Merrill R. Chapman's Blog, page 6

What Hugh Howey Won't Talk About (but Should). And Amazon is Not a Publisher! (Part I of Several Parts). A Quick Update

Hugh Howey has just posted up another stemwinder on his blog and some of it leaves you scratching your head.

He makes several points in favor of Amazon, but I'm afraid two of them are off the charts wrong. Here's the first.

+++ * Amazon pays roughly six times the royalty rate that Hachette pays. +++

As I've just pointed out, Amazon doesn't pay you a dime (or anyone else) in royalties. Amazon extracts margins from you in return for access to its electronic shelf.

+++ *Amazon allows me to retain ownership of my work, which means I can leave if conditions become unfavorable. Hachette is making it more difficult to reclaim the rights to one’s work. +++

This is off the point. Amazon never was a publisher and ownership of your book was never an issue. If you were published by Random House, because B&N sold your book didn't give them ownership of your book rights. That's something you fight out with publishers.

That's enough for now. Have a great weekend if you've read this.

What Hugh Howey Won't Talk About (but Should). And Amazon is Not a Publisher! (Part I of Several Parts)

I swung by Hugh Howey's site the other day, and he's just posted up an article on his blog entitled: Could it be any Clearer?  I strongly urge you to click on the link and read it. Well worth it, whatever your take on the Hachette vs. Amazon issue.

Now, Hugh's a big Amazon fan, as anyone who's read his blog postings know. But I think he's losing perspective on the issue. I also think there's an element of an odd sort of class warfare that has crept into the entire debate that I find very strange. It's a sort of "Stephen King Must Make Less So I Can Make More" vibe that's strumming along some of the blogs. One of these days, I expect to see posters of Holston from Wool dressed up like Che brandishing an AK-47 if things go on like this.

Before going any further, I need to make it clear I'm neutral on the dispute between Hachette and Amazon. These are both large companies with vested interests and money to make and protect. I expect neither to put the interests of authors first. That's not what large companies do. I do expect both to blubber hugely when talking about the travails and problems of authors, then, when the cameras are off and the interviewers are gone, look after their respective piggy banks and not worry a whit about whether or not you, the author, are making a living writing books or whatever. This is as it should be.

Further, anyone, from an objective standpoint, should understand the tremendous benefits that the electronic shelf as provided authors. It has:

Activated the long tail in books. The concept of a book  going out of print is obsolete in electronic publishing.

Allowed anyone to self publish. You can now avoid the gatekeepers of publishing and attempt to engage directly with the market and sell your book. Yes, you could do this before the electronic shelf (and I have), but it's a lot easier in theory (though Amazon has decided to make it practically impossible for many classes of books, as we'll see shortly).

Reopened new publishing models such as serialization, which had vanished for the most part since the 19th century. Howey is one of serializations revivers.

Opened up the possibilities of new innovations in publishing. I know something about this because in 2001 I created what I believe was the first E-book to incorporate community and messaging directly within a book. Today's technology offers the possibility of doing that, as well as much more. We really haven't seen much of this, but I'm sure someday we will. I think.

Introduced real competition into the market. See bullet point two. Yes, a lot of people are going to  write and publish drek. (But one man's drek is another's golden bundle of soft porn. See Fifty Shades of Grey for a reference point.) And many people will write wonderful books that otherwise would have never been discovered. The market can function to help make this so.

Provided a much needed wakeup call to the publishing establishment (I worked in publishing, briefly. Scholastic and a couple of other smaller players. Didn't care for it). They don't like the ringtone, but, c'mon guys. Don't you all have iPods (or at least did) and smartphones? No one ever heard of MP3? Napster? The torrents? Didn't you realize the jig was up when you saw the Kindle? Did you really think print was going to be the analog empire to survive the Mongols of digital? Sheesh.
Now, Amazon has received much of the credit for the above, though it all would have occurred whether it was WalMart, B&N, or you who had built the platform. The discussed capabilities are inherent in the technology. But it was Jeff Bezos and Amazon who realized the opportunity and built an effective channel for E-books. It was a brilliant move and I'm overflowing with admiraton. And in E-books, Amazon is reaping rich rewards. And it deserves them.

That said, I'm an author and an ungrateful bastard. Also, I need to eat and I'm going to want to avoid handing over any more of the proceeds from my book to the greatest extent possible. After all, if didn't write the book, no one has anything to sell.

So let's first level set everything. The first thing that you must learn is that Amazon does not pay you royalties! Yes, I know that's what they call their retailer markup, but that is completely misleading. Amazon is NOT a publisher. They provide NO publishing services. Amazon is a channel. It does not make a market for your book. It does not promote it. It will not generate reviews. It doesn't edit or copyedit it. Does not design it. Doesn't provide graphics or graphics guidance.

If you doubt this, here is a test you can take to prove this to yourself:

Write a book. When you have finished it, upload to Amazon.
Do nothing. Wait for Amazon to market your book.
Check back in 60 days to see what has happened.
Always remember that channels do not make markets. You will make the market. That 30 points (30% retail markup, not royalties) Amazon is charging you is channel margin. Because of its size, Amazon can pretty much lock its 30 point margin in and regardless of whether you have a publisher or not, you will pay that fee to use its downloading service because right now, there isn't much in the way of competition to force it to lower its retail markup. One of the principle points of argument between Hachette and Amazon is wants to raise its margins with Hachette up to 30 points. Hachette is paying less than you. What the amount is has not been disclosed. Probably between 20 to 25 points.

Now, let's look a little more closely at that 30 points. Howey has stated that bookstores typically markup their books by 40% to 50%. This is true. This is their gross margin, because now they have to support an extensive physical infrastructure. Once this accounted for, a paper bookseller's net margins range between 6% to 15%. For the physical stuff Amazon buy and resells, margins are similar.

But the 30% retail markup Amazon is charging you is for it to stock its electronic shelf with an E-book. And this is far less expensive than managing physical inventory. Once you have built an electronic shelf, the cost of adding new items to the shelf drops steadily as the initial cost is amortized over time. And remember, the physical cost of maintaining its electronic infrastructure tends to drop as well. Server space gets cheaper, CPUs faster, memory cheaper, etc. Even programming and support costs can be sharply cut via outsourcing. (One area that's much trickier to manage is the cost of power.)

So, what is the cost to Amazon of adding your book to its shelf? Pennies, maybe. Let's stretch a bit and say,  $0.50. Heck, let's make it $1.00. 

Oh, and you can't factor in Amazon's transmission costs when they sell a book. That's applied against your retail markup. I'll put up a table at a later date to factor that in.

So, Amazon's net markup on your book is $29 dollars. 29 points.

In channels, 29 points net margin is a license to print money.

But, wait! That's just for books under $9.99. For books over that figure, Amazon's retail markup is 65%. 65 points. Take away that buck.

In channels, 64 points net margin is not a license to print money. It is a license to print gold bars.

I've raised this point several time on Howey's blog, but no one seems to want to talk about this.

I'll be digging into that number in the next part of this series.

She's Come Undone: A Review of "The Beauty" by Aliya Whiteley

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley





Paperback
Publisher: Unsung Stories 
ISBN-13: 978-1907389252

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange...

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Closely related to the man vs. woman Sci-Fi genre I discussed in my review of Space Games is the other-side-of-the-species bows out sub-genre. I've read several novels of this type and they have, at least to me, a peculiar power to stick in the mind. Over time, the collective consciousness of the writing community has dispensed gender extinction fairly evenly The girls go down in Frank Herbert's The White Plague . A bereaved scientist develops a virus to wipe out the world's women in retaliation for an IRA terrorist attack that kills his wife and daughters. During the 60's, I read a British novel, whose name for the life of me I cannot remember, in which an evil corporation wipes out the guys via distribution of a drug with a very unexpected side effect. In the New Outer Limits episode "Lithia," the guys go down for the long count because of war and our inability to get along with women. (It's too bad the author of this episode didn't have the chance to watch some episodes of one of those "Real Housewives" shows. It might have changed his/her perception on the issue of female cooperative instincts.)

Now, the girls are up again for the big sleep in The Beauty 

The novel (really a novella)  is set in a near-time dystopian future in which all the Earth's women have died, victims of a slow-acting fungal infection that eventually overwhelms them. We are never told the origin of the plague nor the precise timeline in which it appears. The Beauty is not a techno-thriller but rather a parable about the relationship between the sexes  and our  inability to remain whole in the absence of our natural partners.

As they succumb one by one, the wives, sisters, and mothers of mankind are buried in communal graveyards in which eukaryotic strands and garlands wrap themselves around the corpses in their unquiet resting places. Soon, soon, something will be coming back. Something always does.

The novel's narrative is told in the first person by Nathan, a young survivor of this XX holocaust. Nathan lives with other male survivors in a place called simply the Valley, the location of a commune that sought to move its members away from the ills of modern life but didn't move far enough. Nathan's job in the story is to act as a sighted Tiresias and as a speaker for the dead. In the evenings, the men of the Valley gather around a fire and listen to Nathan tell stories of their lost companions, recreating them in memory and feeling as best he can. His tales are meant to bring comfort to the group, but the reality is that all its members are insane or slowly losing their grip on reality. One example is Nathan's Uncle Ted, who confesses to killing three lost women in cold blood because he could not stand to watch them die.

Author Whiteley is a prose stylist. Her sentences often have a smoky, psychotropic quality and they can wrap themselves around the base of your brain:

It is sunset. The sieved light has taken on a dusky, pinkish cast and I can picture the others waiting at the fireside, ear attuned to the pops and crackles of flames, hoping for a story that will not come. Or is someone else tell them tales of the dead? I try to picture Thomas conjuring the peachy skin and red lips of women for their listening enjoyment, and it makes me smile. He would do a grander job of describing and onion and goat's cheese tart.

You can imagine Toulouse-Lautrec's mistress writing something like this after a night of absinthe and laudanum.

Part of the normal arc of for this type of tale is discovering how life will reassert itself and some sort of balance restored to our species. The Beauty does not fail in this regard, but its restoration path is both unexpected and grim. But I suspect any woman who has given birth will find it peculiarly just. You men will shudder a bit.

I was musing for a while after I'd finished reading The Beauty and my thoughts turned to a little girl I'd seen with her Mom the other day while visiting my local YMCA for a workout.The child, about six, was Asian, probably Chinese, the woman, white. I see this combination quite frequently in Connecticut. Over time, I've come to think of the state as the Land of Little Asian Girls. They're everywhere, chattering with their parents, playing with their siblings, who are sometimes Asian and sometimes of the same biological stock of their parents, getting off the school buses with their backpacks, etc. At the Conservative temple I attend during the High Holy Days, I'm assigned the same seat in the building's balcony section. Across the open space, for close to a decade, have sat opposite me a couple with two little girls. They're twins, Chinese, their parents Jews, probably of Ashkenazi origin. The little girls are always wearing skullcaps when I see them and I've heard they're due to be bat mitzvahed soon (the ceremony is the female version of the bar mitzvah). Perhaps one day they'll be married in the temple; they're parents are observant and it wouldn't be surprising.

A few months ago, I read an article in, I think, The New York Times about Chinese mothers who are going to public places handing out flyers on behalf of their sons. The flyers proclaim their desirability as husbands. The mothers do this because there are no wives for them to marry locally. China, like India, is one of those countries that has slaughtered and abandoned their daughters in mass numbers, the killings and adoptions driven by social mores and political policies, not a plague or techno-conspiracy. I wondered when I read the piece if any of the mothers carrying the flyers ever aborted a girl or gave up their daughter to a couple from the US.

The beauties of China are all around me in Connecticut and I suspect the mothers of China would like them back. But they won't be returning.

The Beauty is eerie, elegaic and haunting. You will never forget it.

Are Lower Prices Good for Sci-Fi/Fantasy Authors?

I've been spending a great deal of time on Hugh Howey's website recently. Howey is becoming an industry legend. In addition to self publishing and transforming his Wool series into a major best seller, he's been providing a wealth of information on self publishing. Of particular value are his regular reports on the income generated by independent authors from Amazon sales. How these calculations are generated can be found on his site and I urge to you investigate them. Required reading.

One of the hot topics Howey's research has sparked is the issue of what the prices of digital fiction should be. I'm not ready to make any definitive pronouncements on the topic, but I did think it would be useful to do some quick and dirty analysis that factored in inflation. I've learned that it's pointless to discuss pricing, particularly on long-lived markets such as book selling, without considering the long-term effects of devaluation on purchasing power.

I began my analysis beginning with the year 1965. That year I turned twelve, a normal YA starting point for a male to begin reading Sci-Fi/fantasy.  The median prices are accurate for the softcovers sold during that period. (I was a major frequenter of the BookMasters located on the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road in the Bronx and still have a few books from that era.) Also, during the 60s, the US population broke 200 million and the era saw an explosion in sales and acceptance of new Sci-Fi and fantasy authors and titles.

First, let's compare today's dollar with one from 1965.
1965 Dollar


$1.00

Purchasing Power of the 1965 Dollar in 2014

$7.55 Now, let's do a quick analysis of price points and incomes for books being sold in 1965. The 15% royalty payment is typical and remains so today. 1965 Median Prices for Sci-Fi Fantasy Titles Royalty Royalty Income 1965 Royalty  Income in 2014 Dollars $0.35
$0.50
$0.65
$0.75
$0.90
$1.00


15%
15%
15%
15%
15%
15%

$0.05
$0.08
$0.10
$0.11
$0.14
$0.15

$0.38
$0.60
$0.76
$0.83
$1.06
$1.13

Amazon Medians for Indie Sci-Fi/Fantasy Titles
$1.00 
 $2.00 
 $3.00 
 $4.00 
 $5.00 
 $6.00 Amazon Royalty (70%. assuming price between $2.99 and $9.99) 70%
70%
70%
70%
70%
70%

Amazon Royalty Income

$0.70
$1.40
$2.10
$2.80
$3.50
$4.20

Amazon Royalty Income Value in 1965 Dollars
$0.09
$0.19
$0.28
$0.37
$0.46
$0.56

Amazon 2014 Royalty Income in 1965 Dollars $0.09
$0.19
$0.28
$0.37
$0.46
$0.56

1965 Income in 2014 Dollars $0.38 
$0.60 
$0.76 
$0.83 
$1.06 
$1.13 

The side by side comparison above brings the profound impact of inflation into clearer focus. While the current author makes significantly more money in absolute terms, the purchasing power of their earned royalties is about one third their 1965 counterpart.

Of course, other variables must be factored in. For example, if Amazon is significantly expanding the number of people reading and purchasing books, then today's author may be able to hope to make up in sales volume what they have lost in purchasing power. (On the other hand, higher prices would certainly help out authors, at least so far as this spreadsheet exercise is concerned.)

Also, since Amazon and other services enable anyone to be published at the digital level of production, the argument that making something is much better than making nothing is compelling.

I'll be refining these numbers and incorporating some of the aforementioned variables into the numbers moving forward. But even at this level, they provide food for thought.

Another observation is that above $9.99. Amazon's royalties are punishing at 65% and it's difficult to see how they can be justified. Many titles above that point often serve niche and limited-scope markets and the volume does not exist to offset the loss in income. We'll publishing up some numbers on this as well.

Super Kids: A Review of "Elixir" by Ted Galdi

Elixir by Ted Galdi






For more information, visit the official Elixir website



Elixir by Ted Galdi is a YA sci-fi/techno thriller. Now, I need to be forthright. I'm probably not the best person to review YA titles. I'm a crusty curmudgeon of 60 and for the last several years have been practicing my "get off my lawn" mantra in the event I ever live in a place where a child might actually wander over onto my grass. I've also been slowly adding to my collection of vintage metamucil and realizing I can answer the hard questions on Jeopardy five minutes after they've been asked. (A case of game show l'esprit de l'escalier syndrome.) 

That said, let me sip a bit from my cup of prune juice before setting it down and getting to work. Elixir  falls into that category of yarn that I call a "Super Kid" (SK) book. We've all read and enjoyed some of  them. Perhaps the best known SK books ever written  are the Harry Potter series, where the Super Kid's super ability is magic, but there have been many others. Steven King's Charlie from Firestarter , where the heroine is able to perform exactly what the title says. Katniss from The Hunger Games, who's a distaff  version of Green Arrow but not as well fed.    One of my personal SK favorites was teleporting Davy from Jumper (though they spoiled him for me when they cast Young Darth Vader for the lead role in the movie adaptation.)

Both SK and YA techno thrillers typically incorporate the following dramatic elements. These are:

The absence of one or both parents. This provides the SK with a reason for boatloads of angst and regret. (If I lived in the magical fantasy world of Literary Figures Come Alive and was told my son or daughter was destined to be the lead in an SK book, I'd immediately give the little package up for adoption. Hey, it's me or you, babykins.) Otherwise, the SK has to rely on other psychological traumas to provide the requisite inner conflict. These can lack dramatic snap. Imagine what would have happened with Superman if we'd learned that Kal-El had dedicated himself to Truth, Justice, and the American way as a result of being locked in the girl's bathroom in Krypton grammar school by his arch nemesis, Eve-El. It would change your whole perspective.

An evil government agency. Usually the CIA, NSA, FBI or secret underground offshoot of any of these. All present in Jumper , Harry Potter (well, magical analogs), Firestarter , et al. I have to say, I must fault the vision of the current generation of fiction authors. Anyone who's traveled knows that the true locus of government evil in the modern world is the TSA, but I haven't read any book that's exposed these satanic minions.

An evil corporation. Invariably, the evil corporation is A) in pharma, B) defense, C) energy,  or D) technology. (I myself would nominate the cable companies. No, I don't regard them as high tech. I reserve another phrase for them.) Most thrillers settle for either evil government or evil corporation, but Elixir sports both.

An evil operative hired by aforementioned evil entities. No, I'm not doing a survey of these characters. We all know who they are and we all know they end up dead or thoroughly chastened. In YA world, evil invariably earns its just rewards. Not so in adult land. (For just one reference, watch "Body Heat" on DVD some time.)

A girl/boyfriend who is put in mortal danger by aforementioned evil entities but is saved by the hero. This is as it should be. If not the main plot thread of the book, the secondary thread almost always circles around rescuing a Fair Maiden or Lad. The main exception to this rule is The Amazing Spider-Man's failure to save Gwen Stacy. I haven't gotten over it and neither have you.

Not much sex. That's OK. The human race is having entirely too much sex these days, and broadcasting what seems to be 90% of it on social media. Give us all a break.

A happy ending. Natch. This is YA, remember? Who in this demographic wants to read a novel where the whole world really does go to hell a la Brian Caldwell's We All Fall Down ? Or watch "The Rapture" on screen  (despite the fact that this is the only good movie ever made about the end of days)? No one, that's who.

Now, having rambled on in typical old-man fashion, let's take a look at Elixir's plot.

The story revolves around Super Kid Sean Malone. Sean's super power is being very smart indeed. At 11, he's a Jeopardy champion and at 14, takes a whack at solving the famous traveling salesman problem (TSP). In its simplest form, TSP exercises attempt to calculate the shortest possible route between cities wherein each city is visited once with the trip ending with a return to the original location. Companies such as D-Wave are building quantum computers to optimize ways to crunch through this class of calculations. Sean figures it out in an afternoon. That's smart.

His discovery draws the attention of the evil head of the Department of Defense, and through a series of mistakes and misunderstandings, Sean is forced to enter the FBI's witness protection program (presumably, the DOD and the Mafia are on equal footing in the eyes of the bureau). Sean, along with his guardian aunt, are whisked off to Italy to hide out. The aunt marries a hot Italian guy who likes to cook and doesn't cheat. Sean, now renamed James, becomes a renowned graffiti artist (the type of low-key trade people on the lam from evil government henchmen typically adopt).

At eighteen, Sean meets the beautiful child-woman Natasha Vonlanden and the two fall deeply in love. Natasha, unfortunately, is dragooned into going on safari with her clueless father. While gazing at giraffes or lions or whatever, she brushes up against a dead chimp?! and contracts ebola. Back in Italy, the disease takes hold and Natasha will die unless Sean can devise a cure. To do this, Sean will need to hack into the servers of an evil pharma company, figure out how to develop an ebola vacine, fly back to the US where the live-saving serum can be manufactured, avoid the clutches of an evil henchman, and return to Europe in time to save his girlfriend. He's got about four days to accomplish all this, if I've tracked the book's timeline correctly. The clock is ticking. (Better hope the airlines are up to snuff. The last time I flew to Basel, I missed my connecting flights on both sides of the trip.)

OK, I think we can stop with the plot synopsis at this point. As is already apparent, Elixir isn't an exemplar of tight, coherent plotting, but in YA, that's not entirely necessary. Five minutes with Divergent makes that clear. Heck, now that I ponder the issue, it isn't always necessary in bigger, non-YA  fantasy novels either. Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is twelve hundred pages, sold over a million copies, and doesn't really have a plot, so we can all cut the author some slack. Still, Elixir's action framework clanks, rattles and clunks a bit too much for my taste. For his next book, more time with a plot doctor is called for.

Where Elixir hits the mark is Galdi's ability to write taut, visceral prose that makes you feel the story. For example:

"He sits on the the ledge of a fountain, marble angel in the center spouting water from its hand, a droplet jumping up and grazing the back of his neck every now and then."

And this description of the last rites being administered to the dying Natasha:

"His body heat fogs the plastic shield in front his face, the girl hazier through it now. He removes the cork from the oil receptable and dribbles some on his rubber gloved thumb. He spreads it on her brow, the liquid cold, goose bumps running down her neck."

This is good stuff. As I read these passages, I  could feel the cool water on my back and the clammy gasp of the enviro suit as the priest  looked down on his dying recipient. Couple that with the breakneck pace of the narrative and at its best, Elixir achieves a breathless, edge of your seat, Crank-the-movie feel.

To sum up, for YAs between 12 and the late teens, a fun ride. For us old geezers who fuss about plot and continuity, the book has less appeal. Let's see how Ted handles that criticism in his next book.

The Self Publishing Review Project

As we all know, obtaining reviews for your self-published book is an important part of the marketing equation. The problem is finding out who will review your book (I'm going to reserve this article for independent, non-paid reviews only. I'll talk about the paid platforms in the future.)

(Before going further, let me just quickly state that I will, when time permits, write book reviews. One of my reviews, a look at Space Games , is up on this site and another for a new book, The Elixir  is on the way.  The submission guidelines are on the blog main page. )

 But who will review your book and who won't? I'm currently submitting Rule-Set to several reviewer lists. I'll be capturing the replies/results and creating a spreadsheet that tracks who is actually doing reviews of self-published works and who isn't. I'll be posting this spreadsheet for free download  as I build up the database. If you wish to contribute to the project, contact me at rickchapman@softletter.com

To kick off the projects, we can recommend not submitting to SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com). The site positions itself as a online "Fanzine." Also, don't bother with a print version, either. The website states that "Please note that due to immense backlog, we no longer review self-published and vanity press works." A review query letter elicited the following response:

"Thanks for considering SF Signal.  Sadly, we are not accepting new books at this time -- we already have way more than we can read.

Regards,
John DeNardo
SF Signal"

July 10th, 2014

What's Exciting About Exciting Press? (and "Nano" Publishers) I just read about Exciting Press, which Hugh Howey describes as a terrific idea. Link to the article here

However, the article does not explain what value nano or digital-only presses bring to the equation.

Traditionally, publishers provided access to bookstores and bookshelves. They also provide access to international markets, a potentially important source of secondary income. However, as the market shifts from paper and shelves, the question arises as to what value added services traditional, as well digital, publishers offer.

So far, there doesn't seem to be much information on the topic. I'll be tracking this issue and finding out more.

The Self Publisher Review Project

If you're a self-published author, you already know you want people to review your opus. But who will review your book and who won't? I'm currently submitting Rule-Set to several reviewer lists. I'll be capturing the replies/results and creating a spreadsheet that tracks who is actually doing reviews of self-published works and who isn't. I'll be posting this spreadsheet for free download  as I build up the database. If you wish to contribute to the project, contact me at rickchapman@softletter.com

To kick off the projects, we can recommend not submitting to SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com). The site positions itself as a online "Fanzine." Also, don't bother with a print version, either. The website states that "Please note that due to immense backlog, we no longer review self-published and vanity press works." A review query letter elicited the following response:

"Thanks for considering SF Signal.  Sadly, we are not accepting new books at this time -- we already have way more than we can read.

Regards,
John DeNardo
SF Signal"

Review: Space Games

Space Games by Dean Lombardo






Buy it on Amazon


File Size: 535 KB
Print Length: 362 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Kristell Ink, Grimbold Books (June 21, 2013)
Language: English
ASIN: B00DJIEUPG

The battle between the sexes has a long and glorious history in sci-fi. From move "classics" such as "Queen of Outer Space" on  to the 90's New Outer Limits' episode "Lithia" and Norman Spinrad's forgotten but still worth reading novel "A World Apart," boys and girls have been arguing, fighting, and getting on each other's nerves for decades. It's a conflict meme that never goes out of date. Only the style of the clash changes.

For example, "Queen of Outer Space," the greatest movie Zsa Zsa Gabor ever made, has a ringy dingy, "girls just want to have fun" vibe to it that leaves you remembering your first prom date. (Though the movie does have a darker side. The male lead, Eric Flemming, who would later star for years alongside Clint Eastwood in the TV series "Rawhide," is thought to have thrown himself to Amazonian piranhas while filming in South America.  One would think that after spending a couple of weeks on set with Zsa Zsa Garbor, this manner of demise would have had a certain "been there, done that" feel, but we musn't question fate.)

The Outer Limits' "Lithia" possesses a more dystopian atmosphere and drives home the lesson that women can be cold indeed. Spinrad's novel reaches back to that 70's Cold War zeitgeist, when capitalism and communism wrestled for world supremacy under the shadow of two forests of ICBMs and asks both genders "can't we all just get along?"

Space Games  answers that query with a resounding "no." The novel's feel is a blend of UFC meets Survivor meets Rollerball and no one gets along with anyone.

Now, before going any further, I feel it only fair to warn you.  Games  is one of the most violent and vicious books I've read in years, just this side of action porn.  If you tend to tear up while rewatching "Notting Hill" for the tenth time and think "The Notebook" one of the greatest films ever made, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. It will depress your life. On the other hand, if you're up for some sly, hard- nosed, insightful social satire, you will enjoy Space Games . And once you pick it up, you won't put it down until the last blood splatter has been launched and the last bone has been crunched. (Both occur frequently in the book.)

The plot of Space Games   is as follows. Several decades from now, a new version of the International Space Station has been launched. Funded largely by private and corporate funds, the station is rented out for a new reality show, Space Games. The format pits man against woman in a contest for farme, fortune (a cash prize, endorsements, virtual fights  against viewers) and gender superiority bragging rights. The competition consists of a series of contests, most of which encourage mauling, mutilation and mayhem.

The impresario of this death match in the sky is producer Sheldon Zimmer, accompanied by his not-so-loyal sidekick, Morty. (I know, I know. This is satire, remember?) Sheldon is a cross between Jerry Springer and Heydrich and  worships money, ratings, and notoriety in no particular order.

The protagonists (the words "heroine" and 'hero" are completely inappropriate to the novel) of Space Games are Robin and Joe. Robin is a hybrid of Kim Kardashian and a rottweiler; Joe a mix of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason. When the games begin, Robin is giving away a foot and a hundred pounds to Joe, but zero-G and a lack of a conscience can make up for a great deal. As the bloodletting and violence slowly spiral out of control in the orbiting colosseum, both characters win, lose, recover, and fight their way to the story's bloody denouement. Who you root for and why will depend entirely on your individual perspective and the level of trauma you've suffered in the past at the hands of the opposite sex. (Some of these aspects of your personality are probably best kept to yourself.)

Author Dean Lombardo's prose is crisp and professional and he keeps the story moving at a breakneck pace. The descriptions of how the station operates and other technical details are well thought through and convincing. The action sequences will make you wince (or adopt even more extreme facial contortions), but a generation that has flocked to seven "Saw" movies has no reason to object.

The most cogent complaints levied against the book are its violence and sexual abuse, but c'mon. Have you ever watched a UFC match? When I was a kid, there was name for what takes place in those arenas. It was called "criminal assault." Today, UFC matches regularly out rate their boxing counterparts.

When discussing sexual abuse, I have to admit there's no TV show (yet) that encourages or rewards the contestants for raping each other (and to be accurate, neither do the rules of Space Games .) But we've already created and eagerly watch reality shows that encourage and reward paid prostitution. (What, you don't realize that's what's going  in The Bachelor and The Bachelorette? No need to thank me; I was glad to make that clear.)

I do have one objection to Space Games and that's the coda at the end. In this section, the thoroughly loathsome Sheldon gets what's coming to him. I won't describe how or why, but I think his fate fails to mesh with the thrust of the book. You see, in the world of reality TV, when the last chair bangs over the head of the last guest on the set of the Jerry Springer Show on its last day, or when Geraldo descends from exposing patient abuse at mental hospitals to hawking the discovery of a couple of bottles of discarded beer in the "crypts" of Al Capone, these guys don't go away. Shame does not quell them. Public revulsion does not move them. Past guests do not kill them.

Instead, they plan their next comeback.

I highly recommend Space Games . (I also highly recommend that you not let your girlfriend, fiance, or wife read it after you've just had a fight.)