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Archive for the 'Can’t Stop Thinking' Category
Sunday, January 8th, 2012
 HiLoBrow.com has announced the launch of HiLo Books, an imprint dedicated to what they call Radium Age Science Fiction – because, after all, what the genre needs is more labels. By "Radium Age" they mean science fiction written between the years of 1904 and 1933, bounded on the one hand by the scientific romances of Jules Verne, Edgar Alan Poe, and H. G. Wells, and on the other (the upper?) hand by the Golden Age works of writers like Asimov and his contemporaries.
I have a problem with labels. Still, since HiLoBrow is effectively creating a brand I can understand why they’d want to find some label to distinguish it from everything it’s not.
The lineup of releases for 2012 is a pretty promising one – there’s Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; taken together, these show a united front of mainstream writers from the period who each experimented with speculative fiction.
 If it all sounds a little bit like someone who’s desperate to be taken seriously, I expect that’s fine. A series like this exists in part to draw new readers into the scary, nerdy depths of science fiction in a way that seems comfortable, and even respectable .
What I can’t understand, though, is the books’ covers. They look like something out of the ranks of the worst of Amazon’s self-published novels. It’s especially confusing because the folks at HiLoBrow certainly know what good book covers look like, either for these same works or for their own. Their earlier Wage Slave’s Glossary has a handsome cover by Seth, and they’ve showcased a beautiful gallery of period book covers including this lovely one for With the Night Mail.
So there’s no question that they know that books can be beautiful. I don’t understand why they want to publish ones that are pretty much the opposite.
 This led me to wonder whether these books aren’t the slapped together Amazonian things they resemble; and trying to answer that question led me right down the rabbit hole.
First, HiLoBooks has a distributor for its books. So there can’t be much doubt that there will be a warehouse of their books someplace – PGW also handles Archaia Studio Press, Nolo Press, Cricket Books, and plenty of other familiar independent and small press publishers. It sounds like we ought to be safe from some of the self-published horrors at Amazon (full disclosure: I’m also self-published, though I hope not horribly, at Amazon)
Second, HiLoBooks – according to their press release – will be an imprint of ‘Cursor, Richard Nash’s “publishing platform of the future”.’ Since a visit to the Cursor web site was completely uninformative I dug deeper, to find Nash’s talk at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum. In this talk (""Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships") Nash admits more than once that he’s speaking in very abstract terms. Those terms are in fact so abstract that at the end of the presentation I still had no idea what Cursor was supposed to be.
You’ll see in the talk that Publishing 3.0 (more labels!) is supposed to be an upgrade for the role of publishers in which books themselves become just one aspect of the relationship between readers and writers; in which that relationship has now become the focus of publishing, since so many large and small interactions within that community – including the sale of books – can be sources of profit for a publisher.
But if, like me, you’re left scratching your head and wondering first, what that means, and second, why a publisher deserves to monetize every aspect of the relationship between authors and their audience, well, your head is just going to get scraped bare from all the scratching. The answer isn’t in there. The subtitle of the talk is "From Gatekeeping to Partnerships", but it sounds more like "From Gatekeeping to Super-Gatekeeping".
Like the music industry, the book publishing industry probably feels as though it’s besieged by new technologies and the uses we find for them. Nash’s "Publishing 3.0" seems to be a response that’s in direct opposition to the way things are headed. By "the way things are headed", I mean that we seem to be on the verge of a world where there are no gatekeepers; where, for better or worse, artists are left to deal directly with the community. This requires marketing, which is one of the traditional roles of a publisher; but it’s by no means certain that publishers will be the ones doing that marketing. The "Publishing 3.0" of Cursor looks like a plan to establish a whole new level of gatekeeping in which every interaction between writers and their audience is owned by the publisher. That’s why I called it "Super-Gatekeeping".
What would publishers bring to the table, to make that look like a good deal for the writers and their readers?
There is just the glimmer of an answer – to half that question, anyway – in a post at Nash’s own blog.
For writers…
No more life-of-the-copyright contracts.
Instead: three year contracts.
Yup, from a contract that locks you in till seventy years after you’re dead, to a three year contract. Renewable annually thereafter. Which means after three years you can walk. Or stay, but stick it to us for better royalties because there’s gonna be a movie. Or stay with us because with all the additional formats and revenue opportunities we’re creating above and beyond what any publisher has to offer, you’re making more money than ever before.
This seems to translate to "We will own every cell in your body, but only for a little while". It doesn’t take too long a trek down memory lane to recall how many writers and artists were willing to do original work for hire just because they had to and how this sometimes left them excluded from very lucrative extensions to their work (Siegel and Shuster, or Jack Kirby, are the obvious examples in comics publishing). So in a Cursorized world, maybe creators would figure that assigning a publisher complete and total ownership – which might be temporary – is the price of doing business.
Nash’s talk establishes some comfy small press credentials (starting a publishing company during the night shift at Kinko’s) but the end product seems like something out of a dystopian novel. I don’t mean that in a good way, if you were wondering.
And with "dystopian novel", I seem to have come full circle and landed on the back of HiLoBooks. I wish them well, especially if they didn’t really mean for us to believe in those book covers. But I’m not sure about the company they’ve chosen to keep. I suppose that (their authors being dead, after all) one half of my misgivings about Cursor are unfounded in HiLo’s case. That leaves a not inconsiderable amount of discomfort, though.
Technorati Tags: hilobooks, with the night mail, rudyard kipling, radium age, vintage, science fiction, reprint, cursor, publishing 3.0, author, publisher, business models
Posted in Can't Stop Thinking, Found on the Web | No Comments »
Friday, April 8th, 2011
 Sommer Leigh has written a pretty thorough description of the retro futurist genres that (mostly) end in the suffix "punk".
I’ve said before that I’m not all that crazy about labels of this kind, and it’s partly because apart from the first of these – cyberpunk – the punk suffix is completely meaningless.
In William Gibson’s Neuromancer
and in at least its first descendants, "punk" really did belong in the name. The technological marvels of these futures were not there to benefit people. They were there to cement the power of large corporations and organizations. The fact that a disenfranchised few on society’s fringes were able to subvert those technologies to their own ends is what made them punks, in the punk rock sense. They were standing on its head the mechanism of power and making something personal and subversive out of it.
But then the word became popular, and shortly afterward it became meaningless, as we see in all the labels that have followed.
Leigh touches on this in her description of steampunk, which is nice to see. Heck, it’s always nice to see people thinking about the meanings of the words they use.
Apart from my own crotchety observations, then, Sommer Leigh has come up with short form descriptions of what each of these labels gets stuck on which should be useful to anybody who wants to use them. (Did I say I was done being crotchety? Oh well. And get off my lawn, there, you kids!)
Consider it a field guide to spotting these words when they’re thrown around in the wild. There are some nice examples cited except, oddly, for the one label I rather like. That’s "Raygun Gothic". Why do I forgive that particular label? First off, there’s no meaningless suffix – what a relief! But despite that, if you take a good look at it "Raygun Gothic" doesn’t seem to mean much, either. It’s just such a… pretty phrase, I guess, and sort of evocative, so I find myself smiling at it even though it, too, seems to be playing on my lawn.
Technorati Tags: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, raygun gothic, gratuitous uses of the suffix “punk”, retro futurism, retro futuristic
Posted in Can't Stop Thinking, Found on the Web | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
 Sometimes, when I see the increasingly litigious ways we deal with one another, I think about the things we’ve lost. Oh, I don’t mean disputes over property lines or breach of contract or any of that. I’m thinking about the way we now use law to set our personal boundaries and criminalize bad behavior.
It’s not that I don’t despise things like sexual harassment. In fact that’s one I especially dislike. Sexual harassment is the sort of thing that makes a thinking man angry. I mean, a few overgrown infants make the rest of us look pretty bad by association, just because we share the same kind of plumbing.
But as we’ve relied more and more on labelling behavior, and on laws to regulate it once it’s labelled, and on punishments for it once it’s regulated, we’ve lost some of the skills that people need just to deal with each other in groups. Skills that we actually used to have.
A lot of bad behavior is more unfortunate than it is criminal. Once upon a time we’d have dealt with it through deflection… or by hauling the offender out behind the tobacconist’s and knocking out one of his teeth.
Case in point: stalking. Once upon a time some forms of stalking were not only permitted. They were necessary. I wouldn’t be here typing this if my grandfather hadn’t stalked my grandmother. And there wasn’t a creepy thing about it.
My grandfather – who, later in life, appeared in the terrifying photograph above – first saw my grandmother on the Vaudeville stage. She would have been about sixteen at the time, right about the time her photo below was taken.
This was the musical comedy act of Noodles and Elsie Fagan. My grandmother Blanche and her sister were each part of their parents’ act. Family legend has it that Grandmother even managed the act from the age of eleven because everyone agreed she was the most sensible one of the bunch.
So when Reuben Smith saw her on that stage she’d have been singing, lit romantically by the stage lights. And that did him in. The moment he saw her he decided that this was the girl for him.
 But what to do? In that day and age you wouldn’t get anywhere by approaching a young woman and introducing yourself. You’d do more harm than good. An action that forward was an implied insult: by acting improperly, you’d be suggesting that she was improper and that, as they say, would be Game Over. Out behind the tobacconist’s for some quick dental surgery, bub.
One of the interesting things about what my grandfather did do was that it’s closely paralleled in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, in an episode set at about the same time. Lazarus Long, in that story, travels back in time to meet his own family. And he does just what my grandfather decided to do on the night he saw my grandmother on Vaudeville and followed her all the way from the stage door to her front door. In the dark of night. Stealthily, I bet.
Grandfather started to hang out in her neighborhood. He started shopping there; he ate his meals in the neighborhood restaurants; he hung out there long enough to make some friends, and once he was a fixture in the neighborhood, someone introduced him to my grandmother. The rest, if not history, is my history. And – probably because of the way things turned out – even that bit of stalking under the streetlights doesn’t seem sinister. It seems charming.
I’m fascinated by the fact that Heinlein had his character adopt the same strategy because it suggests that my grandfather wasn’t the only one. I really wonder if someone Heinlein knew in the 1920′s hadn’t told him a family story a lot like mine.
Chances are that if my grandfather tried this clever plan today he’d end up in jail, and as a result there would be no me to tell his story.
Now one reaction you might have to this tale is that in a repressed and rigid society people are forced to deceive and scheme in order to lead a normal life. I think that’s absolutely true. But after half a century in a less repressed and rigid society I haven’t noticed that people have given up deception and scheming. So, I say, phooey.
And when I think about those stiffer, more formal days I also think that when we hand over our personal relationships – even the unpleasant ones – to the law… well, we’re formalizing those things in a different, impersonal way. Society hasn’t abandoned its rules and manners. It’s just delegated them. How weird is that?
Technorati Tags: stalking, society, mating rituals, law, robert a. heinlein, time enough for love
Posted in Can't Stop Thinking | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
 We have to thank Mister Doortree of Golden Age Comic Book Stories for this image (thanks, Mister Doortree!), which has reminded me of something odd from the past.
Back in 1977 I moved from Southern California to a great, small beach town halfway up the coast. Wonderful place… but I’m not going to say where, exactly, for reasons that may become clear.
For the first little while that I lived there, every time someone local found out that I was new in town they would always tell me: "Don’t go to Happy Jack’s!" I’m serious. This happened every time.
The bar called Happy Jack’s, it turns out, was The Dive of Death.
The only thing that anyone ever said… specifically… about why I should not go to Happy Jack’s was, I kid you not, that they sold knives at the bar. Because people in the bar kept finding out that they really needed a knife, apparently. All of a sudden.
The fact that virtually everyone told me not to go in there was good enough for me. A few years earlier or later, and maybe I’d have made a beeline for Happy Jack’s. But just then, I decided to take their word for it.
And after awhile, well, I was a local. And without even thinking about it, when someone new showed up I’d tell them "Don’t go to Happy Jack’s". After a couple of years I started to wonder why I was telling them that. I’m not sure if it stopped me, though. This says something about the way people behave in groups. Most of the things you can say about how we behave in groups are not very good things. This could be an example.
So eventually I moved away and had adventures, and mostly I forgot all about Happy Jack’s. But years later I came back to spend the Christmas holidays in the old town. And I found myself walking down the street right past the open door of Happy Jack’s. I had never seen that door standing open in all the time I lived there.
It was quiet in there. They had a lot of Christmas decorations up. I’m pretty sure there were little Santas. And it looked like a peaceable, quiet sort of place to drop in for a drink.
It seemed to me that there’d been a change of management in the fifteen years I’d been away and I was sort of sad to see it tamed. If it had remained a little dangerous it would have been a lot more interesting. I didn’t go in.
I’m still not sure if that was a mistake. And I’m not sure that it wasn’t just force of habit, either.
But then there’s this: what if Happy Jack’s had never been a dangerous bar where they sold knives to people who suddenly needed them? What if the whole thing had been wrong… and I’d been perpetuating that when I chimed in to warn off the new folks in town?
I find that I prefer to believe that it was all true. But then, that’s what we usually prefer, isn’t it?
Technorati Tags: happy jack’s, the dive of death
Posted in Can't Stop Thinking | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
E-Readers (Neat!) and E-Books (Not!)
 I love the idea of a reading slate, an e-reader, a tablet. I love books, after all, and no computer can match their portability or ease of use. And there’s that retro-futuristic quality about them – though honestly, even modern futurism likes the gadgets – that makes me feel right at home with an imaginary one in my hand.
The problem is that we should not want the ones that are here and coming to market. They’re loaded with problems for those of us who would like to use them. Their functions and their limitations are heavily skewed toward benefits to their manufacturers’ limited and incompatible retail schemes. So much so, in fact, that as sexy as you may think that iPad demo was, or as pleased as you are to see Neil Gaiman exulting over the Kindle, these gadgets are going to lead their buyers down a dark and twisty path that leads to that place where media go to die.
A book is a simple object, which is not to say it’s a limited one. It’s portable knowledge. It – importantly – is an object that can outlive both its author and its reader. All its contents are present at once, and one can skim it or hone in on a particular page as quickly as one’s eyes and fingers can move. It can be given to a friend; it can be loaned for a short time; it can be sold or traded. It can be borrowed from a library. It can be left on a dusty shelf for a couple of decades and then picked up and read again. Someday, long after its author wrote it, it will pass into the public domain and can then be reprinted for next to nothing.
E-books, like books, are portable knowledge. But they’re very bad at everything else in that list.
(more…)
Posted in Can't Stop Thinking | 4 Comments »
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