First Contact as You've Never Seen It

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.