Letters From America | With A Little Help From My Friends

So, the story so far: last Wednesday, I left for America.

I will be back eventually!

 

More's the pity, I expect; such are the height of my hopes about this improbably long holiday. But one way or another, I'll be gone a good wee while, and it must say sort of a lot about me that one of the first things I thought, when this Stateside sabbatical suddenly solidified in the middle of February, was: what in the world will I do about the blog?

 

For a fair while there, I wondered. I seriously considered spending a few serious weeks at the keyboard coming up with a full month's worth of content in advance of my departure, but in the end, with the teaching I do to make ends meet and everything else, it simply wasn't realistic. Then I thought: why not repost a few old articles... make a kind of greatest hits thing of it?

That was a poor plan. I put it with my other poor plans: in a document marked TO NOT DO.

 

At some point during this period, it occurred to me that I was overlooking what must be far and away the most fun and informative of all my options. Guest bloggers!

Now I've certainly hosted a couple of guest posts here on The Speculative Scotsman in the past, but only very occasionally, and mostly only from authors whose writing I admire. It had simply never crossed my mind that I might be in a position to ask the bloggers I've become friends with in the process of keeping this site for a helping hand.

 

When it did - just a few weeks ago, really - I didn't hang about. But nor did I reply all to the many and various folks featured in my inbox. I may only have met a few of 'em, but I know more people now, through doing this lovely thing that I love - did I mention that? - than I ever have in my life. And for all that I'm away for an entire month, I couldn't feasibly co-ordinate guest posts from everyone I found myself in a position to ask.

 

So I made a list of some of my very favourite bloggers. Then I crossed out the folks who predominantly write about other things than speculative fiction... then everyone who had (in my arbitrary estimation) large readerships in their own right... then everyone whose circumstances would have ruled them out from contributing in any case.

 

I was left with a list of twenty-odd perfect potential guest bloggers. And to my sheer surprise and delight, almost everyone I touched base with - with a few understandable exceptions - seemed happy that I'd asked, and happier still to help out.

 

Thus, the coming month. From tomorrow, as a matter of fact, you'll be treated to an assortment of voices that may or may not be new to you. I certainly hope they aren't, but if they are, I hereby wholeheartedly recommend you follow them over to their own blogs. I regularly read the work of every one. Their sites are all on my blogroll - or they surely should be - and coming from a Scotsman, that's a stamp of absolute approval.

 

On the day, I will of course introduce each of the coming contributors in turn, and even burble a bit about why you should be reading their blogs. Because you really, really should be, first and foremost, but also because it's the least I can do, given all the bother they've gone to on my - and your - behalf.

 

So please, everybody, be nice! :)

 

In short, I may be AFK for almost the entirety of April, but expect The Speculative Scotsman as a site to be better than ever for the duration.

 

And one last thing before I finally give the floor over. I'll be keeping as close an eye on the site as I can while I'm away, and the plan - as it stands - is to stop in each and every week to keep you all up to speed on a miscellany of my misadventures in America. Time permitting, I should have the first of those posts ready for Friday.

 

 

But between now and then? Some truly terrific stuff, beginning tomorrow with a review of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson from the marvelous Mieneke of A Fantastical Librarian. If you enjoy it and everything else that's in the pipeline a fraction as much as I've loved arranging it all, you'll have a hell of a time in my absence, make no mistake.

With which, as they say in the States - or at least the one I'm in at moment - I'll see y'all! :)

But I Digress | My Hand Hurts, Blogger to Blame

So much has happened since we last spoke. So much that - just this once - I might have to be brief.

Yes, yes. I know: what a turn-up for the books!

For starters, then, blogger.com was dead for a day, during which time one could actually hear the self-satisfied smirks of WordPress devotees the world over. You didn't even have to listen closely to pick out the sounds...

But as of now, Blogger is - thank the dead - back. That is, pretty much. Some of the posts I had scheduled to go live during the downtime - not to mention most of the comments made on articles from this past week - seem to have made good on a daring escape attempt into the wild blue yonder.

And you know what? I might as well wish them happy travels. Because there's bigger news.

Well, bigger news for me. See, I've sliced the hell out of my hand.

Not by design, I hasten to add. Least, I hope it wasn't; certainly I didn't come upon this great gash according to the machinations of one or another of my deeply dastardly plans - which are legion, needless to say.

But before a thorough investigation can be made into the particular circumstances surrounding this attack against all that is Scottish, for simplicity's sake, we're going to say I had myself something of an accident. Involving a broken Pyrex dish and my right hand. Involving a broken Pyrex dish in my right hand.

Long story short, it hurts to type.

It also hurts to play video games, or hold a book the way I usually do, or button up my jeans. It hurts to carry my morning coffee through to the computer, and writing silly notes to my better half on the message board on the kitchen wall is quite out of the question, I'm afraid. By the great Google, it hurts!

Anyway, updates might be a bit thin on the ground, going forward. For one thing there won't be an edition of The BoSS on the blog tomorrow, as per the usual schedule, and I don't have a great deal of here's-one-I-made-earlier posts either... though of course you can have whatever there is in the vault.

And I'll keep tap-tapping away at the reviews I've been working on of late while I'm out for the count - which shouldn't be for too long, in truth - however I imagine my progress will be painfully slow... that is if the time it's taken me to get this paltry status update together is anything to judge by. We'll see, I suppose.

Meantime, I've remembered how much I adored the album Shooter Jennings did with Stephen King, and that's going to be the soundtrack to whatever meagre feats I might achieve today. Perhaps even some reading.

So. I'll be absent for a little while. Just heed this one warning, please: while I'm away, whatever you do, don't feed the animals.

Chocolate watches to everyone who caught that reference, incidentally. To claim your prizes, send stamped, addressed envelopes marked "The Heirophant and I" to...

*faints conveniently*

The Index Updateth

Just a quick post to remind you all of the review index. It's somewhere over there on the sidebar, sure, but for myself, I haven't noticed it for months, so I thought I'd bring the old beast out for one more turn in the spotlight.

Not to mention I spent some of last night updating it - for the first time in since April! What a disorganised blogger I've been...

Anyway. If you ever come along to The Speculative Scotsman and there's nothing new for you to read, or else nothing terribly interesting, or if you're thinking of buying a book and you want to know a little more about it before you put down the dough, don't forget the review index. It's not even six months old and it's got links to about 100 reviews already, across video games, film and (of course) literature, lovingly arranged in alphabetic order. So:

Index of Reviews on TSS

Go there, and be merry.

If that isn't enough to tide you over, you might also think to drop by another handy collection of speculative fiction reviews. The Epic Fantasy Review Index over at Genre Reader has just been spring cleaned, and it's well worth your time to stop by and see what it has to offer. I'm going to let Jeff explain it to you himself.

With that, adieu!

Stepping Out On Speculative Fiction

If you'll tolerate it, fair readers, a moment of your time.

You might have noticed something funny going on with The Speculative Scotsman these past few weeks. Perhaps, if you've been paying particularly close attention, you'll have noted an unusual lack... a lack where not so long ago there was an abundance. I've talked about Bioshock Infinite, reviewed Limbo and Splice, speculated rather more often than was perhaps wise about Guillermo del Toro's mysterious video-game venture (turns out he's working with THQ, so all was for naught anyway).

Do you see the missing link?

As well out with it than in, I guess: I have a confession to make. Go easy on me, gentle readers, for I have been unfaithful. I've been stepping out on speculative fiction. In literature, that is. A couple of weeks ago, after reading the first fifteen pages of a handful of appealing-looking books and finding my interest not at all piqued, I realised I must be suffering from a case of fantasy burnout. My first. And what a bitch it's been to shift.

Seven months and seventy books into 2010 - hey, that a lot for me! - I couldn't just go back to my idle old ways, much as I might have liked to. So I tried reading outside my comfort zone. My literary diet tends, I'm afraid, to consist of fantasy, fantasy, sci-fi, fantasy, fantasy, horror, fantasy, fantasy, and so on. These past few weeks, behind the iron curtain, I've tried to radically alter that pattern; the better to whet my appetite for the good stuff you all want to hear about. So I read Anne Holt's 1222, a Norwegian locked-room murder mystery coming from Corvus in December. I read The Newgate Jig, a Victorian crime thriller by Anne Featherstone Hodder's sister company John Murray are publishing in early September. I read The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann. You'll hear about a few of these at a later date. The others I read not with potential coverage in mind, but to cleanse my literary palette.

And it worked. Slowly but surely, I found myself coming back to the beginning, rested, refreshed and rearing to go. A Dead Space novelisation, Martyr by B. K. Evenson, rather disappointed my renewed expectations, but between Lauren Beukes' incredible Zoo City and The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton (in readiness for The Evolutionary Void's release in a just a few, short weeks), I was won over to the cause of speculative fiction all over again.

Make no mistake: I'm ready, once more, to sink my critical teeth into some epic fantasy - either The King's Bastard or The Black Prism, I can't decide. In any event, the services you've come to expect from TSS will thus be resumed. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact.

So I stepped out on speculative fiction, and the time away, pleasant though indeed it was, only made me miss my genre of choice all the more. And now I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a regular thing of this genre-neutral jaunt. Maybe every three or four months, a couple of books that don't meet the definition of speculative fiction would do wonders to reenergise my enthusiasm for the mode of storytelling I find myself so devoted to.

And I'm wondering: am I late to the party? Do you guys do something similar, from time to time? Take a little time out only to come back feeling like there's ass to be kicked? Or does the break leave you wishing your reading habits weren't so predictable? In short...

How often do you stray from speculative fiction?

Reviewing Reviewers' Reviews

I'm given to understand The Left Hand of God finally made its bow in the US. Now a whole other continent can get a copy of the year's worst fantasy that much more easily! To my American readers: I do not envy you the disproportionate hype that will inevitably accompany its release.

But hear ye, and hear ye well. I'm not going to gripe about The Left Hand of God today. Indescribably tempting though it is, at this point I must have dedicated more words to debating that book on The Speculative Scotsman than any other. Tigana might be the reason I started blogging in the first place. The Passage might be my favourite read of the year. It's The Left Hand of God that I keep coming back to, though. Time and again, it seems to resurrect itself in my mind as a springboard for interesting discussion. As in this case...

Last week, over at Only the Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Seak read and reviewed Paul Hoffman's execrable fantasy. He didn't love it, nor did he hate it - but that's neither here nor there, really. When I read The Left Hand of God, I turned its first pages with great expectations. The publicity blitz - the millions of pounds spent on advertising, the iPhone app, the book trailer - had seen to that. There are an uncountable number of fantasies that I simply don't have time to read each year, but here was one, and at the very start of 2010, that I simply couldn't afford to miss. Or so I was led to believe.

Seak, on the other hand, as well as - going from the comments on his review - several other speculative fiction fans, has come at The Left Hand of God from an entirely different angle. I don't know that I was the first blogger to rail against Hoffman's book, but clearly enough of us did to effectively counterbalance the hype with negative expectations aplenty. Seak went into The Left Hand of God expecting it to be awful, and though he admits it was "not without its flaws, overall [he] enjoyed" it.

So Seak's experience with The Left Hand of God, and thus his review, was coloured by his expectations - not the expectations generated by the manufactured buzz, as in my case earlier in the year, but by actual reviews of Hoffman's novel. Like mine.

All of which brings up an interesting question, though I'm afraid this is mostly one for the other bloggers reading this pint-sized diatribe.

As reviewers, do you read other reviewers' reviews before composing your own?

For myself, I do everything in my power to ensure that I don't. Which isn't a slight on those bloggers who do - I intimately understand the temptation to check one's own opinion against the general consensus for fear you're way off base - it's only to say that I want the reviews I write to be reflections of my personal experiences, however against the grain they may be in some cases. I worry that my own opinions might subconsciously shift to more closely align with those others I've read or heard were I to read what Adam or Ken or Aidan or Larry or any of other bloggers whose judgment I respect were to say. I try so hard to maintain a sense of subjectivity, in fact, that I have an RSS reader which nearly chokes every time I load it because it's so backlogged full of reviews I won't let myself read - yet.

So what about you guys?

Publishing Apocalypse... Now

"In the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes."

So says Benjamin Franklin, whom I understand to be some sort of semi-important historical figure. I hear he's even on money in the States! Thus, I can only conclude he's the American equivalent of our own Robert Burns.

The Speculative Scotsman is perhaps not the most appropriate venue for a discussion of taxes, but Franklin's other sure thing seems to coming up a lot these days. Spend any amount of time on the internet reading about books, video games, movies, CDs, TV... whatever you please, in fact, and sooner or later - very likely sooner in this age of miserable navel-gazing - someone, somewhere is going to be predicting the death of it.

So what's dying today?

Well, publishing, of course. Of late, it's become almost vogue to gainsay the imminent demise of publishing. And I suppose it's not difficult to see why: what with the widespread adoption of eBook readers and the addition of the iPad to an already rather overbalanced equation, it seems that more and more, people are reading elsewhere, if they're reading at all. Sales are down across the board, self-publishing is up, up, up.

As Garrison Keillor writes in his column for the Baltimore Sun:

"Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

"And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a website. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you've got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75."

Of course he's going a point - publishing, as we know it, is perhaps dying. But it's difficult to discern Keillor's meaning in amongst all the grumpy old man moaning. So what is it that's killing publishing, Garrison? Is it the text-speak? The economy? The bloggers? The internet?

What a lot of horse. Here's another of his so-called gripes:

"Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I'm sorry you missed it."

This is priceless stuff, isn't it?

Clearly, if you don't write your manuscript on a typewriter, it isn't worth the paper it isn't written on. If you communicate via email or use word processing software, you're an amateur.

The man obviously wants to make a fuss. His use of inflammatory language is a deliberate ploy to stir the pot. Publishing is assuredly not, as Keillor would have it, dying. It is only changing - as all things do. That it is not what it once was, that the industry has had to adapt to new technology, new media, new modes of communication, is symptomatic not of the end - woe betide us all - but of evolution.

Over on Flavorpill - thanks to Robert Jackson Bennet for the link - Judy Berman has touched base with a bunch of industry professionals to see what they had to say about Keillor's shameless attention-seeking. If all this doomsaying has gotten you half as riled up as it has me, I'd urge you to click on through and read the responses for yourself. But let me end on a particularly choice rebuttal, from literary agent Colleen Lindsay:

"It is his snobbery that got publishing into this mess. He talks about the coveted New York Times, but the Times doesn’t review the books that keep publishing alive. He is afraid of genre fiction. Publishing isn’t dying, it is evolving, and evolution hurts... Werewolf and vampire porn saved publishing."