Bargain Books | Graham Joyce, Stormwatcher

Though it's taken a bit of a backseat because of his illness, Graham Joyce updated his blog the other day with news about his current work in progress; thoughts on the shortlisting of The Year of the Ladybird for the August Derleth Award; a reminder, not unrelatedly, of The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit's release date; and, of most interest to me at the moment, a pointer towards the e-book edition of his famously "lost" novel.

Wait, his what?

Well, that's what I thought. Over to the author to explain:

I call it lost because it was one of those that fell between one editor going and another coming in the UK, and was never properly published in the US either. It’s an important novel to me because I was trying to push the envelope of what I could do with that mix of magical or supernatural elements and a focus on domestic relationships, and trying hard not let the one value preside over the other. You’ll know I’m still working on that! It comes with an introduction in which I talk about what happens to a book when you lose your editor (fired, head-hunted, absconded, incarcerated or whatever); and about first trying to find a way of writing character-driven supernatural stories.

"A quietly supernatural thriller set in the Dordogne region of France in which a group of somewhat dysfunctional friends spend a two-week holiday in a lonely cottage," The Stormwatcher appears to have been written immediately after The Tooth Fairy—my first Graham Joyce novel, and a brilliant British Fantasy Award winner—before being published in 1997 "not in secret, but with the very opposite of a fanfare."

That's fair. I care, and I wasn't even aware of its existence.

In any event, The Stormwatcher has finally been made widely available... and about time too. You can—and you should, I'm sure—pick up a copy of the digital edition for your Kindle for a couple of quid. Go forth and ghost, folks!

Guest Post | "The Once and Future Dragon" by James Maxey

Last week, the Dragon Apocalypse trilogy by James Maxey — comprising Greatshadow, Hush and Witchbreaker — was released as a DRM-free download. Ever since, several Solaris sorts have been celebrating its long-awaited liberation over on When Gravity Falls by reflecting on their favourite dragons in film and literature.

I figured I'd go one further and ask the man himself how and why dragons came to fascinate him.

Take it away, James!

***

I’m a little obsessed with dragons. They’ve played major roles in seven of my novels to date, and should you ever visit my house, you’ll find dragons watching over the driveway, climbing on my shelves, and peeking out from among my books. Why do they fascinate me so?

There’s the mythic element, of course. Dragons are found in the legends and artwork of many cultures around the world. They often symbolize nature as the embodiment of storms, oceans, or forests. Even today, who can look at a volcano belching fire and smoke, shaking the earth  with powerful rumbles, and not imagine some great slumbering beast stirring to life?

Of course, in Christian mythology, volcanoes are forever tied to images of Hell, a landscape of flowing lava and unbearable heat, reeking of sulfur. Perhaps this is why Satan himself is portrayed in Revelations as “that old great dragon.” The mythical reptile becomes not just an efficient predator, but the eternal foe of God himself, the avatar of destruction waiting to wipe out all life and goodness.

I play a lot with these ideas in my books. In my dragon apocalypse series, Greatshadow is the living manifestation of all flame. His malignant intelligence spies upon mankind through every candle flame, watching for one moment of carelessness to leap out and devour entire villages. The Church of the Book has decided to rid mankind of Greatshadow’s menace, and assemble a team of twelve powerful warriors to slay the ancient beast once and for all. Among all the carnage that follows once the team begins their quest, I try to explore the larger question of whether the human desire to tame and control nature is always beneficial. Are there times when it’s best to learn to live in harmony with these dangerous forces?

While the symbolic nature of dragons is valuable to me as a writer, I still ponder the universal appeal of dragons. For this, I turn not to myth, but to science. Evolutionary biology has left us with relics of ancestors that have outlived their usefulness, like the goose bumps that rise on our skin when we’re frightened, attempting to bristle fur that we no longer possess. What if some of these relics exist within our brains? Our tiny, tree-dwelling, lemur-like forebears had good reason to be instinctively skittish of a whole range of predators. They had to watch out for large birds swooping down from above, beware of snakes slithering among the branches where they lived, and worry about large cats skulking in the shadows, ready to pounce. Early primates with an inborn fear of hawks, snakes, and tigers had a better chance of passing on their genes than primates without this fear. Is it so odd to think that, millions of years later, our fear of these primeval predators still lurks within us?

If you blend together the wings of an eagle, the scales of a serpent, and the claws and musculature of a lion, you get a creature looking very much like a dragon. They are the sum of our natural predators.

The possibility that dragons have their roots in biological realities raises interesting possibilities. Were there ever creatures that existed in nature that could pass for dragons? Archaeopteryx is a good candidate with its wings, long next, and toothy jaws. Of course, its fearsomeness is somewhat diminished by the fact it was little larger than a blue jay.  Still, there’s no reason to think that a winged creature big enough to qualify as a dragon couldn’t fly. Some fossils of Quetzalcoatlus show that it had a wingspan of fifty feet. Within the relatively short span of time that men have been upon the earth, there have still been birds with wingspans in the twenty feet range. I imagine it would be quite thrilling to look at an animal the size of a small plane soaring overhead, but, alas, large birds went the way of most megafauna, driven to extinction partly by the advance of mankind. But, if our ancestors proved ruthlessly effective at wiping out large animals, modern man is on the verge of bringing some of these lost species back via cloning. It’s not wild fantasy to dream that we’ll one day visit wildlife parks populated by wooly mammoths, Tasmanian tigers, or dodos. 

Some would argue that we shouldn’t play God in resurrecting dead species. But, giving our increasing proficiency at manipulating DNA, I would say the more intriguing question is whether  we should give birth to species that have never before existed. Would it really be so difficult to mix a little goat DNA with a horse and wind up with something very much like a unicorn? Would it be such a stretch to tinker with a turkey until it once more had teeth? The day will come when a kid sitting at a computer will be able to tweak and edit a strand of DNA into all sorts of fantastical creations. Biological printers will be able to assemble the double helix gene by gene. Mankind collectively has contributed to the mass extinction of millions of species. Once we perfect the technology, might we give birth to just as many new species? The days when knights ride out to test their mettle against dragons might not be a vision of our mythic past. It just may be what waits in our future.

(If I may slip in one last shameless plug, the idea that men may one day be the ancestors of dragons is the foundational premise of my Dragon Age fantasy series. The first book, Bitterwood, is now available a free download on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, and many other fine ebook outlets. Bitterwood was also recently released in audio format, available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.)

***

Thank you, James, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman to talk a bit about your continuing fascination with dragons. I'm entirely glad I asked.

Now why don't you all go read Greatshadow? It's bloody good fun, AND it has dragons.

Bargain Books | The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

It's an understatement to say that Night Shade Books has been through the ringer in recent years — and not for no reason. The ex-management's attitude to its authors as well as silly little things like contracts and royalties and what not was (as has been documented in excruciating detail elsewhere) abominable.

I'll say this, though: since the small press was acquired by Skyhorse and Start, I think things have been looking up. Speaking as a blogger rather than an author, working with the company in any capacity was next to impossible for me before it was auctioned off — I gather I was blacklisted after speaking out against the publisher way back when in 2010 — but last month a representative got in touch to see if I'd be interested in a fresh start of sorts, and I agreed, seeing no reason to bear a grudge against Night Shade Books' new bosses.

Didn't hurt that they had a few beautiful-looking new books on the slate, not least The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron:

Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.  

Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including "Blackwood's Baby," "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven," and "The Men from Porlock," The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Having got my grubby paws on a physical copy a week or so ago, I can say with absolute certainty that The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is well worth the money. It would be a fine investment at full price, in fact, but from the time of this writing (I'm told) till the end of October, you can grab the Kindle edition of this brand new and rather brilliant collection for just $2 on Amazon.com.

How's that for a bargain book? And timely, too, what with All Hallows on the horizons...

Quoth the Scotsman | Patrick Ness on the Printed Page

A couple of Quoth the Scotsmans ago, I featured an excerpt from The Explorer by James Smythe—a fine novel, no?—which revolved around the inimitable feeling of reading. I'd like to return to that idea today, if I may, via a passage from The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness... coming soon from Canongate in the UK.

The main character in The Crane Wife is an older gentleman called George, and in his spare time, George is a bit of an artist. But he doesn't paint or draw or sculpt... he cuts. Not himself! No, he makes cuttings from books he finds in bargain bins at charity shops.

That's really all you need to know to follow the following, which is taken from the first act of Ness' phenomenal new novel:

To take his blade and cut into the pages of a book felt like such a taboo, such a transgression against everything he held dear, George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it. 

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He'd never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no email from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. the edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark—fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper—moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut. 

And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim. George's whim was simple—by author, chronological within name—but over the years he'd also done it by size, subject matter, types of binding. All of them there on the shelves, too many, not enough, their stories raging within regardless of a reader.  

[...] 

He had seen a story once about sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Unbelievably gorgeous creations, sometimes just a metre across, sometimes big as a room. Different colours of sand, painstakingly blown in symmetrical patterns by monks using straw-like tubes, building layer upon layer, over the course of weeks, until it was finished. At which point, in keeping with Buddhist feelings about materialism, the mandala was destroyed, but George tended to ignore that part. 

What was interesting to him was that the mandala was meant to be—unless he'd vastly misunderstood, which was also possible—a reflection of the internal state of the monk. The monk's inner being, hopefully a peaceful one, laid out in beautiful, fragile form. The soul as a painting. 

The books on George's walls were his sand mandala. When they were all in their place, when he could run his hands over the spines, taking one off the shelf to read or re-read, they were the most serene reflection of his internal state. Or if perhaps not quite his internal state, then at least the internal state he would like to have had. Wheich was maybe all it was for the monks, too, come to think of it. 

And so when he made his very first incision into the pages of a book, when he cut into an old papterback he'd found lying near the rubbish bins behind the shop, it felt like a blundering step into his mandala. A blasphemy, a desecration of the divine. Or, perhaps, a releasing of it. (pp.60-61)

This is a sentiment near and dear to my heart indeed. I flatly refuse to even fold over the pages of a novel to mark my place... never mind taking a knife to one. The horror!

In any case, I'll be reviewing The Crane Wife in full on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who's read Patrick Ness in the past that it's simply stunning stuff.

Now, to stroke the spines of a few good books...

Quoth the Scotsman | James Smythe on Physical vs. Digital

Since the dawn of The Speculative Scotsman, e-books have gone from the margins to the mainstream.

I remember seeing video of a prototype of Sony's first e-book reader at CES years and years ago, and thinking this could change everything. I wanted one then and there... but when the time came that I could actually buy one, I held my horses.

I told myself was waiting for the next iteration. Then when the next iteration became available, I told myself... something else.

Eventually, however, be damned my doubts: I had my heart's desire. Not a Kindle, oh no! Ever the contrarian, I bought myself an Asus Transformer tablet, which - though it's beginning to look a little long in the tooth - I still use to this day. Primarily to read comics on, and e-books when needs must.

I'm just not a lover of electronic literature, by and large. I mean, I'll make do with an e-book - and these days, I often find myself with e-ARCs instead of physical proofs - but it simply isn't the same.

Before the tech savvy tell me what my problem is, I actually don't find the resolution of the text my tablet renders to be a problem. But I do mind the sluggishness of my micro-library. And I do wish Amazon would come the hell on and incorporate some of the software-side features of the Paperwhite line into the Kindle app.

But here I am having trouble articulating why I find e-reading such a sterile experience, when this whole post  is supposed to showcase a quote that captures my feelings exactly. It's from The Explorer by James Smythe, who's been rereading Stephen King for The Guardian recently, and it's short, but sweet:

"I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn't tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it's a satisfaction all in itself." (p.251)

Well said, James Smythe! I agree completely.

But who's with us, I wonder?

Ironically, the e-book of The Explorer is out on December 20th in both the UK and the US, but Harper Voyager aren't distributing the paperback till January 2013.

The far-flung future, in other words. :P

Never mind my trumpeting about time: I'll be reviewing The Explorer on tor.com shortly, and - spoiler alert - it's incredible. But resist the temptation, readers: wait for the physical edition!

Science Faction | Why Do Old Books Smell So Good?

Despite my initial resistance to books, the new breed, I do actually own an e-reader. We've talked about it before. In point of fact, it's a tablet in disguise - the original Transformer, if you must know - but after a period of experimentation with Aldiko and several other alternatives, the increasingly full-featured Kindle app has served me very well.

Well enough that these days, the ratio of my reading habits - which is to say the number of e-books I read versus the number of tree-books - is fast approaching 1:1. That said, if I love a book, I'll buy the hardcover, regardless of whether or not I already own an electronic copy. This has become something of an issue in itself... but it's not the issue I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about today is why I still tend to buy tree-books over e-books. There are many reasons, really, but whenever I have to rationalise my fondness for physical copies, one of the first factors I look to is, oddly, the aroma of a beloved old book. The savoury scent of printed paper. The musty wonders of something second-hand. The way that a simple smell can take you back years - decades, even - to the time you first read through a particular book. A favourite, say.

Speaking of which, I have a mind to spend a minute sniffing my first edition of The Scar, but for the sake of this bitty blog post - already many weeks in the making - I'll resist.

Now I'm not a complete idiot. I don't lead with my nose in altogether too many of my decisions, but when it comes to books, the smell of an old paperback means a great deal to me. Or rather, it did... before I watched the short video embedded below, which aims to explain some of the starter science behind that marvelous musk.

Fair warning and all: this clip has taken the wind out of my sails somewhat, so watch it at your own peril.

So how about now? Still love the smell of old books? Even now you know the aroma is essentially a combination of chemical reactions and rot?

Sniffing The Scar will never be the same again! :/

The Best Things In Life | From Tor.com, With Love

Valentine's day, eh?

It's an especially happy day for couples, of course, but equally, Valentine's day must be a depressing occasion for many, many others - for all those folks who don't have some kindred spirit to share it with, for instance... and all so chocolatiers and florists can stay in business through the lastmost moments of winter! The greedy gits.

But never mind me: look to tor.com. In honour of the occasion, they've put together a short anthology - namely the 2011 edition of Some of the Best From Tor.com - and released it, for free, to e-book readers around the world.

Actually, that's a lie. Sure, if you're in the United States, you can have it - for now - for nothing, but if (like me) you're based in Europe or the UK, or anywhere outside of America, I expect, you're plum out of luck, pal.

International rights issues like this have been a source of some small frustration to me recently. Most notably I'm still desperate to read The Butcher of Anderson Station by James S. A. Corey, one of Orbit's so-called Hot Shorts... though at this point I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it released here.

But maybe Orbit will surprise the pants off of me and slap it in the back of the next novel in the Expanse series as a deleted scene or some such. That'd be brilliant. Then again Caliban's War, due in June, is very probably going to be brilliant in and of itself, so I won't be complaining if they hold off.

Anyway!

Some of the Best From Tor.com features short stories, novelettes and a novella by Harry Turtledove, Nnedi Okorafor, Charlie Jane Anders off of io9 and Michael Swanwick, whose work I've only recently come to appreciate -- on which note: stay tuned for a full review of The Iron Dragon's Daughter shortly. As well as all that, there are contributions from an assortment of other authors I'm unfamiliar with, as yet... but that's half the fun of reading through an anthology, isn't it? The experience. The education. The occasional delightful discovery!

If I could slap this thing onto my Kindle - well, onto the Kindle app I have on my tablet - I'd do it in a Valentine's heartbeat. Failing that, all of the stories in Some of the Best From Tor.com are of course still archived on the site, and the folks in charge have assembled a page with direct links to each and every one of the above. So poor souls like me aren't completely in the dark on this happy/sad day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Americans amongst you can grab a free copy of Some of the Best From Tor.com from Amazon via this link. The anthology should also be available wherever you usually order your e-books.

Go on now... have a free collection of speculative short fiction!

And do enjoy your Valentine's day, if you can. :)

The Best Things In Life Are Free | Lavie Tidhar's Osama

In a world without global terrorism, Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden, vigilante...

Intriguing, right? Intriguing to say the least.

Osama isn't Lavie Tidhar's latest, but it's been getting a lot of attention of late, in all the right places. The British Science Fiction Association have nominated it for Best Novel alongside the likes of Embassytown, By Light Alone and The Islanders... and one other book I clearly need to read, given the company it's keeping: Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith.

Meanwhile Osama is also up for a Red Tentacle over at Pornokitsch, where Anne has given it an incredible review.

So for the last little while I've certainly been interested to see what the big deal about Osama is for myself. Alas, the limited edition wasn't and isn't cheap, but for some reason - presumably to promote it - PS Publishing have slashed the price of the e-book right down. 

In fact, at the moment, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, Osama is available to download onto your Kindles or computers for... free.

Click on through via the links above to have your copy "whispered" to you at no extra cost!

I can't yet speak to the quality of Osama myself, but I absolutely do trust the individuals and organisations who have recommended it, so I'm excited to start in on this thing now that the cost of laying hands on a physical copy is a non-issue. You really should be too.

Short Fiction Corner | "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" by Mira Grant

A couple of months back, Orbit Short Fiction blinked into existence.

There was much ado about the programme before its launch, and I'm sure it's been getting by alright, but from where I'm sitting, I've seen precious little about Orbit Short Fiction since.

So, between very much enjoying Feed, and very much looking forward to enjoying Deadline just as soon as I can put away a few evenings to do the second book of the Newsflesh justice, I bought - for buttons - a copy Mira Grant's hot short. Coming in at under 4,000 words, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" sounded just the ticket to tide me over.

My mistake...

"Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is about a group of friends who have been meeting up every Friday night for all their adult lives to roleplay the end of the world. Every week, one of the friends paints a picture of the apocalypse, and the others must decide how they'd overcome it - or at the very least else survive it. On the 683rd such evening, Cole, in absentia, presents a viral scenario that would be bog standard were it not for its cold, hard plausibility.

"It's just sick," says one of the gang as the tape recorder containing Cole's last message to them plays out. Suddenly her absence seems conspicuous, and alarm bells start ringing... but it is already too late?

Well, yes. Yes it is.

"Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is executed with all the accessibility we've come to expect from Mira Grant - the pseudonym of urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire - but precious little of the panache. And the payoff, whether in terms of narrative or character, is sadly something of a nothing.

Evidently unequal to the task of communicating personality or import in such a short space of time, Grant resorts to an old and exhausted formula: there is the set-up, then the explication, then the reveal. Apocalypse twist!

And there's some dreadfully clumsy composition, most notably:

"Cole stopped again before starting back up, sounding more and more like a broken marionette."

I mean, really? Seriously?  I'm not often so pedantic - and it's a perfectly appropriate image, I'll give Grant that - but exactly how does one sound like a broken marionette? Methinks someone should have returned this simile to sender...

In the end, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is a neat idea, and not a great deal else. It could have made for an fine bonus feature in one or another of Grant's novels, but as it is, sold as a standalone short story, "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is slight and not at all satisfying. But at a buck (or $2) for a bit of fun, you know; easy come, easy go.

Now where could my copy of Deadline have gotten to...

The Best Things In Life Are Free | L.A. Noire

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've been playing L.A. Noire.

You might be wondering how that could possibly be, given that I was also playing L.A. Noire... what? Three weeks ago? Four? Well, the other half took an interest in an early case, and never one to rebuff the prospect of gaming together - a prospect much belittled of late, with couch co-op all but abandoned to make way for online mutiplayer - I've been playing it in fits and starts since; whenever we've both got a few hours to spend and an appetite for detection.

Anyway, we're on the last desk as of now: we were demoted to Arson, I'm afraid, for certain... infidelities. And I'm rearing to polish off those last few investigations and get started on a review for you all. But in the meantime, I've been following closely news of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, an anthology of eight short stories related in some way to the game, from a who's-who of contemporary crime and thriller authors including Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates and Duane Swierczynski.

And yesterday, almost lost in the E3 shuffle, there was news. The best news you or I could imagined, at that, because L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories is not only now available for your e-reading device of choice - it's available to download for absolutely nothing.

That's right.

For your free Kindle download, if you're in the UK, this link will get you where you need to be. If you're based in the States, try this one, instead.

Or for directions on how to get a compatible file for your Nook or your iPad or whatever else it is you use to read these thingummies, hit up the links on Rockstar's blog.

Pretty sweet of Mulholland Books to offer this treat up gratis, no?

But be aware: the e-book will not be free forever. As of June 12th, L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories will run you some pocket change... so go on and get it now, while the getting's good!

But I Digress | The Transformer and I

So last week.

You might recall - I did go on about it a bit on Twitter - my internet died. It died at the very moment I needed it most... though if it'd died on another occasion, that would have been the worst possible time for it to go down too, sure enough. I brook no illusions otherwise.

But let's not get distracted. My tubes are in full working order again, and that's grand - thank you internet fairies! -  but my connection has never been the most reliable thing, and given how inextricable the work I do each day is from the internet, I decided - hell, I didn't need much of a push, if I'm honest - that it was time to sacrifice a few hundred first-born squids for a shiny new tablet.

Not an iPad. A tablet.

Because I'd thought about this. At length. I hate iTunes with a fiery, filthy passion - we'll not get into that today - and besides which, I don't believe the ability to make use of removable storage in addition to whatever mounted memory this or that model of iPad has should be in any sense a question. And yet.

So the part of me that's argued against every Apple product I've considered buying in the past - which is to say most of them - won out once again. And thank the lord for that. I've had almost a whole week now with my eee Pad Transformer, and if it's not quite the device that the new iPad is, nor was it anything like the price of that extortion-mongering machine - and as aforementioned, an iPad wasn't what I wanted anyway.

I wanted a tablet primarily so I'd have a practical way of staying connected when all else fails, as so often all else is wont to do. I wanted an Android tablet because the notion of slapping in a USB key or a Micro SD card stuffed full of books and movies and comics and music rather than having to filter everything through iTunes - and be forced perhaps to re-buy certain things, otherwise acquired - meant an iPad was quite out of the question, and would remain so (given Apple's well-documented aversion to surrendering control) however long I opted to wait.

Which I wasn't much for doing anyway. I'd been waiting for the right tablet for more than a year as was - since the iPad was first announced, I'd had the hankering. And before that, I'd waited an age for the right e-book reader; one with colour, so I could read all my old scanned comics on it too, and maybe - who knows? - a few new releases, too. So it was long past time to take the plunge. And then there was a sweet time-limited deal for the tablet sans dock . And now I'm rather poorer, but that's alright: whether I end up on the mean streets or not, I have my eee Pad Transformer now.

I'll always have my Transformer. :)

###

Now then. The scene's set. I've had my tablet for a week, and here are a few of the things I've accomplished with it in that time:

• I read two books from start to finish, which you'll be seeing full reviews of shortly
• I devoured maybe twenty comics, including some Conan and the first collected volume of Locke and Key, which may just have reignited an old (and expensive) passion in me
• I watched a film - Harry Potter, you so small! - and several episodes of South Park - when will it end?
• I managed to set up internet streaming for my entire mp3 library, for free, through the AudioGalaxy app
• and I've written an entire blog post. Well, I will have done once I've finished this!

And what I want to know is this: what do you want to know?

If any of you are on the fence about buying a tablet, wondering how viable these things are as e-book readers, or comic book viewers, or portable video players, or netbooks, or oversized iPods, well. I hereby invite you to ask me anything you please.

(And don't think I've forgotten the last time I did that - it's still coming. It is!)

So to what extent would you all be interested in hearing about the various e-book apps, their relative strengths and weaknesses? Does a blow-by-blow of the reading experience on a 10.1" IPS screen appeal? Would anyone care to read about the comic book viewers on offer in the app marketplace, for instance?

Because I'll gladly take the time to write up my impressions... if, that is, there are enough of you out there that give a monkey's. No sense in wasting your time or mine, after all.

Thus, I ask of you, fair readers: who has an ape to spare?

The Best Things In Life Are Free | A Weekend In Fairyland

Thanks to some canny negotiation on the part of TSS favourite Catherynne M. Valente, from this very minute through sometime on Monday evening, you can legitimately download a PDF of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making for free, true to its original crowd-sourced roots, by following the signposts here.

There's a precious little game involved, but take heed: use your heart before your head  *ahem* and you'll find the direct link to this fantastic time-limited freebie just fine.

Now unfortunately this complimentary e-book of Valente's small but perfectly formed novel lacks the beautiful illustrations commissioned for the forthcoming Feiwel & Friends edition, pictured - and due May 10th in the States - but for myself, that's reason enough to justify a purchase I'd have been making anyway, to be perfectly honest.

For those of you a little less certain of this author's unspeakable talent, go forth, I urge you: read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making for absolutely nothing.

You can thank me later.

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.