Tor.com Story Podcast January 2010

Gonna try grouping these by the month and see how that plays.

Bugs in the Arroyo by Steven Gould

Episode 004 contains Steven Gould’s Bugs in the Arroyo, narrated (I think) by the author. According to Gould’s comment on Tor.com, this is an excerpt from a new novel.

The southwest has been overrun by bugs, little machines that feed on metal to create copies of themselves. They can’t stand water, which is why they haven’t spread past the southwest. They are swarming things, and if they get excited they’ll go after the iron in a person’s blood. The scene is a girl stuck on a rock in the desert surrounded by bugs. Makes me think of the scene in Tremors, except with these bugs. A bunch of people a distance away have to figure out how to save her. Pretty cool story, and I’ll look for the novel when it comes out.

The Starship Mechanic by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake

Episode 005 has two stories by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake. The two authors sat down together to write these stories in public; each started a story and then they switched after a time to finish the other’s. Here they read their stories. One note to the two of them on reading their work: drink less caffeine! Holy cripes but you guys read fast. My experience is that audio fiction needs to be read at a fairly slow pace to keep up.

The Starship Mechanic is the first story. Pretty good story of Penauch, the first alien on earth, who keeps returning to Borderlands Books to hang out with the narrator. Penauch has the ability to fix just about anything, except himself as it turns out. I liked this.

Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake

Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder is the second story from episode 005. Protagonist is still messed up from the death of his parents on the same day a decade earlier. His therapist robot recommends Wild Blue Yonder, some sort of hallucinogenic drug. This story was very much not my thing. Hell, pretty much any story about therapy won’t be my thing.

The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles by Kij Johnson

Episode 006 is part of The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles, a story from Kij Johnson about a cat. A semi-homeless cat. Johnson’s work can be hit or miss for me. I liked 26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss, but thought The Fox Woman was kind of slow and fairly pointless. And so I felt about this story too, until going back to the web site to prepare this post. I hadn’t realized the podcast only has half the story. So I wouldn’t listen to this podcast until Tor.com posts a second half. If they do.

Catch ’Em in the Act by Terry Bisson

Episode 007 has Terry Bisson reading his story Catch ’Em in the Act. Loved this story, and loved the narration. The two previous Bisson stories I’ve read had a very similar feel. Understated plots with a twist. Lou buys a CrimeStoppers video camera on eBay, and finds that when he films people they automatically commit crimes for the camera. Lou uses these filmed scenes for blackmail to build up a group of people around him, because at heart Lou is a lonely guy. Not laugh out loud funny, but still full of scenes that caused me to snicker to myself.

Categories: Short Fiction Reviews.

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Four Escape Pod podcasts

Another set of podcasts, this time from Escape Pod, which podcasts science fiction stories. These are a little scattered in ordering. I grew dissatisfied with Google Listen’s (the default Android podcast catcher) features and particularly it’s user interface and switched to BeyondPod. BeyondPod, though the UI wasn’t exactly intuitive, worked much better once I got used to it. Super-easy, just not explained too well in the app. Anyway, BeyondPod had the ability to go back further than Listen did, so after listening to Infestation, the next bunch of podcasts were from months earlier.

Infestation by Garth Nix

Episode 222 contains Infestation by Garth Nix from the John Joseph Adams edited By Blood We Live, narrated by Geoff Michelli. The Adams anthology is vampire themed, and this story seems like what I would imagine a pretty typical vampire story to be. What I would imagine is a key phrase here, as I don’t really read much vampire fiction, the odd bribe to read Stephenie Meyer excepted. A bunch of semi-amateur vampire hunters go into a closed off zone where a nest of them have been discovered. For some reason vampire hunters get first dibs at them before the government levels the place with explosives. I don’t know why, but it does lead to certain plot twists that could not have happened without that caveat. One of the hunters is an old pro, the rest are relatives of vampire victims claiming blood. They fight. Mostly interesting for the interplay between the various hunter characters, but still about average overall. Love Michelli’s narration though. He has a very fluid voice that I like but that I haven’t heard in much audio fiction.

Will You Be an Astronaut? by Greg van Eekhout

Jumped back to Episode 202, which had Greg van Eekhout’s Will You Be an Astronaut?, narrated by Christiana Ellis. I really didn’t like the narration here, but I don’t think it’s Ms. Ellis’ fault. The story is written as a pseudo child’s story, so Ms. Ellis reads it as if reading it to a class of small children, with the kinds of inflection that parents and teachers and librarians use with children. Maybe I’d make a bad parent because of it, but I never use that tone of voice or inflection with kids. I hated being talked to that way, and I hate talking to anyone that way. But that’s the way people do things with kids, so I can’t really blame Ms. Ellis.

The story itself is okay. As I noted, it’s written as a pseudo-children’s book, telling the story of an astronaut in the future. In that future, Latin America has taken the lead in space exploration after the failed Apollo moon mission (it made it there, but didn’t make it back). But astronauts aren’t so much explorers as they are young soldiers, because aliens are attacking Earth, and astronauts have to shoot them down. The hook isn’t so much the science fiction as the juvenile fiction style. One thing that comes through with that form is just how indoctrinating it is.

The Legend of St. Ignatz by Samantha Henderson

Episode 203 was The Legend of St. Ignatz by Samantha Henderson, read by Ray Sizemore. A less than honorable priest is stationed on an alien planet to minister to extraterrestrials that look like insects and also to plunder their resources, both for himself and for the church. Only things go terribly wrong. Bringing the Gospel to a foreign culture that doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t share your background is ripe for issues. A very solid story.

The Fifth Zhi by Mercurio D. Rivera

Episode 204’s story comes from Mercurio D. Rivera, The Fifth Zhi read by Steve Eley. A clone (#5 of hundreds of Zhi’s) is part of a wave of humans attacking a giant stalk from space that’s landed on Earth and causing nightmares for humans. No one knows what it’s purpose is, but it puts up a force field to protect itself against the humans. The fifth Zhi is the only one to make it through; he carries a poison designed to kill the stalk if he can make it through. But despite the science fiction element, this is really a father-son story in an age of clones, not so much an alien story. Only the son is one of all of many nearly identical clones, bred for a singular purpose. That messes with familial bonds. I like this one, because it started off letting the reader think it was about one thing, but revealed itself to be something else by the end.


I’m going to need to figure out how to title these podcast roundup reviews, since they are going to start getting duplicative. But I’ll figure that out next time.

Categories: Short Fiction Reviews.

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Two Trains Running / Lucius Shepard

Cover of Two Trains Running (John Picacio)
Amazon Logo
Powells Logo

I’ve generally liked the Lucius Shepard stories I’ve read in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best collections. Some of them I’ve really liked. So when I saw a Shepard book in the piles at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library semi-annual book sale, I grabbed it.

Technically, this is a literary collection. The book starts with a non-fiction piece expanded from a story Shepard wrote for Spin magazine about hobos. Yup, actual train riding hobos. I didn’t realize people still did this, but they do. There was a kerfuffle about a hobo gang that was murdering hundreds of people, and Spin asked Shepard to investigate. I’m surprised I missed this, because the primary purveyor of the hobo gang story was a Spokane Washington detective, and I lived in the area at the time the story came out (1998), but I missed it.

For some time, Shepard rode the rails seeking to talk to members of the Freight Train Riders of America (F.T.R.A.), the gang involved in the murderous rampage. Only it turns out, of course, that the gang is mostly homeless drunks. While they do get violent sometimes, they aren’t exactly the scourge they’d been portrayed as on Americas Most Wanted and other shows.

Shepard gets philosophical about the train tramp life. Hard and short-lived in many cases, but he asserts it has many charms:

Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago.

After Shepard’s non-fiction piece, the book includes two short stories. The first, Over Yonder fits in very well with my impressions of Shepard’s Year’s Best stories. A hobo named Billy Long Gone (because his real name is just too prissy to tell others) catches a train out of Oregon that takes him to a magical place called Yonder. Magical, but not wonderful. Downright stupifying, in fact. Residents lose all their cares, which is not a good thing. Billy Long Gone is one of the few who retains any hopes at all, and his is to cross a distant mountain range, where rumor has it monsters abound and a fabled city exists. Very enjoyable story, though I didn’t understand the ending much at all.

The second short story was of a non-fantastic variety. Jailbait tells a story of a romance in the railyards between Madcat and Grace. Grace is new to the hobo life. She’s a gutter punk, runaway from home and sees riding the rails as a romantic step up from life on the Ave (or Spokane’s equivalent). Madcat is a cynical type who couldn’t care less about Grace (or anything), but avails himself of Grace’s body which Grace uses in her own cynical way. Mutual symbiosis in the face of extreme violence. But it turns out really not to be as cynical as it could be.

Title: Two Trains Running
Author: Lucius Shepard
Cover creator: John Picacio
Imprint / publisher: Golden Gryphon Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 112 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1-930846-23-1

Categories: Book Reviews.

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Usurper of the Sun / Housuke Nojiri

Cover of Usurper of the Sun (Katsuya Terada)
Amazon Logo
Powells Logo

Usurper of the Sun is a solid, but unspectacular, novel of first contact. I’d say it’s good reading but won’t win any awards, but I’d be wrong. It won Japan’s Seiun Award, so maybe my perception is a bit off.

Aki Shiraishi is a high school student in the astronomy club when she points the club’s telescope toward Mercury and the sun. But instead of a normal, rapidly moving across the face of the sun Mercury, she sees what appears to be a tower three times the height of the planet stretching up from its surface. And thus begins her lifelong relationship with the Builders, an alien race that is proposed to be the creators of the nanotechnology based structures being created out of Mercury’s substance. The tower is actually a stream of material being fed to a thin ring around the sun designed to absorb massive amounts of solar radiation, but which also blocks sunlight from Earth.

The main strength of the book is its science grounding. This is hard science fiction, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke, if Arthur C. Clarke’s characters were Japanese and female. (Maybe Clarke did write such a book…) Space travel to Mercury takes months. Faster than light space travel is not possible. Aki takes years to become an expert in astronomy. Obviously, the presence of extra-terrestrial intelligence isn’t exactly heavily based in science. It doesn’t detract too much though.

Science fiction I read often has characters who can do no wrong. If a character messes up, they do something wrong but learn from it for the future. Usurper of the Sun has a couple of plot branches that just don’t pan out whatsoever. Or they succeed but are wholly irrelevant to everything that comes afterward. Just like real life. Some company comes out with breakthrough technology that no one cares about, stuff like that. There’s some of that going on here, and it makes everything seem all that much more realistic.

However, there’s a lot of drawbacks to the book. Like Arthur C. Clarke, Nojiri’s characters are stiff and wooden. The only one with any depth whatsoever is Aki, but even her character doesn’t have any hidden depths. Nojiri exposes all of her motivations in successive infodumps. In fact, the whole book could be characterized as one long speculative infodump with a little dialog thrown in. What’s more, some of the plot pieces are so clichéd I just had to groan. For instance, an Illuminati-like cabal of the world’s most powerful men meet to discuss the direction of the world’s policy… in a darkened room where no one can see anyone else for no discernible reason.

In addition, the pacing leaves a lot to be desired. The last 70 pages or so are great in moving the story along. The 80 pages leading up to that are snoozeville. The same thing with part 1. There’s an initial rush of discovery, and a speedy exploration of the ring that blocks the sun at the end. But the middle is filled with philosophical discourse that no one wants to hear at a cocktail party.

If this had been written 40 or 50 years ago when this style of science fiction writing was predominant, Nojiri’s work would be considered a classic. What we’ve come to expect from science fiction has changed quite a bit, so it feels quite dated. Not in technology, just in style. The technology described is still interesting, even a decade after its original publication as short stories in Japan.


A few other blogged reviews:

Title: Usurper of the Sun
Author: Housuke Nojiri (野尻 抱介)
Translator: John Wunderley
Cover creator: Katsuya Terada (artist) (寺田克也)
Imprint / publisher: Haikasoru
Format: Paperback
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4215-2771-0

Categories: Book Reviews.

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Miscellaneous thoughts on ebooks and Amazon/Macmillan

After posting the piece on agency selling the other day, I’ve watched the twittering and blogging on this run amok. I have some further thoughts (of course, cause I’m opinionated that way), but nothing really worth writing at length about. At least until all of them are added up. So here you go with a mostly unordered list of thoughts, opinions, etc about the whole mess.

  • Most authors seem to be coming down on the side of Macmillan on this. A lot of readers seem surprised in their comments that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Macmillan is asking for higher prices on their behalf for stuff. And Amazon has cut off money for them. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. Readers should not assume that an author’s interests are equal to their own interests.
  • Many readers (though I have no idea what the percentage is) seem to be siding with Amazon. A lot of authors seem surprised that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Amazon is selling items to them at lower prices. Macmillan is asking them to either pay more money or wait longer. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. The increased money they might get comes out of the readers wallets, even if a billion people along the supply chain take their cut.
  • Capitalism does not mean you sell at the cost of production plus a fair markup. I read an ostensible economist assert that readers who say they should get books at a price they are willing to pay is not capitalism. No, that’s exactly what capitalism is, if you add in that the seller has to agree to the price too. Cost of production has an impact on whether the producer agrees to the price, but even then it’s not determinative. If I spent $10 to make something but can only get $5, I may sell it at $5 just because it’s better than not selling it and getting $0.
  • Because of the latter, I tend to skip all the scribblings about how much it costs to produce an ebook. I’m not basing whether I will pay $X for a book based on whether someone else makes a profit. I’m basing it on the utility to me.

  • An ebook’s utility is very different than a regular book’s utility. I get the same story. I think, I’ve never compared any of the ebooks I’ve acquired with the paper copies. I get space saving and portability. But there’s a lot I don’t get: the ability to loan, sell or give away the book. I don’t get protection from book loss, computer problems being much more common than fires, floods. I don’t get the ability to signal like a paper book gives me. When you step into my apartment, you know I am a reader as well as whatever you can glean from my collection. There’s no equivalent with ebooks. I also don’t get to be a collector. I’m not as much a books as fetish object kind of guy as many, but I still like to have a few signed copies and I keep a few books around just for their artwork. What I’m willing to pay depends on what priorities I give to each of these utilities, not how much it cost someone else to make the damn thing.
  • I give a lot more importance to the change in retailing models than most others do. I don’t know a single retailer that has achieved dominance in a market when they are unable to set their own prices, unless they’ve done it through means that are unavailable to Amazon. Tobias Buckell countered with Apple is an agent in their iPhone app market, where they are dominant. But that’s because they are a true monopoly there at the moment. Amazon can’t do that with ebooks.
  • A lot of people, including myself, have been reading tea leaves inappropriately. So far, we have a couple of statements from Macmillan and a buried post from Amazon. Both of these entities have strong incentives to lie to us.
  • Amazon is a recognized place for books. Every other place plays second fiddle to them. I include Powells links in my reviews, but I’ve seen less than 5 clicks and no sales from them. People reading my backwater blog click through to Amazon on the order of one or two hundred every month, and I usually see one or two purchases from every month.
  • The user experience and blogging tools for Amazon put every other site to shame. For book information, really only LibraryThing even comes close. Only Amazon offers product previews for bloggers (if you don’t have Adblock, hover over an Amazon link on my site to see). Only Amazon offers detailed reporting. Only Amazon offers Site Stripe for bloggers. Only Amazon offers quality recommendations for users.
  • Authors and anti-Amazon people pushing alternative sites to link to should coalesce around one alternative. Places I’ve seen pushed include The Book Depository, bn.com, Indiebound, and Powells as well as a slew of local bookstores. The promotion is too spread out to get any of them critical mass to be a viable alternative for bloggers linking.
  • Why the hell hasn’t any of these sites or others offered extra incentives to sign up as affiliates right now? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to me.
  • A lot of author commentary comes across like celebrities who work all their lives to be famous and well recognized and then complain about how they don’t have any privacy. Authors work hard to get Amazon to sell lots of their books, and now complain that Amazon is so dominant.
  • Amazon is not a monopoly. They have no more than 43% of the book market. They are dominant.
  • To tea leaf this, I wonder if the solution will result in something along the lines of Macmillan’s pricing model but Amazon’s retailing model. Merchant model is kept so Amazon can price as they want generally. But they also agree to limitations on pricing items, particularly a time-based price lowering.

  • I’m not so sure that cheap ebooks will cannibalize physical copy sales early on. The price conscious already have the option of waiting and getting the books used or in paperback. The price conscious folks aren’t generally buying the expensive early editions.
  • The primary value to a reader from a publisher is in signalling. The publisher communicates to the reader that this book is worth reading because they’ve sunk money into it. I seriously doubt a self-publishing model will be generally workable even in a world of cheaper production for everyone. If nothing else, the publisher of quality work will command bigger prices for their time, and won’t work for less. So their books will cost more.
  • In an ebook world, I wonder if a stock exchange marketplace model would work or is where the agency model would end up. Purchasers won’t want to go to different destinations for each publisher for their books. They want to go to one place to purchase multiple books. The retailer and their web site acts much like a broker does for stocks. The retailer places orders for their customers on ebook exchanges, of which there really are only a handful. People can sell their used ebooks there too. And publishers can control the price by releasing copies into the market at the going rate. (i.e., the distribution right in copyright law becomes the right to release new copies into the exchange) Just musing…
  • Really only tangentially related to all of this but I’m gonna throw this out there too in this post. I don’t owe independent stores my money just because they are local or independent. I shop at stores that provide services that are of value to me. Either they have good prices, or good selection (broad or focused both are possibilities), or other amenities to make it worth my time, money and effort. I don’t owe an author, publisher, or retailer money or allegiance either.

I’m not really siding with Amazon in the whole matter, though I have taken somewhat of an anti-Macmillan tone. Basically in my mind, it’s all a business dispute and not really about morals or fairness so much as a negotiation about who gets what. Authors took risks by getting into the business, and there’s no guarantee that they succeed. There’s not even a promise that their work not be held hostage to outside interests. That’s just the way business works. On the other hand I think they should rail against Amazon for business reasons (even using the language of fairness). It would be dumb not to. It would be dumb to send traffic to Amazon when Amazon ain’t selling the authors’ product. Amazon has no right to continue to make money either, or to continue to be a dominant player. I’ll shed no tears for Amazon should they lose this battle. Nor does Macmillan have any hold on me either. There’s no right or wrong, just the market. Now I sound like a goddamn libertarian.

Categories: Opinion.

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