Who Reads My Books? Kirby Ubben.

Recently you posted on your blog prior to 1999 you were shoveling shit. well, as fate would have it, same here.

I grew up on a farm in the central US, in the state of Iowa. Shoveling shit was considered one of the 'good jobs.' That's not true, it's not considered good, just available. I did however spend my formative years shoveling the proverbial and quite literal shit.

I didn't fancy sports much, and living in the country, socializing wasn't readily available, so it was books, and largely, those were fantasy and sci/fi. At 18 years of age, in the year of 1993, I moved to Seattle, and happened on a contract job working at Microsoft's Redmond Campus, and my tastes in leisure time literature turned more strongly science/fiction: William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut.

Over the years, as I moved about, as I went to university and continued the IT career, I always came back to sci/fi. I'd jaunt off on Japanese history, Japanese historical fiction, a good mystery series, but sci/fi has remained my baseline.

Currently (speaking of Dirty Jobs) I work as the in-house systems engineer, defacto IT director, for a small company back here in Iowa, which has been featured on Dirty Jobs. Remember the chicken sexing episode? Squeezing poop from chickens to determine gender? Yup, that's us: McMurray Hatchery.

It's all about poop here in Iowa.

I would guess about 2004, I picked up a copy of a book by a fellow I hadn't read before, one Mr. Neal Asher, on recommendation from a friend in Seattle: Gridlinked.

blown

away

I absolutely fell in love with it; the world it portrayed, the characters, both protagonist and villain equally compelling... I registered gridlinked.net and have been using it for vanity email since.

Next came the epic hunt for all things Asher; minor collector nerd OCD happily at work. The pinnacle of my Asher collection, in my mind, is the copy of Mason's Rats, the paper pamphlet original, closely followed by the US hardcover first edition of Gridlinked, amusingly signed by Mr. Asher himself.

Just another farm boy turned deep Linux nerd obsessed with British sci/fi and the epitome of said genre, Neal Asher.

Increase fanboy count by one, please.

k.

 

 

Sundog

Here's one of them there UFOs:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/20/sdo-whacks-sundog/#more-16565

Not.

Dexter Ominbus -- Jeff Lindsay

The language of the first page of this hauled me up, but I persevered and was soon in territory I recognized from the excellent TV series. I was a bit dubious about the somewhat camp depiction of Dexter and the emphasis on his 'Dark Passenger' which only kicked in in the TV series when he was pretending to have a drugs habit, both as an alibi with Rita and a way to put Doakes off the scent. I really enjoyed the first two books of this, noting the differences and being quite happy with them - there were quite simply things that happened in this only suitable an X classification and would have cut down on the success of the TV series. The last book I hated. Lindsay took Dexter's 'Dark Passenger' into supernatural territory, Dexter himself became a soppy ineffectual mess, and I felt it was wrong wrong wrong.

Thing is, whilst there were a couple of really enjoyable books here, and the idea of Dexter is all down to Lindsay, I find the TV series a lot better. I think that the TV version nailed the essence of it, of Dexter, which was in the first two books, and definitely not in the last one. You may think it odd me feeling that straying into fantastical territory was the wrong thing to do here, if you do, then go read my post about UFOs again.

Book Haul

Real highstreet book shops still have their appeal, especially when you know you want something, but are not sure what. The stack of books beside my bed was sadly lacking in decent SF so I wandered into Waterstones in Chelmsford to see what I could find. After signing their stock of my books, I started browsing, and was glad I did. Remembering authors I have enjoyed, picking up and handling books and reading the cover blurbs certainly works. I discovered quite a few that were in the 'I must get that' category, but then forgot to get. Here's my haul:

Alastair Reynolds produces few duds, which means I'll always buy his next book, and I've heard good things about this one.

Always loved Greg Egan's stuff, but it's sadly lacking in my collection. Reading the first bit of the blurb 'A million years from now...' was quite enough.

Greg Bear is another writer I've always liked, and I looked up this one when I found it on the Salamander Award shortlist with The Skinner, and thought then that I really should buy it.

I very much enjoyed Eric Brown's stories in Interzone, many years ago, and it's quite daft that I've never read one of his books. And reading the blurb of this it looks like this is an oversight I'm going to enjoy correcting.

Thing You Need to Know.

Karl Popper on falsifiability:

A property of any proposition for which it is possible to specify a set of circumstances the occurrence of which would demonstrate that the proposition is false. Falsifiability is the crucial feature of scientific hypotheses: beliefs that can never be tested against the empirical evidence are dogmatic.

Bertrand Russell’s teapot:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

If there is no way of proving something wrong, it’s not science. And if you can’t prove something wrong, that doesn’t make it right. Can you think of prime fat contemporary examples of both of these? I certainly can.

Beware the Bottom Probes.

-->

I remember, before I was taken on by Macmillan, getting cornered at a house party by a woman who, upon hearing that I wrote SF, wanted to talk to me about UFOs. I remember, when I was in my twenties, seeing something up in the sky out the back of my parent’s house: a sphere, silver on top and black underneath which, when I saw it, shot off at great speed. But now, I need to let you in on a secret: I don’t believe we have been visited by aliens.

I don’t believe flying saucers are playing peek-a-boo with airliners or having races with Airforce jets. I reckon that object I saw was a weather balloon caught in a high wind, or maybe, just maybe, it was some sort of military drone. I don’t believe a spaceship crashed at Area 57 and that the US military has some bug-eyed monsters on ice. I don’t believe the greys, with a technology capable of propelling themselves across a distance of a minimum of four light years, have come here to stick probes up the bottom of an Arkansas yokel.

You see, I’m a science fiction writer, which means I don’t buy into crap. I buy into logic, emphiricism. Crystals don’t heal, homeopathy is bunk, the only way anyone can predict the future by the stars is if that person sees a monster meteorite on a collision course with Earth. Faith is not proof; there is no invisible friend in the sky. Any theory that doesn’t adhere to Popper’s dictum is not a theory. A tin-foil hat will not stop the mind control rays from Alpha Centauri and walking under a ladder is only unlucky if someone drops a pot of paint on your head.

And these will maybe contain some interesting, rare or even unknown natural phenomena. They will contain delusions, sad attempts at attention seeking, lies, and maybe some truths about just how suggestible is the human mind. Sorry and all that.

Who Reads My Books? Barry Arrowsmith

Since Barry hasn't been able to supply a picture of himself, I've found one for him.

Wotcher, Neal.

My name is Barry Arrowsmith and I'm a Science Fiction addict.
How did I sink to this degraded state?
It all started so innocently....

Imagine.... it's the late 1940s and a small boy has his ear glued to to a hissing, crackly radio. For what? For Dan Dare on Radio Luxembourg of course.

That was me, and it was the start of a life-long love, bordering on obsession, with SF. The obsession got fed too, what with beeb radio pulling in massive audiences with 'Day of the Triffids' and 'Journey into Space', and when TV started becoming the broadcast medium of choice, with 'Quatermass'. All quality stuff, but then there was a bit of a gap until 1963 and 'Dr Who'. How to satisfy the cravings?

Well, there were the Saturday morning matinees at the local flea-pit, the 'tanner rush' as it was known, for the weekly dose of Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon. You could see the wires holding the model space-ships up, and the smoke from the rocket-ship engines always rose vertically, even in the depths of space, but who the hell cared?
Next Monday in the playground you too could be a Clayman.

Next step, comics. The Eagle (more Dan Dare) and then there were those oh so rare and coveted imports from the US. Then books. Those started with a Christmas present - 'Death of Metal' by Donald Suddaby (wish I still had it, but it fell apart decades ago). With strictly limited pocket-money real hardbacked books were beyond my means, but at the local market there was a stall that sold the trashiest second- hand SF paperbacks you ever did see. I loved it. Covers plastered with panicking girls in brass brassieres and everybody wearing goldfish bowls. The local library also helped fill the gaps with (among others) those wonderful old Bleiler & Dickty short story collections. Grabbed every one I could as soon as it appeared on the shelves, 'cos with a bit of luck there might be an Eric Frank Russell story in there.

Of course as you age and cash isn't so tight, discrimination kicks in. (It's either that or the fact that brass brassieres on covers went out of fashion, though the reaction to Carrie Fisher as a chained Princess Leia showed that there's an eager market for this stuff out there. Yummy!) So, it was time to switch to Penguin SF, the Gollancz SF yellow-jackets and the more sophisticated stuff.

Then in 1981 I inadvertently went sort-of cold turkey on SF. Working out in Saudi for 9 years, and back then there was no SF available out there. That's not why I went of course, but it was one of the consequences. Worse, I'd cleared my bookcases of all fiction prior to storage for the rest before I went. Wish I hadn't. Impossible to replace some of those books, at least for a price I can afford.

Back home in 1990, the cravings still persist, and 20 minutes away is a place of pilgrimage - Rog Peyton's Andromeda bookshop. Oh, bliss. All those lovely imports - Vernor Vinge, David Weber, Greg Bear, Gibson, plus the new generation of UK authors when they came along - Reynolds, Stross, Morgan, Stephenson and that Asher feller. Shelves looking healthy again now, about 1500 SF titles, half of them hardback. So I'm main-lining again.

One thing, when you accumulate a lot of books you need to add them onto your contents insurance. Replacement would be bloody expensive, just work it out. But - and this is the good bit - you'll probably be asked to value them (they like titles worth over about £50 to be listed) and that's when you find that a volume you bought for the cover price 20 years ago is now worth a bomb. How nice. Gives you a really fine glow. Signed, dated 1st/1st 'Revelation Space'? signed 1st/1st 'Altered Carbon'? 1st/1st Touchstone ed. of 'The Prestige'? Add a few more and your bookshelves are more valuable than your furnishings. Not just the new books you bought, either. Try pricing a VG+/VG+ Compton Russell hardback of Niven's 'Protector', it's slightly more than the 69p I paid in Oxfam. Rarer than hen's teeth; rarer even than 'Mason's Rats'. Do I have a copy of 'Rats'? Erm... yes, got one from an Amazon re-seller last month. Cost me a tenner - but what the hell, it's only money.

No photos, I'm afraid. As a tech fan I'm a disgrace. No camera, no mobile phone, not even a TV. I spend so much time lost in books, you see.

District 9

So I finally got round to watching District 9 last night. I did enjoy it, but with reservations. Yes, the way of presenting the story with news clips, segments from interviews and CCTV shots was interesting, but jarring at first – took a little getting used to. The aliens themselves were okay, but really, I’ve yet to see truly alien aliens anywhere other than the film of that name (and even they were a bit too anthropomorphic).

Some usual Hollywood tropes and issues here. Why did the alien spaceship choose to park over Johannesburg? Because characters speaking with an Afrikaans accent is sure to raise the spectre of racism, which was rather unsubtle. Admittedly Blomkamp was brave giving the ‘Nigerians’ such a bad guy role. And of course, the arch bad guys role has to be taken by the big corporation. Now where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, Avatar, all the Alien films, Blade Runner, Terminator (initially) – in fact, how often is it not the big evil corporation that’s ultimately to blame?

We had here a spin on the idea of giving beads to the natives in exchange for something more valuable, but that the beads were cans of cat-food and the natives were aliens just transported from a starship I found plain silly. Why were they starving? Here we have a race capable of zipping across the light-years in their starship, their whole technology based on biotech, yet they are incapable of feeding themselves?

I have to wonder how these aliens, starving and dying aboard their spaceship, were transported to the ground, without anyone noticing a large number of big fuck-off Men in Black guns, along with an enormous alien military exoskeleton. I also have to wonder why the alien spaceship, hanging in the sky on some sort of antigravity and empty of the prawns themselves, wasn’t crawling with reverse engineering experts, scientists, in fact some massive research effort. And I also have to wonder why the shuttle dropped to the ground and was concealed; why it didn’t stay where it was. Starvation again? So what were the father and son prawn going to eat during their at least a year and half journey back home? Maybe a scene was cut showing the shuttle packed with cans of cat food.     

Suffice to say that we have some great scenes here – the action scenes are particularly good – but the whole, if you just think about it for a little while, doesn’t stand up to inspection.

The Technician.

Okay, I've gone and done it now - I've emailed The Technician to Macmillan. There is a point I often reach when checking through and editing where I wonder if I'm beginning to make changes simply because I'm bored with reading it for the nth time. I know that there will be mistakes in the book that I've missed, but finding them becomes an increasingly difficult chore as I read the words that are in my head, rather than the ones on the screen.

Time to sit back now, take a breath, and start looking at the the next one.

Incidentally, more questions for the next video clip please, but no more: "When are we going to see so and so again?" or "What's next?" I've already covered that The Technician comes out next August, The Departure comes out the year after and meanwhile I'll be writing the series of books that come after the latter.

Neal Asher video Clip 15/2/10

I thought this was going to be crap, but it's come across more natural, probably because I just read the questions and answered off the cuff - no notes or answers written down.

The Technician.

I've just written a synopsis of the book, which always helps to get it clearer in my mind and enables me to identify any faults in the plotting. My usual move at this point would be to carry on reading it through, back and forth, editing, until sick of it, then put it to one side and get on with something else. I would then print it out a month or two later and cast a fresher eye over it. Also, reading from a typescript rather than a screen also enables me to pick up on any problems. However, this is due to be published in August, so I need to send it to Macmillan soon. The fresh eye re-read will have to wait until after scary pencil time.

New Moon -- Stephenie Meyer

I have my fingers in my ears ready for the howls of derision. Very much enjoyed this book and hope she can keep the story telling and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion at the end of the series - I've got Eclipse and I'll get the one after when it's out in paperback. These books are also very successful and selling well so I want to know why. Apart from their targeted demographic, they have exactly the same quality as the Harry Potter books, which I also enjoyed: transparency. The author isn't getting in the way of the story. Of course these won't make it to many people's top tens - I don't mean the 'what I really enjoyed reading' top tens, but the 'what I want people to think I enjoy reading' top tens. 

Who Reads My Books? Paul Schofield.

Hi, my name’s Paul Schofield and I’m 46. I’ve been  married, to Gill, for the past 20 years. I’ve lived on the Fylde Coast in Lancashire for all my life. We have no kids. We do have three boisterous cats; two Siamese and a tabby.

We love America and spend as much time there as we can. New York and Vegas are our current favourites. I’ve enclosed a picture of the wife taken in Quark’s Bar in the Hilton Las Vegas at The Experience Tour. He did offer me 3 bars of gold pressed latinum for her, but how could I accept? Have you seen the price of gold these days? Doh!

I’ve been a big fan of Sci-Fi since reading the Day of The Triffids and The Tripods at school. I’m a big fan of Arthur C Clarke, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Greg Bear, among many others.

I work for Jobcentre Plus, in a Contact Centre, in Blackpool. It was once the home of ERNIE, the Premium Bonds number generator. I’ve worked for The Man for the last 29 years, and probably will for the next 29 too. It pays the bills...and that’s really all I can say about it. God that’s depressing!

Last March I had a second heart attack and spent 3 months at home recovering. I discovered Neal’s book Gridlinked on Amazon one day, ordered it and couldn’t put it down. I quickly ordered the other Cormac books in the series and they got me through my rehabilitation, and saved me from daytime TV!

 

 

Birthday Cards

The middle one from Caroline, who certainly knows my taste!

Good Morning Midnight -- Reginald Hill

Finding less and less in the SF world that floats my boat, I'm reading more of this sort of stuff. Very enjoyable, enough twists, turns and kinks to satisfy even me. Dalziel in this is very much like he's portrayed by Warren Clark, but Pascoe is nothing like the moody and taciturn version played by Colin Buchanan. Also noticeable that Pascoe is not divorced from Ellie in this, book twenty-one of the series. Now why did they have to do that in the TV version? Are we not sufficiently engaged unless one of the lead cops has a miserable home life? 

The Technician

Here's the cover for The Technician:

Who Reads My Books? Caleb Young.

Here is my Bio

I'm 29 years old, grew up on a Cattle Ranch in South Texas.  I attended Texas A&M University.  I've read all my life, started with Jurassic Park, Congo type novels around 2-3rd grade.  Kept reading all the time.  I got addicted to SCI FI in college when I found a little resale book shop that had two complete walls dedicated to SCI FI, I started reading every work done by Sir Arthur C Clark, devoured his works.  I was averaging about one novel every two days.  Once I graduated I worked and still read on and off over the next few years.  Eventually I went to work in the Oil Field, I work on the big platforms that are out in the Gulf of Mexico drilling for oil.  Well when you get off of work, you have a lot of time to read, no grass to mow, no garden to tend, so I read, and read and read, I would average 15 books in a 21 day period.  Well when the world changing Hurricane Katrina came into the gulf and set its sites on New Orleans, our rig was evacuated, during the evacuation we spent 5 days in a hotel with no power, I had run out of books, so I found a little book store and picked up Peter F Hamilton's "Fallen Dragon" and thats how I found the "Space Opera" Genre.  While searching for his books on Amazon UK, it recommended some of your books, I started with Gridlinked, and then Line of Polity, well while waiting for my next few Asher's i have been reading the Max Brook's fiction "World War Z".  I have all of your Cormac novels, and Brass man is in queue after my current read of "Zombie Survival Guide".  I love you style of writing, it reminds me of Louis Lamour, he wrote westerns here in the states.  Well thats my reading history, heres my bio stuff.  I have a wife who reads as much as I do, and love video games, a 2.5 year old daughter who loves to be read to.  I'm working my way through the compilation of ACC short stories and she really enjoys them.  I have two dogs a Chihuahua that reminds me of Shuriken, and a laborador mix.  Please find attached some pictures of myself.  I will send one more email tommorrow with a picture of my Asher Books lined up.  Thanks for being a down to earth guy.

Cheers,

Caleb Young

Alien Life

I just read an interesting article in the Sunday Mail's Review and decided to do a little search on it over the Internet. Michael Brooks (a consultant at New Scientist) is having his book '13 Things That Don't Make Sense' published this February. The first of those things is (both can be found here):

NASA scientists found evidence for life on Mars. Then they changed their minds
On July 20, 1976, the Viking landers scooped up some Martian soil and mixed it with radioactive nutrients. The mission's scientists all agreed that if radioactive methane was released from the soil, something must be eating the nutrients – and there must be life on Mars. The experiment gave a positive result, but NASA denied an official detection of Martian life. Today, there is even more evidence that something is creating methane on Mars. Is it life? The Viking experiment suggests it was. Martin Rees, England’s astronomer royal, calls the search for extraterrestrial life the most important scientific endeavour of our time. But have we already found it? 

Apparently, the reason they changed their minds was due to readings from another instrument on the Viking mission that searched for traces of carbon in the Martian soil and found none. The verdict about life remains unchanged despite it being known that the second instrument couldn't even detect large quantities of carbon here on Earth. It was a dud, but as we are learning every day now, scientists protecting their backsides quickly lose any acquaintance with the truth.

The next 'thing' was this:  


Has ET already been in touch?
It was an electromagnetic pulse that came from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. It lasted 37 seconds and had exactly the characteristics predicted for an alien signal. Maybe that’s why, on 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State University's radio telescope in Delaware. The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that really is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter. More than 30 years later, its origin remains a mystery.

After much consideration, wondering what method aliens would use to attract attention, researchers decided that a radio signal at precisely 1,420 MHz - the vibration frequency of hydrogen, the most common molecule in the universe - would be the best choice. That's precisely what they got. It also came from an area of space completely devoid of stars, maybe from a spaceship?

What do you think about this? The easiest thing to do is err on the side of doubt. I mean, lakes of methane on Titan aren't immediately pointed at as evidence of life there. And frankly, that signal could have come from Earth and been bounced back by some phenomena much more likely than a passing alien spaceship.

Conflicts

Here's the cover for Ian Whates upcoming 'Conflicts' anthology:

Update:  

Just to notify you that, as of late yesterday, the anthology has its own page on the NewCon Press website and is available for prepurchase (indeed, the first copy sold this morning!)

http://www.newconpress.co.uk/BookDetail/tabid/57/ProdID/17/RtnTab/70/PageIndex/1/CatID/-1/Default.aspx

The eagle-eyed among you may note a small error in that the 'buy' button claims both editions are 'signed and limited' whereas only the hardback will be (signing sheets are doing the rounds at this moment).  The webmaster has been notified and that should be corrected soon.

-- Ian.

L is for Lee and LeGuin.

STEPHEN LAWHEAD	EMPHYRION
TANITH LEE	HERE IN COLD HELL  HEARTBEAST  ELEPHANTASM  NIGHTSHADES  THE STORM LORD  VIVIA  WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT  VOLKHAVAAR  THE ELECTRIC FOREST  THE BOOK OF THE BEAST  KILL THE DEAD  EAST OF MIDNIGHT  LYCANTHIA  GOLD UNICORN  THE BIRTHGRAVE  SILVER METAL LOVER  CAST A BRIGHT SHADOW  DELIRIUM’S MISTRESE
URSULA K LEGUIN	PLANET OF EXILE  CITY OF ILLUSIONS  EYE OF THE HERON  ROCANNON’S WORLD
BARRY M LONGYEAR	MANIFEST DESTINY
RICHARD A LUPOFF	FOOL’S HILL

Terry Pratchett's Dimbleby Lecture.

Here's the BBC Iplayer link to that Dimbleby Lecture mentioned:

Shaking Hands With Death.

Anyone Out There?

Regarding the 'Who Reads My Books?' posts I've been putting up on here. I've got one left to post and haven't seen any more. How about more from the men and women out there, like those shown in Mike Rowe's 'Dirty Jobs',  who tighten up the nuts and bolts that keep our civilization running? I'm not saying the previous ones are abnormal, but maybe some are a little intimidating to those who, say, simply work on a production line and enjoy SFF. I'd like to hear from you people - don't kid yourselves that you're not interesting. And don't forget, prior to 1999 I was shovelling shit too.

Temperance Month Over

So, for the health of our livers, Caroline and I spent this January drinking tea, coffee, juices and cordial only. This was after what the bansturbators in the BMA and nanny government would describe as excessive drinking, mainly because they made up the unit limits back in the 80s and have never bothered to change them.

Stopping drinking wasn't a problem, in fact, we looked forwards to it, almost as if bored with it. We didn't get any cravings and neither of us concealed any bottles of Vodka anywhere. The noticeable effect was a lack of hangovers and a tendency to sleep throughout the night, not wake up in the early hours. How it affected our health otherwise I don't know - I had a cold throughout most of January so couldn't really tell.

Last night we cracked a bottle of red wine and shared it. Did I really enjoy it having been abstinent for so long? Not really. It seemed watery, tea would have been better, and we finished the bottle more as a matter of form than because we were relishing it. I don't think I'm going to bother with it much now. I'll have a drink on my birthday tomorrow, and I'll toast my brother at his wake on the 8th. Of course I rather think that the chilled carafe of wine down by our local beach on Crete is going to be a different matter...

Who Reads My Books? Bob Lock.

Hi, my name’s Bob Lock and I’m an alcoholic... oh wait, wrong forum!

Umm... hi, my name’s Bob Lock and I’m an Asherholic...

I first stumbled onto SF in the mid 60s when I was fifteen and left school to work as an office boy in Wm.Hancock & Sons in Swansea, a brewery. One of the guys in the office was an avid fan and he loaned me a copy of Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’ I read it in one go, and so, a new SF fan was born.

I worked for the brewery until meeting my wife Anna, who is Italian, and once married we decided to go over to Italy and try and make a life for ourselves there. I taught English as a second language in two private schools and then was offered a job by a large foundry as an assistant to the director, translator and general dog’s body. About four years later, with all our savings spent, we decided to return to the UK (holidaying in Italy is vastly different from trying to make a living out there with a wife and two kids!) Back in the UK I managed to return to the brewery (which was now Bass) and worked my way up to technician in both the beer and soft drinks side.

I retired early some years ago and started writing in earnest (in English would have been better, but whatcha gonna do?) Some of my short stories were taken up by a few online e-zines. A couple of text adventure games I wrote were fairly successful and finally I had a short of mine published in a horror anthology called Cold Cuts which was edited and put together by Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis, two Welsh writers who’ve had numerous works published including some Dr Who stuff.

In 2007 my debut dark SF/F/Horror novel ‘Flames of Herakleitos’ was published by Screamingdreams Publishing and I was fortunate enough to have Neal read a copy and he allowed me to use some of his comments on the back cover (I only used the ones where he praised the story and left out the rest...)

2008 saw a short of mine in Nemonymous 8 – Cone Zero, called The Cone Zero Ultimatum, receive a lot of praise and I have to admit it’s one of my favourite stories.

2009 I was also published in Nemomymous 9 – Cern Zoo (I can’t say which story is mine yet as all Nemomymous authors remain anonymous until the next edition is released.) This is a ground-breaking idea put into practise by the publisher D.F.Lewis (who is also well known for his own novels and stories)

2009 also saw a SF novella of mine called A Cloud Of Madness published and this is available through Amazon.Com only, at the moment.

2009 I surprised myself by writing a zombie novella called ‘They Feed On Flesh’ for the NaNoWriMo competition to write 50,000 + words in a month. I’m a very slow writer so 50,893 words in 30 days is a big deal for me!

2010 will see the publication of an Urban Fantasy novella of mine by Screamingdreams and that will be called ‘The Empathy Effect’

2010 I hope to finish the sequel to ‘Flames of Herakleitos’ (working on it now) and that will be called ‘They Made Monsters.’

Neal’s writing ticks all the boxes for me, even his blog is a delight to read and I don’t think any fan could find a more helpful and accessible writer than him.

And , that’s all folks!

http://bob-lock.blogspot.com/

http://www.myspace.com/bob_lock

www.celt.org.uk

www.flamesofherakleitos.com

Terry Pratchett

Anybody watch the Dimbleby lecture from Terry Pratchett 'Shaking Hands with Death'? Or rather the Pratchett lecture delivered by Tony Robinson because this brilliant and wise writer is too buggered up by Alzheimers to deliver something like that. Here's a bit about it, but I'm sure you'll be able to find more if you do a search. He's feels the terminally ill should be allowed to kill themselves, that the means should be made available - assisted by medical practitioners if necessary - and I thoroughly agree. The government doesn't own our bodies (though of course it would like to) and it is our choice to make. In fact I've always agreed with this, but it's even more plain to me after seeing both my father and my brother on their death beds. I want the option Pratchett is after for himself: sitting in a chair in his garden with a glass of brandy and exit potion of choice. No damned way do I want to end up dribbling and pissing my pyjamas in some stinking old people's home, or tubed up in a hospital with those supposedly looking after me afraid to give me enough painkillers for fear of being accused of killing me. In fact that will not happen to me; I intend to ensure it won't happen.

What do you think?

Ebook Thoughts.

I’m just thinking about this; throwing a few ideas about. I don’t know, so don’t assume I really know what I’m talking about, though I’m pretty sure that many in the industry don’t know what’s going to happen either.

I’ve been reading up on this row between Macmillan and Amazon about ebooks, but now want to step back and consider what it all means. The ebook market is going to grow, every time someone buys a Kindle or an Ipad or any other the other readers out there, that’s a dead tree customer gone. This is not like the fight between Betamax and VHS, since with them the information, the entertainment, was a physical product that wasn’t interchangeable. The makers of these readers will try (using stuff like DRM), initially, to corner the market for their e-reader, but it is a losing battle. The more restrictions put on ebooks sold or what e-readers will accept, the more piracy and the more likely people will buy product with less restrictions. By making restrictions publishers and e-book manufacturers will lose market share. The eventual winners will be the e-readers that will accept any ebook and the ebooks that can be loaded to any e-reader. Piracy will be easy and rife. Publishers will have to accept that to sell ebooks they’ll need to reduce the price, because high prices will push customers towards piracy. So what does all this mean to me, the writer?

Things are going to change, and drastically. The market for paper books will continue to survive, hopefully until I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil, but it’s going to get smaller and smaller. Hopefully people will still want to read my books. This is what I must think. Books as we know them are just the medium through which the story I tell goes from my mind to yours. Even if that medium changes, I have to presume that you still want that story.

I wonder about the shape of a future market. Maybe the book publisher as we know it is going to die. Maybe a writer will publish his book on the Internet, without much in the way of middlemen, incidentally taking a larger cut of the cover price than present paltry royalties, which will be necessary to cover the losses through piracy. After a book has sold well on the Internet, has been proven as a product, that’s where the dead tree publishers step in. People will read many ebooks, and some they will decide are keepers.

Maybe.

Another scenario I see is the end of writers being able to make a living through writing books. If the main source of books is the Internet, without the middle men, where is the guarantee of quality? How is anyone going to be able to sort the wheat from the truckloads of chaff? A dead tree book you pick up in a bookshop has gone through a process, the first part being people in the publishing industry looking at the typescript and deciding they are prepared to risk spending thousands of pounds to get that book into print. (For those who say that publishers produce a lot of crap, let me give you a wake-up call: for every Daniel Steel or Jeffrey Archer book you sneer at, please remember that the publisher has rejected skiploads of the most appalling drivel you can imagine.) There’s your guarantee.

Perhaps the guarantee will be simply through sales, electronic bestseller lists, trusted reviewing. Even publishers admit that word-of-mouth is the best advertising available and, once the middlemen are out of the way, this would be the ultimate in word-of-mouth. Let’s face it, despite the ‘is this going to make us money guarantee’ publishers still quite often get it very wrong. How many publishers rejected the Harry Potter books?

What do you think?

Macmillan/Amazon Row

I think this concerns Amazon.com only, since my books are still available through Amazon.co.uk. You can find more about it over on John Scalzi's Whatever.


To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

I regret that we have reached this impasse. Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future. They have been a great innovator in our industry, and I suspect they will continue to be for decades to come.

It is those decades that concern me now, as I am sure they concern you. In the ink-on-paper world we sell books to retailers far and wide on a business model that provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably. Looking to the future and to a growing digital business, we need to establish the same sort of business model, one that encourages new devices and new stores. One that encourages healthy competition. One that is stable and rational. It also needs to insure that intellectual property can be widely available digitally at a price that is both fair to the consumer and allows those who create it and publish it to be fairly compensated.

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

Amazon and Macmillan both want a healthy and vibrant future for books. We clearly do not agree on how to get there. Meanwhile, the action they chose to take last night clearly defines the importance they attribute to their view. We hold our view equally strongly. I hope you agree with us.

You are a vast and wonderful crew. It is impossible to reach you all in the very limited timeframe we are working under, so I have sent this message in unorthodox form. I hope it reaches you all, and quickly. Monday morning I will fully brief all of our editors, and they will be able to answer your questions. I hope to speak to many of you over the coming days.

Thanks for all the support you have shown in the last few hours; it is much appreciated.

All best,
John


We're going to see more of this sort of stuff as companies try to corner the Ebook market, but the amusing thing is that there won't be any cornering, or at least not for long, since this is not a fight between the producers of Betamax and VHS. That aside, again, US book buyers, you can get my books through The Book Depository. They ship for free and are offering some big discounts on there. I just bought New Moon & Eclipse for a total of £6.90.
 

Twilight -- Stephenie Meyer.

Okay, putting myself in danger here of undermining my tough guy SFnal street cred, I have to say I really enjoyed this book. I polished it off in one day (having completed American Gods that morning) and it wasn’t boring, my attention didn’t wander, I didn’t skip anything and I became thoroughly absorbed, so much so it felt like I was watching the film again. This is because Meyer’s writing is transparent and allowed the characters and story to shine through – what you’ll find in many popular best selling books (ones that very often get sneered at by the literarti). No writerly ego here trying to display ‘literary brilliance’ and jostle the story into second place  Another thing to note is how true to the book was the film. Everything in the book seemed to be up there on the screen. That transparency again – I’m guessing that writing the film script was just an exercise in precis. Thoroughly recommended.  

Who Reads My Books? Paul Mackay

Hi Neal

I read your books!

I am a 39yr old nurse, working in a prison in the North of England. I did my nurse training some 20 years ago and have worked in loads of places all over the country and also in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia and I did some aid work in Lebanon in the 1990s. I even managed health insurance for BUPA in one of their call centres and that really was as bad as it sounds.

I enjoy amateur astronomy and I belong to the York Astronomical Society. Indeed I write Sci-Fi reviews for our quarterly magazine Algol and always stick in a review of the latest Asher. (I think I was a bit hard on Peter F Hamilton once, moaning that it takes him 3 pages to describe a kitchen tap or something)

I also like the Steampunk aesthetic and I make jewellery in that style which I like to flog at craft fairs and to friends.

There is some good Steampunk fiction around, particularly Jay Lake’s books Mainspring and Escapement.

I first started reading Sci Fi at about 12 years old with Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica ‘TV tie-ins’ as they were called back then, and when I ran out of them, I started on the better stuff, mostly Roger Zelazny, Philip K Dick, E.E ‘Doc’ Smith and Robert Heinlein (dead misogynist and pseudo spouter of new-age claptrap that he was). Never could get into Asimov.

I prefer modern, hard science fiction, the more sweeping in its scope, the better. You of course are my favourite, followed by Alistair Reynolds, Iain Banks, Adam Roberts and I was a fan of Richard Morgan until he started messing around with that medieval stuff. The pace of Orbus was frenetic and every battle fought like it was the last, I loved it, passed it on to my brother who is also a massive fan.

I particularly enjoy the evolution of British Sci-fi over the last 10 years. In my view, American authors have a tendency to stick with the ‘Middle America’ view of Science Fiction, earth against the aliens with very clear black and white good guys and bad guys. Scalzi’s Old Mans War was a case in point. It was OK as a book, but I think British sci-fi is further on that that and you are leading the way.

We love the way that you just get on with writing with at least one or two books a year so keep it up, and thanks.

Paul Mackay

 

 

J & K are for Jensen to Kuttner

JAN LARS JENSEN	SHIVA 3000
JAMES KAHN	WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME TIME’S DARK LAUGHTER
GUY GAVRIEL KAY	THE SUMMER TREE THE WANDERING FIRE THE DARKEST ROAD TIGANA
STEPHEN KING	ON WRITING DIFFERENT SEASONS NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES FIRESTARTER NIGHT SHIFT THE GREEN MILE SKELETON CREW
DAMON KNIGHT	THE MAN IN THE TREE
HENRY KUTTNER	CLASH BY NIGHT

Who Reads My Books? Mike Stone.

Michael Stone

I was born in 1966 in Stoke on Trent, England, and still live there with my wife and daughter. As a result of retinitis pigmentosa, I’ve struggled with diminishing eyesight since my teens, and in 2006 I was registered blind. So, gone are the motorbikes that were my pride and joy, and there’s to be no more tennis or golf. I can still use a computer though, and read books, so things aren’t too bad. When asked what I do for a living, I either tell people I’m a full time writer or unemployed, it depends on who’s asking. I feel a bit of a fraud telling people I’m a writer when I don’t earn anywhere enough to pay the weekly bills.

I am progressing though. I’ve sold over fifty stories to date, most of them written in the sf/fantasy/horror genre. My influences include Graham Joyce, Larry Niven, Adrian McKinty, Terry Pratchett, Garry Kilworth, Jasper Fforde, Iain (M) Banks, Colin Bateman, Desmond Morris, Carl Hiaasen, David Gemmell, George R R Martin…the list goes on and on and isn’t all genre stuff, as you can see. Everything I’ve read and watched is grist to my mill when it comes to putting words on paper.

The most recent addition to that list is Neal Asher. I read The Gabble collection last year and was so blown away I promptly went to Amazon and ordered all I could get my hands on. I’m currently reading (slowly, it must be said) The Voyage of the Sable Keech.

What else can I tell you? Well, 2007 saw a collection of my novellas published as Fourtold, which garnered positive reviews from readers and fellow writers alike, including praise from Graham Joyce and Garry Kilworth...and you can imagine how chuffed I was about that. In 2009 I signed to the Sobel Weber Associates literary agency who are now shopping two of my novels to various publishers. I have just finished co-editing an anthology of Irish crime stories for Morrigan Books, which should be out mid-2010. Also this year I have two novellas coming out as chapbooks. One of them is called The Skinner! It is, I hasten to add, nothing like Neal’s wonderful novel of the same name. My skinner is a werebear preying on other werebeasts in a near-future Britain. No spatterjay viruses in sight.

If anyone is interested, I have a website at www.mylefteye.net.

Trying out a Poll...

Martin Asher

Whilst I was struggling up the writing ladder and beginning to cast an eye over those new-fangled Amstrad word processors, my brother Martin, having worked as a diesel fitter then bus driver, took an electronics course, then a job with a company repairing printers, computers and other office hardware and, as time passed, sorting out software too. He suggested to me that I needed an IBM clone computer to do my writing on. I demurred, I was a writer, so why would I need anything more than a glorified typewriter? So much for the foresight of this science fiction author.  

Because he could and because he knew better (he did), Martin provided me with one nonetheless and, after a period of painful adjustment, I saw the advantages in this green screen Wordstar computer with its one megabyte hard drive. Martin moved on, working in various other computer repair companies, and upgrading me throughout that time to what I have now. He went through a divorce, has a daughter called Dawn who is now thirty, hooked up with Kathy and, after they were together for a number of years, eventually married her. He scuba dived, wind surfed, took holidays, read books, watched TV, got drunk, spent too much time on his computer, ate meals… He did all those things we all do as we live a life, and some things we don’t all do. He ended up running servers and sorting out computers at Essex Police HQ in Chelmsford and was valued there, made a lot of friends there. Throughout that time he was the one I could rely on when my computer went wrong, the one who sorted it all out for me, and incidentally sorted computers out for the rest of our family and numerous other people besides.

But not any more.

I had three brothers: Paul is four years older than me and Bob is ten years older than me, and Martin was six years older than me. Difficult to write in the past tense here. I grew up with them all, they’re all a part of my life, my history. From Martin I read my first Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter on Mars book, and some J T Edson's… The first and only shotgun I fired was his. Two small memories from a great mass of them; two small aspects of that large chunk of existence that was, well, my brother.

We’re not one of those families that need to live in each other’s pockets – it’s enough to know that the others are there, and we get on with our own lives. On occasional family get-togethers you realise you still have a lot in common, but less and less as the years pass. But still.

Martin was, I think, proud of my success. But as I said, we were not so close that we needed continuous contact, so I wondered why when he called me over the phone whilst we were in Crete this summer. It was to inform me that he’d been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. He would have six weeks of chemo then an operation to remove the affected part. All very matter-of-fact, and maybe some degree of unconscious self-preservation stopped me checking out statistics on the Internet.

He was operated on about the time we got back – part of his oesophagus and stomach removed, and the two severed ends sewn together again. He spent many weeks in hospital. We went in to see him and it shocked me to see how thin he was, but then, he hadn’t eaten food in four weeks, the food fed in by tube. Even the water was fed in by tube and all he could do was rinse his mouth out and not swallow. While he was in hospital he had problems, things weren’t healing up, he had a leak inside, then, all at once he was out. Looked like he was getting there.

Out of hospital for just a few weeks and he didn’t improve, almost died and was taken back. Eventually they got round to testing the fluid in his abdomen only to discover a secondary inoperable cancer. Quite bald statement then: he is going to die, and soon. How do you handle that? It’s something you can neither deny or ignore. You can get angry, but it doesn’t change the verdict, and in the end you just feel a horrible hollow misery. We went to see him in hospital, he was skeletal, barely coherent, obviously uncomfortable. His life-span was one week, then two weeks, then  a few days, then twenty-four hours. He died today on Sunday 24^th January, and has left a hole in my life. He was 54 years old and too damn fucking young to die.

I guess I’m not the first person to say that. 

Little Story

Here's one from Max Thompson who joined up on my FaceBook site:

I also have a tale of synchronicity involving one of your books.

I was living in Kuala Lumpur a few years ago and Hilldiggers has just been released. I could not get it anywhere and was mightily disappointed as wanted to take it on a trip to Langkawi to read on the beach. On arriving at the aforementioned island after settling myself in I went for walk along the seafront and came across a flea market. Bugger me if the wasn't a 2nd hand copy sitting there on a book stall for about 5 ringit !! The only English book in sea of German bodice rippers. I was the happiest bloke alive and you have never seen a anybody get their wallet out so fast.

I've seen by books right round the other side of the world, plenty of them in New Zealand and I even signed a wall in a bookshop there, but it is nice to find out where else they appear.