Witch Way to the Mall

This was going to be a small announcement that I’ve got a story coming out in Esther Friesner’s Witch Way to the Mall this next June, and Baen is offering five of the stories early, including mine (you have to click all the way to the end to find it, since it’s not linked in the contents), but, well, it’s sort of morphed into a rumination on copyrights and giving it away for free.

This was prompted by a short letter I got last night from Paizo, a gaming company I’ve bought from before and who has given me some very nice PDFs of their other games as free samples:

Dear Kevin,

Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs by that time.

We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.

Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team

This has prompted a great deal of talk on the Paizo and Wizards boards and elsewhere, with a press announcement from Wizards saying they were shocked shocked! to find that people were violating their copyrights on the internet, and they’re now suing people as far away as Poland and the Philipines — this particularly ironic since a number of years ago, they themselves violated the copyrights of a number of authors, myself included, with the publication of the Dragon Magazine compilation CD.  But the fact that my very first professional sale (if not publication credit), which was reprinted by Wizards without my permission, was then pirated around the globe without Wizards’ permission?  I suppose I could fall into a fit of apoplexy that my words my precious words! were no longer under my control.  But since I’ve been giving that article away for free on my website for years, the mental chain is more: sauce, gander, world’s tiniest violin.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think Wizards has the right to pull those works they do hold copyright to from publication, but giving customers who’ve already paid for the work less than twelve hours notice is rather bad form.  Moreover, I think it’s inane to cut off electronic reprints of out-of-print books, especially when there’s a demand for them and the fans will have to chose between pirate networks and the absurd prices of antiquarian booksellers.  And when I say absurd, I mean absurd: Last night I went on to Half.com to get a book I wanted, and while I was there, the engine (which had remembered my previous searches) told me I could get a copy of  Wild Cards Card Sharks, which has my first professional fiction publication, for only $1.37.  This seemed absurdly reasonable, and since I’d heard they were going for much more (and I only have two copies myself) I decided to snatch it up, only to find that the price had jumped to $53 once I clicked on the link and it was absurd the other way.

I’m not going to pay $53 for a paperback.  Moreover, I don’t expect any fan to.  And it’s not like I’d see any of that money from the antiquarians in any case.  I’d rather the fans download it from Polish pirates, then buy something current (such as, for example, Busted Flush or Witch Way to the Mall).

Which I suppose brings us full circle: There are free stories–regardless of how they got there–and if you like them, you can buy more stories.

Meanwhile, I want to let you know about a new venture started by a group of women writing in SF, fantasy, horror, mystery, and romance: the Book View Café.  Writers such as Ursula LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Irene Radford, Katherine Elisska Kimbriel, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Sarah Zettel, and, well, <i>me</i>, are putting up screenplays, stories, poetry and even whole novels.  Right now it’s all read for free, while we’re in the shakeout period.  Thereafter some of it will be free, some will be free if read online, some available for download for a nominal fee. 

The idea is to make a place where we can get our work before readers in a new way–stories that are out of print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable.  There’s also a blog with posts by the site’s various authors–updated daily, and as diverse as we are.

Looking for something good to read?  Want to check out a writer you haven’t tried before?  Check out the Book View Cafe.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514

Too many people think that everything digital is “the future” and thus somehow good. You know, the future could turn out kind of crummy. It has in the past.

There are twenty eight characters on the show and we’ve got illustrations for all of them from the amazing Mike Miller. More, all of the authors have been writing confessionals from the standpoints of their characters. Up now for Week 1 are Joe Twitch (created and written by Walton Simons), Spasm (created and written by Daniel Abraham), Drummer Boy (created and written by S.L. Farrell), and Rosa Loteria (created and written by yours truly).

Go over and take a look. Ask the characters questions. Of course, the contestants are all busy with challenges on the show, but who knows, some of them might answer. (Mine are Rosa Loteria and The Maharajah.)

This is also kind of exciting as an author since it’s a new publishing venue. I’ve seen website expansions to the content from movies, most notably the rather amazing Donnie Darko site which had some neat fiction which expanded the movie, and likewise the (now long defunct) website for the Point Pleasant tv show. But this is the first time I’ve seen extra web fiction content being done for a series of novels and anthologies, especially author created and owned.

Anyway, please take a look and see what you think, and also, let’s talk about the web as a venue for new fiction in general.

There will be more added in the coming weeks, including bio with yours truly, but the preliminary launch is focusing on Inside Straight, which is coming out next month and as with all things publishing, may have early copies in some stores now.

There’s also a newsletter to sign up for and a story from Walter Jon Williams which is sort of the proto-Wild Cards tale.

But the question I’m interested in at the moment is when will science fiction end? I’m not asking this from a commercial standpoint so much as from an epistemological standpoint. Will there always be new science fiction? Or will the genre just wither up at some point and go away?

Here’s something I’ve noticed about futuristic science fiction stories: the characters in them never tell futuristic science fiction stories. Think about it. Can you think of a single example of a character in a futuristic science fiction story reading (or watching) a story that’s science fiction from their point of view?

Of course, you could argue that few characters in stories are actually shown telling stories at all, which is true. We tried that kind of metafiction in the ’60s, and that gave us John Barth and Robert Coover and writers of that ilk. Still, I can think of plenty of examples of SF characters reading nonfiction or history or contemporary literature (by which I mean contemporary from the characters’ point of view).

It seems to me that most of the counterexamples I can think of involve some primitive civilization telling stories about something that’s already proven to be true in the scope of the story. The spider creatures of Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky speculate about space travel and life on other planets, while we the humans watch them from orbit. The people in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland discuss the possibility of a three-dimensional world. And of course, there’s the old trope of the cut-off space colony that reverts back to its primitive roots while its SFnal history becomes the stuff of legends.

Then you’ve got the case of futuristic characters reaching for some even-more-futuristic contraption that simply extrapolates their current technology to the next level. We’ve got the Mega Giga Ultra Hyperdrive that allows us to travel at six times the speed of light! Wouldn’t it be great if we could invent the Super Mega Giga Ultra Hyperdrive that would let us travel sixty times the speed of light? (Impossible! say the doubting scientists. And then, of course, at some point in the story somebody goes and invents the damn thing.)

But where are the examples of people in a futuristic story themselves looking off into a fictional and theoretical future of wonder? I can’t really think of any. Maybe I’m not framing the question right, or disqualifying things out of hand.

Fantastic literature, you’ll note, doesn’t have this problem. (This is assuming you buy the argument that fantasy and science fiction are separate if related animals, which I know others on this blog don’t.) People in fantasy stories are always hauling out the old books and reciting myths and legends from the distant past. Many of these stories turn out to be true in the end, but just as often they’re recognized as fantastical within the context of the story. Tolkien’s characters have no hesitation to pull out the old chestnuts about Beren and Luthien; the folks in George R. R. Martin’s Westeros tell each other all kinds of fantastical tales about dragons and the undead, and I’m willing to bet some of them will turn out to be true and some of them will turn out to be just bedtime stories.

Perhaps the issue with science fiction is simply a question of narrative economy. As one author put it to me when I posed this question to them at Readercon, if you’ve got a science fiction story inside a science fiction story, that makes two entirely different universes you have to keep track of. Not an easy thing to do.

Yet I think there’s a deeper answer here, and it’s relevant to our business as writers and readers. We have a hard time envisioning futuristic science fiction characters envisioning a future of wonder because they’re living in one themselves. They’re inhabiting this theoretical future, and so they no longer need to extrapolate. In other words, there’s no need to look off to some far-off feat of scientific progress because there are feats of scientific progress all around them.

You might see where I’m going with this. The first time the world saw actual live music being captured onto a vinyl disc, it was incredibly, unbelievably amazing. Whole new vistas opened up for us. When we saw live music being captured in high fidelity on a little metal CD, it was still awe-inspiring. The iPod is really, really cool. But the wonder’s starting to wear off, isn’t it? Soon we’ll have tiny iPods that can fit all of our music in a chip the size of a postage stamp, and then chips that can fit everyone’s music in the size of a postage stamp. The wonder can’t continue forever, can it? Eventually you reach a saturation point where you just shrug your shoulders and assume that the future is a given.

So maybe that’s the problem with science fiction these days. We’re losing market share because we’re losing our capacity for wonderment at the future.

Example: When I went off to college in 1989, I ran an 8086 computer with 4Mhz of power, a 10 MB hard disk, and an orange monitor. Today I’m running a Core 2 Duo with 1.8GHz of power (per chip) and a 200 GB hard disk, with a monitor light as a feather that shows images in absolute crystal clarity. I assume that in another 20 years the technology will be that much further ahead. Forty years ago, someone could have written a science fiction story about the Wonderful Calculating Machine That Connects the World. It would be difficult today to write about the Core 8 Quadro with 4TB of power in a way that’s not just mundane prediction like the stuff you read in Business Week. The technology I wrote about in Infoquake and the forthcoming MultiReal — nanotechnology, unlimited computing power, biologic software — will one day be somebody else’s ho-hum existence, though probably not in the forms I’ve envisioned them.

So what’s left after that? Will science fiction truly be dead at that point?

You never look back at the Romans or the medieval Europeans and wonder why they didn’t write science fiction. It’s simple. The Romans assumed that if you rolled the clock forward two thousand years, the world would look pretty much the same. Perhaps there would be different people or different political entities around, but the idea of a steady slope of scientific progress wasn’t part of their mindset. Same with Church-dominated Europe. In a few hundred years, Jesus will have come back and ushered us into a neverending paradise, so why bother speculating? If he doesn’t come, we’ll just be sitting around in our feudal societies waiting.

Perhaps the same thing awaits us from a different angle. Perhaps the universe will one day become predictable enough — perhaps scientific change and progress will be so much a part of us — that looking into the future will just be an exercise of more-of-the-same. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but we might be approaching it. Maybe we’ll have so much of an understanding of the workings of the world that we can’t write anything but what we term the fantastic. In other words, the impossible, the fanciful, the mythic that has no pretension to reality other than a metaphoric one.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But will that always be true? If we’ve got the technology safely mapped out as far as we can see, and beyond that lies magic — what’s left for science fiction?

Consequently interesting typefaces have always caught my eye, and while I dearly love some of the fonts that came out of the 90s revolution of computer typography, most of them looked just awkward/grungy with far too much attitude and far too little readability.

So I set about making a few fonts of my own, or rather I should say, digitizing, cleaning up and generally twiddling with typefaces from old books that weren’t available from any of the modern font foundries. I put them out on one of my websites, and apart from a guy in Italy who loved one of the fonts until it crashed his computer (very complex fonts will do that), I didn’t hear anything more until last year when I was contacted by Bonnier Publications A/S of Denmark, who wanted to use my WitchHunt font for their history magazine. Of course, they also wanted a few extra Danish characters (and Swedish ones as well, for the Swedish edition), along with open type format and a few other whistles and bells.

Unfortunately, I’d packed up my fontography programs a few years and two computers before. Fortunately, however, I knew Dave Nalle who runs Fontcraft, about the top historic typeface company out there, and he not only agreed to make the extra characters for Bonnier, but asked me to join Fontcraft as one of their designers. So now WitchHunt is available from Fontcraft, in its newly prettified and gussied up form (thanks, Dave), as part of the Halloween 2006 promotion. Even better, it’s soon to be followed by some of my other typefaces and ornaments.

Currently rockin’ the William Morris vibe here. It’s very fun to have both fiction and typefaces of yours being out there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, I managed to catch this just before it left San Jose.  What is it, you may ask?  Well, it’s the latest project from etoy, the Zurich-based artists who’ve done various avante-garde tech-savvy art projects over the years, including the ToyWar some years back, where I signed on as one of their “toy soldiers” to help drive the internet toy company “Etoys” (no relation) bankrupt for having sued them because it wanted their domain name.

Anyway, their latest project came to my home town and I managed to catch it before they packed up and left.

Here is the press release:

 

The glisteningly white MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS shines in front of the Museum of Art in San Jose, CA. In close vicinity to mortal art, card board architecture, Californian palm trees and dedicated security guards, the SARCOPHAGUS performs its dateless duty of demonstrating deadlines that are here to be crossed by art.

Visitors are ushered through a sound gate into the SARCOPHAGUS after checking in to receive angel status. For security reasons, spiritual  and physical, the individual visiting time is limited to 5 minutes  inside the SARCOPHAGUS. Instable and spiritually impaired visitors  are discouraged from entering the SARCOPHAGUS. Additional information  material is available outside and etoy.AGENTS in white may be  approached for information and initiation.

The MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS is a mobile sepulcher for users who  prefer to be buried at an indetermined geographical location. The  mobile cemetery tank is a 20 foot ISO standard cargo container (6m  long, 2.4m wide, 2.6m high, 4 tons weight) and potentially travels  planet earth forever. The system allows for simple re-location of the mortal remains of up to 1000 M∞ PILOTS.

The SARCOPHAGUS is equipped with an immersive LED screen of 17’000 pixels that cover the walls, ceiling and floor on which the visitors  can walk. It displays the ARCANUM CAPSULE content and functions as a  public installation wherever the TANK travels.

STORAGE ANGELS, CODERS, LAWYERS AND MORTAL REMAINS COURIERS CAN APPLY  ONLINE FOR ANGEL STATUS AND PARTICIPATE IN THE MISSION.  http://www.missioneternity.org/angels Visit http://www.missioneternity.org/ for detailed project  documentation, software download, and initiation protocols.

Anyway, an explanation of what I saw.  Outside the museum was a white shipping container, and outside of that was some comfy inflatable orange tubing for folk to sit on waiting for the next tour, and there were also various white and orange-clad etoy agents.  The etoy agents dress rather like the Oompa-Loompas did in the Wonkavision room in the first version of the movie–clinical spare white tyvek windbreakers with an orange logo, a reversal of the usual orange etoy jumpsuits with white logos.

Anyway, we were ushered into the sarcophagous which was in fact a shipping container with plastic pixils on all walls.  You couldn’t see the images that clearly by standing inside of them, but they were of a famous actor from Switzerland who’s signed on to be one of their first “test pilots.”  What this means is that when he dies, his cremated remains will be mixed with concrete and used to replace one of the pixils inside the sarcophagous, turning it dark.  When visitors enter, they may touch his dark pixil to begin playing the images of him on all the rest, and also on the small viewing screen at the entrance which has a slideshow.  More complicated than that, however, is the plan to have his life works and biography stored in electronic form on the internet with redundant servers, hosted back and forth across the world between various users who volunteer their storage media to take a portion.  There’s all sorts of crunchy techy goodness to keep the data from being lost, with multiple redundancy across the world.

The plan is for 1000 peouple to be “entoured” in each sarcophagous, leaving those pixils dark and the rest light as the container tours the world and people get to visit and find out more about the people “entoured” there.  New sarcophagi will be created in later years, but with the current technology and art aesthetics.  It’s definitely interesting to see something I’d first seen in Max Headroom back inthe 80’s now becoming a portion of real life.  The docent said the pixils would be replaced everywhere with the cremated remains except the floor (which also had pixils) “out of respect for the dead.”  As I mentioned (people were encouraged to ask questions and make comments), burying people in the floors was pretty standard with most of the old cathedrals.

After emerging from the sarcophagous (which got very stuffy inside with everyone standing in it breathing all the air), I went out and chatted with the etoy crew, in paricular Agent Zai who I remembered back from the ToyWar days.  He gave me a handful of “zingles” (large chrome ball bearings engraved with the etoy logo) as a reward for my service in the ToyWar, with each a tiny fraction of a voting right in the etoy corporation.  If you had a dump truck full, you’d be able to take over.

The next place the Mission Eternity Sarcaphagus is scheduled to be exhibited is at Burning Man, but in the meantime, he and his girlfriend are vacationing and seeing California for a while.  I found out that they’ll be in LA at the same time as WorldCon, so Zai may show up for a day and see if any of the SF writers want to sign up to be “entoured” after their deaths.

etoy was in town for the ISEA festival, aka The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts.  Unfortunately I hadn’t realized they wouldn’t be the only exhibit, and by the time I got there, most of the other artists were striking their tents, or at least their obelisks.  I did, however, have a bit of time to be the last visitor to see this black obelisk pimpled with dark LEDs, which was entirely unimpressive until the exhibitor showed me that if you looked at it with a camera phone or other digital video, you’d see words and images scrolling down over the surface in infrared.  Terribly cool tech, and an interesting project–the title was “The Fruit of Your Labor” and the data was from folk from Silicon Valley they interviewed.

It’s very simple: make sure you have the right tools for the trade.

What are the right tools for the trade of writing? Well, obviously they differ from writer to writer. Some prefer to write longhand with ballpoint pens. Some prefer to bang their literary masterpieces out on a PC in their basement office. Here are a couple of items that have proven indispensible for me.

1. Desktop search program. If you’re writing a novel, you know that there’s a lot to keep track of. Characters’ names, distinguishing features, personal histories. What the butler was really doing at 2:36 AM when everyone suspected he was stabbing the haughty Lord Higginbotham in the chest with a silver dagger. You need to have quick access to all of the details of your book so you don’t get bogged down trying to find them when they’re needed.The native searching tool that comes with Microsoft Windows sucks, plain and simple. You need to download one of the free desktop searching tools out there that will put all of the details you need at your fingertips. Personally I recommend the Copernic Desktop Search, which has the advantage of a search-as-you-type feature. By the time you’ve finished typing “Lord Higginbotham dagger,” you’ll have all of the documents you need at your disposal; you can even preview them with Copernic’s built-in preview window.

   Copernic’s only one of many similar products. There are also good desktop search programs out there from Google, Yahoo!, X1, and, believe it or not, Microsoft. (And if I hear just one of you whine about how I wouldn’t have this problem if I used Mac OSX or Linux, I’m gonna hunt you down in cold blood.)

2. A CD or DVD-ROM dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia. I bought Microsoft’s Encarta all-in-one reference way back in 2000 when I first started Infoquake, and even though it’s a few years out of date, it’s still my most valuable tool. If I’m uncertain how to spell “sartorial” or need a good synonym for “cryptic” or need to know what the 42nd element is (anyone? anyone? it’s Molybdenum), it’s no more than an Alt-Tab away. I don’t even have to lift my fingers from the keyboard.Why bother with a lousy ol’ disc when you can have the latest information from Google or Wikipedia? you may ask. Because if you’ve got a DVD in hand, you don’t need to worry about connecting to the web with all its infinite distractions. Every time I go to Wikipedia, I find myself drifting off into tangential subjects and finally look up to a darkened room after having wasted hours reading about the influence of Rick Springfield on ’80s pop-rock. Keep that WiFi off and stay focused on your work.
3. A cheap, dependable laser printer. I don’t care how focused you are on writing and revising online; there comes a point when you’re going to need to print out your stuff and see what it looks like in black and white. These days, a brand-spanking-new 20-pages-per-minute laser printer can be had for as little as $50 online. There’s little point messing with inkjets anymore; unless you’ve got other, non-writerly projects that require color printing, it’s just too simple and too cheap to go laser. Personally, I’ve been very pleased with my Brother HL-5140, but it goes without saying that there are a million different brands out there.
4. A thumb drive. Writers used to worry about losing their work. Nikolai Gogol and Ralph Ellison are only two of the many writers who lost their only copies of major works to house fires. You don’t need to worry about that anymore; not if you buy a thumb drive. It doesn’t take much storage space to hold every Word document you’re ever likely to type. Fifty bucks will get you a 1 GB SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive that you can put on your keychain. Pop that sucker in at the end of your writing session, back up your shit, and off you go.Worried about security? Unless you’re J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin, I wouldn’t worry too much. MS Word password protection will probably do just fine in most cases, and there’s plenty of free encryption software out there if you’re paranoid. Just don’t store personal information like banking records and credit card numbers on there, and you’ll be fine.

   But how’s that going to prevent me from losing my work if I lose my thumb drive? you might be asking. Good point. That’s why you should also…

5. Sign up for online storage. Personally I use Yahoo’s Briefcase, which gives you 30 MB of free online storage space. 30 MB might not seem like a lot of space, but considering the fact that you can store an entire draft of a novel in a zip file that’s only a few hundred kilobytes, 30 MB should be plenty. Alternatively, you could FTP files up to your web space, if you have web space.If you back up your work regularly to your thumb drive and to your online storage space — and print things out occasionally for good measure — you can put all those worries about losing your work behind you.
6. A good PDA for jotting down notes. Many is the time when I’ve found myself sitting in a dull meeting when suddenly a vital story idea comes to me. If you’ve got a handy PDA — or a cell phone that’s got a good note-jotting feature — then you can be assured that these snippets of thought won’t just float away, never to be found again.

So those are the practical tools I use to help me stay focused on the writing. What do you use? Anything I’m missing?