Tag Archives: Charles Stross

Krugman’s SF Reading List

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Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman has posted a list of SF recommended for economists at his “Conscience of a Liberal” blog. “Not surprisingly for anyone who was at Anticipation,” says Morris Keesan, “Krugman is a big Charlie Stross fan.”

I absolutely second (and third, and fourth) Charlie Stross. But Accelerando, although great, isn’t my top pick. He’s incredibly prolific, with the ability to write in multiple sub-genres, but if economics is what you want, you might want to look at the Merchant Princes novels, which are arguably parallel-universe fantasies that are also essays in development economics. (New edition of the MP novels coming out, with some plot snafus fixed). If you want sheer giddy fun, try the Laundry novels, Lovecraft-meets-hackers-meets-pop-references, with tips of the hat to everything from James Bond to Modesty Blaise.

[Thanks to Morris Keesan for the story.]

Paul Krugman Interview

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Believe it or not, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s love of science fiction is the principal focus of an interview conducted by Amy Sutherland for the Boston Globe.

KRUGMAN: I just finished Ken MacLeod’s “The Restoration Game,” which was great fun. And I am rereading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” because I am supposed to write an introduction to a new edition. That is pleasure and work together.

BOOKS: That trilogy was formative for you wasn’t it?

KRUGMAN: I first read them when I was a teenager. I was really inspired by the psychohistorians, who used statistics and social sciences to predict the future. I knew it was fiction, but what really struck me is the notion that the science of what people do could be important. I wanted to be one of those guys.

He also praises Frank Herbert and Iain Banks. And Charles Stross: will this inspire another t-shirt?

[Via Michael Walsh and the peripatetic Andrew Porter.]

Tor’s DRM-atic Announcement

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Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, will make their entire list of e-books DRM-free by July. The imprints had a combined 30 New York Times bestsellers in 2011.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are designed to give the seller control over the transferability of content after it has been delivered to the consumer. E-books in the Amazon Kindle format, for example, are readable on that company’s devices, but not those of its rivals. DRM is justified as an anti-piracy measure.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing reacted by breezily predicting –

[More] to follow, I’m sure; I’ve had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers…

On the other hand, Laura Hazard Owen at CNN Money questions whether Macmillan itself, the big company that owns Tor, will adopt this policy across the board  –

One should not necessarily infer, from the changes at Tor, that Macmillan is close to dropping DRM across all of its imprints. This decision could be related to competition within the genre (sci-fi/fantasy publishers Baen and Angry Robot are also DRM-free) or to Doherty’s specific role at Macmillan.

Presumably, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who made the final decision to drop DRM on ebooks from Tor/Forge (according to Charles Stross) will watch how it plays out.

A move affecting only the sf/fantasy market still benefits fans wanting the freedom to store and manage their ebook collections on any device they choose.

One of Tor’s top authors, John Scalzi, is in favor of the change. He thinks DRM is an unnecessary impediment to sales. 

Does this mean it’s easier for someone to violate my copyright? It does. But most people don’t want to violate my copyright. Most people just want to own their damn books. Now they will. I support that.

Charles Stross has posted arguments he was invited to make to Macmillan brass about the decision to drop DRM. He admits DRM makes no difference to those who buy a few top bestsellers a year, however, he told execs it makes a big difference to some of the most devoted book buyers.

The voracious 20-150 books/year readers are a small but significant market segment. These people buy lots of titles. They frequently have specialized interests which they pursue in depth, and a large number of authors who, although not prominent, they will buy everything by… Previously they bought paperbacks and hardcovers from specialist genre bookstores or, failing that, from large B&N/Borders branches. They will go to whatever retailer they can find online, and they find DRM a royal pain in the ass — indeed, a deterrent to buying ebooks at all.

It’s no secret he’s talking about sf fans, since he mentions us explicitly a few lines later…

Priest’s KTF Review of Clarke Shortlist

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Christopher Priest does not like the Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees. Despite teeing off in a style reminiscent of Spinrad, his arguments are as easily understood as Seuss: Priest thinks these picks are mostly wrong. He thinks the books are not too strong. He says throw this shortlist in the trash. He would not give these books the cash.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award goes to the best sf novel first published in the UK during the previous year, as chosen by a panel of judges from the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and (this time around) the SCI-FI LONDON film festival.

Priest complains:

We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent. Their incompetence was made more problematical because the overall quality of the fiction in the year in question was poor. They did not know how to resolve this. They played what they saw as safe.

They failed themselves, they failed the Clarke Award, and they failed anyone who takes a serious interest in speculative fiction.

Priest says he’s dismayed that several quality books didn’t make the list, and sketches the defects of the actual choices. It makes entertaining reading so long as you’re not the author of one of the books involved. (And even then, judging from Charles Stross’ reaction, which was to issue a commemorative t-shirt.)

Priest’s 5-point plan for averting a travesty is:

1. The present panel of judges should be fired, or forced to resign, immediately. Their names are Juliet E. McKenna, Martin Lewis, Phil Nanson, Nikkianne Moody and Rob Grant. Chairman Andrew M. Butler should also resign. These people have proved themselves incompetent as judges, and should not be allowed to have any more say about or influence on the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
2. The 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award should be suspended forthwith, and the planned awards ceremony on 2nd May should be cancelled.
3. The award fund (£2,012.00, as I understand it) should be held over until next year. Next year’s fund should be added to it, so that the prize for 2013 becomes £4,013.00.
4. The 2013 Clarke Award should be made to the best novel published in the two years ended 31st December 2012. All novels currently eligible for the 2012 award, whether or not they have been shortlisted by this year’s panel, are eligible again.
5. All the other usual rules of the Award should be applied.

Bloggers are weighing in, beginning with the dean, John Scalzi, who says he was able to read many of these novels without holding his nose:

[I] believe that if Embassytown is China Mieville underachieving, we should all slack as well as he. But of course that’s my point, and in any event it’s a rare nomination slate for any literary award that does not have someone railing against it as a parade of mediocrities, or worse.

In contrast to Scalzi’s light touch, Damien G. Walter of the Guardian decided Priest’s personal tone needed to be reciprocated in spades. Unfortunately, Walter merely indulged in pseudo-psychological slurs like the following, code for Priest is old:

First the New Wave, then wave after wave of SF writers have swept past Christopher Priest. Many of them far less intelligent. Most of them far less educated in the field of SF. And now, just when Priest might have expected to be acclaimed as an elder statesman of the genre, another wave of writers have taken the limelight instead.

Maybe it’s being a fanzine fan has made me touchy about that kind of thing, but darned if Walter didn’t leave me almost feeling sorry for Priest, and having read a lot of Priest’s rants over the years (here let me borrow Ben Bradlee’s line) I didn’t think that was possible.

[Thanks to James Bacon for Priest’s post and Ansible Links for the responses.]

Update 03/30/2012: Corrected the affiliation of one Clarke judge per Mark Plummer’s comment.

Clips from Eurocon2011 in Stockholm

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Swedish Educational TV recorded several Eurocon2011 programs for airing in September. A couple of “teaser” videos are posted at YouTube.

Although the panels are in English, the titles as you might expect are in Swedish. I’ll bet fans who are familiar with sf jargon will be able to guess what the titles mean anyway.

Dumpa information med stil [YouTube file] 3:34 minutes. Features Elizabeth Bear, Charles Stross and others.

Inspirationen till Elizabeth Bears böcker [YouTube file] 8:15 minutes. An interview with Elizabeth Bear.

Here, also, is a gallery of Tommy Persson’s photos from the convention.

[Via Ahrvid Engholm and Andrew Porter.]

YA: Bad for the Hugo?

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Mark Bartlett’s Mataglap SF publishes interesting, well-written reviews. I would have enjoyed his highly-readable critique of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book even more if he had not led off with this lightning bolt:

The most disturbing statistic from this year’s Hugo ballot is that 3 of the 5 novel nominees were marketed as YA books, with the voters passing up hard SF heavyweights like Baxter, MacLeod, Bear, Egan, Haldeman and Banks in favor of more lightweight fare. Is this cause for concern?

Count me as one Hugo voter who didn’t get the memo banning “lightweight fare” from competition. A lot of people didn’t get it and have been carelessly nominating things like Little Fuzzy, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers for years.

Maybe Bartlett doesn’t believe a YA marketing strategy automatically makes a novel an inferior brand of literature, though readers could be pardoned for interpreting his comment in that way. The notion of categorical inferiority in the world of literature isn’t alien to fandom (slash fiction!), though people still blush to admit they have judged a book by its cover – or its advertising.

Advertising especially, because marketing evolves even when the story remains the same. By the time I started reading sf in the mid-1960s, Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit – Will Travel and Andre Norton’s Witch World were being offered as juvenile or YA fare. Yet Heinlein’s Hugo-nominated 1959 novel originally had appeared in F&SF, the raised-pinky literary prozine, and Norton’s 1963 novel, another Hugo nominee, started life as an Ace mass-market paperback.

Does Bartlett really have a problem with YA and so-called “lightweight fare,” or was he reaching for words to express the same complaint Gregory Benford has voiced about Hugo voters who didn’t seem (to him) to be rewarding intellectually challenging science fiction with nominations for the Best Novel Hugo. After counting off the fantasy novels that had recently won the Hugo, Benford’s letter in File 770 #146 continued:

I don’t think it’s an accident that fantasy novels dominate a market that once was plainly that of Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Phil Dick. I think it’s to the detriment of the total society, because science fiction, for decades really, has been the canary in the mine shaft for the advanced nations, to tell us what to worry about up ahead. Phil Dick was a genius at this. He could see the implications of the technologies, and what they would lead to, and people’s responses to them. But now, most of the readership is running away from these problems, perhaps terrified by them, in order to pretend that they’re really wielding swords in defense of the king, or something– which horrified people like Isaac Asimov. He saw this as just an old intellectual cowardice.

I know Benford is disappointed that I don’t share his alarm about the field, even though I do share his lack of enthusiasm for a few of the award nominees. If nobody at all was writing the kind of story he admires, then I’d be alarmed. (I wonder if he liked last year’s Hugo-nominee Halting State, by Charles Stross, which met my need for entertaining cautionary tales.) However, I’d hate to surrender the chief virtue of the Hugos  - that fans give them to works they actually like, rather than works they’re supposed to like. (Isn’t that what the Nebulas are for?)

Anti-Surveillance 101

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Locus Online reports that Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow are giving a benefit talk entitled “Resisting the All-Seeing Eye” for the Open Rights Group on May 1, 2009, in London.

The entry price is either joining Open Rights Group – by handing door staff a completed form – or making a one-time £10 donation at the door.

I predict brisk at-the-door sales — in cash. At least, I doubt the first choice of people trying to fly under the radar will be to turn in a form with their personal info to a group in the public spotlight. The form even asks applicants to provide bank info so dues can be debited automatically. Are you kidding? Perhaps this is really a test of whether prospective members are too gullible to be trusted with anything important…

Snapshots XX

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Ten developments of interest to fans:

(1) Hear, hear! SFFaudio asks an excellent question: Where are are the Charles Stross audiobooks?

Seriously, the guy is super talented. There have only been three commercially released Charlie Stross audiobooks (all from Infinivox). The were terrific, but they’re not enough.

If Saturn’s Children and Halting State were available as audiobooks they’d shoot up to the top of my listening stack.

(2) The Los Angeles Times says a new Mark Twain collection is on the way, with no love for Jane Austen:

“Who Is Mark Twain?” is due to hit shelves next month. It’s the first collection of Mark Twain’s unpublished short works and will include both fiction and nonfiction. In one essay, he wonders if Jane Austen’s intent is to “make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters?”

(3) Coming soon: a new Card trilogy:

Simon Pulse senior editor Anica Rissi has acquired world English rights to the first three books in a new fantasy series by Orson Scott Card written specifically for a YA audience; Barbara Bova of the Barbara Bova Literary Agency made the sale.

(4) Do you study Google Analytics’ map of the hits on your blog? The other day File 770 got a hit from Gabarone, Botswana, the locale of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. Spammers beware! Precious Ramotswe reads my blog.

(5) The Virginia legislature has declared June 27, 2009 to be Will F. Jenkins Day. Steven H. Silver is soliciting reminiscences about Murray Leinster/Will F. Jenkins, or pieces talking about how he/his writing has influenced writers and fans, for a memory book that will be presented to Jenkins’ family. Written pieces or photos of Jenkins/Leinster for inclusion should be sent to Steven at murrayleinsterday@gmail.com no later than May 31.

(6) Alexis Gilliland’s website is up and running. Lee Gilliland announces, “We are slowly adding cartoons (we have an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 total to post) and we also now have a forum.” It’s quite nicely designed.

(7) The fastest growing category in the iTunes App Store is: books. O’Reilly Radar explains:

Granted releasing an e-book for the iPhone is a lot easier than writing a gaming application using the iPhone SDK. Roughly 6 out 10 of the Books on the app store sell for 99 cents or less, and 1 in 20 are free.

(8) Laurraine Tutihasi’s Feline Mewsings #35 can now be downloaded at http://homepage.mac.com/laurraine/Felinemewsings/index.html.

(9) Have you already heard about the Dalek found in an English pond?

I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me. It must have been down there for some time because it was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage. One of the dome lights was smashed, but the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out.

(10) Guy Gavriel Kay’s piece for the Toronto Globe and Mail tries to make sense of readers’ intrusive demands on writers who blog:

These days, writers invite personal involvement and intensity from their readers. In direct proportion to the way in which they share their personalities (or for- consumption personalities), their everyday lives, their football teams and word counts, their partners and children and cats, it encourages in readers a sense of personal connection and access, and thus an entitlement to comment, complain, recommend cat food, feel betrayed, shriek invective, issue demands: ‘George, lose weight, dammit!’”

[Thanks to Francis Hamit, Andrew Porter, Steven Silver, David Klaus and John Mansfield for the links included in this story.]

Taxing Your Fantasy Assets

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The realization that people are making real-world earnings from goods and services offered in online multi-player games has been the subject of news reports, and inspired Charles Stross’ deftly-handled Halting State.

Even the government, in the person of IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, has finally caught a sniff of the escaping revenue:

Her report said that about $1 billion in real dollars changed hands in computer-based environments during 2005. Additionally, more than 16 million people are said to have active subscriptions in these worlds, “many of which have their own virtual economies and currencies.”

A Chaos Manor reader submitted that link and Jerry Pournelle answered with pointed humor:

Astonishing. Is there anything left to tax? Must we send quarterly withholding for killing monsters on World of Warcraft? Will Blizzard automate this so that whenever you kill a monster it shows something like “your share of the loot is 1 Gold 4 Silver with 30 pieces of silver withheld”?

(Speaking again of Charlie Stross, he will be doing a Q&A and a signing at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, MA on February 10 at 7 p.m.)

[Thanks to Steve Davidson for the Stross link.]