Deluxe Editions Of Science Fiction/Fantasy Classics

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Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

David Gerrold wrote a piece in the Village Voice, responding to Josh Olson's rant "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script." And Gerrold, who wrote classic Star Trek episodes including "The Trouble With Tribbles," plus The Man Who Folded Himself, When Harlie Was One, and the Chtorr War series, explained just how annoying it is when other writers try to send him their unpublished materials for feedback, or so Gerrold can pass them along to the powers that be. Explains Gerrold:

Not too long ago, a writer of my acquaintance (a person of some fame in the industry) was hired to work on a major franchise. After several months of development, the project was making genuine progress and looked good. Then one day, out of the blue, an amateur from West Elbow, Nevada, sends him an email containing her outline for a spinoff of that franchise, asking him to help her sell it because "she has the story, but he has the access to the people who will produce it."

My friend backed away in horror, but the damage was done...

He had received this woman's email. Even the act of telling her, "No, I can't help you," was an acknowledgment of receipt. Therefore she could prove that he'd had access to her material — and it didn't matter that he'd already done six months on the project — her email had created a situation where she (and an unscrupulous lawyer) could claim that he had ripped off elements in her material.

The studio's lawyers were not happy and my friend almost got booted off the project, until he informed the amateur that he intended to sue her for compromising his ability to earn a living. She signed and notarized a waiver and he got to keep his job.

And John Scalzi (coincidentally, a writer recently hired to work in a major franchise, Stargate Universe) chimes in on his own blog:

You know, right after I announced that I was hired as the Creative Consultant for Stargate: Universe, people I didn't know came out of the woodwork asking me if I could hook them up with gigs or send along their scripts or if I give them the e-mail of the producers so they could talk to them about this great idea they had. You know what would have happened if I had done any of that? If you say "oh, you'd probably have gotten fired," you'd be absolutely correct. It would have been frankly insane for me to jeopardize my gig that way. I ended up putting up a note telling people to stop asking, but I still to this day get people who think that it's somehow logical to ask a complete stranger who knows nothing about them (and who they know nothing about) to carry water for them.

When you ask a favor of a writer, you're asking her to take time from her own work and/or her own life. You are asking her to assume you're not crazy or won't turn spiteful or angry when she can't give you 100% of what you want. You are asking her to assume that 10 years from now you won't sue her because something she's written is somewhat tangentially related to something you asked her to read. You're asking her to assume that continually pestering her own contacts on behalf of people she doesn't know at all won't jeopardize her own relationships with those contacts. And so on.

So there you go: Your unproduced screenplay may actually be the greatest thing since the invention of cameras. But hard-working, lawsuit-phobic writers still don't want to see it.

So, Strange Horizons is an online magazine of science fiction and fantasy that pays writers official pro rates (as defined by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), publishes a wide range of fiction and non-fiction about science fiction and fantasy, and goes out of its way to publish new and emerging writers. They're also a non-profit organization (a real one, with tax-deductible status and everything), and do all that they do through donations from readers and others.

This August is its fund drive month, and its goal is to raise $7,000 by the end of the month. Here it is the 14th, and they're at $1,565 as I write this, which is a more than a little disconcerting to me. I know the people involved with Strange Horizons quite well, and I can assure you that these aren't people who are taking that donation money and spending it on frivolities. That money goes right out the door to the contributors of the site and to make the site a great place to visit on a daily basis. I'm not even sure the editors pay themselves for all their work, which is kind of insane, but a testament to their dedication to expanding the market for science fiction and fantasy. The site runs lean. So when the folks running it say they need the $7k to keep going, they're not plumping up their numbers; dude, they need that $7k.

I'm embarrassed I haven't donated to the magazine yet this time around, but excited that my donation can go a bit further today than it would on other days, thanks to Scalzi's generosity. There are still nine hours left in which you can take John Scalzi's money and put it to good use. [Strange Horizons and Whatever]

Probably the biggest surprise was Best Novel winner, Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which defeated Neal Stephenson'sAnathem, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Charles Stross' Saturn's Children and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale. Nancy Kress also professed to be surprised that her novella "The Edrmann Nexus" won the Best Novella award, but nobody else seemed that startled. The most moving speech of the night was probably David Anthony Durham, who won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He talked about how he had achieved some success as a literary writer, but felt that he needed to be true to science fiction, since the genre had gotten him through some hard times and had made him want to be a writer in the first place.

Here's the official list of winners, from the Hugo site, and our gallery (including Neil Gaiman licking his Hugo rocket!) is below:

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)
Best Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): David Anthony Durham

High Bloods, John Farris (Tor)

It's the near future, and LA is overrun with werewolves. An International Lycan Control force is set up to keep tabs on the "high bloods," those that can keep their werewolfish nature under control. But then something goes terribly wrong, and the book becomes a hard boiled crime novel. With werewolves.

Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace)

Notorious future-forward sci-fi author Charles Stross has collected the strands of some of his short fiction into this compilation. Stories feature everything from relocating the cold war in deep space to a Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra scandal. The collection showcases Stross's short works that have never found their way into any of his longer pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Subterranean)

Dozois and Martin have gathered a crop of modern sci fi writers to write their own stories exploring Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" universe. The "Dying Earth" series is a cornerstone of its very own sub-genre of dystopian sci fi, and these stories give some other writers a chance to lend their voice to this seminal canon.

Metatropolis,edited by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Five sci fi writers collaborated on their own urban future, and then each took a turn writing stories set in their collectively imagined universe. The result is a portrait of a possible future of cities. From the io9 review:

These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there.

The Osiris Ritual, George Mann (Snowbooks)

George Mann's well-received "The Affinity Bridge" created a steam-punk Victorian London landscape for his intrepid mystery solvers. Now his steam-punk Sherlock Holmes is back to solve another mystery, interacting with some distinct characters along the way. This one is for fans of clockwork robots, airships, and good old fashion mysteries.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman (DC)

This hardcover volume collects a few of Gaiman's Batman pieces, focusing on his canon-spanning final story, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" This story stretches from one end of the Bat's career to the other, offering a new angle on the Batman mythos.

Purple and Black, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)

"Purple and Black" is an epistolary novel, or one told only in letters. In this case, the letters are between a reluctant intellectual emperor and his best friend on the front lines of combat. The result is an exploration of the duty of leadership, of war, and of friendship. It's also printed in two colors, purple for the official empire business between the two friends, and black for the less formal, more personal letters.

The Stars Blue Yonder, Sandra McDonald (Tor)

A military commander dies, but then comes back to life on a mission to save all of humanity. This mission takes him all over space and time, where he meets his yet-non-existent grandchildren and his descendants from thousands of years in the future. He also manages to thoroughly confuse his grieving wife with resurrection and stories of far-flung time travel. The two work together to save everything they've ever known.

Bar None, Tim Lebbon (Night Shade)

After the world ends, a group of tenacious survivors hole up in a giant home in Wales, but supplies start to get thin, and they learn from a supernatural stranger of a haven a few days away. It's the Bar None, and it's maybe the last bar on Earth. The survivors then decide to do probably what anyone would do in their situation: against all odds, braving corpse-strewn countryside, they try to track down a cold beer. From the io9 review:

In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Stephen Hunt (Tor)

Amelia Harsh, a sort of steam-punk female Indiana Jones, and a cast of adventurers sets out in an ancient U-boat to discover the sunken "perfect society" of Camlantis. Also on board are a band of female mercenaries, escapees from an underwater prison, and an insane guide. Sounds good to me.

Blood Red Sphere, Lawrence Barker (Swimming Kangaroo)

A recovering "cactus juice" addict passes his days scavenging ancient artifacts from the surface of mars and selling them. Then one such object, the "blood red sphere," attracts attention from pretty much everyone on Mars and the rest of the solar system. It's like the "Maltese Falcon" on Mars, which is something I can definitely get behind.

The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne)

After a psychic trauma visits itself on four students (causing one to commit suicide), a journalist investigates a home haunted by madness and strange occult happenings. The novel touches on many different eras of the house's history, eventually leading to a confrontation between our protagonist and an ancient evil.

The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this past February, is a yearly event that brings literary professionals together to examine current trends and new technologies in the publishing world.

One panel, called "Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers? A Study in Online Community Building," included John Scalzi (author of Old Man's War), Tobias Buckell (author of Halo: The Cole Protocol), and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor of the science fiction publisher Tor Books); the panel was moderated by Ron Hogan of Beatrice Books. All three of the panelists are bloggers as well. A video of the panel has just gone up (we've put it at the bottom of the post), and here's a quick summary of the highlights.

The basic premise of the discussion was that using blogs and newer media like Twitter can make publishing a more successful enterprise - a not particularly startling assertion in 2009. But the panelists delved into the nuances of what really makes a difference. Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted the appeal of successful bloggers goes beyond just their ability to write:

As an editor who's always look for good, promising new writers, obviously the ability to write an entertaining work of popular fiction is absolutely paramount, but on a secondary level, somebody who can keep an audience engaged with their personality and their thoughts on a variety of topics that aren't the incredibly boring subject of writing is a big plus. It basically suggests somebody who's going to flourish in the new media environment…

Towards the end of the panel, John Scalzi returned to this idea and succinctly spelled out the relationship between his roles as blogger and science fiction author:

When you build those 40,000 people or 4,000 people or however many you have because what you write is interesting to them and they come back again and again and again you develop an interest in yourself as an author. There's somebody in this room who once said the next generation of authors will be performers as well and there is something to that. My performance is not necessarily what I'm doing now, for example my performance is on my website on a daily basis. It makes a difference.

Of course, it's all well and good to trumpet the coming of this bold new media as the next big thing, but does it actually translate to increased sales? Nielsen Hayden gave a resounding yes to this question:

We published John's first novel, Old Man's War, as a hardcover original. Like most hardcover originals from unknown science fictions writers it shipped a very few thousand copies and went back to press almost immediately, and by the time a year had elapsed we had sold nearly like nine thousand copies in hardcover, over two-thirds of them through online sources, mostly Amazon. Which is to say the brick and mortar book industry mostly treated it like any first novel and it took them a long time to realize their lunch was being thoroughly eaten by online sales because John already existed online.

Moreover, a web presence is not only useful in driving up print sales; increasingly, it can be an end in itself, and a more popular one than traditional sources of science fiction at that. Scalzi discussed the impact of the Tor Books website offering original short fiction:

I think one of the things that was very useful for Tor to do, quite honestly, was they they did from the outset publish some original fiction. And I think that is something that is very useful, not just for upcoming authors but for existing authors…The short fiction market is kind of in turmoil at the moment and people are wondering where they're going to be able to find short fiction and how it works and where we go from there. The fact that Tor from the outset is doing short fiction has made quite a difference. I'll give you an example using my own particular story. We did, after The Coup, which came out when Tor.com debuted and after two weeks, more people had clicked through to read the story, or at least look at the story, than the combined circulation of the big three science fiction magazines.

One of Tor's advantages is that it actually pays writers a decent rate compared to the prestige science fiction magazines. Tor's online content pays about 25 cents per word, while their print counterparts pay about 7.5 cents per word. Scalzi draws the obvious conclusion:

Tor.com fiction is generally some of the best short fiction out there and it is specifically because it is paying a professional rate as opposed to a lot of the rates being paid in the genre.

They acknowledged that Scalzi's model for success can't really work for everyone, considering a huge part of his audience appeal is derived from the fact he's been writing online since 1998 (I'm not even sure how aware I was of the internet in 1998, but, in my defense, I was ten at the time). Still, there's always something new and different that those seeking to build a web presence can make their own, as long as they're able to do it in 140 characters or less:

Scalzi…Part of the reason that I have this audience I have is I was able to spend ten years building it. Now necessarily this is not…something that is necessarily practical for every writer to do. Every writer cannot replicate this because [to Nielsen Hayden] you say it's an early advantage and simply…

Nielsen Hayden: …right now there is just time for people who are suited to the medium to be early adopters of Twitter and become the huge Twitter stars of the future.

If I understand what he's saying, and I think I do, I believe this means Shaquille O'Neal will be the next big science fiction writer. I am very much on board with that.

Tobias Buckell, on the other hand, detailed common misconceptions about how online readerships work. Essentially, online marketing strategies can never have marketing as the sole, perhaps not even as the primary, purpose:

For an example, because I do have some credibility of being an author of a blog that's been around for a while and I've used it to leverage some of my success is that I will usually see a new writer with a first novel run off and create a website that is purely promotional and I have to say that one of the words I mentioned when I was first talking about what success I do have was ‘authenticity'…When I also do consulting for corporations occasionally about how to roll out some new media, like how to integrate Twitter or how to bring a blog to their website is always their first impulse is they want to speak to the customer, they want to deliver a press release, they want to tout their products. They're not interested in a conversation, they're not interested in building, like we said, a community. And so one the amazing things I've found is the honesty and authenticity to go out there and try to engage produces more long-term results, stronger result than just sort of vomiting content.

If you've got forty spare minutes and you really want to know more about this, you can watch the full video below:

[Bowling To The Future]

For those of you unfamiliar with Scalzi's previous novels in this series, a quick recap. Humanity has reached the stars to find the neighborhood teeming with other races all vying for the same planets to colonize. The Colonial Union governing all the human worlds except Earth has a tight monopoly on all travel, commerce, and information between the colonies. The home world is kept ignorant technologically and politically. Mother Earth is just the CU's breeding ground for more colonists, mostly from the Third World, and cannon fodder for their endless wars. The Colonial Defense Force doesn't draft witless eighteen-year-olds to do their dirty work. They want educated volunteers with life-experience who no longer fill useful roles in dirtside society.

On his seventy-fifth birthday John Perry leaves Earth to fulfill his contract with the CDF expecting never to return. He and his fellow septuagenarian are shortly amazed to find themselves in young healthy bodies. CDF soldiers wear cloned flesh with augmented abilities covered in chloroplast imbued skin. These old fogies are now mean green fightin' machines armed to the teeth facing alien armies over hotly contested planets, "Get off my lawn, you tentacled scum!"

This series has often been compared favorably with Starship Troopers, although Scalzi treads a bit lighter on the soapbox than Grand Master Heinlein and has a superior sense of humor. If you haven't read Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony you are in for a treat. Zoë's Tale is more of a companion novel than a sequel and works fine as a stand alone story. It recounts the events from The Last Colony but from the viewpoint of John Perry's seventeen-year-old adopted daughter Zoë and is the stronger novel for it.

The story opens as John and his wife, Jane Sagan a former Special Forces officer, have retired from the CDF in new demilitarized bodies living as rural colonists with their daughter. Zoë's biological father was Charles Boutin, a scientist who schemed with an advanced race called the Obin against humanity. The Obin were uplifted to sentience by the Consu, a godlike and enigmatic species who gave the Obin intelligence without consciousness, then kicked them to the galactic curb without explanation. Boutin offered the Obin a technology that would give them all individual consciousness and emotion in exchange for wiping out the CU whom he believed responsible for Zoë's death.

Of course Zoë wasn't dead, the plot failed, Boutin was killed, but the technology worked. To honor Boutin for his miraculous gift the Obin made a truce with the Humans and sent two of their kind to protect and serve Zoë, whom they revere with something akin to worship. Her two bodyguards, Hickory and Dickory – she named them when she was very young – vaguely resemble a cross between a giraffe and a tarantula, carry huge knives and scare the bejeesus out of everybody. They treat her like a beloved magic princess but she still has to do homework and chores and junk, bummer. Clearly the girl has issues.

Naturally, a quiet pastoral life is not in the cards for this odd but loving little family. The growing populations of the older established colonies pressure the CU to continue spreading out into an increasingly dangerous galaxy. Because of their leadership skills and military record John and Jane are asked to lead a brand new colony called Roanoke. I know, why not just call it Certain Doomsylvania? At least their ship isn't named the Titanic. Immediately things go terribly wrong. The tiny colony is cut off from the rest of the CU deprived of advanced technology on a world with an incompatible biology and a savage native species. A Conclave of a hundred hostile races patrols space sworn to destroy any further human colonization. And oh yeah, the whole planet smells like a stinky locker room.

As young people do, Zoë adapts quickly to this difficult new life. She, her wise-cracking pals, and her absolutely dreamy boyfriend, Enzo, manage to have fun when they can while working alongside the adults for Roanoke's survival. Zoë inherited Boutin's brilliance as well as her adopted father's relentless,sarcastic wit and Jane's fierce determination and resourcefulness. Good thing too, because she's going to need all that and more to save herself and the new colony.

I wondered if it was very realistic to have a heroine that young be so clever and observant while spouting off with Scalzi's trademark sarcasm. Some readers might think that a brilliant and resourceful young Messiah of an alien race who Saves the Day with blatant Deus ex Machina has it a bit too easy. But Zoë's Tale isn't really about the clash of mighty empires or rescuing loved ones from monsters, exciting as those parts are — it's about Zoë. It's about that time in our lives after we've come to grips with how the world sees us but we are still not sure how we see ourselves. It's not about what you are, but finding out who you are. This whip-smart, often funny, and deeply moving novel portrays that journey of self-discovery to the satisfaction of adults young or otherwise.

Zoë's Tale via Amazon

This month, io9 reviews all the nominees for the Nebula, Hugo and Clarke awards. You can read them all here.

Commenter Grey_Area is known among the space-cruising whipper-snappers as Christopher Hsiang. Why can't you young punks let an old man read in peace?!

Oh, and there will be some spoilers here. But I won't reveal who Luke's daddy is or anything.

Metatropolis is unusual for a number of reasons. It's available as an audiobook now - narrated by Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan, Kandyse McClure, and Alessandro Juliani - but it's coming out as a print anthology this summer. It's a shared-world anthology, but it's not based on a world created by one particular author, with a bunch of other writers trying to stay faithful to the Master's vision. Instead, it's a near(ish) future setting that editor John Scalzi and the contributors worked out amongst themselves.

And it's strangely optimistic, once you get past the premise that the United States has all but collapsed and old ways of living are being wiped out. Most of the stories in the book offer something between a trickle and a flood of hope. The biggest theme in the book is that once our current unsustainable way of living finally unsustains, something better may rise up as a result out of the chaos. But on the other hand, the chaos will be plentiful.

And most of that optimism is centered on cities, or city-like strutures. Most "fall of civilization" storylines show cities turning into unliveable nightmares of violence and bad hair. It's only in little rural communes and enclaves that you can survive the collapse of everything. But Metatropolis turns this cliche on its head, with some future cities that seem quite nice, surrounded by suburbs and countryside that are referred to as "The Wilds."

In particular, the Cascadiopolis of Jay Lake's story "In The Forests Of The Night" and the New St. Louis of Scalzi's "Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis" are places you could imagine wanting to hang out. Cascadiopolis is an anarchist commune built near what's left of Portland, Lake's hometown, where everybody works to create green technologies. And New St. Louis is more hierarchical, but also extremely eco-friendly, with vertical farms and genetically engineered pigs who create ultra-rich fertilizer and whose urine that can be used to stabilize plastic. Both places are all about sustainability and "zero footprint," even as they keep out the outside world with paranoid levels of security. Towards the end of the book, we learn that these megacities have a loose confederation, including non-U.S. cities like Shanghai, that allows people to travel among them.

In Tobias Buckell's awesome story "StochastiCity," we visit a version of Detroit that's more like what you'd expect in a futuristic dystopia, complete with private security guards from a company called Edgewater, who crack skulls of anyone who gets in the way. But even there, super-organized eco-anarchists have a scheme to hoodwink Edgewater and take possession of one huge building, turning it into a vertical farm and building a mini-eco-paradise in the middle of the urban hell.

That's another major theme of the book's five long stories: people creating unconventional social networks. In Buckell's story, it's "turking," in which people subcontract a task out to dozens, or hundreds, of individuals, none of whom know the whole story. In Karl Schroder's story, "To Hie From Far Cilenia," this turns into an alternate reality game, Oversatch, where fictional countries like Cilenia and Sanotica are not just overlaid on the real world, but they supercede it. (To join the game, you need to wear special glasses which let you see a display of the alternate reality.) And instead of "turking," people actually "ride" other people by looking through their eyes and telling them what to do or say. And in Lake's story, we see how trust networks are still vulnerable at the level of human interaction, because someone who's good at social engineering or especially charismatic will always be able to find a way in to a supposedly closed system.

As I mentioned, the optimism in the stories is tempered with a lot of chaos, and we get to see a lot of the downsides of this shiny future. If you happen to be in the wrong city, or outside the cities altogether, life can be pretty horrendous. Besides the somewhat thuggish security contractor Edgewater, we also see how organized crime has stepped in to take some of the roles that government has let drop. All the same, I'm not sure how realistic a picture of our urban future the book is supposed to be - at times, there seemed to be a bit of wishful thinking mixed in. And here and there, there are huge chunks of preachiness about environmentalism, recycling, cars, sustainability, and other green topics.

But the way you know these urban settings have succeeded in their worldbuilding task is, they provide a backdrop for some cracking city adventures. Scalzi and Buckell, in particular, keep you guessing about where their stories are going and provide fun yarns where you root for their underdog protagonists. These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there. [Amazon]

To his credit, in his New York Times essay, Nicholson rejects some critics' claims that super-bountiful literary production is confined to genre authors, or is a matter of "low" writing. For every Dean Koontz or 800-novel-writing romance author, there are people like William T. Vollman and Joyce Carol Oates, who manage to hang on to their cache despite pounding out books like snausages.

But actually, super-prolific novel production is more challenging, and thus more impressive, among SF authors than among other types, for the exact reason that Nicholson lost his reading contest: all that world-building. The young Nicholson was reading stories containing tons of details about the "wastelands of imaginary planets," while his victorious friend Rob was "gliding through the works of P.G. Wodehouse," whose work is not only breezy (and plentiful) but also takes place in a world where the props and settings are well established.

And world-building doesn't necessarily get easier once you're writing in a world that you've already established in a previous book. As Laura Anne Gilman explains, once you've got multiple books in the same universe, it becomes a nightmare to avoid contradicting yourself, and bringing in characters from past books may be tempting, but is an invitation to continuity crisis:

It's that continuity thing again. If you're writing a one-off, or even a duology or trilogy, you only have to worry about the timeline in one direction – forward. There are six books in the Retrievers series, including May's Blood From Stone, and since the two series are running more or less concurrently along the timeline, I have to make sure that nothing happens that's too jarring, or contradicts something previously established. It's a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but about 10% of the pieces will come from a puzzle you already completed. Worse, it's like doing a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, because the timeline goes not only forward and backward, but sideways as well.

In fact, SF authors may have a reputation for being prolific, but fans get cranky when their favorite authors don't crank out new works fast enough, especially longed-after works in their favorite universes. John Scalzi comments on George R.R. Martin's frustration with fans who lambaste him for, well, having a life, instead of producing his next novel faster. And Scalzi guesses Martin's alleged slowness comes partly from that world-building complexity:

I don't want to hazard guessing how GRRM does his creative thing, but I'll say this: The reason GRRM's series is so damn popular is because he's created this immense, complex world strewn with characters readers love to follow. When you do this, it doesn't get easier building on it, it gets harder, especially if you're trying to maintain quality control. This isn't like a television series (or their literary spinoffs), where you have several writers working in the universe sharing the load; it all comes down to this single guy, pulling it all out of a single brain.

Seriously, people, WTF? Give the man a friggin' break. Yes, it's taking a while. Yes, he's doing other things. But I assume it's taking time because GRRM believes it's worth getting right, and I assume he's doing other things because he wants to stay sane. Let the guy do what he needs to do to make himself happy, and happy with the writing. You'll benefit from a book that you'll actually want to read, as opposed to a book that is simply there to have.

assisting the producers and directors in shaping the direction of the series, to offer technical writing suggestions and advice, and basically to be useful when they want another point of view on something; it’s a background rather than foreground sort of job. No, I won’t be writing for the series at this point; hey, I just got the one gig, let me do that first.

Let's hope Scalzi brings a fresh perspective to a franchise that's already produced hundreds of hours of television. [Whatever]

Writes Scalzi:

Original, major science fiction releases for 2009? Well, there's the super hero deconstruction tale Watchmen in March and James Cameron's whatever-the-hell-he's-been-up-to-for-a-decade Avatar in December, plus the animated spoof Monsters vs Aliens. But while casting no aspersions on the potential quality of either Watchmen or MvA (I'm looking forward to both, actually), those movies are thematically "meta," which is to say they rely on us having sucked down enough superhero and monster flicks in the past to get what they're trying to do. Basically, we have to know the genre to get the story, and that means Avatar is the only big scifi movie next year that we're walking into totally blind.

Scalzi is totally raising the bar here — asking for movies that aren't just part of an existing franchise, but don't rely on our knowledge of past genre works. But in the vanishingly unlikely event that Hollywood is listening, I hope they follow his suggestion. A slew of new science fiction films that are open to anyone who loves movies, regardless of their knowledge of monster movies or superheroes, would only be good for the genre in the long term. And they'd almost certainly be more thought-provoking and challenging, just by virtue of creating their own sub-genres from scratch. Yes please. [AMC]

The collection also includes contributions from Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, and Karl Schroeder (which is like my scifi dream team). Here's the premise of the book, according to Scalzi:

Welcome to a world where big cities are dying, dead - or transformed into technological megastructures. Where once-thriving suburbs are now treacherous Wilds. Where those who live for technology battle those who would die rather than embrace it. It is a world of zero-footprint cities, virtual nations, and armed camps of eco-survivalists. Welcome to the dawn of uncivilization.

The whole book comes out Tuesday, so start warming up your audio devices using solar or bicycle power. You can download Lake's complete story here, and get samples of other stories here. I'm always excited to see another Scalzi joint.

Your Weekend Goodie: Free Metatropolis Story [via Whatever]

It's been 20 years since Bruce Sterling compared the "mainstream" of science fiction to a fossilizing Politburo. Since that time, the situation has only gotten more dire. People are constantly remarking on the graying of science fiction readership, but statistics seem to be hard to come by. Here's Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden talking about the fact that almost no people born in the 1970s or later have won Hugos or Nebulas. (And in the comments on that post, there's lots of assertion that WorldCon's attendees were skewed towards an older demographic, but no hard numbers that I can see.) Here's an amusing essay from the New York Review of Science Fiction analyzing an issue of Asimov's where every single story is by an older writer and is about getting old.

Meanwhile, young-adult science fiction is exploding. According to John Scalzi, the top 50 young adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers sold twice as many books as the top 100 adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers. As we mentioned before, there have been hardcore post-apocalyptic novels for kids and young adults for decades. With more on the way. And with City Of Ember finally being adapted to a (hopefully) major movie, more YA readers than ever will be looking for similar stories.

It's great news that young people are getting exposed to SF at an impressionable age, without apparently feeling any particular stigma about it. And yes, a lot of those people will eventually come to view SF as "kid stuff" and stop reading when they reach adulthood. But if even 20 percent of those readers keep reading SF after they turn 18, that guarantees a sizeable readership for SF in decades to come.

The other great thing about YA science fiction is that people come to writing it from all sorts of angles. Some YA authors write non-speculative YA books and then drift into writing books with science-fictional plots. Some "real" SF writers, like Cory Doctorow (and Scalzi, whose new book Zoe's Tale is being marketed to both adults and teens), try their hands at YA fiction. And then there are "literary" writers, who would never dream of trying to write a grown-up SF book, who find themselves writing for the YA market. I was having lunch with a literary author, an MFA who teaches creative writing and writes for journals like Ploughshares, and she was telling me her agent had told her the big New York publishers were looking for YA books with scifi or fantasy elements, and she was trying her hand at one. Dale Peck, who's now co-writing a science fiction novel with Heroes creator Tim Kring, started in speculative fiction by writing the scifi/fantasy blend Drift House series, about time-travel and a tapestry that shows the future.

Meanwhile, "science fiction" as a publishing niche refers to a segment of books that appeal to a particular segment of people. Call it "nerd lit." You don't have to be a geek to read science fiction - just like you can dress in Banana Republic and listen to Death Metal or Goth/Industrial music. It just helps. You're more likely to find your fellow Vernor Vinge enthusiasts at a gathering of sysadmins than at a dressage meet, or a stockbrokers' convention. Science fiction is stories written by geeks for geeks. (I'm a nerd myself, so I'm not being obnoxious here.) Your average SF novel nowadays assumes you belong to that culture from the outset, and you're used to a whole range of concepts and stylistic tics that might put off other readers.

Luckily, we can have both grown-up science fiction and the YA version. But to the extent that one is shrinking and the other one is growing, that may not be entirely a bad thing. Look at it this way: is it better to have SF written for a subculture, or anybody of a certain age?

The readership of "regular" science fiction books is a defined group of people with a shared set of interests, who dress a particular way and talk in a "nerd accent." The readership of YA books is anyone of a particular age. So, in a sense, YA books have a more diverse readership and are more welcoming to outsiders. Grown-ups might feel silly reading a Scott Westerfeld book on the subway, but there's really nothing to stop you doing it anyway.

Bottom line: We're lucky to have both YA literature with science-fictional themes and "regular" science fiction. There's no reason we can't have both, and appreciate both for what they are, including the innovation and breadth of concepts that mature science fiction can explore. But we should especially celebrate the awesome potential of YA SF to revitalize the field, and bring new readers to SF concepts.

It turns out you can make a lot of changes in history without actually derailing it, claimed Flint and Cornell. Go back in time and step on a butterfly, and that probably just means there's one fewer butterflies around in the past. Even if you kill Hitler before he rises to power, Germany probably still becomes a fascist country — although it's debatable whether the Holocaust would have happened.

Flint said his 1632 series of books was his attempt to refute the "great man theory" of history. He's interested in periods of history where huge historical forces are at work, and he chose the early 17th century because of the flowering of democracy and widespread literacy.

At one point, Hemry and Cornell debated whether it would have made much difference if George Washington hadn't been around. The colonies might have broken off from England sooner or later, Cornell said, but Hemry insisted Washington's decision to give up control of the army, and later to step down as president after two terms, helped keep America from becoming too autocratic. That kind of forebearance is rare in history, he said.

So why World War II and the Civil War? It's because most Americans are "ahistorical" and are only dimly aware of most things that happened more than 20 years ago, said Scalzi. There are only a handful of historical periods that stick in people's minds and hold their interest. Neal Stephenson was able to focus on a different period in his Baroque Cycle, only because he had gained so much goodwill with The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.

Scalzi wanted to do a different approach to changing history, in which someone treats history like a disease state, and tries to "vaccinate against Hitler," making lots and lots of little incremental changes here and there, so Hitler either isn't born or doesn't become a dictator. But when he pitched this to his editors, he got a muted response because a story about people making subtle changes in history didn't sound like good drama. (Which is too bad, because I'm actually prety fascinated with that idea.)

These days, a hit film usually scores over $50 million at the box office its first week, and it's not unusual for it to have as much as a fifty percent dropoff in the following weeks. In other words, hit films are almost never created via word-of-mouth anymore. Either the studio and reviewers have created enough buzz about a film before opening day to drive insane crowds into the theaters, or the film flops.

Says Scalzi:

What Star Wars could do that Speed Racer and other movies today generally can't is just keep running. From its first limited release on Memorial Day weekend, 1977, Star Wars stayed in movie theaters for nearly an entire year, and for that year, experienced very small drop-offs in business from weekend to weekend: Between ten and twenty percent each weekend. Compare this to last year's Transformers, which made $300 million in six weeks — and experienced 40 to 50 percent dropoffs in attendance each week. In both their eras, Star Wars and Transformers are state-of-the-art blockbusters, in terms of how they made their money — it's just that the state of the art evolved.

$20 Million Now, $20 Million Then [AMC]

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]