Stephen Hunt's Blog, page 8
September 18, 2019
I is real. But is you?
I was walking back home on Friday from the supermarket with heavy bags, my mind wandering, when I managed to get myself worked up into an existential lather about the slipshod output of various recent streaming films and series.
Studios go to all the trouble of paying actors, building sets, laying on post-production and SFX, etc, etc, but often to such dismal result. Lacking only one key ingredient. A decent story. Sometimes, it oft appears to me, the story is treated as a costly extra – when, ^%^^ me, there are more fabulous tales on the Story Tree waiting to be plucked than grains of the proverbial on Brighton Sands.
That got me thinking about all the books and authors I’d love to see adaptions from – Jack Vance, William Gibson, Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, Jack Williamson, (more) Harry Harrison & Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, C. J. Cherryh, E.E Doc Smith, David Eddings. The list goes on. All faves who were responsible for genre classics from my misspent youth.
But, I silent muttered to myself, the kids these days barely know whom JK Rowling is, let alone a forgotten master like Clifford D. Simak. Who the ^%^& is ever going to make a Simak movie, I snarled at a passing granny?
On Saturday it was announced Netflix is turning Clifford D. Simak’s novel Waystation into a Netflix series.
This is surely proof of Elon Musk’s theory that we are indeed inside a hyper-advanced alien computer simulation. A glitch in the Matrix. I’m real, but I’m not entirely sure about you. Come on, Jack Williamson’s Legion of Space, the Amazon Prime series. If we all concentrate extra hard …
August 17, 2019
Got game?
Well, I finally managed to reach the end of the ‘Another Life’ science fiction series streaming on Netflix. It picked up a little towards the end, I think. The beast was weighted on the way, though by a lot of wheel-spinning, as well as a strange backstory that made little sense and ended up making matters feel very uneven.
Here’re just a few points.
1). Humanity has warp drive starships, yet doesn’t seem to have settled any worlds outside of Sol? Everything the vessel hits seems to be new and a big-ass surprise. Why?
2). Earth oddly appears to only possess a single – yes, one – starship to task with saving our whole freaking planet.
3). Said starship appears to have been designed by a Clown Car manufacturer. Every episode, the doors seem to fall off as its wheels spin away.
4). The only starship we do have is crewed by young whiny EMO snowflake kids, rather than steady and experienced military/naval types. WTF?
Let me suggest two easy fixes that could’ve plugged these gaping plot holes.
1 & 2 & 3). Earth only manages to back-engineer a warp drive from the crashed alien vessel (or, maybe a mystery data transmission from the planet they’re finally sent to), so of course we haven’t explored beyond Sol, yet, and only have a single experimental ship equipped with warp. All prior missions were sub-light probes leaving us with little knowledge of our galactic locale. Naturally, a new ship on our first warp flight is going to display serious teething issues.
4). To try to save Earth from the eco-devastation and nasty wars that seem to form this world’s backdrop, much of humanity has now submitted to mass genetic engineering making us more peaceful and breeding violent instincts out of our race. That would’ve heightened plot tension, too, as we’re now exploring space and meeting potential hostiles just when we’ve hacked our DNA to make humanity soft and cuddly.
One interesting piece of news on the home fires front. Arion Games is currently running a Kickstarter to produce an RPG game based on my Triple Realm universe from ‘For the Crown and the Dragon’. If you’ve got game – or would like some – you can sign up over at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2036759092/crown-and-dragon-rpg/description
Tony Hough of Fighting Fantasy-fame is lined up to do the art if the game gets funded, too.
If you love flintlock fantasy, Georgian steampunk and the like, this could be the game for you!
August 6, 2019
Many-Me?
There have been a few funny side-effects of the indie book revolution enabled by Amazon – that’s the thang where the masses get to bypass the legacy gatekeepers inside the big four publishers and publish directly to the world (either as e-books, or print-on-demand for dead tree books).
First off, and most obviously, there’s been a Cambrian explosion of books and authors in the market. This had led to hyper-evolutionary competition of a sort not hitherto seen … you must have noticed all those scifi book adverts overrunning Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, right?
But there’s been other more amusing side-effects, too.
If you have an idea for a brilliant book title in January – you check the Zon and nobody else has thought of it – by December when you publish, it’s odds-on that some other $%^&&*er has claimed your idea. You’ll probably also find your old book titles and series names being claim-jumped by others who either didn’t bother checking for ‘prior art’ first, or did, and thought sod it, that’ll just get me more traffic.
When I was a publisher at Pearson there were five other Stephen Hunts in the company’s in-house phone book, which always made taking external phone calls a strange game of random dice rolling. Now, Amazon’s massively extended indie book catalogue suffers from much the same effect.
There’s been a couple of Steven/Stephen Hunts who have come and gone as scifi authors on Amazon … nothing to do with me. I’m not going to make you change your name. I presume they got tired of fans emailing them asking when’s the next Jackelian novel coming out, before adopting weird pseudonyms almost guaranteed to be unique. Jogol Bundleberry, or something.
This happened to a Stephen Hunt who had to change his name to the outlandish Adrian Tchaikovsky so as not to clash with me. He’s done rather well, since. That’s a joke, BTW.
There’s even now a S.A. Hunt – Samara Adam Hunt – published by Tor. The same Tor that publishes S.A. Hunt – Stephen Alexander Hunt … aka me.
It makes you wonder if there’s an indie author out there called Philip Kane Dick or Arthur Colin Clarke who is wondering what the heck to do when it comes to hitting the ‘publish’ button? They’re bound to be out there! Hah. Well, this tickles me, anyway.
If your name does happen to be John Kerry Rowling, I’d suggest the pseudonym route for you. J.K. has lawyers who are paid too much to go into fits of laughter like yours truly.
Catch you soon.
July 25, 2019
Terribly Technical: that Sinking Feeling when you realise your readers are far better server engineers than your web host, 1&1 Ionos.
It is going to be a functional rather than philosophical blog update for you, this month.
Ever since Google strong-armed SFcrowsnest into getting an SSL secure certificate for every web page just to stay in their stupid search engine index many months back, we’ve been playing this weird frustrating game where a small but not insignificant number of you readers have reported problems accessing the magazine’s site.
It’s a problem neither myself or Geoff or, indeed, any of my friends and family – as well as web host tech support at 1&1 Ionos – whom I asked to confirm the magazine was working 100%, was ever able to replicate.
Recently, a kind reader, Zan Lynx – henceforth known as Zan the Man: Saviour of SFcrowsnest – who was also experiencing this problem, suggested a possible cause and a fix for the oddly elusive and shy bug.
IPV6 requests? You don’t need 1&1 Ionos to service no stinking IPV6 requests, you human maggot.
It transpires that our SSL was incorrectly set up unable to process IPV6 requests. By way of explanation, most telcos offer broadband and wireless connectivity to you via the old IPV4 standard, but some providers, T-Mobile being one example, have implemented the latest protocol. Around 4% of internet users in Europe and c. 10-14% in the USA/Canada access the Net via shiny new IPV6, now.
This misconfiguration by 1&1 Ionos resulted in most users being able to access SFcrowsnest perfectly, but a small minority using providers like T-mobile hitting odd ‘connection denied’ error screens which the rest of us couldn’t even see.
Anyway, all fixed now – but only after a very long painful week trying to convince 1&1 Ionos that they ^%%$%^ed up their SSL server config for IPV6. I finally fixed the issue by ringing them up and walking one of their staff through the missing AAAA record for the secure IPV6 connection.
I suspect it’s mainly science fiction magazines that possess such fine and rarified highly techie readers as Zan.
I reckon if SFcrowsnest was a crime genre magazine or cookery web site, 1&1 Ionos would still be serving their customers’ web sites in a ^$$%^ed manner that dumped between 5% and 14% of their reader traffic down the sh^%^^er.
1&1 Ionos is Europe’s largest web host with over 7000 staff in ten countries, serving 8 million customers hosting 12 million domains.
And Zan?
Zan’s the &^^&&*ing Man.
Truly, the geek shall inherit the Earth.
June 2, 2019
To absent friends.
Yours truly was in London the other day dropping the kids off to a cinema excursion in Leicester Square while I got some quality writing time in at Pret around the corner – a couple of quid for a coffee, seat and free wifi for three hours.
After I did the drop-off, I stumbled over the world premiere for Amazon Prime’s Good Omens being hosted at one of the cinemas on the square, Neil Gaiman and David Tennant in front of the theatre being interviewed for a live-stream. I snapped a few photos on the phone which I’ll post on my blog, but it seems that being on the wrong side of the makeshift security hedge only produces papped shots of Neil which look like, well, a hedge!
Neil did mention how much he misses Terry Pratchett and how they had set an empty reserved place in the cinema for him, which brought a tear to my eye.
It got me thinking of the SFF authors I’ve been lucky enough to know over the years who have passed away. Some too soon, like Terry Pratchett (67) and Iain Banks (59). Others who reached respectable innings like Jack Williamson (98) and Harry Harrison (87).
I wonder in a hundred years’ time if there will be readers who still read and love Terry, Harry, Iain, and Jack, or if they’ll be the equivalent of Irving Bacheller – the best-selling author of the 1900s with such mega-blockbusters of the time as ‘Ben Holden’. Who, you ask? Exactly.
All our novels, it seems, are written in disappearing ink.
Here’s a story Terry told me, the last every time I saw him, at a joint book signing we did together at Waterstones Piccadilly. I’d just asked him how he was doing.
A black stallion appeared galloping desperately down the road, carrying a rider apparently charged with an immensely vital mission to carry out. A farmer standing alongside the road, yelled, “Where are you off to?” and the rider called back, “I’m not sure … ask the horse!”
March 13, 2019
Down Egypt Way.
To celebrate opening the doors on my new Patreon page over at https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt, I’ve excepted one of the first posts.
“Here’s one of the more fun traditions you get in a Spanish city – rather than building Guys for bonfire night (an obvious no-no) like the UK does – each street makes a beautiful paper mache statue, which is then burnt after a week of highly kinetic fireworks and carousing.
This is our street’s effort, prior to the match being applied. It always breaks my heart to see them going up in smoke.
The junior Queen and King of the Fair – each street has one – are allowed to break off a piece and keep it, though, before the inferno.
I’ll try and post a photo of the bonfire, if I can stay up that late without falling asleep in a drunken stupor … as is my wont.”
November 6, 2018
Hell Fleet (Book 5 in the Sliding Void series).
‘Hell Fleet‘ is the 5th book in Sliding Void series. It’s a completely stand-alone adventure, not directly linked to the first four books, and will be released early December 2018 in both print and e-book format.
Captain Lana Fiveworlds has three ghastly problems:
(1) Her beloved crewman Calder Durk’s gone missing.
(2) She now has a daughter to bring up on the rickety free-trader ship, Gravity Rose.
(3) Said daughter’s from a parallel dimension (and that’s only the start of her strangeness).
Meanwhile,
Commander Adella Vega of the Alliance navy – aka Hell-Fleet – also has three dire headaches:
(1) She’s stuck at the dog-end of the galaxy on punishment duty with the Fleet’s losers, thieves and pedantic pen-pushers.
(2) Large portions of her sector just went dark.
(3) Something big, bad, and particularly nasty is now heading her way.
Both their troubles are about to collide and multiply in the most horrific manner since the Vela Supernova Remnant detonated.
Sometimes, the future’s so bright you better bring lead-lined shades. And a rail-cannon or three. Because Earth’s best space opera series just met the page-turning universe of military science fiction!
Hell Fleet (Book 5 in the Sliding Void series).
Get in the USA at https://amzn.to/2RH9IGX
and in the UK at https://amzn.to/2SNovkN
and in Canada at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07K6XVXRV
September 13, 2018
Got a hyperlink on your web-site? Hey, there’s a EU tax for that!
Well, the European Parliament has finally passed the EU Copyright Directive by a majority of 438 to 226.
This ‘interesting’ EU-wide law states that (a) anybody who links to a web page and uses more than two words found in said web page has to pay copyright fees to the originating website as long as it considers itself a newspaper and (b) anybody who uploads videos/pictures to the internet has to have prior permission from the copyright holder and needs to pay them a fair shake for doing so. E.g. kiss goodbye to memes, picture/video parodies and fair-use rebuttals in online discourse, and expect take-down notices and constant lawfare – many issued in error or with malicious/extorting intent – to fly like bullets from a chain-gun linked to an infinite ammo factory.
I actually read the full paper as voted on by the MEPs – which is more than many of them can do, given the insanely high throughput of daily legislation (they usually get their paid advisers and PAs to read new directives, then give guidance on how to vote).
‘Micro’ businesses are exempt from the EU Copyright Directive – defined by the EU as less than ten paid employees, so at least my author’s blog and zine should wriggle out of this, no matter how the UK finally ‘Brexits’ from the European Union.
EU Space Pirates, raiding your universe for hyperlinks very soon.
However, there are so many holes in this law that you could drive a Battlestar through it.
No decent definition of ‘newspaper’, for starters, as far as the link tax is concerned.
Is SFcrowsnest.org.uk a ‘newspaper’?
Will I soon be coming after you Patent Troll-style for you linking to SFcrowsnest articles on FaceBook?
You’re only allowed to use a maximum of two matching words from any piece being linked to. Does ‘the’ and ‘a’ count, in which case illegal infraction by you is guaranteed?
So many questions.
No hints on how this unworkable mire is to actually be implemented, either. Each nation state in the EU will have to come up with its own technology and process solutions – e.g. 28 different national versions of how you as a website owner have to caper like a marmoset to this nonsense.
This is what happens when you have the European Commission and Council – the un-elected European equivalent of Croydon Town Planning Department – issuing legislation & only then giving often clueless careerist MEPs a yes/no vote on passing it.
You can’t hold the Council or Commission’s feet to the fire by voting them out, sadly, to spank them for this lack of understanding of what the internet is and how it works.
The video/picture copyright uploading part of the new law means that only the likes of Google and FaceBook will be able to afford to develop the monster infraction filters/database/complaint handling systems; thereby guaranteeing their monopoly against any new smaller competitors who may emerge.
As an author, I’m always for putting money in content creators’ pockets, the stated aim of this law. Fairly sure in two years’ time I’m not going to be any wealthier for the passage of this technically illiterate idiocy, though.
June 27, 2018
Empty Between the Stars: a new science fiction novel hits the book stores.
Surprise – I’ve just released a new science fiction novel called Empty Between the Stars!
Empty Between the Stars is a science fiction adventure set in a universe where A.I.s are gods and mankind a fairly reduced force in the great scheme of things.
So far, readers have told me it has put them in mind of works by everybody from Frank Herbert (Dune), Jack Vance (various), and Harry Harrison (Stainless Steel Rat). Nice company to be held in, at any rate.
I’ve been getting some great reader feedback on the book which is wholly heartening – this was very much a passion project for me and I’m glad it’s hitting the right notes with you, too.
Empty Between the Stars: a new science fiction novel hits the book stores.
Here’s the title’s blurb:
It is the far future. The artificial intelligences created by humanity are now gods, and mankind mere ants who scrabble in their shadows across a million worlds.
The Lords of the Great Houses on the ever-night Moon of Hexator are suspected of the murder of one of their own. And merchant William Roxley, once a magistrate-priest, is unwillingly coopted to uncover the truth behind the killings.
With only the help of his naive young assistant and a brutish robot bodyguard, the man they call ‘Sweet William’ digs into the Moon’s eerie existence. A collapsing society where many strange, terrible things are happening under night’s unsettling cover.
But, Hexator is a place where nothing is what it seems, perhaps not even William Roxley himself!
Here’s the title’s Amazon links:
It’s now out in both print and e-book format. I’m trying something new and have made this an Amazon Exclusive, which means the e-book is solely available on the Kindle at the moment.
The print book is printed via Amazon’s own facility, and is technically available everywhere else outside the various Amazon country stores – in practice, it’s a special order item, as small bookstores and rival chains don’t like providing blood and treasure to the Jeff Bezos machine unless they have to.
If you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited, this e-book is free for you to read, also.
If you want to order the print edition from a bookstore that isn’t Amazon, then this is the ISBN to request it…
ISBN-10: 1983183989
ISBN-13: 978-1983183980
Mission to Mightadore (Jackelian #7) hits the bookstores.
One for the Jackelian fans among you – hey, never say I don’t give you anything!
Here’s the 7th book in the series, Mission to Mightadore.
It’s now out in both print and e-book format. I’m trying something new and have made this an Amazon Exclusive, which means the e-book is solely available on the Kindle at the moment.
The print book is printed via Amazon’s own facility, and is technically available everywhere else outside the various Amazon country stores – in practice, it’s a special order item, as small bookstores and rival chains don’t like providing blood and treasure to the Jeff Bezos machine unless they have to.
If you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited, this e-book is free for you to read, also.
Mission to Mightadore (Jackelian #7) hits the bookstores.
Here’s the blurb …
Cassie Templar hasn’t experienced an easy life. First, her father died for reasons that have been shockingly concealed from her. Then Cassie’s mother, Molly, went missing in suspicious circumstances. So she’s been raised as a ward of King Steam in the Steamman Free State, far away from the potential perils of her home in the Jackelian Kingdom.
Raised in relative solitude among the machine race . . . until an old friend of the family, the steamman scientist Coppertracks, turns up in the capital with news of the most amazing discovery. It will set Cassie and her companions off on a dangerous adventure to the mysterious and distant Mightadore.
There’s only one problem with Cassie’s destination. Many are those brave souls who have set out to reach the legendary city. But, nobody has ever come back alive from the trip to describe what they found!
And here are the links …
If you want to order it from a bookstore that isn’t Amazon, then this is the ISBN to request it…
ISBN-10: 1982997567
ISBN-13: 978-1982997564
