Just The Caffeine Talking

Retro-Review: Treasure Planet

I recently watched the 2002 Disney animated movie Treasure Planet. I am told by my children that we rented it multiple times when they were younger, but I am sure I never actually watched the whole thing. Perhaps I was in the room while they watched it, but my attention was elsewhere.

My judgement is that Treasure Planet is an ambitious failure. It has nifty graphics, an interesting blend of cel and computer animation, nonstop action, some decent character moments, some hammy supporting voice actors, and a story which doesn't stray too far from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic original.

So why do I call it a failure? Three main reasons.

First, it felt rushed. It weighs in at 95 minutes, which is acceptable for an animated feature. But throughout the movie the interval between setup and payoff was too short. At the beginning, the aged pirate Billy Bones arrives at the Admiral Benbow inn, just as he does in the book. Stevenson's novel gives him a couple of chapters there before he dies, but in Treasure Planet poor Billy (voiced by no less than Patrick McGoohan!) doesn't even make it inside the inn before uttering a cryptic warning, handing young Jim Hawkins the treasure map, and dying.

A couple of scenes later, when Jim boards the ship RLS Venture (cute, Disney) he no sooner meets Long John Silver than he immediately suspects him of being the sinister cyborg of Billy Bones's cryptic warning. Again, in the book Stevenson took time to let his (and our) suspicions develop. 

Given its full feature length, where does the time saved by all this rushing go? To my second reason.

Second, it had too many pointless action sequences. Look, I'm no prude about pointless action. My complaint about the movie Battleship was that it wasn't stupid enough. But Treasure Planet had too many obvious "put that in so we can use it in the video game adaptation" chases with Jim riding his space sailboard through random obstacles. There's a scene with an exploding star collapsing into a black hole which comes out of nowhere, gets resolved by technobabble and handwaving, and serves no purpose in the plot whatsoever. But I'm sure there was a level for it in the game.

Finally, the scriptwriters wasted time and plot space on some stupid character motivation bullshit. Young Jim has (wait for it) an ABSENT FATHER and so has (yep) ABANDONMENT ISSUES and all the boilerplate "character arc" tomfoolery of every other film for young people cranked out by Hollywood. Stevenson managed to convey all the same information without resorting to maudlin flashbacks or having Mrs. Hawkins outright infodumping to another character. In the novel he just assumes the readers are clever enough to notice that Jim's father does not appear in the book, and clever enough to figure out that's why he has conflicting bonds with several different paternal characters in the story (Captain Smollett, Dr. Livesey, and of course Silver himself). Not every character motivation has to be displayed in giant illuminated letters.

Oh, and some idiot had the brilliant idea of including a couple of pseudo-alt-rock pop songs in the film, thereby locking it solidly into the decade in which it was made — a sure way to avoid timeless icon status.

My letter grade for Treasure Planet is a B minus. Adequate but nothing more, which is a shame because it could have been considerably better.  

 

 

 

 

I Will Sign Your Book Wherever You Are

There haven't been any bookstore signing events for The Godel Operation, and I haven't been able to attend any conventions in person. But one of my friends had a brilliant suggestion: signed bookplates! 

I ordered a batch: they're self-sticking bookplates, about the size of a business card, with original artwork (above) by Emily Cambias, showing the logo of the spaceship Pelagia from the novel. It is a proven fact that copies of the book with Pelagia's logo never get destroyed by angry whale cyborg space mercenaries.

If you want a signed bookplate, just email me at billionworldspromo@gmail.com, and I'll get one in the mail as soon as possible. You can have more than one if you want, although my supply is finite. I'll also throw in some bookmarks from previous books and anthologies, depending on what I have.

So anyone in the world can now get their copy of The Godel Operation signed, and I don't have to get out of my chair.

Baen Free Radio Interview

The Baen Free Radio Hour sounds like it should be broadcast from hidden antennas deep in occupied territory, keeping the flame of freedom alive. Actually, it's a podcast. They've got an interview with me up now, about — no surprise — The Godel Operation.

You can listen to it or watch the video version here. Note that the video player doesn't seem to like the Safari browser.

 

Big Idea Guest Post

I've got a long guest post up at John Scalzi's 'blog Whatever, part of his ongoing "Big Idea" series for writers to talk about their work. For this post I waded deep into the history of how I came up with the Billion Worlds setting and my future plans for more stories in that future.

It did make me wonder something: various libraries around the country have collections of "papers" from various authors. H.P. Lovecraft's letters and unpublished drafts are at the John Hay Library at Brown University, for example. 

But I have no "papers," at least not as such. I have a hard drive stuffed with material — but memory storage decays, formats and hardware become obsolete. Will there be any "papers" of 21st-century writers for libraries to keep? And if libraries do maintain electronic archives of unpublished material by authors, how secure will they be? What's to prevent some busybody from going into the John Scalzi Collection at the University of Chicago Library in 2121, in order to remove (or insert) passages offensive to that era's sensibilities? With a box full of crumbling old typescripts one can at least authenticate the age of a document, and whether it was made on the right typewriter with the right kind of ink. But electronic documents have no such protection. Metadata can be tinkered with.

It will be ironic if future centuries have more concrete information about pre-2000 authors than they do about their nearer contemporaries.

Godel Operation: The Page 69 Test

The 'blog The Page 69 Test asks writers to judge their own works on the basis of a single page. Marshal Zeringue, of the Campaign For the American Reader, describes it thus: 

"This 'test' grows out of an observation attributed to Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), who recommended that book browsers turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If they like that page, buy and read the book."

Mr. Zeringue asked me to apply that test to my new book The Godel Operation, and you can see my response here.

How valid is McLuhan's idea in the first place? Can any single page of a book really give you a sense of what it's like? I suspect most authors — and pretty much all publishers — put the most emphasis on the first page. Start with a boffo opening line, grab 'em and don't let go. If you don't do that, you risk the reader putting down the book and forgetting about it. Barnes & Noble booksellers used to sell a tote bag covered with the opening lines of various famous novels, and it's always impressive how many of them people recognize.

But, of course, if the author's really putting a lot of work into a dynamite opening, there's no way to sustain that forever. At some point you're going to have to slow down and take a break. Slip in some exposition. Vary the pace and tone a little. If we assume 300-400 words per page, then Page 69 comes at about the 20-30,000 word mark. That's far enough in for the author to set the stage, introduce the characters, show the "inciting incident" which kicks off the plot, and show the initial responses and consequences. The characters and the reader are getting a handle on the situation, which means it's about the right time for a new complication.

So I guess McLuhan's test isn't totally crazy. Page 69 will show you a more representative slice of the book than the eager-to-please Page 1. Try the experiment yourself.

Godel Operation Interview by Paul Semel

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been doing a lot of interviews and soliciting plenty of reviews for the release week of The Godel Operation. This is to make sure that people who might like the book hear about it — and I think a lot of people will like the book. All this activity also has the purpose (as I mentioned) of raising the book's visibility to various search and sales algorithms.

I did an interview with omni-media reviewer Paul Semel, which is now up on his Web site. Read it here.

Watch this space for more news.

Launch!

The Godel Operation is officially published today.

Which is kind of a weird thing to say. I've had a box of copies sitting in my living room for nearly a month. You've been able to pre-order it on Amazon since last Fall. You've been able to download eARCs from the Baen Web site for months. It's a safe bet that at least some bookstores have had it on the shelves for a week or more.

The concept of a set, predictable publication date is a hold-over from the days when publishers were, at heart, printers. They'd get a book set in type, and set a schedule for when those plates would go into the presses and that book would be printed. Once enough copies were ready, they'd send it out to the booksellers. (In many cases the bookstore was just the street-side room of the print shop.) And that was the publication date.

Even after publishing and printing split into separate industries, the concept of a set date remained useful because that gave one a benchmark for advertising and sales. Get some bound galley proofs to send out to reviewers in advance, so they can have their book reviews ready by that date. Buy ad space for that week in magazines and trade journals. Try to book the author on a talk show (or plant a scandalous story in Confidential to get some free publicity).

But now? In the age of ebooks, The Godel Operation has been "published" ever since the editor and I signed off on the final print file revision. That's the basis for the PDF and Kindle versions, it's the file which goes to the printer to be put on paper when time permits, and it's the version which will be used for any print-on-demand versions. None of which has much to do with the official publication date.

What's especially odd is that as the physical significance of the publication date has vanished, the marketing importance has grown. Remember back when Amazon was new and growing, and business gurus were talking about "the long tail"? The idea was that you could sell a few copies of your book a week on Amazon forever, without having to worry about bookstores maximizing the value per inch of shelf space. We wouldn't have to worry about making a big splash with the launch of every product because the niche customers would find it. Remember?

We didn't reckon with the problem of finding your niche product in the vast tsunami of other items competing for the customer's attention. Which led to Amazon and others developing algorithms to publicize specific products. Which means we now have to game the mechanics of the Almighty Algorithm.

All of which means that marketing is now highly concentrated, trying to get a sales spike at the book's launch good enough to win the Algorithm's attention. That's why I've been guest-blogging and doing interviews like a madman for the past couple of weeks, so that for the first half of May I'll be able to get as much attention as possible. And by attention, I mean clicks on YouTube videos and 'blogs, to push myself up the search engine rankings, and orders at bookstores and Amazon, to work the Algorithm.

So: if you want a copy of The Godel Operation, and want to help me: buy it. Ask your local bookstore — especially if it's a big chain store like Barnes & Noble — to order a copy for you, because that will probably spur them to get a couple more. Order it (in whatever format) from Amazon, and put up a review on their site. And do it all in the next week or two. I get paid the same amount per copy no matter what. But the more you can make the big boys pay attention to me, the better.

There aren't any bookstore signing events this year, but one of my old highschool classmates had the brilliant idea of asking if I could send out signed bookplates. I can and I will. As soon as I can get that set up I'll announce it, and anybody who wants my scrawl in their book can have it. Watch this space for more information.

 

Godel Operation Minus One

Eight . . . seven . . . six . . . 

The promotional juggernaut for The Godel Operation rolls on with one day left before the official release date for the book. If you like you can read Marshal Zeringue's "Q & A" interview with me about it on the Campaign for the American Reader Web site. Read the interview here.

. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . 

Godel Operation Minus Two

Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here.

Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult. I wrote The Godel Operation with fairly vivid mental pictures of the characters, and consequently I had to do a fair amount of research to find actors who looked like my own imaginings. 

I actually think The Godel Operation would make a splendid film. It's full of exciting action and entertaining plot reversals. The future setting of the Billion Worlds might take a fair amount of computer animation to put on screen, but in a time when even historical dramas have green screens behind the actors to dub in renderings of past landscapes without power lines and jet contrails, that should hardly be an obstacle.

If you're interested, let's do lunch.

 

Worldbuilding Workshop: After-Action Report

On April 17 I ran a three-hour workshop on science fiction worldbuilding for the Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop. It was my first time teaching a class of any kind, so I think I learned as much as I hope my students did.

The students were great. All ten of them were engaged, intelligent, and seemed to have no trouble keeping up. They all participated, asked useful questions, and grasped the concepts quickly. Better still, they appeared to be having fun.

The online format worked well enough, but doing class discussion via Zoom did slow everything down considerably. Questions take longer, polling the class takes longer, and typing on the online "whiteboard" screen is much less satisfying than actually writing on a board in front of a group of people. I really want to do this in person when I do the class again.

The three-hour time slot seems about right. Longer would just wear everyone out. If I can streamline the presentation I can fit more material into three hours and keep the class engaged.

My outline was a little over-complicated. I began with what I had planned to be a brief lecture on why and how to do worldbuilding, but it ran a little long. After that we began a collaborative exercise, in which I walked the class through creating an alien world. Their choices drove what kind of a world we built, and I tried to show how story choices set requirements for the planet's physical parameters. I think I could trim down the introductory lecture and introduce more of the physical science aspects as they come up in discussion.

One thing which I will change is the option of designing the world from the bottom up (Hal Clement style) versus top-down. That choice just added a time-consuming step. In future workshops I think I'll simply start with the story concept and show how that informs all the worldbuilding decisions.

Another feature I would love to add would be to collaborate with an artist. This would be best for a live workshop, where my colleague could be sketching away on an easel or whiteboard while the class proceeds. People — even writers — are visual animals, and seeing what we're imagining would be a huge benefit. I need to find someone who can draw aliens and otherworldly environments quickly, and is willing to do it for a three-hour stretch. (Any volunteers? Contact me privately if you're in western Massachusetts and are willing to do it. You will get paid.)

Overall I was very happy with the turnout — a full class of ten people, all excellent participants. If there's enough demand I'd be happy to do this twice a year or even quarterly. As soon as I can set up another session I'll announce it here on my 'blog, and of course on the PVWW Web page.