(1) PATEL SURFACES, THEN SUBMERGES. A new Sunil Patel story that went online two days ago has been taken down. In its place, David Steffen, editor of Diabolical Plots (and the Long List Anthology) has posted “An Apology, Regarding Sunil Patel’s Story”.
On March 15th, I sent a story to Diabolical Plots publishing newsletter subscribers written by Sunil Patel. The story had been purchased and contracted in August 2016, before stories about Sunil’s abusive behavior surfaced (in October). I neglected to remove the story from the schedule and it went to the inbox of 182 subscribers of the newsletter.
This was not the right choice for me to make. Diabolical Plots is here to serve the SF publishing community, and I am sorry for my lapse in judgment. I can’t unsend an email, but the story will be removed from the publishing lineup scheduled on the Diabolical Plots site (and replaced with a different story if I can work it out). If anyone wishes to provide further feedback, please feel free to email me at [email protected].
The incident prompted Sarah Hollowell to tweet –
To anyone Sunil hurt that might be triggered by his re-appearance:
You are important. You are strong. I've got your back.
— Sarah Hollowell ???? (@sarahhollowell) March 17, 2017
(2) SLICING UP THE PIE. New from Author Earnings, “February 2017 Big, Bad, Wide & International Report: covering Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Kobo ebook sales in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand”.
Greg Hullender says “This report just came out, and it’s fascinating. Although it doesn’t have the breakdown by genre (so probably not useful for File770 yet) it shows big-five publishers continuing to lose ground in e-book sales—mostly to small/medium publishers, not to independents.”
Today, with the click of a button, any author can start selling any title they wish simultaneously in 12 country-specific Amazon stores, 36 country-specific Kobo ebook stores, and over 40 country-specific Apple ebook stores.
As of yet, most of these non-English-language ebook markets are still fairly early-stage. But that’s not true of the four other major English-language markets outside the US. In those markets, too, as we’ll see, a substantial share of all new-book purchases has already gone digital. And, as we’ll also see, untracked, non-traditional suppliers make up a high percentage of ebook sales in those countries as well. Which means that these other digital markets have also been consistently underestimated and under-reported by traditional publishing-industry statistics.
(3) IN MEMORY YET GREEN. A St.Patrick’s Day coincidence? Cat Rambo has a new entry in her Lester Dent retrospective — “Reading Doc Savage: The Sargasso Ogre”.
Our cover is mainly green, depicting Doc poling a log in what have to be anti-gravity boots because there is no way he would maintain his balance otherwise, towards an abandoned ship. As always, his shirt is artfully torn and his footwear worthy of a J. Peterman catalog.
In this read, book eighteen of the series, we finally get to see another of Doc’s men, electrical engineer Long Tom. I do want to begin with a caveat that this book starts in Alexandria and initially features an Islamic villain, Pasha Bey; while I will call out some specific instances, this is the first of these where the racism is oozing all over the page and betrays so many things about the American popular conception of the Middle East. I just want to get that out of the way up front, because it is a big ol’ problem in the beginning of this text….
(4) DRIVING THE TRAINS OUT OF IRELAND. On the other hand, our favorite train driver James Bacon says explicitly that the new Journey Planet is “Just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day.”
This is our second issue looking at comic connections, in one way or another, to Ireland. I thought you would be interested, and hope you are.
Co-edited with ‘Pádraig Ó Méalóid and Michael Carrolll, this issue features an interview with Steve Dillon when he was living in Dublin, and an interview with Neil Bailey who co-edited The comic fanzine Sci Fi Adventures where Steve’s comic work began. We have an interview with Steve Moore about Ka-Pow the first British comic Fanzine and the first British Comic Con. We have and extended looks at the fan art of Paul Neary and fan and professional art of Steve Dillon and we reprint a piece about Steve Dillon that I wrote for Forbidden Planet.
This fanzine is all about histories, stories and in many respects is an oral history. We have a lovely cover by co–editor Michael Carroll.
I’ve loved reading and writing about the comic connections, interesting, yet I feel historically significant happenings. The Fanzine connection, the Irish Connection, the comics connection. It is all connected and it is fascinating fun to find out about them. I am exceptionally graceful to Neil Bailey, Alan Moore, Paul Neary, Dez Skinn, Michael Carroll, Paul Sheridan, and of course to my co-editors Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Michael Carroll and Christopher J Garcia who have grafted very hard on this one. My thoughts are with those who mourn Steve Dillon and Steve Moore and I hope we remember them well here.
(5) FLEET OF FOOT. A scientific study from the University of Felapton Towers, “What Are Pixel Scrolls About?”, shows I haven’t been running nearly as much Bradbury material as I thought. So maybe I don’t really need the excuse of St. Patrick’s Day to plug in this adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Irish story “The Anthem Sprinters.”
(6) AURORA AWARDS CALENDAR. The Aurora Awards calendar is up.
Nominations for the 2017 awards will open on March 31, 2017….
Online nominations must be submitted by 11:59:59 PM EDT on May 20th, 2017.
Voting will begin on July 15, 2017. Online votes must be submitted by 11:59:59 EDT on September 2nd.
The Aurora awards will be presented during at Hal-Con / Canvention 37 on the weekend of September 22-24, 2017 in Halifax.
(7) NEW MANDEL STORY. Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, in collaboration with Slate’s Future Tense channel, just published “Mr. Thursday,” a new short story by Emily St. John Mandel (author of Station Eleven) about time travel, determinism, and unrequited longing. Read it (free) here, along with a response essay, “Can We Really Travel Back in Time to Change History?” by Paul Davies, a theoretical physics professor at Arizona State University and author of the book How to Build a Time Machine.
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 17, 1755 – The Transylvania Land Company bought what became the state of Kentucky for $50,000, from a Cherokee Indian chief.
(9) A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS. Matt Wallace’s award suggestion rapidly morphed into a vision for a deadly cage match competition.
There should be a Hugo Award for agents.
— Matt Wallace is Updates Only (@MattFnWallace) March 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/dongwon/status/842610704049889282
(10) PEWPEW. In Myke Cole’s interview by Patrick St.Denis the author does not hold back.
Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a World Fantasy/Hugo Award? Why, exactly?
Hands down an NYT bestseller. Nobody, apart from a tiny cabal of insiders and SMOFs, cares about the Hugos or the WFA. Winning them does help expand your audience and sell more books, but if you hit the list that means you already ARE selling more books. I come out of fandom, and consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool nerd, but I want to write for the largest audience possible, and you can only hit the list if you’re selling *outside* the traditional and limited genre audience. Added to this, both sets of awards, but moreso the Hugos, have been so mired in petty controversy that I’m not sure I want to be associated with them anymore.
You are now part of the reality TV show Hunted on CBS. Tell us a bit more about the show and how you became part of the hunters’ team.
Hunted is the most elaborate game of hide-n-seek ever made. It pits 9 teams of ordinary Americans against 34 professional investigators, all of us drawn from the intelligence, military and law enforcement communities, each of us with an average of 20+ years experience. We have state of the art equipment and full powers of law enforcement. Any one of the teams that can evade us in 100,000 square miles of the southeastern US for 28 days wins $250,000.
Most folks know that I worked in intelligence for many years, but most don’t know that my specific discipline was as an SSO-T (Special Skills Officer – Targeter) in the Counterterrorism field. Counterterrorism Targeting is just a fancy way of saying “manhunting” and I guess I built a reputation, because when CBS started making inquiries, my name came up as a go-to guy, and I got a random call out of the blue asking me if I wanted to be on TV.
It was (and is, because the show is running now) and amazing experience. I’m most pleased that it’s a window into who we are and how we work for the general public. Police relations with the public always benefit from visibility, and I think this show is a great move in that direction.
(11) DIY CORNER. Charon Dunn knows a good interview helps publicize a book. But who, oh who, could she get to do the interview?
Sieging Manganela is a short novel (just under 65k words) which takes place in the Sonny Knight universe, concerning a young soldier named Turo who, while laying siege to a city, makes a connection with a girl who lives inside.
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWER THAT I MADE UP (BECAUSE I AM AN ASOCIAL FRIEND-LACKING HERMIT) TO ASK ME QUESTIONS THAT I CRIBBED FROM REAL INTERVIEWS WITH SUCCESSFUL WRITERS: So tell me about your protagonist.
CD: Arturo “Turo” Berengar has lots of references to bears in his name, because he’s a strong stoic bear most of the time. His friends used to call him Turo, but they all died, and he has a massive case of stress and grief and survivor’s guilt and depression as a result. He’s trying to hold it together until the war ends, to keep his blind mother receiving benefits. He’s a bundle of stress but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at him. He conceals it well. He is seventeen years old….
II: Hard military science fiction, then?
CD: You could call it that, but the notion of me writing in that genre blows my mind and I’ll probably never do it again. Sieging Manganela came from me doing NaNoWriMo in the middle of being blocked on the Sonny Knight trilogy, which I’d classify as YA science fiction adventure. Sieging Manganela is darker and closer to horror, which is a genre I adore yet can’t seem to write – until I tried coming at it from a military science fiction angle. And yes, in fact it is military science fiction in a salute to Heinlein kind of way.
And, since most of the point of view characters are teens, I guess it counts as YA. So, military horror YA bioengineering dystopian science fiction adventure, hold the starships.
I will note that the research for it involved some grueling reading about soldiers, and specifically child soldiers, because I wanted to treat my soldier characters honorably. I love soldiers, especially when they’re happy and healthy and still have all their parts attached and are goofing off drawing pictures and drinking beer and telling each other about the awesome lives they’re going to have after they’re done being soldiers. There are some villains in this tale, and they are not soldiers.
That said, yeah, there’s kind of an anti-war theme running through it, but no preachy granola hogwash and no disrespecting of warriors. In the same spirit of trigger-disclosure, there’s minimal sex, some extreme violence and no animal cruelty. There’s at least one nonstr8 character but since it’s not relevant to the plot it’s undisclosed, and you’ll have to guess who.
The jacket copy is here. And Cora Buhlert ran the cover together with an excerpt from the book at Speculative Ficton Showcase. There’s even a photo of Charon with, as she calls it, “my humongous SJW credential.”
(12) THE CREATOR. With the impetus of the American Gods series, Neil Gaiman is becoming a television maven.
The comic book legend will develop projects from his library as well as original ideas.
Neil Gaiman is pushing deeper into television.
The creator and exec producer of Starz’s upcoming American Gods has signed a first-look TV deal with FremantleMedia.
Under the multiple-year deal, Gaiman will be able to adapt any of his projects — from novels and short stories — as well as adapt other projects and original ideas.
“Working with my friends at FremantleMedia on shepherding American Gods to the screen has been exciting and a delightful way to spend the last three years,” Gaiman said in a statement announcing the news Tuesday. “I’ve learned to trust them, and to harness their talents and enthusiasm, as they’ve learned to harness mine. They don’t mind that I love creating a ridiculously wide variety of things, and I am glad that even the strangest projects of mine will have a home with them. American Gods is TV nobody has seen before and I can’t wait to announce the specifics behind what we have coming up next.”
(13) ALL ABOARD! The Digital Antiquarian tells how Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley cooked up Railroad Tycoon.
The problem of reconciling the two halves of Railroad Tycoon might have seemed intractable to many a design team. Consider the question of time. The operational game would seemingly need to run on a scale of days and hours, as trains chug around the tracks picking up and delivering constant streams of cargo. Yet the high-level economic game needs to run on a scale of months and years. A full game of Railroad Tycoon lasts a full century, over the course of which Big Changes happen on a scale about a million miles removed from the progress of individual trains down the tracks: the economy booms and crashes and booms again; coal and oil deposits are discovered and exploited and exhausted; cities grow; new industries develop; the Age of Steam gives ways to the Age of Diesel; competitors rise and fall and rise again. “You can’t have a game that lasts a hundred years and be running individual trains,” thought Meier and Shelley initially. If they tried to run the whole thing at the natural scale of the operational game, they’d wind up with a game that took a year or two of real-world time to play and left the player so lost in the weeds of day-to-day railroad operations that the bigger economic picture would get lost entirely.
Meier’s audacious solution was to do the opposite, to run the game as a whole at the macro scale of the economic game. This means that, at the beginning of the game when locomotives are weak and slow, it might take six months for a train to go from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. What ought to be one day of train traffic takes two years in the game’s reckoning of time. As a simulation, it’s ridiculous, but if we’re willing to see each train driving on the map as an abstraction representing many individual trains — or, for that matter, if we’re willing to not think about it at all too closely — it works perfectly well. Meier understood that a game doesn’t need to be a literal simulation of its subject to evoke the spirit of its subject — that experiential gaming encompasses more than simulations. Railroad Tycoon is, to use the words of game designer Michael Bate, an “aesthetic simulation” of railroad history.
(14) CAT MAN DUE. Zoe Saldana enlists the help of Stephen Hawking to solve a quantum riddle in order to get Simon Pegg’s cat back in Quantum is Calling. Released by a CalTech production group in December 2016.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, James Bacon, Cat Rambo, Joey Eschrich, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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(11) DIY CORNER.
I’d say that Dunn dodged a bullet there. Her book could have been reviewed by Timothy The Talking Cat — and we’ve all seen the sorts of psychotropic, conspiracy-laden disasters into which his reviews inevitably degenerate. 🐱
12) I would love to see an adaptation of Gaiman’s Books of Magic, especially if Matt Ryan can play Constsntine again!
[Shadow-stalk]
(7) That should be “New Mandel story”. It’s not a double-barrel surname. As she says here “St. John’s my middle name. The books go under M.”
I read the full link @2. The big 5 publishers continue to lose market share while independents are gaining share.
This is probably a function of high price and bad gate-keeping by the insular big 5 publishers.
It would be interesting to see this data compared to total revenue instead of units sold alone. By a total revenue number, the big 5 may not be declining nearly as sharply.
Big Fifth
airboy:
The gate-keeping must be so much worse for the smaller publishers then, as they sell so much less. I guess they are much more insular too.
I’m in the scroll! With my cat!
*dances around deliriously*
I like Timothy’s writing best when he’s peaking on catnip. Kahuna is not nearly as articulate; he’s more of a litterbox sculptor.
***
JUST OVER 4 HOURS LEFT TO NOMINATE FOR THE HUGOS
***
If you haven’t finished your nominations yet, you will want to do so, to avoid any potential issues caused by high server load toward the impending deadline.
Be sure to “Save” all changes before exiting. Each category has a “Save” button, and there is a “Save All” button which appears on the lower right if you have any unsaved changes.
Note that the confirmation e-mail of your ballot choices will be sent to your e-mail approximately 1 hour after you exit out of the nomination screen.
If you experience issues, such as the page not appearing to reflect your latest changes, close the browser down completely and re-open it, then clear the browser cache.
How to Clear Your Cache on Any Browser
If you’ve tried that a couple of times and it hasn’t worked, or if you’re having any other issues, send a message to [email protected].
@airboy
Look at the last graph before the comments. Independent’s percentage of gross sales peaked at abut 25% in 2016 and are back down to 20%, which was their May 2015 number. In that same time, the small-to-medium publishers have gone from under 20% to over 30%.
[box-checking]
I’ve double-checked my Hugo nominations and they’re ready to go, with more than 3 hours left! (Last year, I got the final result in with 15 min. to go, so yay me).
(11) I would opine that Charon does in fact have one of the most gigantic SJW credentials currently in authordom. I want to pet him. Since they’re hermits, maybe I’ll turn up at the house someday. “No, Charon, you don’t have to talk to me… you can hide in the other room… I’m just here to pet Kahuna and then I’ll go away…”
Clicky
*slides in in a cloud of dust, pebbles, shoes, etc* My artist nominations.
(3) I love Cat Rambo’s reviews of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage books. The Sargasso Ogre is the one I remember best (except for the story with poisonous centipedes). It had a wonderfully creepy setting and dastardly characters–like every other Doc Savage book! But I’m glad someone is reviewing them, because I want to remember them, but I could not read them now without a painful awareness of the racism and bad writing. I re-read van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle recently, and all my nostalgic joy was swallowed up by inconveniently analytical brain cells.
(10) PEWPEW. I like Myke Cole’s books and like what I’ve seen of him as a person (from his blog, panels at cons, interviews, etc.). I enjoyed this interview and learned some new stuff about him. 🙂 I haven’t read his blog in a while; I checked and there’s no new post since November – bummer. I’m not really interested in ancient military history, but it’s cool that he’s branching out more, and I hope that goes well for him (I’ll have to at least peek at the excerpt when it’s published). I’m looking forward to his Tor.com novellas – I like that premise!
11) Charon’s SJW credential is truly amazing, so huge and fluffy. This was definitely one of my favourite author photos so far.
Also thanks for the shout-out about the Speculative Fiction Showcase. We feature indie and small press SFF, do interviews and have a weekly link round-up.
Okay, NOW I’m done with the ballot, still with an hour and a half to go! I’d forgotten to check the spreadsheet o’doom, so I added a few more.
(10) I’ve only seen the ads for that TV show, and they always make me VERY uneasy. It’s like, they already had a show called “Big Brother”, and now they’ve actually made one that uses the concept/tech?
I’m just not comfortable with hunting down my fellow Americans for entertainment, even if they volunteered and are getting money.* And if moi, a college-educated native-born WASP feels that way, some of my neighbors are liable to be even more uneasy about it. I generally think well of Myke Cole, but this doesn’t sit right with me.
We’re almost to the year in which the movie “The Running Man” was set, wherein… lemme quote from IMDB:
“The great freedoms of the United States are no longer, as the once great nation has sealed off its borders and become a militarized police state…. the government attempts to quell the nation’s yearning for freedom by broadcasting a number of game shows on which convicted criminals fight for their lives…. When a peaceful protest of starving citizens gathers in Bakersfield, California, a police officer named Ben Richards is ordered to fire on the crowd, which he refuses to do. Subdued by the other officers, the attack is carried out…
then Ah-nuld has to run from cameras and highly trained people following him.
Tagline: The year is 2019. The finest men in America don’t run for President. They run for their lives.
Yikes.
*although only 25% of what The Amazing Race pays, and in that you get to travel the world openly, not hide from people in one muggy part of the US.
Thank you! I never know with these.
/HugoStalk (I’m on the edge of my seat!)
Im a bit worried about the trend in the latest scrolls to feature St. Patricks. If that trend continues it will be all about Ireland in 6 month time!
(14) I enjoy those. And I really like Zoe Saldana, so thats a double-like here 🙂
Good morning! Just in from taking the Little Dogs, a.k.a. The Cats That Bark, outside at the ungodly hour of 4am.
No Hugo noms this year, because I’ve had no spoons for the Hugos, and have had some decent luck in, at least, finding new comfort reads. Which is about what I can handle, right now.
(10) Does sound like a bad idea, and no, I don’t get how this is supposed to be entertainment in any healthy way. But I think we really do need to blame the people who brought us The Running Man.
This is a test. Strange stuff happened with that last post, and I was surprised to find it posted properly.
@Lis Carey
We can hear you fine, even in the back!
——
WorldCon tweeted that this was the second-highest number of nominators ever (after last year). I guess that’s a lot of data cleanup for them to do, so good luck!
I’d be waaaay more interested in a Timothy Hunter TV series than I was in a Constantine one, though I suspect the rights are DC’s rather than Gaiman’s. Still, who knows? The Children’s Crusade done over a 10-12 episode season? Hmm..
(Actually, I’d be even more interested in a new Gaiman novel. American Gods 2?)
lurkertype, re (10):
I think a TV show that highlights the different digital and non-digital traces we leave behind in our lives could be interesting. A Wired-writer did something similar some years ago: https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff_vanish2/
However, I wonder how they’re actually doing this in practice. In particular, I wonder about this line by Cole: “We have state of the art equipment and full powers of law enforcement. ” What does that mean – do they have access to cellphone data, credit card data, and surveillance cameras? Can they call in local law enforcement to help them? Can they stop cars or search houses if they suspect the “fugitives” are inside? And if the hunters can do any of that: How does it work out legally? I sort of hope that line is just marketing bullshit and not an accurate description of the show – and I suspect the show is a lot more staged than the “reality” label suggests.
Nigel opines that (Actually, I’d be even more interested in a new Gaiman novel. American Gods 2?)
Might be a while on that as he’s announced that he’s writing another novel set in his Neverwhere universe.
@Johan P
Based on the UK version of the show, they seem to be simulating the effects of those things – so there is a crew with the “hunted” at all times and if they trip any of the elements that the hunters declare they have set up, the hunters get the equivalent information. So, yes, quite heavily staged.
So … does Tam Lin by Pamela Dean ever reach a point where I won’t want to murder all the characters, or is that just the way this book is going to be?
@10: Cole assumes there’s a divide — or at least, no strong connection — between ]people who pay attention to awards[ and ]most book buyers[. I’ve frequently seen arguments for the reverse: that ]fans[ are commonly epicenters of recommendations for buyers who don’t think of getting involved. I’d love to see some practical investigation of these theories. (I also don’t know how many fans Cole knows to evaluate his assumption; the first time I saw him at a con was the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, which may have affected his opinions even though he’s also been to a couple of Boskones.)
@12: It’s interesting that Gaiman is getting involved in putting old works onto the screen when he had been saying that he had too many new things he wanted to write and had to cut back on appearances to get time for them. OTOH, it would be interesting if he comes up with new screen-specific works; he’s got enough clout now that he’s unlikely to be cheaped out (as he was on Neverwhere — cf that wretched excuse for a Beast), and there won’t be a print version to leave us … disappointed … about its screen presentation (one word: Stardust).
@Kyra: Dean is notorious for taking a long time to get to the point; cf Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which rambles along through much of a year before all the fuses she’s lit go off at the same time a few pages from the end. I thought JG&R was a little too much of this, but I loved Tam Lin. Were you ever a college student, and if so when? I had some gear-grinding at first because the book is set about ~20 years before its original release (~25 years ago), but I had no trouble believing the characters, and liking some of them; people who are for the first time out from under parental supervision don’t always act wisely, let alone sedately. And as someone who’s been a reader forever I loved Janet’s enthusiasm for English lit even if I’m not as fond of much of it as she is.
Mark:
I ran across a blog that confirms this – and also criticizes the CBS show for being unreasonably obtuse about it, in particular compared to the UK version which is apparently more open about what it does.
https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2017/02/hunted-fact-check-enterprise-car-rental/
https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2017/02/hunted-behind-the-scenes/
So yeah, Myke Cole’s description of the show is mostly PR speak and not accurate.
I enjoyed the Sad Puppies recommendations this year. I’ve been skeptical of the project since it began as Larry Correia’s primal scream over not winning the Campbell, but what they’ve done this time around far surpasses the previous four years.
I loved Tam Lin. Yes, the characters do sometimes inspire a desire to shake s9me sense into them, but, as Chip said, college kids. They need practice being independent.
@Greg – thanks for the link. I thought that the price increase of the majors could have helped with gross revenue market share – but ebook share for them has tanked from 53% to 35% in two years. Small & medium publishers now exceed ebook revenues of the large publishers.
Has there been a decrease in aggregate price point of independents that hit the gross margin? They seem to be selling a lot of units with less aggregate gross sales – which suggests a big pricing differential.
@Hampus – you might want to look at the graph Greg linked to.
> “… people who are for the first time out from under parental supervision don’t always act wisely, let alone sedately …”
***POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR TAM LIN BELOW***
Well, if they’re going to start acting unwisely and unsedately at some point, I suppose I’ll keep reading for a while. So far, the story has neglected pursuing anything potentially interesting (admittedly because of obvious supernatural mind-f*ckery, but that isn’t exactly helping to propel the book along) in favor a depiction of the minutiae of campus life which seems geared towards aliens who have never before heard of a “university”.
Well, since it’s based on Tam Lin, I guess I can assume that at some point Janet gets pregnant, so presumably it’ll kick into unwise and unsedate mode for that to happen? I guess I’ll see.
Hello Filers, some assistance if you please? I’ve been looking for the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for 2017-2018. I’m sure it got linked in a prior Pixel Scroll, but my Google-fu has failed me. The link from the 2018 Wikia took me to the 2016-2017 Spreadsheet. Can somebody help me out?
@lurkertype
This sounds eerily like a real life version of the West German early 1970s SF TV thriller “Das Millionenspiel” (The Million Game), which also has hunters hunting down contestants for a cash prize of one million deutschmark. Only that in The Million Game, contestants can actually get killed. The film caused a scandal at the time, because some viewers mistook it for a real game show and complained, while others eagerly applied. It does look eerily like TV from a parallel universe. The Million Game is adapted from (uncredited, alas) a Robert Sheckley story.
You can watch the whole thing here, but only in German alas.
(2) I used to buy Big Five ebooks as soon as they came out, or at least consider doing so, but not at the over-$10 price point. Now I just file those in my Too Damn Expensive wishlist and wait for the MMPB to come out and the price to drop to something reasonable. Yes, part of that is the current employment situation (although I had an encouraging interview yesterday!), but the $12-$15 price tag is just too hefty to justify unless I’m in dire need or something.
After all, it’s not like Mt. Tsundoku is running low, and meanwhile I have several indie series I follow at $5 or less per volume. Specifically, I mentioned the Big Sigma books a few scrolls back, the new Action Figures book came out a couple of weeks back, and I just picked up both of the Two-Percent Power books (about a superhero with dairy-control powers) for a buck each. Granted, I expect those last to be more than a little cheesy…
The last time I spent more than $5 on a Big Five book at regular price was Seanan McGuire’s new InCryptid book, at $7.99. Around the same time, I spent a decent chunk on a few Marvel collections, but that was during a half-off sale. When a $20 book drops to $10, that’s hardly the same as spending $12 on a new release.
All of which is to say that I can observe the macro trend in my own micro habits. I get twitchy about reading “unprofessional indies” these days, due to their lack of editing, but the ones who have a good handle on grammar and punctuation frequently also know how to spin a good yarn at a reasonable price. If I can pick up four high-quality indie books for the price of one new Big Five release, why shouldn’t I do exactly that?
(14) Directed by Alex Winter? Nicely sly Bill & Ted reunion.
Re: Constantine – Word is that the series is being revived in animation on CW Seed. If a premiere date has been announced, I haven’t seen it.
@Lis Carey: Of course strange things are afoot. Bill & Ted are in the Scroll, and a gas station near my house just became a Circle K. What else would you expect?
@Johan P: Oh, I didn’t doubt that it was heavily staged — the surveillance industrial complex isn’t about to give up its sweet sweet data for a TV show. But I dislike the normalization of surveillance, the instillation of fear, the pounding of “you can run but you can’t hide”. Along with the normalization of misogyny and racism we’ve gotten lately. It’s just a bad trend.
@Dawn Incognito
http://bit.ly/hugoaward2018
@rcade what exactly happened to SP5? I did some googling; there was some umbrage taken in early January on MGC that somebody would try to usurp the authoritah of the duly selected SP5 organizer, and then the campaign seems to have disappeared without a trace. Was I missing anything?
@Rev Bob: I’m the same way as you for the same reasons on Big 5 ebooks. I just wait till MMPB and/or commensurate price drop of ebook. There are plenty of indies who can spell, punctuate, plot, and dialogue. I like Renee Pawlish in light mysteries, and her Reed Ferguson books come out at $4.99 and drop accordingly. Sometimes even free on special occasions! 15 novels and some short stories in the past 6 years in that series, plus a few in a 50’s-set series.
People who want endless amounts of dystopian YA love triangles, or grouchy shapeshifters and the women who lust them can get all that for free or cheap as well, and some of them are decently written.
Occasionally Amazon will price-match the hardback with the ebook. “The End of All Things”, by Scalzi was IIRC $11.99 ebook preorder and $11.95 hardback. For four cents less, you betcha I got the hardback. Then I resold it to a used book store, which Scalzi told me was fine b/c I bought cat food with the cash and he already got: so much money that TOR went broke/didn’t make any money at all/got whatever his usual royalty rate is.*
So an indie or small press that’s more flexible about their pricing is naturally going to pick up more business. And I ain’t paying above $8 for a batch of pixels.
@Cora: There was an Italian/US movie of that Sheckley story in 1965 called “The Tenth Victim” that did give him credit. Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress chased and flirted around Rome. No TV show following contestants.
This “Hunted” show is way more “Running Man”, though. Right down to much of the terminology, and oh yeah, Arnold’s a reality show star himself now. Minus death, but still. Yeah. Creeeeepy.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual!
*(choose one according to your level of paranoia and alternative facts)
2)
For me, it depends. I will preorder books by authors I really like and want to support, even at $10+ price point for the ebook. But a brand new author to me? No, unless I’ve gotten an ARC, read such ARC and liked it well enough to go and support the author thereby (c.f. Malka Older, just as an example).
I also noticed that the Tor novellas have gone up in ebook from $2.99 to $3.99. I have a couple of preorders pending at the older price.
@Rev.Bob:
I can’t argue with that, I have to admit.
Let’s see what happens this time…
No weirdness this time! Yay!
Which may mean it’s my phone doing Weird Stuff. We’ll see.
For myself, I don’t necessarily mind paying $11 or $12 for an eBook if it’s something that I’m ready to read right now; or I also do the occasional preorder. But I don’t do the Amazon equivalent of my olden trips to Uncle Hugo’s where I’d just wander amongst the shelves for 30-60 minutes and come home with a grocery bag full of paperbacks to be read … eventually.
Also, reading-wise, I just finished revisiting d’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths for probably the first time in 30+ years, and it’s still an absolute gem. I do very much look forward to reading Neil Gaiman’s Norse Myths, but I wanted to refresh my childhood memories first.
what exactly happened to SP5?
The Pups did what we always knew they were eventually going to do: They put their tails between their legs and slunk away.
I tend to have about 150 books on my Nook wishlist at any given time. Many of them are waiting for price decreases. There are a few authors I will buy immediately even at prices above $10, but even while prices are rising, I’m finding the average amount I’m paying for the many many books I buy are dropping: I’m on a coupleof email lists that notify about books that go on sale, and I’ve been accumulating a LOT of older books at .99 or 1.99 or 2.99 each.
I scroll through my wishlist and see prices of 9.99 or over $10, and I think about my TBR pile on my tablet (which is getting to be 2 or 3 times the wishlist size because the cut-price sales are short-term), and purchases of new releases get postponed.
@Mark:
Thank you kindly. I saw “The Dark Birds” by Ursula Vernon was missing from novelette. This was an appalling lack which has now been rectified 🙂
@Kyra:
My bet is on the latter. However, I would feel a great deal more confident in saying so, if you gave us some details: like, how far into the book are you? And just what about the characters inspires homicidal rage? That would make it a lot easier to know if things are likely to change later on.
Sad Puppies 5 was going to be a monthly effort, then it was going to launch its website “soon” for several months, then nothing. As far as I can determine, the closest the organizers got to doing anything was to yell at an author for writing a blog post with “Sad Puppies 5” in the title. Then he yelled at File 770 instead of them. A good time was had by all.
The best part of that blog post was when the Sad Puppies, without a scintilla of irony, made this complaint: “when they seem to be stepping up and taking control of something they have not been involved in, then they have crossed the line.”
It does suck when people try to control something that isn’t theirs, dunnit?
> “… how far into the book are you?”
About a fifth of the way in. Janet just looked for the 19th century books that were thrown on the lawn in Peg’s room and wasn’t able to find them.
> And just what about the characters inspires homicidal rage?
The main character is a pretentious jerk who has decided she detests one of her roommates for having the gall to prefer tennis to reading; she also believes that quoting poetry makes you deep and so does the boy she is attracted to, who so far has been pretty much awful. I could certainly chalk all this up to Deliberate Depiction Of A College Freshman With Judgmental Preconceptions, but adults with similar literary pretensions are also being depicted with what seems to be approval (her lit professor, her father.) To be fair, I could chalk that up to Deliberate Depiction Of English Professors, but I’m beginning to wonder if any redeeming qualities are going to show up anywhere. Most of the other characters as of yet lack a personality altogether and so far I could not tell you the difference between Peg and Sharon and Robin and Molly and Nora and the dozen or so others whose names I forget because they all kind of sound the same.