Graham Storrs's Blog, page 18

Review: Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Fuzzy Nation is a "reboot", a re-imagining of the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. As Mr. Scalzi says, "I took the original plot and characters of Little Fuzzy and wrote an entirely new story from and with them. The novel doesn't follow on from the events of Little Fuzzy; it's a new interpretation of that first story and a break from the continuity that H. Beam Piper established in Little Fuzzy and its sequels."

Fuzzy Nation is the story of a prospector, Jack Holloway, who, while searching for minerals on the planet Zarathustra hits the jackpot with a seam of "sun stones" worth a fortune. Holloway is the type of man who is always at odds with authority and this find brings him and the powerful Zarathustra Corporation nose to nose. However, even as Holloway struggles to retain control of his interest in the find, his future – and everyone else's on the planet – is thrown into uncertainty by his next find: a small furry animal he calls a "fuzzy", which seems unusually clever, and whose family comes to live in his home. The problem is that, by Colonial Law, if the fuzzies are not just clever but actually "sapient", then all mining must stop on Zarathustra, Holloway won't get rich, and the Corporation and its tens of thousands of employees will be booted off-world. The plot is absolutely predictable from very early in the book, but if you still don't want spoilers, don't read Little Fuzzy first.

Mr. Scalzi delivers this simple, no frills, no surprises story with a rather ponderous, old-fashioned style and humour that fans of Harry Harrison will probably enjoy enormously. Indeed, Mr. Scalzi's books all have a somewhat old, slow, quaint delivery that really does take the reader back to the Golden Age of sci-fi (or, at least, the Silver Age). The style of his "Old Man's War" series has been compared to that of Heinlein – which is not a comparison anyone should be ashamed of – and it may well be this steady, exposition-heavy delivery that has made him so very popular. Many modern sci-fi readers hanker for a time forty, fifty, or more years ago when future technology was understandable and writers weren't manically whirling readers around cyberspace, baffling them with genetics, and shoving them through the Singularity. These readers are Mr. Scalzi's natural audience and, given that, perhaps it is no surprise that we find him retelling a fifty-year-old story, or that the language, the technologies, and the ideas in the book have hardly changed at all from the original. As Mr. Scalzi says, he is offering readers the equivalent of "a cover of a song they like".

While H. Beam Piper fans are already bristling with indignation that anyone should think Little Fuzzy needs retelling, the bigger questions might be; why retell an old story in an old idiom – wouldn't the re-imagining of Little Fuzzy have been more interesting if it had been done by Charlie Stross, or William Gibson? – and why do it at all for a sci-fi book? If science fiction is "the literature of ideas" as many fans believe, why reboot sci-fi stories at all if you are not going to add something wholly new and original? Little Fuzzy was the Avatar of its generation: a tale of a big bad mining company exploiting a planet at the expense of its indigenous sapients. As such, it had points to make about the rights of indigenous peoples, the exploitation of non-renewable resources, and about the nature of sapience. It was a solid contribution to "the literature of ideas" in the best traditions of science fiction. It is very hard to see what Mr. Scalzi has added by updating the story.

If you only read a few sci-fi books a year, it is probably not worth making room for Fuzzy Nation. There are many more interesting books being published. If you are an H. Beam Piper fan, you will either be dismayed or excited by this reboot. Mr. Scalzi is a good writer and tells a good tale. He may well be going to take the "Fuzzy Universe" in fun new directions – like the recent reboot of the Star Trek films, which added nothing significant but gave fans the possibility of more of their favourite "world" yet to come. If you are already a John Scalzi fan, you will almost certainly enjoy it.

Review: Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

 

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Roger Penrose is one of the world's leading mathematicians and a man who has also made significant contributions to theoretical physics. His work with Stephen Hawking on black holes is almost as famous as his purely mathematical contributions in the field of tiling, yet his contributions to science go well beyond these highlights. So, when he writes a book subtitled "An Extraordinary New View of the Universe" it should be of interest to anyone who is interested in the world, how it works, and how it got here.

And he really does present a quite extraordinary hypothesis. The universe, he says, is cycling repeatedly from one big bang to another. It bursts into existence in a very special state of uniformity and extremely low entropy, expands in ways consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which means entropy is constantly increasing – mostly through the production of black holes), and this expansion accelerates to infinity, over a period of at least 10^100 years, as the black holes evaporate away and even the rest mass of electrons and positrons fades to nothing. And then, by a geometrical sleight of hand, the new, uniform, low-entropy, 'spacelike surface' of the end of the old universe becomes the uniform, low-entropy, 'spacelike surface' of the big bang for a new universe.

To get from big bang to big bang, Prof. Penrose takes us on a journey that starts with the peculiar imperative of increasing entropy and the Second Law, passes through the special nature of the big bang. And ends with what he calls "conformal cyclic cosmology" ("conformal" because, he conjectures, sometime in the future, all particles are effectively massless and their "world lines" are therefore constrained to the outer surface of a "null cone" in a Minkovskian 4-space.) And if you're having trouble following this, then Cycles of Time might not be the book for you.

Usually, popular science books, written for the layman, introduce us to established science, or summarise a new field. They avoid maths as much as possible, and they take their time over the more difficult ideas, often repeating the same material in slightly different ways, to help the non-specialist fumble their way through the arguments.

Cycles of Time is not that kind of book. It describes the author's own ground-breaking and controversial research in cosmology. It is a difficult read and tackles extremely deep and complicated matters. Repetition is almost completely avoided, replaced with references back to where the material was first introduced or discussed. Although the reader is spared the worst of the mathematics (which is, nevertheless, presented in a set of appendices) there is enough maths in the text to make most non-specialists work hard to follow it, and the physical concepts presented are not for the faint-hearted.

Yet it is worth the work. Prof. Penrose is a clear and articulate writer. Even his academic papers are a marvel of lucidity. If these ideas seem hard, it is probably because they are, and even one of the world's best science writers cannot make them any simpler than this. There are many references in Cycles of Time to Prof. Penrose's earlier, 1,000-page work, The Road to Reality, and it is probably fair to say that this earlier book should be kept handy as a companion work when reading Cycles of Time. And degrees in maths and physics would probably help too.

Why is it worth the work? Well, there are great insights to be had here into the nature of entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and their relationship to the big bang and to black holes. Even though Prof. Penrose makes some assumptions which, even to a layman, seem suspect (for example, that the mass of the electron and positron will fade away given enough time, and that information loss in black holes can be re-stated as a loss of degrees of freedom as the singularity consumes particles) he also makes predictions, at least one of which (concentric anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to gravity waves from pre-big bang black hole interactions) has been tested and found to exist in the data.

Many physicists argue that these circles in the CMB are statistical artefacts, or that they are the result of colliding universes in a very different kind of multiverse. Yet the fact remains that they support Prof. Penrose's "extraordinary view". And, in the end, the data is what really matters in science. Probably the best thing to do is to take a deep breath, grab a copy of this fascinating book, and plunge right in.

May the Fourth (3 GWC) Be With You

Yes, it's that time of year again. For the many people who weren't around on May 4th 2008 when I posted my first "hello world" from my brand new writing blog – that is, all of you – May 4th 2008 is the date from which I reckon my writing career began. So as 3 GWC (Graham's Writing Career) draws to a close, it's time to take stock once more and reflect on all that has happened since 2 GWC drew to a close.

Well, maybe not. Oh, alright, but just one paragraph. It was a busy and complicated year – essentially the first year of my first novel – and it ended (near enough) with me having found a wonderful literary agent (Ineke Prochazka) to call my own. There were a few story sales along the way and lots of other writerly stuff. In all, it was a year of good, solid progress. I started writing three novels in 3 GWC too – and finished one of them. I hope to finish the other two in the coming year. It was also the year that Jodi Cleghorn and eMergent Press came into my life and Big Bad Media came and went (literally – it has now wound up). I went to Worldcon. I went to Supanova. A couple of my friends did amazing (publishing-related)  things (that's you, Emma, Marianne, Joanna and Joanne) and I got two new computers!

And all the other things that I forgot to mention.

On the agenda for next year are another novel sale – or two – (which is now your department, Ineke), more shorts sales, finishing my comedy sci-fi novel "Cargo Cult" and possibly a couple of other books, maybe going to the Brisbane Writers Festival (haven't quite decided yet), and seeing "TimeSplash" finally appear in print (and maybe audio – how's that going, Em?) I think it will be another busy and complicated year. At least I hope so.

There are a couple of shorts of mine appearing soon in anthologies for you to look out for (please!)

In Situ – a spec fic anthology from Dagan Books, ed. Carrie Cuinn. It contains my story "Salvage". Expected publication date is 15th May – pre-order it via Goodreads.

Hope – a spec fic anthology from Kayelle Press, ed. Sasha Beattie, with a great cast of Aussie writers. It contains my story "The God on the Mountain". Expected publication date is "real soon now"! I am especially stoked that two of the other contributors are friends who shared the QWC/Hachette retreat with me in May 2008 – the event that I believe kicked off my professional writing career.

Nothing but Flowers: Tales of Post Apocalyptic Love from eMergent Press, ed. Jodi Cleghorn. It contains my story "Two Fools in Love" – the first time I ever sat down to write a love story and actually did it. This is already available as an ebook but should hit the streets as a paperback any second now.

You all have a good 4 now. Happy New Year.

Take The Twitter Ratios Test – and see what kind of tweep you really are

Our Twitter profiles provide a number of curious facts about us. In particular they give the following four figures:

Tweets: the number of tweets we have made since we started tweeting. I quite often look at that number when I'm considering whether to follow someone. If it is very high, I give them a miss. The last thing I need in my crowded tweet-stream is another 50 tweets per day!

Following: the number of tweeps we are following. I try to keep mine small by refusing to follow people whose tweets look dull, or who are marketing gurus (I make a few, rare exceptions), who are bots, or who are obviously just selling stuff. For all my vigilance, the number keeps growing.

Followers: this is the number of tweeps who follow you. You may think it odd, but I am constantly culling this number too – mostly using Twitter's "block and report for spam" option. Spam on Twitter is a cursed plague. I block and report about twice the number of tweeps who are genuine. I think some of the people banging on about marketing insights and their no-doubt-brilliant self-published fantasy trilogy don't even realise they have crossed the line and become spammers.

Listed: this is the number of tweeps who have added you to one of their lists (or the number of lists tweeps have added you to, which could be slightly different, but not significantly for our purposes.) I don't do lists myself, but they do seem enormously popular as a way of organising one's acquaintances.

It struck me how useful the ratios of some of these numbers might be. For example, marketing types are very keen not to "waste their time" following people who do not follow them back. There are even tools to help you see who these people are! Consequently, the savvy Web 2.0 tweep, will always have a Following that is almost exactly the same as their number of Followers – a ratio that is close to 1. When I see this, it makes me wary and, I have to say, reluctant to follow this particular 'guru'. I don't use my follows as a currency. I follow because the tweep looks interesting and is someone I wouldn't mind chatting to. A tweep who sees a follow as a unit of exchange, seems to have missed the whole point of why most of us are there.

So here are three, key Twitter ratios and what I think they mean (with a couple of examples). Of course, I may be wrong about how to interpret these numbers, so I'm keen to hear your own interpretations. You might like to calculate your own ratios to see what kind of a tweep you are. To calculate them, take the first number and divide it by the second. It's as easy as that. For example, if you are following five hundred people (Following = 500) and are followed by 250 people (Followers = 250) your Following to Followers ratio is exactly 2.

Following to Followers (F to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more likely the tweep is to be a marketing guru.

The greater this ratio is than 1, the more likely the tweep is not trying to sell you anything.

The less this ratio is than 1, the more famous, beautiful, or fascinating the tweep is. (Famous because famous tweeps just have hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers and simply can't follow that many themselves. Beautiful because I have observed that attractive young women always have far more followers than ordinary mortals – that's why spammers always use avatars featuring this type. Fascinating because, well, I suppose there must be people out there who, even though they are not famous or beautiful, are still amazingly interesting – @shitmydadsays, for example.)

Listed to Followers (L to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more these tweeps' followers value what they say – because they have taken the trouble to put them into categories that are accessible to others. After a quick survey of about four random famous people, I can say that the Listed to Followers ratio does not seem to correlate with fame. Perhaps famous people are actually boring in real life?

Tweets to Followers (T to F)

If this ratio is significantly over 1, the tweep is probably a bore – either because they rant on about their own fascinating self so much, or because they are always chatting to their five hundred closest friends in long exchanges that have tweets in them like, "Lol. Me too!" or "I haz beans. You?" etc..

If this ratio is close to and preferably just below 1, then the tweep is probably actively engaged with their followers, but not excessively so.

If this ratio is significantly below 1, the tweep is likely to be in the famous/beautiful/fascinating category.

The following table compares Stephen Fry (famous, fascinating, but not beautiful) and Katy Perry (famous and beautiful, but not fascinating) to myself (neither famous, beautiful, nor fascinating).

Tweep
Tweets
Following
Followers
Listed
F to F
L to F
T to F


Stephen Fry
8,376
52,671
2,562,148
42,028
0.021
0.016
0.003


Katy Perry
2,841
69
7,051,908
95,953
0.000*
0.014
0.000*


Me
5,869
1,269
1,384
226
0.917
0.163
4.241

Clearly, Stephen and Katy have the profiles of famous people on the F to F ratio, whereas I come out looking like a marketing guru! Perhaps only the truly famous and beautiful can get away with not following anyone at all hardly, and only tweeting occasionally. In fact, F to F and T to F ratios of 0.000 might become the new status symbol for the mega-famous. Certainly my own T to F ratio of over 4 is extremely undesirable. Am I really such a bore? Interestingly, my L to F ratio is ten times that of either Stephen or Katy, and I will take comfort in all the love that implies.

—-

*The number was so small that three decimal places just weren't enough!

 

Welcome, Curious Blog Lovers!

If you are reading this, the chances are about four to one that it is because I am a finalist in the Sydney Writers Centre, Best Australian Blogs, 2011, Competition. That's what my site stats tell me, anyway. Believe me, I'm as amazed as you are to find my blog has made it so far. Apart from a general feeling of chuffedness and a bit of bragging to my wife and daughter, I hadn't given much thought to what this means.

Then I noticed my site stats and the big spikes in the number of visitors on the days when announcements have been made. Now I feel vaguely guilty. I mean, all you nice people popping over to take a look at my blog! I should have done something nice for you all, put up a couple of deep and profound posts, changed the banner to a big "Welcome!" sign, tried to flog you a book, or something.

Ah well, another day, another blunder. Too late now, I suppose.

Unless…

Nyah! There's no chance I could win. I mean, there are some truly exceptional blogs in my category (and I already follow them all, by the way) and anyone in their right mind would see that at a glance. Still, I didn't expect to be a finalist, either. So, just in case, the following paragraph is for you, kind stranger. (Regular readers can go back to writing desperate pleas to publishers and agents.)

Hello, and welcome to the Graham Storrs blog. Don't let this post fool you, I can be quite sensible, even interesting, sometimes. So, take a few minutes to skim through previous posts. The gold nuggets are in there somewhere. Probably. If not, well, at least you will go away inspired by the thought that, if my blog can be a Sydney Writers Centre, Best Australian Blogs, 2011, Competition finalist, then so could yours.

Thank you for dropping by.

Marketing Books on Goodreads

Of late I've been receiving friend requests on Goodreads from people who have (apparently) read 0 or 1 books and have a large and growing number of friends. Where they have 1 book listed, it is invariably their own.

Look, guys, I know all the marketeers tell you to use the power of social networking to plug your products, but, for heaven's sake, if you're going to do it, do it subtly, or don't bother. And don't pervert sites like Goodreads, which is there for readers to get together to talk about books, by using it as a platform for what amounts to spam.

I have loads of friends on social networks. I follow or friend them because they seem interesting and seem to share common interests, similar views, or a similar sense of humour. I'm not going to friend you just because you ask. And, yes, when a friend of mine, someone I'm interested in, says they've published a book, I do often go off and buy a copy – but that's because it was someone I like, not just some stranger.

Twitter has a very useful "block and report for spam" button for people who are simply trying to sell me things. Sadly, Goodreads does not. So I'm developing a stock response to Goodreads spammers, which goes something like this:

Dear X,

You've sent me a friend request on Goodreads. It's nice that you're so keen, but I have to tell you, I deliberately "ignored" it. It's nothing personal, I'm sure you're a great guy and you're nice to your kids and all that, but when I see a friend request from someone who has 1 book listed and 500+ friends, all I think is that you're using Goodreads to market your book.

And that's OK too, but if *all* you're doing on Goodreads is marketing your book, I can't see why I'd want to sign up for that.

The people I have friended on Goodreads have read, rated and reviewed many books, typically hundreds. They're into this. They like sharing their views about books. Like me, they like reading. They're not just trying to sell me something.

So, I'm sorry, but I'm more than just grist to your marketing mill. I know how hard it is to get people to notice one's book, and I sympathise, God knows, but this is not the way.

Regards,

Graham.

What is Advice to Writers Really Worth?

Emma Newman, rising star of the YA science fiction world, has just posted a thoughtful piece on her blog about why she doesn't like giving writing advice. As with many of Emma's musings, it got me thinking.

My view on free advice in general is that tends to be worth exactly what you paid for it. Mind you, I speak as somebody who worked as a consultant for many years, so I'm used to charging people through the nose for even the most banal truisms.

I've scoured the Web for advice on writing, and talked to my social network til I'm blue in the fingertips, but I haven't found anything much that was useful in all those millions of words. It seems to me there are areas of this business where advice is worth having and there are areas where it is not (that'll be $500, please.) Advice about the business side of publishing is something that most beginning writers need. Until I got some myself, I was just wasting my time and energy, with no hope ever of being published.

Advice about how to write is another matter altogether. My own view is that part of what you bring to the table as a writer is a sensitivity to what good writing sounds like. Some of this sensitivity you develop by reading lots of the very best books. The rest is just there in you. Some have it and some don't. It's like having an 'ear' for music. You can train yourself to some extent but in the end you are limited by your innate sensitivity to the nuances of the composition. And the worst of it is, if you don't have it, you may never realise it.

It isn't as simple as learning the 'craft' – understanding plot, sentence structure, punctuation, and so on. Those things are essential but that's like saying understanding music theory is essential to writing a brilliant symphony. I know lots about music but I will never write a great symphony because I just don't have the talent for it.

I've always been awed by something Stephen King wrote. It is in an essay called, "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes". He tells the tale of being a cub reporter on a small town weekly. He had turned in his first piece and the editor made a few deletions and adjustments. which he shows us in the essay. Standing there reading through what the editor had done, he says, "[The editor] looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation." The young King, seeing those editorial changes, immediately grasped what it takes most of us half a lifetime to understand about the sound of a good piece of writing. And, he tells us, he never made those mistakes again.

I think this is why writing advice doesn't help much; good writing depends on your own aesthetic sensibilities more than on anything else. Because of this, about the only thing I've found that does help is an honest critique, and the only people I've found who give you those are editors. A rejection is an honest critique (and helpful, in a limited way) but acceptance is where it really starts getting interesting, because then you have someone with a good 'ear' for writing, working to help you improve what you've written. Even then, like King, you need to be able to 'hear' what your editor is asking for.

Until you get to the point of working with a good critic, however, you are almost on your own. But not quite. You have two invaluable sources of criticism to tap into that can really make a difference. One is the critique group – of which there are many and of varying quality, online and off. If you're not being accepted by publishers and working with editors, join a crit group. Do it now. The other is your own brutal honesty, which you really do need to cultivate. You have to listen to your own sense of what sounds good and what doesn't. You have to refuse to accept anything you write that is merely acceptable because good enough is not good enough. If you let it go by, the editor won't, and you'll be rejected or (sometimes worse) you'll have to suffer the horrible embarrassment of having a passage corrected that you already knew in your heart of hearts wasn't the best you could do.

Read an eBook Week Becomes a Feeding Frenzy

At least, if my own experience is anything to go by!

I mentioned the other day that the few books I've self-published have been available for free on Smashwords to celebrate Read an eBook Week. Well, the week is almost up and it has been an astonishing success. People picked up almost as many of my self-published books in this single week as they did in the whole of the past year! If this pattern is reflected across all participating authors, this is going to be an outstanding success for Read an eBook Week.

There are five books of mine involved in the celebration – only two of them under my own name – and it is just as fascinating as the overall numbers to note that the three written under a pseudonym have been flying off the virtual shelf at ten times the rate of the ones under my own name. I would dearly love to know why that is because,

The pseudonymous books are in a different genre to the one I normally write in. Is that genre ten times more popular than sci-fi? (Maybe I should be asking, are there any genres that are not ten times more popular than sci-fi?)
The general consensus among those I trust to read and comment on my books before I submit them anywhere, is that the pseudonymous books are nowhere near as good as my sci-fi books. They tell me I should stop dabbling in other genres and stick to the knitting. That's why they're self-published under a pseudonym in the first place – I have no intention of inflicting them on a publisher but I can't bear the thought of them just sitting on my hard drive. Could my beta readers be wrong?
I made a couple of announcements about my books being available free for RaEW, here and on Twitter, but anybody who noticed would only be able to find the ones under my real name, not my pseudonym. That means the pseudonymous books got absolutely zero publicity and yet are going ten times faster than the ones that did! What does this tell me about book marketing? Does it mean some genres require a hard sell, while, for others, there are crowds of eager readers prowling the book sites, desperate for free books?
Since a week of free is roughly equivalent to a year at next-to-nothing (most of my books are normally for sale at $0.99) I'd like to be able to conclude something about the optimum price-point for self-published ebooks. It certainly looks as if I can. Basically, if a self-published ebook is not free, I can expect to ship about a fiftieth of the book's potential numbers. So, do I want lots of readers, or a trickle of income? It does seem to be an either/or situation.

There are lots of questions a result like this raises, but I think those are the big ones for me. Is anyone else seeing this kind of thing with free vs sold books? Is the picture as depressing as it looks? I mean, it's great that Read an eBook Week is looking like a huge success, but the sudden voracious consumption of my work, just because it's free, leaves me with a slightly queasy feeling – like I'm watching a joint of meat being devoured by piranha fish.

 

Is this the face of today's ebook reader?

In Situ: Coming Soon

In preparation for their forthcoming sci-fi anthology, In Situ, Dagan Books has begun posting interviews with the contributing authors. And today, it's my turn.

The idea behind In Situ is a good one. It is an anthology of science fiction tales about alien excavations, weird archeology, and the unearthing of mysteries. As an avid Time Team viewer, I absolutely could not resist! And I can't wait to see what the other writers have done with this 'future archaeology' theme. My own contribution is called "Salvage" and breaks new ground for me – a sci-fi story set so far into the future that everything we are now has been lost and forgotten. A very long way from the near future thrillers I have been writing lately.

Publication is planned for May 15, 2011, so grab an RSS feed and I'll let you know when it's out.

Free eBooks for Read an eBook Week

Yes, it's Read an eBook Week again. And for all you folks who would love to read some ebooks but can't bring yourself to part with a dollar or two to buy them (you know who you are), now's your chance to get them at reduced prices or even free at Smashwords.

I don't have many works on the Smashwords site – I'm a bit of an ebook dabbler – but what I do have is yours for the taking all this week. Just click the links below and download the books. It won't cost you a thing and, if you don't like them, toss them in the bin! All popular ebook reader formats are available.

Placid Point: Tales from the history of transhumanity is a collection of short sci-fi stories all set in my Omega Point world. Some have been commercially published before in magazines and anthologies, and some are brand new, especially for this collection.

Hangin' With the Monkeys is my idea of a children's story for very young kids. Part A Dog's Day and part Danbert Nobacon, it is the story of a rather self-centred dog and the family of evolved apes he hangs out with. Does he save the day? Oh yeah!

(Aussie readers please note. Read an eBook Week is happening in US time, so you might have to wait a few hours for them to catch up.)