Whatever

I have absolutely nothing of interest to say at the moment, so here, have some music, namely, the best Led Zeppelin track of the last 20 years:

Yes, I know, not technically a Led Zeppelin track. But come on. There are some fictions that make sense, and some that don’t. This is a Led Zeppelin track, whether it says so on the label or not.

It is here.

First: Embarq appears to have pulled its head out and restored my Internet connectivity. Yes, I missed you too. No, don’t hug me.

Second: Tor has gotten its shipment of Zoe’s Tale Advance Reading Copies and sent me a couple, which makes me happy. Now it looks like a book! The ARC is taken from the first pass of edits, so there are little fiddly bits still in the text (for example, the hermaphrodite characters are still occasionally referred to as “he”), but people who read ARCs are generally aware that most of the fiddly bits will get fixed before the final printing. They won’t hold a little inappropriate gendering against me, hopefully.

The arrival of ARC is also interesting because it means the book is going out to reviewers and critics, and as always it’ll be interesting to see what they think of the book. Naturally, I hope they like it. I also hope they figure out what I was doing with it, in terms of Zoe, who I think with this book becomes one of the more fully-realized characters I’ve written. Early on in the writing process I got feedback from the Tor marketers, who were concerned about the title and suggested we might want to think about something else; we communally thought about it but eventually “Zoe’s Tale” won out. I’m glad it did, because it is precisely descriptive of what goes on in the book. It really is about Zoe, and her growing up over a certain stretch of time. We’ll see what they think.

I know what I think: I’m pretty happy with this book. And I think Zoe — the character — is a kick. I hope in August, when most of you will have a chance to spend some time with her, you’ll feel the same way about her, too.

Apparently someone poured Fresca all over Embarq’s Internet connection here in Ohio, and it’s down in a big way, and the recorded message at customer service suggests it might not be back up until evening tomorrow. So, I’m likely not to be around all that much until they get things back under control, and I’ll probably be difficult to come by in e-mail as well (in case you’re wondering, I’m writing this at the local library). You’re on your own, folks. Try not to wreck the place between now and when I get back, okay? I thank you in advance for your cooperation.

To keep you busy, consider this an open thread. Converse among yourselves. Your conversational starter: the Smurfs and the Care Bears in a knife fight. Who wins? Be realistic, now.

AMC, the cable channel, is having me as a weekly guest columnist on its science fiction/fantasy movie blog, writing about, you guessed it, movies and science fiction/fantasy. I’ll be writing there on Thursdays for the next several weeks. This naturally pleases me because as a long-time movie critic and commentator, and a science fiction writer, it’s nice to write a little about both on a regular basis. And get paid for it! And write off all my movies and DVDs as tax deductions again. That’s always fun.

I mention this to you now because my first column is up, discussing the upcoming Hobbit movies and why Guillermo del Toro is not only the smart choice to direct them, but may be an even better choice for director than Peter Jackson. No, seriously. Stop looking at me like that. Search your heart. You know it to be true.

If every single one of you would be so kind as to click that link above, and check out that column, I’d appreciate it; it’d be nice for my temporary corporate masters to feel like they’re getting their 23 cents a column out of me. Also feel free to leave comments, etc over there rather than here (I’m turning off the comments to this entry, in fact, to encourage the conversation on the AMC site). Have fun with the column; I hope you like it.

More server issues this morning. Be aware.

On another note, I think we need a word that describes what happens when a piece of technology stops working until you call technical support, only to start working again perfectly when you finally reach the tech support dude. Because, no lie, this has happened to me twice in the last day with the server: The moment the dude said “hello, tech support,” I’m suddenly able to connect to my site. And then, this morning, the moment I hung up — I couldn’t reach the site again. Now, that’s no coincidence; that’s cyber-karma messing with my head. Fortunately I made the tech dude run a diagnostic anyway. Who’s the smart one now, balky server? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Anyway, if one of you can come up with a word for that situation, I’d be appreciative. Yes, I know, I’m the writer here, I should be coining words, not you. But come on. You know you love the audience participation stuff.

Quick note: Seems like my server is having some issues and throwing off some errors. If you are momentarily kept from seeing this site on refresh (or dropping a comment, or whatever), don’t panic. I’m on it.

Apparently Minotauro, my publisher in Spain, is whetting appetites for the Spanish language release of The Ghost Brigades (Las Brigadas Fantasma) by releasing the first chapter of the book online as a pdf document, which you may find at Scyla, which to my entirely-unable-to-read-Spanish eyes is a news/info site for Minotauro and other related booklines. Here’s the page it’s on; click on the link that says “avance de publicación de Las Brigadas Fantasma” for the pdf. And clearly, if you have Spanish-reading friends who are science fiction fans, by all means point them in that direction. The official release date, incidentally, is June 5th. Start saving your euro-pennies now.

Some of you asked whether LBF would be available here in the US; honestly, I have no idea. I would imagine if you have a Spanish language bookstore near you, you could check or perhaps have them special order it. Be warned that I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be cheap, however, since the list price of LBF is €18, which at current exchange rates is something like $47,000. I might be off on the math there. Sadly, not by much.

You know, today would be an excellent day for the mandarins of the Democratic Party to pay a call to Hillary Clinton, sit her down and then, kindly and gently, and with full appreciation of everything she’s done for party and country, stick a goddamn fork in her. She suffered a 14-point blowout in North Carolina and while she scraped up a bare popular vote victory in Indiana, in the realpolitik terms of delegates, she tied. Combine the popular vote and the delegate allotment from both states, and she’s the huge loser for the evening. She lost. She’s done. She’s fallen down and she can’t get up.

But wait, you say, what if she manages to get the delegates from Michigan and Florida seated? And then convinces the superdelegates to roll her way? And then uses the Clinton machine at the convention back rooms to seal the deal? She could still get the nomination! Well, no. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure even now the Clinton apparatchiks are plotting out some Rube Goldberg-like contraption of an strategy that lands their gal into the White House. But in the real world, at this point, the fallout of a Hillary nomination and the positively un-small-”d”-democratic machinations that would be required to make it happen would be surpassingly grim, since among other things it essentially gut punches pretty much every Democrat who is either African-American or under the age of 40, Chelsea Clinton excepted. Throwing these folks under the proverbial bus is not the way to actually win an election. One advantage the Democrats have over the GOP is that significant slices of the GOP base actively dislike their nominee; it would be ill-advised for the Democrats to offer up a candidate with the same qualities.

And while one should never underestimate the Democratic Party’s ability to fuck up a cakewalk, I think in this case they’re not quite that dumb. Outside of the Clinton camp, it’s hard to see how anyone in the Democratic Party can see the Clinton campaign as anything more than an affectation at this point. It’s time to send in the grand old men of the party to tell her that it’s time to let it go. And if she won’t let it go — she is a Clinton, after all — then it’s time for them to metaphorically get up and start turning off the lights around her. Just because she’s still pretending she has a chance doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to any more.

Since people are curious, here is why Lopsided Cat is called Lopsided Cat:

Lopsided Cat came to us a few years ago when he basically emerged from the woods to the east of our house, walked up to Athena and started loving on her, which pleased the then 3-or-4 year old Athena immensely. He was a good cat, but one thing we noticed about him is that his head was almost always at a tilt, as if there were an invisible weight pulling down one side of his head. Thus, and because we hadn’t quite officially adopted him yet, we called him “that lopsided cat.”

When we eventually did decide to adopt him and took him to the vet, we discovered the reason for the head tilt was not invisible weights but a serious ear mite infestation, which apparently irritated him enough to cause him to walk around with his head at an angle. We got the infestation cleared up, but he continued to have a tilted head; I don’t know, maybe he just got used to seeing the world that way. In any event, by that time “Lopsided Cat” became his full name, because if you call a cat something long enough it just gets weird to call him something else.

You’ll also notice that Lopsided Cat, like Zeus, just showed up at the door and was taken in. We very strongly suspect (also like Zeus) that he may have originally been someone else’s cat, since Lopsided Cat had already been fixed before he came to us; unlike Zeus, however, we don’t suspect he was abandoned, because he was well fed and (minus the earmites) in healthy form. What we think happened is that he was the kid of a neighborhood cat named Baby (who is also Ghlaghghee’s mom) who was given to another neighbor, and that eventually Lopsided Cat simply decided he was going to trade up, owner-wise. I think it’s likely at first he time-shared between two households, because in the early days he’d be gone for days at a time, but then either he made a final decision in his catlike head, or the other owners simply moved away, leaving him behind.

Either way, he’s our cat now, and an excellent one: Very mellow, unless he’s killing something, in which case, he’s pretty much the opposite of mellow. I think this is a good way to be a carnivore, personally. And the whole permanent head tilt is an endearing quirk, since it always makes it look like he’s looking at you like you just did something funny. It’s like a permanent laugh track, in cat form.

That’s his story.

Basically, for everyone who complains I give too much blog love to the cats and not enough to the dog.

You’ve seen Ghlaghghee. You’ve seen Lopsided Cat. You’ve even seen Zeus. But until now, you’ve never seen all three of them together in the same picture:

And there you have it. Your life is now totally fulfilled. You’re welcome.

For actually, the interesting thing about the picture for me is that three years after we moved it to another location, you can still see in the grass the circular impression of the inflatable pool we once set up there.

I just found the cover art for the spanish version of The Ghost Brigades (Las Brigadas Fantasmas) and it rocks. If you want to see it, click on the “continue reading” link (I’m doing this way so as to not yet knock the “Big Idea” piece below the fold).

Continue Reading »

We’ve been talking about YA quite a lot here in Whateverland, and as coincidence has it, today’s Big Idea piece is from Maureen Johnson, who writes — can you guess? — young adult books. Her latest, Suite Scarlett, takes place in a fantastical land with strange creatures, but in this case the fantastical land is Manhattan, and the strange creatures are the Martin family and the guests who stay at their small, family-run hotel. Hey, YA: it’s not all unicorns and spaceships, pal. Sorry if I’ve been giving you that impression.

In this installment, Maureen Johnson talks about getting a Big Idea out of a Bad Idea, in a story that involves Kurt Vonnegut. Yes, indeed: Kurt Vonnegut. Let’s let our author go into the details. She tells it better.

MAUREEN JOHNSON:

My latest novel, Suite Scarlett, exists because I once allowed an eight-year-old to conduct a band in a musical production of Kurt Vonnegut’s apocalyptic masterpiece Cat’s Cradle, with the author himself in the audience. Most sensible people would have stopped the moment they heard “musical” in connection with Cat’s Cradle and would therefore never have gotten as deep into the mess as I did. But if there is one principle I’ve come to embrace and even make Big Ideas out of, it’s this . . . occasionally, you must embrace the Bad Idea, if only to see how things pan out. Sensible Ideas will only get you so far in life. If you really want to get somewhere, Bad Ideas are the way. Every once in a while you just have to take a match to something and say, “I wonder what this does when it burns!”

But as to how I got into the Cat’s Cradle situation . . .

I went to graduate school to study theatrical dramaturgy and writing at Columbia University. I did it cheerfully, signing all my loans on the dotted line with a grim, manic determination, one after another, each one bigger than the last, in a manner in which I like to imagine would befit poor Giles Corey—the man pressed to death under stones during the Salem Witch Trials—who, when asked for a statement, would only say, “More weight.”

Most of the people I knew had no idea what theatrical dramaturgy was. I had only the faintest idea myself. Technically, I had been one for a Philadelphia theater company, and I had spent the majority of my time their breaking up fights, putting out (literal and figurative) fires, and finding lost cast members. Cat’s Cradle was my last show with the company, and was also (not surprisingly) the last production the company ever did.

It did not go well.

At the time, I was enthusiastic and gung-ho to do absolutely any show, anywhere, anytime. I was perfectly amenable to an all-singing, all-dancing apocalypse. Nevermind that the company was going bankrupt, that the playwright was a known liar and pervert, the cast was near mutiny, the script changed every other day, and the band regularly snuck off to get high on breaks. When the set designer failed to measure the stage—and the cat-cradle-like platforms he constructed himself—and the massive airplane wing he brought in for the dance number toppled over and fell into the orchestra pit . . . I happily joined the group who lifted it out and quietly snuck it down an alley, to leave it along with (what I image was) a very surprised Philadelphian’s garbage.

On the night that Kurt Vonnegut himself came to see the show, I found the stage manager rocking on the front steps of the theater, chain-smoking and mumbling “If just one more thing goes wrong . . .”

It was ten minutes later that I found the eight-year-old with the baton in his hand. He was the son of the bandleader. His father was stuck in traffic a hundred miles away, having incorrectly assumed that he could go to New York City and make it back to Philadelphia in one three-hour span that included rush hour. I was faced with a choice: tell the stage manager what was going on (and possibly witness an aneurism), or say that everyone was in place and let the show go on. I weighed the options, and decided to let the kid do it. Because when you get to a certain point, you simply have to deal with the hand life has dealt you and roll with it. The curtain must go up, and something must happen. You cannot wait around forever for perfect circumstances. You improvise. You deal.

On the back of that experience, I signed my life away and moved to New York to get myself some more. In short, it was all a fairly bad idea, made from the parts of lesser bad ideas. But I rolled many of those experiences and observations into a book. Or a series of books, actually, of which Suite Scarlett is the first.

Suite Scarlett is the story of the Martin family—the owners and operators of a much-distressed Art Deco hotel in New York City called the Hopewell that has lost money steadily since the 1970s. Everything is falling apart at the Hopewell Hotel—lives, futures, furniture. The family itself though, six in all, is quite strong. The story centers around fifteen year-old Scarlett who finds herself in a situation not unlike the ones I was often in, although much less willingly.

Scarlett’s older brother (and close friend) is Spencer, an out-of-work actor facing down a family deadline to get some kind of paid work or go to culinary school and give up all hopes of performing. Enter Mrs. Amberson, a former Broadway diva of the disco era and a woman of some means, who has come back to New York to make something. What, she has no idea. At first, she thinks it is a book, but she soon decides that it is a theater company, specifically the one that Spencer has just joined. It, too, is out of money and in need of a miracle. Mrs. Amberson shanghais Scarlett into becoming her assistant, dragging her into the theater world and taking over almost every aspect of her life.

This is not the Manhattan of Gossip Girl. Suite Scarlett isn’t about buying things or vying for position. I wanted to write about the New York I understood—the one where you make things, and the creative underclasses and the rich mingle, sometimes uneasily, sometimes very fruitfully. Scarlett soon learns the skill of making things up—solutions that have little to do with money, and everything to do with creativity and embracing the implausible and slightly insane. I think this is an especially important principle to introduce to today’s teens, some of whom may be laboring under the misapprehension that things in life are supposed to work in a certain way, that a series of standardized tests will lead to a life of perfect order—a life in which mistakes and risks are things to be feared and avoided.

I mean, take the case of the eight-year-old conductor. Letting him conduct the band was a terrible idea. As it turned out, no one could tell the difference between the band on that night and the band on any other night. Maybe it’s because they knew what they were doing. Or maybe it was because they were always playing while they were a little high and it all sounded the same. In the end, it really didn’t matter. The show on the stage was always a lot less interesting than the one I was living every day.

Before I go, I would also like to point out that the book features a performance of Hamlet on unicycles, which might possibly be of interest to some of you. You seem like the type. I mean, you guys like bacon on cats. And that, if nothing else, is an example of a Bad Idea becoming a Big Idea.

–

Visit Maureen John’s blog here. Also, because I find it extremely amusing, view this YouTube video from Maureen Johnson about five things you didn’t know about her, in which she simply doesn’t blink. Around minute three my eyes started watering for her.

The estimable Paul Di Filippo shows up in the comment thread for “Why YA,” explaining why he holds the contrary view that a robust YA sf/f market is not necessarily a good thing for adult sf/f. I’ll leave to others to argue most of his several points of contention, if they so choose, but there’s one I’d like to tackle myself. Di Filippo’s main complaint is thus:

In a nutshell: every book of YA SF written means one less book of “adult” SF written by that author.

In all likelihood, we will never see another EVOLUTION’S DARLING by Scott Westerfeld, given the success of his YA stuff.

So the genre is deprived on that level.

The genre is certainly deprived, I agree. But not for the reason Di Filippo suggests. The reason we might not see another Evolution’s Darling from Scott has almost nothing to do with the fact he’s successfully writing YA, and quite a lot to with the fact that adult SF/F didn’t make it worth his time to continue in the field.

(Note: I’ve not talked to Scott about what I’m about to write, so don’t blame any of my speculation here on him.)

The first issue, predictably enough, is money. I don’t know what Scott got for his five adult SF novels, but I guarantee you it wasn’t very much. I don’t know what he would have gotten for adult novel #6, but whatever that amount would have been, I also pretty much guarantee you it wouldn’t have been what he got paid to write Young Adult. If the adult sf/f genre is deprived of additional Scott Westerfeld work (or the work of any SF/F author), one reason is because the genre is endemically cheap, not because the author is merely frittering away his talent writing for teens.

And this is not the case merely because Scott is now successful and naturally commands better advances, although he is and he does. Off the top of my head, and without naming any names, I can think of two sf/f authors who have sold rather fewer books to readers than I have, who recently got advances that were about twice the top amount I’ve been offered so far, because those advances were for books in YA. And those books only have to be half to two-thirds as long as mine have to be, which is a real knife twister, if you ask me.

This is not necessarily a complaint about what I’m paid; I’m being paid just fine, now that the back end’s kicked in. Thanks to my writing income in other fields, I didn’t have to Ramen up while waiting for my royalties. I wouldn’t mind larger advances, but the semi-annual bundles of cash I get from Tor are nice too. But note well that I am one of the relative few writers who receives a significant amount of income from my book royalties; the pay most writers get is what they get from their advances. This being the case, it’s really no wonder why so many writers of adult science fiction and fantasy have been crossing over into Young Adult, or at least have been trying very hard to do so. If you’re trying to make a living writing, why wouldn’t you write for the people who pay you more money for fewer words — and who are, if the numbers tell us anything, generally doing a better job of selling the work they do have?

Which is the second point: part of the reason YA sf/f pays more than adult sf/f is that it sells more — for whatever reasons, it gets more books into buyers’ hands. To get back to Scott for a moment, let’s face it: There has to be some reason that Scott was a bit of a flop (sorry, Scott) in adult science fiction, while being a huge success in YA. It’s not that his skill somehow advanced moving from one genre to the next, since Scott’s adult SF was critically praised; for example, Evolution’s Darling was a New York Times Notable Book and a special citation winner at the Philip K Dick Awards. And speaking from personal taste, his Succession books — The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds — are so good that I gleefully stole whole chunks of his action plotting when I wrote my own action scenes in The Ghost Brigades. Scott’s YA is excellent, but it is not so excellent, relative to his adult work, that it should sell exponentially better.

Nor can this be chalked up entirely to “well, kids just stop reading when they’re adults,” since adult fiction in general sells substantially more than juvenile fiction, and the top adult fiction titles sell more than the top YA titles, when the author of the YA is not JK Rowling. Adults read fiction just fine, thanks. And they even read science fiction and fantasy just fine, too, and in impressive numbers, as long as it’s handled outside of genre. Stephenie Meyer — primarily a YA author, note — is about to top the adult bestseller charts with The Host, which is flat-out science fiction, albeit handled by Little, Brown rather than Orbit, Hachette’s SF arm. Likewise, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Chabon have sold hundred of thousands of copies of their science fiction works, cleverly disguised as mainstream fiction. And then there’s J.D. Robb, aka Nora Roberts, who sells unspeakably huge numbers of science fiction police procedurals, just not shelved in the SF/F section. This may suggest that YA readers do graduate to reading adult science fiction and fantasy, they just don’t want to be seen in the SF/F section of the bookstore when they do it.

The fact of the matter is that adult science fiction (and to a lesser extent adult fantasy) has a harder time marketing itself to readers. There are lots of reasons for this, some relating to structural issues in the book business and some just cultural issues, but it’s a real problem. I think it’s being addressed — I know I’ve had a lot of discussions with the Tor folks about it (and for the record I think Tor’s done a pretty good job getting more than the usual suspects to read my own work). But it’s a long way from where we are to where the genre needs to be, and I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone.

Structurally there is no bar to writing in both YA and adult fields: Stephenie Meyer’s doing it, James Patterson is doing it, Robert Heinlein did it, and it’s probably true that Scott Westerfeld could easily do it as well, if he so chose. Some significant portion of Scott’s YA audience would likely follow him into adult territory, as some significant portion of Meyer’s crowd is following her; this would pretty much automatically make a new adult Westerfeld book one of the biggest-selling SF titles of its year. He could write another Evolution’s Darling if he wanted. But the real question is whether anyone in adult science fiction would actually make it worth his time to do so, with money and marketing.

I’m skeptical. I suspect if the adult sf/f genre had made it worth his time in the first place, he’d still be writing in it. Which is to say the loss of Scott Westerfeld to the adult sf/f genre is a self-inflicted wound.

Earlier in the year I was asked to write the introduction for Project Moonbase and Others, a book of scripts that Robert Heinlein wrote for a 1950s television series based on his stories (a series which, alas, never made it out of pilot). I readily agreed, both because I am a huge Heinlein fan and also because it meant that I was going to have a chance to read some Heinlein work almost nobody else had to that point, which really is like getting a shiny new toy on Christmas. Needless to say, I found the scripts fascinating — but for reasons which were a bit different than what I expected.

Over at Subterranean Online my introduction to the book is up for your perusal, which explains what I found so interesting about the scripts — and there’s a sneak peak at the text of the book itself: the script adaptation of “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” one of the several scripts in the book. This is your chance to look at some of the first “new” Heinlein in decades (and, uh, me talking about it). Don’t miss it.

(P.S.: That awesome cover? Bob Eggleton.)

Cory Doctorow has a tradition of releasing a Creative Commons-licensed free electronic version of his books when they come out in the stores. For Little Brother, Cory was a little behind the actual book release — he had the temerity to be offline, having a life with his family, of all things! — but now he’s all caught up and has out up a Little Brother area on his personal site, complete with free CC downloads as well as other ginchy things. Check it out.

Also: if you check it out and you like it (as I expect you will, it’s excellent), go to your local bookstore (or favorite online retailer) and buy it, either to have a physical copy for yourself, or as a gift for a teen you’re hoping to either start or to further encourage on the road to geek rebellion. As you know, around here we’re big fans of rewarding authors one likes with income, so they can maybe write more books later. It’s a virtuous cycle, it is.

Hachette Book Group USA (HBG), seeks to fill the position of Editor for its science fiction and fantasy imprint, Orbit.

Hey! It comes with dental! Because even the king or queen of geeks needs top-notch dental hygiene. Perhaps more than most.

I’d apply myself, but I don’t think Hachette wants me running their science fiction line out of Bradford, Ohio.

I’m absolutely delighted to say that today is the day that my astronomy book, The Rough Guide to the Universe, comes out in a second, updated edition. In it you’ll find the latest on Pluto, Saturn, Mars and other astronomical entities about whom we’ve learned more since the first edition of the book hit stores in 2003.

For those of you who didn’t know I actually wrote anything but fiction, this book is an introduction to the universe and everything in it, for the sort of person who has just gotten themselves a telescope and is now wondering what the heck to do with it. The book tells you, explaining everything you can see in the heavens, and then helping you find those objects way up there. It covers every planet in the solar system (including the dwarf ones, and including our own) plus stars, constellations, nebulae, clusters, galaxies and the ever-proverbial more, and provides detailed star charts to fill you in on what’s where in the night sky.

I was immensely proud of this book when it first came out five years ago — I am a huge believer in the idea that science is accessible to just about anyone who wants to find out about it, and it was a life goal of mine to write an astronomy book. This was exactly the sort of book I wanted to be able to write on the subject: accessible but not simplistic, informative but not bone-dry. The fact it’s been successful enough to warrant a second edition is just about the best thing ever, in my opinion. I hope in 2013 you’ll see the third edition, too. I’ll be happy to update it as long as they let me.

If you’ve wanted to learn more about astronomy, or know someone who wants to learn more, I hope you’ll check out the book. Remember, you want the 2nd edition, with Saturn on the cover (the previous version had Jupiter; it’s now out of date). And if you do get it, I hope you enjoy it. It’s an amazing universe we live in. I’m really happy to be able to tell you about it.