Just The Caffeine Talking

Excellent Analog Review

Don Sakers has a review of The Godel Operation posted in the current issue of Analog. You can see it online here (but only until the next issue comes out). 

Because of that time limit, I'm going to quote it, especially since the review really is quite favorable.

In science fiction we deal with weirdness budgets all the time, especially in stories set in the far future and dealing with technology advanced enough to be, in Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase, “indistinguishable from magic.”

Any advanced far future must include elements that today’s readers find unfamiliar, if not downright bizarre. We know that time brings change. Any world of future millennia in which everything is just like today just isn’t convincing.

At the same time, a future world with too much change borders on the incomprehensible. . . . Indeed, some cross right over the border. If we’re going to be honest, a realistic depiction of a society thousands of years in the future would be foreign in language, culture, technology, and a thousand other variables. It would be at least as hard for a present-day reader to apprehend as are Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Authors of far future SF must tread a thin line: Exceed the weirdness budget and lose readers, or use too little weirdness and bore them.

In The Godel Operation James L. Cambias hits the balance just right.

This was an issue I really worried about while writing Godel Operation. I wanted to have relatable characters at least similar to modern humans, but I wanted to convey the fantastic reality of the Billion Worlds. Glad to hear I managed to thread that needle.

Pulp Covers!

Here's an article on LitHub about pulp-style covers for some very not-pulp novels. I even remember seeing some of these back in the 1970s. Some are silly, but a few are hilariously wrong.

Still, I kind of wish publishers still did covers like these. I think my own novels could really benefit.

A Darkling Sea: scantily clad Alicia menaced by giant lobster, beefy Rob Freeman wrestling it, knife in hand. Tagline: "An Ocean of Danger — and Passion!"

Corsair: bare-chested beefy David Schwartz, bikini-clad Elizabeth Santiago trading pistol shots with bad guys as a rocket lifts off in the background. Tagline: "A Fortune From Space — Big Enough to Kill For!"

Arkad's World: Arkad, sans shirt, punches tentacled pirates while Baichi in just the shreds of her torn cloak fights off a clawed flying monster. Tagline: "Across a World of Danger Lies the Ultimate Treasure!"

The Initiate: Pretty much the cover and tagline of the actual book, really. Maybe replace creepy horror-novel Isabella with Taika Feng in a femme-fatale pose.

The Godel Operation: Shirtless Zee and Adya in torn skintight spacesuit battling a big boxy robot with eye-beams. Tagline: "Save the Fabric of Existence Itself!"

My Canon

In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some odd borderline cases, mostly the result of rights ownership issues, but right now pretty much all live-action films about Marvel characters can be assumed to take place in the same world.

A related concept is "canonicity" — which stories "really happened" in the fictional universe versus which ones are either "imaginary stories" (a term pioneered by DC Comics in the Silver Age) or alternate timelines. The Star Trek universe illustrates this: for a long time the rule was that the live-action TV shows and movies were "real" and thus canon while animated shows, comic books, tie-in novels, and games were not.

There was some permeability, as when the depiction of Klingon society and culture invented by John M. Ford for his novel The Final Reflection and the FASA Star Trek roleplaying game were adopted wholesale by the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thereby became canonical. The 2009 film snarled everything up by introducing a canonical timeline split induced by time travel, so that it's no longer clear which universe is which.

All that throat-clearing accomplished, now I have to grapple with the fact that I seem to be creating a couple of Universes of my own.

Most of my novels and short fiction have been stand-alone works. The world of my first short story "A Diagram of Rapture" has nothing to do with my second story "The Alien Abduction," or my first novel A Darkling Sea. And none of them are connected with The Initiate or "Object Three" or Arkad's World.

However, because I was writing "Abduction" and Darkling Sea around the same time, some concepts and jargon did seep into both. Those two stories can be considered to share the same Universe. Its defining features are:

• Very near-future interstellar travel (basically some smart people discover a convenient way to go faster than light next week, and this sparks a boom in space exploration),
• Star travel primarily a scientific endeavor, under the auspices of the UN Interstellar Cooperation Agency (UNICA),
• Multiple intelligent species, but
• Few technological civilizations.

I may return to this Universe again, especially if I want to do another first-contact story. There are some complications about publishing, but nothing insuperable. Possible names for this setting are "the Darklingverse" or "the UNICA/UNIDA universe." At present it includes only the novel and the short story already mentioned.

My second, and more extensive Universe is of course the Billion Worlds. So far it encompasses one published novel, one published short story, a novel in progress and two forthcoming short stories. In addition, some concepts and ideas from some of my earlier works show up again in the Billion Worlds, so I'm inclined to retroactively put those stories into the same history.

So, the official list of Canonical Billion Worlds Universe fiction, straight from the creator, is:

"Balancing Accounts" (2008) — the dawn of autonomous sarcastic artificial intelligence;

"Periapsis" (2014) — first mention of Deimos as an important power center;

Corsair (2015) — the dawn of private space development and colonization;

"Contractual Obligation" (2014) — collective AI runs a military squad, Deimos shows its ruthless side;

"Calando" (2020) — specifically mentions the Billion Worlds, side reference shows up in Godel Operation;

The Godel Operation (2021) — primary introduction of the Billion Worlds;

"Out of the Dark" (forthcoming) — Billion Worlds short story, references Juren habitat;

"The Paoshi Puzzle" (forthcoming) — involves Adya and Pelagia from Godel Operation;

The Scarab Mission (in progress) — takes place a few years before Godel Operation and involves one character from that book.

By including Corsair I can even create a thrilling canon/non-canon debate about its short story progenitor "The Barbary Shore" of 2007. Let the flamewars begin!

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!

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.

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.