Opinionated Speculations | A Deal With The Devil?

So the press were all over George R. R. Martin in advance of HBO's hugely anticipated of A Game of Thrones, and needless to say, after starving for years on occasional tidbits of news from Not A Blog, when it rained, as the pilot's airdate approached, it poured.

In fact it poured such that a few comments well worth further discussion were rather lost in the downpour provoked by certain provocative pieces, which I'll comment on no further than to say: what utter bloody nonsense.

To wit, then, an incidental bit from The Guardian's chat with the man who would be king.

"Hopefully, the last two books will go a little quicker than this one has, but that doesn't mean they're going to be quick," says Martin. "Realistically, it's going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace. I hope it doesn't take me six years like this last one has. I have a million ideas. I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first and then I'll decide what I'm inspired by at that point. If I'm not in some old folks' home." And if he is, no doubt his fans will be haranguing him even there.

I've bolded what particularly interests me from that paragraph. Which is to say, George R. R. Martin wants to be writing other things than A Song of Ice and Fire. And oh, how I wish he could!

Because it's a deal with the devil, isn't it? The series. The saga. On the one hand, real breakthrough success in speculative fiction only seems to come with multi-volume opuses like The Wheel of Time, The Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Kingkiller Chronicles. What is, for some, and will be for others, a lifetime's work. Rarely does a book from a mere trilogy hit The New York Times' list of bestsellers, after all, and still less often will you see self-contained science-fiction or fantasy sell half as well. For speculative fiction to stand a chance of such widespread success, all indicators point to volume seven or eleven of such and such a series being a more likely prospect for bestseller status than even new China Mieville... for what is really no better reason than inertia, as I see it.

Though I expect some might take me to task on that.

Anyway, whatever the cause and effect, that's a pretty darned shady state of affairs. Variety is the spice of life - surely we can agree on that - and while one understands that the industry must supply as demand dictates, the import it puts on sequels and series, and so the dispersal of the same marketing dollars that might help elevate a standalone novel to the realms of runaway success... that over-valuation, and not just on the part of the publisher, serves to stifle innumerable other avenues of genre literature.

Take a minute and think of all that could have been.

What, for instance, might J. K. Rowling have written if she hadn't spend a decade and change on Harry Potter? Or Robert Jordan if The Wheel of Time hadn't taken over his writing life?

Loathe though I am to even mention Robert Jordan, I do so for a dual purpose: both to illustrate the question I'm asking here - shouldn't authors be able to write what they want rather than what readers are seen (and indeed heard) to want? - and equally to demonstrate what happens when an author doesn't acquiesce to the demands of certain elements of his or her readership. For instance when an author has the gall to "pull a Jordan."

You've heard the phrase said, haven't you? Needless to say it's disgusting; absolutely sickening. For the innocents out there, it means to die before you've finished telling your tale, and I'm with George R. R. Martin on this, when he says in The Independent (via a message board post on Fantasy Faction) that "anyone who uses that phrase... is an asshole."

But for all that, it's used often enough. In fact of late, and here we come full circle, it's been put to the aforementioned author as regards A Song of Ice and Fire, a series which George R. R. Martin has spent 15 years of his life writing as is. And of course the guy's getting on - what of it?

It's a credit to the gent that he's as dedicated as he is to the series in question. "I have a million ideas," he writes. "I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first." The long and short of which is, he's 62, it's taken him five years to write the last two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, and he's prioritising this one narrative over all the others he'd like to write largely to satisfy the unfathomable sense of entitlement certain very vocal readers feel. Because "nothing is as savage as a horde of starved fantasy fans."

Well, I say: the hell with them.

We all know I've not yet read A Game of Thrones - though I'm loving the HBO series based on the book thus far - but I have read, and adored, Fevre Dream, Dreamsongs and many of Martin's recent anthology contributions. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd spent several years on tenterhooks, waiting to see what Winter finally brings, but... you know, I doubt it. All stories are created equal. That these days some stories seem more equal than others is perhaps a truth, but a harsh truth, and a sad one - symptomatic of a very specific problem in a very specific area of very specific era and we're going to need to get over it quick smart, guys. Because it's just as wrongheaded as heads come.

Or are we - I shudder to think - thus entitled? Was that the bargain struck?

Clearly, I don't think so. I believe authors should be able to write what they want when they want rather than writing to a timetable dictated by the whims of what a particular sphere of readers are seen and indeed heard to want. Surely this pressure George R. R. Martin feels should not exist. Surely the vitriol he's been on the receiving end of, simply for taking a little longer than usual to put out A Dance With Dragons, is as outright unreasonable a thing as getting angry at scientists for not curing cancer a bit quicker.

What do you think?

One the one hand you have your sequels and sagas, which come hand in hand with the shot at mainstream success apparently inherent in such things, and on the other you have the freedom to write whatever you please on your own timetable, to no guarantee of sales or even much in the way of support from your publisher. Are these trade-offs fair? Or do I sound like a child here, worrying about what's fair and what's not?

In short, is this particular deal with the devil worth the paper it's written on, far less the blood price of signing the hellish thing?

###


Source: The Guardian

Opinionated Speculations | The Curious Case of The Quantum Thief

Not so long ago at all, in a galaxy practically next door to our own, John DeNardo sparked off quite the conversation over at SF Signal with his review of The Quantum Thief. Before we get any deeper into this, check out the post in question - and be sure to stick around for the comments.

I'll wait.

...

So two stars from five.

Not to be utterly reductive, you understand, but that's the sole reason there's been this controversy. And in turn, that's the sole reason I've avoided any sort of scoring system here on The Speculative Scotsman. Because the numbers are essentially meaningless, to my mind: an arbitrary statement of how awesome, on a scale from 1-5 or hats out of ten or percentiles out of a hundred or whatever, a book has been. In your opinion. Your inescapably personal and utterly subjective opinion.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

What happened was, John DeNardo didn't really do The Quantum Thief justice. He admits that real life repeatedly intruded on the time he'd meant to spend reading Rajaniemi's debut, and of course that's fine; it happens. It will continue to happen until critics are locked away in sensory deprivation tanks for the duration of their respective reading experiences.

John acknowledges that. In his review he goes so far as to stress that "this [was] a reader fail, not necessarily a book one." He iterates the same opinion again in the comments. He saw in The Quantum Thief all the things other reviewers - myself included - have spoken of in such glowing terms: its grand-scale imagination, its very involved worldbuilding, its meticulous and addictive plot... and so on. Then he gave The Quantum Thief two stars from five.

Which isn't reader or writer fail, if you ask me. It's reviewer fail.

Two stars from five might seem a fair and representative review of John's reviewing in this instance, but of the book itself? I find myself hard pressed to sympathise. Because how is it in any sense reasonable to hold a text accountable for factors far without its purview? Does a dodgy cinema audience prone to juggling popcorn affect the quality of a good film? Should I take umbrage with a television show because the content of the ad breaks are inappropriate?

Of course not.

Now on the one hand, scored reviews are anathema to me in the first instance. At best they're short-cuts - easy outs for folks who can't be arsed to read the actual text of a given review; at worst, however, you can see in them the beginning of the end of bona fide criticism. Look at what happened to the video game industry in the wake of Metacritic and its ilk, sites founded entirely on the principle of aggregating all the aggregates to come up with one mega-aggregate to rule them all. These days, entire livelihoods often depend on developers achieving a certain aggregate threshold. Largely arbitrary scores are costing people their jobs, and all that follows.

So the numbers game bothers the bejesus out of me personally. Especially when the numbers in question seem so utterly at odds with the content of the review, as in the curious case of The Quantum Thief. On the other hand, however much I might differ from the following folks, I appreciate that there are those individuals and organisations to whom such scores matter a great deal. To each their own and all that.

But in both cases, the result of John's two-star review is a knock on The Quantum Thief. A knock, moreover, utterly unjustified; that's the heart of the matter here. Whether I believe these numbers hold any water or not, there needs to be some correlation between review and rating, surely, and an account of someone's personal circumstances does not an argument of the merits and demerits of a certain piece of entertainment make.

That said, SF Signal is an important resource to the community, and John DeNardo is usually a very fine reviewer. I'm not having a go at one or the other here. I simply don't think this sort of ill-conceived criticism should stand unchallenged, particularly given the ever-increasing prominence of certain score aggregators.

Because it can't be right to punish a book for your own shortcomings, can it?

Opinionated Speculations | A Dance With Dragons and A Storm of Bloggers

What happened late last week was, some guy - I hear he's pretty popular - announced a provisional release date for a book he's failed to hand over for five years running, and the blogosphere went bananas.


Because of course this date is the real date. Even though the last four have probably seemed pretty real, too. I don't know; I wasn't really paying attention then either. Even though the real date is only four months from now, and the manuscript still isn't finished, and even if it were, it's the length of three or four normal novels, and how something like that goes into one end of the publishing machine and comes out the other so speedily without some serious shortcuts being taken is a feat beyond my powers of imagination.


I'm talking about the new Haruki Murakami, of course: IQ84, coming this Autumn from Harvill Secker. And about damn time, too!

Ach, but I wish I were.


Not that I've any reservations at all about the quality of A Song of Ice and Fire, the latest volume of which - A Dance With Dragons (but you all knew that) - is what I'm actually using as a platform from which to rant atop today. Of George R. R. Martin's back-catalogue I've only read Fevre Dream and the first few pages of the very first book in said saga; enough nonetheless to know I'll surely adore A Song of Ice and Fire whenever I can find the time to get properly stuck in.


Anyway. As I was saying, after half a decade of holding pattern, dear Mr Martin announced on his blog, Not A Blog, that A Dance With Dragons would be coming out July 12th, 2011. Thereafter, the blogosphere imploded. And in a way I think bears some discussion, before we all move on to the next Next Big Thing.


Now I keep up with The Wertzone and Pornokitsch and A Dribble of Ink and all my favourite blogs via an RSS reader: used to be it was Feed Reader, but Newz Crawler has been much better behaved when handling the massive backlog of posts I manage to rack up every week. So on the day of the re-announcement aforementioned, I'm scrolling through my unread folder in Newz Crawler, and what do I see but 40-odd reiterations of what might as well have been a form letter?

George R. R. Martin Sets A Date to Dance With Dragons

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS Release Date Announced

Release Date For George R. R. Martin's "A Dance With Dragons"!

A Dance With Dragons Coming July 12th, Honest It Is

...and so on.


I'm sure you can all imagine. We look at a lot of the same blogs, I would wager. And I'm perfectly happy with the blogs I do follow. But this sort of thing comes up far too often, and it really rubs me the wrong way.


A few of the guilty parties, I can sympathise with. There's the urge to be "first" with big news; I've done as much myself, on those rare occasions I'm on the ball enough to get in before the last whistle for breaking news sounds. There's the guaranteed bump in traffic that comes with even the sort of tangential mention of GRRM that there's been in this post. And there is of course the desire to inform one's audience.


That lattermost rationale... to a point, I can get behind it. The others, no; not really at all, I'm afraid. But even then, we're none of us - Pat perhaps excluded - io9s or Suduvus or even SF Signals. However many folks we might hope to reach, we can hardly cast a net as far and as wide as the aforementioned sites. And I think it's a reasonable presumption to make, that those of you reading this will also be hitting up io9 every few hours. Certainly more often than you are The Speculative Scotsman.


And I'm just fine with that. I update once or occasionally twice a day. In that timeframe io9 with its paid specialist staff will have put together more than 25 tidbits to entertain or inform you. So by the time I'd heard the news, thought about it long enough to have something to say, and found the time to say it, it would already have been - had I done so - old news. And old news, by its very definition, is hardly even news any more.


So what's the fucking point?


Is my point.


As far as I can see it, The Point is to offer a different - dare I say original - perspective on those announcements and developments one's readers might have an inkling of an interest it. We're not newshounds, however much we might play in a similar sandpit - though of course some bloggers have a better nose for news than others (here's looking at you, your Wertness) - and to simply repeat and repeat and REPEAT a certain few sentences is not. Blogging.


At least not as it I believe should be. Not from where I'm sitting.

Let me be clear here: I'm not calling out every blogger who blogged about the release date of A Dance With Dragons being announced. Far from it. In point of fact several of the blog posts resulting from the release of the release date - and that's all it was, in the end: a veritable Russian doll of teasing - were priceless:

• James thought, as indeed I do, that all the fuss was pretty ridiculous
• Amanda poked some well-deserved fun, as I might have done had I been a tad quicker off the mark
• And Adam, the Godsend, clarified a few uncertainties

Not every blogger, then. And not just those bloggers, either; if I've missed your erudite rebuttal I'm sorry, Newz Crawler and I are still playing catch-up. But those bloggers who couldn't even care to stop themselves long enough to offer a particular perspective on the news - and FYI, "YAY!!!" is not the sort of opinion I mean here - exactly what have they achieved except to waste your time and mine, not to mention their own?


I love bloggers. And there are a lot of bloggers I hold in the sort of esteem no-one writing for io9 gets from me - that sort of reporting is all very BBC News ticker, and though it has its place, I don't know that it's a particularly personable one. That's why I read blogs as well as news aggregators. For personalities. For perspectives. Not for facts. And certainly not for the same fact, forty times over.


Nobody did, but if you ask me, we either we need to shape up, get ourselves some actual opinions to go alongside all the bloody press releases, or learn our place, and steer clear of those sorts of posts. I tend to think the blogosphere would be a better entity either way.


Agreed?


I really do want to know. Should bloggers be blogging about news, do you think? Or would our time be better spent doing something more... productive?


###

Also: no doubt A Dance With Dragons will be totally effin' sweet, but you guys really need to get some IQ84 love on the go too.

Opinionated Speculations: On The Polity of Politics

So this thing came up on Twitter last weekend. A few particularly droll twitterers twittered that they'd twittered about it before, so I'll make no claims as to - God forbid - original thought, or even framing the argument in a way it hasn't been presented before. Make no mistake: I'm sure other people have said these very things, and perhaps in this very way!

So as I was saying, this thing came up on Twitter the other day. Except it didn't really come up on Twitter at all; I guess that was just where I thought out loud about it. It came up here, on Mark Charan Newton's blog - as, I might add, thoughtful and interesting things are often wont to. Mark begins with a disclaimer, saying "Neal [Asher] has been a science fiction writer for several years, and the quality of his books are not in dispute here," and that seems to me symptomatic of the thing that bothers me most about the whole discussion: the fear of stepping on a toe, of infringing on another's territory: of the mincing of words in a space that should be all about words, shouldn't it?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Mark's post is a systematic rebuttal of a blog post written by Neal Asher - author of (among many other novels) The Technician, one of Amazon UK's top ten bestselling SF&F books throughout 2010. Asher, as Mark asserted, "wishes to discredit Global Warming." And you know, it really seems he does. His argument is here, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Mark for caring to demonstrate its inadequacies; I for one applaud the fellow.

Asher is an influential gentleman, after all. The Technician is sandwiched between China Mieville's Kraken and The Passage by Justin Cronin in the aforementioned end-of-year list (published somewhat sickeningly before November's even upon us - though I suppose the advent calendars are out, and there's no sense fighting a losing battle). Those are some stonking good books - full reviews of each here and here - not to speak of bestselling, and for a bit there I was thinking perhaps I'd give Asher's latest a shot before the year's out. I've got a copy and The Technician's success teased full-blown curiosity from my mild intrigue... why not?

Why not indeed. Because it seems Neal Asher's politics - at least in terms of his opinion as regards climate change, which he gives every impression of believing to be left-wing bullshit - bother me. Of course, the politics, ideologies and prejudices of plenty of my friends and even (dare I say particularly) my family members bother me too. I'm not suddenly going to drop a mate or a mother because they think a thing I don't; a lonely life that would be...

But.

It's one thing to have an opinion. It's another to have an opinion, particularly as regards a hot-button issue like global warming, that you can back up. It's still another thing to perpetuate misinformation as if it were the truth because it fits with your perspective and to do so from a position of considerable influence.

Neal Asher can believe I and the others who share my beliefs a gaggle of liberal twits. That's fine. That wouldn't dissuade me from reading The Technician. But to assert that we're such because he's heard a bit of knock-off knowledge in the pub one night and deemed it absolute truth; to then use his status as a bestselling author in this climate of exponentially more intimate interaction between reader and writer to preach a bunch of potentially very harmful claptrap; and to do so without fact-checking his inherently controversial assertions even in the least... that does the trick, you know?

And I'm forthright enough to say so. Well blow me down.

You hear a lot of talk about objectivity, about consummate professionalism in what is - let's face it - an amateur arena, and I'm sorry, but I simply don't buy into it. Objectivity, as I tend to think I've said before, is a lovely idea, but be you a blogger, an author, a paid critic or an awards judge, who you are plays some part in what you read and do and say and think, what you like and dislike. I wouldn't have it any other way, for myself. When I read a person's thoughts and opinions, I'm buying into that person as much as the thing they're thinking and opining about. And I don't believe I'm alone in that. Particularly in this climate, where you can tweet Brandon Sanderson out of nowhere and HE GIVES YOU THE TIME OF DAY, by God.

I said it on Twitter, I'll say it again: I have to wonder, would I have given Tome of the Undergates a chance if it hadn't been for Sam Sykes seeming such an upstanding fellow on Twitter? Well, maybe. Probably, even; it was right up my street. But the fact that he said a few nice things, or funny things, the fact that from what I could see of him - as perceived through the filter of social media - he seemed a clever guy and a right nice bloke at that made me that much more amenable to cracking the covers of his (needless to say very fine) first novel.

Why, then, does it seem so very unacceptable to take into account the more negative stuff that Twitter and its ilk have opened the door to inasmuch as one absorbs the good? Can those authors employing social networking primarily to publicise and promote really have it both ways? Or is it that because we're so near to reaching out and touching these people who'd have been as good as Gods a decade ago, we're afraid to say a thing that might rub a dude whose books we respect the wrong way?

Don't misunderstand me. The Technician might be a brilliant book. I didn't think it was likely to be when my review copy came through the door a couple months ago - but I'm wrong, let's face it, rather a lot. It sure sounded like a lark. At this point, though, having read Neal Asher wax on about his own inconvenient truth - crucially in the face of the facts (such as they are) - makes me that much less likely to give his bestselling novel more than the time of day.

It could still happen.

If I'm honest, though, it probably won't. Not now.

Tell me: does that make me judgmental? Do I need, mayhap, to be reminded that in the end, the books are all that matters? Perhaps they were a decade ago, but can one really sustain such an isolationist perspective in this climate?

Opinionated Speculations: Thar Be Pirates

The great catch-up - wherein I endeavour to read all the emails and blog posts and comments to have come a-calling while I was on holiday there - the great catch-up... well, it goes.

Seems I missed a couple of almighty fusses. I'm already on the back foot as regards this so-called "Amazon review scandal," which seems to me a fine exemplar of the internet in action - and well worth bearing in mind the next time the internet assembles for such a petty, not to mention predictable set-piece - and there was the whole FOAF thing recounted on Haunted Legends editor Nick Mamatas' LJ. That properly got me going.

But alas, the internet. It moves a mile a minute, and for all that people profess they'd like to read about something other than what's hot and shiny and new, somewhat counter-intuitively, the internet also likes to bitch and moan and whine when someone dares to talk about something it's deemed in its infinite wisdom yawnsome old news.

So I won't bore you.

...what was I going on about again?

Ah yes. The great catch-up. So, whilst in the grips of the mighty Thunderbird and my RSS Reader, I came across an email from Celine Kiernan, author of The Poison Throne - full review here - as well as its sequels, The Rebel Prince and The Crowded Shadows. I'm sure a bunch of other bloggers did too, but as yet no-one (or at least no-one in my blogroll) seems to have given the point Celine raised therein the time of day. Shame on you all for that.

She blogged about it too, opening with the admission that "I've now lost count of the number of piracy sites that have my books up for illegal download as bit torrents or as pdfs or as so called e-books." Celine trots out the anti-piracy arguments as old as time, the same rationales people have met with utter disdain or at best disinterest since peer-to-peer filesharing paired with the woeful anonymity of the internet became a cause for concern. She trots them out and casts them aside, and well she should, because for all that the force is strong with them, and the logic sound, they - let's be frank - haven't made a whole hell of a lot of difference, have they? Instead, she asks:

"I'm just going to ask you to stop. OK? Stop stealing money from my pocket, sales from my reputation, and business from the legit booksellers and sites who legally support me and others like me. If you can’t afford to buy my work then, please, go to the library - at least they keep track of how many times the books are checked out - and those reports go back to my publishers, and believe it or not, that’s important."

And I applaud her courage. For standing up against the paramount immovable object of our era and saying her piece. She's certainly entitled to, and I'd go one further, say she's right to. Why? Because the oft-cited line between piracy and stealing isn't half as fine as pirates (what do you know?) would have you believe.

Let's do a little math.

Wait, no! Come back! It's only a little math...

So I went to Demonoid. Demonoid is perhaps the most prevalent private tracker out there; it's where you go for the good stuff, you know, as opposed to The Pirate Bay, which would be the torrent tracker of choice for stuff of interest to the great unwashed. I'll admit to having torrented a few things in my time - a few very specific things that I couldn't get my hands on otherwise, I hasten to add - and Demonoid has been my go-to whenever I've had need of an index of illicit things.

Anyway, I went to Demonoid, and I searched for Celine Kiernan. And much to my surprise - I hadn't honestly realised there was much interest in bootleg e-books - I got a result.

Here it is.

Now that's not a bloody invite to download The Poison Throne, you hear? What it is is one of - at last count - 40,904 e-books Demonoid are cool with you stealing. This is of particular import to us, I think. 'Us' here standing to mean fans of genre fiction. As a readership I think it's safe to say we're more interested in technology than most. Furthermore, we're more likely to be familiar with the ins and outs of filesharing via p2p networks. Thus, and this is just a guess, of those forty thousand torrents - and bear in mind they've only been counting since Demonoid wiped their servers of the millions of torrent files it had hosted before the government snarled in some legendary damn fool pirate's direction - perhaps 20,000 of those torrents are e-books likely to be of interest to you, and to me.

Now we're not even factoring in the teratorrents: those torrents indexing not just one file, and by extension one e-book, but many hundreds or thousands... all in one convenient click.

Nor are we going to look, for the sake of this little exercise, beyond Demonoid. This is a single server, and there are hundreds of prominent servers out there, each indexing their own versions of each torrent, each of which will likely have been downloaded as often as the aforementioned torrent of The Poison Throne. Which is to say, 764 times.

Let me repeat that: 764 people have downloaded The Poison Throne via Demonoid alone. Factor in a hundred other trackers with an e-book of Celine's novel each - and that's underestimating things some, I would wager - and we're looking at tens of thousands of pirated copies of The Poison Throne doing the rounds. Tens. Of. Thousands.

I'll put that in perspective for you. The top ten bestselling fiction novels recounted each week in The Times is pretty much the definitive bestsellers chart here in the UK - our paltry equivalent of the lists in The New York Times.

And I say paltry with good reason. Earlier in the year, Peter V. Brett - one of speculative fiction's biggest new authors - blogged that his second novel, The Desert Spear, had made it to number nine on the list. It took a bit of digging, but here's his post. Notice, as I did at the time, and much to my surprise, that all it took for The Desert Spear to be the ninth bestselling novel in the whole of the UK that week (the week of its release) was...

...wait for it...

1,475 copies. (As opposed to the 3,000 copies distributed by the darlings at Demonoid.)

Christ, that week the new Dan Brown only did shy of 3,000, and it was still the second most bought book in the whole of Britain. That revelation knocked me for six - seven even! - back in March. As does the thought today that if even a fraction of the people who have pirated The Poison Throne had put a few quid down for actual copies at an actual bookstore, Celine Kiernan would have been made. Her name would have been trumpeted from the tree-tops. Weather conditions notwithstanding, of course.

Instead... well. I have no idea how The Poison Throne did at retail - Orbit don't share their sales numbers with us, more's the pity. I'm sure it did fine. Sold as per expectations. But there's a reason expectations are so low: e-books have made a product that was once almost impossible to distribute in any other way than on paper pages (in books!) as vulnerable to piracy as MP3s and AVIs.

So why is no-one kicking up a stink about it? I ask you, where's the Metallica of SF&F gotten to?

...

I'm afraid I don't have an easy answer to those questions, and add to that: I tend to think I've gone on long enough for one afternoon anyway. I don't have an answer, per se, but never you fear, I do have a song for you all to sing while pondering over the great quandary of e-book piracy.

You might even know it:

If you go down to the Pirate Bay /

You're sure of a big surprise /

If you go down to the Pirate Bay /

You'd better go in disguise.

For ev'ry author that ever there was

will gather there for certain because /

Today's the day the pirates have

their goddamn hands lopped off for thieving!

Now Celine's a publisher author, a professional - if an exceedingly friendly one - so she has to be polite about this whole thing. I don't.

So... pirates? If you're reading this? You're helping to kill genre fiction. If not quite single-handedly, all the same, you're killing a lot of things that in turn mean a lot to me. And for that, fuck the lot of you.

Opinionated Speculations: eBooks and iPads

Over at his blog, Stephen Deas - author of The Adamantine Palace and The King of Crags, which The Speculative Scotsman will be reading shortly - answers a question that I've often pondered myself. Regarding e-books.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In and around the blogosphere, we hear a lot about e-books. In particular, Jeff C over at the wonderful Fantasy Book News and Reviews has much to say about the emerging medium, but there are others beyond him - and no shortage of them. In fact, there's enough talk about e-books and the various readers with which to consume said that of late, I've felt increasingly pressured to drop the however many hundreds of pounds I don't have and get with the damn programme.

To be perfectly honest, though, it's only lately that I've considered buying an e-book reader to read actual books on. I've had my eye on the market since the very earliest news of Sony's first piece of hardware; I had a real geek crush on that initial bit of tech, but in the end, I wasn't in a great place financially when it finally arrived on the market, so I didn't take the plunge. Besides which, my hope has always been for a colour reader that I could get back into comics through.

I used to read a whole bunch of comic books. These days, I don't, but not because I became disillusioned with the medium, or fell out of love at all. I only stopped buying my stack of Vertigo and indie efforts because of the sheer cost of them, firstly, and the incredible amount of space they'd begun to take up. There are very few comics I'd care to read more than once, ultimately, and I made such a pittance selling on those I didn't love enough to keep that the proposition just stopped making sense. I started on the graphic novels, but that didn't last either; the very same problems were inherent there, too.

As I say, I've never stopped wanting to read Fables, Finder or The Walking Dead, nor anything by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman, but before the recently announced iPad, the only available readers were black and white, and comics without colour would be like bread without butter. Hell with that, especially considering the expense.

With the iPad on the near horizon, however, the equation, for me, has changed. I'll certainly wait to see what support there is for e-comics before I trade the big bucks for what is essentially a tablet PC, but the temptation is greater now than ever before.

And yet, since I launched TSS in the New Year, the urge to buy an e-book reader of some description has changed again. There's the pressure I've already mentioned, but add to that the fact that I've been offered PDFs and epub files for review months in advance of actual printed proofs, and I've had no choice but to turn them down, with hat in hand and the excuse that I'm a veritable luddite when it comes to literature that isn't printed on trees. I feel like an old man who can't find his way around a keyboard - no offense intended to any computer illiterate old men who are reading, incidentally.

On Tuesday, a post from Stephen Deas prompted me to reconsider yet again. He reports that, at the annual Orion party, discussions were had regarding the actual market-share of e-books. Better you hear it from the horse's mouth. You can read the original article in its entirety here, but for your convenience, dear readers, a brief excerpt:

"Amid the Amazon vs. Macmillan malarkey, iPads and other shenanigans and the poorly advertised possibly-not-actually-a-fact that the e-book version of The Adamantine Palace will have something pushing 60,000 words of extra material in it, I’d somehow gained the impression that e-books were, somehow, well, y’know, important? Apparently not. According to Peter Roche, chief executive of the Orion Publishing Group, there is the possibility that e-books will expand greatly in 2010, possibly up to a whopping great 2% of total sales. Woo-hoo."

Now hang on just a minute. A 2% share of a market that's dwindling year-on-year would represent a great expansion? Well... I guess I'm not so behind the times at all.

I don't doubt that e-books will go on to become a much more significant endeavour, perhaps even to equal old-fashioned printed equivalents in the not-too-distant, but I'm truly staggered at the disparity between the frequent talk of them around the blogosphere versus the reality of what, when you come right down to it, is their miniscule appeal.

In light of Stephen's comments, I think it's safe to say I'll be waiting for the inevitable next iteration of Apple's no doubt soon-to-be ubiquitous iPad. Either that, or for the price of the initial model to come down far enough that I don't feel as if I'm wasting hard-earned on tomorrow's technology today. The comics I've missed have waited this long, and while I'll have to keep turning down offers of e-books for review, in the end, who doesn't prefer the reassuring solidity of a real novel anyway?

I'll get an e-book reader one of these days - I will! The only upshot of all this is: today just isn't that day.

On the other hand, did someone mention that there'd be an extra 60,000 words worth of content in the electronic edition of The Adamantine Palace? For those of you further ahead of the curve than I, that's a hell of a bonus...

Opinionated Speculations: Book Trailer Park

For the next bit of featured burbling here on The Speculative Scotsman, I have for you, dear readers, a topic that's been intriguing me increasingly over the last little while; a topic brought to mind during my much ballyhooed-about review of The Left Hand of God, which I was reminded of once more while browsing through the publicity materials that accompanied my review copy of A Dark Matter. That topic?

Namely, the book trailer.

We've all seen a few, I'm sure, but what purpose do they truly serve? Do we think they work, or is the book trailer a marketing tack too far?

Let's take a look at the short promotional video the PR wizards from Doubleday put together for Peter Straub's latest novel:

It's a quick one. To say it lasts for 30 seconds is to give the static powerpoint screens advertising the book's title and a few choice recommendations more credit, perhaps, than they deserve.

That said, let's take stock - from the perspective of someone who hasn't a clue about this book - of what little one might glean from the trailer for A Dark Matter.

Firstly, there's a run through the woods from a first-person perspective that can only recall The Blair Witch Project, which will surely bring to the savvy viewer's mind the concept of found footage - or in this case, a found manuscript, such as those recovered in House of Leaves and Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree. Someone is either running from something, or, conversely, chasing it; it's unclear which. Whatever the case, the visuals soon become distorted, and the viewer must understand that things have taken a turn for the worse.

Perhaps the only other notable aspect of this book trailer is its sound: an aurally twisted gladiatorial chant that ratchets up throughout before erupting into applause and a few wolf-whistles. The chant hardly sounds human, animalistic even. It unnerves, implicating the viewer in some sort of supernatural and/or horrific goings-on.

The trailer's last seconds are devoted to brief blurbs. We know, from these, that Stephen King and Michael Chabon enjoyed A Dark Matter. And from the brief scene that precedes their recommendations, we gather that Straub's latest novel is creepy, potentially supernatural metafiction in which something bad happens in the woods.

I haven't yet read enough of A Dark Matter to say, with any certainty, if the book trailer's assertions are correct. In the interim, however, a plot synopsis will suffice:

"The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.

"Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier."

So it's safe to say that yes, the essential elements alluded to by the book trailer for A Dark Matter are present and correct in the text itself - or, at the least, the outline of the text. And yet, for all that the audiovisual experience of the trailer implies certain key features of Straub's novel, I can't help but feel it obscures rather more than it illuminates. In the end, it takes about the same amount of time to read the product description on Amazon or wherever else, and that, surely, gives potential readers a better idea of what to expect from A Dark Matter. Where in the trailer, for instance, can viewers learn of Spenser's cult of sexuality?

Of course, product descriptions themselves are often rather unhelpful, deceptive in the particular parts of a text they foreground - the better to shift the damn things in the first place. I wouldn't make the argument that a sales pitch is any more reliable an indicator than a book trailer; neither, after all, are the creations of, in this instance, Peter Straub, but rather the marketers whose job it is to sell his novel to as large and diverse an audience as possible.

But book trailers such as that advertising A Dark Matter are, I feel, an abstraction too far. If a blurb represents a stripped-down version of a novel, and a book trailer is a second-hand interpretation of said reduced still further, what's left can hardly bear much resemblance to the text itself, and the text, at the end of the day, is what counts above all else.

I understand that the intent is to pitch a book to an attention-starved audience that isn't interested in blurbs - that a 30-second clip can be televised to reach further than any written sales pitch - but how effective are they in that regard? Is that segment of the market even the type to care about books? Let's be frank for a moment: people who first hear about the likes of a new Peter Straub from some ad between episodes of Ugly Betty or some such drivel are hardly the sort likely to invest the time and effort into reading a book as dense as A Dark Matter anyway. So who are such book trailers even for?

Here's another offender, this time for Stephen King's Under the Dome:

I won't waste my time and yours by subjecting this one to similar analysis as I did A Dark Matter. I post it only because I feel it's indicative of what book trailers seem to have become: desperate and often inaccurate appeals to the lowest common denominator.

But there are better examples of book trailers out there. From this, one of the very earliest, an award-winning short from Hoss Gifford advertising the truly breathtaking A Life of Pi by Yann Martel:

To this, a trailer for a steampunk YA novel you'll be hearing more about on The Speculative Scotsman shortly. Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld:

And finally, to this piece, in which Neil Gaiman himself narrates a brief pitch for The Graveyard Book:

For my money, each of the three ads above represent the better traits of book trailers, the things a little more thought can achieve. Rather than confusing the issue as the Peter Straub and Stephen King trailers did, they add a complementary dimension to the texts concerned that means, had I not already read and enjoyed each of these three novels, their respective advertisements would have certainly piqued my interest.

All the same, there is the thought that whatever their merits, book trailers could be said to rob readers of the pleasure of their own imagination. The implication that my mind's-eye simply isn't up to the task of realising the landscape of Leviathan or the unlikely situation Pi Patel finds himself stuck in could even border on the insulting.

But enough of my burbling - that's my $0.02 on book trailers. Over to you, then. Are book trailers a necessary evil in the era of web 2.0, or a marketing tack too far? Are they in any way effective, do you think, or are they borderline offensive?

Most of all, readers, I'd like to know whether you've ever been inspired to buy or read a novel because of a book trailer, and if the trailer left you feeling satisfied, or short-changed. Do chime in and let me know!

Opinionated Speculations: Writers Reviewing Bloggers

You've all read 'Righting the Left Hand of God', right?

If not, go do that. You'll also want to read the review of Paul Hoffman's eagerly anticipated fantasy debut that preceded it. Don't worry; it's not too much to get through, and hey, what better way is there to spend another dreary Monday than by shirking more pressing responsibilities?

Let's push forward on the presumption that if you're here, however, you're already familiar with the two posts Google Analytics tell me now reign supreme on The Speculative Scotsman - although before we do, let me thank everyone who's read the article, as well as those who were moved enough to tweet about it, link to it, or follow it up on their own blog, with their own thoughts. In the end, it's all about the conversation - the power that arises from this speculative collective - and I'm chuffed to bits to have contributed something to the endlessly stimulating dialogue that's followed.

But let's get on with the show.

In 'Righting the Left Hand of God', I discussed how the reception to my negative review of said novel had left me feeling a little conflicted; or, at the least, I certainly meant to. One way or another, to cut a long story short, I didn't launch The Speculative Scotsman in order to bully readers into buying or not buying a book - any book - based solely on my say-so.

Now far be it from me to suggest that any of the readers who said in the comments section of said review that they would no longer be buying The Left Hand of God made that decision based on a single blogger's opinion. I'm sure that wasn't the case, but equally, it's not impossible that in some cases, my thoughts on Hoffman's much-hyped novel represented the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. And no wonder: that camel's got to be exhausted by now, trotting back and forth with all the world's expectations on its shoulders like the first man to set foot on the moon, albeit with humps. And straw.

So. Tome of the Undergates author and seemingly frequent TSS visitor Sam Sykes posted his thoughts on the questions raised in part in 'Righting The Left Hand of God' on his own site, which I'd advise you bookmark or add to your RSS readers right this second.

I don't want to repost his entire blog, so go read his response, 'Do Y'all Wanna Talk About Reviews?' - and then, dear reader, return to me, for I have things yet unsaid to say.

To surmise: Sam - perhaps a little nervous over the perception that if bloggers don't like his highly anticipated debut, people might be dissuaded from buying it - doesn't think that a single recommendation, or indeed a warning not to go near a certain novel, is worth overly much. I find myself agreeing with Sam disturbingly often, and this surely isn't the ideological crossroads at which we must part ways; he's right.

I'm not the magical Scotsman that has been suggested elsewhere, nor need my English degree be any sort of validation of the opinions I presented here on the blog; assuredly, the university I studied at is no universally renowned bastion of education, though I suppose it's a step up from the drive-through colleges you can buy diplomas a dime a piece from. That said, there's nothing more or less valid about my reactions to a novel than any other blogger's. TSS is but a single voice, and though I'm not afraid sing a different tune here than other writers and readers might, that's only because, at the end of the day - as they say - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What makes a book great to me isn't necessarily what would make a book great to you; my opinions are my own, and I promise you, I'll think no less of you if you do not share them.

Anyway, never one to say a little when I could say a lot, I've only really written all of the above to somehow justify with sheer verbosity my reposting of the lengthy comment I made on Sam's blog, as follows:

"Be it good press or bad, if people are talking about your book, if there's buzz of any sort surrounding its release, there's got to be a greater chance that the average Joe or Jane will recognise it when he or she is window-shopping in Waterstones or browsing in Borders. People aren't like lemmings - as Sam says, we can and should be making up our own minds about whether or not a particular thing appeals to us, be it a book, a film, new food or fashion. As far as books go, a review, whether positive or negative, serves firstly to give people who otherwise wouldn't look twice that first incentive to pick up, say, The Left Hand of God, or indeed, Tome of the Undergates, and make their own decisions according to their own criteria.

"And though a part of me rebels against it, there is that other point that no-one's quite making. The Speculative Scotsman may only be a month and change old, but I've been lurking amongst the community for years, and as such I don't think I would be far off-base to say that a negative review on a blog, any blog really, seems to be an uncommon thing. It's not like there's a chance Orbit or Gollancz would stop sending ARCs to The Guardian or The Times if either made a habit of ripping their publications to shreds - the exposure is just too valuable - but as far as blogs go, I imagine things are quite different.

"Bloggers are in the unenviable position of either buying just the books they want to read, and therefore leaning necessarily towards covering only those novels that they're likely to react positively to, or relying on publishers to send them a selection of the good, the bad and the ugly alike. In that latter case, the bloggers in question must then decide how important the relationships he or she has with those publishers are before publicly savaging a book they've particularly disliked. There's certainly bad press to be had in the blogs, but largely I think it's a case of good press to be lost.

"Now I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that blogs which rely on ARCs and the like are dishonest - I'd only be shooting myself in the foot, let's be frank - but I feel there's an important point to be made in amongst all that thinking-out-loud. At the end of the day, I don't necessarily trust a good review in the way that I do a negative perspective; a reviewer has nothing to lose by saying nice things about something, and much to gain. A bad review, on the other hand, will do him or her no favours - it's akin to biting the hand that feeds. Suffice it to say I don't imagine any attempts I make to establish a working relationship with Michael Joseph, the UK publishers of The Left Hand of God, will meet with much success. For a book to be met with indifference or outright negativity, therefore, there have got to be some real problems for a blogger to take that chance.

"Of course, none of that changes the fact that ultimately, readers must make their decisions for themselves. Better that they're informed decisions, though, and better still that they're decisions made bearing in mind the advice of bloggers whose reactions in the past have been similar to your own.

"But for me, for the reasons outlined above, when I'm looking to add to my collection of books, a single bad review carries substantially more weight than a single good review."

Of course, the larger part of that comment is a story for another time, and that time is not now. I've burbled enough for one day.

But do, dear readers, let me know what your thoughts are on these issues in the comments. Are bad reviews bad things? Do they impact your perception of a book more than a good review might? Can bloggers be considered a source of legitimate criticism if there's anything to the above-mooted opinion? At that, is there anything to it?

Discuss!