geekdom

The dirty little secret of publishing

Published on April 13, 2011

Finally, I saw some question about whether or not the original withdrawing author will be “blackballed” for being a troublemaker. The best answer to this is HAHAHAHAHAHA! The sad fact that nobody ever believes is this: there’s not a lot of competition out there. There really isn’t. It’s hard to find people who can write well, and that goes double for short stories or convincing young adult material. The field may seem competitive because of all the semi-literate baboons out there blogging about their rejections slips, but they don’t count. Remember the try-out weeks on American Idol—it’s like that. Tens of thousands try, maybe a couple hundred are good enough to make it to Hollywood Week, and in publishing there’s no need to find a single winner. Verday, whom Bookscan tells me sells fairly well, ain’t going nowhere. Certainly no book publisher cares about the placement of a story in someone else’s anthology, or any ensuing controversy. Verday almost certainly made back her lost $250 and more in terms of goodwill and linking and solidarity purchases of her books. So good for her, bad for the editor, and bad for the publisher for being snotty and defensive in its public statement.

Context available at his original post.

Honey is all right but beeswax is right out

Published on March 19, 20112 Comments

Bottle and glass of St Peters Honey Porter

So I was looking for something to drink during the last day of the Six Nations rugby and amongst others, found this: St Peter’s Honey Porter (dark brown, 4.5 % alcohol by volume). Now I like porters and I like honey flavoured beer, so the combination seemed a natural for me to try. Unfortunately, it turned out a bad idea. Perhaps this particular bottle had gone off somehow because I found it to be undrinkable, like biting into honey flavoured potpourri or beeswax. My first impression was the honey, then came the more disagreeable elements. The mouth feel was like drinking liquid soap, all smooth and cloying without any of the fizziness you expect from beer, while the taste evolved into a mixture of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and perfume, all floral and sweet. Very unpleasant indeed and in the end I poured it down the drain.

If this was how it was supposed, it wasn’t for me, though some people certainly like it.

Much more to my liking was the ordinary porter I drank before this abomination, the Klein Duimpje Porter: Light golden brown in colour, 5.5 % alcohol by volume. Starts off light, with metallic overtones, almost lager like, but becomes more bitter as the bottle progresses and ends at the Kilkenny or Murphy’s Red end of things. Something you could drink all day long without damaging your taste buds.

Giefors

Published on March 16, 2011

Really everything that came out in the seventies or eighties and has some appeal to thirty and fortysomething grownup nerds is being made into movies or tv series these days, isn’t it? Gatchaman is no exception and while the hardcore fan might find anything but the original anime suspect, I suspect this is really aimed at those of us who got to know it under another guise, as Battle of the Planets, bowlderised and chopped to bits as it was. Gatchaman was my first fandom, playing in the sandlot at kindergarten in the very early eighties and fighting over who got to be Mark, Jason, Tiny though not so much the princess or Keyop. Yet back then we didn’t have the slick version shown above; rather we had something like this:

Unbearable whiteness of British science fiction

Published on March 1, 2011

Pie chart depicting the race of 2011 Clarke Award submissions

Everything is Nice has some nice, juicy posts up analysing the eligible submissions for the 2011 Clarke Award. The Clarke Award is awarded annually for the best science fiction (or fantasy) novel published in the UK the previous year. It doesn’t have a long list but a short list is selected from all submitted novels; those submissions cover roughly 90-95 percent or so of new sf&f novels being published in the UK each year. Some works of course always slip through the crack, especially from non-sf publishers who don’t know or care about the awards. The Clarke Award submissions list than is a good, but not perfect indicator of the state of the UK’s sf publishing industry and as such Martin Lewis has analysed them, which resulted in e.g. the figure above.

In other words: sf publishing is only marginally less white than the group of writers the BBC thinks represents the future of British literary fiction. And worse, it has a much bigger gender imbalance: only 17 percent of the 54 novels submitted this year were written by women. Martin also looks at other identity markers (sexuality, nationality) and it all points to the conclusion that it’s largely straight, white British or American men that were published last year. (The raw data for all this can be found at Torque Control. )

The questions this inevitably puts to mind are a) is this analysis reliable when applied to the general state of the UK’s sf&f publishing industry as opposed to just the Clarke Award submissions b) is this a bad thing (imo: yes) and c) what can we do about it?

Assuming the answer to a) and b) are both yes, the question what we readers can do to change this situation is a difficult one to answer. You can only buy what’s being published after all and if only two books out of fifty-plus are by people of colour, how big an impact will it have when enough people buy their books? It’s easier to send a signal by boycotting a given company’s products, not so easy to express a preference through your buying habits. More projects and media attention to under represented people in science fiction as with the various “women sf writers” reading projects started this year would be a start, but are only suited to provide attention to this problem, not solve it. Suggestions?

Pavlovian scolding

Published on February 17, 2011

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that you shouldn’t give trolls undeserved attention, even famous trolls, but Cheryl Morgan hacked me off:

Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.

What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.

The one thing more tiresome than engaging trolls is complaining about other people engaging trolls, especially when you make it seem that you’re mostly offended that they don’t pay attention to you. Which I’m sure wasn’t Morgan’s intent, but it does come across that way. I’m sure she understands something like Salon Futura with its mixture of short stories and thoughful non-fiction takes time to digest and reflect on, while Leo Grin’s fart of outrage takes no more than five minutes to read and mock. It makes for a nice bit of light entertainment as it does the round of Twitter and sf&f blogs, with e.g. Joe Abercrombie responding to it with some deft skewering:

But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here?

That’s very far from the “pornography of rage” Morgan talks about, more a sort of bemused merriment at the idea that somebody can be so threatened by any kind of fantasy that isn’t like he imagined the “two titanic literary talents” J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard wrote that he has to write such a dumb polemic. It can be interesting to dissect, though I won’t bother myself, to understand why somebody is so insecure that he has to imagine that any fantasy he dislikes is not just to his taste, but actively undermining western civilisation…. To scold those who are interested in doing this seems counterproductive.