Just The Caffeine Talking

Event Horizon Interview on YouTube

I have been a fan of John Michael Godier's "Event Horizon" channel on YouTube for more than a year now, so I was particularly pleased when Mr. Godier and his team decided to interview me about my new book The Godel Operation. The interview itself was great fun. Our conversation rambled widely, discussing the book, artificial intelligence, apocalypses, the Fermi Paradox, and some topics I'm probably forgetting.

While it's technically a "video" because it's on YouTube, the graphics are mostly just for show. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

Political-Literary Observation

In the news one constantly hears journalists and government officials referring to "bad actors" when talking about matters of crime and national security. I think that movie reviewers and theater critics are the ones to guard us against bad actors. Soldiers, spies, and policemen should confine themselves to stopping wrongdoers instead.

How's It Doing?

 

The Godel Operation has been out for three weeks now. I've done interviews and promotion — there's an interview on the "Event Horizon" YouTube channel due to drop Friday the 27th. I'm sending out signed bookplates in lieu of autographings. Reviews have been good: Publishers' Weekly liked it, and Paul DiFilippo wrote a glowing piece for Locus. Responses on GoodReads and Amazon customer reviews are also very complimentary.

Naturally, this prompts people to ask how the book is selling. I can track that a little — the Amazon ranking is currently #1430 in "Hard SF," #4645 in "Space Operas," and #6272 in "Science Fiction Adventures." That's pretty good. Store sales, however, are a mystery.

Publishing in 2021 is an odd mix of current cutting-edge tech and practices dating back to the age of Dickens. I write on a laptop, and submit my manuscript in electronic form via email. The book doesn't actually exist in physical form until it's sent to the printer. It's all just-in-time and postindustrial.

But sales information and royalty payments hearken back to the era of stagecoaches and post horns. I won't see my first official sales reports until six months after publication. 

So for now we are enveloped in fog. I hope a lot of people find this book. I think they'll like it. Pass the word.

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 [email protected], 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.