working with him over the last month as we prepared AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for publication. He was delighted when he discovered John C. Wright had dedicated the book to him, and I’m pleased that he was able to see the book meet with both commercial and critical success. He had mentioned to me that his Parkinson’s Disease was acting up and warned me that he might need to go to the hospital soon to deal with it, but was eagerly anticipating future fictional expeditions into the Night Lands.

He was amusing, high-spirited, and iconoclastic. In the very first email he sent to me, he wrote: “What are these links in the sidebar?  Alpha Game?   iSteve?(crikeyblimey, you are openly linking to the king of the HBDbloggers!!??!!)  my, you are a naughty, naughty lot. I think we will get on just fine. Please now to direct humble self to links where I may read all about your fall into badthink and your justified banishment from the society of all decent folk.”  


We did, indeed, get on just fine.

The Night Land was very close to his heart, and although I believe he already has a good team in place who will be able to carry on without him, in the event that assistance is needed to maintain its continuation, Castalia House will be pleased to provide it in Andy Robertson’s memory.

UPDATE:

It is with great sadness that I must inform you that Andy Robertson has died after a stroke.