J. Steven York's Multiplex of the Mind -

Spam, spam, spam, Spam!

2010-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I don't post much to this blog (mostly I'm over at www.YorkWriters.com) but I've been having real problems with Asian spam, so I've turned on moderation here for all message comments. It's not like the action is so fast-paced here it will put a cramp on things, and maybe it will at least keep the damned spammers under control.

But if you leave a comment, be aware, it may not show up for a while until I've had a chance to review and clear it.

-Steve

SpaceX Excels Through Patient Steps to Space

2010-06-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

Today's successful first launch of SpaceX's Falcon9 medium booster and prototype Dragon capsule is a vindication of their patient, determined, building-block approach to space flight, one that resembles the original NASA method far more than what NASA has done since the cancellation of the Apollo program.

The Falcon 1 was a test program for everything that followed, an "X-Plane" if you will, but it was also designed as a functional commercial launch vehicle that could take small payloads to orbit. It had its share of failures before it succeeded, but it was designed to. The scale was small enough that failures were economically survivable, which probably wouldn't have been possible with a larger vehicle. It was also complete enough that if money had run out for further development, they still had a launcher to sell. Brilliant.

Upscale the structure of Falcon 1, put nine Merlin motors in the first stage instead of 1, one Merlin with a bigger nozzle in the second, multiply many of its systems, and you have the medium lift Falcon 9 that flew today. The approach of clustering to create a larger booster resembles the very successful Saturn Ib booster used on many Apollo orbital flights, manned and unmanned (including taking astronauts to Skylab, and the Apollo Soyuz mission). The Saturn I clustered and stretched tanks and engines used on previous launch vehicles (the Saturn Ib had eight first-stage engines).

But while the Saturn Ib was a mass of mismatched parts, the Falcon 9 is built more like a Lego toy, from a smaller number of common elements. The first and second stages use different versions of the same engine. The first and second stage use different versions of the same structure, and therefore overlapping tooling to build them, roughly half the work to verify the structural methods and performance. The Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 share many common parts and systems.

Like the original NASA approach, Space X is designing launch vehicles independently of their mission. Falcon 9 can be used for satellite launches, to loft cargo in its Dragon capsule, and eventually astronauts (or paying passengers) as well. But it isn't limited to those things, or overspecialized in ways that cripple it for other missions (see the Shuttle as a worst-case in this department).

Today's launch isn't the end of the road. It's a mid-point in their master plan. The next Dragon capsule to fly will be fully functional on orbit, able to maneuver under its own power and do everything except dock with the space station. Docking is the next step. At some point, they also need to demonstrate reentry capability, and (if the capsule is to be used for manned launch) an escape rocket system.

But even that isn't the end. Incremental upgrades to Falcon 9 are certainly possible, and Space X eventually plans the Falcon 9 Heavy, a heavy-launch vehicle that straps two Falcon 9 first stages as boosters to the sides of a central Falcon 9.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that the building-block approach may have its limits. The Saturn Ib was a huge success, but the Russian N-1 Moon rocket (challenger to the mighty Saturn V) was a colossal failure. It may not be fair to make comparisons though. SpaceX shouldn't suffer the political snafus and pressures that hamstrung the N-1 program, and the engineering problems are far better understood (as are the tools for predicting and solving them).

Today, Space X has announced that they're in early talks with NASA on the development of a future "super-heavy-lift" vehicle. Would this be a Falcon 9 heavy with four strap-ons, build on some further upscaling of the core vehicle, or would it be the start of a new cycle of development built around larger motors and structures? It will be exciting to find out.

Hey, Retailers!: Ace is the Place with the Annoying Hardware Man

2009-09-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one who gets annoyed and stressed at over-helpful shop clerks? Because to "serve me better," these guys are making me freaking crazy... Today I actually snapped at a clerk at the local Ace Hardware store. I felt bad about it. They were trying to help, and simply, I'm sure, acting on the training and dictates of management, but they were still part of a vast conspiracy to drive me insane. After becoming the third person to ask if I needed help in about 45 seconds of walking across the store, I simply lashed out. Sorry 'bout that...

I live in a small town where, if you want hardware, the main choices are one of the two locations of the local Ace Hardware, or driving 50 miles or more to get to a Lowes or Home Depot. (There's actually another small chain store in town, but their in-stock selections are limited, and they cater more to contractors and builders than do-it-yourselvers like me.)

That's actually not a complaint. I actually really LIKE our local Ace franchise. They have most of what I need, the people generally know their stuff, and while the prices don't always match the big-box stores, they generally aren't bad. What I DON'T like is being stalked by sales clerks from the moment I walk in the door. It's a stupid policy, bad customer service (though in an an unusual form) and bad business.

At this point you may be asking yourself, "Steve, if you find the employees to be knowledgeable and helpful, why is this a problem? How can it possibly be bad customer service? How can it be a bad way to do business?"

Okay, here are a few points for those of you in the retail world.

1. There's a fine line between friendly and cloying. I love that there are friendly people at my hardware store. Local people, who smile and greet me, and sometimes know me by name. That's great. But I don't need them in my hip pocket every moment I'm in the store.

Greet me at the door. This makes me feel good, and makes me welcome in your store. This is also a the BEST time to see if I want help. Even if I don't you can then assure me that your employees are there to help at any time if I need it. Ask me once. I really don't need to be asked by EVERY employee in the store.

After that, be aware that I'm there, and look to see if I seem in serious need of help, or especially if I'm trying to FIND someone to help But don't loom. Give me some space and the quiet to figure out what I'm looking for and what my needs are, or (SHOCK!) just to SHOP. Plus, as annoying as your people can be, Murphy's law still applies. When I REALLY have a question or need help finding something, that's inevitably when nobody is around. They're all busy pestering other customers...

2. Don't make me unwelcome in your store through excessive attention. Come on, you know what I mean here. I worked in retail once upon a time, and the customer that ALWAYS got tons of help was the one you were suspicious of. The troublesome-looking kid off the street. The person who had had a little too much chemical self-alteration and seemed to have just stumbled into the store. The nervous potential shoplifter with the giant backpack.

When employees start attaching themselves to me like lampreys, it sends a subtle message, "take care of your business so we can get you out of here." The more welcome I feel in your store, the more I'm going to be happy and in the mood to buy. The more time I spend in your store, the more likely I am to think of something else I need, discover something I didn't KNOW I need, or make an impulse purchase. Don't hold me up, but for goodness sake, don't rush me out the door either...

3. I am, like millions, possibly billions, of other Americans, an introvert. I am not, by nature or personalty, a people person. It doesn't mean I don't LIKE people, but it does mean I like my alone time and the company of my own thoughts. It also means that social contact, especially with strangers, creates stress and discomfort.

This is a minor thing, but very time one of your "helpful" employees tracks me down and insists on an exchange I don't want, the stress multiplies. Times are, I literally emerge from the hardware store, my jaw clenched from stress, feeling like I've been through the wringer.

Many of your customers simply DON'T go to the hardware store for the chit-chat and the social interaction. Some, sure, but not all...

Worse, the more persistent and inquisitive you train your employees to be, the worse this situation is.

Train your people to take "no" for an answer. Better, train them to take a HINT of a "no" for an answer. If the customer has clearly heard you and still isn't making eye-contact, isn't talking back, isn't engaging the clerk, then that's a good time to say, "I'll be over that way if you need anything," and move along.

4. Despite what you may think, no matter how well you train your people, no matter how good they are, YOU CAN"T HELP EVERYONE.

Oh, sure, you can help most people. Most people have common, household, problems. They need to put up a mailbox, fix a leaky faucet, or replace an electrical outlet. Your employees can take those people to exactly the thing they need and show them what to buy and how to use it. Good on you.

But there are other kinds of customers that aren't so easy to pigeon-hole, and who are really more inclined to help themselves.

First of all, it's a new world these days. The building/remodeling boom is over for the moment, and there's a growing movement of people who make, repair, and build things on their own. These people could be building a windmill, or a rain-barrel, or converting an old shopping cart into a go-cart. You just can't know. All you can know is that there is no "Shopping cart upgrade" section in your store. They may need some lawnmower parts from your garden section, some screws from hardware, a piece of metal conduit from electrical, a muffler-clamp from automotive, and some plastic pipe from plumbing.

Likewise, there are other people shopping in hardware stores for the most unlikely stuff for the most unlikely reasons. They could be crafters, artists, hobbyists, kite-builders, boat-builders, redecorators, toy-builders, amateur-theater set-builders, and a million other things. I build 1/6th scale sets and props to use in my "Minions at Work" photo web-cartoons. We don't care what things are intended to be used for. We're in your store to buy conventional materials for unconventional purposes.

These customers care about what things look like, are shaped like, how they move or fit together, not what their common application is. These folks are into form, not intended function. Your employees are rightfully trained to deal in function, not form, to best help the majority of customers. But for this potentially signification (and possibly growing) minority, they'll just slow them down and get in the way. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have a persistent clerk insist on my explaining my needs. Only when I do, at length, they simply stare at you slack-jawed, unable to comprehend, or worse, they're scornful or dismissive. "You're building WHAT!?"

I move along only to be intercepted by another sales-person 60 seconds later. Thank you for your support.

5. I don't always KNOW what I'm looking for.

No, you can't always help with that either. Sure, if it's a common job like fixing a lamp or patching a garden hose. But for a moment, refer back to point 4. If I"m one of these "off the map" customers, I may have a good idea of what I WANT to do and what I HOPE to find, but it's really an open problem to be solved in the confines of your store. I need to wander through a bunch of departments and figure out what I need.

For example, maybe I need to make two linear supports and connect them at right angles. Maybe the supports can be wood, or plastic, or metal. Maybe they'll be plastic pipe, or angle-iron, or wooden-dowel, or 2x2 lumber, or electrical conduit, or threaded rod. Maybe they can connect with some kind of bracket, or a bolt, or screw, or a connector junction, or a nail, or a clamp, or glue, or even tape.

Probably there are a dozen or more solutions to this problem in your store, so I'm going to look for the one that is the best and cheapest. Your employees probably can't help here. Back off, and let me figure it out for myself. Yes, I'm wandering aimlessly looking like I can't find what I want. IT'S BECAUSE I HAVEN'T FOUND WHAT I WANT! DON'T ASK! I'LL KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT!

And look, this applies even to customers with more conventional needs. Often I'll walk into your store with the vague idea that I need something. I know I'd run into one of those common household problems the other day. "I should fix that," I said to myself. I remember that much, but not the details. Was it something to do with electrical? Plumbing? A sticky window? If I wander for a bit, maybe I'll spot it, or at least something that reminds me of what I needed to fix.

Even if I do know the primary thing I'm after, I'm a home-owner, and at any given moment, there are a HUNDRED things that need fixing. Just give me some time, I'll think of the ones bugging me most and make some more purchases. Stop derailing my train of thought every time I get close.

Worse, don't frustrate me to the point that I leave your store before I've figured it out. I'm GOOD at procrastination. I don't need any help.

6. Shopping is not a crime.

I know, this is crazy talk. Easy in, easy out is your motto.

But if infomercials have taught us anything, its that we can't buy what we don't know exists. I know for a fact they your buyers spend lots of time looking for nifty and clever new products to stock your shelves with. Trouble is, I don't KNOW what you have in your store unless I see it. And I'm going to let you in on a secret: often neither do your employees.

I've got a specific example: I was in my local Ace Hardware one day on a totally unrelated mission when I wandered past a rack of light bulbs. There, I was excited to spot a couple pegs of LED light bulbs. Now, I knew LED light bulbs existed, and I was excited about the prospect of the technology. After all, they last a very long time, and make even the most efficient compact florescent look like a power hog. But last I knew, they were still expensive specialty items, costing $50 and up a bulb.

But here they were, in a local store, and priced at under $10 a bulb! And according to the packaging, I could well save over $100 on power over the life of the bulb. So I grabbed a couple to try out. A clerk stopped me to ask if I'd tried them, and how they worked. So did the person at the register.

So, it turns out the LED bulbs work well in the application I have for them (lighting my large office/studio) and I go back frequently over the following weeks to buy more, replacing old bulbs as they burn out. Over and over, the folks at the checkout are amazed. The clerks ask questions (which I really mind FAR less then the unwanted "can I help you find something" queries). I bought another one today, and the person at the register commented on how strange it looked, clearly never having encountered one before.

I've spent about $100 on these bulbs so far, money I'd NEVER have spent if I'd waited for an employee to direct me to the product. Heck, I'd never have thought to ask the question, even though I knew that the product existed (though not at that price). I found the product by SHOPPING. Let people browse your store freely, and they'll gladly spend money they never would have otherwise.

And fact is, some of us, even men, like to shop. The old hunter-gatherer instincts are still strong. We like tracking down the rare and elusive prey. That works strongly to the retailer's advantage, if they'll just let it.

That's my rant. I'm not going to stop shopping at my local Ace Hardware (not that I have a lot of choice). But I know I'd spend MORE there if they'd just back off and let me shop.

"Can I help you?" I think I just did...

Clearing the Cobwebs

2009-09-06T02:13:00.000-07:00

Before we get to our next topic, a little housekeeping business. I'm afraid I've been neglecting this, one of my suite of blogs devoted to my rather diverse fields of interest.

One reason is that I've been much more focused on our "core" blog, www.YorkWriters.com lately for publicity reasons. Chris has a new series of mystery novels coming out starting this fall, and we're trying to build traffic and awareness there. I've also made "YorkWriters" available for subscription through Amazon's Kindle store, and if I'm even allowing, much less asking people to pay even a modest amount for something, then I feel some obligation to deliver regular and substantial content. I haven't listed this blog on Amazon, not because I'm unhappy with the quality of content here. Quite the contrary. But in terms of quality and regularity, no, it's just not there.

But the result has sometimes been that things I might formerly have posted here, simply in the interest of evenly spreading interesting content around the various blogs, has instead ended up on YorkWriters by default. Sorry about that.

That doesn't mean I've given up on this blog, or that there aren't some things that are going to end up here that you'd never see on YorkWriters. Here's my general mission-statement about how things will break down.

Things that will end up on YorkWriters: Most posts about writing and publishing. Posts of general interest, opinions, current events, and major career announcements.

Things that will end up here at the Multiplex: Things from me that are of a more personal nature. My ramblings and rants about technology, science, space, and the future. Things that reflect the more nerdy aspects of my persona: posts about pop culture, movies, toys, comics, etc. Most anything that's just a little too off-mainstream or quirky to fit on YorkWriters.

I hope not to go so long between posts here in the future, but no promises. One aspect of what I write about here is that the posts are often much more personal, passionate, and technically complex than what I post elsewhere. A lot of though, hard-work, and research goes into many of these posts, and I approach them as though I were writing an op-ed piece or magazine article.

Okay, I won't claim that the polish of them always gets to that level, but I don't just dash them off in fifteen minutes and post them. A lot of sweat goes into some of these posts, and I don't usually even start one unless I think I have a topic, and an approach to that topic, that's worthy of that effort. You won't catch me blogging just to make noise and fill dead-air. I don't roll that way.

Anyway, I've got some ideas rolling around my head about what is necessary for a society to create complex technological projects (like airliners, or Moon rockets), and our ability to maintain the culture that makes such things possible. I'm worried that we're losing our abilities in those areas, and the costs to our society may be more significant and far-reaching than we imagine.

I'm on the road in Los Angeles, and have the starting-gun on a new novel project looming that could start at any moment (or be several months late, as it is right now), so I'm not sure when I'll get that through the pipeline. Hopefully in the next few days to a week.

Building a Moon Rocket From Common Household Materials, Part 2

2009-06-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen it already, you can see part one of the article here.

Well, yesterday, just as I was starting to relax a bit, that I had 24 fewer hours to finish my Saturn V model than I planned. So it's been a sprint to get it done in time, but (except for some drying glue) it's done, or as done as it's going to be.

The first couple pictures show the nearly complete rocket. The lower stages are done, though there are still rubber bands holding things on while the glue dries. The interstage (the lower taper) between the second and third stage is missing its final roll-markings, and actually that whole part of the rocket is just dry fitted together, and awaiting final gluing and assembly.

From start to finish this has been a question of compromise, but due to time constraints, I didn't detail it as much as I'd hoped to. It's got none of the external tunnels or rocket housings I'd hoped to add. The service module has only one of its twelve thruster nozzles, I never got around to adding nozzles to the escape rocket, and the engine nozzles were never painted silver (the protective covers for the engine nozzles were nearly an identical shade of red to the cups I used, so this isn't a huge issue).

But also along the way, mistakes were made. The biggest one is that through some error of measuring or calculation, the first stage/second stage joint is way too low. The first stage should be longer than the second. Actually, that could be the problem. I may have measured from the wrong end when I put in the lower second stage wrap. During assembly I kept turning the tube upside down and back again for various parts of the assembly, and that got confusing.

There are other smaller things. One of the flags is a little crooked. There are small gaps and imperfections I wish weren't there. A couple of tank wraps I'd planned to add got skipped for time (and one of the because the first stage was too short, because of my mistake, for it to look right.

Several things about the interstage between the second and third stages are less perfect than I'd like them to be, including a staggered joint in the roll pattern that should be straight.

I kick myself about these things, and yet I know that probably nobody at this party is going to know enough to notice, and there's just not doubt, looking at this thing, despite its flaws, that it's a Saturn V. It has the look, even if the details are wrong.

It also has size going for it. One problem with most Saturn V models, no matter how detailed and accurate they are. They just don't communicate any of the sheer size of the rocket.

The Saturn V was 362 feet tall. That's well over twice the height of the 10 story hotel the party is being held in. Refer to what I call the "shock and awe" low-angle shot of the incomplete model above. The fact that even I (being six-foot six inches tall) still have to look up to see the top of the model (if it's sitting on the floor) makes a huge difference. Put it on a table or pedestal, and it really reminds you that this is a a model of something big.

The details for tomorrow's display are still being worked out, but due to limited ceiling height in the party room, it will likely end up sitting on the floor tomorrow. I really wish there was room for even a short pedestal. Oh, well.

These last two pictures show the final model.

I'm really nervous now that something will happen to the model tomorrow. Parts of it (especially the fins) are fragile, and could be damaged if someone knocks the thing over, kicks it, or moves it without knowing what they're doing. I'm really hoping to get the model back intact after the party.

As I said before, we might be able to donate or loan it to a local school for educational purposes. Failing that, it will probably end up hanging (sideways) from my office ceiling. In fact, since school is out (and due to budget crunch, I don't know how much summer school they're having this year), even if it does go to school, it may have to be stored hanging from my ceiling until fall.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Building a Moon Rocket From Household Materials

2009-06-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

This is a little off the usual topics around here, but... (Actually, given that I've done a lot of posting about space issues, maybe not so much.)

The beach hotel where my wife, Chris works her day-job is celebrating it's 40th anniversary this month. Given that this closely coincides with the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, the moon landing is one of the major themes for the party. Somehow I got talked into (or did I talk myself into it?) building a model Saturn V moon rocket as a central decoration.

Somehow I got the great idea: We can get one of those cardboard concrete form tubes (used to pour piers and the like) at Lowes and build it around that! It'll be easy and cheap.

Yes, this is being done on a budget of close to nothing. So far I've spent about $30 for materials. No, I'm not being paid for my time. I'm nuts.

Fortunately, there were lots of free resources on the web to draw on, especially for the capsule and escape tower. There are free paper models on the web that you can print out, cut out, and (with only a hobby knife, some glue, and the skills of a brain surgeon) turn into a nice 1/48th scale (just the size I needed) model of an Apollo space vehicle.

Actually, there are rather sketchy models of the whole thing in 1/48th, and better ones in smaller scales. I've ended up using bits of at least four different paper models. But only bits. Mainly the capsule "skin" and the shrouds that connect the stages and cover the four outer engine bells at the bottom. Everything else has been engineered from scratch, scrounging and adapting as I went along.

I needed this thing to be stronger and more durable than a paper model could be, so the entire upper stack, from the upper interstage to the end of the escape tower is supported by a "spine" of wooden dowel. You could put your eye out with the escape tower, but it isn't going to break off.

The interior structure is full of foam-core-board rings and plates, and this material is also used for the fins. All of the black markings are hand-cut bits of black posterboard or craft-board individually glued in place. The engine bells are carefully (we went through three stores measuring to find the right ones) selected plastic cups bolted to a foam-board base-plate. Because the cardboard base tube isn't EXACTLY to scale, and my hand-rolled third-stage tube also wasn't precise, the lower shroud had to be enlarged and modified.

There are well over a hundred (maybe two hundred) parts at this point, and most of them have been designed from scratch, hand-cut, and fitted.

This isn't a museum model though, and it has to be done on a deadline, so like a Hollywood prop, it's a rolling compromise to time and materials. I couldn't find a corrugated material like I wanted to use on the tank wraps, so I had to compromise and use bands of flat poster board.

I may not get around to adding the service module thruster nozzles (twelve tiny cones that would be cut from round toothpicks.)

I may not add many of the service tunnels, ullage (once again, my vocabulary exceeds my spelling checker, a small rocket-motor used to push liquid fuel to the back of the tank of an in-flight vehicle before main-motor ignition and stage seperation motors, and other "bumps" that cover the real Saturn V.

Still, it's nearly 8 feet tall, and even incomplete, the iconic look is there. Get some more paint and a few roll markings on it, and any baby-boomer will know exactly what it is.

I don't know what will happen to it after the party this weekend. Presuming it survives the proceedings (uncertain, but I hope), I hope to get it back. Maybe it can be donated to a local school, or failing that, it could end up hanging from my office ceiling.

In any case, I am very much a child of the space age. Building this is my homage, my totem (in more ways than one) to the anniversary and one of humankind's greatest achievements.

See part two of the article and the finished rocket, here.

Ebooks in space

2009-04-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

The other day NASA took a mock up of the new Constellation manned capsule to the Washington mall to show it off, and I studied the press images with interest. I'd seen a rather less detailed mock-up recently at the NASA visitor's center at the Kennedy Space Center, but this gave a much better sense of what the real item will be like, and the fact that it was sitting on a flat-bed truck provided an unusually good reference for scale.

I was at once stuck by how large it is, and how small. Certainly, it's big compared to the Apollo capsule that the reentry body is based on, and big enough to provide a "wide load" for the semi-truck. But it's still very small when you think of some of the tasks put before it.

Constellation will replace the shuttle in taking astronauts to orbit, and hopefully will eventually get us back to the Moon. But long-term plans are also to use it for for extended missions to Mars, or possibly to near-Earth asteroids. Such missions would require astronauts to live in the capsule for many weeks or months. Even Constellation lunar missions may have much more extended stays than the longest Apollo mission. For a Mars mission in particular, the Constellation looks tiny.

It's one thing to be crammed into a tight space with several other people for a week or two. Human beings can endure almost anything for that length of time. But when this stretches to months or even years the psychological stresses can be intense. Boredom, isolation, lack of privacy, all are concerns on long duration flights, even in much roomier environments like the International Space Station.

Several years back I had the pleasure of watching the IMAX film, "Mission to Mir." One of the great things about IMAX is the level of visual detail, and the sense of presence that it gives you. You're free to ignore the action at the center of the screen and study the dusty corners of whatever environment is being filmed.

This was of special interest here, as Mir was quite an old space station at that point, and it was anything but a sterile environment. It was literally a house, or maybe more properly, a dorm, in space, and it showed. Objects showed obvious signs of wear and use. Everywhere you saw signs of human occupation: notes, pictures, personal objects, signs.

Given the eventual sad decline and death of Mir, this could be taken as signs of decay, but my reaction to it was joyful. People weren't just visiting space, they were living there! It was an important distinction from the space missions of my youth. Even the Skylab space station missions seemed mostly to have been carried out with a sense of military pragmatism.

One scene I found of special interest featured a visiting astronaut showing off their tiny personal quarters. In particular my eyes were drawn to a small shelf full of well-worn, well-loved paperback books (held in place with some kind of strap or bar, in case you were wondering). The 'naut explained how every new visitor added to the library, and left the books behind for future occupants of the station.

Since every pound of mass sent to orbit is literally worth its weight in gold, these are probably some of the most expensive books I've ever laid eyes on, and they were likely among the most appreciated.

Which brings me back to the Constellation. The astronauts who go on those long missions will almost definitely have one advantage no previous space-traveler has had before: a space-rated version of the Kindle or some similar ebook device loaded with an entire library of books.

Yes, they'll have other entertainment technological advantages as well. They'll certainly have an iPod, or something like it, loaded with music and movies. There will be personal computers, possibly game consoles, and maybe even simple virtual reality to help them escape their little technological world from time-to-time.

But I think books have a unique power to engage the mind and take the reader away from whatever their reality may be to a different mental place. I think books will be a great source of comfort in the long void between the worlds. It makes the ordeal of spending months on end jammed into that little tin can seem just a little more thinkable.

The Shuttle Disaster that wasn't -- Barely

2009-03-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

I follow space flight fairly close, but here's a chilling bit of history I wasn't familiar with. 21 years ago, just after the return to flight after the Challenger explosion, the Space Shuttle Atlantis came dangerously close to being destroyed by the same sort of tile damage that later destroyed Columbia.
Except that, in many respects, the tile damage to Atlantis, also caused by an insulation impact during launch, was actually worse than the Columbia accident. More than 700 tiles were damaged, and one tile in a critical area was completely destroyed, resulting in melting in the exposed aluminum underneath.

And because of a communications blackout on the top-secret military flight, NASA remained blissfully ignorant of the damage, even while mission commander Robert "Hoot" Gibson was looking at images of the tile damage and thinking, in his own words, "we are all going to die."

I just read the story on the web site Space Flight Now. Here's the gist of it, with some added insights of my own (based in part on the rather mundane picture from the NASA archives seen above):

In 1988, the second post-Challenger mission, STS-27, was launched with a secret spy satellite on board. 85 seconds after launch, a chunk of insulation broke loose from the nose of the right solid-rocket booster and struck along the right side of Atlantis.

It isn't clear from the story if the discovery of tile damage was accidental, but it appears so, and the astronauts were extremely alarmed by what they saw. The insulation had impacted near the nose, and resulted in a triangular-shaped cone of damage all the way down the right side of the spacecraft, from the nose almost to the rear of the wing. You've read Gibson's immediate reaction above.

But because of limitations on communications, the crew were unable to properly communicate their concerns to the ground. During military missions, strict limits are places on communications with mission control to insure secrecy. Anything that might even remotely reveal information about the payload, its characteristics, purpose, or orbit, are closely guarded. One hard-fast rule in this case was, no video.

Finally, reluctant permission was given to send encrypted video of the damage to the ground. But the encrypted video system was black and white, low resolution, and could only send one frame every three seconds or so.

It's also interesting that the only photo I could find in the searchable NASA photo archives referencing the damage is the one above. It shows the crew attempting to repair a video tape containing the video of the tile damage. Yes, that is a roll of duct tape floating there.

The implication I take from this is that video was recorded (using the shuttle's robot arm) of the damage was recorded on tape in order to be converted into encrypted format and sent back to Earth. Only the tape jammed somehow, and... This is a SNAFU of historic proportions. You can read a million things into the bemused expression on the mission specialist's face at right. I like to think he's something like, "we're f*cking about to die, and it all comes down to duct-tape and a Betamax."

Because of the poor quality video, engineers on the ground thought they were just looking at shadows on the surface of the tile and assured the crew there was no danger. The astronauts knew otherwise, but did not attempt to convince the ground, perhaps unaware of their line of reasoning. It was nothing a little open discussion couldn't have fixed, but apparently the communications restrictions didn't allow for that, or at least, encourage it.

And so, the mission continued as planned, with NASA doing nothing (not that there was a lot that could be done, since no repair tools or materials, besides that duct tape, were carried, nor had even been developed at this point), and the astronauts soldiered on, plauged by doubts that they would survive reentry.

Upon landing, they discovered the damage was even worse than the astronauts had realized. Without the new cameras and extension boom now routinely carried on the Shuttle, there was no way to image the entire underside of the shuttle, including large areas of damaged. In told, more than 700 tiles were damaged, including the missing tile, located under the orbiter's nose, an area subject to high heating. Upon landing, it was discovered that the exposed aluminum under the tile had actually begun to melt.

If it had burned through, a literal torch of plasma would have cut into the shuttle and its fragile systems underneath, quite likely dooming the spacecraft. Perhaps, as with Columbia, one of the first warnings would have been the pressure in the landing gear tires, as heat caused them to expand, and finally explode. Except, the indicator might have been on the front tires, rather than the rear.

It didn't happen though. One bit of luck, the missing tile exposed a mounting plate for an antenna, and so was thicker than the skin only inches away. That one detail may have saved Atlantis and its crew.

Post flight, NASA apparently minimized the damage and the risk to the crew. Secrecy may have been an issue, but it's almost impossible to ignore the potential CYA factor. A near disaster only two flights after Challenger, following what was supposed to be a complete safety overhaul of the program, could have grounded the shuttle again and heads were certain to roll. It's interesting that, even now, there are apparently no photos of the tile damage in the searchable on-line archives, though they exist (Space Flight Now has a few).

Of course, if Atlantis had been lost, the shuttle would have definately been grounded, and it very well could have been the end of the shuttle program, and perhaps American manned space flight. That's one grim alternate universe.

But in another one, NASA learned from the mission and launched an immediate review of the potential for tile damage. Methods might have been developed for routine examination of the tiles during each flight. Improvements might have been made to reduce foam shedding and ice build-up. Repair tools and techniques might have been developed. And in that world, Columbia might have survived, or at least its crew might have been rescued by an emergency launch of a second shuttle.

But that didn't happen.

We are their grim alternate reality.

The shuttle is scheduled to be retired next year, and I will miss the capabilities we lose when that happens. But I will not miss the shuttle itself, with its inherent design flaws and dangers. There's no reason that the Constellation system that replaces it shouldn't be far safer for the women and men who fly in it.

Let's hope that's so. Space is a dangerous business, and more people will die in its conquest. But those deaths shouldn't be tragically avoidable, as was the case with Challenger, Columbia, and almost, Atlantis.

Alabama Shooting Hits Close to Home

2009-03-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes you'll turn on the radio or the TV with the news already in progress, and you get this bit out of context that really doesn't register till later, if at all?

It started like that for me. I turned on the car and the radio came on, and I was focused on backing out of a parking space. I'm not listening, but a few words call out to my unconscious. I hear "shooting," "gunman," "Alabama," and that bit before "Alabama." Was it "south-east?"

Surely not.

Though I live on the Oregon coast now, I was born in south-east Alabama, and spent most of my childhood there. Though we moved a lot later on, my folks always had a house there, my mother's family lived there, and it was always "home" no-matter where we lived. It's poor country, sparsely populated, and generally speaking, not much happens there. When something from from there makes the national news, I pay attention.

But in this case, I was quickly out of the car and distracted by something else. It wasn't until that evening that I checked into Google News and saw the headlines, and dug into the reports with increasing alarm. This was all familiar territory. All the pictures showed familiar places. This was hitting close to home. Very close indeed.

I knew intimately almost every inch of the gunman's rampage, and had history with it all, and it had ended shocking close to the house I grew up in.

After fretting for a few minutes about the late hour, I called my Brother who still lives a half-mile or so from my parent's house in Chancellor, Alabama. My parents are snowbirding in Gulf Shores, but I couldn't be sure where he'd been that day. His first words on answering the phone weren't "hello," or "who is this?" They were, "I'm alive."

Yes. That was the answer I was looking for. Death had come to southeast Alabama, trod through my memories with an assault rifle in-hand, and come perilously close to people I love.

It had been worse for Tim. He'd been 3o or so miles away, in Dothan, Alabama, when he heard about the incident on the radio, but his girlfriend had been home. The news reports said only that the gunman had been cornered "on highway 27 between Geneva and Enterprise," which is exactly how you'd describe Chancellor if anyone asked.

I make that phone call sound grim. Actually we laughed and joked through most of it. Gallows humor. Whistling in the dark. A defense mechanism. We're good at it.

We didn't talk long. It was late on a work night. But it didn't stop me from thinking about it.

The part of the shooting spree I'm least familiar with is where it started, in a tiny town called Kinston. Yet Kinston lies along probably the first road I ever traveled. Kinston is on the road between Opp and Samson. I was born in a hospital in Opp, and that road is the one my parents would naturally have taken driving me home.

Michael McLendon started his rampage there by killing his mother and her dogs and setting her house on fire. Talk about someone feeling walking on your grave? This is the exact opposite. It's like death walking on your birthplace.

He then proceeded to the tiny town of Samson, one I know very well. I never spent a lot of time in Samson. There was no reason to.

The downtown is just a few blocks long. But it was a place you went through on the way to somewhere else. We usually passed through on our way to the beaches in Florida, so I associate it mostly with happy time. We stopped there to eat a couple times, or for gas. But unless you have business or family in Samson, there isn't much there, there.

My dad got us in a fender bender there once when I was a kid (just to be clear, it was the other guy turned right from the left lane, and it was definately his fault), and that's probably the most time I've spent in the town, sitting there while waiting for the police, trading insurance information, filling out accident reports.

It was almost certainly the most exciting thing that happened in Samson all day. And it might have been the most exciting day that week. That was the kind of town it was.

McLendon killed seven people in Samson.

Seven.

In a town of less than two-thousand people. Five of them on one block of Pullum Street.

I can't get over that.

I looked Pullum Street up on Google Earth. Near as I can tell, it's only a few blocks long. My Uncle Wayne had an apartment very close to there until he passed away a couple years ago, maybe no more than a block or two away. Though I don't know Samson that well, I could drive you there without a map.

From Samson, he drove the road to Geneva, another one I know well. If you were coming home from Florida and needed to pick up some groceries or stop for a bite to eat, you'd probably detour over to Geneva rather than taking the direct route through Coffee Springs (a few miles from Samson, where I attended school until the sixth grade).

Just outside of Geneva, there's a grain silo. It's visible in many of the news photos. It's been a landmark as far back as I can remember. It was once the tallest thing for miles in relatively flat country. There are some new water towers and radio masts, but it's still one of the tallest things in the area. Seeing the grain silo in the distance, as you were driving highway 27 from Chancellor, was the first sign that you were approaching Geneva. Though the silo was on a different road, it could be seen from miles away.

The police set up a road block in front of the silo, on the Samson-Geneva road, and tried to stop the gunman. They failed, though they succeeded it slowing him down. Two policemen were injured, and according to some reports he shot at people in the Wal-Mart and Piggly Wiggly grocery-store parking lots nearby, both places I've shopped while visiting my family.

Geneva I know very, very well. It was the closest town of any size to our home, and we frequently went there to shop or eat. Our family doctor's office was just a few blocks from where the roadblock took place. Next door was the drug store where I first discovered comic books. Even closer is the hospital where they set my first broken bone. The place is loaded with memories, good and bad.

McLendon proceeded through Geneva, then turned left onto highway 27. Highway 27 leads directly from Geneva to Chancellor.

Home.

Chancellor is on highway 27. The tiny town is only a block wide. A short block, one house deep. My brother's house is on the highway. My parent's house is a block off it.

Fortunately he didn't make it that far. That was the first moment of recognition when I logged on and started reading news reports. Not where it started. Where it ended. The Reliable Metals plant.

It wasn't called that when I lived there, but I remember when the building was put up. It was a big deal, a modern steel industrial building going up in a declining town that had seen better days. I recall that, for some strange reason, there was a golf course built around the building, greens and sand-traps where there are fenced parking lots today. The golf course didn't last long, and the building changed hands, but I still recognized it immediately in the news photos.

It's well out of Geneva on the road to Chancellor, just past the little Geneva airport where my dad got his pilot's licence, where we spent many a happy afternoon watching airplanes when I was young, where my parent's friend Lynda and Jerry once lived in a mobile home behind the tie-down area, and had a German shepard dog.

McLendon was maybe ten minutes at most from my brother's front door when he decided to turn off and make his final play. Seven miles according to Tim. And not any random seven miles. Not any random ten minutes. He was on the right road, going in the right direction. There aren't even any other major roads to turn off on. There was almost literally no other place for him to go.

But thankfully for me, death took a detour, then left the building. Leaving bodies and grief and confusion, and for me, so far away, a disturbance in the Force.

It's a sleepy place that lives mostly in memories for me now, and in the occasional phone call or visit to my parents and brother. How did a gunman get in there? How did mass murder intrude on my past, invade my lazy days of childhood?

Like most people, I study the news reports and try to make some sense of it all. I scan the names of the dead and wonded, and give some thanks that none of them are familiar. Strangers are dead. Good. That's just human nature.

But the odds still eat at me. There are less than 27000 people in Geneva country. Less than 2000 in Samson. Less than 4500 in Geneva. It's almost surprising that I didn't know someone.

And among the dead, some of the surnames are familiar, the same as classmates I went to Coffee Springs School with. It's very likely that I know someone related to those killed. It's that kind of place. Nobody is that far seperated from anyone else, even when one of them is completely across the country.

I almost wish I was there. If I could drive that road and see those places, maybe I could make more sense of it all. But I can't, and I'm left to sort it out from postage-stamp news photos and a lifetime of memories.

Sprinkles, Frosting, and a Twist: Taking Fictional Tropes Beyond the Next Level

2009-03-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my wife Chris was taking a badly needed break between writing books on a tight deadline. All she wanted was to veg out in front of the TV for a while. Unfortunately, it was somewhere in the Holiday/new-year wasteland of TV. All of the shows we follow were either off the air or in repeats.

As it happened, I had just then stumbled on a deal at a liquidator store on an anniversary release of James Bond DVDs. I brought a couple home, and Chris spotted them. Before we knew what we were doing, it was back to the store for more Bond DVDs. All the Bond DVDs in fact (except for the two most recent "reboot" films, which we already had).

We ended up spending the entire holiday break on a Bond marathon, watching not only the films, but many of the bonus documentaries, which this release generously provided. I don't consider it wasted time at all. Quite the contrary, it was quite educational.

The classic Bond films aren't just films, they're grand entertainments, joyously excessive in every way. They're clearly born of the pulp magazine tradition of storytelling: fast moving, exotic, suspenseful, action packed, engines for over-stimulation. But of course, the pulps only described the things that James Bond movies brought to life.

I don't think the younger generations can appreciate a world-changing experience it was for audiences seeing "Goldfinger" or "Thunderball" for the first time. It did what "The Great Train Robbery" or "King Kong" did for the generations before, or what "Star Wars" or "The Matrix" did for later generations.

But of course, Chris I don't make films, or even write screenplays these days, so what's to be learned here for prose writers? Well, one thing we learned was the power of taking fictional tropes to the next level, to not just have things happen in your stories, but to have them happen with pizazz and style. In any kind of fiction, not just adventure, it could be the difference between bland story that just sits there, and exciting fiction that engages the reader and won't let go.

Here's how Chris and I came to call this, "Frosting, Sprinkles, and a Twist."

We were watching a typical Bond action sequence, I don't remember which one. I remarked to Chris, glancing at the plate of holiday sugar cookies looking for a metaphor, "You know the thing about Bond. It isn't just about viewer cookies ("cookies" in this instance, referring to those story elements placed to offer special pleasure to the audience). They all have frosting."

At which point the scene immediately topped itself. I did a double-take, and struggling to adjust, said, "Okay, frosting and sprinkles."

At which point, the scene again managed to top itself, taking to outrageous to an unbelievable level. Chris looked at me and grinned, "Frosting, sprinkles, and a twist!"

The pattern was revealed, and once we recognized it, we saw it again and again. Like I said, I don't remember that first scene where we spotted the pattern, but I do remember one that came immediately after, a chase scene in "Live and Let Die" which repeated the pattern twice in quick order.

In the scene, Bond and the inevitable lovely companion are being chased by bad guys. That's the cookie, and it's the sort of thing that could (and usually does) happen in any adventure or suspense story. It could be pretty exciting, except for the fact, we've seen it a million times before.

But this being a Bond film, we don't leave it there. They're on foot, so Bond steals a handy motor vehicle to make an escape. Frosting? Maybe, but weak, thin frosting. We've seen it all before.

Which is why Bond steals a bus. That's frosting.

But wait, there's more. Not just a bus. A double-decker bus. Now that's sprinkles!

The bad guys also make motorized pursuit, some on motorcycles, which some might consider a twist. A bus chased by guys on motorcycles with guns. Pretty exciting.

But not enough for a Bond film. Chased by the motorcycles, Bond cranks the bus steering wheel and puts the top heavy thing through a 360 degree spin, driving the motorcycles off the road. Not only a great twist, but a literal one!

But the scene isn't over, and there's time to run through the cycle again.

Though Bond has gotten rid of the motorcycles, there's still a car back there, and the way is blocked by a low bridge! That's a pretty darned good cookie, and many a writer would be willing to stop there. But this is a Bond film.

Bond keeps driving! The bus hits the bridge, and the entire top deck of the bus sheers off and falls to the ground, blocking the car's path, allowing Bond to escape. Excellent frosting! One could well be satisfied with such a cookie and such frosting.

But this is a Bond film, dammit! The pursuing car crashes into the upper deck of the bus, gets stuck under it, and the car and severed roof drive away blindly! Action sprinkles with humor added!

But that isn't quite enough. As I said, it's driving blind, so the car (still under the bus roof) veers off the road and crashes into a lake. A light but refreshing twist to finish off the scene.

Frosting, sprinkles, and a twist. It's a classic "rule of threes." There are several examples of this sort of thing in storytelling. For example, there's the classic structure for a short-story:

Character in a setting with a problem. Character tries to solve problem. Fails. Things get worse.

Character tries again to solve problem. Fails. Things get worse.

Character tries one last time to solve problem. Succeeds (or fails ultimately).

It's also used in humor, from fiction to stand up.

Set up the joke. Reinforce the setup. Break the setup with the punch line. (Bad example. Man tells doctor, "Doc, my father thinks he's a chicken." "Oh, that's terrible. But don't worry, I've dealt with cases like this before, so I'm sure we can cure him." "Oh, I can't have you doing that, doc! We need the eggs!")

But Bond movies apply their rule of threes to everything! Bond can't just go someplace to find the villain. It has to be exotic, colorful, and dangerous. He can't just have a weapon. It has to be unsual, exciting, and disguised as some common object. He can't just drive a car. It has to be a fast, sexy car, loaded with weapons and gadgets. He can't just meet a woman. She has to be stunningly beautiful, have a suggestive name, and hide a dangerous secret.

In one of documentaries, the son of original Bond producer Harry Saltzman quotes him as saying, - "(I'm) thinking about another way to die. Death is really quick. A bullet to the brain, you're dead. But what I've got to do is think of something glamorous. You've got to die Hollywood style. It's got to look beautiful, it's got to look graphic, and it's got to give the audience a sense of revenge."

Exactly. Why use a gun when a poison blow gun would work? Why have the hero duck the dart when he can use his murderous dance partner for a human shield?

Of course, you could say, "What a stupid bad-guy. A gun would be better, and with a steel jacketed round, that human-shield trick wouldn't work at all."

But that's the real secret of "Frosting, sprinkles, and a twist." The viewer (or reader) can figure this out just as easily as you. But if you've entertained them, surprised them, stimulated them, titillated them, they don't care! In fact, they'll move right past it and want more. In fact, if you're good (as in the chase scene described above) you've got another helping lined up before they even have time to want more.

Of course, you may be saying to yourself, "this doesn't apply to me. I don't write James Bond, or action, or thrillers. I write romance (for example)!

No, it still applies. Sure, the tropes you use may not be as broad, but there's still no reason you can't take them up a level. Or two. Or three.

Maybe in your romance, the scene where your ugly-duckling, small-town heroine meets the potential mother-in-law just lays there. But what if the mom is brilliant and beautiful? And is soon revealed to be a jet pilot. And, oh-yeah, a retired astronaut. It all piles on to grind all your heroine's worst insecurities into the dirt.

Maybe the break-up scene at the corner coffee-shop is strictly by the numbers. What if instead you put your characters on a roller-coaster at Coney Island? And one of them says "I think we should see other people" just as the train tops the first hill and takes the plunge. But the roller coaster malfunctions, and they end up stuck together, in uncomfortable silence, with hundreds of people looking on from the station platform only 30 feet away.

Romance, mystery, science-fiction, it doesn't matter. If the story needs something, just take the elements that are already there, the settings, the characters, the situations, and take them up a notch -- two -- three.

Just remember, when in doubt, ask yourself, "what would James Bond do?"

Star Trek: "It Ain't Canon"

2009-03-08T22:48:00.001-07:00

As usual, the fan whining began many months ago (maybe years at this point) about the upcoming J.J. Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise. As it happens, I've seen two things in the past couple days the reenforce the idea that this reboot is not only going to be good (maybe even great), it's also going to be true to the roots of Star Trek. Roots that even many die-hard fans have (often conveniently) forgotten.

First thing, is the latest trailer. Check it out if you haven't seen it. I'll wait...

I feel like I've a little street cred to talk about Trek. I've been a big fan since I watched the first airing of "Man Trap" live on NBC back in (mumble-mumble), and I've since worked on three Star Trek prose projects for Pocket Books with my wife Chris (two "Star Trek SCE" ebooks, one since reprinted in paperback, and a "Next Generation" ebook, all of which are, I believe, still available for download, ebook fans).

A lot of what you hear is griping about it not being "canon," that is, the established history of Star Trek. There really has been a fantastic amount of effort over the years to document all things (on-screen things, that is, the books were never considered "canon") Trek and bind them into some sort of whole.

But behind-the-scenes efforts at this really didn't take root until well in "Next Generation's" run, and they were never entirely consistent. Despite what you may have been told, Trek has repeatedly contradicted itself in dozens of important ways, through it's entire run, in all of the series, and pretty much all of the movies.

Don't believe me? If you've got half an hour or so, check out the following series of fan-produced videos on Youtube highlighting a good number of these contradictions. Actually, if you don't have 30 minutes, the first few minutes of the first video should be plenty to convince you.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The fact is, Star Trek "canon" has never held up to close scrutiny, and this is especially true of the original series, where such continuity was never a large concern, and "facts" were established with no thought of how it might fit into a larger continuity or time-line.

Yet that hasn't stopped the endless sniping, based on the few stills and trailer clips that have been released.

In fact, these are probably the same people who were bitching all the way through the three year series run of "Enterprise." Let me tell you, Enterprise had a lot of problems, but continuity is among the smallest of these. Really, is the "first contact" date for the Ferengi really that important in the greater scheme of things? (Don't get me wrong. I love the Ferengi, but you can pretty much ignore anything about them that happened until Deep Space Nine came along.)

But let's not get side-tracked (and there's so much Trek, it's easy for that to happen). Let's address the cries that, based on what we've seen so far, the new Trek movie "isn't Trek," and "isn't canon."

Please.

First of all (mild possible spoiler here) it's clear that the plot of this movie deals with some kind of time travel plot from the future mucking up young Kirk's life. What little we know about his early life (that which doesn't already contradict itself) from the original show and movies just doesn't necessarily apply.

Get over it. The details aren't important. What matters to me is, are we going to end up with the Kirk, the uber-captain, that we all know and love? (And watch the moment in the trailer when he apparently first takes the Big Chair, and tell me it isn't so?)

Another common complaint. Spock shows emotions. Spock fights. That's not Spock!

Sorry, kids. You weren't paying attention. That's very much Spock.

First of all, as Leonard Nimoy (in a performance whose depth and subtlty is constantly overlooked, even by fans) and the writers developed him, Spock is not some kind of meat-robot without emotions. He's the son of a violent warrior race that has learned to supress and control the expression of emotions, born of a mother whose species revels in them.

It's where pretty much everyone else who played a Vulcan in the other series (other than Mark Leonard, who played his father, Sarek, and maybe Jolene Blalock by the end of Enterprise) got it wrong. The brilliance of Nimoy's performance was to act out all the emotions while almost always keeping a mask over them.

The full range of emotions were still there in the eyes, in the posture, in the subtlty of expression, if you were watching closely enough. But even if you weren't watching, you were unconsciously aware of them, and it kept him from being a stilted, human-shaped computer. It was as though he was always performing the role of a poker-player in mid-bluff -- a poker player with a "tell."

And on occasion, the mask slipped aside (think specifically of the moment in the TOS episode "Amok Time," Spock believes he has killed Jim Kirk. On seeing him alive, the mask slips totally aside for a moment of unbridled joy, and then is pulled back with embarrassment.

And that's the key. It's like a proper church-lady. Yes, she certainly has breasts and a vagina, but she certainly isn't going to show them in public, or even acknowledge their existance in polite company. And yes, those five kids came from somewhere, but we certainly aren't going to talk about details, and you'd be unspeakably rude even to draw attention towards the subject.

(Looked upon this way, and in retrospect, the occasional taunting and prodding by McCoy, and to a lesser extent, Kirk, seems cruel and culturally insensitive. You can perhaps excuse it a bit by imagining that they see Spock as a human with some Vulcan ancestry, rather than as a Vulcan with some human ancestry, though Spock clearly portrays himself as the latter. And some of it can simply be written off to the pre-PC era in which the show was spawned. But I prefer those moments in which Kirk very appologetically asks Spock to engage in a mind-meld with an alien for the greater good, despite the way it will force him to lower his emotional screens. Okay, to be honest, I'll be happy if the movie brings back the Kirk/Spock/McCoy banter. Those were good scenes. I just hope it's better justified in the context of their relationship this time.)

And the entire run of the series, and even more so in the movies, it's made clear that Spock has always struggled to control his emotions, and that this was even more true of young Spock. And by definition, the Spock in this movie is going to be a younger Spock. Why shouldn't he slip more?

Nothing we've seen of Spock in any of the trailers contradicts this. Sure, there's a lot of emotion in those early trailers, a lot of physicality. About five seconds of it. Don't the most dramatic bits always end up in the trailer? Even if Spock is that way through the whole film (and based on this last trailer, I don't think that's the case), it still could be justified in the context of what we take as "canon."

Which brings me to my last bit of evidence. The other night, which trying out streaming video on the computer I was hooking up to my television, I stumbled into the CBS.com site, and discovered the Star Trek episodes available there. I pulled up the HD, remastered version of the first-season episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" is actually the beginning of the Trek most of us are familiar with it. It's actually the second pilot, the first pilot (Starring Jeffry Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike) having been rejected by NBC. Even more confusingly, it was the third episode to air in the original run. But it's more-or-less "our" original Trek. It's got Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Sulu (McCoy was yet to come, however).

See it here in standard definition or here for HD (remastered version) if you have the bandwidth.

I got sucked into watching the first few minutes of it. There was something very familiar about it, not just because I've seen it a zillion times before in my wasted youth (and occasionally since). It had a rawness, an energy like -- that last Trek movie trailer. It was there in the sense of adventure, the playful banter between the crew in the turbolift, the feeling of always heading into unknown territory.

Sure, it wasn't as fast-paced and kinetic as the movie. Nothing on TV was in those days. The shorthand language of storytelling just didn't exist yet. To a large extent in those days, television series (even Star Trek) were more like stage plays with cameras pointed at them than anything else.

But it feels much the same to me. And that's not a bad thing at all.

And of course, there's Spock. Spock, who claims not to have emotions, but who grins and smirks and growls and frowns through many of his scenes...

What is "canon" for Star Trek? The general rule is that it's anything that appears on-screen in any of the series or movies (with the exception of the 70s animated series, except for one episode, and maybe "Star Trek V," don't ask). This is on-screen, in-series, and Spock is pretty out there.

"Oh," but the die-hards argue, "it's the pilot. The character is still evolving. It doesn't count."

Bull. Purists don't get to pick an choose that way.

I do, of course, because I'm not a purist. I know that allowances have to be made for time, and human error. I get to embrace the emotional version of our Vulcan first-officer (not literally, this isn't your damned slash fiction!).

I get to pretend that the episode "Spock's Brain" never, ever, happened.

You're stuck with it, mr./ms. Purist!

As a kid, I always hated history, because it was always about memorizing dates and battles. It was only later, when I discovered that those things were only a template some stuffed shirts had put over a real world, where people had lived and loved and fought and built the entire world I knew.

That's how I feel about the purist view of Star Trek canon.

It remains to be seen how good or bad the new Trek film will be. I'm hopeful, but I haven't seen it yet. But if it succeeds, it will do so not on its slavish adherance to "canon" but on its ability to tap the spirit of Star Trek and its characters, and to reach not only us old-timers, but an entire new generation of fans.

An update to "Writers and Other Delusional People," and the "Truths of Writing."

2009-03-07T01:18:00.000-08:00

Having learned new truths, and caught myself in a self-delusion, I find it necessary to update this three-year-old post. A lot of people seem to have found it useful the first time around, so go check it out here.

Flying Cars Still a Bad Idea

2009-01-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

There's been much discussion and media buzz lately about the impending test-flight of the Transition "flying car." No pun, but I've been down this road before. Cool though they are in concept, there's just no practical application (other than as a rich-person's plaything) for flying cars, for a number of fundamental reasons.

Go read my old post about it here. Nothing has really changed (except the tanked economy makes the commercial success of this thing even less likely).

Specifically, just take a look at this thing. It makes an ugly little car (it's not exactly a pretty airplane either), and I'll bet it drives about as well as it looks. It has two seats, no trunk, and it's likely that the slightest fender bender will render it unairworthy.

None of this would be a deal-breaker if it cost the same as an ugly little car, but the anticipated cost (and these things have a way of inflating before they're finalized) is close to $200k. If I pay $200K for a car, I expect it to go more than 65mph (165mph is more like it) or at least have a wet bar in the back. (In fact, the Transition only goes 115mph as an airplane, and it doesn't even have a back.)

Though I remembered my post on this subject, I'd forgotten I'd talked about some other perpetual futuristic ideas I thought were also bad ideas (video-phones, touch-screen computers) and those I thought would eventually catch on (ebooks readers).

So far, looks like I'm right about the video phones. Touch-screen computers of various sorts are starting to show some promise thanks to improved interface design, but I'm still doubtful these are ever going to become more than a secondary input device on non-handheld devices.

As for ebooks, sales were a rare growth area over the holidays, and Amazon is once again sold out of its Kindle reader. I think we've finally hit critical mass on this technology, though prices still need to come down, and the devices need to be more flexible.

All in all, my crystal ball is still looking pretty shiny at the moment.

Which makes me feel bad, because the Terrafugia folks who make the Transition are certainly very clever people. I just don't see it ending well though. Sorry, guys.

"Daemon" and the self-publishing question

2009-01-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

Oh, noes!

I couldn't help but notice an article in yesterday's USA Today about the self-published thriller "Daemon." (Ever notice how it's awkward to talk about "USA Today" in anything other than the present tense? I hate that.) You can't tell from the on-line edition, but the story is pitched in the print edition using somewhat more colorful language.

From the front-page sidebar: "Daniel Suarez's self published techno-thriller, a hit, nets a two-book contract with Dutton."

And the sub-title on the article: "Web makes hit of internet tale."

Interestingly, the attention-getting word "hit" doesn't appear anywhere in the on-line version.

You can read the article yourself, but the gist is that Daniel Suarez (writing under the pseudonym Leinad Zerauz, which is Daniel Suarez backwards, in case you didn't figure that out) produced a high-tech thriller which he tried unsuccessfully to market to conventional publishers. He then went the self-publishing route, promoting the book through bloggers and on-line pundits to achieve enough success to interest a major publisher. The book sold on a two-book contract, and movie rights have been optioned a major player.

Interesting.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are going to see exactly three words out of this article: self published and hit.

As you know, in past posts (here and here) I've thrown my share of muck recently at the whole idea of self-publishing, so I was curious as to the facts here.

In a way, I anticipated this in my first post on the subject. Without making you go back to read it, here's what I had to say about it at the time:

The whole vanity publishing thing is like Dracula. You think you've got it staked real good, and it just keeps popping out of the grave. It doesn't help that every now and then you hear (usually a lot, because it makes a good story) about the exceptions to the rule, the self-published books that went on to great success, that were picked up by major publishers, and in a few cases, even turned into New York Times best-sellers.

I shake my head every time I hear one of these, because they are rare exceptions, because most of them would have sold through conventional means if the author had only been a little smarter about it, and because I know it's the nature of would-be writers to treat any crumb of false-hope like the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Rio.

Just because somebody won 40 million in the Powerball doesn't mean you should invest your life savings in lottery tickets.

It still leaves questions though. If Daemon is an exception, what kind of exception is it? It is a fluke, or the vanguard of some new trend? Does it change in any way the basic issues of self-publishing? What can we learn from it?

Like I said, to figure that out, I needed facts, and USA Today was notably light on those. At least the kind of background information that I'd need to make any judgments about about how Daemon came to be. Fortunately, it did mention a Wired article that helped bring the book into prominence, and that was easy to find on-line. Not surprisingly, the Wired piece (read it here) has some more meat on its factual bones, enough to develop some more informed opinions about the situation.

First question: What efforts did Suarez make to place his book initially with a conventional publisher?

According to the Wired piece, his effort weren't minimal, but they were probably less than exhaustive. He submitted to "dozens" of agents. That's a little vague, but I'd say it's probably not close to or over a hundred, or they would have said "nearly a hundred," or "over a hundred" or "hundreds." My gut feeling is we're talking a couple of dozen here, though that's only a guess.

In any case, a quick search for "general fiction" agents on Publisher's Marketplace turned up 233 pages (some of which might be agencies with multiple agents). Not all of those are going to handle thrillers, but I think it's reasonably safe to say that Suarez ran out of patience before he ran out of agents.

Of the number he did submit to, he reports that "three read it." Unless he received several-dozens-minus-three letters telling him that they didn't read it, I suspect what this means is, he got three responses. Lack of response doesn't necessarily mean lack of consideration. Sad but true, in the publishing world, no response is simply another way of saying "no." Of the three that did respond, he reports that one said it was "too long" (I don't see any mention of how long the book actually is) and the other two that it was "too complex."

The article doesn't tell us if those responses were of the "get lost" variety or if maybe they were suggesting a rewrite to correct what the agents (correctly or not) perceived to be legitimate marketing problems, of if they were saying "close, what else have you got?"

Frankly, it's often difficult, even for those of us who have been in the business a while, to read past the "does not meet our needs" part of a rejection letter for the editor or agent's actual intent, so it's highly possible that Suarez wouldn't have known the difference anyway.

Let's look at the options that Suarez apparently didn't take in marketing Daemon.

He apparently didn't keep submitting till he ran out of agents.

He didn't rewrite the book to respond to the agent's marketing concerns.

Okay, I'm not saying he should have rewritten the book at this point, just that it was an option.

My gut sense is that this was a good call. Start rewriting when you're out of marketing options. I'm also guessing that the "too complex" comments were way off base. The "too long" comment could have been fundamentally right though, even if the book has now sold at the longer length. This is guesswork, of course. I don't know how long it is. But since thrillers are often big books anyway, I'm guessing that this is really, really long. Overly long books are a harder sell. Maybe this book needs to be this long, but I'll just bet it could be tightened (and one wonders if that will happen by the time the print edition comes out).

Okay, and the third thing he apparently didn't do: He didn't submit the book directly to publishers. It's a totally fallacy that you can't get a book read or sold without an agent. Yes, it can be more difficult to get in the door, especially for a new author, but it can be done. Near as I can tell, Suarez didn't try.

Bottom line, it's by no means certain that the book wouldn't have sold without going the self-publishing route. Maybe self-publishing was a valid route to publication for this particular book, but it's also possible that it was simply a pointless detour on the way to the final destination.

There's something else we can learn here though. The book did sell. It sold for major money. It sold without an agent (though not through the most direct method possible). It apparently sold without being shortened (at least in submitted form) or dumbed down. Though not yet published, it's already gotten good reviews from Booklist and a starred review in Publisher's Weekly.

From this we can take three important lessons:
1. Agents can keep you from selling books as easily as they can help you sell them.
2. Agents don't know everything.
3. Sometimes, agents don't know anything.

Next question...

Was Daemon a "hit" as a self-published book?

By the standards of self-publishing, it was pretty darned successful. Maybe even hugely so. What information I have comes from the Wired article, which was published in their August issue of last year, so they can't be assumed to be current. But at some point the book was selling 50 copies a month, and as of March of last year, the book had reportedly sold 1,200 copies.

Underwhelmed? Well, breaking four-digits in total sales is huge for self-published book. I'm fairly certain that few break three-digits.

It's pretty likely that Suarez made a profit off his self-publishing venture, but it's hard to know how much. I don't know how much he spent, for instance, on set-up, editorial and design costs. I don't know how much (if anything) he's spent on other promotional efforts. I also don't know what the cover price on his POD edition (sold through Lightning Source) was, or what his deal with Lightning Source was.

Let's just take a wild (and perhaps generous) guess and say he made $10 per copy. That translates into $12,000. This isn't chicken-feed, but it's pretty puny by publishing standards. That's a entry-to-low-midlist advance.

In reporting deals, Publisher's Marketplace calls this a "Nice deal." That means it's in the $1-49,000 dollar range, their polite way of saying its at the bottom of the publishing food change. And I'll confess, the biggest deal I've ever gotten is at the ragged high-end of "Nice." I'd be happy to get another such "nice" deal today.

(The Dutton deal seems to have turned the original book into an instant collector's item, with used copies on Amazon selling at $80. Ironically, if Suarez had gone the traditional vanity-press route, he might be liquidating the pallet of books in his garage for some serious bonus-scratch right now.)

Okay, so what did Suarez make going with a traditional publisher? Well, first of all, lets observe first that he did go with a traditional publisher. Apparently without hesitation. If self-publishing is so swell, ask yourself, why was he so quick to cast it aside?

Neither USA Today or Wired was any help here, so I turned to Publisher's Marketplace and their deal-tracker feature for info. The deal was announced in May, two months after the cover date of the Wired article. An agent did handle the deal (interestingly, from their PM listing, they mainly handle business and technical non-fiction, and Daemon is their only listed fiction deal of any kind).

So what did he get? Well, PM doesn't give specific numbers, but it wasn't a "Nice" deal. It wasn't "Very Nice," their next category, meaning deals from $50,000-99,000 It wasn't "Good." It wasn't "Good." It wasn't "Significant." No, it went right to their highest category, "Major Deal." That means $500,000 and up. That's the advance (though for a two book deal, not one). If the book takes off, there could be significant royalties, foreign sales, subsidiary rights, and he's already sold a movie option for unknown money.

And mind you, that "Major Deal" is just what they're passing along to the author. The publisher has an expectation of grossing at least 6-10 times that. That's a lot of books. That's a hell of a lot more than 1,200 books.

So, it's obvious why Suarez went with a regular publisher. For a book like his, self-publishing sucks.

Real publishers know that too. They look at a self-publishing "hit" and figure that if a self-publisher, even a motivated self-publisher like Suarez, can sell 1,200 copies, they can sell ten times that amount without breaking a sweat. If the book is good and they put a little effort in, they can probably sell a hundred times as many. Maybe a thousand.

Most self-published books are over-valued by the people publishing them. Most are unmarketable, flawed, or lacking in some why that they're better off not being published and will never find a market.

But when a success like this comes along, it usually means the self-publisher has undervalued their work. Whatever sales and returns they're getting from their self-publishing efforts, they could be doing much better with a regular publisher.

Conclusions:

Now, this post shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Suarez or his choices. He's written what is reportedly a good book, and he's found a path to success. Great success. And as I said up front, I don't have all the facts on his history or circumstances. I'm reading a lot from a little data.

But was self-publishing an absolutely necessary part of that success? Perhaps, but I remain unconvinced. Even if it was for this book, there are special circumstances.

The bloggers that Suarez used to create early buzz on the books were the very ones he'd mined to research the novel, so of course they were likely to respond positively. And it should hardly be a surprise that a book about the internet is especially suited to being promoted on the internet.

None of this applies to your self-published cozy mystery or literary novel about a girl growing up in Poland in 1939. It probably doesn't apply to your thriller, unless it's also about computers and the net.

The book also found an important advocate, Rick Klau, an executive at Feedburner (now part of Google). I don't see how that could be anticipated or replicated.

Finally, there's nothing about the self-publishing that leads inevitably to the Wired, article, which I suspect had more to do with getting the Dutton deal than any other single factor (other than the quality of the book itself).

Suarez found a path to success. It's impossible to say it was the best path, and it almost certainly wasn't the only path. But you can't argue with success.

That still doesn't mean that this path can be emulated, or that you should even try.

"Change is Coming" - or - "Are Bookstores Obsolete?"

2008-12-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of panic in the air when it comes to publishing recently, what with announced purchasing freezes (as opposed to unannounced ones, that happen all the time), layoffs, bad news from book retail, and so on.

On one hand, I think it's overblown. Publishing isn't going to go away. Books will still get bought. Books will still get published. It's time for us writers to hunker down, tighten our belts, and keep pushing ahead. It's the people that panic and give up that are going to wash out. I believe that most of the rest of us will get through.

Yes, a lot of dead-wood will be trimmed, poorly performing lines, editors, and authors will find themselves in a difficult situation. But that sort of thing can actually be good for the industry.

On the other hand though, there's a strong counter-sentiment out there that publishing is recession-proof, and nothing will change because of the economy. I'm not so sure about that, and I have a gut feeling that this attitude can be as dangerous in these hard times as panic.

This isn't like the last few economic slumps where publishing has done quite well. It's a different economic, technological, and social environment this time, and I have a feeling that publishing-as-we-know-it will come through the recession radically transformed.

Why so?

Well, first of all, the whole business of book retailing in the United States (and elsewhere, but I know less about that) is in chaos. For years we've been hearing about how smaller independent bookstores are in trouble, pushed out by the chains. But now Borders is on the edge of bankruptcy, and nobody is partying over at Barnes and Noble, so it appears that business model is in trouble too.

Other players like Wal-Mart, Amazon, and eBooks are of increasing importance, but mass-market retailers don't carry the depth of selection needed to support a healthy book industry, and there are plenty of pitfalls before on-line sellers and/or eBooks can become the predominate means of book distribution.

Meanwhile, publishing will suffer as we go through the transition to whatever is coming next. Expect this situation to get better before it gets worse.

The next big problem is that books (and magazines, and newspapers) are an overpriced niche product in an increasingly crowded entertainment environment. In previous economic downturns, entertainment options were limited. Movies were expensive, there was no internet, video games, if they existed at all, were crude and expensive, and television offered limited options.

Now the internet is ubiquitous, video games are sophisticated and offer lots of value, cable and satellite tv offer hundreds of channels, and movies are cheap on DVD, and stream in via the internet and pay-per-view.

Another big difference is that the internet and cable are now considered essentials of life. Facing hard economic choices, people are going to let their cable or internet service slip before they can't pay the rent or electric bill, but not much before. And by the time you've made that hard choice, you aren't likely to head over to Borders for a $30 hard-cover novel, or even a $10 paperback.

Which brings me to pricing. Books are just way, way overpriced for the value they offer. Gone are the days when trashy paperbacks and pulp magazines offered cheap entertainment in an uncrowded competitive environment. Books are expensive to make, expensive to ship, and the return system doesn't make books any cheaper.

Books are also expensive to sell. You can offer a pretty extensive selection of DVDs in maybe thirty feet of wall space, assuming most are displayed spine-out. A video/computer game section might even be smaller, even if it includes some hardware and supports multiple platforms.

In book terms, that's tiny. Maybe it's one genre in a super-store, or a read-and-dash airport newsstand, or a tiny specialty bookstore that doesn't even try to cover all the bases.

I've been saying for years that the disadvantages of print books were overwhelming the advantages, but print has coasted along well past it prime on momentum alone. Now we're in crisis mode, and it isn't clear what happens next.

So, what does happen next? Well, I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have some opinions. Here are the players, and some predictions on what might happen to them.

Independent bookstores: I think the crisis came for the indies a long time, ago, and that ultimately may be good for them. A lot of the weaker stores are already gone, and a lot more won't survive this winter.

But I predict a lot will survive, and the smart ones will do well. Whatever happens to print books at mass market retail, there are still plenty of people who love them and will seek them out. If chain-stores start closing, and that seems likely, book lovers aren't going to find what they need at Wal-mart, and many still love the browsing experience that Amazon doesn't offer. Independent bookstores can position themselves to take up that slack, and it may give them the niche to survive.

Another trend that seems to be happening with independent bookstores is to move into used and antiquarian books, either shelved along-side new books, or exclusively. I can see how, in many respects, it's a great time to be a used book dealer. There's still a world of information and fiction out there that doesn't exist in electronic form, and possibly never will. And a lot of baby boomers are downsizing, retiring, or dying, putting their libraries on the market. There's a flood of good used books out there. It's finding the particular thing you need or want that's hard.

Used booksellers fill that void by finding and concentrating the good stuff, and can back up their retail sales with online sales and auctions. They benefit in that the profit margins on a well-run used book operation can be much higher than the traditionally slim-margin new book business.

That's at best a mixed blessing for publishers and us authors. People reading old books aren't buying new ones, and in a way, used bookstores (and libraries) put us in competition with ourselves. But I suppose anything that keeps people reading can't be entirely bad, and if some stores continue to offer new books, that's good too, especially if offering the used stuff allows them to keep their doors open.

Chain bookstores: These stores aren't going to go away, but expect downsizing and transitions in how they operate. It's a hard time for retail in general, and not just because of the economy. The internet, gas prices, traffic, busy schedules, all are shaking up the ways people shop in general, not just for books.

Already, book superstores are struggling to find a mix of merchandise (of which books and magazines are only a part) that will keep them afloat. The Borders where I shop has DVDs, music, books, magazines, comics, games, toys, novelty items, stationary, gifts, collectibles, calendars, coffee drinks, pastries, and lots more. That sort of diversification has worked for the chains for years, but now it's breaking down, first more music sales, and now movies, are moving to on-line distribution. Those two categories had been major profit centers, propping up stores that less saw themselves as book retailers, and more as entertainment retailers.

Overall, I don't see the outlook here as good, unless the chains can find a new profit center in addition to books. I don't expect chain stores to go away, but I do expect them to become fewer and possibly smaller. It's true, these folks need to learn how to sell books again, but that alone isn't going to keep them afloat.

eBooks: Though it still represents a small portion of book sales, it's one category where publishers are seeing growth in the downturn, and that's getting their attention.

Awareness at publishers is also way up, as most editors in major houses are making extensive use of electronic readers to read submissions, and by most reports, they love it. After years of foot-dragging, publishing finally seems willing to embrace electronic books.

The problem is, nobody knows what form eBook distribution is going to take, what reader platform will predominate, or how a move to eBooks is going to change the form of books themselves. There's huge opportunity here, but also huge risk.

But I think a move to electronic distribution is inevitable, and good. If nothing else, it offers the opportunity to lower book prices to the point where they can be more competitive with other information and entertainment media.

Yes, I still hear lots about how people love books, how nothing looks or smells or feels like a book, and about how books are just better and more convenient than any electronic reader.

But I still think about 90% of that is crap. Yes, many of us love books, have a great deal of nostalgia for books, are even a bit fetishistic about the sensory aspects of books. That offers a niche that will exist for some time, maybe forever. It changes nothing.

Books are too heavy, too bulky, too expensive, too fragile, too inconvenient and poorly designed in a hundred different ways that book-lovers have trained themselves to ignore. They just can't be the predominate means of distribution any more, especially for a (hopefully) new generation of readers.

(By the way, speaking of the next generation, one writer friend of mine is fond of pointing out that she sees young-people routinely reading books on-line, and only then buying physical copies of the books they love. She takes that as proof that young readers still love books in the way us oldsters did.

I'm not so sure. In those cases, I have to wonder if the physical book is being read, or if it's being displayed as a tangible artifact of what they read and like. If so, the book isn't a book, it's a token for a book, and such a token could potentially take many forms. It could be replaced by a collectible plaque, or a button you could attach to a jacket or backpack, or a trading card, or a coin, or an action figure, or a wearable zipper pull, or a picture on a social networking site, or a book-list on a cell-phone that can be wirelessly traded with friends, or who-knows-what.

I have the feeling there are new exciting marketing opportunities there, but that's just one more unknown in the list of many that surround eBook publishing.)

Right now the "big three" in terms of hardware platforms are the Amazon Kindle, the Sony reader, and (surprise, from out of nowhere) the iPhone. The Kindle has an early lead, but I'm keeping a wary eye on the iPhone. The iPhone is pretty poorly suited to being a book-reader, but it has a huge advantage in that it's already an indispensable accessory for millions of people around the world. I'm skeptical that an eBook reader that's only an eBook reader is going to last, in the same way that you almost never see a phone that's just a phone any more.

Actually a problem with both the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, the Kindle, is that they could represent future monopolies in book retailing, the way Apple has an anti-competitive strangle on the music business now.

I'd much prefer that things shake out to a more open model, where readers (and publishers) can choose from a variety of retail sources and hardware suppliers, and where any reader, regardless of what kind of reader they own, will have access to any book from any publisher.

It isn't clear things are going to shake out that way. In fact, at best I'd give it even odds at this point. Apple and Amazon both would be happy with a monopoly, or at least, a dominating closed platform.

It also isn't clear what eBooks mean for the kinds and lengths of books sold. A lot of what a book is has always been defined by the physical format of the book and the mechanics of marketing it. If a book is too long, it's too big, heavy, and expensive to carry around or sell. If it's too short, it isn't cost effective to sell or market. If it's a series or trilogy, the chunks are going to come out in a certain size, at a certain interval.

It opens all sorts of new possibilities, and with them, uncertainties. I'm virtually certain, though, that we'll see new marketing models emerge.

For instance, MP3s all but killed the traditional music album, as people instead bought individual songs. Likewise, eBooks could kill anthologies and the few surviving fiction magazines, possibly replacing them with trusted fiction portals, where people kind find and purchase individual stories from trusted sources.

Some fiction formats, such as the novella, have probably been unnaturally restrained by print formats. Novellas are too short to be marketed effectively as books, but so big that it was difficult for magazines to publish them. Yet this is a natural length for storytelling that has the potential to prosper in several genres, especially science fiction, fantasy, romance, and possibly mystery as well.

ePublishing offers new opportunities for serialized and subscription-based fiction. Could we see a return to something like the pulps, where people subscribe to monthly novellas featuring series characters? Could we see something like the print-versions of soap-operas or telanovelas, where fiction is serialized in a longer, possibly open-ended form? Will eBooks ability to cheaply reproduce art or photos result in new kinds of heavily illustrated books and fiction?

All exciting possibilities. All annoying uncertainties.

eBooks are coming, that's more certain than ever. But it's far less clear what form that market will take, or what it will mean for writers.

Traditional Book Publishers: Again, much chaos ahead, but I don't see traditional publishers as going away. Finding good manuscripts and turning them into published works is still a complex and labor-intensive business. That won't change because of changes in retail or the advent of eBooks.

Yes, an eBook economy may offer new niches for small publishers, start-ups, players like Amazon or Apple who might try to publish the books carried on their platforms, and even self-publication by authors.

I predict we'll see some surprising new players emerge from all this. But I don't think the experience, resources, or brand value of the major publishers can be underestimated. They may look much different when this is all over, but they'll still be here.

To my mind, the important thing for conventional publishers is not to fight change, to remain flexible, and not to get greedy. A lot of experimentation is going to be necessary to find what works and doesn't work in this new publishing environment. They need to be ready, and to embrace this process.

They also need not to get greedy about the profit potential of eBooks. Prices for books must fall in the mass market to remain competitive, and they need to pass a portion of any additional profits along to authors and packagers. Failure to do this last thing will provide incentive to bypass them, either through new publishers, through small press, through self-publishing, or perhaps through new models like author-coops, that haven't even been tried yet.

And despite the inevitable shift, print books aren't going away soon, at least, if publishers play their cards right. One thing I think publishers need to think very seriously about, is to stop thinking about book, eBooks, and maybe even audio books, as separate products.

Compare this to DVD publishers, who have addressed sliding sales by, in many cases, including an electronic copy of the film along with the regular DVD. The purchaser can watch the DVD (and its extras) on a conventional player, a portable player, or even a computer. But they can also load their digital copy onto a variety of portable devices for easy viewing on the go. It's too early to know how effective this model is, but at least they're trying something different. And it's still a way of charging $20-30 for a new-release DVD instead of taking a cut of a $2-5 download.

Likewise, I think it would be a very good idea for book publishers to include a digital copy with, at least, new hardcovers, and possibly trades or even paperbacks. If people want only the digital copy, sell them that, and for less, but offer then a package deal at a price comparable to the printed book alone.

This addresses the younger "token collectors" my writer-friend has pointed out, and plays to the nostalgia value of printed books. A purchaser can read the print book in the tub or sitting in front of their home fireplace, and still have the convenience of reading the electronic copy if they manage to steal a few moments in on a commuter train, in an airport, or in a waiting room. It would give them a greater incentive to buy a hard-cover rather than waiting for a cheaper trade, paperback, or fully-electronic edition. (Another option would be to offer the electronic edition only with the hardcover edition, splitting it out as a separate item only after the paperback is released. Make it worth people's while to buy the hardcover.)

Just as importantly, it keeps traditional booksellers in the loop for some eBook sales, and allows for the kind of hand-selling that indie stores do well, and that isn't available to eBooks. Like I said, the trick is not to get greedy and try and sell the package for as much as the print and eBook editions would cost. If it costs anything extra at all, there should be a very substantial discount.

Audio-books, in file rather than CD or DVD format, can also be part of a "value-added, high convenience, high-flexibility" package that may be more attractive to readers than stand alone books.

Publishers may also want to consider adding other extras in the package, in the way extra features are offered on DVDs. This might include bonus short-fiction, photos, author interviews (audio or video), author readings from the text, and even documentaries for high-profile books.

No mix of publishing formats or materials should be ignored until the publishers find a new model that works and pushes books back into a sales and profit growth curve, for themselves, and their authors.

On-line sellers: This another growth area, at least for 500-pound gorilla Amazon, which is well positioned no matter how the shake-out of print vs. electronic editions goes. On-line sales are going to increasingly cut into the sales through traditional bookstores, large and small.

But there are still niches here. Amazon still hasn't replicated the browsing and social experience of visiting a bookstore, and given that their focus is increasingly on other areas of retailing, that doesn't seem to be a priority for them.

In the near term, that's a bonus for traditional bookstores, but it also might create opportunities for an innovative on-line competitor to Amazon. In particular, I think there's a huge opportunity for the first company to seamlessly combine the reading, book-purchasing experience with social networking sites and with Twitter-like phone services. Young people don't see reading as the solitary experience many of us baby-boomers grew up with. (To some extent, they don't see any aspect of their lives as solitary experiences.) There's a huge market there for the first company that figures out how to tap it.

What this means for authors: There are some hard and uncertain times ahead.

Ahead? Hell, they're here.

But it isn't all bad news, especially for those authors who are flexible and open minded enough to try new things.

Continue to write novels and books and market them as you always have. But keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground for new trends. Don't be afraid to take some risks and try new things. Yes, most of them will fail, but you could also be catching the wave of the Next Big Trend.

I'd also recommend that, if you haven't written short fiction, or haven't used those muscles in a while, it's time to polish your skills. I think eBooks will create new opportunities for shorter-form and serialized fiction, and the authors who are able to move into those areas stand to benefit.

Also be prepared for changes in how you have to market your fiction. Book tours and press appearances are being replaced by web sites, chats, forums, social-networking sites, podcasts and YouTube videos. Publishers increasingly expect these things of their authors, and I don't see that trend going away. Quite the contrary.

But this can be good for your sales, and offers opportunities for the author to cross-market their works, and make money from selling other merchandise. While the profit margins aren't great, the tools are out there to do these things without creating a huge distraction from writing, which should always be the author's primary focus. In this environment, any potential revenue stream is nothing to sneeze at.

Things are changing, and there's much uncertainty ahead. But (Star Trek geek alert) there's an old Ferengi saying that goes something like this, "even in hard times, somebody is making a profit."

I couldn't agree more.

Are you ready?

More on self-publishing

2008-12-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

As fate would have it, days after the recent posts by Chris and I on the problems with vanity publishing, I spotted this post on self-publishing by CNET writer David Carnoy. It's especially interesting in that he's self-published his own novel, a thriller.

Though I disagree with his article on several points, it's well written, and far more balanced that most pro-self-publishing articles you're read. Carnoy seems to have gone into self-publishing with his eyes open, and without the unreasonable expectations that seem to trap most self/vanity publishers. It also deals more with new models of self-publishing such as print-on-demand (known as POD in the industry), something that Chris and I really didn't touch on. So it's certainly worth a look if you're interested in the subject, and then come back here some comments. I'll wait.

Okay, let's continue.

As I said, Chris and I didn't break out print-on-demand or e-publishing schemes in our discussions, in part because we were responding to an article about what appears to be a traditional vanity press, and also because we're skeptical of all self-publishing schemes on principle, POD, vanity, or whatever.

But if you still feel compelled to go this route, there are important differences, and such forms of publishing do offer some advantages. At the very least, they don't lock you into a print-run of physical books that you need to store and (hopefully) ship or distribute. They reduce some of the up-front costs (though as Carnoy discovered, turning a manuscript into a professional quality book isn't quick, easy, or cheap). Carnoy's article has some useful information on these differences.

What we also left out of our posts is that there's a world of difference between a non-fiction book and a novel. In my opinion, the chances of a self-published non-fiction book becoming a commercial success are slim, but the chances of a self-published novel are nearly nil. With the right subject matter, the right title, the right hook, it's much easier to hook a buyer than with a novel from an unknown. Not only is it difficult to create a fiction premise that sells itself, reducing that premise to a cover blurb or a marketing slogan is an art-form in itself, one completely beyond the reach of most self-publishers (and to be honest, most of the people they might hire to do the job for them).

But let's go over the article point-by-point. Carnoy has enumerated his major points in a list of "25 things you should know," so we'll follow his template. We'll talk about some of the areas where I agree or disagree with the article's conclusions, and add some speculations where I think Carnoy has gone wrong (and right) on his path to self-publishing.

1. Self-publishing is easy.

No, as Carnoy himself concludes elsewhere in the article, self-printing is easy. Self-publishing a professional quality book is hard.

2. Quality has improved.

Quite correct. Print-on-demand systems have come a long way, and now produce books nearly on-par with traditional (vanity and otherwise) publishing system. But as Carnoy discovered, having something that looks like a professional book doesn't mean it is a professional book, or that it will be treated like one by reviewers, publishers, and booksellers. The nice results just make it easier for self-publishers to fall into that trap, and set themselves up for, at best disappointment, and possibly complete failure.

3. Some of the more successful self-published books are about self-publishing.

An astute observation, and a telling one. This was about the point where I decided Carnoy's article would actually be worth reading.

What this reminds me of is the old scam of ads reading, "Find out how to make BIG MONEY, no work, from your own home! Send $5 to XXXXX" And if you respond, you get a letter telling you, "First, place an ad in the newspaper reading: 'Find out how to make BIG MONEY...'"

It doesn't mean other types of self-published books can't sell. It just means that selling books is hard, and they don't sell themselves.

4. Good self-published books are few and far between.

Another astute observation, and very true. Most self-published and vanity press books are amateurish dreck. And what that means is that, no matter how good, how professionally prepared your book is, it will be judged by the lowest standards of that dreck.

It isn't that major publishers don't publish plenty of bad books too. But at least they're bad books prepared to certain professional standards, backed up with at least some minimal bit of marketing and the cachet of a brand-name on the spine.

I know plenty of booksellers (good company for writers to keep, don't you know) and they all tell stories about self-publishers who wander into their stores and introduce themselves. "Hi, I'm an author with a new book out."

Most booksellers are glad to meet authors, so this usually generates a positive reception. But at some point, often no more than a sentence or two into the conversation, though sometimes longer, the bookseller learns the truth. And as a rule, the reception cools, to a degree depending on the kindness and patience of the bookseller. At best, the bookseller will usually stop listening, and withdraw to some deep, happy recess of their mind, the place were torture victims go to survive.

Yes, your book may be wonderful, but don't count on convincing a conventional bookseller of that unless they're an immediate family member.

6. Creating a "professional" book is really hard.

Amen to this. As I said, there's a big difference between "printing" and "publishing," Carnoy states that he's spent around $5000 on his book so far, and I don't find that sum shocking, if he pulled in professional editing, graphic design and art skills.

Keep that in mind when you're marketing your book to publishers. What they're putting on the line in buying your book is always far more than whatever they're offering for an advance.

7. Have a clear goal for your book.

What Carnoy talks about here is, essentially, minimizing the damage. If the goal is simply to hold a book with your name on it in your hands, rather than selling a truck-load to others, you may not need to blow your life savings.

I'd add to what he said that, if you'd really like to leave something to family posterity, a hand-written ledger or hand-crafted scrapbook is more likely to be appreciated than a slickly printed paperback. Your great grand kids are only a little more likely to be impressed by that self-published book than the fore mentioned booksellers.

8. Even if it's great, there's a good chance your book won't sell.

I've already beat this horse pretty thoroughly. Books don't sell themselves, and selling books is hard, even if they're good.

(By the way, one point about self-marketing that Carnoy ironically doesn't make, is that your best chance for marketing your self-published book may be to exploit an established audience or reputation already at your disposal and use that to make people aware of your book. Which is exactly what his article does.

This isn't a criticism. Kudos to him.)

9. Niche books do best.

This applies mostly to non-fiction, but it's absolutely true. If you're an expert in some specialized area with a small but enthusiastic interest group, and you can communicate well, there might be an opening for you. A self-published book can be termed successful with a much smaller print run, sold over a much longer period of time, than would be possible for a commercial publisher.

But I suspect this isn't as true as it once was, ironically, because of technology. Much of the information once only communicated by word-of-mouth or through niche books, magazines, and newsletters is now available on the internet.

In fact, if you have a good niche in mind, you may well be smarter to start a web-site or on-line forum than trying to publish a book. The up-front costs are often smaller, the profits (from advertising or sales of associated merchandise) while small may start to trickle sooner, and you can evolve and grow it over time.

Many people have even used successful niche web-sites to (surprise!) leverage the launch of self-published books.

10. Buy your own ISBN--and create your own publishing house.

This is another annoying up-front cost, but if you have any hope of all of getting into bookstores or getting reviewed, this is probably a necessity. The bad news: you probably still won't get into major bookstores or get reviewed anywhere that counts.

11. Create a unique title.

Carnoy's point here is that you need something easy to search on Amazon or on search engines, and that's a valid point.

But there's a lot more to titles than searchability. A title is a sales tool. It's often the potential buyer's first contact with your book, and in most cases, their last and only contact. Unless you can interest them with the title, they probably won't read your cover copy, or blurbs, or listen to the radio interview you've been struggling for months to line up, or engage with you or the book in any other meaningful way.

Good titles are hard. You have to tell, in as few words as possible, what the book is, who should be interested in it, and why they should care. On a professionally published book, the title usually has a lot of marketing backing it up, as well as open doors to reviewers and booksellers. It's important, but the whole book isn't hanging on the title. (Carnoy's title for his thriller, by the way, is "Knife Music," which is a pretty darned good title for a novel from a major publisher. For a self published novel though, it's a mixed bag. For starters, while it's memorable and evocative, it's also ambiguous. It could be a thriller, yes, or a horror novel, or a It could also be a non-fiction true-crime book, or one about music, or knives, or martial arts, or even a cookbook. One moment, one millisecond of confusion or indecision is all it takes for a potential reader to pass the book by.)

12. Turn-key solutions cost a lot of money.

What Carnoy is talking about here is more traditional vanity-publishers, while he's advocating a more do-it-yourself, be-your-own-general-contractor approach. As far as it goes, I agree with him. My trust of companies who make most of their money printing unsalable books is very, very, low. If they really thought these books could be successful, why aren't they offering better deals for a cut of the profits? Why aren't they just buying the rights up-front and being a real publisher? In my opinion, it's because this is easier. It's because they make money, even if everything is done poorly, and because they know that even if everything was done right, there would still be no profits to split.

On the other hand, doing it yourself, even when contracting out the hard parts, requires you to be a jack-of-all-trades, and to make a bunch of critical decisions, the failure of even one of which could doom your book. Greater potential to get things right, but greater potential to screw it up royally too.

13. Self-publishers don't care if your book is successful.

Here is this section, in total: "They say they care, but they really don't care. You have to make them care." By "they" I assume he means the people offering self-publishing services, and if so, he's correct. But he's wrong about the "make them care" part. Don't worry if they care. Nobody cares about your self-published book but you. Conventional publishers care, at least a little, because they have more of a financial stake in the book than you do.

But in the self-publishing world, everyone else is just somebody you've hired to do a job. You have to make sure they do it, do it well, and give good value for your money. Asking them to care is like asking a prostitute to love you. It only proves that you don't understand the nature of the transaction.

15. If you're serious about your book, hire a book doctor and get it copy-edited.

Most of what follows this point is correct, but I'm put off by the use of the term "book doctor." Many, many people who advertise themselves as book doctors are, themselves failed writers, or (maybe worse) academics who wouldn't recognize a commercial book if they saw it, and would probably hold it in contempt if they did. Convoy talks about hiring someone who has editing experience with real publishers, and that's, ideally, what you need.

Yes, some people like that offer their services as "book doctors," but the term, to my mind, borders on an insult. What you need a freelance editor with credentials. A good one. That may not be easy to do, and it may not be cheap.

And keep in mind that even the best editor can't polish a turd. If your book sucks, an editor won't fix it. If it's good but flawed in some fundamental way, an editor may not be able to fix that either. They may be able to point you in the direction of fixing it yourself. They may be able to tell you how to avoid the pitfall in your next book. (You are writing a next book, right?) But at some point, if the book can be fixed at all, it isn't editing, it's collaboration.

16. Negotiate everything.

Personally, I rarely have the stomach or the nerve to do this, but in most all things in life, these are words to live by.

17. Ask a lot of questions and don't be afraid to complain.

Again, this is just generally good advice.

18. Self-publishing is a contact sport.

We're back to the point that books don't sell themselves. I don't know what this "buy X get Y" program he's talking about is, but a self-publisher has to be prepared to do a lot more to market his book than one thing. And they should resign themselves that any "turnkey solution" is probably wasted money. In fact, they should be prepared to do most of the heavy lifting (and spending) of a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

To put this in perspective, according to an essay I just read in the New York Times, more than 250,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Think about it. If you'd never heard of you or your self-published book, how likely is it that any grass-roots effort is going to bring that book or its author to your attention? You're just one flake in a snowstorm, shouting into the wind, "pick me! Pick me!"

19. Getting your book in bookstores sounds good, but that shouldn't be a real concern.

I don't find much to disagree with here. It's possible you can seduce some local bookstore to become an enthusiastic hand-seller of your book. In that case, write off the low royalty return to publicity. But don't count on it. And pay special attention to the "no returns" policies he mentions. Bookstores have to take a risk, money out of their pockets, in stocking your book that they don't in stocking the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts. Why on Earth would they chose you?

20. Self-published books don't get reviewed.

True, but maybe not as important as he thinks. Below a certain level, reviews just don't have the commercial value they once had. Getting a positive review in some publications may get you noticed by libraries or independent bookstores, but they're only one part, maybe a vanishingly-small part, of getting your book noticed by the public.

21. Design your book cover to look good small.

This goes with number eleven about titles. It applies to on-line sales, and is good as far as it goes. But there's obviously a lot more to covers than that.

One of the arguments used by the vanity publisher, in the article that set Chris and I off last week, was that the author had no control over their cover. My response to that is, What makes you think you know the first thing about book covers? You may, may be able to recognize a really terrible one. (I'm reminded of the featureless, black "Smell the Glove" album cover from the classic movie "This is Spinal Tap.") But designing a book cover that sells is an art-form that people spend decades learning and perfecting.

You don't know squat, and probably neither does the guy at the art student, or the local graphic art or advertising firm you hire to design yours.

22. If you're selling online, make the most out of your Amazon page.

More reasonable advice on on-line selling and marketing. Given that Carnoy writes about tech stuff for CNET, it isn't surprising this is where he gets things most right. (Even authors published through conventional publishers might pick up some ideas here.) And he's right that Amazon (and other on-line sellers, but mostly Amazon) is increasingly important to book sales. And on-line sellers are one place where a self-published book has a chance to compete on even a vaguely level playing field.

23. Pricing is a serious challenge.

Again, this seems solid. There also some advice on leveraging the Amazon affiliate program to increase author profits that could work for conventionally published authors as well. It might not amount to much, but every little bit helps.

24. Electronic books have potential, but they're still in their infancy.

Again, solid. Even conventional publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off ebooks.

On the other hand, for future reference, keep in mind that ebooks are about the only growth area in conventional publishing at the moment, and they will become important. How this figures into self-publishing isn't clear though. The lack of the physical package, or the simple ability to discover a book while browsing in a store, it may make the "branding" of a major publisher more important, not less.

My bet is still on the people who have been making money at publishing all along.

25. Self-publishing is a fluid business.

True, as far as the technology goes. But there's one constant that runs through the whole history of self-publishing and vanity presses. The vast majority of such books are expensive failures that never find an audience.

Given that simple fact, you've got to ask yourself if the time, effort, and money wouldn't be better spent improving your book and working harder to get it published through conventional means, or more likely, writing more, better books that will sell.

Here's another important, secret fact about publishing. Of first books by successful authors that sell (and many do), many didn't sell first.

Let me explain that a little more. A first book, like any first effort anything, is likely to have flaws. Even if it's good, plenty of good books don't sell for any number of reasons. Maybe the topic is overdone, or hard for the marketing people to sell, or maybe it just isn't commercial enough.

Just for an example, take mega-best-selling author Ken Follett. His first novel was his most successful, "The Pillars of the Earth."

But it wasn't his first published book. Publishers balked at the huge novel, a sprawling, generational, historical about a seemingly unsexy subject (the construction of cathedrals) where the only central character is the building itself.

Did that mean the book was bad? To the contrary. But it wasn't safe, conventional, or based on something else with demonstrated success.

So Ken Follett self-published it and sold a billion copies.

Not.

He put it aside and used his considerable skills to write more conventional thrillers like "The Eye of the Needle" and "The Key to Rebbecca."

Only after these books were successful was he able to convince them to take a chance on "Pillars" to tremendous success.

I've heard this story over and over again, from writers big and small. The first novel doesn't sell until after the second of third novel sells. Until after the writer has the track-record and the clout to make it happen.

Now keep in mind, in many cases, the first book still wasn't a success. Often there were still flaws or marketing issues that made it a hard-sell to readers. Sometimes, the publisher still didn't understand or want the book, and did it only to humor the successful author.

But even the-least successful commercially-published book is going to outsell 95% (and I think I'm being very conservative with that estimate) of the self-published books ever produced.

Those first books, where the author had the patience and the determination to see them through the process, found an audience, no matter how small. Most self-published books never come close.

Ultimately, as an author, what you want (or should want, in my opinion), is not to be printed, and not even to be published. You want to be read.

Or maybe you just want money, but if you've done things right, that just comes naturally with being read. Win-win. Most self-published books don't make money (quite the contrary) and they don't get read. Where's the upside in that?

Which brings me to:

4 Reasons David Carnoy Probably Shouldn't have Self-Published

Now, keep in mind that I don't know all the specifics of his experience or his situation. I have only the details he chose to share in his article, as he chose to share them. And I certainly haven't read his book. I base my opinions on what I could glean or extrapolate from what he said, and on some rather broad assumptions I make based on my own experiences and knowledge of the publishing industry. Given that, here we go...

1. It might have sold if he'd just written the next book.

See my example of Follett above. Mr. Carnoy obviously put a lot of money, time, and effort into self-publishing his novel. Could have have translated that into a second novel, or even a third? He doesn't mention any follow-up writing at all.

Here's one more little secret fact about publishing. Publishers are less interested in individual books than in careers. This is especially true of novels. They don't want a writer with one good novel. They want a writer with one good novel and the ability (at least the strong promise) to turn out more on a regular basis.

I recently heard an interview with a writer I've recently come to enjoy, New York Times Best-selling crime writer Tim Dorsey. Dorsey was, like Carnoy, a journalist who put several years into writing a novel.

Things diverge in that he got a publisher interested in that first book. But things are the same in that, Dorsey hadn't even thought of writing a second novel. So he was shocked when the book sold as part of a two-book deal. He had to quickly write a prequel to his first book, because he'd killed off most of his characters in book one! (Find his discussion of this point just after the three-minute mark in the YouTube video.)

The publisher didn't see that first book as marketable. They saw Dorsey as a marketable writer, and in that, they were obviously correct.

2. I doubt he exhausted all possible avenues to sell the book to conventional publishers.

Okay, I confess that I'm way into speculative territory with this one.

According to Carnoy he got a "top agent" on the job, and I'll take him as his word.

But speaking as someone who recently let go a "top agent" (by at least one measure, the top agent in the industry right now) because they weren't doing enough to market my original work, a "top agent" isn't always what you need.

It's like looking for a spouse. You might want the most beautiful person on the planet, or the smartest, or the most powerful. But that doesn't mean that's what you need. You might discover that being an average schmo being married to Angelina Jolie, or Hugh Jackman, or Stephen Hawking, or George W. Bush, it might just have a down-side. It might not work out. It might not last long at all. It might cause you a boat-load of grief and pain along the way.

What you want is somebody compatible, even if they aren't quite as beautiful to behold, or smart, or powerful. What you need is somebody who's a good fit with you. That's where 70th wedding anniversaries are made.

Maybe that still means a top agent, but maybe not. Top Agents are top agents because they are specialists at big books and big deals. Maybe that's not what you need a this stage in your career.

A "top agent" probably is only interested in you if you are, or they think you can be, a "top author." As a first-time author, they may not work as hard for you, give you the individual attention you need, or keep trying as long as a lower-tier agent would. Maybe you need someone who will put your book on the desk of every editor in New York, not just the desks of five VPs at the biggest publishing imprints on the planet.

Or maybe the agent isn't interested in a deal below a certain level. Maybe you'd be thrilled with a five-figure deal, and the agent really can't (quite reasonably, they're a top agent after all) be bothered with anything less than six figures. (And keep in mind that even a three-figure deal is still way better than the negative five-figure or more deal that most self-publishing projects turn into.)

Or maybe, no make this for certain, a "top agent" is going to have bigger fish to fry than you. They've got top clients, best-sellers who are always going to be their first priority. No matter how much they may like you, no matter how sincere their interest, there are going to be times, maybe lots of times, when little clients like you fall between the cracks. Fact of life.

3. Maybe the book didn't sell because it SHOULDN'T have sold.

Like I said, I haven't read the book. And it's just possible that is sucks.

I rather doubt that though, since a high-level agent apparently took it on. I'm guessing that it's at least a competent book with some gleam of specialness that separates it from the pack.

But it's possible that there's some flaw that the agent overlooked. Maybe the "gleam" is just something that pushed their hot-buttons, that wouldn't register with anyone else on the planet.

Really, it's entirely possible that the book is fine. Lots of fine books don't get bought (or at least, bought immediately) for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book.

But many, maybe most, first novels aren't fine. Mistakes are made. Maybe the plot is great, but the prose sucks. Maybe prose is beautiful, but there's a tragic plot-flaw that just can't be fixed. Maybe the plot and the prose are great, but the characters are flat. Maybe everything is great, but commercial publishing isn't ready for a 2000-page space western written from the viewpoint of a gall-stone, no matter how well executed.

On the other hand, maybe if he'd simply moved on and written the next book, Mr. Carnoy would have learned things in the process (writing novels requires practice, like any other craft). Maybe he'd have learned enough to spot that one, fatal flaw in the first book, and fix it, and sell it.
Maybe he'd develop the understanding to realize how embarrassingly flawed his first effort was, and how it's better sitting at the bottom of a drawer for his biographers to figure out.

In either case, he's better off in the long run.

4. Even, in the unlikely instance that the book is successful in its self-published form, it proves nothing.

As I said in my previous post on vanity publishing, there are counter-examples of self-published and vanity press books that went on to great success. But I'm of the opinion that those were mostly books that could have seen equal or greater success if the author had simple made more (or more effective) efforts to sell the manuscript, or if they'd (as in the Follett example) kept writing and let the momentum of their career pull that first book into print.

If you read the fine print, most major "self-publishing" success stories actually made most (if not all) of their money only when they were picked up by a conventional publisher. The "self-publishing" stage only created enough success to bring them to the attention of the publishers, or to convince them that the book reached a market they didn't know existed.

As I said, there are other, probably more cost-effective ways of marketing a "problem" book. Most of these involve writing the next book, of course, but that's the thing that's going to develop your career, your reputation, and your abilities as a writer.

And isn't that what you want?

(I've beaten on Mr. Carnoy pretty hard in this post, and if he takes any notice of it at all, I hope he can be a good sport about it and take it in the constructive spirit that it was intended. I wish him all success with his book, and hope it's one of the exceptions that makes the rule. The very least I can do is offer him plug. You can order his novel "Knife Music" on Amazon here. Or better yet, order it through his web page and give him an extra cut.)

Vanity isn't Easy

2008-12-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

There was a rather annoying article in one of our local papers the other day: a rather glowing profile on a vanity publisher.

Now, if you don't know what a vanity press is, it's a publisher that will, for a (often sizable) fee turn your manuscript into a printed book.

Such presses can take slightly different forms at this point.. They may (usually for yet another fee) pretend to market your book.

More likely, they'll simply deliver a pallet of books to sit in your garage while you try unsuccessfully to pawn them off on local bookstores, until finally you give them away to every friend and relative on every birthday and Christmas, leaving the bulk of them as a white elephant for your estate to dispose of at the local landfill.

Oh, come on, Steve! Tell us what you really think!

Okay, perhaps my usual level of contempt for self-publishing is a bit pumped up by the article, which was full of myths, distortions, misinformation, unquestioned self-promotion, and generally suffered from a complete lack of basic fact-checking. (For example, it went unchallenged that conventional publishers take ownership of the copyrights on books they buy. You'd think that newspapers would know at least the barest essentials of copyright law, but I guess not.)

But for the purposes of this rant, I'm going to push all the misinformation aside and deal with a couple of things the article (and the vanity publisher) got right.

One fact that the publisher used in support of using their service was that getting a book sold to a conventional publisher is hard.

This is true. It is very, very true. (Speaking as someone who's currently trying to turn a string of well-received media tie-in novels into an original novel career, I can speak to this personally.) It's hard. It takes time. The deck is stacked against you, and a lot of the publishing process exists primarily to keep the flood of dreck out, sometimes keeping good books and writers out in the process.

What's wrong is that this is any reason for an aspiring writer to turn to self-publishing and vanity presses. If it bothers you, and it probably does, I've got two words for you.

Boo.

Hoo.

Like many things worth doing, getting a book published is work. It requires patience, resilience, and determination. And despite all this (and this is what the vanity publishers don't tell you), it beats the alternative.

Okay, early on I told you what self-publishing is, but now I will give you the precise definition of self-publishing: A process by which, through the application of large amounts of money, an unsold manuscript can be transformed into a large quantity of unsold books.

There's the ugly truth of it. If selling your book to a legitimate publisher is too too hard for you, then going to a vanity press won't solve your problem, it will multiply it.

Yes, for only a few (maybe quite a few) thousand dollars you can expand a hundred-fold your opportunities for rejection, abuse, disappointment, and perceived failure! But wait, there's more! We'll throw on a huge distraction from your writing, and a tangible monument to your inadequacy that can squat in your garage, basement, closet or unit at the Mini-Storage for decades to come!

Where's the logic here? Getting a job is hard too. Does that mean that if you can't get a job as a dish-washer, you open a restaurant? If you like to fly, do you start an airline?

Of course not. It's obvious that these enterprises are expensive, time-consuming, risky, and highly prone to total failure, and that to manage one takes a skill-set completely separate from those possessed by most of the people it employs. You start an airline because you want to start an airline, not because you think it's a shortcut to getting some time in the cockpit.

Why then do so many would-be writers think they should start a publishing company? I can't tell you. If you have the skills and desire to be a manager, a salesperson, a marketer, a warehouse manager, a shipper, a bookkeeper, and you'd rather do those things than write, then maybe a writer is not what you want to be. Maybe you should start a business. (I wouldn't recommend publishing though. There are easier ways to make money.)

Writers write. That should be obvious.

Being a writer already is a business anyway, one that will, as you become more successful, take far more time and energy from your writing than you want. If you are a writer who has time to run a second (publishing) business, then it's a good sign that you aren't very successful as a writer (and probably as a publisher too).

It's that simple. That should be the end of it, and we should never speak of this thing again.

Not.

The whole vanity publishing thing is like Dracula. You think you've got it staked real good, and it just keeps popping out of the grave. It doesn't help that every now and then you hear (usually a lot, because it makes a good story) about the exceptions to the rule, the self-published books that went on to great success, that were picked up by major publishers, and in a few cases, even turned into New York Times best-sellers.

I shake my head every time I hear one of these, because they are rare exceptions, because most of them would have sold through conventional means if the author had only been a little smarter about it, and because I know it's the nature of would-be writers to treat any crumb of false-hope like the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Rio.

Just because somebody won 40 million in the Powerball doesn't mean you should invest your life savings in lottery tickets.

Yes, selling is hard.

Buck it up, keep writing, and keep the manuscripts in the mail.

It's easier that way.

(Postscript: Chris just wrote her own blog post covering some different aspects of this same issue. Read her "No Hope Publishing Plan" here.)

The Tale of the Ackerfish

2008-12-11T00:49:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard, the broad field of science fiction and fantasy lost a legendary figure last week: Forrest J. Ackerman, perhaps best known as the editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine, and as one of the world's foremost collectors of science fiction, fantasy and horror memorabilia.

Those things are only a little of what Forrey was, and what he meant to our genres. In his time, he was a writer, editor, literary agent (for many major writers, including L. Ron Hubbard), and translator (bringing the countless Perry Rodan books to the United States). He coined the dreaded term "sci-fi." He's reportedly the first person to wear a costume to a science fiction convention, giving launch to every cosplayer on the planet.

Okay, it starts to become clear why Forrey was to some, as infamous as he was famous. But his importance to the history of the sf/fantasy/horror genres, both in print and film, can't be overstated.

And what made Forrey great wasn't all the professional things he did in the field, really. It was that, through it all, Forrey was a fan. An uber-fan. The god-king-500-pound gorilla-high-wizard-United-Federation-of-Nerdery-atomic-supreme-Dalek of fans.

He did fannish things, only on a scale comparable with the pyramids. Fans have collections of book, or comics, or toys. Forry had the "Ackermansion" a home jammed with a massive collection of books, pulps, posters, and original film props, masks, models and costumes. Fans write fanzines. Forrey (in 1958) started "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a newsstand publication jammed with pictures and writing about genre films (mostly horror and fantasy, but a smattering of science fiction as well).

It was through Famous Monsters of Filmland that Forrey entered my life, as I discovered it hidden in the back of magazine rack of a little drugstore in Geneva, Alabama. I flipped through its pages, wide-eyed at creatures, sights, wonders and horrors, most of which were completely alien to me.

It's impossible for anyone born after the 70s to understand what this magazine meant to a generation. If you want to find out about films, or see them, it's easy. You've got cable, DVDs, the internet, pay-per-view, satellite, a zillion ways to access them.

But Famous Monsters of Filmland came along at a time before the internet. Before DVDs, or VHS, or even Beta. It was before Cable. It was at a time when television often meant a tiny, blurry, black and white picture selected from no more than an handful of channels, and in most areas, far less.

If you missed a movie in the theaters, you missed it, unless it eventually ran on TV, jammed full of commercials and cut to shreds by the censors. And I missed a lot of genre movies as a kid. Pretty much all of them, as a matter of a fact.

I lived in a tiny Alabama town, barely more than a wide spot in the road. I was miles (which might as well have been light-years) from the nearest theaters. On rare occasions I'd go to a movie with my family, or with family friend and sometimes baby-sitter Linda Miller (hi, Linda!), but rarely did I get to see the space-ships and monsters that I craved.

So Famous Monsters of Filmland was a window on a world I only barely knew existed, films I knew mainly through tiny ads in the monthly schedules that the local drive-ins printed and distributed everywhere. From those schedules I had only titles, and maybe a tiny picture of slogan to go with it.

In the pages of FMOF I could see pictures and read about the plots, special effects, and actors. I became obsessed with some of the images I saw there, and waited patiently until the movies that spawned them showed up on TV in some late-night or Saturday-afternoon time-slot. I might have eventually seen those films anyway, but FMOF told me what to look for, which films might be worth fighting my parents to stay up late or missing a sunny Saturday afternoon's playtime to watch TV.

It's certainly not the only thing that fanned my interest in science fiction and fantasy, but it was a major early influence on me.

Ironically, I don't think I bought many actual issues of the magazine. Maybe I preferred to spend my money on the comic spinner rack next to the magazines. Or maybe it was just that my mom considered the magazine to lurid and scary and discouraged me from buying it. I really don't remember. But I'd always pick it up off the rack and flip through it when the druggist wasn't looking. ("This isn't a library!")

My interest in FMOF waned after a few years. We moved to bigger towns where I had better access to theaters, and often more TV channels (some of them those wonderful independent stations that tended to cram their schedules with old movies). I got older, became more independent, and was able to stay up to catch the late-shows where genre films often played. But Famous Monsters of Filmland played a critical role in priming my interest.

I wasn't alone. A whole generation of people like me were also reading the magazine. Some, like me, went on to become writers. Others became makeup artists, prop-builders, costumers, and film directors. Out of its lurid covers and pulpy black-and-white pages came an army of genre creators, who unleashed countless pop-culture wonders and terrors upon the world.

Flash forward thirty years ago. I'm a struggling but published writer of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, attending conventions to chase editors, make contacts, and learn my craft. My wife Chris and I are at a Westercon in Seattle, where we're approached by our friend, con-runner Richard Wright (who we sadly also lost a few years back). He asks if we'd like to attend the Locus Awards banquet. The convention has had to buy a minimum number of banquet tickets, and there are extras. Would we like a pair for free?

Starving writers don't turn down free food (even rubber chicken), and we gratefully accepted. We also figured we might make some contacts.

We didn't know many people in the field back in those days, and the few people we did know were sitting at already-full tables, so we got a table by ourselves. I'd seen Forrey's picture many times, and I knew he was at the convention, but until that point in time, I hadn't seen him. So I recognized him when he walked in late, accompanied by another old-time fan (whose name now unfortunately escapes me). They looked around for some place to sit, and we asked if they'd like to join us. Maybe to my surprise, they did.

I don't remember a lot of specifics about the banquet, but Forrey was charming, friendly, and talkative. We quite enjoyed their company, and I was a bit dazzled to be sitting across the table from someone who had so influenced my youth.

But one thing I'll never forget about the banquet were the table decorations. For reasons that escape me, the place-settings consisted of some kind of beach/luau kitsch, and at the end, we were encouraged to take anything we wanted as with us. At our table we all laughed about that, as we'd spent a good deal of time making fun of it all. There was certainly nothing there that any of us wanted.

But then, I had an inspiration. I'd not thought to bring a camera, so I couldn't get a picture with Forrey, but there was a way I could get a remembrance. I grabbed a cheap, ceramic fish from the centerpiece, held it out and said, "Forrey, will you sign my fish?"

He stared at it, puzzled, then laughed and took it. We found a ball-point pen somewhere, but it wouldn't write on the glazed part of the fish. Forrey turned it over and signed it on the unglazed bottom.

We've carried that fish around for years, through multiple moves, two states and three cities. It's usually been on display somewhere in our house, an incongruous item amid all the books, comics and sci-fi toys. I drew attention to itself. Visitors would ask why we had that ugly little thing, and I'd always pick it up, turn it over, and tell them the story.

When I learned of Forrey's death, it was in my living-room, sitting on a bookshelf. I knew exactly where to find it. The Ackerfish.

Some day, when we're old and gone, I imagine our our kids will be going through our stuff, and they'll see this ugly little fish, and maybe they'll throw it away without a second thought. But I hope not. It's an artifact. A link with an important bit of history that shouldn't be forgotten.

It's appropriate, somehow, that of Forrey Ackerman, collector, keeper of things, curator of whole genres, I have an object, an artifact to remember him by.

Goodbye, Forrey, and thanks for the fish.

More on book returns

2008-11-10T16:48:00.000-08:00

As a follow-up to my recent post on how book-returns may be a necessary evil if you value independent bookstores, here's a great post from an industry-insider on the dark flip-side the equation. Returns are hurting publishers in a big way during the credit crunch, and it's behind a lot of the dire financial news you're hearing about publishing companies at the moment.

Ignoring my arguments about how they benefit indie booksellers, it's otherwise hard not to conclude that the return system is insane. But it isn't likely to go away, or even be substantially modified, any time soon. There are lots of reasons, but here are the big two:

For any one publisher to modify or eliminate the return system would be suicide for that publisher. Buyers, especially the 500-pound gorillas of retail, would simply stop ordering.

But for all, or even several of the publishers to change the terms in lockstep would undoubtedly cause anti-trust laws to kick in.

Loved to Death (or, why book-lovers don't always make great book-sellers)

2008-10-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

We'll get to the meat of this post in a minute. First, some background material authors, would-be authors and book-lovers should be aware of...

I've just been reading a fascinating post over on the blog of Andrew Wheeler, a 20-year publishing professional who should know his stuff.

His post is prompted by the outrage several science fiction and fantasy authors about having their recent books "skipped" by chain bookstores. Apparently there was some talk of a boycott, but that seems to have gone nowhere so far. Probably a good thing.

Anyway, that's the start of Wheeler's post, but he goes way beyond that. He explains, in painful-but-necessary detail the realities of the book business. How and why books get ordered (or don't get ordered), and why there are some sound reasons for "skipping." He also talks about the flawed nostalgia that always clouds such discussions of business; the days when books were all good, bookstores were all small and independent, and good authors (was there any other kind?) were carefully sold, nurtured, and rewarded.

And that's where my post begins. Wheeler talks at length about the many shortcomings common to indie bookstores, and why many of them deserved to die. Many are (or were) poorly managed, under-funded, dirty, disorganized, stocked only to suit their owner's peculiar tastes and interests. I can't disagree with much of what he says.. We'll all been in great indie bookstores, but we've been in the clunkers too.

But he doesn't address another kind of doomed bookstore, one I've had the sad experience to observe closely in recent years here in my town: the Store That Loved Books Too Much.

We used to have a great little indie store in the town where I live. It's a beach-resort town, and so I became familiar with the store long before I moved here. In fact, though I lived in a much larger college town with some pretty good (chain and indie) bookstores, I always looked forward to visiting this one. A stop was a necessary part of any trip to the beach, and I rarely walked out without a bag full of books and periodicals.

It wasn't a big store, nor did it have a picturesque location. It was a bland storefront in a strip-mall, located next to a chain grocery store. It wasn't the store. It was what was in the store. Which was (stand by for the big surprise...) books.

Okay, it wasn't just that. It had new books. Every single week. Hot-off-the-presses books, mostly paperbacks, just the thing for a beach read. Most of the paperbacks were displayed face-out on racks along the side walls for easy browsing. Even better, new releases were on the floor below the racks so you couldn't miss them. Sure, this runs contrary to the logic that puts new books at the top, but it worked. The latest thing was there, and easy to find.

They weren't snotty either. They had a rich stock of best-sellers, thrillers, trashy-beach books, and good sections for all the genres, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, western, horror, you-name-it.

Oh sure, that wasn't all the store carried. They had a small but rich assortment of hard-covers and trades, fiction and non-fiction, children's books, an old-fashioned comic-spinner rack (the kind that collectors hate because they crease the comics, but which are great for kids who might actually read a comic for pleasure). a huge magazine section (another good source of beach reading), and a few gifts and cards.

They also had a few of those things that people think of when they think of indie bookstores. They had a nice little rack for local authors that was always well-stocked, and another one for staff picks and recommended reads. They hand-sold books, and were always glad to recommend an author or book in any given genre.

They also had a small blocked off corner for "adult" magazines. I never shopped back there (you believe me, right?), but it was somehow reassuring. I always figured a news-dealer that didn't traffic in material that was offending somebody just wasn't doing its part for the First Amendment, and was probably incomplete in other important areas as well.

Near as I could tell, they did a brisk business. There were always people in the store when I went in there, and the register was always busy. There were even lines sometimes.

What the store had, and I think this was key, was energy. The pulp and newsprint were always fresh, and smelled that way. It was exciting to go into the store on a shipment day, when the new books or periodicals were being unboxed and shelved. Often I'd hover around the magazine racks, waiting to see if the latest issue of one of my favorite magazines was coming out. Every week you'd go to scan the racks for your favorite authors and genres, and never were you disappointed. There was always something new and interesting, even if it wasn't what you went in looking for.

I've never seen anything like it, before or since, in such a small town. I was reminded of some of the big cities I'd lived in, the huge corner newsstands in Los Angeles, the huge Paperback City store in North Hollywood, the seedy-but-has-everything Magazine City in downtown Seattle. Most of these places were dirtier and colder and less refined than our little bookstore, but the buzz was there, and they shared another important characteristic: turnover. Most things moved, one way or another. If they didn't sell, then they were gone.

I'm an author, and I know, I know. If there's one word in the English language we writers hate, it's strip, at least where it's not being applied to an attractive member of the opposite sex (or same, if that's the way you play it).

Stripping, for those of you who don't know, is the process of getting credit on unsold paperbacks and periodicals. The book (or magazine, or comic, but what we complain about are the books) isn't returned. Only the cover is ripped off and returned for credit. The body of the item is (theoretically, that's another story) destroyed. It's a wasteful system, one rooted in history more than business logic, and one that authors just hate. A stripped book is not only unsold, not only returned for credit (and thus taken out of your royalties) it can't be reshipped or resold at any price. It not only isn't sold, it's an anti-sale.

One of the reasons that people like indie bookstores is that, in theory anyway, they don't strip as much. They keep back-lists on the shelves, and give books time to sell. They hand-sell good books that aren't from big-name authors, and aren't fortunate enough to make the Times best-seller list.

Like I said, theory. And at this little bookstore, there was a little truth to it. They shelved back-lists, for top authors and favorites anyway. They kept smaller authors they liked around for a while. But money and space were finite, and things got stripped.

Every. Single. Week.

See, there are places where stripping makes sense: places with high traffic and high volume. Places where people go to look for something new and fun to read. Places like our little store.

It was harsh but true, and while the writer in me would sometimes cringe (especially when it was one of my books), as a reader I loved the place. It was actually a factor in my decision to move to town.

So what happened?

Well, I'm unclear on the details. As I recall, the out-of-town owners sold-out, and it was bought by a well-meaning couple who clearly weren't cut out to run a bookstore. They didn't last long. Just long enough to mess up the stock and chase off a bunch of the staff.

They wanted to sell out, and when that didn't happen, planned to close.

Then a white-knight appeared in the form of a true book-lover. A guy who runs several used bookstores in the area, stores that are still open. There are good stores, and his flagship store is world-class, one of those places a book-lover can wander for hours through the maze-like stacks and never see everything.

But the trouble was, he loved books too much to run a new bookstore. He never stripped anything. The magazine second, already reduced, got smaller still. The adult section disappeared. The wall racks gave way to shelves to make room for the rapidly growing stock of dated (and eventually yellowing) paperbacks. Staff morale was low, and turnover rapid. Various other things were tried, more gifts and cards, games, more comics (but not enough to be a real comic store), music, a bigger kid's section, but nothing seemed to take hold. The foot traffic wasn't there to support it, because people weren't coming back as often.

I found myself going in less and less often. Once a month would catch the new magazines, and there weren't many of those that interested me any more. I stopped looking at the paperbacks. Of course, they were still happy to special order, but without the browsing experience to fuel purchases, I didn't do it often.

It was depressing. Nothing new to browse, and the new releases I'd heard about weren't going to be there. Maybe in the grocery-store next door...

It's sad when the book department at a grocery store starts to look better than a "real" bookstore.

Towards the end, the shelves thinned out as the old stock was presumably sold or stripped, but the money apparently wasn't there to restock. Books were face-out on the shelves, and got further and further apart. Used stock was moved in from other stores to fill the shelves. Even the reduced magazine section was getting thin. Hours were cut back.

There were "business for sale" signs in the windows, but it was hard to imagine what there was to buy. The stock was old and picked over, the traffic gone, the staff decimated, the reputation tarnished beyond repair. The death-spiral was solidly confirmed by then.

A couple weeks ago, while shopping for groceries, I happened to glance over and see the storefront dark and empty. I went over and examined the sign on the door. It had been closed for almost two weeks, and though I shop for groceries next door three or four times a week, I hadn't noticed.

Our little town is full of writers, and near as I can tell, none of them in my circle had noticed either. We all order our books on-line now, or drive to chain stores in the bigger towns in the valley 60 miles away, or go to indie-monster Powell's Books in Portland a couple hours from here.

I was sad, but hardly surprised. Clearly the book-loving-owner was just riding out the lease. He had loved a once-great store to death.

This isn't intended to be critical of the guy who bought the store. He's a neighbor of mine, and a good guy, and he still has those great used stores. It would have died a lot sooner without his intervention, and he tried to make it a success the best way he knew how. God knows how much money he lost in the deal, and I'm certainly not privy to all the many things behind-the-scenes that may have contributed to the store's slow demise.

But it's difficult to see how he could have ever succeeded because of that one blind spot of his. He couldn't strip books, and without that, the store could never again flourish.

Let that be a lesson. Independent book stores aren't magic fairy-lands of literature and enlightenment. They're businesses, and to succeed, they have to be run as such.

Chain book stores didn't kill our nifty little bookshop. We don't have any within 60 miles. Wal-Mart didn't kill it. It's 30 miles to the nearest big-box store. Amazon didn't kill it. Its troubles were apparent long before Amazon was a significant factor.

Management decisions killed it, plain and simple. Decisions that were well-intended, and right minded, and intended to be charitable to authors. Decisions that were still wrong.

The store is gone now, and it isn't coming back, nor is there likely to be anything to replace it. I order on-line, and I look forward to out-of-town trips where I can go to a large book-store and browse (as good as Amazon is in many respects, it has never replicated the book browsing experience).

I miss the magazines more than anything, but magazines are on the decline. Many of the more obscure magazines I used to enjoy have died, and with others, the internet provides more useful and current content. The more popular ones are cheaper to subscribe to, often at a fraction of the newsstand price, and increasingly that's just what I'm doing.

But to be honest, I suspect even this is short-term. Electronic book-readers are getting attractive, and I fully expect most print magazines to go the way of the dodo in only a few years. I recently subscribed to a magazine for three years (they were practically giving it away) and wondered if my need for a print version would run out before the subscription did.

Books are still with us though, for a while anyway, and independent stores have to depend on them to survive. Much as we rail against the return system and stripping, as illogical as it is, if we were somehow to end it today, it's the independent stores, the small stores, that would suffer the most. Chain stores have the size, the volume, the financial resources to soldier on through, but the marginal little stores like ours won't. Let our store serve as an example, and a warning.

Our beloved little store is gone, and it isn't coming back. Nostalgia is all we have left, and that doesn't pay the rent.

But some days, in some ways, stripping books does.

Countdown to Nowhere

2008-07-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

(This is a follow-up post to yesterday's "Buzz Off" which concerns astronaut Buzz Aldrin's recent statements that shows like Star Trek led to the decline of support for the space program. If you haven't read it, go there first.)

I've gotten a lot of support and "attaboys" from people who read "Buzz Off," but it turns out I didn't win over everyone. Fact is, I thought this over pretty carefully, and there's a lot of stuff I DIDN'T put in the original post, because I didn't think it was necessary given the basic
facts. More would have just been clutter.

But since the facts weren't as obvious as I supposed, let's look at another major
problem with the Buzz Aldrin theory. I don't think the historical time-line supports it.

At first glance, though, you might think the dates line up well. Star Trek was on TV from September 1966 through September 1969. The collapse of the space program's support is really centered around 1970. (The live TV broadcast from Apollo 13 wasn't covered by any of the major networks live, and it flew in April 1970. Apollo 20 was canceled in January of 1970. Two more Apollo missions were canceled in September of 1970.)

So the dates seem close, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.

First of all, remember that Star Trek was a failure in its broadcast run. It was nearly canceled in September of 1968 (while Apollo 8 had the world's attention, and Apollo 11, which drove the country (and the world) into a frenzy was nine months away. In fact, the decision to pull the plug on Star Trek had to have been made just about the time Apollo 11 landed, and the program was at the peak of its popularity and public interest.

Star Trek REALLY didn't take off until it was in syndication and college kids started watching it. I don't have a good date for that, but I suspect we're talking 1971 or 1972, when the smoking gun had long-ago gone off.

But the decisions to pull the trigger on that gun had to be made earlier.

Congressional support had to deteriorate sometime well before the cuts started, and the decision not to cut-in live on Apollo 13 probably resulted from viewership numbers on Apollo 12, which flew in November of 1969.

Of course, Apollo 12 blew out its TV camera shortly after landing, and that probably accounts for a lot of any ratings tumble. You can hardly blame that on Star Trek. (Ironically, almost without exception, Star Trek never showed TV cameras being taken along by its explorers.)

In any case, if Star Trek somehow poisoned the U.S. public on the space program, it did it as a low-rated show with a limited audience. And indications are that, during both first-run and in its re-run "boom" period, the audience for Star Trek largely consisted of people under 21. The voting age was still 21 at this time, and wasn't lowered to 18 until July of 1971. So as far as political influence, it's hard to see how it ever could have had any significant impact at that point in time.

The first evidence that Star Trek fans had political clout didn't come until the first Space Shuttle was renamed ENTERPRISE, following a letter-writing campaign to the Ford White-house by fans. I don't have a date for this, but it happened sometime between when President Ford took office in 1974 and the Enterprise roll-out in 1976. Since construction didn't start until June of 1974, and its original name was "Constitution," and Ford took office in August of '74, it would not likely have been any earlier than that. It's very likely that the reduction in the voting age was a factor here.

Regardless of the date, this hardly supports any lack of support or interest in the real space program by Star Trek fans. Quite the contrary.

On the other hand, NASA's internal grumbling and foot-dragging on the matter is a fine example of how they loved to shoot their public image in the foot. Here was a great opportunity to connect their mission with the public, and rather than exploit it to the fullest, they minimized it as much as possible.

I just don't see any evidence here that Star Trek harmed the space program in any way.

Of course, Aldrin wasn't specific that he was talking about Star Trek, but there just aren't many other on-air TV candidates for killing support of the Space Program.

Lost in Space started (and ended) a year earlier than Star Trek, and had a much bigger audience than Star Trek, but there was no beaming there. There were aliens (often very silly aliens) and interstellar travel (though the science was so weak that I don't recall any kind of faster-than-light drive ever being mentioned). But most of the signature hardware, robots, space-walks, jet packs, surface crawlers, and a very LM-like landing vehicle, were all right off the NASA drawing boards at that time. It was more futuristic and advanced, but in its own way, much more realistic than Trek.

The British series UFO (which featured a modest and fairly believable lunar base) didn't reach U.S. syndication until 1971 and 72. The follow-up Space 1999 with a much bigger Moon base (and some screamingly bad science) didn't show up until 1975.

Other than that, I can't think of anything (other than some Saturday morning cartoons) that qualifies. Feel free to correct me if I've missed something significant.

Meanwhile, all the stuff that Aldrin frets about, teleportation, faster-than-light travel, and so on, had been popular staples of print and comic science fiction since at least the 1930s. Somehow, the U.S. space program got off the ground anyhow (mostly by people who had at
some point read plenty of the stuff.

And we can't ignore movies. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were rocketing off to alien worlds in theaters as early as 1936 (and on radio starting in 1932). Heck, even Duck Dodgers used a teleporter in his first 1953 cartoon appearance!

None of the offending concepts or devices was invented by Star Trek, or any TV show. It predates broadcast television entirely.

Really, looking at the evidence, if the time-line supports anything at all, it's the idea that cutbacks in the Apollo program (and news coverage of same) may have contributed to the renewed popularity of Star Trek in syndication in the early 70s.

If the real space program wasn't going to give us the stars (or even the Moon again, or Mars) anytime soon, we'd watch Star Trek and dream until it did.

That just makes more sense than the idea that B led to A.

But there's a subtext in the time-line the supports more significant factors.

At least some of the press (and the public's) interest in covering the Apollo program has to be traced to the camera failure on Apollo 12. Apollo 13 might have turned that around, but it never made it to the moon, and was covered for entirely different reasons.

Support for Apollo in congress was weakening by early 1970, when Apollo 20 was canceled. The next two cancellations happened after the near loss of Apollo 13. By then, the risks were obvious, and there's no political stock to be gained in backing a losing horse. Better to end the program a winner.

It was also obvious by then that the press was more interested in covering failures in space than successes. Lose, lose. Not much here you can blame on Star Trek.

Combine this with the growing cynicism about government, and the huge cost of the Vietnam war (which lead directly to the cancellation of the Air Force's manned space program before it even started), and there just wasn't anything to be gained politically by backing NASA. Again, not Star Trek's fault.

The facts aren't there. The logic isn't there. Star Trek didn't do it. No science-fiction TV show did. If anything, Star Trek has been a positive influence on people's interest in space.

So, anybody want to start a write-in campaign to name the first, manned, Orion crew-capsule to reach orbit (no test models this time!), Enterprise?

More writings about the Moon:

Closely related to this topic, I have a couple of previous posts about the Moon and the Apollo program that you should check out:

Buy Me The Moon
Why the Apollo program didn't cost nearly as much as most people think it did, and how we might trade certain -- luxuries -- for a Moon base or a Mars program.

1200 Days On Mars
People say there's no reason to return to the Moon. "Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt." Well, we haven't been there, haven't done that, and we don't even know where the tee-shirts are sold. How we've barely touched the Moon, and how it compares to our current unmanned explorations of Mars.

Buzz Off

2008-07-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

Don't you hate it when one of your childhood heroes says something so profoundly wrong and stupid that you just have to call them on it? Unfortunately, it just happened to me.

The hero in question is Apollo 11 moon-walker Buzz Aldrin. Ironically, I ran across this story on the US Sci-Fi Channel's "Sci-Fi Wire" news site. If any of the space sites or major news sources picked it up, I didn't see it. Aldrin was shilling his new National Geographic Channel show, "Unseen Moon," at the annual TV Critics Press Tour.

Anyway, Aldrin went on about how "unrealistic" science fiction television shows caused the public to lose interest in the space program. He doesn't name names, but he keeps mentioning "beaming," which seems like a reference to Star Trek. But he also is quoted as saying something about the shows being on "today," which kinda points a finger towards Stargate Atlantis, the only other current show I can think of that "beams" people.

Or maybe he's confusing reruns with new shows, or is being unclear about the time. Because, the public started losing interest in the space program before half the people working on Atlantis were born.

So I'm going to assume he's talking about Star Trek, since its the best known and most iconic space science fiction show, and its history somewhat parallels that of the space program.

Just so's you know I'm not taking him entirely out of context, here's what he's quoted as saying:

"I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today. All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It's not realistic."

and later in the article:

"But, if you start dealing with fantasy and beaming people up and down and traveling seven times the speed of light, you are doing damage. You're not helping. You have young people who have got expectations that are far unrealistic, and you can't possibly live up to the expectations you have created in young people. Why do they get bored with the space program? That's why."

Can't have those young people stretching their imaginations and developing unrealistic expectations, can we? Good grief. Next thing you know, he'll be going on about the sins of dancing and the dangers of "the rock and roll."

Seems to me, Buzz, that if some young people, scientists and engineers, had not developed unrealistic expectations based on the unrealistic works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, there might never have been rockets into space.

Though Verne is credited with being highly predictive of the Apollo program in many respects, he shot his adventurers to the moon with a giant cannon, something even an engineer of the time could have shown was impossible. Verne, in turn, scoffed at Wells, who sent his travelers to the Moon using an "unrealistic" anti-gravity metal. (This debate is not a new one.)

Many later space program participants also cite the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs as inspiration, which were even more fantastic and romantic. His hero, John Carter, travels to Mars through some kind of ill-defined astral projection, and his Mars is populated with all manner of fantastic creatures and races, including one that happens to have hot (yet egg-laying) females with whom Carter can conveniently interbreed. (Thus, I suppose, clearing the way for Captain Kirk to later bed-hop across the galaxy.)

And of course from there we can go the the Lensmen books of E.E. Doc Smith, or the juvenile novels of Robert Heinlein, for example. Smith's books are as fantastic, in their way, as Burroughs. Heinlein tried to be more realistic, but his books are still full of aliens and rockets flitting from star-to-star.

Yet this sort of stuff has managed to somehow inspire generation after generation of scientists, engineers, pilots, space advocates, and yes, even astronauts. In fact, many of the current crop site Star Trek, and the even-more-fantastic Star Wars, as inspirations.

The fact is, Buzz has it all wrong. Realism isn't the issue. Scientific accuracy isn't the issue. Science fiction is inspiring to those who make real space travel possible, and it's inspiring for entirely different reasons.

Star Trek offered hope that humans could go to the stars, that there might be other life in the universe, and that we would find it, and it would ultimately be good. It also offered the hope that humans could solve enough of our internal struggles to survive and work together to make it possible.

The how of getting there isn't important, it's the hope, the wonder, that we could. Once you've embraced that, you don't look around and say, "well, I can't beam to space, so I'm not going." No, you go and find the next nearest thing you can, the Shuttle, Spaceship One, the new Orion vehicle, and you try and get on it if you can.

And if that isn't good enough, you roll up your sleeves and try to make something better. Not the Enterprise probably. Not a transporter. But better.

Or at least, you hope somebody else does, and you're much more likely to support them if they say they're trying.

No, I'm afraid Buzz has it all wrong.

Not that I can blame him for his frustration, maybe even anger at our lack of progress in space, and the public's seeming apathy towards it. It's just that he's lashing out in the wrong direction.

The reasons for the public's lack of interest are complex, and I don't think there's one single thing to blame. But if fingers are to be pointed, I think you can start with NASA's stunning ability to counter-promote itself. We're not just talking inability to promote here. We're talking an exhaustive 40+ year campaign to dehumanize its astronauts into bland, interchangable drones in the public eye, and to make some of the most exciting voyages of adventure in human history, seem boring.

Buzz has always been one to buck that trend. Unlike some of the Apollo astronauts, he's not been reclusive, or allowed himself to be one of NASAs obedient PR pawns. He's been out there, in the public eye, pushing himself as an individual, and yeah, even licensing his image for toys, models and other trinkets.

Even signing on to host TV shows. Yeah.

And I've always backed him on that, because the astronauts should be rewarded for their courage, celebrated for their place in history, and appreciated as the deep and complex human beings that they are. If that means Buzz Aldrin Action figures, well, that's fine, because I want a Buzz Aldrin action figure, and I want one for my grandkid too. I want to know their stories, the good and bad of them. If they have something to say, I want to listen. And if they make a little cash along the way, more power to them. Who do I make the check out to?

But this time, Buzz is just wrong. He just doesn't know what he's talking about.

We should be thankful for Star Trek and Stargate and Star Wars and all the rest, that kept people thinking about the future, thinking about the stars, thinking about the planets, and not thinking about "if," but only "how, and when?" Because it's only through that spark of hope that we'll get there, however we do it.

And I'll take that spark any way I can get it, thank-you...

(While most responses to this post have been supportive and positive, not everyone was convinced. So I put some of my cast-off arguments into a follow-up post that I hope will put the matter to rest. Check it out.)

A Thumbnail Cover Gallery

2008-06-19T20:50:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture for a larger version.

A while back I started collecting recent covers from books in which Chris and I were published and combined them into a single graphic to use as a backdrop for our oft-neglected web-page. I realized today that I hadn't updated it in a long time, so I wasted several hours this afternoon tracking down covers (new ones, and old ones that I hadn't included before), resizing, and editing them in.

This is what I came up with. It still isn't complete. For example, I can think of at least four anthologies that aren't included (with several more coming before the year is out), plus a computer game (yeah, there are already two computer games in the grid that I wrote for), and a non-fiction book. I'll add another row later this year if I think of it.

It's been my experience that if you write and publish enough, you quickly start to forget things that you did, even if they were only a few years ago. Having an "at a glance" cover gallery like this is a bit of an ego booster, and a reminder on the hard days that you have accomplished something.

Borrowing Against the Future

2008-05-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

One of the most powerful tools the right has used to pull the wool over America's eyes these last many years has been their ability to define the terms used to discuss key issues like the economy. One of my favorite examples is "tax and spend."

It's been a rallying-cry of conservatives for years, and a knee-jerk tag to attach to anyone of liberal stripe.

But what does it mean?

Almost nothing, actually.

First of all, while liberals do tax and spend, so do conservatives, especially the spend part.

But what's missing from the phrase is the wonderful loop-hole that conservatives so often skate through. If we keep repeating "tax and spend" over and over (and it appears so often in the media, political advertising, and political speeches, that it feels like being stuck in a room-full of parrots all with the same trainer) it trends to frame all our thinking on government spending and taxation. "Tax and Spend" implies that those are the only two options, and that isn't at all the case.

Okay, the spend part of the equation is pretty accurate. Show me a politician who doesn't spend. Left, right, I don't care. Show me one. I'll go wait.

Pretty hard to find, aren't they? Actually, we pretty much hire politicians to spend, much as we hate the idea. They're there to administer our collective will and resources to solve problems too big to solve ourselves, and too important to ignore. conservatives and liberals (and even fiscal conservatives and some other kinds of conservatives) differ greatly on how these things are defined, and that's a legitimate area of debate, which is probably why the political machine has chosen to avoid it.

Taxing, on the other hand, is far from the only option on how to fund that spending. But it's significant in that it's the most direct and honest way of funding the government, and we can't have that, can we?

Governments, on the other hand, can borrow money, or issue bonds, which is just another form of borrowing. Sure, these just defer the eventual payment, and make it more expensive in the long run, but like running up your personal credit-card, it somehow feels like free money, something that a straight-forward tax is never going to be.

Now sure, there are legitimate reasons for governments to borrow and issue bonds, but it's the "candy-coating" factor that I'm talking about. "No money down! No payments for 90 days! What will you do with all the money you save?" Republicans spend (in different amounts, and on different things, but spending is spending) just like Democrats do. What's different is in how they choose to pay (or often not pay) for what they spend, and how carefully they obscure the facts of that payback.

Okay, I'm getting a bit side-tracked here, as I'd actually like to talk about a specific kind of "obscured borrowing," one I consider the sneakiest, most insidious, and most destructive of all. Call it borrowing against infrastructure. Call it borrowing against the future.

How this works is simple. Governments have assets, usually lots of assets. Buildings, land, vehicles, bridges, subways, equipment, computers, weapons, pipes, wires, office supplies, all kinds of things. But few of these assets are of fixed value. Many things depreciate just sitting there. Others wear out or are depleted as they're used. And most require maintenance, otherwise they depreciate faster and wear out faster. Also, in most governments these assets need regular updating, both to keep things current, and to adjust capacity of government services to follow rising (or changing) populations.

There are other kinds of assets as well that are even less obvious. Employees for example. It's hard to think of the stereotypical, under-motivated government worker as an asset, but each one represents a bank of experience, knowledge and training that would have to be replaced right along with the body. Yes, some employees are much more valuable than others, and some are much more expensive to replace. We'll get back to that.

When you run up financial debts, it's pretty obvious. When you issue bonds, its there for everyone to see. And when you raise taxes or fees, everyone screams. But all this other stuff I've mentioned is like an invisible bank account that politicians can dip into without creating much attention.

The easiest way is simply to defer maintenance. Stop fixing school roofs. Stop repairing bridges. Don't change the oil in government vehicles. Don't replace vehicles as they wear out. Don't paint. Don't repair. Don't fix.

Another way is to delay needed upgrades. Sewage plant over-burdened? Why worry? So what if you have to dump raw sewage into the river every time it rains? And if the EPA wants to fine you, well, blame it on the liberals... Fact is, most any such crisis of capacity is usually slow in coming. Almost universally it can be pushed past the next election cycle, and with luck, until term-limits kick in. Then it becomes someone else's problem (hopefully, the other party's).

The massive application of this strategy dates back to the Reagan administration, which just stopped spending money on infrastructure. We're, in many cases, only now seeing the fall-out (no pun intended) from that policy today, with collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, and failing levies. You've got to give some grudging respect. All than invisible borrowing deferred to not only decades after Reagan left office, but until he is several years safe in his grave.

And since our national government tends to change hands periodically, if you can simply stall long enough, any debts you run up will simply get handed off to the other party, who can take the blame if they actually to raise funds to pay off your debts. Yet another implication of "tax and spend" is that the person or party doing the taxing is also the person or party who did the spending, but very often that is not the case.

Reagan ran up the debt, Bush I ran it up more, Clinton paid it down (more than canceling out the Bush I years) and now Bush II has run it up to unprecedented levels.

Speaking of, a more contemporary (and far more contemptible) example of borrowing against the future is to be found in current US war in the middle-east. Of course, the obvious up-front costs of the war are already eye-bleedingly staggering (if there were some sort of Oscar for Government Spending, George W. Bush would certainly deserve the statue), but there are equally staggering hidden cost here.

The war has been grinding our military down to a nub. Equipment is wearing out at a phenomenal rate. Stockpiles of ammunition, equipment, and supplies (a lot of this stuff in turn left-over from the Cold-war era) have been drawn down and not replaced. Sooner or later, all this junk will have to be repaired or replaced, and somebody will have to pay for it.

But to my mind, the really tragic cost, the one that makes me want to spit, is the human one. This war has been run on the backs of National Guard and reserve units who have been deployed again and again and again in a way that nobody, a few decades ago, would have ever imagined happening short of an alien invasion or World War Three. These people, even the most loyal and determined of them, are exhausted. Most of them have to be thinking that, by now, they've more than done their service to their country, and I don't see how you can argue with them.

For many of them, they're going to take the earliest opportunity to get out of the service, and that means losing their experience and training.

Remember when I said a while back that some government employees are more valuable than others? Well, there are few more valuable than the modern military man or woman. The day of the ignorant grunt is over. The typical modern soldier is a highly trained technical expert not easily, quickly, or cheaply replaced. I'm finding good numbers hard to come by, but it seems safe to say that even the most basic infantryman has several hundred thousand dollars invested in them, and on the other extreme, a fighter pilot's costs are likely well north of two million dollars.

There's also the simple fact that combat veterans have an experience and perspective that can't be obtained through training at any cost, and to which a monetary value can't be assigned. The men and women who fight future conflicts and defend our shores need these experienced fighters, and we're pissing them away.

When you drive people out of the service, and we're doing so on an epic scale, you're most certainly borrowing against the future.

Of course, this only considers the people who are able to walk out of service whole and hearty (and bless them, I wish it was every one), but there are many more who come home with shattered bodies and injured minds, or who simply come home in a flag-draped box. To those people (or their survivors) we owe compensation for their sacrifices. To my mind, when you've borrowed against a soldier's life and future, this is (or should be) an immediate pay-back time.

Sadly, we still hear again and again of nightmarishly run-down medical facilities, of injured veterans denied benefits and proper medical treatment, even of the bodies of returning soldiers being treated with disrespect because somebody found a way to cut corners on the processing.

This makes my eyes red. If you're going to do this thing, run out the national debt, raise taxes, do what it takes, but don't try to hide your spending by putting it on the backs of the very people who have fought the war.

I know that "honesty" and "politician" are two words that rarely interact, but I think the Republicans have pushed fiscal deception to an unprecedented level. It's time for a hard, hard correction. I suggest when election time comes in November, that if you want any possibility of fiscal responsibility and accountability, you look for someone with the "tax and spend" label attached to them.

Sure, you may not agree with them on every detail, but it's right there on the table: what to tax, what to spend, and what to spend it on. From there you can negotiate.

The option is be left eternally wondering what the Republicans are borrowing, how they're borrowing it, who they're borrowing it from, and when you are going to have to pay it back.

What is Science Fiction Anyway, and Does it Matter?

2008-02-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Just stumbled on this (to me) very annoying essay that attempts to ever more narrowly define what is "real" science-fiction.

I'm annoyed on multiple levels, starting with the idea that this distinction is somehow important, moving on through how the author seems to think "real" sf is somehow superior, just on principle, to that Tolkien and Harry Potter crap, and continuing on from there.

I do, however, think there's some interesting validity to the author's idea of an scientific “event horizon” that defines whither a science fiction story is technically plausible or not. His idea is that the line between science fiction and fantasy (his term, though I think “science fantasy” is more correct, if a distinction must be made) isn’t a static thing, that a story can be written as science fiction based on the best scientific knowledge of the day, and be turned into science fantasy after the fact as science marches on.

Yet his central premise is that most sf produced today, especially media sf, actually starts out inside his speculative "event horizon," that most of it is scientifically implausible by today’s science (and probably yesterday’s as well) not tomorrow’s.

Okay, actually, I agree with this too. Where I differ is that this is somehow a bad thing. I think it's time to embrace it, fess up to the fact that it’s absurd to think that (as an example) Star Trek is, an any way more than metaphorical, any kind of prediction of the future, and that as long as we enjoy the stories, that's FINE.

First of all, I'm of the opinion that a good story rarely starts out, "An idea walked into a room." That notion has damaged sf as a literary form more than any single thing. Stories are about people, and if an idea enters into it, it is how the people react to that idea which is involving to the reader. The idea may be interesting as well, but a story is not simply a science-fact essay with dialog and a villain. This is important, because if the story is good, the failure of the science (by time or intentional design, at least, not withstanding the author's ignorance) will not significantly diminish it.

Frankly, I think that science fiction's function as a literary crystal ball predicting the future has always been highly over-rated. For starters, "science fiction" is a misnomer. Science fiction CAN'T predict science, except through guess-work, and where sf has attempted to anticipate hard science, it has almost always been wrong. Making up undiscovered subatomic particles is just fantasy with sf trappings. Even speculating about predicted-but-undiscovered particles (such as the Higgs Boson) is questionable, because, even if they exist, most likely anything you say about it will be wrong (and is likely to be proven so within a few years).

Most of what we think of as "science" in science fiction stories is applied engineering and technology, and it IS possible to extrapolate these things, to some limited extent. Jules Vern, for instance, didn't predict the submarine, or even its use in war. But he did extrapolate the submarine into a capable and useful vehicle and consider how it could be used for good (exploration, access to aquatic resources) and evil (terror attacks on shipping). He predicted lunar travel, but even by the science and engineering of his time, his technology was fatally flawed. The story's predictive value is not in that his science or technology were correct, but rather in its (quite correct) assurance that the technology COULD solve the problems involved with enough time and effort.

It’s ironic that Vern then scoffed at H.G. Wells book on lunar travel because he relied on anti-gravity metals and other such implausible devices. Yet neither book holds up to modern science, and the flaws in Vern's work are much more obvious and easier to prove. Yet Vern’s work is also satisfying in part in the his method for reaching the moon, though scientifically flawed, is at least plausible and understandable. Never mind that it would never reach the moon, and even if it did, it’s passengers would be nothing more than jelly due to the incredible acceleration. The method allows even the modern reader to willingly suspend their disbelief.

Classic Star Trek is sometimes given credit for "inventing" the cell phone. Yet all it really predicted was the shape and size of a cell phone, not the technology that makes one work, or the science behind it, or even the functional way in which a cell phone works. Functionally, near as we can tell, a Star Trek communicator was just a WWII walkie-talkie decreased in size, and increased in power. Actually, what it did, how it worked, and what those little dials and buttons did is all rather vague. From a story standpoint, that's actually good, as in being vague, it has dated less than a more scientifically-grounded device would. It served a story purpose, and served it well.

Really, that’s all most early Star Trek technology was, story devices dressed up with flashing lights, buttons, and sound-effects. Look at the elegant, self-descriptive names of those devices: transporter, communicator, shuttlecraft, warp drive, impulse engines, photon-torpedoes, phaser, tricorder. A transporter is less a teleportation device than a method of moving characters rapidly through the story (and without the expensive special-effects necessary to show a spaceship landing). A shuttlecraft isn’t a form of transportation at all, it’s a bottle to stuff a couple-or-three characters into and then crash into a planet for story purposes. A communicator is a delivery device for exposition (and so is a tricorder, for that matter). And so on…

Science Fiction was born in an age when science was expanding into a vast unknown, and when technology was advancing in absolute terms. But while technology moved slowly (by modern standards) in those days, it pushed regularlly into new realms, and seemed able to advance without limits. These days, things are much different. Technology is moving so fast these days than any such speculation is almost certain to be rendered either wrong or obsolete in very short order. And fast as it moves, it does not heave blindly into the darkness.

We live in a world where science bounds us at every turn by provable or demonstrated limits. The speed of light seems much more absolute than it once did, and time-travel far more likely to be an absolute fantasy. The list of unknown scientific things to speculate about grows ever shorter. Even the day in which you could imagine planets at random around known stars is growing to a close. We're mapping distant star systems, with new planets discovered almost every week. There are still gaps in our understanding of physics, but they're relatively small, and their practical implications far less profound than the heady days of the atomic era.

Computers continue to advance, but in such regular and predictable ways that the progress has gone on for decades, regular as a clock, far more predictable as the weather. Yes, we can speculate about artificial intelligence, or robots, but we've been speculating about those things for a very long time without a clear grasp of the technology that might make it possible. Are Asimov's robots no longer valid because of that? Hal 9000? Frankenstein's creature? The Golem?

Really, some of the best and most enduring sf isn't even about technology, it's about society and culture. A good example is, unfortunately, a story I can't name. I think it's a Bradbury story (though it might be Asimov, or someone totally different, I haven't read it in a long time). This is from memory, so forgive me if I get the details wrong, but here's my recollection about the story. It's about a future world where everyone gets from place to place using teleportation doorways, and as a result, culture has evolved to a point where nobody goes outside any more. One day a household's door breaks, and a boy walks to school. He discovers that he LIKES going outside, and even when the teleportation door is fixed, he continues to go outside. His concerned parents, of course, try to break him of this aberration. My memory of the ending is vague, except that the pleasures of going outside won't go away, and the idea spreads...

Looking at this from a scientific standpoint, it's kind of absurd. Science is showing us that certain kinds of "teleportation" may be possible, but the idea that we'll be routinely teleporting people from door-to-door is highly unlikely. The energies involved are incredible, for starters. Quantum uncertainty is another huge issue. But the story is no less valid because of this. In fact, it may have become MORE valid with time. We might turn into these people, even if the technologies responsible aren't teleportation, but some combination telecommuting, the internet, console gaming, robotic cars and general paranoia. In fact, to some extent, we're well along the way to turning into these people. The story still works as a metaphor for that. It doesn't matter if teleportation doors are possible by the most current version of physics or not. It doesn't matter if the story had used magic mirrors instead of teleportation doors.

Or look at Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands." If you haven't read this story, you should. It's about a man who discoverers a new store in town, one selling household robots. The robots are black, sleek, beautiful, and perfect. They clean house. They run errands. They do chores. They wait on their owners hand and foot. And they are completely incapable of harming humans. They EXIST to protect us from harm. It is their primary function. Never mind where they come from. Never mind how they work. Not really important.

Of course, there's a catch. The robots are TOO perfect. They move in and take away all human want, all human suffering, and in the process, all human freedom. Humans become prisoners of safety, not even allowed a knife to cut their food, least they injure themselves or others. The hero realizes this, tries to thwart them, but it's too late.

As I said, not so important how the robots work or where they come from (space, presumably from some non-existent planet via non-existent FTL). It isn't important how likely real robots are to be human-shaped or not. It isn't important if robots could really take over this way. The story is more valid than ever because it's about the slippery slope of trading freedom from comfort and an illusion of safety. It doesn't matter if the "safety" takes the form of a sleek-black-robot or a border-line fascist government, or helpful fairies that help too much. It's the sort of thing every school kid in American should have been reading post 9-11, every voter should read before choosing their next president. It's a story WITH robots, not a story ABOUT robots. That's an important distinction, and one that's lost on a lot of sf purists.

Sometimes a science-fiction can even be accurately predictive in ways that have nothing to do with the scientific device in the story. In 1971 hard-sf writer Larry Niven published a novella titled “Flash Crowd.” The story is set in a world where teleportation booths make instantaneous travel anywhere in the world possible. The basic premise is that with live television reporting of breaking events, people would naturally jump into a teleportation booth to see things for themselves. The result: instant crowd, instant mob, and potential instant riot.

In fact, “flash crowds” did happen, and they didn’t require teleportation. Live coverage of TV did play a role in some real “flash crowds” but the cell phone turned out to be a far more effective device for creating them. Ask the teen in the news a while back who threw an adult-free party at his house and invited a few friends. Apparently they invited a few friends as well, and they told other friends, and so on, until the police had to be called to break up a near riot of hundreds of teens converging on the home, drawn there by an invisible web of phone calls and text messages.

The point here is that, who cares if teleportation is possible or not, or if real teleportation would ever look or work like Niven’s teleportation booths? That isn’t where the predictive value of the story is at all. It was a “what-if” thought problem that translated to the real world in a completely different form.

If we define science fiction and fantasy as stories built on the premise or "what if?" and If science fiction (valid science fiction) is defined purely as a "what if" story that "could happen" then we're left with a pretty narrow field indeed, an even the stories that pass this litmus test are inevitably headed rapidly into the dust-bin of history, to join the huge pool of "real" science-fiction that's gone before. Whole subgenres, such as alternate history, are excluded from the canon as well. (Yes, you can scientifically justify alternate history through some application of the "many worlds" theory, but few books in the genre even bother. And of those, I rarely see it as more than tissue-thin rationalization; science as window-dressing.)

Really, for science fiction and fantasy I think the important distinction is not "could this happen," but how willing and able the reader is to BELIEVE that it could (or did) happen for the purpose of, and duration of the story: the suspension of disbelief. Fantasy has its roots in myth and legend, in a time when monsters, gods, and magic were, if not believed, then no less incredible than FTL drives or time machines are to most modern readers. Science fiction was born out of time when science and technology had largely replaced those things and in the realm of "fantastic but credible" in the public consciousness. (There was still religion, of course, but speculating about religion has always been and remains to this day, a dangerous pursuit, more likely to enrage than enlighten.)

Mind you, it isn't important to REALLY make the reader believe in the fantastic elements of the story. They can enjoy and be moved by Lord of the Rings without thinking that Middle Earth is historical truth, or that orcs and elves are real. They need only be willing to embrace them in the context of the work. The same is true of science fiction. It really doesn't matter if teleportation doors or warp drives work or not, only that the reader is willing to believe them in the context of the story. If scientific or technological trappings make that easier, then so be it.

In fact, a distinction one could make of fantasy is that the average reader has the comfort of putting down the book and knowing that the fantastic things they're just read are NOT possible. The story mentioned could make the same point with magic mirrors as with teleportation doors, but would it have the same impact if the reader could so casually dismiss it in the end? Perhaps not. But that distance also has its advantages. "The Golden Compass" can write about religion (like I said, dangerous) in a way that might not be possible in a science-fiction book, or even in non-genre fiction. The subject is dangerous, but there's the emotional and societal safety-valve that it "isn't real," making such an examination much more palatable than it would otherwise. This is true of any hot-button topic. A little distance, the different perspective provided by a science fiction or fantasy context, makes it a bit easier to approach objectively. It's a bit of trickery that Jonathan Swift understood well almost 300 years ago, and it's still valid today.

Likewise, there's great value in allowing the reader to believe that a thing could be possible. "From the Earth to the Moon" is important, not because it accurately shows how a trip to the Moon might be made, but because it makes it credible that through industry and determination, such a thing IS possible, even if the details differ. Compare that to Star Trek. We know that space travel, even to distant stars, IS possible. And while I can say with some certainty that our methods of accomplishing this will not resemble the Starship Enterprise, that the explorers aren't likely to have much in common with Kirk and McCoy, and that the aliens will almost certainly not resemble Mr. Spock, that DOESN'T MATTER. We can understand and identify with Star Trek far more easily than we can, for instance, post-human intelligences spending centuries traveling between stars in "spaceships" that resemble silicon cobwebs thousands of miles across.

If Star Trek makes us believe that such voyages, through industry and determination are possible and desirable, then the rest is just window dressing. Details. And though science fiction can't predict how, we will get there someday.

The Darwinism of the Wind

2007-12-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Update to this post: 12/07/07 - See added note at the end of the post for additional information.)
Well, the worst storm in at least 20 years here on the Oregon coast is gone. The power came back on last night, and we have phones again (though with limited service) and internet. It's really nice to be back in the 21st century. Really nice.

Here we got some rain, but the brunt of the damage came from wind. Gusts, depending on who you listen to, were either as high as 125 or 129MPH. I think 125 is the official number. We're the lucky ones. Just north of us they got the rain, often 10-12 inches in just a few hours. You can resist the wind, but when water is determined, there's no stopping it. Those people have been devastated.

I drove around town this morning with camera at hand. I was surprised to see how quickly repairs and clean-up were progressing. A destroyed billboard had already been cleaned up. As you can see in the pictures, the gaping hole in the side of the local Casino was already being patched. Chain-saws, bucket lifts, and service trucks were everywhere.

Another thing that surprised me, given the extreme winds, wash how little real damage I could find. There were plenty of trees down, many ripped up by the roots or snapped off at the base. But very few structures were significantly damaged. There were a few broken windows from flying debris, lots of damaged roofs, and a few freakish things like the damaged wall at the Casino (and in that case I have to wonder if it was already weakened somehow, possibly by water leaking inside the wall).

There was lots of damage to signs, of course. It seemed like half the business signs in town were down or seriously damaged. But for the most part, unless they happened to be in the path of a falling tree (none of the ones I saw were, but I did hear of this happening) there was very little visible structural damage.

In most any other town, winds like these would have flattened the place, but it didn't happen here. The reason, is the Darwinism of the wind. We have storms here every winter. Locals really don't even pay any notice to the wind if it's under 60MPH. Below that, it's more an annoyance (blown-away trash cans, flattened winter flowers in the garden, and a few power outages) than a real threat.

For the most part, things that could be flattened by the wind were long ago flattened. Anything that could be blown away is long gone. The exceptions are, as mentioned, trees and signs, both of which tend to grown and age until the right gust of wind catches them and snaps them off.

Roof's age too, so damage there is inevitable, but usually not serious. By necessity, things are built strong here. My house has been standing up to these winds, three blocks off the beach and on top of a hill, for over fifty years. With luck, it will stand fifty more.

Thing is, when things fail here, they tend to fail catastrophically, especially in a storm as strong as this one. The Casino wall seen in previous pictures is a classic example of that. Somehow the wind got under the outer wall, and peeled that big building like a grape.

A less spectacular example is our big loss to the storm, a storage shed we bought last year. Yes there is (or used to be) a shed in this picture. Mostly what is left is the floor, some of the heavier contents, and a couple corner panels that remain attached. It was one of those pre-fab plastic jobs. It was surprisingly strong. I've never seen it move in our strongest winds before, and I watched it closely to be sure. But it just wasn't ready for triple-digit speeds. About midnight Sunday I saw that one of the side panels had popped out.

Chris and I ran out in a lull and moved the most vulnerable contents inside. But it was too late for the shed itself, as the most powerful part of the storm was still to hit, and with a hole in its side the wind could get under the roof, turning it into a sail. I knew the roof would go, it was only a matter of when. When the big gusts came, one of them lifted the roof off in one piece and deposited it in our front yard. The rest of the shed walls started to rapidly self-disassemble.

We ran out in heavy rain and wind (probably 70-80 gusts instead of 100) to grab the roof and drag it into a sheltered alley between two houses, so it didn't blow into someone's house or car and do more damage. We were lucky it didn't turn into a parasail and take both of us away, but we were successful.

Not happy for us, but looking around at people who lost homes or cars or even roofs, we were pretty lucky. We even managed to salvage all the pieces of the shed. I'll have to examine the parts carefully for damage, but it might even be possible to rebuild it. If we do, I'll be modifying it with all sorts of reinforcing straps and bolts to make it stronger. Worth a try anyway.

Because this is the coast, where only the strong survive.

(Update to this post: 12/07/07 When I took the picture of the Grocery Outlet store seen in the second picture, I thought the damage was only superficial loss of roofing on the facade. Turns out I should have looked through the windows. Water built up on the roof and caused a large part of the store's ceiling to collapse. As I said, when things happen, they tend to be catastrophic. The store has never suffered any noticeable storm damage in all the years I've lived here. Anyway, the store is now closed for major repairs with no word on when it will reopen.)

storm warning

2007-12-04T14:01:00.001-08:00

We've just weathered the worst storm we've ever seen here on the Oregon coast. 129mph gusts reported here in our little town. Our house is okay, but our storage shed self-disassembled. Damaged and downed trees all over town. Roads blocked. No power, phones, or internet. I drove 30 miles to a coffee-shop where I could blog this quickly. Here are some pictures of local damage and some downed power lines around the corner from the house. No word when we'll get power or phones yet. The main lines into the city are down, and we don't know for sure even where the breaks are.

Locals Dean Wesley Smith, Kris Rusch, Dan Duval, Jerry Wolfe are all well and accounted for. More later.

Buy me the Moon

2007-11-13T19:49:00.000-08:00

(Earthrise photos taken by the Kaguya probe, credit: Japan Space Exploration Agency)
As I've said before, people constantly over-estimate the cost of the Apollo lunar program. Not that it was cheap. It was a huge undertaking. But compared to many of the things big economies (like we have here in the United States) do, it just wasn't that big.

Today, a report by congressional Democrats pegged the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far at 1.6 Trillion dollars. The report is controversial, and Republicans are already calling for a retraction, but consider how it compares to the Apollo program.

By comparing various estimates as to the program's cost and running through cost-of-living calculators to adjust for inflation, I come up with a number of about 143.5 billion in 2007 dollars. Just for safety and simplicity, round it up to 160 billion dollars.

Now, keep in mind that a trillion has three more zeros in it than a billion. So if the report is right, our adventures in the middle-east have cost us as much as ten Apollo programs, and if its predictions are near correct, it will cost us over twenty Apollo programs by 2009.

But as I said, the report is controversial. Let's say it's wrong. Let's say it's a wild lie that inflates the actual cost of the war by a factor of ten. Then our war-of-the-moment has only cost us one Apollo program, and by the end of the decade, shouldn't cost us more than one or two more. That's much better.

Oh, one other factoid to consider. The Apollo program ran for 14 years, 1961 through 1975. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and the second Gulf war started in 2003. The report's projections only go through 2009. The Apollo program not only cost far less money, it was spread over a much longer time.

By the way, if you're curious, according to a recent Washington Post article, the inflation-adjusted cost for the Vietnam War was 549 billion dollars. And that was money well-spent, wasn't it?

A lot of people like to say we can't afford to go to Mars, or back to the Moon. Maybe they're right. But if so, it's important to consider why we can't afford it.

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's just cancel our next war and just build a Moon-base instead. Or to put it another way...

For decades, it's always stuck in my craw when I'd hear somebody say, "if we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we do 'X.'" Well, I think it's time to finally put that one to rest. I propose this replacement:

"If we can put an army in Iraq, why can't we put a man on the Moon?"

Geeks bearing gifts

2007-10-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

Forgive me. I have done a Geek thing. I installed Linux on one of my computers here last night, and I'm here to share the tale.

This is a big thing. I'm a writer, and computers are (following in importance perhaps only the English language, a tool I frequently and shamelessly abuse) one of my primary tools. I rely on them not only for word processing, but for business communication (email), project delivery (email again), research (very, very important), record keeping, promotion, tax preparation, almost everything to do with my web comic Minions at Work (except the Minions themselves) and that's just for starters.

There was a time that was pretty simple. Chris and I shared one computer back in the day (though that was before she started writing seriously), first CP/M (remember CP/M? No? I guess I am getting old...) then later MS-DOS, and then Windows. Everything, including the early Windows computers didn't require much upkeep. You installed software once (if it wasn't already installed on the machine when you got it) and forgot about it.

But upkeep has become and increasing burden. Software updates come weekly now, often whether you want them or not. Windows updates itself. So does the Norton security software. But there there's the browser, the media players, the browser plug-ins, all the Microsoft Office programs, all downloading, installing, hogging the computer's resources in the process, usually wanting to reboot when it's least convenient, and often causing other problems in the process. Each of these updates, we are assured is important, even vital. Most cover security issues, and we all know the threats are real. Despite all of this, my computer, probably the best-maintained machine in the place, still managed to get infected with adware a few weeks ago.

And it isn't just one machine. Oh, no. There are just two of us here in the house, Chris and I, but we have a bunch of computers. Four working desktops at the moment, and I think three laptops. There are computers in each office, a computer in the guest-room (which is also a backup), another desktop that may serve as a backup or a file server in the near future, a main laptop, and a couple of older machines as backup for that.

All of these are Win-boxes, all in need of constant care and feeding that some of them just don't get. I'm mostly the IT guy here, and I don't do nearly enough. Plus, all of them need security software, and that needs to be replaced, at considerable expense, annually. Worse, some of the older machines are still running Windows 98, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, and worse, by Norton, so there are suddenly these unsecured computers on my network, infrequently used, but still inviting trouble.

Something has to give. I'm tired of the update treadmill, and while lots of the old hardware we have here just keeps chugging along, its the software that wears out, and it matters not how little we use it. Turn on a computer you haven't used in six months, you still need six months worth of updates, if you can even get them.

"So," I can hear many of you saying, "you really need to get a Macintosh." Some of my best friends are Mac people, and I hear plenty of this in lunch and diner conversation.

Nope. I can tell you right now, I'm not going there. It isn't that I don't think Apple products are good. Most of them are. And they do solve a lot of problems in the short-term. Mainly it's that I'm of the unshakable opinion that Apple is an evil company. Now, sure, Microsoft is evil too. But everybody knows it, including all their customers and even their most loyal supporters. Microsoft doesn't even flat-out deny it, though they dance around the subject.

But my Apple friends are in blissful denial about the evil that is Apple. Apple is arrogant, monopolistic, anti-competitive, and most disturbing for me as a writer, seeking to establish a stranglehold over the distribution of intellectual property and then lock it into their hardware.

Making them, I guess, not much worse than any other large corporation. But what really disturbs me is the response of their average customer, which seems to be, "please, sir, may we have some more?" I'll consider putting a Mac on my desk the day I can buy a song from iTunes and put it on my Creative media player.

Which is not a blanket condemnation of Apple products or customers. Some of you know the devil you're dancing with, and that's fine. And there are plenty of people who, at this point, probably should never buy any computer other than a Macintosh. They're great for people with minimal technical aptitude and little time to fiddle, and who just need a smooth, easy, reliable computer experience at any price.

In fact, listening to my mom struggling (she lives diagonally across the country from me, with one phone line and a slow dial-up connection, so there isn't much I can do directly to help) to update to a new version of Norton, I found myself really wishing I'd told her to buy a Mac when she replaced her last PC. It would have required her to relearn a lot of things, but I think she could have managed it, and staying secure and stable using a dial-up connection would have been much less of an issue.

But there are unlikely to be any Macs in this house any time soon. We shall not speak of it again.

Up until recently I told myself that as long as I kept our primary hardware and software reasonably current, the problem would stay under control. The problems came only when we let things (like Windows 98) fall too far behind the technology curve. But due to a hardware failure, we recently replaced Chris' computer with a new Dell and Windows Vista.

You know Vista, the operating system that's supposed to be all stable and secure? Well, bloated and annoying seems to be more the case. I haven't been exposed to it much, and Chris' seems satisfied enough with her machine at the moment, but I've seen enough to suspect that it's just a continuation of the problem (and buying deeper into the Microsoft evil) rather than a solution, and it's no solution at all for our older machines. Even if they'd run Vista, it's just too damned expensive, difficult, and risky to update.

And one thing that has increasingly bothered me about both Apple and Microsoft is how much you no longer own the technology, it owns you. Look at the Apple customers who unlocked their iPhones (that probably never should have been locked in the first place) only to have them turned into "iBricks" at Apple's earliest convenience. Look at Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage," a bit of spyware that assumes your copy of Windows is pirated until proven otherwise, and then subjects your computer to a cavity search every time you want even the most minimal support, and which has already locked down the computers of countless owners of legal and legitimate Windows installations.

Ever notice how every new piece of software, and many of those countless updates, comes with a new terms-of-service agreement? Do you read them before clicking the accept button? Of course not. Nobody does. Would you understand them if you did? Unless you're a lawyer, no, and possibly not even then. These guys have their hooks into us, and they keep reeling in the line. It's not only infuriating and insulting, it's frightening, considering how much of our modern world depends on one of those two technology companies.

Which, along with other things, has had me thinking about Linux for a while. Based on internet and media chatter, it sounded appealing. A free, secure, stable operating system that operates on an open-source license that won't make you an indentured servant to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Plus, plenty of free software to choose from. In fact, it sounds almost too good to be true, which always makes me suspicious.

So, I keep hearing good buzz, but my last exposure to Unix-like operating systems was back in the command-line-driven days. I used command-line operating systems (MS-DOS, the afore-mentioned CP/M, and a variety of other early personal computer DOSes) for years, but I had no desire to learn another one.

Oh, sure, I knew there were graphical, windowing shells, but I was put off by the idea that there would be a technically complicated installation process. But more recently, the buzz has been that Linux is nearly ready for the mainstream, that there were versions that featured clean, automated installations and refined interfaces that hid most of the geeky stuff from the user. But (this is another thing I dislike about the Mac) all the geek stuff is still there. If you need to, or if you want to, you can "pop the hood" and poke around in the guts of the system at any time. I like that, even if I never have to use it.

Finally, the Linux guys had me intrigued enough to do something. The old Compaq in the guest-room hadn't been turned on in months, and its outdated Norton and Windows 98 operating system had turned it into a critical security issue if I ever did need to use it. It really didn't have any data on it that I was worried about losing, and if the installation failed, it really wasn't going to become much less useful than it already way. It was too old to bother with any significant hardware upgrades, and Chris' old Dell (running still-maintainable Windows XP) was probably going to replace it as soon as I got around to replacing a fried hard-drive.

Given that there wasn't a lot to lose, I really didn't sweat a lot over which of the zillion versions of Linux to download. My research mostly consisted of looking up Linux on the-often-unreliable-Wikipedia and looking for buzz-phrases like "stable" and "user-friendly installation." I finally decided to try Ubuntu, since it was based on Debian (which I'd heard of) only supposedly with more emphasis on usability. Also, you could supposedly try it without actually installing it by creating a bootable Ubuntu CD-ROM.

This wasn't very successful for me. First, I found the slowest server in the world (despite the fact that it's located only a few hundred miles from me) to download the 600+ megabyte disk image from. Then, when I tried to run it on the Compaq, it would grind on for a long time, display some pretty logos, then crash down to a command line where I was utterly lost.

To be fair, this is probably the fault of my old and eccentric hardware, and I never actually tried to install Ubuntu, just run it from the CD-ROM. Your experience may be much different. However, rather than dink with it, I decided to try another implementation. I decided to try Debian itself, as it had been praised by at least one Linux-user I'd talked directly to.

Debian didn't offer the "run from CD-ROM" option, but they did offer a "net installation" CD-ROM image that was much smaller (about 140 megs, I think). It required the target machine to have a high-speed Internet connection during the installation, but I had that covered. I downloaded the disk image file onto our primary laptop, along with a free disk-burning program the Debian folks recommended. This latter program allowed me to turn the disk image into a bootable installation CD-ROM, and it ran without a hitch.

I put the disk in the Compaq, turned it on, and watched it go. I was expecting problems, as I hadn't bothered to even investigate Linux drivers for the machine or any of its components (network card, graphics card, printer, sound-card, etc.).

The installer is text-based and pretty simple. If you're installing it as the only OS on a machine with no existing data on the hard disk you need to save, you shouldn't have to tell it much more than "go." I, however, wanted to try and preserve a Windows partition so I could keep that as a backup in the installation failed.

The installer included some pretty slick partitioning software, so I repartitioned the old 10 gig drive to allow a minimal 2 gigs for the Linux installation. I knew that Linux was supposed to be much more efficient than Windows, but this was only a blind guess. The installer automatically divided this up into two partitions, one for the installation, and a smaller one for swap files.

Let me stress that this is technical crap that you can avoid by just allowing Linux to completely take over the system, or at least a particular drive. I made things harder for myself than they needed to be.

The installation took quite a while, though it was no more long or troublesome than any of the many Windows installations I've been through. In fact, it was easier in that I never had to swap disks. Debian pulled everything it needed off the Internet.

Problem was, my first attempt at installation failed. It told me where it failed, in the process of installing application software, but it told me nothing at all about why. Now, it appears that at the point of failure, Linux itself had already installed just fine. I soft landed in a text menu of the install program, and it encouraged me to repeat the process manually, hopeful that it would somehow work the second time. But, it didn't, and neither did the following process, which was to set up the operating system to boot. Again, no information on why, not even a cryptic error code or number.

But I had a guess, which I suspect was probably right. I think it ran out of disk space. I restarted the process, partitioned the disk to give 3-gigs total to Linux, and tried again. It went through the process this time without a hitch. There were a couple of questions and prompts along the way that gave me pause, and might have sent a less technically savvy user into a panic. I had to come up with passwords (both an individual password, and an administrator password), an individual user name. I had to give the computer a name, and a domain name (not much of an issue unless, like me, you're trying to make it talk to an existing network of computers at your location).

But for the most part, it worked in an almost magical way. In any given Windows installation I've done, I've needed at some point to track down one (or more often many) hardware driver disks or track them down on web-sites. Here, it never happened. The installer seems to have recognized all my hardware and found the appropriate drivers on its own.

The moment of truth arrives. Following the prompts, I take out the CD-ROM and reboot the computer. It works! I have my first real look at Debian Linux!

In some ways, it's almost disappointingly familiar. It looks a lot like Windows, and most of the differences are pretty self-explanatory. I had no trouble finding and running applications, and navigating the files. It's slick, modern, and mouse driven. Oh, maybe the look isn't quite as sophisticated as a current version Windows or the Mac OS, but that's mostly window-dressing (no pun intended). If you've used either of those computers for a few years, you shouldn't have a bit of trouble here.

In terms of performance, it seemed fine, despite the old, slow, hardware and the minimal disk space I allowed it to have. (I'm sure that, like most operating systems, it would have run better with a faster processor, more memory, and more, faster, disk-space. On a even vaguely modern computer it seems to me that it would fairly scream, especially when compared to a resource-pig like Vista)

Did I say applications? Yes I did. One of the nifty things about these more user-friendly versions of Linux is that they give you the option of pre-installing software packages based on how you plan to use the computer. Debian gave me a lot of goodies to play with right out of the box. (Wait, there was no box! My bad!) First, there was an email program, several web-browers, and a BitTorrent-type file-sharing program. There was a whole list of mini-games of the sort that come with most Windows and Mac boxes (solitaire, blackjack, a mine game, a Tetris clone, and other time-wasters. There were video players, music players (for these latter two you'll probably need to download some decoders elsewhere, as these contain proprietary technology, and the Debian package includes only "open-source" software), picture viewers, and what is supposed to be a powerful PhotoShop clone.

Best of all, unlike most Windows computers you can buy, none of this is nag-ware, share-ware, spy-ware, ad-ware, cripple-ware, or any other flavor of no-ware. This is all full version, fully functional, no-strings-attached stuff.

And most importantly for the writer, it includes the open-source Microsoft Office clone, Open Office. I really haven't done much more than open this and poke around, but it looks fine for what most of us do. All the familiar formatting and editing tools seem to be there, and it reads and writes to all but maybe the very newest Microsoft Office formats (when submitting electronically, I always drop back to an older MS Office format anyway, as it avoids all sorts of potential compatibility problems). Moreover, it fully supports the "Open Office" formats which may better allow your documents to be used around the world.

It's really going to take a lot of use and transferring files back and forth with Microsoft systems to see if this is really ready for prime time as a professional writer's tool, but what I've seen so far is encouraging.

There's plenty of other Linux software out there too, much of it free and open-source. Are you going to be able to use your familiar applications on Linux? Quite likely not, but for the most common tasks, you'll probably find something similar, just about as good, and best of all, free.

This is an ongoing story. I doubt this is the last Linux installation I'll be doing here. One of the older laptops will probably be the next Guinea pig, and at some point, I might try to set up on one of the backup boxes as a file server for backups. For the foreseeable future, our two primary computers will probably still run some version of Windows. But I could at least imagine a day when the primary machines might at least be able to book Linux, and when maybe it might be just a backup computer running Windows, for those few instances when nothing else will do).

Is Linux ready for prime time? Should you consider it? My answer at this point is a definite "maybe." Installation still seems the greatest sticking point. Your installation could be great, and probably will be, but things will occasionally go wrong, and when they do, you could be on your own. Telephone or in-person access to an experienced Linux user is still probably a plus.

However, you can avoid this completely by buying a computer with Linux already installed. That's now an option, from major players like Dell, down to such mundane sources as Wal-Mart. As a bonus, you're likely to pay considerably less than for an equivalent Windows machine.

I still don't think this is for everybody, and I'll really have to pound on Open Office before I'm ready to sign-off on it. And like Mac users, Linux users are always going to find themselves facing programs they can't run, hardware they can't use, and things they can't do. It goes with the territory.

But it's at least now I see Linux as a viable option, if not for your primary computer, then maybe for your laptop or backup machine. It has many of the security advantages of a Mac, the openness (only better) of a Windows machine, and its cheap and friendly to any older hardware you may have laying around in the closet.

I'll continue to report our experiences, but if you're brave enough, and especially of you have a spare computer taking up storage space, go ahead, give it a try...

Gone but Not Forgotten

2007-09-24T03:47:00.000-07:00

One sad thing about writing, as I often have, media tie-in novels, is that they have a tendency to last only as long as a given licensing agreement. That means that most of them have a very short shelf-life. In a year or two or three, they're out of print, and with very rare exceptions, they never come back. They're owned by whoever licensed the particular property. You don't get the rights back, and in general, the license owner has little or no reason to reprint the book.

Sometimes, that's a blessing, but other times, when you're especially pleased with a project, it's a very sad thing. For me, the latter was true of the two novels I wrote based on the since-canceled Marvel comic book, "Generation-X." They were fun to write, I was pleased with how they turned out, and I would have loved to have written more if I'd had the chance. Alas, I didn't, and now I never will.

But books have an after-life of their own, drifting through garage sales, used book-stores, eBay and the occasional library. Tonight (thanks to a Google Alert I have set up to search for my name) I was surprised to discover a new web review of the second of my Generation-X novels, Genogoths. (Follow the link, and you'll also find my extended back-story there on the writing of the two Marvel tie-in novels I did.)

Now, the reviewer didn't declare it the classic of the ages, but they did read the book and seemingly enjoyed it. Even better, they decided to share the experience with others (and incidentally, me). I'm not sure how a writer can ask for more, especially this late in the game.

Thanks to those of you out there keeping our lost books alive.

A REALLY Cold War

2007-08-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Having just passed the depressing age of 50 does have a few advantages. It gives one some perspective on history. It's perhaps even more profound when one, as I did, starts out, a fan of science fiction and space exploration.

Even as a child I was living outside the day-to-day, anticipating a future which, for the most part, has never arrived. We never got our rocket packs or flying cars, we haven't been to Mars, and in fact have yet to get back to the Moon (though there's at least some hope that it will happen in my lifetime, even if it isn't as clear which country is going to get there first).

As a whole though, it's sometimes strange how much is the same. We still mostly get places cars on concrete and asphalt roads, or in subsonic jet airliners that are, in terms of comfort, if not technology, probably a step backwards from a 1966 Boeing 707. The plug of a 1945 radio still fits in a modern wall socket, and while the bulbs are slowly changing, Thomas Edison would still have recognized most of the light-sockets they fit into.

Yes, there are computers and the Internet, cell phones, iPods and other techno-toys, but in general, history seems to march along in the same rut. Our current misadventures in the middle-east wouldn't be unfamiliar to anyone who lived through the Vietnam war or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

There are exceptions though. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union being the most profound I can think of, events that clearly mark some kind of transition, that clearly state: things will never be the same again.

But for the most part, profound change is hard to come by. Most of all, while borders may squiggle and names on the map may mutate and shaft, the globe itself has remained the same. In fact, in looking into the future as a child, that was probably the last thing I ever expected to change. They don't call it the firmament for nothing.

But now the globe is changing. It's started, and it isn't about to stop. Of course, I'm talking about Global Warming, and not in the most obvious way, with the rising of sea-levels, the radical changes in coastlines, and the erasing of islands (and maybe much of Florida) that is likely to follow.

No, I'm talking about something which is changing much faster, something we folks who live in temperate regions don't normally think of as permanent at all: ice. Scientists have known for years that the arctic ice sheet is shrinking, and for places where land is normally locked in by sea ice, this is a profound change indeed. The mythical Northwest Passage for which early explorers of the Americas searched now exists, at least part of the time, and too soon, all the time. Compare it to a the appearance of a new ocean, or Atlantis reappearing above the waves.

But for those of us in the United States, this change has, so far, been fairly easy to ignore. Yes, one can point to Hurricane Katrina, but there's just enough scientific uncertainty about it's direct connection to global warming to allow for an easy state of denial. Same for the record-hot summers we've been having lately. Weather is, by definition, an uncertain business.

But maps are hard to deny, and for those to the north of us with each passing season they look out on a new world, one full of peril, and just possibly, opportunity. In such a situation, it shouldn't be unexpected that the balance of world power and tensions would shift. Still, I didn't see this one coming, and it's only taken a few weeks.

It started when Russia announced their intention to plant a flag under the ice cap on a submarine ridge extending out into the Arctic. Their intent was to lay claim to a until-now hidden region which may have untapped oil, gas, and other mineral reserves, made suddenly accessible by the melting ice cap. Russia claims the ridge is a natural extension of their homeland, and therefore should belong to them.

Some would dismiss the whole idea as silly, but several countries appear to be taking it very seriously. First, Canada, with designs on the same ridge, has announced its intentions to build a new deep-water port to service arctic patrol craft, to build new ships to use the port, and to beef up an existing paramilitary force called the Rangers (currently staffed mostly by part-time reservists) to defend their claims to the arctic region.

Then Denmark has started its own mapping expedition of the ridge, prepared to make their own claims under UN treaties.

Finally, surprisingly late to the party considering the current administration's close energy ties, the US is dispatching an ice-breaker to do a little mapping of their own off the coast of Alaska.

And just to raise the ante, Russia is now suddenly holding extensive war-games in the Arctic this week. Sabers, they are a rattling, and we're hardly getting started. With stunning speed, this is turning into a literal cold-war, and the long-term outcome is impossible to to predict.

Welcome to the future. We have passed through one of those portals of history, and nothing will ever be the same again. If you don't believe me, just look at the globe.

Life Imitates Art

2007-07-04T19:29:00.000-07:00

NASA has just released some exciting new images taken by the Cassini space probe of Saturn's moon Hyperion. As many fantastic moons as we've seen in the Jupiter and Saturn systems, they continue to offer visual surprises.

Hyperion, as it turns out, is an icy sponge of a moon blasted with craters and impact damage. But it's my understanding that the most striking visual feature comes not from impact, but from melting. Scientists believe that dark material on the surface of the moon is heated by the sun, thus causing it to melt its way into the surface. What makes this moon look so strange is that it's too small to be pulled into a spherical shape, and so "down" as defined by gravity isn't what our common sense tells it should be.

Our lifetime of experience on Earth tells us that "up" is usually at right angles from the ground. There are exceptions, of course, but then we're usually standing on a hill, mountain, or slope deviating from the surrounding terrain, and under sky, both of which usually allow us to define "flat," which is in turn 90 degrees from "up" and "down"

Not so on Hyperion, where "down" is going to point pretty much towards the center of mass. So dark objects melting into the ice near the ends of its oblong shape will travel "down" at a sharp angle to its surface. This is the first time I can think of that we've seen this so vividly illustrated.

You can think of Hyperion as two hills joined bottom to bottom. While those arches of flat planes at either end look to be relatively flat to the surface, I suspect to an astronaut standing on the surface they would appear to be steeply sloping upwards towards the ends of the moon, and from an observer out in space (like Cassini) the astronaut would appear to be standing at an angle.

Yet another example about how "common sense" may not serve us well once we move beyond the environment we evolved in.

But I was also struck with how the image reminded me of something more familiar, New York's famous Chrysler buildings (in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of design in the 20th century).

It's impossible to know what architect William Van Alen was thinking when he designed the arches of that famous spire. Could some part of his mind been imaging how a building so massive, so magnificent, so lofty, would actually defy the Earth itself? Could he have have envisioned a building that, so attracted only by its own gravity, its upper reaches would be drawn towards the center of its own, mighty, mass?

Okay, that's probably not what he was thinking, but it's a nice dream. I think I'll keep it.

New Star Trek Cover

2007-06-15T18:24:00.000-07:00

You see here (click on the image for a larger version) the just-approved "cover" art for our (a collaboration between my wife Chris and I) upcoming Star Trek the Next Generation ebook. It's part of a 5-book series that focuses on the "lost" year on the Enterprise-E between the end of the movie "Star Trek Generations" (where the Enterprise-D is destroyed) and "First Contact" (when the Big-E is just finishing its official shakedown period). Our book deals with the infiltration of E by a Changeling spy as they explore a dangerous planetary nebula, and features a lot of character development on Lt. Hawk, a helmsman who appeared in "Generations" and "First Contact," and who is one of the few established gay characters in the Trek universe.

If you're curious, the rest of the covers in the series can be on our editor Keith R.A. Decandido's blog here.

By the way, I don't know if I've already posted this cover, but another Trek project (previously released as an ebook) will finally hit print in trade-paperback later this, year. "Star Trek Corps of Engineers: Creative Couplings" includes our ebook "Spin." Spin is a harder-than-usual science-fiction first-contact story inspired in part by my love of the works of such old-school sf writers as Hal Clement and James White.

In the book, the SCE must deal with a derelict alien spacecraft on a collision-course with an alien planet. The ship is a rapidly spinning ring with very high artificial gravity at the rim, a bunch of very alien corpses on-board, and no inner hub or structure to provide logical access to or from the interior. And in this case, neither the ship, nor the planet it is endangering, are what they seem.

I'm pretty pleased with this one. Check it out.

1200 Days on Mars

2007-05-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

There was exciting news from NASA yesterday as the Spirit Mars rover has accidentally discovered silica-rich soil, a mineral that likely could not have formed without the presence of water. It's a strong further clue that Mars was once warmer and wetter than it is today, and might (or might once have) supported some form of life.

Which is pretty cool stuff, but it isn't really what this post is about. What struck me was a quote from Steve Squyres of Cornell University, leader of the rover team in a TimesOnline Article. He says, "This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there."

Indeed. We've been poking around the planet we live on for many thousands of years and it continues to surprise and mystify us. Which is why I'm always appalled at detractors who dismiss the idea of a return to the Moon because, "we've already done that."

What surprises me most is that I hear this not just from opponents of space exploration, but from space advocates as well. Many of them simply see the Moon as a nothing more than a distraction from their real goal of a manned expedition to Mars. "Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt and some rocks. Move along. Nothing to see here."

Bull.

Now, admittedly, the Moon is in many ways a far less interesting and complex place than Mars. But we still know so little about it. The assumption that the Apollo missions "saw everything there is to see" is simply absurd, and some people don't appreciate how short a time they were there, and how little they saw while they were there. First, let's look at the numbers:

Apollo 11
Time on Surface: 21 Hours, 36 Minutes
EVA Time (time spent outside the spacecraft actually doing something): 2 Hours, 32 Minutes

Apollo 12
Time: On Surface: 31 Hours, 31 Minutes
EVA Time: 7 hours 45 Minutes

Apollo 14 (Apollo 13, of course, suffered a crippling explosion on the way to the Moon and was unable to land)
Time on Surface: 33 Hours, 30 Minutes
EVA Time: 9 Hours, 22 Minutes

Apollo 15
Time on Surface: 66 Hours, 55 Minutes
EVA Time: 18 Hours, 33 Minutes

Apollo 16
Time on Surface: 71 Hours, 2 Minutes
EVA Time: 20 Hours, 14 Minutes

Apollo 17
Time on Surface: 75 Hours
EVA Time: 22 Hours, 4 Minutes

So that's it, a total of about (by my sometimes shaky math) about 80 and one half hours on the Moon. And a lot of that was spent climbing up and down ladders, opening and closing hatches, stowing and unstowing gear, figuring out how to walk and work (every flight was essentially a training flight). Three days and change. Almost seven man days, if you're generous.

Yeah, that's just the manned part, but it isn't like there's a huge body of unmanned exploration to back it up. The U.S. sent seven unmanned Surveyor landers in advance of the Apollo program. Five of these landed. The others crashed. These were frightfully primitive by current standards, comparing to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers about like a rusty skateboard compares to an SUV. They had a crude TV camera, a few simple instruments, and some had a simple arm that seemed to have been borrowed from a carnival claw-machine.

This is in no way intended to be dismissive of the accomplishments of the talented people who built this thing. It's simply a product of its time, relatively early in the TV era, and the dawn of the computer/microelectronics age. Compare it to then-contemporary dial phones, televisions with vacuum tubes, and room-sized mainframe computers with 8k (no gigs, not megs, kilobytes) of memory.

The Russians later two sent rather more sophisticated landers that included remotely operated rover vehicles. Technical wonders at the time, and a bit more comparable to Spirit and Opportunity, they're still primitive by modern standards.

Even ignoring the total time spent in exploration, keep in mind that in all cases, the landing sites were picked for safety first, and their scientific interest second. This is especially true of the early Apollo missions. And in any case, that's a handful of sites on a globe with about the same surface area as the United States, Russia and Canada combined. And the sites chosen aren't even a random sampling. Even ignoring the safety issue, none of the sites were on the lunar far-side, which has a surface completely (and perhaps a little mysteriously) different than the one we see in our sky every night. None of the landings took place near the poles, where frozen water may still exist.

What do we know about the Moon? How much have explored? Slightly more than none and zilch. We have barely been there. We have not done that. We don't even know where tee-shirts are sold. But we did get some rocks representative of fairly safe landing zones.

Okay, again, this has to be taken in perspective. The Apollo program was a monumental accomplishment, a wonder if its age or any other. But it ended too soon, and it should have been only the beginning.

I realize too that, although what I'm advocating is a manned return to the Moon, this could just as easily be used as an argument for unmanned exploration, something I'm certainly not against. Quite the contrary, I think any manned return to the Moon should happen in conjunction with a strong program of unmanned exploration. In fact, the Moon could be an ideal laboratory to study how to dovetail the use of man and machine in exploration of another world, lessons that could be invaluable in planning the much longer, dangerous, and yes, more expensive trip to Mars.

Yes, I think we should go to Mars, with robots, and eventually, with human explorers. But one thing I'm not sure the Mars advocates have considered is, "what next?" Going to Mars is going to be hugely expensive and dangerous, and while it is certainly worth doing, it seems doubtful that it will in any reasonable term become routine. In fact, it's possible it could be a one-shot deal. At most, it seems likely that a Mars program would consider of no more than a hand-full of manned expeditions before costs became prohibited.

Yes, there will still be much of Mars to explore, but does that matter if we can't afford to explore it? And as we have seen with the Moon, the presence of unexplored territory is no certainty that we will follow through once the novelty wears off. What if we "go there, do that?" Even if cost were no object, other than asteroids there are few obtainable targets for manned exploration in the solar system without great leaps in propulsion technology.

A stepping-stone approach to Mars via the Moon would allow us to establish a more permanent off-world foothold, one that might better prepare us for that great leap, and allow us to more affordably continue our off-world explorations afterwards. The Moon is not a distraction from Mars. It is both a testing and training ground for further off-world exploration, and a sustainable foothold off this fragile world of ours. A long-term manned presence on the Moon greatly increases the possibility that we will not only successfully go to Mars once, but that we will one day return again and again, perhaps eventually to stay, perhaps to map and explore all those, far, undiscovered lands.

And I wonder what unexpected secrets we will find, on our 1200th day on the Moon? Only 1196 and 2/3rds to go.

(All photos NASA/JPL)

Minions at Work video trailer

2007-04-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

According to some on-line discussions I've been following, it seems to be the hot thing for authors (or publishers, or publicists) to create video trailers for their books and place them on the web. Here's one from my old-pal Virgina Baker, here's an author-produced on from P.R. Frost and here's one for a mystery anthology featuring my friend Kris Rusch. Here's a fancier professionally produced version for science fiction writer Greg Bear's novel Eon.

When publishers do these they're great, but apparently, some authors are spending many thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to have these things produced for them. What do I think of this? Well, like most extreme self-publicity efforts, I think it's usually at best futile, at worst, counter-productive.

My theory of author publicity is still that it should be free and take none of the author's time. Money should flow into an author's pockets, not the other way, and publicity time shouldn't cut into a writer's writing time. (Which means "no-time" makes it okay to post on a blog, if it's something you enjoy enough to consider recreation.)

Which is why I think author produced video trailers can be just fine. The tools to make them are pretty much free (both Macs and PCs have free video editing software that will do the job), and most of the materials for a basic trailer are generally already at hand (cover shots, cover art, cover copy, pull-quotes, author photos, etc.) Yes, you could get original music, professional voice talent, original art, fancy animation. Yes, you could actually hire actors and dramatize scenes from the book. But to my mind, that's the sort of stuff a publisher should do, only if they see it as being cost-effective. Authors should keep it simple. I believe that you can get most of the bang for very few of the bucks.

Given all this, I decided to put my toes in the water. Lacking a new release to promote, I instead did a video trailer for my weekly web comic, Minions at Work. To view the trailer directly in the blog, click on the linked image in the sidebar to your left.

This was produced using all free software. Video editing and effects were done using Microsoft Movie Maker. It's simple, but easy to use and it does the job. I did my own music (yeah, most people will NOT go this route) using a freeware Midi sequencer called Anvil Studio. Finally, I used an nifty open-source sound recorder/mixer/editor called Audacity (also available for Mac and Unix/Linux) to save my music as a MP3 file that Movie Maker could understand and to so some mixing and editing. (This is also a good tool for creating your own voice or narration tracks.)

So, we have tools - free, source material: all stuff existing on my hard disk, time - a few hours of (for me) fun-time. It could be slicker. It could be better. But it isn't bad, and when I do get around to doing a trailer for a book, it will be far better yet...

Silent Running Trailer

2007-04-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

Doubtless the copyright police will find this sooner or later, but for the moment, here's the link to the Silent Running trailer that I discovered on YouTube. If you've never seen the film, keep in mind that that the trailer doesn't represent the movie very well. It tells too much, too little, and misrepresents the film at several points, but it does have some nifty clips from the film in it that will give you some sense of its unique look. Domes and drones. Gotta love it. Go check it out while you still can.

Why I love "Silent Running" (and you should too)

2007-04-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

There are movies you want to forget, movies that entertain purely in the moment and wash from your consciousness five minutes after you leave the theater, and then there are movies that keep creeping back into your consciousness years or decades later, demanding to be watched again to see if they've stood up to the sands of time.

For me, "Silent Running" is one of the latter category of films. I've watched it many times over the years, though not recently, but several months ago it came up in an on-line discussion, and I was compelled to rent the DVD from Netflix and watch it again.

Now, this is always a task approached with trepidation, because some films simply don't hold up, even films you've watched repeatedly and enjoyed. Eventually you, or the world you live in, simply passes them by. At best they become watchable as a relic of their time or an object of nostalgia. On surface, Silent Running seems particularly vulnerable to this, with its Joan Baez songs, cult actor Bruce Dern as star, and its vaguely counter-culture themes.

But I was pleased to find that not only did the film hold up, it's actually aging well. Yes, the once-thrilling special effects have gone from spectacular to merely serviceable for the most part, but there's never a point where they become embarrassing. The spaceship interior sets still look great, and for the most part would look right at home in any modern science fiction film or TV show. And the drones, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, are still among the best cinematic robots (and most endearing non-human characters) of all time.

The enjoyable soundtrack (by Peter Scheckele, better known as his alter-ego P.D.Q. Bach) gives the sometimes claustrophobic film grandeur and scope, and the songs, which at the time seemed to me a bit intrusive, now seem organic and essential to the film.

Moreover, the writing, direction, and performances (much of the movie is essentially a one-man-show, with Bruce Dern ably carrying the movie with only the drones and his artificial environment to play against).

But not only did the movie hold up, as I watched it, I became increasingly convinced that it was not merely a good movie, it was an important movie, a cinematic milestone that almost single handedly created the modern space science fiction film.

Without Silent Running there is no Star Wars, no Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no Star Trek films (or follow-on TV series), no Babylon 5 or Farscape or reimagined Galactica. In so many areas, from the most technical to the most artistic, Silent Running either radically changed or reinvented the genre in dozens of important ways.

Silent Running should be recognized as one of the ground-breaking sf films of all time, on a list with Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, Alien, Bladerunner, and a handful of other better-known films. But for the most part, it seems to languish in obscurity, existing in the shadow of Star Wars, a film that in many ways is made in its image, and in at least a few ways is probably inferior.

Why? Well, Silent Running wasn't a huge commercial success a the time. It was produced as part of an experimental program by Universal to produce five films on a budget of a million dollars (which sounds absurdly low-budget now, and was still pretty low even then) each (ironically, one of these five was George Lucas' break-out hit, American Graffiti). But also as part of the experiment, it was shoved into theaters with no real publicity campaign. Like many people, I think I first became aware of the film not from its initial release, but from seeing the soundtrack album (with its spectacular art from the poster seen above) in a record store. Likely, I first saw the movie on TV, though I later saw it in art-house and college film-class screenings.

People who have seen Silent Running usually remember it, but frankly, not that many people have seen it. The current DVD release lists for about $15, is packed with extras (several documentaries including a 45-minute "making of," and a commentary track by director Doug Trumbull and Bruce Dern) and is well worth seeking out.

So enough about it being good. Here are some of the reasons I think it's important...

1.The entire "Star Wars" era of special effects begins here.

Now, admittedly, Doug Trumbull cut his teeth on the ground-breaking effects of 2001, a Space Odyssey, but in many ways, that film would have a dead end without this film. Director Stanley Kubrick was notoriously secretive about some aspects of the effects, to the extent of destroying the models and most records of their creation after the film was finished. This may have had more to do with preventing a sequel than any real attempt to hide his methods, but while many "big iron" effects for the film (like the rotating Discovery centrifuge set) were well publicized and documented, the model work was relatively undocumented.

In addition, 2001 did little but verify the conventional wisdom of Hollywood: that good special effects could only be done in a huge-budget studio blockbuster. The idea that first rate effects could be done cheaply, and might even make the movie cheaper, that just was unimaginable.

So along comes Silent Running, done on a modest budget, which still managed to incorporate some of the most spectacular models and effects seen on screen until that time. It established the hyper-detailed "kitbashing" (using plastic model parts and other shapes to provide surface texture on spaceships) look that would soon be followed by Star Wars and countless other movies and TV series.

One of the people working under Trumbull on the effects was John Dykstra, who managed most of the model photography for the movie. Dykstra was the wizard who developed the computerized motion-control camera system that made possible the elaborate space-battles of the pre-CGI Star Wars movies (and pretty much every other effects film to follow). Though there is no motion-control on Silent Running, the long-exposure photography methods used on the models were similar, and there were then state-of-the-art robots on set. It isn't difficult to imagine Dykstra already putting the pieces together in his mind.

2. Silent Running brought industrial thinking into film-making

Prior to Silent Running, not only special effects, but many aspects of movie production, had long been static. Sets, props, and models were "old school," done with wood, plaster, fabric and more rarely, metal. Most physical aspects of the film, lights, photography, construction, used long-established methods, many of them rooted in the theater.

Silent Running seemed to take a fresh-look at almost everything. Trumbull came from an engineering background, and he brought new technologies, materials, and production methods into the film. Sets and props were produced using modern plastic molding techniques. Rather than simply using wooden props, many items on the Silent Running set were in some way functional: the small ATV vehicles driven around the ship, robotic arms, video monitors, electronic instrumentation, it didn't just sort of look right, it worked. It contributed to a feeling a realism and believability that holds up pretty well even today.

More importantly, though Star Wars had a larger budget, it simply couldn't have been done without the methods established by Silent Running. You see this all through the film in thousands of places, but it's most obvious in the stormtrooper armor. In old-school Hollywood, it would have required more than film's entire budget to individually produce each suit by hand. The use of plastics allowed them to be mass-produced affordably. The same goes for many of the droids, vehicles, and even Darth Vader himself.

3. Silent Running established the "grunge" look for science fiction films

Before Silent Running, the look for most science fiction spacecraft was clean, mechanical, and sterile. The Valley Forge was one-part well-used industrial and one part lived in. The floors were dirty. People decorated their living spaces, they played pool and poker to kill the boredom. Things showed wear-and-tear. People personalized their uniforms. The Valley Forge was a place where people lived and worked, and it showed it.

Star Wars took it a step farther, by creating even more grungy places (trash-masher, anyone?) and showing us whole, living, cities and worlds, but it starts with Silent Running, and you can trace the line on to the Alien movies and even Bladerunner.

4. Silent Running brought fully-realized characters into science fiction film

Before Silent Running, most future science fiction charters fell into the categories of a handful of stereotypes. There was the square-jawed hero/military man. There was the idealistic and detached (possibly even mad) scientist. There was the cold-blooded human robot. There was the lovely but helpless heroine. There was the slightly dim comic relief. The godly and arrogant (possibly with justification, probably not) alien. A few others.

Even superior films like 2001 and Forbidden Planet usually drew their characters from that pool (and to a lesser extent, so did the Star Wars films that followed).

But the hero of Silent Running wasn't all good, and it's villains weren't really bad. All of them had reasons for acting as they did, flaws, and a whole range of human quirks. Bruce Dern clearly gets a great deal of credit for bringing his character to life, and for picking a number of his Actor's Studio pals to fill out the rest of the Valley Forge crew. These characters wouldn't have been out of place on a contemporary commercial fishing boat, or an oil-platform, or a coal mine, and that was exactly the point. Silent Running brought to cinema the idea that while technology and circumstances may move on, people will remain very much the same. It suggested that science fiction could tell human, character-driven stories, and not just intellectual treatments of ideas, or scary tails of monsters, or square-jawed adventures.

The crew of the Valley Forge is the clear model for the crew of Alien's Nostromo, or the space marines that followed them in Aliens, or the space-cowboys of Serenity.

5. Its environmental themes are more timely than ever

Unfortunately, the idea that ecosystems might collapse, that forests would all be destroyed, and especially that most people would just sit around and let it happen, that all seems way more credible to me now than it did in 1972. Yes, from a strictly science-fictional standpoint, this works best taken as an eco-fable. (What do the people on this plant-deprived Earth eat, or even breath for that matter?) But it's way less over-the-top that I originally thought. (Actually, a whole range of 70s cautionary sf films, Soylent Green, the Omega Man, even Planet of the Apes, seems less fantastic than they once did, which is a pretty sad commentary on the state of modern life, actually.)

6. Best robots ever!

Okay, this is a stretch, especially as fond as I am of Robby the Robot, but Huey, Dewey and Louie broke all manner of ground for cinematic robots. With the exception of Robby, most movie robots to this point had been soulless monsters, just waiting (and often not very long) to run amok. Even Robby, as benign as he is, remains a frightening and potent symbol of technology beyond our understanding.

The drones were believably tools, simply serving as they were programmed to serve. Yet as sophisticated as they obviously are, they also have developed human-like quirks and surprising behaviors. It's hard not to think of them as innocent children caught in some tragedy beyond their understanding. Perhaps this is actually their nature, or perhaps it is merely something we as humans, trying to understand them, project on their boldly un-anthropomorphic shapes and methods of moving and communicating. Either way, it says as much as us as it does about them.

Many scenes with the drones remain the most moving and memorable in the movie. Trumbull's genius was in making them both the least anthropomorphic of film robots, and the most human. The drones were played by human actors, double-amputees, walking on their hands, and hidden inside clever, light-weight, plastic suits, allowing them to deliver a convincing performance without needing to resort to mechanical contrivances to hide their humanity. And of course, Bruce Dern's performance in playing to them also deserves some credit for the power their scenes carry.

And while some aspects of the on-screen methods used to program the drones haven't held up well (keying card-game rules by hand into a terminal or resoldering circuits under a microscope, all guided by a mimeographed service manual), overall their appearance and behaviors have only become more realistic as robots have advanced. I suspect that it's only a matter of time before some robotic scientist, influenced by the film at an early age, builds a functional drone modeled on the early version.

Even if George Lucas hadn't admitted the influence, it should be obvious that without the drones, there is no R2D2 as we know him. And while R2D2 is a pretty cool film robot, in most every measure besides public recognition, the drones just have him beat.

There are other points to be made, but I think the defense can rest here. Without Silent Running, it's doubtful that any of the modern classics of science fiction film and television would exist, or at least, if they'd exist in anything like the form we know them today. It's a landmark, ground-breaking film which had untold influence on the industry.

It's interesting to note too that all the film's influence can't be credited entirely to the film itself. While much of the production of 2001 went unseen, every aspect of Silent Running was unusually well documented. Not only was it the subject of a detailed 45 minute "making of" documentary (yes, the one on the DVD), but it was covered extensively in the industry press, most notably a massive series of articles in American Cinematographer magazine.

Thanks to this, Silent Running provided both inspiration for a whole generation of film makers hoping to make low-budget science fiction films, and a "how-to" guide to dozens of useful and innovative techniques that could be applied to make them.

It's a shame that Doug Trumbull was as interested in innovating the technology used to produce and display films as he was in the films themselves. As a result, he made only one other major theatrical feature, 1983's Brainstorm, a film better known for the death during production of star Natalie Wood than any virtue of the film itself.

Instead of making films, Trumbull became obsessed with a series of largely dead-end large-format projection systems that he hoped would bring greater realism and audience involvement to the masses. Some of these later did find some application in motion-ride systems, and Trumbull did direct several programs for these attractions.

But while this new technology could have revolutionized cinema, for various reasons it didn't, and now the digital world has largely passed it by. I'd trade it all for even one more film like Silent Running.

I Hate Destiny

2007-03-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

There's a great scene in Mel Brook's classic parody film "Young Frankenstein." The young Doctor Frankenstein, as played by Gene Wilder, has traveled to his grandfather's castle in Transylvania and is gradually uncovering the secrets of his ancestor's experiments in reanimating the dead. Though he has tried to distance himself from his family history, he is strangely, almost mystically, drawn to it. He lays in his bead, and his slumber is interrupted by a fitful dream. "Destiny," he mumbles in his sleep. Then again. "Destiny!" Then he begin to rock from side to side, falling into to cadence of a cheerleader, "no escaping, that's for me! Destiny! Destiny! No escaping, that's for me!"

Even in 1974, Brooks (and Wilder, who wrote the screenplay as well as starred) knew that destiny was tired and cliched concept worthy primarily of parody. Yet it is the cockroach of story tropes. Not only has it refused to die, it seeming has grown in popularity of use, as I was reminded by episodes this week of two popular TV shows I generally like very much, Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. (Spoilers for recent episodes of both shows follow, so if you haven't caught up your TiVo or live outside the U.S. where episodes are delayed, proceed with caution.)

In fiction, the concept of destiny (and the often closely related, often overlapping, trope of prophecy) takes on many forms, but the most common goes something like this. Our protagonist either learns of or comes to believe in some special destiny ahead of them. Often there are cryptic prophecies here (as I said, overlapping), or visions, or dreams, or perhaps an inscription on some ancient tablet or temple wall to point the way. Perhaps the destiny of the coming hero/leader is already known to our protagonist or others around him/her, and they only later beginning to suspect that he/she is The One.

At that point, our hero will either seek their destiny, or fight hopelessly against, it, but either way, they're headed there on rails. There will be much hand-wringing over what they cryptic-to-the-point-of-uselessness prophecy/inscription means, and the mysteries will be dragged out, often to tiresome lengths. Maybe the villain knows about the prophecy too, and tries to put the whack on our protagonist, but that trick never works. Sacrifices may be made along the way, there may be some twists and turns, a surprise or two, and it may not come out exactly the way you imagined, but destiny will be fulfilled because -- hey -- it's destiny!

And really, it's this most basic use of destiny that bugs me. It's certainly possible to write good stories using the concept, and to apply it in different ways, but there's a recursive, meta-element to the story use of destiny. Once a writer starts to apply it to the story, all too often it lazily falls into the above pattern.

I'm not sure where the concept of destiny first crept into literature, but it is certain that it is very, very old. It's used in the Bible, for instance (look at Moses) and it's the basis of Arthurian legend. Perhaps it's as old as literature itself, and quite possibly older.

My suspicion is that it is closely related to the concept of the divine right of kings, the idea that the had of God (or some similar supernatural force) reaches down on high and delivers greatness onto some individual. By this rule, great heroes and leaders aren't made, or even necessarily born. They are created, by powers beyond humanity.

It comes down, I suppose, to the fundamental question of free will. Free will, may be an illusion, but by golly it's a good illusion, and I like it. I like the idea that I have free will, and I like the idea that my heroes (and villains, for that matter) have it as well. I like them to make choices, and then see the consequences of those choices honestly played out in drama.

Destiny cheats all that. Ultimately it doesn't matter what choices the hero make. Ultimately destiny is going to use its big, intrusive hand to shove him back onto his preordained course. In fact, a convention of these stories is often that fighting destiny is bad. Destiny is a bitch, and it will often smite your girfriend, or your dad, or your favorite dog Carl if you don't immediately let her have her way.

Now that I think of it, there's another ancient story convention closely related to destiny, one that that has more completely condemned to the dust-bin of literary history: deus ex machina, "God out of the machine." It originates in the ancient Greek and Roman theater, where an actor playing a God would be lowered out of the rafters on a lift to extricate the hapless human characters from their hopeless situation.

In modern terms, it's any story where the characters are rescued from their situation by any intrusively external and unexpected device rather than by their own actions. It's seen as a cheat, and most writers are taught early on to avoid its use. But thinking about it, how is the typical destiny story anything by deus ex machina writ large? In a destiny story, the Gods don't even wait till the end of the play to hit the down button on their cosmic elevator. In a destiny story, they've the first ones on stage, yanking and shoving the other players around through the whole show.

Let's get back to those TV shows I was talking about. First, and to me most annoyingly, Battlestar Galactica. Okay, I really like this show, and I have to let a certain amount of destiny and prophecy slip by. It's really fundamental to the series itself, which is built on mythic and religious elements (as was, somewhat more ham-handedly, the original series).

So when a Galactica character says something like, "this has all happened before, and it will all happen again," I'm okay with that. It's all part of a larger mythic structure that, usually, isn't the story itself. It's simply a framework within which more human stories are told.

Sure, there are the ancient clues to Earth, and how we find them. But that isn't destiny, that's just the McGuffin of the week. And certain characters have had prophecies applied to them before, especially President Laura Roslin. But it's only really become intrusive in a plot line involving Kara "Starbuck" Thrace which (seemingly) reached its climax last week the the death of the character.

In this case, both prophecy (as delivered by "oracles") and visions (in the form of a pacticular "eye of God" design that Kara has felt compelled to paint and draw since childhood) come into play. We are told again and again, from by several widely dispersed characters, that Kara has a "great destiny." I'll even allow for some of this. Kara made a great flawed and reluctant hero, fighting destiny every step of the way. For a while, I thought she might even escape it. But no...

If this episode is to be taken at face value, her "great destiny" was to die a stupid, pointless, and self-inflicted death. It's been suggested by the show's creator, Ron Moore (who I greatly respect as a writer, even if I don't always agree with his decisions) that her death will ultimately have some greater meaning for the future of the colonists (and perhaps the Cylons as well, since they were even more interested in her "destiny" than the humans were). A suspicious mind might even suspect that while she may have "crossed over," perhaps she isn't as dead as she appears.

But ignoring all this, it was just an annoying story to watch. The prophecy elements had become intrusive and heavy-handed to the point of giving the character no real purpose other than self-destruction, and the resolution required a character defined by her willfulness and Independence, to blissfully surrender to her stupid end.

Hopefully it will all get better, and in the later context of the show, this will seem like no more than a speed-bump. Hopefully.

A much different (and in fact, more diverse) approach to destiny can be found in Heroes, where the concept takes on many form. First and most literally, there is Hiro's conviction that his has a "destiny" to use his powers over time and space to become a hero. Okay, he calls it destiny, but I call it conviction. I call it character. Hiro is trying to become a hero because he has chosen to do so. The powers don't make him a hero. Others on the show have powers, and have much different paths. Hiro has made a choice to follow his current path (wherever it leads him, and I hope it is to success). Free will applies. This is destiny in name only.

But the show also has several forms of prophecy, more or less supernatural. Artist Isaac Mendez has been shown to be able to paint the future (an ability also used on occasion by human-duplicator Peter Petrelli). A more science-fictional version of prophecy derives from Hiro's time-travel abilities. Twice (most recently in this week's episode) he's traveled forward to see the destruction of New York City by some kind of explosion. A future version of Hiro also returned to present day and delivered the cryptic message, "save the cheerleader, save the world."

From a story standpoint, not much of this bothers me. Why? Well, while both the paintings and the time travel episodes forecast the future, it is yet to be determined that they absolutely define it. In fact, it seems likely that they do not, since we can presume (if not with absolute certainty) that the destruction of New York will somehow be averted. I can also allow for the typically cryptic "prophecy" of "save the cheerleader, save the world," as Hiro explains he is trying not to cause a rift in time. Perhaps saying or doing anything too direct would cause a paradox. But it suggests also that, within limitations, Hiro knows that time can be changed.

Again, while the rules of the Heroes universe have yet to be completely defined, there's no suggestion that free will is violated. The characters have some clues as to what will, or could, happen in the future, but they apparently can change that future. Their action, and their choices, have consequences.

So, lets try to boil this down to a set of rules or guidelines for effective use of destiny/prophecy in fiction.

1. Free will must be preserved. Characters must have choices, and those choices must have honest results and consequences within the context of the story.

2. Prophecy should forecast, not predict. This is an important distinction, as one leaves your characters room to shape the future, and the other does not.

Of course, there is an entire category of story based on the idea of changing the future while maintaining the prophecy, "cheating destiny" so to speak. Perhaps our heroine sees a vision of her lover stabbed to death, but changes events so that it is actually the villain disguised as her lover who is killed. Its a small (but important) part of the movie "Back to the Future," where when Doc Brown learns that he will be shot in the future, wears a bullet-proof-vest to the meeting and thus survives without changing the events as witnessed.

These "cheating destiny" stories aren't inherently bad, but if that's all the story is about, then its just a puzzle or a trick. Entertaining, perhaps (except that you've seen it a hundred times before), but not good storytelling.

I also remind you that a lesser used but interesting device is the prophecy that is patently wrong or false. In particular, I love the tragic villain who, having latched onto such a false prophecy, follows it straight to their own ruin and destruction.

3. A character with a destiny is always less interesting than a hero with choices. Heroes (and villains) aren't born that way. They may have certain gifts and abilities, sure, but they must be able to choose how to use them (or have their choices taken from them by believable circumstances, not simply the blundering hand a fate). There is no greater villain than one who contains the seeds of his own corruption. There is no mightier hero than one forged by his own hand, guided by his own heart, and for whom a lesser (or darker) path is always an option.

4. Destiny is not required. Remember, even in fantasy, there's no law that says you need destiny or prophecy. In fact, I'd venture there are far more stories to tell without them than with them. In an (as yet unpublished) young adult fantasy novel I wrote, I had a kind-of-fortune-teller say to a young character when she asks if she's locked into the role of world-saver, "There is no destiny. There are only -- possibilities." Really, those are my words to live by.

Finally, I am reminded of my old friend, Conan. He lives in a world of magic, gods and seers. Yet he ultimately becomes a king not by divine right, but by his own hand, by living his life as he must and as he will. His god, Crom, almost never interferes or intervenes in the affairs of his followers. His only gift to them is the strength they are born with. The rest is up to them.

That Crom, he would have made a good writer.

Minions of their own Domain

2007-01-31T03:07:00.000-08:00

I've gotten a domain for my "Minions at Work" weekly web cartoon. It's still hosted at Blogger, and the old URLs still work, but the new "official" address is:
www.MinionsAtWork.com. This makes it easier to remember. Handy, if you want to check in on a computer other than your regular one, or if you want to pass the address along to friends (which I certainly hope that you do).

Work continues on my "I Was a Teenaged Minon" young-adult novel, though I'll have to put it aside for at least a few weeks while I work on a Star Trek the Next Generation tie-in project with a tight deadline.

Chris just turned in a rewrite of a non-genre young-adult novel to our agent and is co-writing on the Trek project.

Oh, and we're about to remodel our only bathroom (if your definition of "remodeling" is bringing it out of the 70s). Demolition has already started, most of the new fixtures have been purchased, and phase one of the tile work is scheduled to happen in a couple weeks. Bathroom remodeling when you only have one bathroom is a tricky business. Fingers crossed that there are no major disasters.

Back after a Break

2007-01-20T22:00:00.000-08:00

Obviously I haven't posted here in a while. All I can say is, life gets complicated sometimes. Life is still complicated. (Like for instance, this week I managed to hit a pot-hole and crack the oil pan of our car, "Herbie." $650 and three days of driving a really crappy rental later, we have a car again. Life's been like that lately.)

But in the great scheme of things, Chris and our kids and I are all fine, I'm working on some original novel projects I'm really excited about, my Minions at Work web-comic will post it's 44th edition this week, and so things could be a lot worse.

On the personal appearance front, Chris and I are (assuming the weather-Gods cooperate, which they haven't much this winter of freakish snow-storms and 92mph winds) scheduled to appear at Radcon, Feb. 16th-18th. We went to Radcon for the first time last year, and really enjoyed it. It's a relaxing, friendly fan convention with a huge gaming side (most of which we never see) and a small but writer-friendly science fiction/fantasy side.

One thing I loved last year was the the hotel has a large lobby area with an open coffee-shop in the middle, an arrangement that is ideal for informal socializing. Groups form "amoeba tables" in the coffee-shop, as friends old and new drift in and out for hours at a time. It's a casual party that never ends. It's what I loved about Portland's Orycon before they closed it's old facility on the Columbia River and moved to a down-town high-rise hotel.

Anyway, if you're in the Northwest, I recommend dropping buy.

As for the blog, I've got a backlog of things that I'd like to pontificate about: the neglected role of cell phones in public safety, how rural have-nots could be left out of the technological revolution, and why Silent Running is still one of my favorite movies. I'll get to them soon. Promise.

Tiny Planets, Big Egos, and Unintended Consequences

2006-08-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

Last week the International Astronomical Union (IAU) passed a resolution that stripped Pluto of its traditional (at least since its discovery in 1930) designation as one of the planets of the solar system.

This was a knee-jerk (and in my opinion, wrong-headed, mean-spirited, ill-conceived, and premature) reaction to an earlier and more elegant proposal that would not only have reaffirmed Pluto's status, but immediately added the largest of the asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, Pluto's "satellite" Charon (due to a minor technicality they would have been designated as a twin-planet) and the unofficially designated "Xena," a recently discovered Pluto-like body located in the distant suburbs of the solar system. Not nine planets. Twelve.

But apparently what really frosted the astronomers was the almost certainty that we'll be discovering many more bodies like Pluto and Xena in the coming years. Dozens, possibly hundreds wait to be discovered out in the dark fringes of our celestial neighborhood.

This, according to the arbitrary will of the astronomers, is just too darned many. And with this vote, the truth about planetary astronomers is finally revealed. They are the under-achievers of science.

Not only can't they remember more than nine planets, nine is apparently too many so they've cut back to eight. We're talking Science for Dummies here. (And I don't mean to paint stellar astronomers with the same brush, as, according to one well-known source, they keep track of "billions and billions" of stars. Impressive.)

Compare this to chemists, who seemed to have no trouble with a periodic table that had more than 90 elements, even before the physicists started making more. Given the current 116 confirmed elements, we can only assume that they are, on average, about 14.5 times as smart as a typical planetary astronomer (up from about 12.888 times just days earlier).

One can only imagine if planetary astronomers were in charge of the periodic table. Certainly they'd have eliminated all the radioactive elements ("...anything unstable enough to have a 'half-life' just shouldn't be considered an element...").

Probably there are other places they would have cut back. Noble gases? "Don't interact with anything enough to be worth mentioning." Hydrogen? "Too darned light." Actually, they could have gone for four, well within the established mental capacity of a planetary astronomer: earth, fire, water and air. "If it was good enough for the Greeks..."

Or compare that to that most garden-variety version of the scientific mind, the family physician. They seem to have little trouble dealing with the more than 200 bones in the adult, human, skeleton, or even the 270 or so bones in a newborn (many fuse together as the baby grows).

Certainly, planetary astronomers would have long-ago cut loose the bones of the inner ear (too small, too different, and not connected to anything), or the thyroid bone that anchors your tongue muscles (also not connected to the rest of the skeleton). Heck, ribs, vertebra, those little things inside your fingers and toes? All similar members of a large class of objects, not worth calling bones. Heck, with a couple voting meetings of it IAU, I think they could get it down to the skull and pelvis, and we're really not so sure about the pelvis.

For that matter, as I recall from when I was a child and my mother was studying for her cosmetology license, even they were required to learn basic anatomy, including the bones of the body. So when you get right down to it, planetary astronomers aren't even smart enough to be hair-dressers. (It also means that my mother is, statistically speaking, many times smarter than any planetary astronomer on -- well -- the planet. Hi mom!)

Okay, okay, I'm having some good-natured fun here at the expense of my astronomer friends. (Well, I'll admit, that most of my science friends are physicists, mathematicians, or chemists, but you shouldn't read too much into that.) But I'm also making a point. My astronomer friends seems to be suspiciously eager to keep the planetary club small and exclusive. In turn, their reasons and reasoning seem, at least, questionable.

The original proposal for a definition of planet seemed simple and elegant enough. A planet would have been any body that has achieved a spherical shape through the action of its own gravity, and which follows an independent path around the sun. The new proposal reads more like an excerpt from the tax code, and in requiring that a planet have cleared its orbit of other bodies, may mean that we'd end up with no planets! (Pluto's orbit crosses that of Neptune, for instance, and many asteroids cross the orbits of the inner planets, including Earth.) Advocates of the new system complain about possible ambiguities of the earlier proposal (define "spherical," for instance), but ignore the big glass of muddy water they've served up in its place.

And though they rationalize their objections to the first proposal, it all seems to come down to "too many planets." I don't seriously think that objection is because they can't keep track of them all, which leaves me to wonder what their concern is. Could it possibly be that discovering a new planet was once one of the greatest achievements in astronomy? Maybe the idea that dozens, perhaps hundreds of such discoveries could be made in a single generation, just plain sucks all the special out of it. Or maybe its that those few astronomers positioned to make those discoveries could get just a little too famous too fast for some people's tastes.

Okay, I don't know that much about astronomy, but as a writer, I do know a thing or two about the importance of words. Even under the new system, Pluto and its icy kin would still be known as "minor planets," so what's the big deal?

It's just this: Defining terms are important. None of the definitions proposed for a planet seems to have much scientific value. Mercury isn't much like Jupiter, and never will be. There are many satellites in the solar system that we'd probably be happy to call planets, if they weren't already orbiting something else. All that's really being proposed is an arbitrary line in the sand that satisfies somebody's inflated sense of order. Over here the important bodies of the solar system. Over here, the other stuff.

Defining something as a planet gives it importance that has real-world (no pun intended) consequences. The most obvious example is NASA's New Horizons probe currently on its way to explore Pluto. Sending probes to study the outer solar system is incredibly expensive and technically challenging, so much so that New Horizons almost didn't fly. Would it have even been considered if Pluto had not, at the time, still been commonly designated a planet? I think not.

Then consider the thousands of smaller consequences. Will new astronomers be as interested in devoting their careers to the study of "minor planets," as opposed to the possibility of actually discovering a planet (even if it is only one of many)? Will as much grant money be devoted to "minor planets?" Will papers be as readily published? Will telescope time be allocated? Awards given out? Will studying "minor planets" get you tenure as fast as study of "real" ones? Will school-children even find them worth learning about?

The unintended consequence here is that the IAU has slammed the door shut on the newest (to our eyes) and potentially most exciting part of the solar system. We're just learning that the solar system is a much bigger and more complex place than we'd ever imagined. This is something worth of our attention and study. It is not "minor," it is "major" by any reasonable definition.

It would be ironic if we turned our back on the distant reaches of our solar system simply to salve a few swollen egos back on Earth. Yet according to the IAU, the final frontier should be very final indeed.

More dangerous things

2006-08-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

The times we live in. I soon expect you'll only be able to make a transatlantic flight naked, handcuffed, and sedated. You just don't know if you should laugh or cry. But personally, I prefer laughter.

Universal Untruth (Yet another writing post)

2006-08-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

They say that anyone who attempts to defend his or her self in court has a fool for a client. Well, let's translate that to writing perspective. The writer who tries to critique their own work has a fool for a judge.

Let me illustrate my point with a little slice from my writing life:

A few weeks ago, my wife heard that Denise Little, an anthology editor she's worked with, had come up short on an upcoming anthology. Several of the people on her invited list of writers had come in much shorter than usual, so she needed 10K words, and she needed them fast, so the book could be turned in. Chris immediately wrote her and said that one or both of us would come up with stories for her.

Mind you, "fast" in this case meant we heard about it on Friday, and she needed stories by the middle of the following week. Mind you, this was a theme anthology, the working title being "Front Lines," and so not just any story would do.

Sub-lesson #1 here for the aspiring and new writers in our midst: this is the sort of situation that separates the writers from the neos. The ability to produce work quickly, on time, to specification, and to market, is a highly valued skill in the marketplace. When these sorts of opportunities come along, and they will from time to time, the ability to follow-through will get you far.

So, kudos to Chris here. She very quickly came up with a fantasy idea, wrote it, mailed it over the weekend, and had a sale by Monday. That's professionalism for you.

I, on the other hand, was struggling. I had a seed of an idea, derived from my hobby of collecting GI Joes (and similar 12" action figures) and my childhood love of GI Joe, Major Matt Mason, and their kin. It also played on the sad fact that childhood is an endangered institution. These days, kids seem to go straight from diapers to video games, computers, cell-phones, and I-pods loaded with gangsta-rap. They're giving up traditional toys younger and younger, and simply never take to them with the enthusiasm that earlier generations did. It's my feeling that with the loss of that imaginative and unstructured play, we're losing something important from our culture, something that may come back to bite us in the ass later.

So, okay, I had a subject, and a theme, but I didn't have a story. I decided my protagonist would be "Backyard Joe," a tired old action figure who was still holding down the trenches in an overgrown back yard, long after the kids have gone on to other things. Valiantly, he guards his post against an unseen enemy that seems to lurk just beyond the high grass. His only companion is the "Limey" (a character in fact inspired by Action Man, GI Joe's counterpart in the UK) an action figure who seems even more broken down and dispirited than he is.

All this is good, but this gives us a character, in a situation, with a somewhat loosely defined problem. That's an opening, but it isn't a story, and that's where I struggled. I had a vague idea of where it might end, but I wasn't at all sure how to get there. The bridging events, the dark moment, the turning point of the story; these things were all missing. Even if I can make it work, there didn't seem to be enough meat there. The story needed to be at least 2000 words long, and I didn't see how I was going to make that with what I had.

So I write a little. I stare at the screen. I write a little more. I stare. I'm stuck. I hate most of what I've written. I hate the whole idea. Several times I'm tempted to throw it away and try to come up with a new idea, but I've got nothing, and I know that I'm probably just trading the devil I know for one I don't.

For me, the darkest moment was probably when Chris got word of her sale. I still was no closer to finishing, and I was starting to feel like a total fraud. (This is the kind of place where jealousy can rear its ugly head, and that's why I'm very wedded to the idea that other people's success is their own, and has nothing to do with you. You succeed or fail based on your own work. Other people's success can't hurt you professionally. It can bang your ego around, though, if you're busy having self-doubts.)

To put this in perspective, I've got a stack of novels under my belt, plus scripts, computer games, and other things. I've sold a fair number of short stories, including to major sf/f markets like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and to anthologies as well. But most of these sales were years ago, before I got distracted writing tie-in novels. More recently I've written stories under contract for tie-in anthologies, but not much original short fiction. Yeah, I can write a novel, but short-stories are a much different skill set.

So this is the part where the highly-trained writer brain starts making things up, starting with, "you're a fraud." Followed by "you can't do this," and "you never even knew how to do this, the other sales were flukes." That's what the writer brain does. It makes things up, and in that, it is often not your friend.

So this is also the part where many, maybe most, would-be writers give up. The difference with a pro is that (most days, anyway) they bull their way through. Maybe you justify it on the thought that, "maybe the editor will be so desperate for words they'll buy even this crap," if that's what it takes. But the professional thing to do is to keep going.

And I did. I figured out an approach, and by Tuesday evening I was over the considerable hump and headed for the ending. I'd managed to flesh out my story a bit, so that it easily went past 2000 words. I even got a good emotional hit while writing the ending, which I normally take as a very good sign.

In this case though, I was still a doubter. I was writing about something very personal to me. I got it, but would anyone else? Were my action-figure references too obscure, too "inside-joke" for the average reader? Had I written a "guy story" that my female editor just wouldn't get, or worse, just wouldn't like? Was it too sentimental? Was the ending too abstract?

The tragedy is, even at this point, some people still give up. The story goes in a drawer (literal or digital) never to emerge again, because the writer isn't sure that it will sell. Well, let me tell you, there's no certainty in this business, but if you don't submit it, you'll never know, and if you don't submit it, it can't sell.

By the time I'd gotten to my computer in the morning, there was a note from Denise saying that she was buying the story. I replied, thanking her, and saying "glad you liked the story."

To my surprise, I immediately got back a note starting, "Liked it, hah! I loved it!" It then went on to further praise the story's virtues. (Normally I wouldn't share the contents of such correspondence in public, and I hope Denise doesn't mind, as I do so only because it's necessary to the point I'm making.)

My first major point is, the writer is almost always the poorest judge of their own work. That doesn't mean that you can't look at your drafts and say, "this and this would make it better." You make this kinds of judgments with every word you choose to type.

What it means is that, when it comes to making critical judgments as to the over-all value or quality of the work, the writer's perspective is hopelessly skewed. This is a vital lesson for every aspiring writer to learn. You can have a first reader, of course, but any reader you know well enough to be worth trusting on other merits is probably too close to you to be entirely unbiased. Ultimately, the only test, imprecise though it is, of the merits of your work is to put it out in the marketplace, and see what happens.

Mind you, just because you think its crap, doesn't mean it isn't. In the beginning, especially, it quite possibly is. Don't worry about it. Mail it. Nobody is going to hold it against you for trying.

But as time goes on, and you've made some sales, it will be less and less likely that it's crap, no matter what the little critical-voice in your head says. Odds are it's at least competent. On good days, it may be far better than that. Maybe surprisingly better.

My second major point is that it isn't unusual to hit a point in the process where you're unhappy with what you're writing and lose confidence in yourself. Maybe some writers skip past that (and I envy them), but in my experience talking with many, many writers is that (for novels at least) it happens to a lot of writers at some point in every project. Knowing that it's usual, that others suffer from it, and that your critical-voice is entirely untrustworthy at this point; is a starting point in fighting your way over the barriers.

If you write, or want to write, and this hasn't happened to you, it probably will. How you respond to this challenge will be a major hurdle in your journey to professional success.

Keep writing.

I'm well behind in my posting here, and I've read a number of interesting things recently that I'd like to talk with you about, several of them writing related. Hopefully you'll be seeing some more major postings here from me in the next few days.

Meanwhile, remember that I post a new Minons at Work cartoon panel every Monday. Check it out, check back, and share it with your friends.

Kudos for Chris

2006-07-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

The upcoming anthology Fantasy Gone Wrong features a story by my wife, Chris, and it's just been singled out for praise in a Publisher's Weekly review.

Yahoo, Chris!

Another year gone

2006-07-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

For me anyway. It's my birthday today. I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner (a bunch of the local writers at a local Chinese/Sushi place that's pretty good). There will be gifts, but I don't have huge expectations. I'm the hardest person on Earth to shop for, and if I want it and it doesn't cost a mint, there's a fair chance I already own it, or if I don't own it, I don't have any place to put it!

Which isn't to say gifts aren't fun and there might be some happy surprises, but they aren't what this is about any more. It's about friendship (not family this time, unfortunately, as most of the family is too far away to attend), and there aren't many things more important, or that I value more highly.

Overall, it's a pretty good life at the moment. I've got a wife I love. I live at the beach. I'm not rich, but I'm far from broke. I had four novels come out in the last birth-year (the Age of Conan trilogy in late 2005, plus my Mechwarrior book Trial by Chaos last month). The kids seem to be doing great.

Out there on the horizon, the world is going to hell, but here at Hangar 18, for the moment, knock on wood, things are good.

New Minions Warning -- er -- Alert

2006-07-10T02:11:00.000-07:00

A fresh Minions toon can be seen tonight on the WB!

No, wait, the WB is toast. Maybe you'll find right now at Minions at Work instead.

MechWarrior Dark Age Q&A

2006-07-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

This post is aimed for my MechWarrior readers. The rest of you can read or skip as you wish. Even MechWarrior readers should be warned that it contains some minor but important spoilers for Trial by Chaos (though I'm not sure how much sense they'll make out of context anyway, if you haven't read the book). If you intend to read it, you probably will want to do so first, then check back.

Now, on with the program.

I love fan mail (the polite and sane kind, anyway!), and try to reply when I can. A few days back, a comment here asked some questions that may have some wider interest, so I'm answering them in the form of a blog post.

I really loved Trial By Chaos, and I will be watching (hopefully reading :) ) the direction the Ghost Bears are headed for, but one thing has me chomping at the bit to find out more about... The Final Codex.. I know i am not the only MW junkie jonesing for it, any chance we will see it soon?

Thank you,
John Ingram

Thanks for your kind words, John. I'm very glad you enjoyed the book.

I can understand your curiosity about The Final Codex. I'm curious too!

Fact is, I was intentionally vague about The Final Codex, in part because I didn't want to reveal too much about it if it wasn't necessary to the plot, and in part because I wasn't sure when I proposed it how Wiz Kids was going to respond to the idea. In fact, my proposal for the book is careful to point out that we could end the book with the Codex being an obvious fraud, or leave it ambiguous.

To my surprise, they were very open to the idea, and I think you can take it as official canon that The Final Codex exists, or at least, it existed, and that the version the Ghost Bears see will have at least some of that text. But it's likely that they won't see all of it, and that some of what they see will be modified, and that there will be some creative additions made to support the agenda of the Freeminders and the U-Khan.

Of course, the question you're asking is, will the fans ever get to see the contents of The Final Codex?

I think the answer is a definite, "maybe."

The only copy we know for sure that still exists is with the Freeminders, but it suggests that the Ghost Bear Loremasters may have an copy somewhere. It seems probable that at one time all the clans had a copy. Now, it also seems likely that the Crusader clans might have had reason to "lose" their copies at some point, but perhaps some copies still exist among the Warden Clans, or even the Unnamed. These could well surface at some point. So maybe some more of the text will be revealed over time.

The problem being, the odds are slim that I will get to be the one to do it.

You see, one of the frustrations of writing the Dark Age books is that MechWarrior Dark Age is the ADD kid of book lines. Because the books chase along after the ongoing game releases, tournaments, and campaigns, I keep getting bounced from faction to faction, and books and characters that I'd love to follow up on get left behind.

For example, when I was writing "Fortress of Lies," I was setting up Duke Sandoval for his downfall, which did happen, in a book written by my pal Loren Coleman. I don't mind that, since Erik is really Loren's character anyway. But as I was writing the book, the story I really wanted to write was about Aaron in exile. I want to tell the story of what happens to him after he's had his butt kicked and almost everything he considers important stripped of him. From my point of view, he was already a fascinating character, but in exile, he just gets cranked up to 11.

But instead, I got to write about the Ghost Bears. Not that this wasn't, once again, a nifty book to write, but again, we've got a really interesting bunch of characters, and a situation that didn't resolve with the end of that story. I'd love to revisit them. But alas, I'm off to some other factions for the next book (I'm plotting to find a way to bring Aaron back, but I have no idea if that's going to happen).

So, if I get back to my little splinter of the Ghost Bears, it will be a while. Maybe some other writer will get to do it first, which would be disappointing for me, but par for the course.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of Wiz Kids or the wonderful people I work with there. It's just business, and I fully understand why they do things the way they do.

So, what can you do about the situation? Well, I have some suggestions that might at least help.

First of all, write Wiz Kids and Roc (the publishers) and let them know that you liked the book, and that you'd like a follow-up (and hopefully, that you'd like me to write it, but that's your choice).

Second, you can support the book. If it's successful beyond the norm for a MechWarrior book, then they'll have more incentive to publish a follow-up. Encourage your friends to buy it. Talk it up on the various MechWarrior, Battletech, and other forums where you hang out. Post positive reviews on Amazon and other on-line bookstores. Plug it on your blog, MySpace, or web page.

Now, I'll admit this is a steep hill to climb, but if you're like me, you like a desperate battle against overwhelming odds. So wipe that blood off your chin, slam the throttle against the stops, and tell them, "bring it!"

Writers along the highway

2006-07-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

Well, we're back from vacation. Obviously I didn't find time to post from the road, so I'll be backfilling here at some point. We had a good (if tiring trip). One enjoyable aspect was the opportunity to visit with writer friends, old and new, up and down the west coast.

Our first stop was on the way down, where we stopped in the Bay Area long enough to have an enjoyable Chinese dinner with our friends Mark Budz and Marina Fitch. Both are novelists, and Mark gave me an advance-reading copy of his upcoming novel Idolon. This is Mark's third novel. His previous books, Clade and Crache were released to great critical acclaim (Publishers Weekly compares him to William Gibson) but just haven't gotten the reader attention they deserve. You should really check out Idolon when it's released this month, and see what you've been missing.

Then we trekked down to my old high-school stomping-grounds of North San Diego County and had a three-hour lunch (cue Gilligan's Island theme)with my old friend Gordon McComb and his wife Jennifer. Gordon and I used to collaborate back in my high-school and college days, and we did a number of student films together back in the day. My first professional publication (see a bit of it here and here) was an article in the old Science & Mechanics magazine written with Gordon.

Gordon went on to become a computer journalist and writer of technology books (everything from word processing software, to home robotics, to how to program your VCR so the number stops blinking). He was very successful, and even occasionally threw some work my way when I was still doing that kind of stuff. I knew he'd cut back on the writing lately, but I didn't know why.

Seems Gordon had people come up to thank him for his books, and then go on to describe the huge sums they were making as consultants based entirely on his work, far more than he was making on the books themselves! So these days, he's focused on his own consulting firm serving corporate clients and leaving the sucker-work -- er -- books, to somebody else. Gordon also continues indulging his long-standing interest in robotics, and has started his own small company to manufacture and market robot components, Budget Robotics.

Anyway, I haven't seen Gordon in years, and it was great to have a chance to catch up. Maybe I can convince he and Jennifer to bail out of Southern California before the Big One hits and move to the northwest (probably just in time for a volcano to erupt, but...).

Finally, on the way home, we stopped off in Eugene, Oregon for dinner with our friends Sean and Rose Prescott, and Adrian Phoenix. It's the first time we've seen Adrian since she sold her first novel, a vampire book, on a two-book deal to Pocket. Her novel will be used to launch an entirely new book line for Pocket, so they're obviously impressed. This is very exciting news, and overdue. Adrian is a fine writer with a unique voice. So, if you'd like a chance to get in on the ground-floor with someone who could be the next Anne Rice, you should look for the name Adrian Phoenix in months and years to come.

Herbie road-trip

2006-06-20T21:56:00.000-07:00

We're leaving the cats with a sitter tomorrow and headed off in Herbie for a long over-due road trip. Good for us, good for the car (diesels really need to be run out, and we do far too many short trips). We're headed down to Lake Elsinore in California to visit our son and his family, with a side-trip to Las Vegas for a couple days.

I'll try to take some pictures, and possibly check in during the trip if anything of note happens.

See you in a few days.

New book out (and Minion guest-appearance)

2006-06-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

I realized that I have announced the arrival of my new Mechwarrior book in stores everywhere but here. Duh. Well Chris loved my in-character announcement over on my Minions at Work cartoon blog so much, that I've decided to repost it here (and save my self a few minutes in the process).

So, let's turn things over to Minion No. 1 (he hates it when you call him "No One.")

Greetings, comrade-dudes!

I am totally cutting into my vital pretzel-break time to bring you the important news of a new novel just released, written by Minions creator J. Steven York! Is called "Trial by Chaos," which pretty much describes the morning I've, I will tell you! This is his second novel in the Mechwarrior Dark Age series, set in the ever-popular Battletech universe.

I am totally urging you to run right out and buy this book on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Powells, or ask for it at your local book retailer.

No. Wait. I must totally be thinking like management if I am ever to be promoted. Do not ask. Demand this book.

You will be all like: "if you do not order this book from the nearest distributor, I will use my orbiting solar-death-mirrors to reduce your world to a blackened ball of carbon!" And they'll be like: "But we have it on the shelf right over here." And you'll be like, "oh, I never know if books like this are shelved according to series or author name." And they'll be like, "yes, different stores do it different ways, but there it is." And you'll be like, "well thanks for your help. Sorry about the solar-death-mirrors thing." And they'll like rip off their rubber disguise mask and shout, "but we've tricked you into revealing your evil plan! Now you can never succeed, Minion No. 1!"

I have just been busted in my own, imaginary scenario. That is so lame.

Just buy the book, because Steve pays the bills here, and without your support, you know what this means: mustard-cutbacks. Buy it for me. Buy it for my pretzel.

Later, dudes. Salty-buttery goodness totally awaits.

Did you get your Monday Minions fix?

2006-06-12T01:45:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, and I just posted a toothsome new Minions cartoon over at Minions at Work. Check it out. Tell your friends. Alert the media. Lock your doors.

Peace at last!

2006-06-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

Well, not in the middle-east, but here on Tsunami Ridge, where our big tom-cat Oz has decided to accept the new kitten, Sydney. Not only is he putting up with her, he's actively encouraging her to play.

This is great for everyone in the house. Oz, because he was lonely, lethargic, and neurotic without his buddy Banzai (our 3-year old cat who passed away several months back). Sydney, because she was lonely too, and at just under six-weeks-old, still much in need of a cat role-model. Us, because it's keeping Oz happy and distracted for the first time in forever, and because it's helping to burn off a lot of that kitten energy and aggression that's been wearing us out.

These two are great to watch together. What's most amusing about it, is that Oz is usually content to let Sydney be the aggressor, leading her on wild chases around the house. Despite superficial appearances, these are his idea.

If he doesn't want to be bothered, there will be hissing, and a swat or two if she bothers him. But when he decides it's play-time, he makes his intentions clear. Sometimes, he'll hide and ambush her, but when he leaps out and surprises her, he'll immediately turn and run so she can chase him.

But it's the relative size-difference that really makes it a hoot. Sydney is growing rapidly, but she's only about two and a quarter pounds, and a lot of that is the pot-belly he has from his constant eating. Oz, on the other hand, is 14+ pounds of athletic muscle and fur. To watch that tiny dark kitten chasing a streak of orange fur many times her size is just something to see.

That's why I decided to post some pictures today that include both of them, just for a sense of scale. Here's Oz in one of his favorite spots, sitting on top of Chris' beading tool-box, watching the front yard for evil birds or bunnies. Sydney is creeping in from the right, watching Oz "hunt," and maybe seeing if she can interest him in a game of tag. (Remember you can click on the thumbnails above for the full-sized pictures.)

A "Generation X" movie?

2006-06-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be aware that a few years back I did a couple of novels, "Crossroads" and "Genogoths," based on a now-canceled Marvel Comic called "Generation X." The comic, which had a troubled creative and editorial history was great in concept. Xavier's School for mutants had become so focused on the X-Men and their agenda that a new school, the Xavier Institute, was formed elsewhere to carry on it's original mission, to locate young mutants and teach them to use and control their powers. One of the headmasters was Emma Frost, the White Queen, a reformed evil-mutant with her own troubled history of dealing with young mutants.

I loved doing those books, I'm very pleased with how they turned out, and I came to love the characters. And because so much of their development in the comics was vague or contradictory, I've always had a somewhat proprietary feeling about them.

This is based on nothing what-so-ever of course. The characters belong to Marvel (one of the wages of writing tie-ins, discussed elsewhere), and neither of my novels is considered "canon," that is, part of the "official" history of the characters. But I love my little dead-end stub of Marvel's X-Men, and I'm still proud to have been associated with them.

But despite the worthy concept (there was even a Fox network pilot for a TV series, aired as a TV movie but never picked up) and some sound characters to work with, the comic was ultimately doomed. The creative staff changed again and again. Various editorial hands pulled it this way and that. Jay Farber (who I had the pleasure of meeting just as he was taking over the book) did his best, but I think the editors never let him run with his ideas. Larry Hamma, best known for updating GI Joe back in the 80s, had an infamous run. If ever creator and subject matter seemed a bad fit, this was it. There were brief moments of glory, but Marvel never seemed to understand what the fans clearly did, that this was a gem in the rough.

The comic was canceled just as it seemed to be finding its legs, and most of the characters passed into oblivion. In fact, most of the characters are dead (as dead as anyone gets in the Marvel Universe) now, or changed almost beyond recognition. I expected that Generation X would never live again.

Well, that's still probably correct. But I was given a ray of hope today by an article in USA Today. Given the huge success of X3, a number of possible spin-offs are in the works. Here's a brief quote from the article:

"We've also talked about doing something on the kids in (Professor X's) school, focusing on their lives, and less of a global adventure for the team," says Hutch Parker, production president of 20th Century Fox.

Hey, I have an idea? Why not put them in a motor-home and take them on a cross-country trip where they fight injustice? Okay, okay, there will be ice-skating in hell first...

Actually, this is likely not the Generation-X that I knew. It could also be adapted from the "New Mutants," comic, or (this is probably most likely) be "X-Men Junior" featuring some of the younger character from the movie like Ice Man, Shadowcat, and Angel. (But there's former Generation-Xer Jubilee, who has appeared briefly in all three movies! Go Jubilee!).

Ironically, in addition to the previously discussed Wolverine and Magneto sequels, they have one more on the table:

The studio is also exploring a movie with Three Kings director David O. Russell based on the character of Emma Frost, a sexy mutant telepath who can transform her skin into diamonds. She is an X-Men comics regular but was not featured in the movies.

Maybe four is two many. Maybe if you guys just combined two of your ideas...

Yeah, dream on.

New Minions

2006-05-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, so there must be a new Minions cartoon posted over at Minions at Work. Check it out. Tell your friends.