Marko Kloos's Blog, page 10

“Gullibility kills.”

I’ve been re-reading some non-fiction favorites recently, and these quotes from Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” (published 26 years ago, back in 1995) really seem amazingly prescient considering the state of the world in 2021:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

The wholesale dismissal not only of science, but expertise in general (as “arrogant elitism” and so on) is a pernicious sort of nihilism that will turn out suicidal in the end. When people are no longer interested in how the world works, when they actively fight the input of the people who are subject matter experts, it creates an informational void that will get filled by any number of hucksters and grifters who are willing to tell people that the world works exactly how they feel it ought to work, and who will be more than happy to sell them snake oil.

(I am turning comments off on this post because I have no desire to spend even a second of my time dealing with ignorance from drive-by anti-vaxxers.)

Coffee in Space podcast interview

I recently did an interview with S. Daniel Smith over at the Coffee in Space podcast. You can check it out here if you want to hear me talk about various Frontlines and Palladium Wars-related things, my writing process, and various other subjects.

(Side note–I’ve been at this for almost ten years, and in that time, I’ve given lots of interviews, including places like BBC World Service and NPR. I like giving interviews. I want to think I’m a pretty good guest because I tend to talk a lot. But I still don’t like listening to my own voice or watching myself on video.)

Audible’s Palladium Wars and Frontlines narrators

This has come up several times on Twitter today already, and I am sure I’ll read it a few dozen more times in the Amazon reviews, so I am going to explain the situation one more time in order to have something to link whenever this pops up in the future.

Book 1, AFTERSHOCKS, was narrated by Luke Daniels. 

In 2019, I finished two novels, one for each series, and I managed to outpace Luke, who has a very busy narration schedule for Audible because he is awesome and in very high demand. We had to either find a new narrator or delay the audiobook release for a year or more (not a realistic option.) So we chose a new narrator for the Palladium Wars series, Angelo DiLoreto.

Unfortunately, Angelo passed away unexpectedly after he had recorded book 2, BALLISTIC. 

Now we needed a new narrator, both for Frontlines book 7 (which also couldn’t be worked into Luke Daniels’ schedule) and Palladium Wars book 3, CITADEL.

I had input on the available narrators under consideration, and I requested that the two series be narrated by two different artists. Since we had to choose new narrators anyway, I wanted each series to have its own voice, to make sure they didn’t sound the same. So Frontlines went to Eric G. Dove, who narrated book 7, ORDERS OF BATTLE, and will to the best of my knowledge also narrate future Frontlines books. I requested Eric because he was the closest to Luke Daniels’ original cadence and voice, and I thought this would help with continuity. I think he did an excellent job carrying on Frontlines, and a lot of listeners seem to agree.

Palladium Wars went to Korey Jackson, whose voice I absolutely love, and who doesn’t sound anything like Eric or Luke. He narrated CITADEL and will (again, to the best of my knowledge) continue to narrate the series.

I understand that people who like to listen to audiobooks like to have continuity when it comes to narrators because it usually feels jarring when you have to get used to familiar characters speaking in a new voice. I feel the same way. But I hope the above explanation will make folks understand why the switch happened, and that it wasn’t arbitrary or somehow related to money or what-have-you. 

Johanna, please pick up the red courtesy phone

Johanna S.,

please contact me via email. Your signed copy of CITADEL got returned to me as undeliverable, and I’ll need a good address from you if you still want to claim your giveaway copy. Thanks!

CITADEL release day

It’s August 10th somehow already. That means CITADEL, book 3 in the Palladium Wars, is out today!

You can find it here in all the usual formats (hardcover, paperback, Audible, and Kindle):

This is the book I wrote while the pandemic took off last year, and it was the toughest one to write of all the novels I have written because it turns out that tuning out the world and focusing on a fictional universe is super hard when the actual world is seemingly falling apart all around you. But I really like the way it turned out, and I think it’s the best one in the series yet. I certainly can’t tell now which writing days were good and which ones had me feel like Conan on the Wheel of Pain.

Anyway, I hope you buy it, and if you do, I really hope you enjoy it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here engaging in my traditional release day rituals of eating carbs and hitting “refresh” on the product page for the book…

CITADEL giveaway winners

The random number generator has spoken, and the following tributes have been chosen:

William Anderson

Adrian O’Neill

Katie Wilkes

Chris Sheehy

Sean Adams

Scott Sullivan

Johanna S.

Rene Dohmen

Jason Enberg

Hannah Norris

Congratulations! If your name is on that list, expect an email shortly with instructions on how to redeem your signed copy of CITADEL. I will mail them all out on Monday.

Thanks for participating, and I hope you pick up a copy even if you didn’t win a free one.

 

CITADEL giveaway is now closed

All right, folks–the CITADEL giveaway is now officially closed. Everyone who has left a comment in the giveaway post up until this moment is eligible. I will now pick ten winners and announce them in a separate post later today. Stand by!

CITADEL signed paperback giveaway

UPS dropped off my author copies for CITADEL the other day. You know what that means–it’s time for my customary pre-release giveaway.

Rules are as before: leave a comment on this thread stating that you would like a signed copy to enter the giveaway. One entry per person, please. I’ll leave the comments open until noon on Saturday, July 10th, at which point I will let the random number wizard pick ten entries out of the pile. I’ll announce the winners Saturday afternoon.

This giveaway is open to anyone in the world, and I’ll ship your book to you for free if you win one, regardless of location.

CITADEL is the third book in the Palladium Wars series. This is the one I wrote during the pandemic, so it wasn’t an easy book to write, but I am super happy with the way it turned out, and I think it’s the best in the series yet. But feel free to grab a copy and make up your own mind! If you don’t win a giveaway copy, you can pre-order the book  in all the usual formats right here. The official release day is August 10, so you giveaway winners will get to read it a bit early.

Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Passing temporal markers, Cap’n.

I just noticed that I have two anniversaries this spring.

The first one is personal–it’s the 25th anniversary of my move from Germany to the United States. I moved here in May of 1996. I know that it’s technically a quarter of a century, but I don’t like thinking of it that way because it makes me feel unbelievably old. But you can’t argue with math. I was 24 when I arrived, and I’ll be 50 this year, so I’ve spent more than half of my life here.

The second anniversary is professional. Ten years ago, I sold my first piece of fiction, a short story called Ink and Blood, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. (It’s still available to read online here.)  I went to the Viable Paradise SF/F workshop on the Vineyard in 2008, so after that it took me three years to sell my first story and five years to sell my first novel. And I was working on my writing skills quite a while before I even got to VP, so my OVERNIGHT SUCCESS only took the better part of a decade.

But what an interesting decade it has been since that story appeared in BCS #74. I sold Terms of Enlistment and its sequel to 47North in the spring of 2013, and I’ve been able to write full-time ever since. It took me until my forties to figure out that I wasn’t really cut out for any other kind of work, so to those of you who are submitting stories and trying to get a foot in the door, I’d say not to worry about being too late to the party. Nothing moves fast in the publishing field anyway.

Screen vs. paper

When we moved to New Hampshire a decade and a half ago, we had to move a substantial library from our old house. Much of it had to wait its turn in our new garage, boxed up until we had the shelf space for them.

We didn’t know that the garage was leaky and would get flooded every time a major thunderstorm hit. A little while later, before we had the opportunity to put up more shelves, a big thunderstorm passed through, and at least a dozen boxes full of books got waterlogged and ruined.

We salvaged the rest and finally had space in the house to put everything on shelves. But at that time, e-readers had really taken off, and I shifted most of my reading to those. The first one was a Sony, followed by a long list of Kindles. Amazing devices, those–they got cheaper and better every year, and I could carry around hundreds of books in my pocket without having to worry about the physical integrity of my library.

A while back, however, I noticed that all the tech I’ve let into the house has changed my reading habits in a major way. I used to have no problem at all sitting down with a good paper book and reading most of the day away. But the longer I used Kindles (or the reader apps on the iPhone and iPad), the less I was able to stay immersed in the material, to the point where I couldn’t read five straight pages without feeling the temptation to check email or messages. It got to a point where I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book cover to cover without putting it aside in between chapters for days and weeks at a time, or when I had last read a book on paper.

It appears that the diminishing attention span induced by perpetual connectivity is a common thing. (Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows is excellent, if unsettling, reading on that subject.)

In order to get my brain to undo whatever rewiring all that tech has done to my attention span circuits, I’ve semi-mothballed my Kindle. Now I only use it for traveling, which means that it has been sitting on my nightstand charged and unused for most of the last 14 months. Whenever a new book catches my attention, I buy it in paper form again. I’ve also bought nice hardcover editions of my favorite books, the ones I tend to re-read every few years. And I’ve found that something really works differently in the brain when I sit down with a real book and a cup of tea, with the electronics in a different room instead of buzzing for attention in my pocket. I feel a similar difference whenever I write longhand with a pen instead of typing on a computer keyboard. It’s like the brain shifts to a lower gear, but one that can pull much heavier loads, if that makes sense.

Here’s the latest book haul, which will keep me busy for the next few weeks:

Not only do they hold my attention much better than their e-ink versions, they can also be put on a shelf for display and future use. Sometimes you just don’t know what you want to read until you spot a particular book on the shelf and think, “I should give that one another read.” (Also, they can be signed by the author. I have a whole shelf full of excellent books authored by friends that I managed to get signed at various conventions and get-togethers.)

Of course, if we ever end up moving to a new house, I’ll probably regret this new habit because boxes full of books are really, really heavy.