Okay so it seems that death of short story mags is still a hot topic. Warren Ellis pointed out the declining circulation numbers of all the SF mags (that you find every year in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best SF, they've been declining every year I've been buying it) and asked what could be done to save the SF short story magazines. So pretending as if Warren Ellis was actually pointing out something new, Cory Doctorow in turn suggested a lot of ideas that consisted of getting bloggers involved, podcasting stories, and trying to build up buzz over the net. Granted, it's done nicely for Cory's own sales, but personally I don't know. Everyone has their own quick fix idea, and most have been tried before with little success. For instace: the only thing I would've suggested would've been to include some media tie-in SF stories in each issue. Have new original fiction by industry mainstays alongside new Firefly stories by Whedon or new Battlestar Galactica tales by Ron Moore. It's media SF that gets most people into the SF section of the bookstore anyway, so why not use the same tactic to get asses in the seats when it comes to the magazines. The problem is that was exactly the approach they tried that with the relaunch of Amazing Stories, and that bombed like a daisy cutter. So I don't know. I don't think the shrinking science fiction magazine market can be fixed. You're talking about the perfect storm of three ill-boding trends: dwindling/stagnating SF readership in general (excluding 'paranormal romances', the only piece of the industry that's really growing.), the afore mentioned waning popularity of short stories themselves, and the restructuring of the magazine market. If you want to save the short fiction market, as Gardner pointed out, there's really only one thing you can do: subscribe.THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT BOXED SET WAR OF GIFTS by Orson Scott Card POSTSINGULAR by Rudy Rucker SELLING OUT by Justina Robson
THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT BOXED SET by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by John D. Rateliffe Houghton Mifflin You know, there seems to be more previously unpublished notes and drafts and manuscripts by J.R.R. Tolkien than pieces of the true cross. You'd think eventually they're going to run out at some point. Take the HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, which is billing itself as no less than the “original version of the most famous tales in world literature.” Released on September 27th in the US (each had been published individually in the UK.), but now they're being published in a boxed set along with the 2004 edition of The Hobbit to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Hobbit. (Yes, I know that was last year.) The title is a bit of a misnomer. 'History of The Hobbit' makes it sounds like some kind of documentary, but in fact what we actually have here is, collected for the first time, all of the surviving Hobbit manuscripts, (including some of the first sketches and illustrations) and scholarly commentary, from the earliest fragments written on the backs of student exams to what was circulated to C.S. Lewis and his friends at Oxford, to later post-publication revisions to make it more in-line with the evolving Lord of The Rings, to an even later failed attempt in the 60s to rewrite it again from scratch with a more mature tone. As the author goes on to say in the introduction, the intention with HISTORY was to “capture the first form in which the story flowed from [Tolkien's] pen, with all the hesitations over wording and constant recasting of sentences that entailed.” Consequently, here instead of a wizard named Gandalf, we first find a dwarf named Gandalf and a wizard named Bladorthin, and instead of Gollum trying to kill Bilbo, he “faithfully shows him the way out of the Goblin tunnels”, the enchanted stream/mirkwood scene is nowhere to be found, and the entire climax is somewhat markedly different. Of course originally this all should've been part of THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH, but we're told that Christopher Tolkien left The Hobbit out feeling that it was so different both in tone and order of publication that it was more a separate entity. Taum Santoski then tried his hand at it but died before he could complete it. Ultimately it fell into the hands of John Rateliffe, who had overseen many of the manuscripts in the collection at Marquette University. THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT is divided into five phases, based on the order that the drafts were completed. The first phase, the Pryftan Fragment and the Bladorthin Typescript, is the earliest surviving material, what Tolkien would read to his children around the fire in those now famous 'winter reading's. The second phase is when 'an intriguing opening developed into a nearly complete story'. The third phase is when it crystallized into a first draft. Finished sometime around 1932-1933, this was the version that C.S. Lewis first read, what he'd call a beautiful story with the dreadful ending. The issue gets a little confused around this point, since there are two different typescripts from around this time, no one being quite sure which came first or second. The Fourth Phase, and I haven't read it so this is just a guess, is the area that was covered in THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT. This is after THE HOBBIT was published and, hard at work on LotR, Tolkien found the original work needing some editing to make it consistent with the sequel. As mentioned above, Tolkien now found he had a problem in the scene between Gollum and Bilbo. Originally in THE HOBBIT Bilbo wins the ring from Gollum fair and square and Gollumn acquiesces, but if the ring has such a hold over the beings of middle-earth, why would he give it up so easily? As Tolkien explains in a letter to the publishers: “I have thought it desirable to give now the true story of the ending of the Riddle Game, in place of the somewhat 'altered' account of it that Bilbo gave his friends (and put in his diary.)” The fifth phase deals with Tolkien's attempt to rewrite The Hobbit to make the style more like Lord of the Rings, darker and more adult. Some of these changes flowed into the 1966 Ace edition, while most were left at the way side. The most fascinating thing to contemplate is how this is exactly in line with what Peter Jackson wanted to do with The Hobbit(or still may be now that he and New Line are no longer putting out mob contracts on one another), making it darker and more of a straight prequel to LotR rather than the stand-alone children's book it was. To some this is probably akin to seeing how the magician does his tricks, to have it laid out before you from beginning to end, how the Hobbit was written and what was going through Tolkien's head at the time. There 's much to be said for leaving some things a mystery. But to others, for a world as rich and vast as Middle-Earth, you can never know too much. THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT Boxed Set hit shelves on October 26th. WAR OF GIFTS: AN ENDER STORY by Orson Scott Card TOR Okay, so we know that Ender's Game is the best selling science fiction series in history. We know this because pretty much just about any Orson Scott Card book has this fact emblazened on the back, lest we forget this it for a moment. And of course we know that any time you have a series so successful, it's a given that the author is going to continue cranking out an endless stream of new additions to the story until he dies, and then they'll bring in someone else to crank out more in his name. (Which I'm NOT necessarily knocking. One of my favorite reads of the year was one of those.) That's the standard formula. But the interesting bit with Card is that whereas most authors will crank out sequels and prequels, Card has made more use of the 'equel', of parallel stories in the Ender universe that take place during the events of Ender's Game. The Ender's Shadow series is far more popular than the Beyond Ender's Game sequence of titles, even though Card mostly wrote Ender's Game to set up Speaker for the Dead and the books to follow. Maybe the sequels get too far away from the core of the original. I dunno, maybe people pick up an Ender book and they want to see Buggers and Battle School, not so much to see piggies and people mourning genocides past. In any event, fans expecting that won't be too disappointed with WAR OF GIFTS, a chapbook only 125 pages long, a small and intimate story, published just in time for the holidays. Set at the Battle School just after Ender joined Rat Army, it's largely told from the point of view Zeck Morgan, the pacifist son of a puritan preacher, who refuses to take up arms against anyone, be they student or Bugger. He discovers early on that he can memorize his fathers sermons word for word, and can recall any bible passage chapter and verse. This is a gift from God, his mother tells him, but he must keep it to himself, because some might think its a gift from Satan. By that she referring to his father, who beats Zeck regularly to "purify" him, but there are others who can't know about his talents either, namely the fleet. Because as we know, those who are gifted are taken away from their families to Battle School, to become fresh meat for the war machine in their search for a savior of the human race. So we're not too surprised when this happens and marines raid his father's church one sunday just after service, but Zeck vows that they will never make him into a killer. At the same time, we check in with the Wiggins family. Every year Ender's mother still lays out his stocking, unable to let go. Peter chides her for it, and already scheming about his future, he demands that his mother stop giving him gifts and just invest the money in mutual funds which he can withdraw when he's older. Back up in Battle School, all Ender wants is a letter from his family. But he knows that's not possible. A child taken by the fleet has everything taken from them; their family, their possessions, their culture, their nationality, and their religion. Ultimately, as Ender discovers, they take away your very humanity. You become nothing more than a weapon, a tool for them. Students are pitted against students, severing any possibility of friendship, forbidding even the slightest bit of kindness or empathy to one another. In fact, the very act of showing mercy or compassion becomes almost an act of outright rebellion. And this is exactly what two students discover, on the dutch holiday of Sinterklaas Day, when one student makes the mistake of giving a gift to another. Zeck, for his part, sees this and is enraged. He is forbidden from practicing his religion, so why should they get to celebrate this pagan false god called 'Santa Claus'? But whatever objection he has falls on deaf ears. Others soon follow suit, defying the school authority and giving gifts to each other, even if it's something as small as giving extra food to someone at lunch time, or a little tutoring, or a stupid poem to make them laugh. It's not just a perfect opportunity to piss of the schoolmasters and thumb their noses at The Man. It's an act to reclaim just a tiny fraction of the humanity that was stolen from them, an act to reassert their human right to actually treat other human beings as human beings, and not chess pieces to be manipulated or enemies in the Game to be beaten. Soon there's almost a revolutionary feeling in the air. Soon students are demanding their right to religion too, Muslim students are openly praying, and the school is forced to begin cracking down if it wants to maintain order. No doubt some are going to complain that War of Gifts has too much of a 'holiday special' vibe, where the obligatory lessons are learned about peace on earth and goodwill towards men and blah blah...and I guess they'd be right in part. But the Ender sequence has always been a bit the victim of oversimplification. Haters have always called it emotionally manipulative militaristic fascism in child's clothing, and the faithful have often thought of it as an anti-war tale more, with more honesty about the human condition than you'll find in straight literary fiction on the subject. In the end there's always just a little bit more going on that meets the eye, if you take the time to look. WAR OF GIFTS will be released October 30th. POSTSINGULAR by Rudy Rucker Tor/Scifi Rudy Rucker really is the Rodney Dangerfield of science fiction, he just has never gotten any respect. Actually, he gets less than no respect. He gets negative respect. He gets the square root of negative respect, imaginary respect. Always left out of the discussion whenever anyone talks about the cyberpunks. He's the unspoken founder. It might've been that he never really fit in. He was part of the Movement, but not of the Movement. He was a fellow traveller. He wrote on the same topics as they did, but he just didn't have the sensibility. They were grim and nihilistic. He was cheery and cartoonish. Strangely enough out of all the cyberpunks, with he being a mathematician and computer scientist, he was probably the only one who really knew what he was talking about when he wrote about cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and the new information age that was rising. But still, accolades were always few and readers were fewer. Gibson and Sterling became merchants of cool, treated more as prophets than as writers. But still, Rucker was treated as their goofy little brother, left home to play up in his room with his seashells and lifeboxes, while they were invited to All Tomorrow's Parties. But then in the last few years, we started seeing signals that Rucker might just be moving into the mainstream. Michel Gondry was announced to be adapting Master of Time and Space. Mathematicians in Love, his first crossover book, came out. Mad Professor showed that he was at the top of his game and had no intent of mellowing with age. It seemed to me that finally he was starting to find a new audience, and the recognition I knew he deserved. When I read his short 'Visions of the Metanovel,' and found out that it was just a taste of a even greater work, called Postsingular, I knew I had to be there. But I was torn. I've had more than one person comment that singularity fiction is dead. Stross had long since called the Vingean Singularity a genre killing trope, and Gibson just recently likened it to millennial madness. For those lucky enough to avoid hearing about the singularity, there's a lot of different interpretations (The Kurzweil view is that it'll be when AI surpasses the capacity of the human brain) but the crux of the idea is that certain areas of technological progress are accelerating until it will reach an infinite point sometime in the next couple decades, at which point nothing will make sense anymore. Ignore the fact that this has shades of the population boom predictions of the 70s, and that hyperbolic curves never are sustainable in reality. In the end, singularity fiction petered out because it never had anywhere to go. Because in the end we have two possibilities. 1) That the singularity is just a nerd rapture fantasy, a way of elevating Moore's Law into Moore's Revelation, and so there's no point in writing about it or 2) That the singularity will really happen but by definition it's going to be an unimaginable event, irreducible to human understanding and so there's no point in trying to write about it. Rucker countered that 'imagining the unimaginable' is what science fiction is supposed to do. Alright, point taken. But still, Rucker seemed to be following the pack with this trend, late to the party and inappropriately dressed, when he should be leading. Thankfully, I'm happy to report that Postsingular isn't even about the singularity. Rucker isn't imitating, and Rucker isn't following the pack. He's doing something there probably isn't even a name for. Transreal isn't going to do it this time. Rucker has called all novels computationally irreducible, and his are no exception. It's almost impossible to summarize or explain. The story begins in your typical Bill Joy/gray goo/Michael Crichton's Prey scenario. Intelligent nanobots, called nants, are launched into space, the brainchild of disturbed software tychoon Jeff Luty and even more disturbed U.S. president Dick Tibbs. (Gee, you think Rucker might still be pissed at the Bush administration? I wonder.) The goal is to disassemble Mars into a dyson cloud computer which will be used by the defense industry. It doesn't work out that well, and the nantsphere becomes self aware and sets about disassembling the earth, uploading everything it eats. It's only stopped at the last minute by Ond Lutter and his autistic son Chu. Ond then creates a self-defense nanointelligence he calls orphids, who will be earth's T-lymphocytes against any future nant outbreaks. But these orphids also have the side effect of creating a new network that links together all the minds of the world, creating both a complete surveillance society and telepathy..not to mention enabling communication and travel between a higher dimension, dubbed the hibrane. All the Rudy Rucker powerchords are here: infinity, artificial intelligence, other dimensions, silicon valley, Wolfram cellular automata, drugs, cuttlefish, seeking the gnarl, and I'll be damned if there wasn't even a Hieronymus Bosch shout-out. While the “gnarl” Rucker seeks is the zone between randomness and predictability, Rucker's fiction more often than not seems to display an almost predictable randomness. Like Rucker's beat generation heroes, Postsingular feels like it was written in a series of 48 hour drug-induced marathons and the inclusion of higher math and bleeding edge physics doesn't help. But the mere act of trying to make sense of it all just pulls you in further. Just to give you an idea, here he is describing someone suckling on 'the big pig' (an AI that allows you to decompress your mind and amplify your intelligence): "The Big Pig was absorbing, mirroring, and amplifying their exchange, layering on further sounds, clips and links from the simmering matrix of global info. Intoxicated by the heady mix, Jayjay soon forgot about Thuy per se---that is, she became an archetype, a thought form, a pattern in the cosmic stew. Knowing Jayjay's particular likes, the Big Pig began displaying a fundamental secret-of-life construction of reality: branes and strings, an underlying graph-rewriting system, a transfinite stack of 'turtles all the way down.' Although the ideas felt familiar from Jayjay's last trip into the Pig, he knew the details wouldn't stay with him for long. So what. Pig trips were all about relaxing and enjoying the show. Aha!" Rucker is the only one who can pull off hard science fiction and hippie stoner new age nonsense and make it all sound like they're different aspects of the same thing. The plot only reveals itself two thirds in, centering around Chu's knot, Thuy's metanovel, and a higher dimensional harp that could not only stop the coming second Nant apocalypse, but change the nature of reality itself. Seeing how Rucker already sold the sequel and it looks like we're looking at a trilogy, we're not too shocked that this ends on a cliffhanger. Nor are we disappointed. I'll need another book just to process the ideas he let loose in this one. I don't think Postsingular will take Rucker any closer into the mainstream, but it will continue to take him further than any other SF writer is going right now, or probably will any time soon. POSTSINGLAR was released October 2nd. SELLING OUT (Quantum Gravity book two) by Justina Robson Pyr It's nothing new to say that KEEPING IT REAL really knocked me on my ass. If for no other reason than the biggest enemy for me these days is boredom. Sooner or later, everything starts sounding the same. Familiarity breeds contempt, and formula breeds stagnation, and genres I always loved like hard SF and space opera eventually end up tiring me more than entertaining me. KEEPING IT REAL was one of the first books I reviewed, and it helped remind me that every once in a while, there IS something new under the sun. As I said in my original review, KEEPING IT REAL was one of the first novels I've read that looked at SF from the perspective of someone who grew up watching anime, reading CLAMP manga, and playing World of Warcraft. It didn't preach to a choir of SF readers who had only read SF writers, who had only read SF writers. It spliced and remixed again genres in a way unseen since Perdido Street Station. Even if it wasn't as well written as it was, it was still a fascinating look into a cultural landscape that was shifting under our feet. And it did it without pretension, without trying too hard to be hip and with it, and without taking itself too seriously. For a quick recap of the first book: In KEEPING IT REAL, in the year 2015, an accident at the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas (which, in the real world, was never actually built) shatters the walls between worlds. Humans find what we call our universe to only be one of seven, the others being Zoomenon (the realm of elementals), Alfheim (realm of the elves), Demonia (realm of demons), Thanatopia (world of the dead) and Faery (self-explanatory.). Lila Black, a bit of a mix between the Bionic Woman and Aeon Flux is a cybernetic agent assigned to protect the No-Shows, an elven-faery rock band that's had some threats made against it. Stay with me, I know what you're thinking. In the process, she winds up in an elemental game with Zal, the half-Elf/half-demon lead singer, gets the spirit of an dark elf necromancer trapped inside her, and gets drawn into a plot to divide the seven worlds again forever. Now, I know how that sounds. I was the same way when I first got it in the mail. I'm probably as far as you could get from what you'd imagine as the target audience for a book like this. But somehow, it all works. You put it down smiling that smile that you wear anytime you read something where an author just doesn't give a shit whether they're going to get awards or more readers, where they just write something because they just can't help themselves. When SELLING OUT opens, Lila Black hasn't been back home long enough to even power down when she's given another assignment. With Zal turning out to be a key in the plot to break apart the seven universes, he's a far more important figure than they had ever suspected, and the agency wants to know more about him. Her mission is to travel into Demonia, uncover his ties to the realm, find out why he disappeared so long ago and came to live with the Elves' mortal enemies, and how exactly it is he came to become 'half-demon'. It's not that hard, except for the whole 'going through hell' part. But Lila being Lila, when she gets to Demonia she pulls a Bateman and just 'had to kill alot of people!', and consequently she runs afoul of powerful families in the Demon Mafia, escapes assassination attempts, escapes marriage proposals, tries to escape an Imp stalker without much success, and soon realizes that a more important question isn't who Zal is, but who she is. The accident that caused her to be cybernetically rebuilt may not have been so much of an accident at all, and she has a part to play out that she couldn't have imagined. All she needs to do is break her cycle of lying to herself, of selling out, and leave the personal hell she's trapped herself in. Now, in movie trilogies the second installment is usually the best, but in books it seems that it's reversed. The second book, the 'bridge', is almost always the weakest. How does SELLING OUT hold up? The biggest problem in telling a story in these meticulously constructed universes is when an author falls too much in love with their creation, when they're more concerned with showing the reader how well thought out and richly layered everything is, rather than just getting on with the damn plot. So in these cases, the sophomore outing is almost guaranteed to meander all over the place. Robson resists that urge better than some, but still we find ourselves a bit all over the map. But the good stuff is a) deeper character development. As a second installment should, this takes you deeper into the personal journeys of each character, as they're separated and have to learn new lessons on their own. b) It's WAY funnier than KiR, more playful, more tongue-in-cheek. No doubt it probably helps that the demons are just more fun to be around than those stuffy, self-important elves. c) Robson is just more comfortable and confident in her telling, having established the characters and the setting, she now has more freedom to let loose and take things further. KEEPING IT REAL will be released in the US on October 31st. If all things go well I'll be back again in a couple of weeks as I continue in the grand scheme of clearing the backlog of crap on my desk. In the mean time, if there's something you think I'm missing or getting wrong, you know where to find me: Drop a letter on Adam Balm!
