The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf

Farewell, Anne McCaffrey

2011-11-22T18:07:00.000-08:00

Sad news for all fans of Pern and of all her other series. After a long and very productive writing career, Anne McCaffrey is no more. A massive heart attack has taken her from this world.

She will be missed.

But her writing will stand for the ages.

Women, Men and Reviews

2011-11-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

Kate Elliot has a very interesting post on her LiveJournal about disparaties in visibility and reception of books by men and women authors. She's brought up some very interesting issues related to the role of reviewing, of positive and negative publicity about the authors' personal lives (women authors are far more prone to getting treated as though their personal shortcomings reflect the value of their work, while men often get far more severe missteps forgiven), and of male vs. female gazes (what men observe is viewed as universally important, while what women look at is of importance only to women).

Bad News for Horror Readers and Writers

2011-11-04T07:45:00.001-07:00

Due to the bad economy, The Twisted Library is putting all anthologies on hold for at least six months and some, the exact number to be determined, will be canceled altogether. Like Norilana Books, which has also had to postpone anthology publications and has had some editors take their anthologies elsewhere, The Twisted Library is a small press that is almost entirely the work of one person. Things had hung on for a little longer there because the publisher of The Twisted Library is a dentist and had been using money from his dental practice to float the anthologies, but as the economic crisis worsens, people are deferring routine dental care, which means less income for him, and a lot of it has to be put back into maintaining the overhead of his dental practice.

This is unfortunate because short stories in anthologies are one of the important ways for readers to be introduced to new writers. If you know that there will be at least two or three authors in it whose stories you are likely to enjoy, you can buy feeling confident that you'll get your money's worth, and thus take the risk of trying out stories by new writers that are also in there. After all, you've already paid your money, so everything else you gain is a bonus.

Guest Posting on "Red Star, Yellow Sign"

2011-05-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Today I'm guest posting on my own story in Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
, "Red Star, Yellow Sign" at Molly Tanzer's blog. I'm delving into the writing process, and how changing views of history intersect with it.

So please come over and take a look.

A Woefully Incomplete Record of the Beloved Ancestors of the Ivybridge Twins

2011-05-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Today we have a guest blog by Molly Tanzer, author of "The Infernal History of The Ivybridge Twins."

When Silvia requested we Historical Lovecraft authors do a “The Author Speaks” segment to go at the end of our stories, and mentioned she wanted us specifically to discuss our inspiration, I decided to go the direct route and confess the original spark came from wanting to do a picaresque about twin incestuous necromancers. Ah, the muse, and her mysterious demands! Can we ever know the why?

While what I wrote was true, going a bit deeper I must confess that the desire to write something set in 18th England, using tropes so often found within the novels of the time, has long been a desire of mine. My Master’s degree in Humanities largely focused on the novels and women’s novel culture of 18th century England, and when I turned my hand to creative writing, I wanted to pay a bit of homage to those writers and their work. I doubt they’d be entirely pleased with my effort. Or pleased at all, in any way, quite frankly. Regardless, their writing inspired me while composing “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins,” for better or for worse, and here I’ll discuss that in more depth.

Scholars such as Ian Watt consider 18th century England to be the place and time where the true “modern novel” was born. It’s an interesting theory, and one that has caused quite a number of critical debates—but even if we disregard that particular academic ruckus, one of the reasons those interested in the origin of the modern novel turn to the era of Defoe and Richardson Fielding is that. . . well, about a bajillion novels that look very much like what we, today in 2011 think of when we think of novels, got published around then. Except for poor Edmund Blackadder's, of course—but there were extenuating circumstances.

Seriously though, there really were about a bajillion novels published in the 18th century, many of which have fallen into obscurity due to various reasons (like their not fitting well into survey curricula, or their being written by the ladies and thus long dismissed by the Academy as unimportant, or their being too didactic for our modern taste, or being. . . well, let’s just say, “not the best written”—though I, for one, still love even the crappiest 18th century novel). And, as with any time period, there were conventions used within those bajillion or so novels that we can now, from where we sit, identify and talk about in essays and articles and stuff.
When writing my Infernal History, I chose some of my favorite novels, novelists, and tropes—the ones I loved and have found myself inspired by for many years—and “artistically borrowed” from them to create the “feel” I wanted for the piece. What I’m going to do today is identify a few little tidbits from my story that were directly informed by the novels and novelists of the 18th century, and cite some works where, if you like what I’ve done in my piece, you can go to enjoy the original (but you don’t have to take my word for it).

I should say, however, that this is an imperfect list, simply because I crammed a hell of a lot of what I learned during my Master’s (and afterwards, in private study) into the piece. Thusly, I’m not even going to start on topics like, oh, say, “sensibility,” or “chattel slavery in the West Indies,” or, Christ, “the relationship between desire and disease in women represented in fiction of the 18th century.” Thankfully, others have given those topics the treatment they deserve, and so I’ve included a bibliography at the end so anyone interested can read around a bit.
Onward!

The Narrator as Character: A few times in “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins,” the narrator interjects herself into the story, giving the reader her specific opinion on the events. This is a convention used frequently in the 18th century novel, and famously in Tom Jones (1749). In fact, the narrator’s voice is so strong in Tom Jones that, in the delightful 1997 miniseries, the writers decided to incorporate that voice by having Henry Fielding himself be a character. He frequently comes on screen to comment on the action, and it’s very amusing. (I also recommend that miniseries for Brian Blessed’s performance.) Tom Jones, as I’ve related elsewhere, was where I discovered what “calipash” was, and thus it yielded the family name of my characters, but it was also one of my main inspirations for the “voice” of the piece.

Names that Tell You About the Character’s Personality and/or Rôle in the Book: So, yeah, there’s a character named Mr. Villein in my novelette. Guess what? He’s not the good guy. Spoiler alert, I know, but for serious, everyone probably could figure that one out. I love this kind of thing. Eliza Haywood uses the effect in her 1751 novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (hmm, wonder what Betsy’s like?) as does Sarah Fielding in The Adventures of David Simple (1744) (hmm, what’s—never mind). Henry Fielding, I suppose I must mention, uses this too, in Tom Jones, though perhaps more ironically, given his characters have names like Squire Allworthy and Reverend Thwackum. Come to think of it, after the publication of Richardson’s famous novel Pamela (1740), where the virtuous Pamela is justly rewarded, Fielding also wrote a book called Shamela (1741), about a girl who spends her time trying to trick a man named Squire Booby into marrying her. . . good times, good times indeed.

The West-Indian, Return’d, at Last, to England: At one point in the “Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins,” a man, after a long time spent in the West Indies, comes home to Devonshire. My goodness, but you can find a lot of that sort of thing in 18th century novels! One of my favorite essays on the subject is an old one, Wylie Sypher’s 1939 “The West-Indian as a ‘Character’ in the Eighteenth Century,” which is regrettably not available online except through JSTOR. If you have a subscription, or know someone who does, and are interested in such things, definitely check it out. It’s fascinating. If you’d rather read the fiction from which this essay is drawn, however, one of the most iconic instances of this can be found in The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) by Frances Sheridan. I shan’t tell you how, though, so it can be a surprise—it’s a great book, and if you can find it, well worth reading for pleasure. Though less dramatically utilized, such a theme is also found in Sarah Scott’s sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison (also a favorite of mine), and in the more socially-conservative Belinda (1801), by Maria Edgeworth. Much later, Charlotte Brontë hearkens back to this trope in Jane Eyre (1847)—the appearance of Richard Mason recalls the events of many of the 18th century novels discussed above.

The Long-Lasting Effects of Education, Good and Bad: Here are a few books that discuss in detail the topic of education, whether it be the need for, the uses of, or the dire consequences of a poor one: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and The History of Sir George Ellison, Haywood’s Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). I could go on to list even more! Often discussed in popular literature, the education debate was found in magazines, newspapers, tracts, and sermons during the 18th century, as well. Many men and even more women wanted for formal learning, and there were countless discussions of how schools were to be funded, who should be educated, and what should be taught. The quality of schooling, too, was a concern, for both sexes, and the repercussions of poor education were lamented and feared. In my Infernal History, education plays a large part in the life-story of the Twins—as it has done for many other characters before them.

Further Reading:

Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, by Nancy Armstrong

The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, by Markman Ellis

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World, by Trevor Burnard

Desire and Disorder: Fever, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture, by Candace Ward

Entertaining Viewing:

Barry Lyndon (1975), Dir. Stanley Kubrick

Burn! (1969), Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo

Blackadder the Third (1987), Dir. Mandie Fletcher

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1997), Dir. Metin Hüseyin

Many thanks to Leigh Kimmel for hosting this essay on her blog, and to Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles for including my story in their fine anthology.

Terror in the South Seas

2011-05-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

When we think of H. P. Lovecraft, we typically think of brooding New England villages whose inbred inhabitants rarely leave the township and who may well have ancestors who aren't entirely human. But the power of ancient eldritch entities can hardly be confined to one small corner of the insignificant little blue-green marble that is our terrestrial sphere.

In Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time, Y, W. Purnomosidhi gives us "Pralaya: The Disaster," a story of the eruption of Mount Merapi and of a conquering emperor. With a little forewarning a saving remnant is able to flee, but it's darkly hinted that the gods they left behind were in fact beings from beyond the stars, entities that feed upon human fear and pain.

The Second Rome

2011-05-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

According to a tradition found among many Eastern Orthodox Christian communities, Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) was the Second Rome, to which the seat of Christianity shifted after the fall of Rome to the barbarians in the Fifth Century.

When readers of speculative fiction think of Constantinople and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, we tend to think of Harry Turtledove, the Byzantinist who launched his career with stories of alternate and fantastical Constantinoples. However, he is certainly not the only one to write of what the Byzantine Empire might have been. David Drake and Eric Flint wrote a six-book time travel series about Belisarius, in a world in which a living computer from the far future has traveled backward in time to prevent a horrific racist enemy from manipulating India's caste-based culture into a monstrous tyranny dedicated to the preservation of a "pure" humanity.

And in Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
we see the marks of the meddling of the Great Old Ones in that part of human history, in "Silently, Without Cease" by Daniel Mills. His jumping-off point is the Plague of Justinian, one of the earliest known outbreaks of bubonic plague in Western Civilization. In the manner typical of virgin-field epidemics, it cut a wide swathe through a population with little genetic resistance to the Yersina pestis bacterium. Coming at a critical juncture in history, it wrecked the Emperor Justinian's plans to reunite the Eastern and Western Empires and restore the glory of the Roman Empire at its height. From that point forward, the history of the Eastern Roman Empire would be a slow but steady erosion, first to the Zoroastrian Persians and then to various Muslim forces, first Arabic-speaking and then Turkish.

In the Cthulhu Mythos, Nyarlathotep is associated both with the Egyptian pharaohs and with plagues and other apocalyptic events. Thus it seems natural to suggest that the mysterious ragged figure who arrives with the plague and subsequently heads West, with him or one of his minions.

The Holy and the Abominable

2011-05-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

Among the terrible cults we encounter in the works of H. P. Lovecraft is the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Masquerading as an ordinary Masonic Temple of the sort that can be found in many cities and towns all across the United States, it is in fact dedicated to the appeasement of monstrous aquatic entities from before the dawn of civilization. Appeasement that even goes to the point of wedding such beings and creating hybrid children, resulting in the population of the town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts having an ever-increasing proportion of its population showing strange deformities.

Interestingly enough, the name of Dagon is not unique to Lovecraft and his various colleagues. It goes all the way back to the Bible, to the Old Testament, where various Prophets of the Lord strove against priests of Dagon. For an avid reader of Lovecraft, those accounts can bring a delightful frission of fear -- are we seeing yet again the tentacle-prints of the Great Old Ones upon human history?

In Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
we have "The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat" by Alter S. Reiss, which takes us to Judah in the time of King Uzziah. The author is a professional archaeologist who has done work on Philistine sites in Israel, and draws upon modern archaeological and geological evidence as well as the Biblical account of the fall of Ashdod and the abominable Temple of Dagon there, giving us a delightfully creepy suggestion of an intersection between one of the West's most holy books and eldritch abominations.

The Pollution of Deep Time

2011-05-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

One of the distinctive characteristics of cosmic horror is its fascination with deep time. The traditional monsters of folklore -- the vampire, the werewolf, the zombie -- all are monsters on a human scale. They are the result of human misdeeds, however terrible, and generally originate in recent history relative to the protagonist of the story. Even Dracula dates back only centuries.

But H. P. Lovecraft and his various colleagues and imitators take a longer view, fitting with the rapidly expanding timescale of human and geological history that was developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Biblically-derived date of 4004 BC for the creation of the world, history and pre-history suddenly stretched backward not mere thousands but millions of years -- numbers beyond even a literate and numerate person's capacity to grasp emotionally. Suddenly the entirety of written history and civilization shrank to an insignificant coda to unimaginable dark ages knowable only by such traces as fossils left in ancient stone.

And what is unknown is by its very nature frightening. We're afraid of the dark because it limits our ability to see, and thus know, our surroundings. Thus we imagine various monstrosities and horrors lurking in those shadows, waiting to gobble us up.

How much more frightening those shadows lying across deep time, the thousands and millions of years about which we could know so little. Might they too hold their horrors and monstrosities, not mere bogeymen on human scale, but vast and horrible intellects utterly incommesurate with humanity, even indifferent to our existence, taking no more note of our civilization than we do an anthill built in the way of a road or wall?

Thus it is fitting that the very first story in the new Innsmouth Free Press anthology Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time should deal with the very dawn of human history. In "The God Lurking in Stone" Andrew Dombalagian takes us to Neolithic Mesopotamia, before the first of the Mesopotamian civilization, to tell the story of a boy whose encounter with entities ancient, unknown and terrible may have been the root of the myths about the Sumerian god Marduk.

Norilana Moving Sale

2011-04-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

After a years-long battle to save her home finally ended in defeat this past winter, Vera Nazarian is moving cross-country to a rental in Vermont. In order to fund this cross-country move, she really needs a lot of sales of her Norilana books.

If you're not sure what you might like, take a look at these reviews from The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf:

Mansfield Park and Mummies

Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

The Duke in His Castle

Sky Whales and Other wonders

After the Sundial

Clockwork Phoenix 2

Clockwork Phoenix 3

Warrior Wisewoman 2

Warrior Wisewoman 3

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIII

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIV

Cause For Concern

2010-11-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

Recently Vera Nazarian announced that several Norilana anthologies would be postponed due to the worsening economy. In addition, another anthology would be published under a different arrangement.

Shortly thereafter, she announced that another anthology editor had decided to take her lineup to be published elsewhere, albeit under a new title, since the old title had belonged to a series.

Now another editor who had previously announced a one-year sabbatical in his annual anthology for purely personal reasons is looking at the possibility that he may go to another publisher for future volumes.

This is worrisome to me because it is looking very similar to what happens when there is a run on a bank. That is, concern about the future of the institution leads to an increasing number of people to decide to get out while it's still possible, resulting in an escalation of the institution's erosion.

Of course a publisher isn't quite like a bank -- editors deciding to pull their anthologies and seek other publishers isn't going to directly deprive other titles of their existence the way a large number of people withdrawing deposits can make it impossible for the bank to make good on the remaining depositors' money. The biggest question will be how book buyers behave -- if they keep buying existing Norilana titles, the situation can still be turned around.

Free Sample of Mansfield Park and Mummies Available

2010-02-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

If you've been uncertain if whether Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights
is for you, Vera Nazarian has just posted three sample chapters on the Norilana website. So take a look now!

The Regency Egyptologist

2009-12-04T16:10:00.000-08:00

You may have heard about the recent Jane Austen mashups bringing sea monsters and zombies into the dear old classics Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Now Vera Nazarian, who as publisher of Norilana Books has already brought us James Fairfax, an alternate Jane Austen in which a royal decree permits same-sex marriage, now brings out her own hilarious parody, Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights.

As a historian (MA, Illinois State University, 1996) with a background in languages (BA in Russian Language and Literature, 1989), I find it of particular interest because, unlike the sea monster and zombie mashups, the introduction of mummies into Regency society is not merely an aventitious intrusion by the author's whim. Far from it, the period in which Jane Austen was writing was also the period in which modern Egyptology was developing as a science, casting off its roots as glorified grave-robbers to actually study the artifacts as evidence of a culture now departed from this mortal coil. Most critically, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's forces made possible the decipherment of the Egyptian sacred writings, the heiroglyphics, and opened the books of Egyptian religious and secular writing. Henceforth historians would be able to examine Egyptian temple and palace records much as they had long been able to read ancient Greek and Roman documents.

But Egyptology wasn't that far removed from its grave-robbing cousins yet. Artifacts were regularly removed from their original locations with little or no concern for preserving provenance or context, and certainly no concern whatsoever about respect for the cultures that had originally created them. Mummies were regularly brought to Britain and unwrapped in exhibitions little better than circus sideshows in a process that destroyed incalculable amounts of information about them which later generations could have learned through non-destructive means. Never mind the question of disrespect for the people whose mortal remains these were.

Now imagine that by supernatural means the ancient Egyptians forcibly expatrated from their beloved Nile Valley are able to express their objections to this mistreatment. Thus that nagging feeling of violation and guilt manifests itself in the form of the horror novel in which the mummy rises and objects in the most forceful manner possible to his victimization. Frightening as the traditional mummy movie may be, might there be just a little sense that the anonymous Ancient Egyptian beneath those wrappings has a reason to be wandering about and mugging presumptuous moderns?

But Vera Nazarian is not a writer of the gruesome variety of horror. No, her weapon is the subtle rapier wit that Jane Austen wielded against her own contemporaries, drawing instead upon the liminal unease of a world in which the boundaries between dead and living have drawn dangerously thin. The darkly handsome young gentleman with the raptor beak of a nose and the guttural accent isn't a Jewish banker from the Continent or even an Arab sheik, but an Ancient Egyptian prince returned from the grave to woo our beautiful young heroine Fanny Price -- leaving us to wonder what might befall her should she yield to his blandishments. And if he has been able to break the Law of Death and return to the land of the living, might it be possible that other boundaries could grow weak and even dissolve away, allowing the supernatural to run wild in the staid society of the English upper crust? Vampires and werewolves cast a dark shadow across the ancient writing that mysteriously appears upon a whitewashed English wall, and just what is that creature known only as the Brighton Duck?

Life Imitates Art

2009-04-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

As I've been watching news coverage on the flu outbreak, I immediately started thinking of John Ringo's recent biothriller, The Last Centurion. Of course the situation isn't exactly the same, since in our world the flu outbreak is following a major economic dislocation caused by the mortgage meltdown, but it still is enough to give me chills.

However, some people on Baen's Bar have been suggesting that the quick response by public health agencies indicates this isn't going to be the Big One, but that will come from some unexpected quarter while we're distracted with something else. Or worse, if this outbreak is successfully contained, we could get a "cry wolf" effect that will actually impair people's readiness to respond properly when it really comes.

1632-verse News

2009-04-16T16:10:00.000-07:00

It looks like there's going to be at least two more novels in the 1632 universe coming out this year or early next year. One, 1635: Sympathy for the Devil is a collaboration with David Carrico, and may either be a compilation or a continuation of the stories of Franz Sylwester and Marla Linder which have been appearing in various issues of Grantville Gazette, as well as in Ring of Fire II. The other, tentatively entitled 1635: The Tangled Web, is listed in a pre-release list as being by Virginia DeMarce alone, which would be a departure from previous procedures, and may represent Eric Flint's decision to hand off some of the side stories altogether. However, this could also be a misprint, so we should not read too much into it.

The Second Book Blues

2009-03-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

It's said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Similarly, a series is only as strong as its weakest book. And unfortunately a number of series have started out with a strong first book, only to be followed by a second volume which is at best uninspiring.

This problem seems to be particularly bad with "trilogies" that are in fact not a series of three interconnected books, but in fact three volumes of a single large novel. As a result, the middle volume is all middle, with no beginning or end of its own.

I think this is the problem with C. S. Friedman's latest, Wings of Wrath. I originally read the first volume, A Feast of Souls, in a single afternoon, stopping only for bodily necessities. As a result, I was really looking forward to the second volume, but now that I finally have it in my hands, I'm finding it a lot slower and less interesting a read than the first. I've been able to casually put it aside and do other things, and pick it up only haphazardly from time to time.

A lot of what I'm reading right now feels like "housekeeping," necessary information to get us moved toward the final climax in the third volume, but not really of that much interest of itself. So I'm impatient to get through it and to some more real action, or even just some interesting hints of fascinating secrets of the past -- but not so impatient to keep me reading obsessively.

Sequel to Crown of Slaves

2009-03-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com has just posted the pre-order link for Torch of Freedom, the sequel to David Weber and Eric Flint's Crown of Slaves.

Of course Mesa wasn't going to take such a blow lying down. Particularly not when it was a publicity embarrassment as well as a major economic loss.

Still, I'm wondering if this is going to go a lot deeper than just Mesa's attitude that it's above the law, and draw in some politicians at very high levels in several other star nations. Especially if it were to expose some hypocrites in the process.

New Directions for the Legacy of the Aldenata?

2009-02-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

The e-ARC of Eye of the Storm, John Ringo's latest addition to his Legacy of the Aldenata series. From some of the things the Barflies have been saying on Baen's Bar, it looks like he's taking the series in a completely unexpected direction.

The original books all focused on the war against the Posleen, a race of ravenous centaroids who stripped whole planets the way locusts do a field. The side trilogy he wrote with Julie Cochrane dealt with the covert war against the sinister manipulations of the Darhel, a race of thwarted warriors who instead focused their aggression into legal shenanigans, with the intent of enslaving every other race in the galaxy. The novel The Hero, which he wrote with Michael Z. Williamson and was set about a thousand years after the Posleen attack on Earth, implied that the intervening years were filled with battles against old-style Posleen, along with a new race known as the Tselk who might or might not be allies of the Posleen.

But from what I'm hearing on Baen's Bar, it looks like Ringo's tossed out the continuity he's created in The Hero and gone in a completely unexpected direction to introduce a completely new enemy from another dimension. We'd gotten one surprise at the end of Honor of the Clan
when the Himmit rescuers of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe referred to their rescue craft as being a battleship of the Himmit Empire. Of course the Himmit were always mysterious, right from the very first book when we were told that they were not among the original races of the Galactic Federation, but had come later, after the Aldenata had vanished. There had been some speculation when Honor of the Clan came out about the nature of the Himmit Empire -- whether it was hidden beyond the boundaries of the Galactic Federation, or somehow within it. But now I'm wondering if the Himmit are from this other universe from which the new, bigger, badder, Bad Guys are coming from.

I'm going to be very interested in seeing exactly how Ringo's handling this. I've seen far too many authors of long-running series getting into the trap of feeling they have to top themselves with bigger new ideas in every successive novel, until it feels like they're just dialing the volume up louder and louder. Other times an author's efforts to add new things into an established series instead end up losing track of the elements that brought readers to it in the first place.

The Very Image of the Modern Vampire Protagonist

2009-01-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

In my reading I've noticed how different authors handle the vampire in a present-day or near-modern setting, and in particular what portions of vampire lore they choose to keep as accurate and what they decide to reject as mere superstitious fancy or ignore altogether. Furthermore, it is interesting to note what rationales they use for those choices, and for the operation of the vampire powers and weaknesses that they are accepting in their version of the vampire.

For instance, Anne Rice's vampires are turned to dust by the touch of sunlight, while Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's can endure sunlight but are strongest at night, and Stephanie Meyer's are undisturbed by sunlight but prefer to avoid direct sun because their more dense body tissue reflects light differently than human flesh, making them sparkle.

And speaking of reflections, there's the old vampire tradition that a vampire shows no reflection in a mirror. This is based on the pre-scientific notion that a mirror contained some kind of spirit or essence that formed an image, and refused to respond to a vampire's undead nature. But for a modern reader who has become acquainted with the actual physics of reflectivity, the notion of a corporeal being who is visible but creates no reflection in a mirror may strain the ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg explained it away as an aspect of the Influence, the telepathic power her vampires, the luren, possessed to better enable them to hunt. A luren who was stalking intelligent prey could simply tell their victim's subconscious to edit their image out of what was being seen in the mirror -- and could just as easily send a similar telepathic command to edit their image out of what they were seeing directly, rendering the luren effectively invisible at will (rather like Douglas Adams' "somebody else's business field).

As I'm reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Dangerous Climate in which she sends her vampire Count Saint-Germain to St. Petersburg at its beginnings, I hit upon that brief mention of the difficulty of casting no reflection while his manservant is shaving him, and it caused me just such a momentary bobble. This is not a fantasy world in which I can allow that light might work utterly differently, but rather a part of the past that I've studied relatively intensely, having a bachelor's degree in Russian language and literature. It wasn't quite enough for me to drop the book like a stone, but now I'm going to be watching to see how she reconciles it with the facts of physics, and hopefully relates it to the fact that her vampires are able to go out in daylight.

Honorverse News

2009-01-26T07:36:00.001-08:00

It looks like it shouldn't be too long before the newest Honor Harrington novel will be coming out. The title is Mission of Honor, and apparently some hardcopy ARCs were auctioned for charity at Chattacon this past weekend.

Badly Written

2009-01-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, humorist Mark Twain listed eleven literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking Tales, and in particular The Deerslayer. Number eight upon that list was: ...crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader...

As I am reading the latest Dune interquel, Paul of Dune, I keep being reminded of that comment. In particular, the section that is supposed to be set between the first prequel trilogy and Dune itself -- I am simply floored by the ridiculous discontinuities and violations of story logic that keep cropping up.

Do Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson think that being licensed to write further works in the Dune universe means that they can toss in whatever outrageious ideas happen to pop into their minds and expect us to accept it as the authentic Dune universe?

Several times now I have been sorely tempted to throw the book against the nearest wall, and have been stopped only by the simple fact that this is a library copy and I don't want to have to return it to the library damaged.

New Sartorias-deles Out!

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

Sherwood Smith has just announced on the Athanarel LJ community that CJ's Second Notebook is now out from Amazon. Its official title is MEARSIES HEILI BOUNCES BACK: CJ'S SECOND NOTEBOOK.

This volume introduces a number of characters who will be important in later novels, so it's definitely one to look out for. Not to mention that if sales of it go well, it's more likely that Norilana Books will be able to afford to publish a lot more of those later novels.

New Cherryh Novel Released

2009-01-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

It's official: Regenesis
is out at last.

It is, of course, the sequel to Cyteen, the story of the murder of Ariane Emory, the brilliant scientist who had become effective ruler of the eponymous planet, and her re-creation through cloning and deliberately planned child-rearing. In the two decades since it originally came out, fans have carried on endless speculation as to the actual identity of the murderer of the original Ariane Emory.

Now at last Ari II will set herself on the trail of her gene-source's killer. And of course all the various political and interpersonal machinations that led to the original Ari's death are still at work, which means that she had best watch her back.

The Books that Shape Us

2009-01-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

A lot of people in my social circle tend to go on about how great Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
is and how reading it was a life-changing event for them. Quite honestly, my own reaction to it was rather meh. I read it as a senior in high school, and I remember finding a great deal of it tedious. Even if I hadn't borrowed it from the library, I really wouldn't have felt much desire to re-read it. When I did acquire a copy of my own, it was almost as much for the sake of completeness of my personal library as anything, and I never did get around to re-reading it.

Instead, my life-changing reading experience happened two years earlier, when I acquired a copy of Frank Herbert's Dune. Reading it was such a consciousness-expanding experience for me that I often felt as though my brain were about to burst from all the new concepts I was discovering. I think I must have read it six or seven times in the first few months I had it. I know I read it so many times that it began to literally fall to pieces, and although I still have that original copy, it has been mended so many times it's held together by tape and must be handled very carefully.

The biggest problem for me was that Stranger in a Strange Land had a very unsteady tone. There were sections that I found quite interesting, and others that I found to be utter bloviating boredom. At the time I didn't have the literary expertise to understand why, but looking back on it, I can see how Heinlein wobbles back and forth between rigorous scientific extrapolation of what it would mean for a human child to be raised by Martians and searing social satire. The result is a very uneven book that ultimately bogs down in preaching to the point where it's uncertain whether he might actually be advocating some of the things his protagonist is putting forth.

By contrast, Dune maintains a solid tone throughout, with vivid worldbuilding that all fits together. Every element builds the experience, to the point that you almost feel like you're actually there. Furthermore, it rewards rereading -- when I go back to it for another reading, I frequently find details that I had previously missed, and which shed new light on the entire novel.

In fact, I would argue that Heinlein's actual masterwork, the novel which for him was on the level that Dune was for Frank Herbert, is in fact Starship Troopers. To understand this, you first need to completely forget about that awful movie that was made in the late 90's and concentrate solely upon the text of the book. In it he maintains a consistent tone and storyline to create an extended meditation on the nature and meaning of citizenship. In it, he brings together the themes of personal and civic responsibility that he had been developing throughout the juveniles and his various short stories. Everything afterwards was a downhill slide into oblivion.

The Missed Metaphor

2009-01-04T13:16:00.000-08:00

Recently I was pointed to a review of Twilight that harshly condemned the series on the basis that "vampires don’t complete humans, any more than a lion completes an impala." And while there are plenty of things to condemn the series on -- the prose that goes beyond lush to purple and even putrescent, the way in which Edward's behavior toward Bella becomes steadily more obsessive and controlling, in ways that make it look like an abusive relationship should be regarded as normal and healthy -- this complaint tells me that the reader is mis-reading the book.

In fact, it almost makes me think of a reader complaining that the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane is bestiality because Superman is in fact a Kryptonian rather than a human. Well, technically it's true -- as described, Kryptonians would have such an alien biology that a gingko tree would be more closely related to dear Miss Lois Lane than our favorite square-jawed superhero. But most Superman readers would groan with exasperation at such objections and answer, "but that's not the point." A literalistic reading of the Superman universe, along the lines of Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (in which he meticulously details exactly what horrors would ensue if a being such as Superman really existed and really tried to interact with human beings) ignores the spirit in which the Superman stories were created. Superman was never meant to be read in the realistic mode, as a rigorous extrapolation of alien biology. It's comfort reading, a way of recapturing in this uncertain adult world the memory of when we were little kids and our parents seemed all-powerful, perfectly able to protect us.

Similarly, we are not intended to read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight as though it were Those of My Blood, in which Jacqueline Lichtenberg creates a human subspecies known as the luren which are the basis of classical vampire legends, and rigorously accounts for each aspect of vampire lore with scientific explanations. Yes, there is effort to create some kind of a narrative rationale for vampirism -- but that is as much because, as Marion Zimmer Bradley frequently said, "suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by the neck until dead." Blatant allegory tends to turn off the reader, to increase the mind's "sales resistance" to the ideas the author is trying to convey, so clothing the story in additional layers of versimilitude will help lower that resistance by reassuring the conscious mind that it is in fact reading a story, not a lesson.

At least in my reading, vampirism in the Twilight-verse represents lust -- that fierce, crazy desire that shuts down reason and leads people to do really stupid, self-destructive things just to get laid. And when you realize that, you can see why it works as a vampire novel, and wouldn't if it were written as a straight-up mainstream romance. Obviously Edward's a bad boy, with the traditional risky bad-boy appeal combined with a deep sense of morality and self-control. If he were a mainstream romantic hero, he'd be a character more in line with the protagonist of John Ringo's Ghost . When Mike Harmon sees a pretty girl, he wants to have her, now, like a dog in rut -- yet he also knows that rape is not just a crime, but a betrayal, a tearing of the social fabric, so he controls that animal-heat urge.

But that kind of a character is too real, and thus way too scary, to be exciting in a teen romance (as opposed to a techno-thriller with fantastical elements, aimed at an adult male audience, as Ghost is). But by making the character into a vampire, we move the dangerous aspect of his personality into the realm of the fantastic, and thus make it less threatening.

Now this isn't to say that there's nothing wrong with the books, or that they're great literature. Far from it, the prose is lousy, the characterization is superficial, and the fantastical elements really don't break any ground. But complaining that the vampire doesn't complete the human in the relationship is to completely misunderstand the nature of the metaphor being used, and to actually undermine whatever valid points the reviewer does make against the series.

New Atevi Novel on its Way

2009-01-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com now has a page up for Conspirator , the tenth volume in C. J. Cherryh's long-running Foreigner universe. It looks like April 28, 2009 is going to be the big day on which we get our hands on yet another installment of the saga of humanity's efforts to live with the atevi, and now with the kyo as well -- in a world in which yet another alien race lurks in menace.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

2008-12-25T17:25:00.000-08:00

Traditionally the used book store has been a dusty little place of shelves crammed tight with books, generally off the beaten path and quite unlike the new book store with its bright lights and carefully arranged shelves of pristine copies. But with the advent of the online bookstore, the distinction between sellers of new and used books has blurred. Amazon.com's Marketplace program enables used-book sellers to sell right on the same page as the new books Amazon itself is selling, thus allowing used books to compete directly with new ones.

As a result, there has been increasing concern that the sales of used books are depriving authors of their rightful royalties. After all, if a person can surf onto Amazon's webpage and find the same title that is sold brand new by Amazon itself sold instead for half or a quarter that price by a used-book seller, it would seem obvious that people would be likely to buy the cheaper one. Thus an organization called Novelists, Inc. has begun pressuring lawmakers to require used book sellers to remit royalties on each book sold, or at least books published in the last two years.

Paul Biba of TeleRead has suggested that requiring used-book dealers to pay royalties could have surprising consequences, including making books even less available to the poorest decile of the population, for whom used books and other inexpensive reading options, including libraries, are often the only way to obtain books at all.

In fact, I would suggest that he has not gone far enough in his discussion of the unintended consequences. In fact, it's very likely that the necessary overhead in recordkeeping could actually kill the secondary market for books altogether. Most used-book dealers operate on very narrow margins, often on a mom-and-pop basis. The sellers aren't getting rich, and often are barely scraping by. And that's just sellers who specialize in books. The generalist secondhand store will decide to no longer carry books at all, even those that are well beyond the two-year limit, for the simple reason that ensuring that nothing recent slips in by mistake is too much of a hassle. Thrift stores such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army will also find it impossible to justify such overhead, and will decline to accept book donations, thus hitting the poor twice -- by eliminating a source of very low-cost books and by the loss of the revenue those sales generate that are then applied to various good works.

In a world where royalties must be collected on (recent) used books, only the largest used-book dealerships and a few specialist collectible bookstores would be able to stay in business. Otherwise, the only venues at which used books would be found would be garage sales, which generally fly under the regulatory radar altogether. Most books that are no longer wanted by their owners would most likely go straight to the trash, needlessly burdening landfills and resulting in further resource destruction as trees have to be pulped to produce new copies. Worse, many old and out-of-print books would become even more difficult to find, making it even more likely that their authors become forgotten altogether.

Which means that what is intended to help authors get more money will instead result in many authors losing out altogether.

Correction The actual article is by Chris Meadows -- Paul Biba is the overall site owner, who has various guest writers posting as well.

Can We Move To the Adventure Part?

2008-12-20T16:03:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been reading John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor's Claws that Catch, and I've been feeling rather frustrated with it. Already I'm at the hundred-page point and we still haven't gotten into space. To me, it seems like there's way too much "housekeeping" stuff going on and it's getting in the way of moving on to the real story.

I'm also finding that I'm unsettled by one major character's bubbly new wife. Not so much that she's happy to be supporting her husband's career -- there really are some people who are happiest when facilitating someone else's success -- but that it is presented as though it were the only valid model for a married woman. We never see any examples of a dual-career couple or one in which the man supports his wife's career. Thus there seems to be an unspoken message that this is the way women ought to arrange their lives, rather than just what worked for one person.

When I consider some of the other books that John Ringo has written recently, it almost seems as though he thinks that we are soon going to be facing some kind of social upheaval that will lead us to fall back onto the traditional hierarchical family in which the adult male is the most important person and everyone else is expected to defer to him and work to support his success, even to the despite of themselves. To be true, there is a rationale behind this sort of arrangement -- the adult male body generates higher levels of testosterone, which translates into greater upper body strength. And frequently in belt-buckle-to-backbone situations that additional muscular strength can translate into an important survival edge for the entire group, which means that it is important to keep it at its peak.

However, it can be rough on the people inside those bodies, for the simple fact that we are individuals, not widgets stamped out in a factory all alike. As roles become increasingly rigid and prescriptive, people who do not fit neatly into them come under increasing pressure, often disproportionate to the actual need to have everyone fitting tightly into their assigned roles. The role becomes an end unto itself, rather than a means to the end.

In the long run, emergency arrangements have a nasty habit of surviving the emergency. For instance, long after the Great Depression was over, my grandmother continued to carefully save and reuse little squares of aluminum foil. The habit had become ingrained in those tight years, and even after she had adequate money, she continued to do so.

When we go from the scale of individual habits to that of social expectations, things can get even worse. Making a virtue of necessity often ends up with the virtue surviving long after the necessity has gone away. This is especially true if it should become enshrined in tradition and given moral force. For instance, the feudal privileges granted the nobility in Europe made sense in the chaotic century or two immediately after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire made sense, because it freed up their time and energy to protect the people who needed to spend all their time and energy producing the food that would keep everybody alive. But by the time society changed such that those arrangements were no longer necessary, they had become so customary that questioning them was met with intense hostility. To suggest that the nobility should pay taxes upon their wealth was seen as an affront, a diminishment of the dignity of their elevated standing in society. Thus many of these privileges survived well into the modern era, to the point that they were actually a drain upon society instead of helping to support it.

And quite honestly, there is in John Ringo's portrayals of gender relation a certain hint of the nobleman annoyed at those "uppity" commoners questioning traditional feudal privileges and duties.

The Book Reviewer Link-Up Meme

2008-12-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

From Grasping for the Wind, a list of active sf/fantasy book reviewers. If you don't see your blog, follow the link to get yours added.

7 Foot Shelves
The Accidental Bard
A Boy Goes on a Journey
A Dribble Of Ink
A Hoyden's Look at Literature
Adventures in Reading
The Agony Column
Andromeda Spaceways
The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
Ask Daphne
aurealisXpress
Australia Specfic in Focus
Author 2 Author
Barbara Martin
Bees (and Books) on the Knob
Bibliophile Stalker
Bibliosnark
The Billion Light-year Bookshelf
BillWardWriter.com
Bitten by Books
The Black Library Blog
Blog, Jvstin Style
Blood of the Muse
The Book Bind
Bookgeeks
Bookslut
The Book Smugglers
Bookspotcentral
The Book Swede
Bookrastination
Breeni Books
Cheaper Ironies [pro columnist]
Cheryl's Musings
Critical Mass
The Crotchety Old Fan
Damien G. Walter
Danger Gal
Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews
Darque Reviews
Dave Brendon's Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
Dear Author
The Deckled Edge
Dragons, Heroes and Wizards
The Discriminating Fangirl
Dusk Before the Dawn
Enter the Octopus
Eve's Alexandria
Fantastic Reviews
Fantastic Reviews Blog
Fantasy Book Critic
Fantasy Cafe
Fantasy Debut
Fantasy Book Reviews and News
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin' Blog
Feminist SF - The Blog!
The Fix
The Foghorn Review
Frances Writes
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint
Fruitless Recursion
The Galaxy Express
Galleycat
The Gamer Rat
Genre Reviews
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Grasping for the Wind
The Green Man Review
Hasenpfeffer
Highlander's Book Reviews
Horrorscope
The Hub Magazine
Hyperpat's Hyper Day
Ink and Keys
io9
Jumpdrives and Cantrips
Lair of the Undead Rat
League of Reluctant Adults
Literary Escapism
Michele Lee's Book Love
The Mistress of Ancient Revelry
MIT Science Fiction Society
Monster Librarian
More Words, Deeper Hole
Mostly Harmless Books
My Favourite Books
Neth Space
The New Book Review
NextRead
OF Blog of the Fallen
The Old Bat's Belfry
Outside of a Dog
Paranormality
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Piaw's Blog
Post-Weird Thoughts
Publisher's Weekly
Reading the Leaves
Realms of Speculative Fiction
Reviewer X
The Road Not Taken
Rob's Blog o' Stuff
Robots and Vamps
Sandstorm Reviews
ScifiChick
Sci Fi Wire
SciFiGuy
Sci-Fi Fan Letter
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
The Sequential Rat
Severian's Fantastic Worlds
SF Diplomat
SF Gospel
SF Reviews.net
SF Revu
SF Signal
SF Site
SFF World's Book Reviews
Silver Reviews
The Specusphere
Spinebreakers
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
Speculative Fiction
Speculative Fiction Junkie
Speculative Horizons
Spiral Galaxy Reviews
Spontaneous Derivation
Sporadic Book Reviews
Stella Matutina
The Sudden Curve
The Sword Review
Tangent Online
Tehani Wessely
Temple Library Reviews
Tor.com [also a publisher]
True Science Fiction
Un:Bound
Urban Fantasy Land
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
Variety SF
Walker of Worlds
Wands and Worlds
The Wertzone
With Intent to Commit Horror
WJ Fantasy Reviews
The World in a Satin Bag
WriteBlack
Young Adult Science Fiction

Foreign Language (other than English)

Cititor SF [Romanian, but with English Translation]

Elbakin.net [French]

Foundation of Krantas [Chinese (traditional)]

The SF Commonwealth Office in Taiwan [Chinese (traditional) with some English essays]

Yenchin's Lair [Chinese (traditional)]

Fernando Trevisan [Brazilian, Portuguese]

Human 2.0 [Brazilian, Portuguese]

Life and Times of a Talkative Bookworm [Brazilian, Porteguese]

Ponto De Convergencia [Brazilian, Portuguese]

pÃ³s-estranho [Brazilian, Portuguese]

Fantasy Seiten [German, Deustche]

Fantasy Buch [German, Deustche]

Literaturschock [German, Deustche]

Welt der fantasy [German, Deustche]

Bibliotheka Phantastika [German, Deustche]

SF Basar [German, Deustche]

Phantastick News [German, Deustche]

X-zine [German, Deustche]

Buchwum [German, Deustche]

Phantastick Couch [German, Deustche]

Wetterspitze [German, Deustche]

Fantasy News [German, Deustche]

Fantasy Faszination [German, Deustche]

Fantasy Guide [German, Deustche]

Zwergen Reich [German, Deustche]

Fiction Fantasy [German, Deustche]

First Contact as You've Never Seen It

2008-12-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

Michael Z. Williamson has announced that he will begin regular snippeting of his new novel Contact with Chaos on his topic at Baen's Bar, Mike's Madhouse.

I've seen a few early-draft snippets of Contact with Chaos, and it looks to be setting several cherished tropes of the first-contact story on their ears. Not to mention that he's showing a dark side of the Freehold of Grainne, to which he introduced readers in his debut novel, Freehold. Since it's clear in his earlier works that he deeply admires the ideals of the society he has portrayed (minimal government, self-reliance and the development of community on the personal level rather than as a top-down mandate, etc), it takes a considerable amount of artistic courage to show it as having flawed people who can use its strengths in flawed ways, and let the consequences of those flaws play out in a logical manner.

The Part that Is Original Is Not Good, and the Part that is Good Is Not Original

2008-12-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

As I have been reading The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross, I have been growing increasingly disappointed with it. This has been frustrating because I really do want to enjoy it. Darkover has long been one of my favorite series, ever since I found a battered copy of Stormqueen! at my tiny hometown library when I was a teen and was immediately sucked into the chilly world that seemed like a feudal society but possessed these odd telepathic powers that made them seem futuristic. Over the next several years I hunted down and devoured every one of the books.

As I read The Alton Gift, I keep having my mind jarred by things that feel out of place. Several times I have come across terms that were used in ways that didn't quite feel right, which made me want to hunt up all the old Darkover books and re-read them to see whether my memory was failing me after so many years. And then there were scenes that didn't feel like Darkover at all, but more like some other fantasy world interpolated into Darkover.

Now that I am not quite halfway through the novel, I'm realizing that there's a consistent pattern to my dislikes: the sections that ought to feel the most like classic Darkover instead feel like the old books were chopped up and bits pasted in rather badly without any real understanding of what they were about, while the sections in which it appears that Ms. Ross was attempting to take Darkover in new directions do not feel like they even belong on Darkover at all.

I've noticed this happening in the most recent books of several long-running series. For instance, I have the latest two Pern books on my shelf right now, but my attempts to read them have repeatedly ground to a halt because I simply cannot seem to get into them. And I loved the original six Pern books, and even some of the subsequent ones. But somewhere after All the Weyrs of Pern some of the old spark of Pern seemed to gutter out, and the subsequent books felt more like efforts to squeeze additional money out of an old idea than anything new and fresh. Although Anne McCaffrey's son Todd seems to have tried to take the storyline in a new direction with his three books, they are rapidly feeling less and less like the real Pern.

And of course one of the most notorious in my mind is the endless series of prequels and sequels to Dune that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have been churning out of late. Even under Frank Herbert's own hand the later books in the series had shown a decline compared to the vivid worldbuilding of the original. When I read the prequel series, it felt like fanfic that happened to be authorized by the estate. Now I like fanfic, especially the sort that knows that it's fanfic and revels in the sense of playing cheerfully in someone else's universe. However, the very pompous "this is the real stuff" message that was larded all over the Dune prequel series really turned me off.

Even when the original creator is still alive and active in the creation, it's not proof against the problem: I still remember watching the first Star Wars prequel and recognizing one scene after another as rehashes of successful scenes from the original trilogy. By the time I was done watching it, I was glad I waited to see it on video and hadn't wasted my money going to a first-run theater. And George Lucas, the guiding genius of the original Star Wars trilogy, is not only alive and well, but still the one creating the prequel trilogy.

However, length of run is no automatic prompter of decline. Some authors seem to be able to maintain the creative spark through a large number of volumes. For instance, David Weber has written over a dozen books in his Honor Harrington series, yet each new one simultaneously takes the story in new directions and continues to feel like the authentic Honorverse. His collaborations with Eric Flint, exploring the war against the genetic slavers of Mesa who were originally almost a toss-off bit of background color, are every bit as compelling as the mainline Honor series, and don't feel like something awkwardly grafted onto the Honorverse.

Yet once the slide into trouble begins for a series, there seems to be no recovering. Which raises the question of whether there really does come a time when it's best to allow a series to die a natural death -- and whether a publisher will allow it to do so as long as the books, however bad, continue to generate money from fans who just keep hoping that maybe this one will be like the ones they remembered from the days when the series was still alive and vibrant.

New Websites and Blogs

2008-12-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Moon has announced in her SFF.net newsgroup that she has two new websites with associated blogs.

The first is dedicated to her near future novel The Speed of Dark, which deals with a revolutionary new treatment for autism and the prices of becoming "normal."

The second is dedicated to her Paksenarrion universe, which has a new series coming out shortly. The original Paksenarrion trilogy, beginning with Sheepfarmer's Daughter (The Deed of Paksenarrion, Book 1), launched Elizabeth Moon's writing career, so it's good to see her returning to that world.

Norilana Books in Peril!

2008-12-06T12:27:00.000-08:00

Norilana Books, the small specialty press which has published such gems as Sherwood Smith's Senrid and A Stranger To Command, is in serious danger.

It is a one-woman production, owned and operated by Vera Nazarian, an immigrant who came here from the old Soviet Union in the depths of the Cold War. After years of struggling to support her aging parents on multiple low-paying jobs and struggling with a crushing debt load (the result of having been defrauded when she was young and inexperienced, and believing that it was her fault because she was, in her own words, "just a dumb immigrant"), her health finally became so poor she could no longer go to an office each day. Determined not to become a public charge, she founded Norilana Books so she could work from home, which also enabled her to give round-the-clock care to her parents as their health deteriorated.

However, businesses take a certain amount of lead time to become profitable, and in that time Vera's personal financial situation worsened dramatically. Her father passed away after a lengthy (and expensive) illness, and her mother went through another illness which required her total attention for several months she desperately needed to build her business. Then she had several major and expensive problems with her house, some of which have not been completely resolved and pose continuing risk to the health of her and her mother.

Now her situation has become critical, and she is in danger of losing her house if she cannot come up with over ten thousand dollars to pay her mortgage, since her forbearance has ended prematurely. Although Norilana Books itself is in sufficiently sound condition that it can continue operations, how can Vera continue to produce books if she and her mother have been tossed out on the street?

A number of her friends have set up a site, Help Vera, on which they are taking donations and auctioning various collectible items in order to raise enough money that Vera will be able to have some leverage in negotiating with her mortgage holder. Every dollar we can raise will make it more likely that they will actually be willing to work with her rather than simply grabbing the house and tossing her out on her ear to fend for herself.

Update: The fundraiser has succeeded far beyond our hopes. We already have enough money to pay the arrearage on Vera's mortgage, and there are still donations and auction payments in the pipeline. The additional money will be used to help Vera get a lawyer to get her mortgage rewritten to standard terms (as opposed to the onerous sub-prime mortgage she currently has), to get her sewer line fixed before it becomes a catastrophe, to deal with medical expenses for her and her mother, and start building a cushion against future misfortunes.

This upwelling of grassroots support really restores my faith in humanity. It's so good to know that people can pull together to help someone who's fallen upon hard times.

Now the best thing we can do to help her maintain long-term solvency is to buy some of her books, and encourage others to do so as well. So go to Norilana Books, take a look through the catalog, and see if there's something that you'd like to get, either for yourself or as a gift for a friend. And pass the word: link it from your Website, blog about it, bookmark it in social bookmarking websites like Digg!, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. Every link we create will help raise the prominence of her Website and her company, and thus its profitability.

Sartorias-deles News

2008-12-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

Sherwood Smith has reported on the Athanarel community on LiveJournal that she has finished CJ's second notebook. It looks like Norilana Books will be putting it out as another Christmas surprise, much as Over the Sea: CJ's First Notebook came out at the Christmas season last year.

And if that isn't enough to sate your hunger for Sartorias-deles, Samhain Books is finally going to be putting out The Trouble with Kings in hardcopy. It's a paperback rather than a hardcover, but if you've wanted something more substantial than the e-book, now's the time to pick it up.

Sign of the Times

2008-11-24T15:36:00.000-08:00

and it's not a good one, either.

According to GalleyCat, Houghton Mifflin, one of the biggest New York publishers, has stopped acquiring new manuscripts. This is supposed to be a temporary measure, but it is still unnerving in these uncertain economic times.

We can only hope that the publishing industry as a whole will be able to weather this storm and come out stronger in the end.

It Doesn't Work Because It Hasn't Really Been Tried

2008-11-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

Today is the 91st anniversary of the Great October Revolution (which occurred on October 25, 1917 in the Julian Calendar, which Russia was still using at the time). It ushered in a time of high hopes and utopian dreams that were based upon a system doomed to fail for the simple reason that it runs counter to the fundamentals of human nature.

However, at the same time we live in the midst of millions of successful communistic societies -- ask any exterminator about the resilience of an ant or termite colony. And not all of these are harmful pests, for many familiar fruits and vegetables depend upon bees to pollinate them.

The eusocial insects' societies work because of their reproductive strategy, in which there is only one reproductive, while the others are sterile children or siblings of the current reproductive. As a result, kin selection leads them all to pull together when a society in which all are reproductives would pull apart.

The phenomenon of kin selection also helps explain why what Marx called "primitive communism" can actually work -- the societies involved are small enough that the community is effectively coterminous with the kin group. Since everybody is family, there is a strong incentive to help one another out without worrying about one's own benefit accrued -- a benefit to a close relative is essentially a benefit to one's own posterity.

As a result, science fiction writers have often tried to imagine a society where different reproductive strategies enable communism to actually work on a large scale for intelligent beings. For instance Eric Flint, an avowed Trotskyist in his politics, populated the world of Mother of Demons with the owoc and gukuy, eusocial mollusks who are just beginning to develop cities and a roughly Bronze Age civilization.

But the possibility of eusocial strategies doesn't have to be limited to weird aliens in a universe that includes the ability to modify human beings at will. The Borg of Star Trek have used cybernetic technology to turn themselves into a hive society with a single Queen who seems to serve as much as a controlling brain as a mother of all living. Less grotesquely but still rather disturbing, the First Family of Patrick Tilley's Cloud Warrior and its various sequels are portrayed as being the genetic source of mass of the populace of the Amtrak Federation, who are apparently sterile.

And Charles Stross in his fascinating, almost surrealistic Missile Gap
suggests that the Communists, faced with the enmity of eusocial insectoid races, may well have resorted to transhumanism to realize their own ideals in one or more iterations of human history found on the giant disk.

More Aldenata News

2008-09-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Julie Cochrane, John Ringo's co-author on the Cally trilogy, has started posting snippets of the forthcoming novel Honor of the Clan in Monster Tracks, her topic on Baen's Bar.

It looks like this one is going to directly follow on the previous one, Sister Time, and like it will be delving more deeply into the workings of Indowy and Darhel societies, and just how alien they are to humans, not just in the matter of customs, but in the hardwired reactions at an instinctive level.

Fourth Part of Kratman Interview Now Up!

2008-09-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

Blackfive has posted the fourth installment of his interview with Col. Tom Kratman, author of Caliphate and several other important military science fiction books published by Baen.

Part Three of the Kratman Interview Now UP!

2008-09-11T14:42:00.001-07:00

Blackfive has posted the third part of his interview with Col. Tom Kratman, author of Caliphate.

Second Part of the Kratman Intervew Now Available!

2008-09-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

The second part of Blackfive's interview with Col. Tom Kratman, author of Caliphate and several other books published by Baen Books, has been uploaded today.

(This time it begins with a really cool title card, and then goes to the interview. Very nice effect).

New Interview with Col. Tom Kratman

2008-09-09T19:11:00.000-07:00

Here's your chance to meet Col. Tom Kratman, author of Caliphate.

The audio on the interview is a little rough, but listen carefully and you can get some very interesting insights on the man behind the book.

Shevraeth in Marloven

2008-08-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

That was Sherwood Smith's working title for the prequel to Crown Duel
when she was originally sharing an early draft on the Athanarel LiveJournal community. But publisher Vera Nazarian of Norilana Books wanted a more intriguing title for the published version of the book.

And A Stranger to Command fits the bill, with its word play that underlines how Vidanric is simultaneously utterly inexperienced in the arts of command and an outsider to the harsh military culture of Marloven Hess and the rank to which he will soon be elevated.

Because the sounds of the Remalnan language are so different from the harsher ones of Marloven, no one at the famous Marloven cavalry academy can pronounce any of Vidanric's names. Instead they mistake the name of his estate, Shevraeth, for a surname and it becomes his appellation while he is a student there. This shift of names helps underline the sense of his movement into and subsequently out of an alien milleu. And alien it is, so much so that he is initially tormented by an intense sense of homesickness in spite of the danger posed by the wicked king from whose reach his parents had sought to remove him.

But as time goes by, Shevraeth becomes increasingly acclimated to this place he initially found shockingly barbaric. In time he even absorbs some of the harsh Marloven ethos as his own as he accepts a position of authority over the youngest boys, and with it the rod used to deliver the beatings known as "breezes."

Shevraeth's process of acculturation into Marloven society reminded me of another character's acculturation into a semi-barbaric equestrian society, namely that of the Jewish intellectual Kiril Lyutov into that of the Cossacks in Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry. However, there are many differences between the two books, the most significant being that A Stranger to Command is YA, while Red Cavalry is most definitely a work for adults (not to say that a certain kind of adolescent is apt to find Babel's portrayals of sex and violence enthralling). Thus it is not surprising that Sartorias-deles (the setting of A Stranger to Command is a world in which rape has been not merely memetically discouraged, but memetically erased, to the point the people no longer even have a concept of forcible sex. Thus the barbarities Shevraeth witnesses during his sojourn among the Marlovens are confined to harsh corporal punishments and the general brutality of military training.

Still, like Lyutov he finds a certain measure of triumph in learning military skills sufficiently well that he is able to blend into the general background instead of constantly being the center of attention as a foreigner. And it is the striking sense of two very different cultures being so fully developed that is the real strength of this book.

A Stranger to Command Is Out!

2008-08-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

A Stranger to Command, the prequel to Sherwood Smith's much-loved Crown Duel, is out from small-press publisher Norilana Books.

It all began as a throwaway line in Crown Duel about Shevraeth having gained his phenomenal skill at arms as a result of several years of study at the famous military academy of Marloven Hess. A fan asked about it, and Sherwood Smith obliged with a few chapters of story, originally posted at her Website under the title "Shevraeth in Marloven Hess." But as it grew, it became clear this was not a casual outtake, but a real work in progress.

Now at last it is available to be read in its entirity. As always, Smith provides a rich and deeply-realized look into a setting that is no mere collection of sets to be sent back to Central Stores when the story is over, but a full round world that exists for itself. A world with layered millenia of history, in which the threads of alliance and enmity may have surprising consequences generations later.

Stranger in Our Skies

2008-07-25T19:47:00.000-07:00

One of the longstanding tropes of science fiction, going back at least to Robert A. Heinlein's Universe, is the giant slowship that forgets its culture and history in the course of the centuries-long journey across the depths of space between stars. However, Eric Flint and David Freer have taken a new view on this hoary old concept with their new novel Slow Train to Arcturus.

Rather than make a one-time journey to a single destination, Flint and Freer postulate that a slowship would find acceleration so precious that it should not be wasted at the end of the voyage. Instead, the main ship would continue to travel indefinitely, while individual habitats would be detached from it, slowed and permitted to be captured by potentially life-bearing stars. There the colonists would have the option of living in their habitats indefinitely if the star's system had no habitable planets, and will have access to the wealth of the system's sub-planetary bodies for space-based industry.

Or at least that was the theory when the Slow Train was sent from Earth sometime in the twenty-second century. It was supposed to simultaneously give a number of separatist groups a new frontier to which to escape and get some of humanity's eggs out of the single basket of the Sol system. But things relatively go as planned.

But Krentz and his colleagues from Miran don't know any of this when their astronomers detect the strange vessel moving into their system's space. They only know that this is an artifact, and that it was not built by any civilization of theirs. Naturally, they are both concerned and curious, so off they go in a spaceship of their own to rendezvous with this stranger and find out what is going on.

But things go disastrously wrong when they make their initial contact with a habitat that turns out to be violently xenophobic. Suddenly Krentz is thrust onto his own resources and into even stranger habitats.

Thus Flint and Freer also delve into another longstanding trope, one that science fiction shares with several other genres: namely, the adventure in the alien society or lost civilization. But the unique nature of the Slow Train makes it possible to visit not one but many such societies in rapid succession.

Some the reader will recognize immediately as commentaries upon certain present-day societies, such as a certain notorious dictator with the bouffant hairdo and the shades. Others seem to be the realization of the fantasies of certain more extreme elements of our own society. But amidst all the humor of cultural misunderstanding and sly cultural commentary, including a very recognizable geek inventor who had the misfortune to be born in a technophobic society, there is a very real consideration of just how well such a scheme would work long-term.

For as it turns out, every one of the habitats we meet is experiencing severe difficulties maintaining the technologies that are essential to their long-term survival. Some, such as the Neo-Nazi group we first meet, seem to have given up altogether and devolved into a war of the all against the all. Others, such as the Matriarchial Republic of Diana which provides ample opportunity for trenchant commentary on relations between the genders, are making an effort to maintain their habitat but are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up the knowledge base, and in particular a population of people with the necessary skill sets to repair the more complex machinery.

Thus, without ever harping openly upon it, Flint and Freer raise yet another age-old question of science fiction -- how large of a population base does one need in order to maintain a technological civilization? And how long can a small group, even one that set out with more than adequate supplies for a long voyage, keep complex systems working when it is not possible to replicate the system of interlocking technologies that originally created them?

Which of course brings us to yet another familiar old trope of science fiction -- the colonial world that reverts to earlier stages of technological development, perhaps even losing civilization altogether and forgetting that it did not originate on the world upon which it now finds itself, or even that it is living on a spherical world spinning in space around its sun, rather than a flat world with a bowl of sky in which hang bright lamps that light and go out as day follows night.

However, Flint and Freer have managed to weave all these ideas together and infuse them with a freshness that is at least partly the result of the alien viewpoint of Krentz, through whose eyes we first see humanity's greatest technological achievement, not as a triumph, but as an intruder not entirely welcome into the skies of a people who assume that of course every organism that reproduces sexually will start as a male, then transform into a female upon full maturity.

Harry Potter -- One Year Later

2008-07-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

How the time has flown -- already it's been a year since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit the shelves. It was a time of particular excitement because it was going to be the very last one, the final time for Harry Potter fans the world round to gather in eager anticipation of a brand new volume in the adventures of the boy wizard. The last time for big themed parties at libraries and bookstores, and generally the last time that we would reach this fevered pitch of anticipation, because after this there would be no more.

Now, a year later, a certain amount of the excitement has worn off and we can begin to look back at the Harry Potter phenomenon with a degree of perspective and ask just what was its significance. Some things are obvious, such as the record-breaking sales statistics that catapaulted a relatively obscure single mother into the ranks of the world's richest women. Others are more debatable, particularly when one begins to move into questions of quality and literary merit.

There can be no question about the Harry Potter books being engaging, for they were books that children read willingly, even begged to be able to read. Children who had previously regarded reading as an onerous chore had come to look upon the Harry Potter books with eager anticipation, and upon acquiring them would even read them multiple times to capture every nuance of the often intricate plotting. The Harry Potter books also crossed generations in a way seldom seen for children's literature, with adults reading with the same eagerness as their younger counterparts. Although some grown-ups were chary of being seen to read a children's book and would take off the dust jacket of the hardcover or wrap paper around the paperback to hide it, a surprising number of adults proudly showed off their choice of reading matter.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground in terms of the substance of children's books. It had previously been regarded as a given that children would not read large books, and many authors had to deal with longer books being broken into multiple parts to keep them within what were regarded as hard limits on length. But when Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire weighed in at nearly twice the usual length for a children's book and young people still devoured it by the crateload, publishers began to re-evaluate their assumptions.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground by allowing the storylines to grow with the characters. Many children's fantasy series feature relatively static characters who face the same sorts of challenges in book after book. Even if the characters' achievements and losses from earlier books carry through into later ones, the types of problems they face generally remain at the same age level. By contrast, Harry Potter and his friends face ever escalating problems in each book, delving into steadily deeper issues of good and evil. In the first few books, the dichotomy is simple enough to almost seem simplistic -- Voldemort is evil because he's evil, and that's that. Harry being downtrodden and suddenly discovering that he's a star is treated as pretty much a plot device, and left at that.

But by the fourth book, we begin to move into more complicated territory, in which Rowling begins to plumb the nature of love and loyalty, themes that will run throughout the remainder of the series and prove to be the foundations of the most powerful magic of all. Even the character of Voldemort becomes more complex and nuanced, and we begin to see more human motivations for his fall into depravity, moving him beyond the menace that is a menace because it's a menace.

However, we may question whether we are seeing a lasting phenomenon. Will we continue to see new children take up the Harry Potter books with the same eagerness now that there are no further volumes to whet our appetite and encourage us to re-read the earlier ones in order to be ready to catch all the subtleties of the latest installment?

Skeptical critics have pointed out that the Harry Potter books really don't break that much new ground in terms of storytelling, and that much of their storytelling is merely the artful rearranging of standard tropes. Yet the tropes are often so common for the simple fact that they speak to deep and basic things within us, with the resonance of the familiar. And truth be told, many of the greats of literature have made their place in the canon by works that are in fact derivative of various precursors now remembered only by specialists. For instance, every educated person in the Western world knows Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, yet only a few dedicated scholars recall such authors as Arthur Brooke, William Painter or Matteo Bandello, all of whom wrote earlier versions of the doomed couple's romance. Shakespeare's genius lay in changing the theme and impact of his story, taking what had previously been a condemnation of youthful refusal to listen to the advice of elders and turned it into a story of the redemptive power of young love.

In the final reckoning we will only know whether the Harry Potter books have lasting literary merit when they have lasted. Which means we need to wait a few decades and see if new generations of children take up the series with the same delight, or if they come to regard it as a stodgy old thing only their parents and grandparents would want to read.

King's Shield is Out!

2008-07-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's official: The King's Shield the third in Sherwood Smith's Inda series, is available.

It is also definite that there will indeed be a fourth book in the Inda series, and its title is going to be Treason's Shore. Barring unexpected delays, it should be coming out during the summer of 2009.

Warrior Wisewoman Is Out!

2008-06-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

Warrior Wisewoman, the first in a new anthology series intended to be a science fiction companion to the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series that was originally begun by the late great Marion Zimmer Bradley, is out at last.

Crown Duel Prequel Now Official!

2008-04-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

Norilana Books has formally announced the acquisition of the prequel to Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel.

Remember, you saw it here. Bookmark the Billion Light-year Bookshelf to keep getting the inside news on upcoming science fiction and fantasy books.

Good News on the Anthology Front!

2008-04-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

In a world where short fiction is rapidly becoming an endangered species, I've got news that Norilana Books is getting ready for two more anthologies.

First, the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthologies that Marion Zimmer Bradley began over two decades ago will be continuing with Sword and Sorceress 23. Yet again it will be edited by Elizabeth Waters, longtime secretary to MZB, and probably one of the people who knew her mind best. We can be sure of a star-studded table of contents in this volume.

Second, Deborah J. Ross will be doing a second volume of Lace and Blade, her anthology of romantic fantasy that came out this past Valentine's day. It appears that the first volume was a sufficient success that it will become an annual event.

New Sherwood Smith

2008-03-07T15:43:00.000-08:00

A Posse of Princesses is out. It belongs in the same world as Wren to the Rescue and its sequels, rather than to Sartorias-deles as do the Inda books.

However, it appears that another Sartorias-deles novel will be coming out from Norilana Press this summer. Sherwood has decided Norilana is the best bet for the prequel to Crown Duel (Firebird). Its working title was Shevraeth in Marloven Hess, and there are mentions of it under that title on the Web. However, it appears a new title is in the works, in the interest of pulling in people who aren't already fans of the Sartorias-deles universe.

If You Want to Send a Message...

2008-02-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

...use Western Union.

That was the old saying that Marion Zimmer Bradley used to use on her rejection slips if she considered a story to be overshadowed by a heavy-handed Message from the author.

I was thinking of that this weekend as I was watching Waterworld. When the principal villains were first referred to as the Smokers, I thought it meant they smoked their prey out of their refuges or some such.

And then we actually see them, and there they've got cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Now I've got no great use for tobacco, and was very glad when Indianapolis went smoke-free in public places. But it was just a little too heavy-handed, a little clearly obvious -- especially when combined with other imagery of the villains as being part of a certain anti-environmentalist mindset.

I think it could've worked, had it been handled more lightly. There are many things that can be done humorously that would fall flat in serious drama. But I do not get the feeling that the Smokers were being played for laughs, letting the message slip in as the audience is laughing.

For Every Gain There Is a Loss

2008-02-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

One of the marks of good fiction is the ability to acknowledge the complexity of the human condition, that all is not simple black-and-white, that heroes have their shortcomings and villains have their good points. It is always easy to write stories of fine heroes flung against villains of the vilest sort, but in that direction lies Mary Sue (or Marty Stu), the utterly spotless protagonist whom everybody just adores, save for the villains, whose villainy is confirmed by their implacable hatred.

When I originally read Eric Flint's 1632 , I was concerned that some of the characterization seemed rather simplistic. Mike Stearns and his friends were all so good and democratic and hardworking, the mercenaries were bloodthirsty killers, and even John Simpson, the out-of-town businessman, seemed to be more a straw-man opposition for Mike to defeat than a real contrary voice.

Thus I was very happy to read the sequel, 1633, and see the beginnings of a richer tapestry. The praise of the virtue of hard work and of the people who do it remained, but painted in a richer palette of shades of gray. John Simpson goes from being a straw-man city-slicker CEO stereotype set up to be knocked down and becomes a complex, three-dimensional person who cares for those under him and who is hurt by the breach with his son.

And the development of complexity continues in Ring of Fire II
with Jonathan Cresswell-Jones' "Malungu Seed." Here we see the story of a man who nearly became the first black Jesuit, and his desperate mission to bring to the world a treasure more precious than silver or gold. And as Dr. James Nichols struggles to save his life, it becomes an opportunity to consider how changing the world so that many of the scourges that plagued it, and in particular the slave trade and race-based slavery, will also eliminate some very fine things, including the development of whole genres of art and music.

Last Centurion News

2008-02-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

John Ringo has created a website for his upcoming novel The Last Centurion. You can find it at www.thelastcenturion.com.

Like the novel, it's written in the first person. However, it appears to take up after the conclusion of the novel, which may or may not constitute a spoiler. In particular, I'm eagerly looking for hints on whether the novel ends with devolutionary spiral to collapse, or with hints of a renaissance to come. The mentions of telephone lines and Internet do seem to suggest that the post-disaster world will not be a reversion to pre-Industrial society.

Renewing an Old Acquaintence

2008-02-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I was an art student, one of my assignments for art history was to watch Artemisia, a movie about the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. So imagine my surprise as I was perusing the latest installment in Eric Flint's 1632-verse, Ring of Fire II, to find her as a major character in Jay Robinson's "Trials."

The opening scene of this story is one of the more grimly vivid scenes in the movie -- Artemisia's interrogation by torture during the rape trial of her former tutor. Although I had almost forgotten watching the movie almost a decade ago, as soon as I read that paragraph, it all came flashing back and I was immediately sucked straight into the story.

And it's an interesting story of many twists and turns that will be appreciated by anyone who enjoys courtroom drama. There is even a bit that is either sheer coincidence or a slight in-joke for Harry Potter fans.

On the Problems of Long Series

2008-02-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

One of the problems of a very long series can be the extended period of time that passes between the publication of the first book and later books. As a result, even dedicated readers of the series may have difficulty remembering details of earlier books when they encounter elements of a current one that depend upon those events.

I'm discovering that in reading the latest books in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner universe, I really want to be able to go back and re-read the entire series in rapid succession. I originally read the first three books over a decade ago, and while I remember the general plot of those volumes, there are details that I'd really like to remember better.

For instance, I'm trying to recall exactly how the atevi cultural principle of kabiu was presented in those early volumes. I'm remembering it as being primarily in terms of food taboos, and in particular the prohibition on the domestication of animals for slaughter or the eating of game and some other foods out of their proper season. However, as the series has progressed, it has come to have a more general sense of propriety in one's actions, and even covers such things as the arrangement of furniture in a room according to the status of its occupants. I'm not sure if the hints were present in the earlier volumes, or this is a development as Cherryh takes the reader deeper into atevi culture.

Not Exactly an Outtake

2008-02-05T17:33:00.000-08:00

Fans of Sherwood Smith will want to keep an eye out for the new anthology Lace and Blade, which is edited by Deborah Ross and published by Norilana Books. Sherwood's story comes from her novel Antiphony, set late in the history of the same universe as Inda. However, when she rewrote it to work as a short story, disconnecting the various tendrils of story that extended to other parts of the novel instead resulted in it shifting to what she describes as "the next universe over."

New Stories of Bren and the Atevi

2008-02-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

It appears that C. J. Cherryh will be writing a fourth trilogy in Foreigner: universe. The first volume is tentatively entitled Conspirator, although no firm publication date has been set.

More Posleen Novels

2008-01-30T08:59:00.000-08:00

It appears that Cally's War and Sister Time are going to be a trilogy. According to information posted on Baen's Bar, the tentative title for the third collaboration between John Ringo and Julie Cochrane will be The Honor of the Clan.

After the trilogy is completed, John is going to be returning to the Mike O'Neal story arc with another three novels. These were contracted shortly after the death of Baen Publishing founder Jim Baen, as part of a package of deals intended to reassure readers that the company would survive the man who created it. However, they have been on hold while other projects were completed.

In addition, Tom Kratman has been snippeting a novel tentatively entitled The Tuloriad (yes, it's a deliberate Classical reference), which helps draw the links between the Posleen of the War and the Tular Posleenar who were mentioned in The Hero. He's done some pretty radical speculation about the history of the Posleen and the Aldenata, and it's possible that John will veto significant portions of the novel, but what I've seen looks promising.

Disaster Ringo Style

2008-01-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

John Ringo originally earned his chops with the Legacy of the Aldenata, a military science fiction series of the invasion of Earth by seemingly unstoppable cannibalistic alien hordes. Now he takes up yet another familiar trope of post-apocalyptic science fiction, namely the plague that ravages civilization. The Last Centurion is a first for Ringo in that it is written in first-person POV, half memoir and half socio-political commentary, as the protagonist reflects upon the catastrophic combination of an avian flu mutated to spread by casual human contact and sudden climate change.

I've been singularly impressed by the snippets John has been posting on Baen's Bar. Normally a blatant political message in a work of fiction gets my back up something fierce. But the first-person narrator's voice is so intense it carries me right over my normal objections. I feel like I'm sitting right there with this guy, maybe at a bar or in the con suite of some convention, listening to him tell his story.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this novel ends. As a historian, I can see two possible conclusion, based upon historical models. The most obvious is a devolutionary spiral and permanent collapse back to an early-industrial or even pre-industrial culture. History is littered with examples of civilizations that came apart under the pressures of a major plague combined with climate change that shifted the growing season for key crops -- the most obvious from the title is the Roman Empire (yes, one of the current theories is that an early outbreak of bubonic plague combined with a series of cold winters caused by a caldera supervolcano eruption did the Western Empire in -- see Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization by David Keys).

However, the long-term effects of a plague can also be major progress in a civilization, as witness the Black Death. In the late Middle Ages Europe was caught in a high-end trap, in which increases in agricultural production immediately went to increases in population rather than economic growth. The sudden reduction of the population as a result of the plague freed both labor and capital for growth. Labor, which had previously been so cheap it had to be bound to the manor by extra-economic means, now came into sufficient demand that peasants and craftsmen could strike a much better bargain for their work. Similarly, the sudden death of a substantial portion of the wealthy elite meant the survivors had a surplus that could be invested in long-term ventures such as art and the various crafts. The result was the Renaissance, and ultimately the modern world.

The key factor in the Last Centurion's future will probably be energy. Given that we have already used up most of the easily accessible deposits of coal and oil, if human culture falls below the ability to extract those vital resources, it will probably be stuck for good. However, if the ability to manage large-scale energy utilization is retained, and even expanded through the development of additional nuclear power plants, it's quite possible that the grandchildren of the survivors will enjoy a world that's actually better.

Given John Ringo's known dislike for a certain kind of fuzzy-minded liberalism that opposes nuclear energy among other things, there are reasons to be hopeful for the long-term future of the fictional world he has created.

Back to Pax

2008-01-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Moon has announced on her Sff newsgroup that she will be writing another novel in the same universe as her The Deed of Paksenarrion. However, it appears that she's going to be dealing with a different part of that world, one that was only mentioned in passing in the original novel. Her extensive discussion of the nature of human culture promises a very interesting, many-layered work.

I'm Impressed!

2008-01-25T09:12:00.001-08:00

Four years ago I fairly wept as I reviewed Tom Kratman's A State of Disobedience. There was just so much unrealized promise in it that I wanted to praise it, but I couldn't because that would do a disservice not only to my readers, but to the author, who could do so much better.

In the following years, Col. Kratman has co-written two books with John Ringo, Watch on the Rhine and Yellow Eyes. Both of them were set in Ringo's Posleen War series, and have given Kratman the opportunity to concentrate on storytelling in an established universe.

And now that apprenticeship has paid off with interest. As I read the first six chapters of the good Colonel's forthcoming novel Caliphate, I'm delighted to see that he has overcome all the weaknesses I had noted in his debut novel. Every scene comes to life with a vividness that sticks with you long after you click the close button on your browser window. The characters, even the nasty ones, come to life -- no cardboard villains or plaster-saint heroes here. Although there are never any questions as to who the good and bad guys are, the villains have real human motivations like greed, and the heroes have real weaknesses against which they must struggle.

Even as it is a novel of America's struggle against radical Islamic fundamentalism and the terrible price she has paid in pieces of her very soul, it is also the story of good Muslims trying to do the right thing in a culture that turns them into monsters. Besma's courage, however untempered by self-restraint, will live in the memory just as long as Lt. Hamilton's fierce lust for vengeance after his beloved is killed, or Petra's helplessness in the clutches of an evil system.

Inda News

2008-01-17T17:57:00.000-08:00

According to news on the Athanerel community, King's Shield will not be the last volume of Sherwood Smith's Inda series, as originally planned. Instead the editors at DAW have decided that the final volume should be split in two to give the story arcs more room to develop.

This is particularly exciting because it means that the publisher really believes in this series as a potential moneymaker. Given the soft economy and the notable lack of publicity Sherwood Smith's previous works have received, any sign of publisher enthusiasm is good.

Library in the Sky

2008-01-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

It's the dream of every science fiction reader -- an endless bookshelf with all of our favorites, and always room for more. A library fit for a voyage across the light-years, with all those stories of strange new worlds, of wonders and adventures to be had for the price of a book.

Here you will find news of the latest publications by the big houses and the small presses alike, as well as more than a few old favorites.