Evaluating Gollancz’s science fiction gateway

science fiction
Published on

So Gollancz finally launched their SF Gateway site after having teased us for months. When they first announced it, I was cautiously optimistic about it. As long as it got the pricing and ease of purchase right and avoided relics from the pre-digital age like territorial restrictions, I could see myself spending a lot of money there. I’m a fairly recent convert to the e-book, liking the ease with which I can carry a small library on my phone, but I still rate physical books higher than their digital counterparts. There are only a few authors I buy in hardcover (Banks, MacLeod, Martin, Miéville, Pratchett, Stross and Walton), more I buy in paperback, but most I buy secondhand. E-books have to compete mainly with the last. They’re certainly not worth buying at hardcover prices and even standard mass market paperback prices is pushing it. Especially for backlisted books.

In short, the books available through the SF Gateway have to be as cheap as buying them secondhand would be. Most of which cost me in the region of two to four euros, being lucky enough to live in a city with loads of cheap, well stocked secondhand bookstores. I’m more than willing to pay roughly the same price or a little bit more for those books I can’t find there, but not much more.

Gollancz got one thing right, from the start offering a wide range of authors and books, but they got it wrong on the other aspects. The first is that you can’t buy the books directly from their site, but are directed to a selection of online booksellers like Amazon. Worse, there’s no pricing information there either. So if I want to buy Pat Cadigan’s Fools, I’m redirected to Amazon, where it costs $8.25. I’m also invited to buy it at Kobo (never heard of it), but that site doesn’t know this book at all!

I could just as well do a search on Amazon UK directly and find the books there, which brings me to the second flaw: the pricing. Here they got it almost right: many of these books are available for three pounds, but there are also quite a few more expensive than that, five pounds and up. Three quid is reasonable; five quid not so much. Annoyingly, most of the books I would like to get are on the expensive side.

Finally, as James Nicoll noted, there are territorial restrictions on these books, while the gender ratio of the authors is a bit skewed…

In conclusion: Gollancz’s experiment is a mixed success. It hasn’t really made it easier or cheaper for me to get these books, but I think I will get at least some of these books at some point. Unless I find them secondhand first of course.

The platonic ideal of a certain Crooked Timber post…

Pointless contrarianism
Published on

So back when the western media were finally noticing the Tunesian and subsequent Egyptian revolutions the angle they took on it to sell to their audiences was by stressing the role Twitter and Facebook played in them, even going so far as to call them “Twitter revolutions”. Unsurprisingly, people objected to this as the actual people building the revolution where reduced to bit players in a narrative that was once again all about us and our toys. You’d think somebody as bright as Clay Shirky would get that, but instead he reduces these complaints to an abstract point about ascribing agency to inanimate objects:

Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.

But here’s the funny thing—we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.

[…]

What puzzles me is why we should want to avoid those phrases in the first place. What is it about communications tools that seems to arouse more anxiety about our usual, agency-encapsulating shorthand than other kinds of technologies?

His examples are not saying what he wants them to, in fact have to be deliberately misread for Shirky to be able to have his argument. So why is he doing this? Why built an argument on a technically correct yet irrelevant objection anybody can tell has nothing to do with the issue at hand? Perhaps it’s just a question of a thesis going in search of an issue to apply it to?

This is an argumenting technique quite a few academics are found off, to seize on an abstract side issue rather than to engage directly an the argument. It can be done in both good and bad faith, it’s often seen on Crooked Timber and Shirky’s post is the platonic ideal of it…

Your internet feed, let us censor it

IT is not magic pixiedust, LGBT
Published on 1 Comment on Your internet feed, let us censor it

So who really thinks giving BT et all control over what you can see on the internet is a good idea:

Four leading web providers are to offer customers the option to block adult content at the point of subscription, the BBC understands.

BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin will offer the protection for smart phones, laptops and PCs.

It comes as David Cameron is set to meet industry representatives amid concern over sexualisation of children.

The prime minister will also launch Parentport – a website to help parents complain about inappropriate content.

And he will back a ban on billboards displaying risque images near schools.

The new measures, aimed at helping parents protect their children from internet porn and other explicit sites, follow a report earlier this year by the Mothers’ Union charity.

It’s all part of the further childproving of society, where anything that potentially could be seen by children and “harm” them has to be packed off to some adults only ghetto. And the internet, being the newest, biggest and still scariest medium available to children of course has to be controlled the most. But you’d be stupid as parents to trust Sky or Virgin with making your internet feed child safe. If these filtering efforts are to be effective they have to be draconian, filtering out anything that talks about s*e*x* or mentions a naughty word — so much for Scunthorpe — and taking a lot of false positives down too. Sex education sites, rape support centres, GLBT blogs, those are all vulnerable to such filtering, because all too often already they’re blocked by net nanny software.

Either that or this sort of filter will be wholly ineffective and consist of only a token effort to block playboy.com… Remember, for these internet providers, this is just an added cost so they’ll be looking to do it as cheaply as possible.

No, we don’t need an unified science fiction award

science fiction
Published on

So there’s been a bit of a kerfluffle about the British Fantasy Awards, the organisors being accused if not of devious going-ons than of giving the appearance of same and general incompetence, most fiercly by Stephen Jones, who has previous form for this sort of thing. Long story cut short, as Cheryl Morgan put it, “the person who counted the final ballot was also the winner of one award, the publisher of two other winners, and the partner of the winner of two more” though there is no evidence that there was any fraud going on. Not a good thing for any award, to give the appearance that its administrators are not wholly impartial and it would’ve been better if those had recused themselves.

For Damien G. Walter this however would not be enough. Looking at the three main UK awards, the Clarke, the BSFA and the BFA, he concludes that these should be replaced by one unified award:

Speculative fiction writing is incredibly rich in the UK, but a splintered field of amateur awards is failing to reflect this richness to the outside world. We need a unified award for spec-fic in the UK, that many fan groups contribute to, which is taken seriously by the SF profession, and the larger world of publishing and culture. British SF is fantastic and creative, and we deserve an award that truly reflects that.

Personally I’d think any attempt to try this will have the same outcome as the various attempts to unify the British Trotskyite left; ending up with one more award at the end of it. But more to the point, what’s the use? Why do “we” need to have one award, when the existing awards do very well indeed?

Take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the BSFA and the Clarke awards: both have an excellent track record for recognising the best works published in the UK. Or at least they both agree with my own tastes.

If Damien is correct in arguing that these two awards are not prestigious or well known enough outside of science fiction fandom, what needs doing is to promote them better, if that’s our goal, rather than starting a wholly new award which will face the same struggle anyway. The Clarke award certainly, as Damien acknowledges, already has a certain standing outside of fan circles, which could be build upon. The BSFA award meanwhile already is the voice of fandom, not the whole of fandom certainly, that’s impossible these days, but as open as any award can be without becoming a meaningless online poll. Both awards do the job they need to do most of all, in that they do most years produce winners that can be taken seriously. Therefore we don’t need a new award, they just need to be better at getting the outside world to recognise them.

If that’s what we want to do.