Bringing back the midlist

books and books review, science fiction
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Last week I wrote about the new Gollancz ebooks gateway which will launch “this autumn”. A week later and we’re slowly getting to see which authors will have books on this service, as they start to mention it on their blogs.

One of the authors I’m most excited about, who most unfairly has been out of prints for years, is Pat Cadigan:

It’s been busy around here but, yes, in case you haven’t heard me turning handsprings from wherever you are, Orion/Gollancz is bringing all of my work back into print. Synners is going to be in the SF Masterworks series and Mindplayers, Fools, and Tea From An Empty Cup will be published in a single omnibus volume. My collections Patterns and Dirty Work will be ebooks.

And all will be part of Orion’s SF Gateway program.

also back in print, Nicola Griffith’s first two science fiction novels:

Ammonite appeared in early 1993 (from Ballantine/Del Rey in the US and HarperCollins/Grafton in the UK). It won some awards. Slow River followed two years later (ditto). And ditto. But the books still went out of print in the UK. (That’s the UK publishing reality. It’s different in the US. Here both books here have been through a zillion printings and still sell steadily, if not spectacularly, in print and digital editions.)

So it’s wonderful to be able to announce that I’ll finally be a Gollancz author–back where I started all those years ago. Repeat Yodel of Triumph, add Nod of Satisfaction, and follow, as always, with beer.

I was already interested in seeing what Gollancz was up to ebookwise, but these two announcements make it much more likely that’ll will buy books through them. Much will still depend on price, easy of buying and the absence of intrusive DRM on the books. The price needs to be roughly in the range of what I would spend on secondhand paperbacks or it wouldn’t be worthwhile to me, though I am willing to pay a bit more for the convenience of buying online, certainly for authors like Nicola Griffith and Pat Cadigan.

As Pat Cadigan noted in her post, twenty-thirty years ago it was normal for most of science fiction’s back cataloque to be in print and easily available. In the last decades this backlist has been steadily eroded as it no longer made commercial sense to keep most authors in print. Epublishing changes this equation: once an ebook is created, selling more of them doesn’t cost more unlike with physical books, where new print runs are usually too expensive for moderately profitable books. The Gollancz intiative helps to re-establish the backlist, another good reason to support it.

(Edited to erase an incredibly stupid brainfart; see comments.)

Life abides

Natural World, posts interesting only to me
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office plant in bloom

In a shocking development that has to be symbolic of something, the horribly ugly chosen because it’s hardy and can handle neglect office plant located next to my desk has actually flowered, which is the first time I’ve ever seen one of them do that. You don’t expect this from this sort of plant, which as well could’ve been plastic for all anybody cared, but there it is, spreading a lavender sort of scent reminiscent of the better sort of public conviences. Doesn’t do my headache any good.

Did remind me of a short story in one of thos Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction bricks, about a team of biologists specialising in finding thought to be extinct plant species and such in office gardens and such. Nothing else remains from that story, but that stuck with me.

From Wilders’ mouth to Breivik’s ears

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, wingnuts
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I’m with Ken MacLeod

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. It has now led to a massacre of the children of the one of the most moderate labour movements in the world.

Two things have to come out of this: first, the mainstream left and labour movements have to take seriously security and self-defence; second, the mainstream right must be made to pay a heavy political price for this atrocity.

In a Dutch context this means that we need to be honest about Geert Wilders and his responsibility for Breivik’s actions and what this means for our political system. Wilders isn’t the only one who has been banging the drum about the Muslim menace and Eurabia and treasonous leftwing multicultural elites, but he is the most influential mainstream European politician to have done so. Wilders is unique in Europe because he has managed to get his programme into the mainstream of Dutch politics, with the current minority Christian Democrat/neoliberal government being dependent on his support to survive, hence not inclined to oppose him, if not quite actively supportive of his politics. Which in turn means that he has had the opportunity to make true on some of his rhetoric, the cuts in arts funding (“leftwing hobbies”) being one example.

Wilders has also been quite succesful in exporting his brand of Islamophobia, through e.g. the Fitna movie, the controversy about the initial refusal to let him speak in the UK and not unimportantly, his ties with fellow extremists in Europe (EDL) and elsewhere (Pam Geller). He’s a central pivot in the conveyor belt of rightwing extremism. Ideas that originate in the fringes of the rightwing, in the sordi little blogs and forums, shitty thinktanks and neonazi and fascistoid fringe groups are picked up by him and made respectable, because he is a serious, respectable mainstream politician, even if we don’t agree with them. Meanwhile his rhetoric, his talk about being in a “hot war with Islam” and how leftwing/social democratic parties have betrayed their countries in turn, fires up this fringe even more, justification for even more extreme opinions and ultimately, as in Norway this weekend, action.

But our mainstream politicians and commentators, those who thought to fight fire with fire and wanted to address the very real concerns of the white working classes/real Dutch people about the excesses of the Islam in the name of more votes, those who wanted to declare multiculturism dead and buried, a failed experiment, those who agreed that art is a leftwing hobby and the Dutch weather institute dangerously partisan because it takes climate change seriously, those politicians and commentators also have the blood of Oslo and Utøya on their hands. They are not completely innocent either of having created a political climate in which such atrocities were made possible.