"Permanent Fatal Errors" by Jay Lake (Part 2 of 4)

Permanent Fatal Errors
by Jay Lake

[Continued from Part 1]

He worked an entire half-shift without being disturbed, sifting petabytes of data, until the truth hit him. The color-coding of one spectral analysis matrix was nearly identical to the green flash he thought he'd seen on the surface of Tiede 1.

All the data was a distraction. Her real work had been hidden in the metadata, passing for nothing more than a sorting signifier.

Once Maduabuchi realized that, he unpacked the labeling on the spectral analysis matrix, and opened up an entirely new data environment. Green, it was all about the green.

"I was wondering how long that would take you," said Captain Smith from the opening hatch.

Maduabuchi jumped in his chair, opened his mouth to make some denial, then closed it again. Her eyes didn't look razored this time, and her voice held a tense amusement.

He fell back on that neglected standby, the truth. "Interesting color you have here, ma'am."

"I thought so." Smith stepped inside, cycled the lock shut, then code-locked it with a series of beeps that meant her command override was engaged. "Ship," she said absently, "sensory blackout on this area."

"Acknowledged, Captain," said the ship's puppy-friendly voice.

"What do you think it means, Mr. St. Macaria?"

"Stars don't shine green. Not to the human eye. The blackbody radiation curve just doesn't work that way." He added, "Ma'am."

"Thank you for defining the problem." Her voice was dust-dry again.

Maduabuchi winced. He'd given himself away, as simply as that. But clearly she already knew about the green flashes. "I don't think that's the problem, ma'am."

"Mmm?"

"If it was, we'd all be lining up like good kids to have a look at the optically impossible brown dwarf."

"Fair enough. Then what is the problem, Mr. St. Macaria?"

He drew a deep breath and chose his next words with care. Peridot Smith was old, old in a way he'd never be, even with her years behind him someday. "I don't know what the problem is, ma'am, but if it's a problem to you, it's a command issue. Politics. And light doesn't have politics."

Much to his surprise, she laughed. "You'd be amazed. But yes. Again, well done."

She hadn't said that before, but he took the compliment. "What kind of command problem, ma'am?"

Captain Smith sucked in a long, noisy breath and eyed him speculatively. A sharp gaze, to be certain. "Someone on this ship is on their own mission. We were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don't know what for."

"Not me!" Maduabuchi blurted.

"I know that."

The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the whole, he realized he'd rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.

His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, "You haven't been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power."

"Uh, yes." Maduabuchi wasn't certain what to say to that.

"Why do you think you're here?" She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. "I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me."

"A useful idiot," he said. "But there's only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?"

"It's Tiede 1," Captain Smith answered. "Someone is here gathering signals. I don't know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them."

"But this is politics, not mutiny. Right…?"

"Right." She brushed off the concern. "We're not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart."

"Any five of us, though?" he asked softly.

"That's another use for you."

"I don't fight."

"No, but you're a Howard. You're hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive."

"Uh, thanks," Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.

"You're welcome." Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. "The question is who, what and why."

"Have you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?" he asked.

"Green flashes aren't a known stellar norm."

"No, but we don't know what the green flashes are normal for, either. If we compare Tiede 1 to other brown dwarfs, we might spot further anomalies. Then we triangulate."

"And that is why I brought you." Captain Smith's tone was very satisfied indeed. "I'll leave you to your work."

"Thank you, ma'am." To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.

* * *

"Permanent Fatal Errors" by Jay Lake (Part 1 of 4)

Continuing my celebration -- and promotion -- of Is Anybody Out There? (Daw Books) my co-edited anthology with Nick Gevers, to be published on June 1, here is another story from the book.

Though I was already quite familiar with his work, the first time I personally met Jay Lake was at BayCon 2005, May 27-30, in San Jose, California. Jay was the Writer Guest of Honor; I was a lowly panelist. We actually met on Saturday the 28th, at 11:30 a.m., in the Carmel Room of the DoubleTree Hotel, for a panel entitled "Editing an Anthology." Later that day I showed up at another of Jay's panels, this time as a member of the audience, so that I could heckle him from the back of the room (just kidding). That second panel was on "First Novels"; I was still acquiring and editing for Golden Gryphon Press at the time, and thus in the market for first novels.

Just short of a year later, on June 22, 2006, I sent Jay an email to let him know that I would be editing his novel Trial of Flowers (Book 1 in The City Imperishable series) for Night Shade Books. If the "New Weird" subgenre is your cup of tea, so to speak, then you'll find few other books that are more "new weird" than The City Imperishable series. Anyhow, I just did a rough count, and at least 90 emails passed between us from the time I first started working on Jay's manuscript until I turned in the final copyedits for the page proofs and the book cover on September 18. When I first began editing, email was already the standard operating procedure; I don't know how folks did this job in the days before email. Unfortunately, I don't see Jay as often as I would like (I believe the last time, albeit briefly, was the 2009 World Fantasy Convention, again in San Jose), but I look forward to sharing another panel with him in the near future.

Jay's contribution to Is Anybody Out There? is a bit of mystery and a lot of science fiction entitled "Permanent Fatal Errors." About this story, Jay writes: "'Permanent Fatal Errors' is part of the Sunspin cycle, an as-yet-unwritten space opera trilogy I've planned as my next major project after I conclude the Green trilogy. This story explores a critical piece of worldbuilding that is a central plot question in the novels. The story takes place about 1,400 years before the narrative present of the novels, when the lessons learned by Maduabuchi during and after the action of 'Permanent Fatal Errors' have been lost. I remember them, and rediscovering them will be an important aspect of the larger story. It was a pleasure to explore the question of where the aliens have gone as part of Is Anybody Out There?"

Permanent Fatal Errors
by Jay Lake

Maduabuchi St. Macaria had never before traveled with an all-Howard crew. Mostly his kind kept to themselves, even under the empty skies of a planet. Those who did take ship almost always did so in a mixed or all-baseline human crew.

Not here, not aboard the threadneedle starship Inclined Plane. Seven crew including him, captained by a very strange woman who called herself Peridot Smith. All Howard Institute immortals. A new concept in long-range exploration, multi-decade interstellar missions with ageless crew, testbedded in orbit around the brown dwarf Tiede 1. That's what the newsfeeds said, anyway.

His experience was far more akin to a violent soap opera. Howards really weren't meant to be bottled up together. It wasn't in the design templates. Socially well-adjusted people didn't generally self-select to outlive everyone they'd ever known.

Even so, Maduabuchi was impressed by the welcome distraction of Tiede 1. Everyone else was too busy cleaning their weapons and hacking the internal comms and cams to pay attention to their mission objective. Not him.

Inclined Plane boasted an observation lounge. The hatch was coded "Observatory," but everything of scientific significance actually happened within the instrumentation woven into the ship's hull and the diaphanous energy fields stretching for kilometers beyond. The lounge was a folly of naval architecture, a translucent bubble fitted to the hull, consisting of roughly a third of a sphere of optically corrected artificial diamond grown to nanometer symmetry and smoothness in microgravity. Chances were good that in a catastrophe the rest of the ship would be shredded before the bubble would so much as be scratched.

There had been long, heated arguments in the galley, with math and footnotes and thumb breaking, over that exact question.

Maduabuchi liked to sit in the smartgel bodpods and let the ship perform a three-sixty massage while he watched the universe. The rest of the crew were like cats in a sack, too busy stalking the passageways and each other to care what might be outside the window. Here in the lounge one could see creation, witness the birth of stars, observe the death of planets, or listen to the quiet, empty cold of hard vacuum. The silence held a glorious music that echoed inside his head.

Maduabuchi wasn't a complete idiot -- he'd rigged his own cabin with self-powered screamer circuits and an ultrahigh voltage capacitor. That ought to slow down anyone with delusions of traps.

Tiede 1 loomed outside. It seemed to shimmer as he watched, as if a starquake were propagating. The little star belied the ancient label of "brown dwarf." Stepped down by filtering nano that coated the diamond bubble, the surface glowed a dull reddish orange; a coal left too long in a campfire, or a jewel in the velvet setting of night. Only 300,000 kilometers in diameter, and about five percent of a solar mass, it fell in that class of objects ambiguously distributed between planets and stars.

It could be anything, he thought. Anything.

A speck of green tugged at Maduabuchi's eye, straight from the heart of the star.

Green? There were no green emitters in nature.

"Amplification," he whispered. The nano filters living on the outside of the diamond shell obligingly began to self-assemble a lens. He controlled the aiming and focus with eye movements, trying to find whatever it was he had seen. Another ship? Reflection from a piece of rock or debris?

Excitement chilled Maduabuchi despite his best intentions to remain calm. What if this were evidence of the long-rumored but never-located alien civilizations that should have abounded in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way?

He scanned for twenty minutes, quartering Tiede 1's face as minutely as he could without direct access to the instrumentation and sensors carried by Inclined Plane. The ship's AI was friendly and helpful, but outside its narrow and critical competencies in managing the threadneedle drive and localspace navigation, no more intelligent than your average dog, and so essentially useless for such work. He'd need to go to the Survey Suite to do more.

Maduabuchi finally stopped staring at the star and called up a deck schematic. "Ship, plot all weapons discharges or unscheduled energy expenditures within the pressurized cubage."

The schematic winked twice, but nothing was highlighted. Maybe Captain Smith had finally gotten them all to stand down. None of Maduabuchi's screamers had gone off, either, though everyone else had long since realized he didn't play their games.

Trusting that no one had hacked the entire tracking system, he cycled the lock and stepped into the passageway beyond. Glancing back at Tiede 1 as the lock irised shut, Maduabuchi saw another green flash.

He fought back a surge of irritation. The star was not mocking him.

* * *

"The Taste of Night" by Pat Cadigan (Part 3 of 3)

The Taste of Night
by Pat Cadigan

[Continued from Part 2]

Nell labored toward wakefulness as if she were climbing a rock wall with half a dozen sandbags dangling on long ropes tied around her waist. Her mouth was full of steel wool and sand. She knew that taste -- medication. It would probably take most of a day to spit that out.

She had tried medication in the beginning because Marcus had begged her to. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety capsules, and finally anti-psychotics -- they had all tasted the same because she hadn't been depressed, anxious, or psychotic. Meanwhile, Marcus had gotten farther and farther away, which, unlike the dry mouth, the weight gain, or the tremors in her hands, was not reversible.

Call-Me-Anne had no idea about that. She kept trying to get Nell to see Marcus, unaware they could barely perceive each other anymore. Marcus didn't realize it either, not the way she did. Marcus thought that was reversible, too.

Pools of colour began to appear behind her heavy eyelids, strange colours that shifted and changed, green to gold, purple to red, blue to aqua, and somewhere between one colour and another was a hue she had never found anywhere else and never would.

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. __________.

C-c-c-contact…

The word was a boulder trying to fit a space made for a pebble smoothed over the course of eons and a distance of lightyears into a precise and elegant thing.

Something can be a million lightyears away and in your eye at the same time.

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ___________.

C-c-c-con…nect.

C-c-c-commmmune.

C-c-c-c-c-communnnnnnnnicate.

She had a sudden image of herself running around the base of a pyramid, searching for a way to get to the top. While she watched, it was replaced by a new image, of herself running around an elephant and several blind men; she was still looking for a way to get to the top of the pyramid.

The image dissolved and she became aware of how heavy the overhead lights were on her closed eyes. Eye. She sighed; even if she did finally reach understanding -- or it reached her -- how would she ever be able to explain what blind men, an elephant, and a pyramid combined with Columbus's ships meant?

The musty smell of surrender broke in on her thoughts. It was very strong; Call-Me-Anne was still there. After a bit, she heard the sound of a wooden spoon banging on the bottom of a pot. Frustration, but not just any frustration: Marcus's.

She had never felt him so clearly without actually seeing him. Perhaps Call-Me-Anne's surrender worked as an amplifier.

The shifting colours resolved themselves into a new female voice. "…much do either of you know about the brain?"

"The Taste of Night" by Pat Cadigan (Part 2 of 3)

The Taste of Night
by Pat Cadigan

[Continued from Part 1]

"Are you all right?"

The man bent over her, hands just above his knees. Most of his long hair was tied back except for a few long strands that hung forward in a way that suggested punctuation to Nell. Round face, round eyes with hard lines under them.

See. Hear. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.

Hand over her right eye, she blinked up at him. He repeated the question and the words were little green balls falling from his mouth to bounce away into the night. Nell caught her lower lip between her teeth to keep herself from laughing. He reached down and pulled the hand over her eye to one side. Then he straightened up and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. "I need an ambulance," he said to it.

She opened her mouth to protest but her voice wouldn't work. Another man was coming over, saying something in thin, tight silver wires.

And then it was all thin, tight silver wires everywhere. Some of the wires turned to needles and they seemed to fight each other for dominance. The pain in her eye flared more intensely and a voice from somewhere far in the past tried to ask a question without morphing into something else but it just wasn't loud enough for her to hear.

Nell rolled over onto her back. Something that was equal parts anxiety and anticipation shuddered through her. Music, she realized; very loud, played live, blaring out of the opening where the men were hanging around. Chords rattled her blood, pulled at her arms and legs. The pain flared again but so did the taste of night. She let herself fall into it. The sense of falling became the desire to sleep but just as she was about to give in, she would slip back to wakefulness, back and forth like a pendulum. Or like she was swooping from the peak of one giant wave, down into the trough and up to the peak of another.

Her right eye was forced open with a sound like a gunshot and bright light filled her mouth with the taste of icicles.

* * *

"Welcome back. Don't take this the wrong way but I'm very sorry to see you here."

Nell discovered only her left eye would open but one eye was enough. Ms Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, the social worker. Not the original social worker Marcus had sent after her. That had been Ms. Petersen, Call-Me-Joan, who had been replaced after a while by Mr. Carney, Call-Me-Dwayne. Nell had seen him only twice and the second time he had been one big white knuckle, as if he were holding something back -- tears? hysteria? Whatever it was leaked from him in twisted shapes of shifting colours that left bad tastes in her mouth. Looking away from him didn't help -- the tastes were there whether she saw the colours or not.

It was the best they could do for her, lacking as she was in that sense. At the time, she hadn't understood. All she had known was that the tastes turned her stomach and the colours gave her headaches. Eventually, she had thrown up on the social worker's shoes and he had fled without apology or even so much as a surprised curse, let alone a good-bye. Nell hadn't minded.

Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, was his replacement and she had managed to find Nell more quickly than she had expected. Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne, had none of the same kind of tension in her but once in a while she exuded a musty, stale odor of resignation that was very close to total surrender.

Surrender. It took root in Nell's mind but she was slow to understand because she only associated it with Ms. Dunwoody, Call-Me-Anne's unspoken (even to herself) desire to give up. If she'd just had that missing sense, it would have been so obvious right away.

Of course, if she'd had that extra sense, she'd have understood the whole thing right away and everything would be different. Maybe not a whole lot easier, since she would still have had a hard time explaining sight to all the blind people, so to speak, but at least she wouldn't have been floundering around in confusion.

"The Taste of Night" by Pat Cadigan (Part 1 of 3)

I wanted to promote -- and celebrate -- the publication on June 1 of Is Anybody Out There? (Daw Books), my co-edited anthology with Nick Gevers, and what better way to do this than to share with readers some of the fiction contained therein! (By the way, have you read the first review of IAOT? that I posted on May 15?)

I first met Pat Cadigan at my first ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas, in 1988, and we've remained friends ever since. I recall writing to Pat prior to that convention, informing her that I was specifically reading some of her fiction ahead of time so that we could chat about it during the con. I was then, and always will be, a fan of her work.

And so, in its entirety (well, actually, in three parts, so check back every couple days) -- and with the kind permission of the author -- is the short story "The Taste of Night" by Pat Cadigan.

About this story Pat writes: "When it comes to the question of why we haven't heard from/seen any aliens, I'm partial to the explanation that we are constantly receiving communication from them but it's so alien, we don't recognize it for what it is. Maybe there's a lot of stuff that's been going right over our heads (pardon the expression, once you read the story) and for a very long time. I can't prove this theory but as far as I know, no one has disproved it, either. Makes for a good story, I think..."

The Taste of Night
by Pat Cadigan

The taste of night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too -- not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a laundromat because phew.

Phew was one of those things that didn't change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing at all.

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.

Memory sprang up in her mind with the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.

The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.

However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.

That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus's impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.

A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?

The doctor's question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.

If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.

Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.

That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.

* * *

Nell sighed, feeling comfortable and irrationally safe. Feeling safe was irrational if you slept rough. Go around feeling safe and you wouldn't last too long. It was just that the indented area she had found at the back of this building -- cinema? auditorium? -- turned out to be as cozy as it had looked. It seemed to have no purpose except as a place where someone could sleep unnoticed for a night or two. More than two would have been pushing it, but that meant nothing to some rough sleepers. They'd camp in a place like this till they wore off all the hidden. Then they'd get seen and kicked out. Next thing you knew, the spot would be fenced off or filled in so no one could ever use it again. One less place to go when there was nowhere to stay.

Nell hated loss, hated the taste: dried-out bitter crossed with salty that could hang on for days, weeks, even longer. Worse, it could come back without warning and for no reason except that, perhaps like rough sleepers, it had nowhere else to go. There were other things that tasted just as bad to her but nothing worse, and nothing that lingered for anywhere nearly as long, not even the moldy-metal tang of disappointment.

* * *

Is Anybody Out There? -- First Review

From the April 25 edition of the UK's Sunday Times Online: "The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out" -- or so says Stephen Hawking, a British theoretical physicist, who, in 2009, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. More from the Times: "[Hawking] has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist -- but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact." These "suggestions" are from Stephen Hawking's Universe, his new documentary series on the Discovery Channel, which began its broadcast run earlier this month. Hawking goes on to say that making contact with extraterrestrials is "a little too risky. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

So, whereas we're all hoping that our first contact with alien races goes something like E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hawking portends a scenario that is more on the order of Independence Day. As he says elsewhere in this Times article: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Sort of gives you those warm fuzzies all over, don't it? But, until such time as we actually experience (if ever) that first contact with an alien life form, we can only use the tools available to us to extrapolate (or, best case, guess) as to what that encounter may be like.

Which brings me to the fifteen stories -- from seventeen authors -- included in my forthcoming anthology Is Anybody Out There? (co-edited with Nick Gevers) from Daw Books. The official publication date is June 1, but I hope to have copies available at BayCon, to be held Memorial Day Weekend. And please excuse this shameless self-promotion: If you click on the Is Anybody Out There? book icon on the left, you will be painlessly transported to the realm of amazon.com, where you may purchase a copy of said book, if you so choose. [End shameless self-promotion.]

In 1950, Enrico Fermi postulated a contradiction (aka paradox): If there are uncountable galaxies within our universe, each containing uncountable planets, and some percentage of those planets are habitable (by our human definition of "habitable"), then why is there no evidence -- at least none that we have found and understood so far -- of alien civilizations? And it is those eleven words that I have set off by em-dashes and placed in italics that are the key to this paradox. The evidence may be out there, but our scientists and researchers simply do not understand it¹. The stories in this anthology attempt to answer the Fermi Paradox. Some of these stories utilize current science; others bend and twist that science; and more than one story is pure SWAG².

In previous blog posts I have waxed poetic on the genesis of this anthology; on the contents of this anthology; and on the cover and back cover text. And in this blog post I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the first review of Is Anybody Out There?

The review -- by the inestimable Gardner Dozois -- appears in the May 2010 issue of Locus Magazine. Just on the extremely rare chance that you are not familiar with Mr. Dozois, let me quote a few lines from his entry in Wikipedia: "...best known as an editor, winning a record 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor (having won nearly every year between 1988 and his retirement from Asimov's in 2004)....[and] the editor of the anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, published annually since 1984."

April Links & Things

I attempted to watch the live streaming video of the launch of the Air Force's "mystery" unmanned X-37B space plane on Thursday, April 22, on the United Launch Alliance website, but that was a bust: the site initially loaded, but then there was only audio, no video, and when I tried to refresh the browser, the site crashed -- numerous times. Earlier in the month I found a link on tips for proofing one's writing, but the blog post itself had a number of errors, and I disagreed with some of the content. Maybe I've just become more jaded.... Anyhow, this month's Links & Things entries seem to favor numbers -- 4 Danger Signs, 5 Things and yet another 5 Things, 5 Ways, 10 Easy Steps, 10 Ways, and 10 Questions.

Here are my links and such for the month of April. I've listed them here, with additional detail and comment (though no rants this time). You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• In my first post this year -- December's Links and Things -- I wrote at length about the border incident in which author Peter Watts was involved. If you are unfamiliar with this particular situation, I strongly urge you to access the link and read up on this. Included in that blog post is a link to a free download of Peter's Hugo Award-nominated novel Blindsight; and links, too, to donate to his cause. Well, Peter has gone to trial, and the case has been resolved; of course, Peter was found guilty but in the infinite wisdom of the judge, Peter was fined, but with NO jail time. Sadly, he still bears a felony conviction and therefore will never be allowed to legally enter the United States. On Tor.com, Madeline Ashby has posted a lovely, heartfelt account -- "Sometimes, we win" -- of Peter's sentencing; and David Nickle, on his own blog -- appropriately titled The Devil's Exercise Yard -- goes into a bit more detail of the actual sentencing. Between the two blog posts, there are more than 95 Comments. I'm saddened that I won't get to see Peter at another ReaderCon in Boston, that, in fact, he will never be able to visit the United States again; but hopefully he can now get back to living his own life.



• The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review (@MadHatterReview) has a guest post by author Mark Teppo (@MarkTeppo) entitled "On the Spectacle of Magic." Those who read my blog regularly know that I edited Mark's first two titles -- Lightbreaker and Heartland (Night Shade Books, 2009 and 2010 respectively) -- in his Codex of Souls series, which I wrote about extensively here. In this guest post, Mark writes: "We've spent too many years in front row seats, rapt and wide-eyed, at the Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer Theater of Explosive Spectacle. Our entertainment must be thrown up on thirty-foot-tall screens, blasted at us through a bowel-liquefying, discretely separated speaker stack, and filled with the dizzying hyperkineticism of rats on meth. Our sense of wonder is so moribund that it must first be shocked and pummeled back to life before it can be suspended. It's the First Rule of Modern Adventure Entertainment: shit must blow up." If that diatribe from Mark intrigues you, you'll want to read the entire blog post.



• This past month, the Large Hadron Collider went back online, and AskMen.com lists "5 Things You Didn't Know" about the LHC: a "$10 billion tunnel that runs for 17 circular miles deep underneath the Franco-Swiss border.... that will accelerate two beams of protons in opposite directions, then smash them into each other in the hopes that the results will give [the scientists] a glimpse of the universe less than a billionth of one second after the Big Bang." And those 5 things you didn't know? 1. The LHC is kept colder than outer space; 2. The LHC may be trying to sabotage itself; 3. The LHC could win Stephen Hawking his Nobel Prize; 4. The LHC contained the hottest spot in the solar system; 5. The LHC relies on Einstein's famous equation. For the details behind each of those points, check the link above.



• According to publishersweekly.com, Publishers Weekly magazine has been purchased by a newly formed company, PWxyz, LLC, headed by one-time former PW publisher George Slowik. The acquisition includes the website as well as PW Show Daily. "The new company will retain all of PW's editorial, art, and advertising employees and the magazine will remain headquartered in New York City." (via mediabistro.com's GalleyCat)
  
  In a related New York Times article: "In an interview, Mr. Slowik said he planned to digitize Publishers Weekly's archives, combine its print and digital databases to get a more unified view of its readers.... He also plans to use Google's translation tool to begin creating international editions, with humans finessing the machine-translated text." (via @calreid)

eARC Giveaway Redux (Revised Rules)

A few people have contacted me directly with some questions -- and related confusion -- regarding my eARC giveaway. So, I will restate the giveaway in this new post, without any subsidiary information, in an effort to keep it simple. The giveaway rules have changed (i.e. there is one less rule), and a bonus has been added.

On June 1, DAW Books will publish anthology Is Anybody Out There? which I co-edited with Nick Gevers. The anthology contains 15 original science fiction stories that address the Fermi Paradox: If the universe consists of billions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains some number of Earth-like planets, why have we not made contact with -- or found evidence of -- other living species?

If you have an interest in the genesis of this anthology, you can read about it here; if you want more insight into the contents, you can read about that here; and lastly, if you want to read the back cover text, you'll find that here. These are all links to my previous blog posts.

The contents of Is Anybody Out There?

Paul McAuley, "Introduction: Here Comes Everyone"
Alex Irvine, "The Word He Was Looking For Was Hello"
Michael Arsenault, "Residue"
Yves Meynard, "Good News from Antares"
Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn, "Report From the Field"
Jay Lake, "Permanent Fatal Errors"
Paul Di Filippo, "Galaxy of Mirrors"
Sheila Finch, "Where Two Or Three"
David Langford, "Graffiti in the Library of Babel"
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "The Dark Man"
Ray Vukcevich, "One Big Monkey"
Pat Cadigan, "The Taste of Night"
Matthew Hughes, "Timmy, Come Home"
Ian Watson, "A Waterfall of Lights"
Felicity Shoulders & Leslie What, "Rare Earth"
James Morrow, "The Vampires of Paradox"

Now, about the giveaway: I have a PDF file available of the Advanced Reading Copy (eARC) of this anthology. If you are a science fiction book blogger and/or book reviewer -- and you have an interest in blogging about/reviewing Is Anybody Out There? -- then here are the rules:

1. You must have a Twitter account.

2. Send a tweet using hashtag #IAOT.

Even though a tweet is 140 characters in length, you don't actually have 140 characters to work with because you must use hashtag #IAOT (6 characters total: 5 characters plus the preceding or following space). Since you are not sending the tweet specifically to me, I will track it using the hashtag. This is a public hashtag so anyone within the Twitterverse may read your tweet.

Use the remaining 134 characters to promote your blog, your reviews, whatever you feel necessary to encourage me to send you the eARC of Is Anybody Out There? Be as creative as this minimal space will allow. You may include anything you wish, such as links to your blog, reviews, etc. (I suggest you use a link shortener such as tinyURL or bit.ly in order to use as few characters as possible.)

That's just 134 characters total of creative thought! And it's good PR for your blog/reviews as well.

3. Only one tweet per person or ID; and, again, the tweet must include the hashtag #IAOT.

4. The deadline for all tweets using the #IAOT hashtag is Friday, April 30, at midnight (Pacific time).

5. The winning individual(s) will be contacted directly after the close of the giveaway. (I may also include the tweets in a follow-up blog post, since they are public postings anyhow.)

6. BONUS: This contest is initially for a PDF file of the Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of Is Anybody Out There? Once I have received my physical copies of the book, I will personally send the winning individual(s) a copy of the book at my expense.


If you have any questions regarding this giveaway, please feel free to post here and/or tweet me, and I will do my best to respond.

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Is Anybody Out There? -- eARC Giveaway

Just after I posted my previous blog entry on Is Anybody Out There? -- an anthology of original stories based on the Fermi Paradox, to be published by DAW Books on June 1 -- I received an email from my co-editor on the project, Nick Gevers. When Nick and I were actively working on this book, emails were flying constantly through the aether between us, especially since email is the only method of communication that we use: I reside in Northern California and Nick resides in South Africa! But now that the book is complete and we're just awaiting its publication, the volume of email between us has declined drastically. So receiving his email shortly after I clicked the "Publish Post" button on my blog entry was indeed a coincidence. Or possibly "synchronous" would be the more apropos word.

In his email, Nick informed me of a new nonfiction book entitled The Eerie Silence by physicist/cosmologist Paul Davies. The U.S. edition, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is subtitled Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. But even more interesting, considering our own forthcoming anthology, is the subtitle of the UK edition (the specific edition that Nick mentioned), from Allen Lane Publishers: Are We Alone in the Universe?

So I did a bit of searching, and found an article entitled "SETI at 50" on Failure Magazine that features a Paul Davies interview, in support of the publication of his new book. Since its inception, SETI has searched beyond Earth for radio signals, all to no avail. So Paul Davies -- director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, co-director of the Cosmology Initiative (both at Arizona State University), and chairman of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup -- is suggesting that we attempt other means of detection and communication. Here's Davies' own words, from the interview:

...It's too soon to say it's a waste of time to carry on with traditional SETI. I think it's a great thing, but maybe after 50 years the public might be thinking, "Can we try something else?" And I think we should. We should think much more expansively about what a signature of intelligence might be. Forget messages, all we really want to know is: Is anyone out there? Their presence could be betrayed in a large number of ways....

...ET might use biological organisms as a means of sending information. Genomes are packed full of information. If you could get a message into a cell somehow it would just replicate and replicate. If you could do that in a way that doesn't compromise the biological functionality of the host then you've got something that could endure for millions and millions of years. So rather than sending radio messages, I would be in favor of, for example, dispatching viruses -- retroviruses -- that would insert DNA into any DNA-based organisms.... So why don't we search as many genomes as we can get our hands on, not just human -- just to see. It's a crazy idea, but then all of SETI is slightly crazy. I believe we should do what we can do easily and cheaply even if the chances of success are exceedingly small....

...If [SETI scientists] succeed, it will probably be the most momentous scientific discovery in history. So to allocate some small fraction of the world's resources to addressing such a very deep question is certainly justified. And even if SETI fails, it's very healthy that we address issues like: What is nature? What is humanity? What is our destiny? What do we mean by life? What do we mean by intelligence? What is our place in the universe? These are all good things to think about, even if we never pick up a signal.

March Links & Things

Following are my links and such for the month of March. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment (and the occasional rant). You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• If you haven't surmised by now, I am a freelance editor; my wife is also self-employed. When our health care premium topped over $1,100 per month -- more than $13,200 a year (and that was 2 years ago!) -- we had to abandon that plan and go with an HSA plan with a high deductible. So you won't be hearing any complaining from me about health care reform; in fact, I'm truly saddened there is no public option: that was the only way to force some real competition among the private health care providers, who whine about rising costs as they give multi-million-dollar bonuses to their CEOs.
  
  I bring this to your attention because of a blog post by award-winning author George R. R. Martin, who speaks from the heart on health care and its impact on freelance writers: himself and his close friends. "It is worth pointing out that if either of my friends had lived in Canada, or Australia, or France, or England, or any country with that old vile 'socialized medicine' the right wing likes to denounce, they would never have gotten so sick. They would have seen a doctor much earlier, early enough so that their medical problems could have been diagnosed, treated, and perhaps cured or ameliorated before they required major surgery. But no, they couldn't afford doctors, and they didn't feel THAT bad... not at first... so they did what millions of Americans have done, and ignored their symptoms until it was almost too late."
  
  If you are a freelancer, if you are self-employed, and you have health care coverage -- even what is termed "catastrophic coverage" -- consider yourself very, very lucky indeed.



• In my February Links & Things, I talked about Paul Williams, former editor of Crawdaddy, former head of the Philip K. Dick Society, author of the Bob Dylan: Performing Artist series, and all-around great guy; and I linked to an article about Paul's current illness: early-onset dementia. As a follow-up to that entry, author Paul Di Filippo has an article on BarnesandNobleReview.com in which he discusses the significance of the Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (12 volumes to date), all of which have been edited by Paul Williams. The final volume, entitled Case and the Dreamer, is scheduled to be published this October. Paul Di Filippo expresses concern that Paul Williams "might already be beyond the point where any kudos can reliably reach him." It's a well-done, albeit short article highlighting the significance of Sturgeon's short fiction, and this 13-volume series in particular. I have all 12 volumes in my library, and am eagerly awaiting the final volume in October.



• Author Mark Teppo (@MarkTeppo) is in the news a lot these days to promote Heartland (Night Shade Books), book two in his Codex of Souls. You can read my previous blog about working with Mark on the first two books in this series.
  
  Mark has two entries on Amazonblogs's Omnivoracious, hosted by Jeff VanderMeer. In the first, on "The Nature of Magick," Mark writes: "I love the idea of secret knowledge, and when you strip away all the pomp and circumstance surrounding most modern religious practices, what remains is an unshakable faith in a secret." The second entry is entitled "On the Existence of Monsters": "I think we're more afraid of our fellow man. We're more terrified of the innocent-looking neighbor who might worship a different god or who has a predilection for devouring children or who might simply want to tell us what we can do in the dark privacy of our own home. These sorts of monsters are hard to defang because you can't find them, because they aren't physically different than you or I. What makes them different is the way they think."
  
  Lastly, here's an excerpt from the Mark Teppo interview in Fantasy Magazine: "I jettisoned all of [the urban fantasy tropes] for historical occult practices, secret religious doctrines, alchemical theories, and other religious magic practices. Why? Because I couldn't sort out a worldview where vampires didn't turn us all into cattle, or we got our shit together to wipe them out. Couldn't do it. Stopped trying after a while. Though, to be fair, Markham [the protagonist in the series] is, essentially, a psychic vampire, and the soul-dead are zombies, so I haven't quite abandoned the tropes.... Ignorance is not the victor; that is certain. Ignorance is what gets Markham into trouble and what hounds him during the ten years he spends wandering. In Lightbreaker, it does come down to a faith and/or knowledge, and [which one] the reader chooses will inform how they interpret the last chapter."



• Another new title (which I also edited) is Matthew Hughes's Hespira (Night Shade Books), the final volume in his trilogy of Henghis Hapthorn adventures. Hapthorn is a "discriminator" (think Sherlock Holmes but in the style/language of Jack Vance), who is trying to survive in a world in which the age of rationalism (aka science) is succumbing to sympathetic association (aka magic). Hespira is reviewed by Andrew Wheeler, former editor of the Science Fiction Book Club. Wheeler writes: "I can't see any reason why the SF audience would avoid a writer as witty and endlessly pleasurable as Hughes, but they certainly didn't buy all that many copies of [his earlier Warner and Tor] books. But Hughes has kept writing, adding new wrinkles to his Vancean far future with each book and becoming one of the most entertaining writers the modern genre has to offer.... Again, I can be reliably counted on to call each new Matthew Hughes novel a triumph; he writes wonderful books that I enjoy massively. The Vancean flavor [has] mixed with a dash of Wodehouse, a couple of jiggers of Conan Doyle, and a shot or two of Wolfe to form a bracing cocktail that is nothing but Hughes. Hespira in particular builds on its two predecessors to make a satisfying end to a trilogy -- and what SFF reader can resist a trilogy? Hughes is the writer I invariably mention whenever the question of modern underrated writers comes up; he writes the kind of wonderful, funny, thoughtful, exciting, zippy novels that should be massively popular and winning him shelves-full of awards."



• We've all been hearing about the demise of print media -- magazines and newspapers in particular; how ad revenue has dropped 30-plus percent over the past year, thousands of newspaper and magazine employees laid off, etc. Well, here's one: Robert Feder of blogs.vocalo.org writes: "...you'd think the chief executive officer of a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy and desperate to salvage an $8 billion buyout-gone-bad would have better things to do than pester his underlings with crazy proclamations. But in the case of Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, you'd be wrong. The man at the top of the troubled media empire took time out of his real job this week [the week of March 10] to issue a list of words and phrases -- 119 of them, to be exact -- that must never, ever be uttered by anchors or reporters on WGN-AM (720), the news/talk radio station located five floors below his office in Tribune Tower." Here are a few of those banned words: "alleged," "close proximity," "flee," "icon," "legendary," "motorist," "untimely death," "vehicle," and "youth," to name only a few of the 119 words/phrases. You will be shocked to see the everyday words on this list. (via mediabistro.com)



• NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has updated its Flickr account with some new, astounding photographs of the "Blue Marble" -- Earth. I often imagine what it would be like to be "out there," looking down. Whew.... (via @Huffingtonpost)

Is Anybody Out There? -- Revealed

If you're a Star Trek fan, you may recall in the series ST:The Next Generation, in the episode entitled "Relics" (First aired: 12 October 1992), the Enterprise picks up a distress call from a transport vessel that has been missing for 75 years. "As the Enterprise drops out of warp to respond to the signal, the starship is rocked violently by a massive gravitational field. Although initial scans do not find the source of the field, they trace the field to its center and discover a massive spherical structure, 200 million kilometers in diameter (or two-thirds of the Earth's orbit around the Sun). The sphere's dimensions are consistent with those of the (until then) theoretical structure known as a Dyson Sphere."¹ This is the episode in which the Enterprise discovers that a pattern has been locked in the transport vessel's transporter buffer these past 75 years, and after some tinkering by the Enterprise crew, Captain Montgomery "Scotty" Scott materializes on the transporter pad.

The Dyson Sphere is named after noted physicist Freeman Dyson, who originated the idea in 1959. Via @projectblackcat, I found a link to the Discovery Enterprise blog, which features a video of Dyson from the TED Conference -- Technology, Entertainment, Design -- held in Monterey, California, in February 2003. I'll save you the trouble of clicking on over to the DE blog and include the video below. Dyson speaks on searching for life in the outer Solar System; he is a genius, a space geek, even a comedian, as you'll see if you watch the vid, and though he rambles a bit, if you have the time (approximately 20 minutes), it is well worth the investment. More after the vid....

February Links & Things

I back up my working data automatically every half hour to a USB drive; specific files and folders (all working data) are backed up nightly to a stand-alone external drive; and the entire "My Computer" (essentially my entire PC) gets backed up to that same external drive once a week. Well, during my weekly backup I have begun to receive bad sector errors, so I ran a disk check upon startup Saturday morning and received four different "File record segment is unreadable" error messages. Disk check fixed the errors so that I was able to then complete the "My Computer" backup, but I'm afraid my hard drive is headed for HDD hell. I have a couple projects that I hope to complete within the next two days, and then I suspect I'll have to replace the hard drive and reinstall the entire "My Computer," and hope that there hasn't been too great a loss of data due to those unreadable file records. Sigh....

Following are my links and such for the month of February. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• Recent reviews of books from two different authors with whom I worked as editor:
  
  Canadian author Nathalie Mallet's second book in a series has recently been published by Night Shade Books. Colleen Cahill, in her review on SFRevu, writes: "In her first book, The Princes of the Golden Cage [2007], Nathalie Mallet took a pass at fairy tales and brought us a new version, with the Prince being locked away rather than the Princess. In her second book about Prince Amir, The King's Daughters [2009], we are again in a medieval fantasy setting, but this time we move from the Arabian Nights to a North Eastern European arena. The good news is Mallet continues to bring us a piece full of fascinating characters and intriguing plots, all presented in a compelling style; the bad news (for Amir) is that while the Prince might be out of the cage, life is not getting any easier.... This book is a good read for fans of medieval fantasy, especially those who want something that does not follow the standard plot. You need not have read the earlier work to enjoy this book, but I recommend both of them. On a cold winter's night, you can't do better than snuggling in with The King's Daughters."
  
  And...Mark Teppo's Heartland, the second book in The Codex of Souls, also from Night Shade Books, is reviewed by @MadHatterReview: "Teppo doesn't suffer the sophomore slump at all with Heartland. In fact, the same level of cleverness and knowledge of the occult still clings to Teppo's prose as this man is a knowledge bucket of the arcane and manages to make it fresh and undaunting.... The Codex of Souls is without a doubt one of the most original Urban Fantasy series going right now. It has stepped away from the pack and embraced a different type of magic and a very different sensibility worth checking out."
  
  You can read my earlier blog post, entitled "Mark Teppo's Codex of Souls Seeks the Light," on working with Mark on The Codex of Souls series.



• Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, writes a sharp and critical analysis -- nay, a rebuke -- of the literary magazine, its writers, and the colleges and universities that sponsor them: "Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature -- not even the writers themselves.... To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes -- and quick.... young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits -- God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read." Bravo! As of this writing, there are more than 120 comments. (via @Catherine_Asaro)



• As a follow-on to the above link on the demise of literary journals, is this article (rant?) in the Los Angeles Times Book Section from Dani Shapiro, guest editor for the anthology Best New American Voices 2010, the latest volume in a long-running series, which is coming to an end because the publisher can no longer justify its publication due to declining sales. Shapiro criticizes MFA programs because "creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score.... The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all." If you've often heard other writers say (or have said this yourself, or at least thought it): "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?" -- then you need to read this piece.



• Author @JasonSanford blogs about a website he just discovered: "Selecting and aggregating content from the 'independent' publishing world, FictionDaily presents three new stories each day -- a short, a long, and a genre story. Excerpts of stories in each of these categories are presented without reference to the author's name, the title, or the story's publication. If you're interested, you click over to the original publisher to read the story.... To get a sense of the site's goals, I asked FictionDaily's editor David Backer a few questions." If you're into reading online short-fiction, but don't have the time to search out all the sites and stories, then let FictionDaily do the work for you. I think you'll be amazed as to just how much short fiction is being published online: I counted 54 magazines on the list, and that was only through titles beginning with numbers and the first three letters of the alphabet! And enjoy Sanford's mini interview with David Backer, too.

Kage Baker Redux

As a follow-up to my earlier tribute to author Kage Baker, her family has posted Kage's parting words to her readers on her website:

"I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind."

Kage's family promises to maintain the website and to continue posting news about her work. [To which I say, Thank you!]


And lastly, Stephanie Klose, Senior Editor/Reviews Coordinator for RT Book Reviews¹, emailed me on February 4 with the following request: "RT is putting together a short tribute to Kage for our April issue. Would you be willing to contribute a few sentences about her impact on the genre and/or on you as a reader? Our senior sci fi [sic] reviewer, Natalie Luhrs, sent me your blog post and I'd love to include some of your thoughts about Kage."

The email was time stamped 3:01 P.M. and my deadline was noon the following day, so I spent the remainder of that afternoon pulling together some additional thoughts about Kage. Today, however, I received this follow-up email from Stephanie: "I ended up not having room to use your tribute to Kage, but thanks again for sending it along -- it was a pleasure to read."

Therefore, I am going to take this opportunity to share with readers of this blog my "thoughts about Kage" that were originally intended for RT.

* * * * *

When I worked with Kage Baker, as her editor, on her short story collection Black Projects, White Knights (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002), I often had questions about unfamiliar words, or historical events and people. In the story "Lemuria Will Rise!" Mendoza finds a sprig of Oenothera hookeri ssp. sclatera. I was unable to find anything online about "ssp. sclatera," so I asked Kage about this (and others), specifically was it a real or made-up species. On November 4, 2001, she responded:

All are made up. There's a joke buried in the word "sclatera": the word Lemuria was originally coined by a nineteenth-century zoologist named Sclater as a term to describe a hypothetical land bridge that once existed in the Pacific region, possibly being the method by which lemurs had spread through the different ranges they inhabit. Mystically inclined people seized on the idea of the long-vanished land bridge and interpreted it as a sunken continent in the Pacific, complete with a civilization to rival that of Atlantis. Eventually someone pointed out to them that Sclater had invented the word Lemuria, after which they began calling it Mu... but there are still old editions of Rosicrucian books in the San Luis Obispo library, and they go into great detail about the amazing ancient Lemurians...

For me, it was such a joy to work with Kage; she had a vast knowledge and could twist that knowledge into ways unimaginable in her stories, as evidenced above. And she was quick to share that knowledge as well. Editing each story with Kage was a history lesson in and of itself. She is sorely missed.

Marty Halpern


---------------
Footnotes

¹ Just goes to show you how up-to-date I am: When did Romantic Times change its name to just RT -- and why? I notice that the domain name is still "romantictimes.com."

Aliens Have Entered Mainstream's Orbit

After joining Warren Lapine's Fantastic Books imprint as an acquisitions editor¹, a bit less than a year ago, the first book I acquired for reprint was Judith Moffett's novel Pennterra. This was her first novel and had been out of print since 1993. In an email to Warren on February 27, 2009, in which I introduced Judy (virtually speaking, that is) to him, I described her as follows:

...Judith Moffett is not your typical sf author! She is an award-winning poet with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, a couple of Fulbrights under her belt and grants from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a world-class translator of Swedish poetry, and presented at the 1998 Nobel Symposium on Translation of Poetry and Poetic Prose held in Stockholm.

Now I know that when Judy reads this, she'll be all "Aw, shucks," and the like, but how many science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream -- hell, even mainstream fiction -- authors do you know with this kind of street cred? Just check out all her awards and recognitions on Wikipedia and then come back here and leave me a comment if you're not totally knocked out!

What influenced my decision to blog about Ms. Moffett and her fiction was a recent online review of Pennterra. The review is by Sam Kelly on a blog entitled Cold Iron and Rowan-Wood. But first, a bit about the novel itself: A group of Quakers colonize a planet -- Pennterra -- already inhabited by the alien hrossa. In order to live in peace and harmony with both the planet and the natives, the colonists are restricted to a single valley, and they must limit their population and forsake all heavy machinery in their building and farming. Not exactly what they had in mind when they left a devastated Earth for a new home amongst the stars. Without the use of machinery, the colonists' days are completely filled with exhausting, backbreaking work, and consequently they have had little time to study the hrossa -- until now. A small group of scientists are sent to live with, and study, the natives, and this is detailed in a large section of the novel through the use of field notes and personal journals; the hrossa have a very interesting set of sexual mores, which has a direct impact on the scientists themselves (sorry, no spoilers here). There is a particularly fine "first contact/coming-of-age" story arc involving the son of one the scientists. The main conflict arises in the novel when another colony ship arrives on the planet and these folks are not so inclined to limit and forsake.

Now, what makes Sam Kelly's review of Pennterra interesting is that he makes little mention of the aliens, but he does comment on the Quaker religion portrayed in the book: "Moffett does a good job of showing us how they find the nature of the planet out...making no distinctions between biological research, botanical studies, practical anthropology, and conversation between friends. At the same time, we see the characteristic painful Quaker honesty about themselves and their reactions to their work. The pacing of discovery is good, without playing I-know-something-you-don’t-know tricks on either reader or characters; it might have been good to have seen the author coming down less heavily on the Quaker side, but then I may well be seeing more of that than is there as a Quaker myself." [Note: I believe the reviewer is sensing more of the Quakerness of the story than a typical reader (myself) would.]

All of this, of course, is to encourage you to read Pennterra. Judy and I spent approximately two weeks copyediting the page proofs, discussing each and every correction during very lengthy (two to three hours) telephone conversations. The Fantastic Books edition of Pennterra is indeed the most accurate text of the novel and thus the author's preferred text. However, copies of earlier editions are available through secondary markets, or you can purchase the Fantastic Books edition directly from the FB website, or via Amazon or other booksellers. (And yes, I'm shilling books here; what can I say...)

January Links & Things

I spent a few hours the other day trying to tweak the code on my previous blog post so that it worked correctly with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. The blog worked perfectly using IE, but not the other three browsers, which actually are used more than IE. I tried everything; I must have reviewed and tweaked the blog post code (seven printed pages) a half-dozen times, but I couldn't get the blog to list properly on those three browsers. I slept on it, and then tried a different kind of search the next day and discovered that the code I was using for the "jump" break (i.e. "Continue reading...") was obsolete; Blogger had updated the template code, unbeknownst to me. I deleted the old code I had entered, inserted the new jump code, and here we are. Would have been nice to have received something from Blogger proactively; instead I had to do a multitude of Google searches until I found the problem explained, along with its fix, in the Blogger Help forums. I sure could use those hours back!

Following are my links and such for the month of January. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my involvement in Andrew Fox's novel The Good Humor Man, Or, Calorie 3501 (Tachyon Publications, 2009). Unfortunately the book didn't get the attention that I felt it deserved. With the constant talk on the news, news-magazine programs, health-oriented websites and blogs, etc. on the alarming increase in obesity in this country, particularly childhood obesity, I thought that these folks would have eaten up this book! (Sorry, I couldn't resist...) Thankfully, io9 has published Chris Braak's thoughtful, and thought-provoking, review: Headline: "One Lipsuctionist's Wild Ride Through American Gluttony" -- "Fox's presentation of the Good Humor Movement -- the neo-fascist organization that, in order to preserve an overburdened healthcare system from the catastrophic expenses associated with obesity -- doesn't just seem frighteningly plausible; the way [liposuctionist Dr.] Schmalzberg describes it, it actually seems like kind of a good idea. The underlying intelligence of the novel is its recognition that, even in organizations whose actions are manifestly evil, the individual members of that organization imagine themselves to be doing good.... an intensely interesting, wild ride through a wickedly accurate depiction of the American psyche that, fortunately for all of us, doesn't bother hewing too closely to its ideological forebears. This is more than just a goofy reversal of Bradbury's classic [Fahrenheit 451], but a witty, incisive satire all on its own. By turns heartbreaking and mesmerizingly grotesque, The Good Humor Man is well worth the read."


• Another series of books that I had the pleasure to edit is Matthew Hughes's Henghis Hapthorn trilogy (Night Shade Books), which consists of Majestrum (2006), The Spiral Labyrinth (2007), and, finally, the just released Hespira. Henghis Hapthorn is a freelance discriminator (read: investigator/detective) in a world where the scientific method and technology are quickly losing ground to the emergence of "sympathetic association" (i.e. magic). It's a delightful series, which I have seen described as "Sherlock Holmes meets Jack Vance's Dying Earth." You can read Chapter 1 online, on the author's website, but be forewarned: the series builds upon itself beginning with the first book, so you really need to read the series in order. The Publishers Weekly starred review concludes with: "A droll narrative voice, dry humor and an alternate universe that's accessible without explicit exposition make this a winner."


• Author Philip K. Dick spent his final years in Southern California, specifically Orange County. Scott Timberg, for the LA Times on January 24, looks back at PKD's years in the OC, based on interviews with his ex-wives and comments from Tim Powers (which Powers gleaned from his journals). Some revealing content, particularly PKD's marital divorce advice to Powers (PKD was married and divorced five times). The article also touches on the events and paranoia that caused Phil to flee from Northern to Southern Cal, and his health issues, which affected his writing. (via @maudnewton)


• Author Jeff VanderMeer shares with us an excerpt from his recent publication Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer (Tachyon Publications) -- "Seven Points to Consider When Submitting Short Fiction": "1) Standard approaches are still the norm; 2) There are complexities to the term "highest paying market"; 3) Repurposing the public perception of your fiction may be important; 4) Pro rates do not necessarily mean an overall level of pro quality stories; 5) Breaking your standard submission cycle may teach you something new; 6) To a new writer, encouragement can be a kind of payment; and 7) Not every writer's career path is the same because not every writer's fiction is the same." For all the specifics, you'll just have to read Jeff's blog post. (via @ericrosenfield)


• If you think that publishers are looking for big fat wordy fantasy novels, think again. Lit agent @ColleenLindsay, of FinePrint Literary Management, has more than a few words to say on the subject of "word counts and novel length." It's an old post, but since Ms. Lindsay continues to see such abuses in the submission queries that she receives, she has retweeted this blog post yet again. Colleen writes: "If a contract calls for a book that is 100k words and you turn in one that is 130k, expect to go back and find a way to shave 30k words off that puppy before your manuscript is accepted. Remember that part of the payout schedule of an author's advance often dangles on that one important word: acceptance." The word counts are broken down into these areas: middle grade fiction, YA fiction, urban fantasy/paranormal romance, mysteries and crime fiction, mainstream fiction, and science fiction and fantasy. A must read. There are more than 65 comments posted that are also worth reading.


• But before you worry about word counts, you had best master the art of writing first! Caro Clarke points out "four faults" that all beginning writers make: "As an editor, I know when I am reading someone's first novel. I have nicknames for the four give-away faults beginners make: (1) Walk and Chew Gum (2) Furry Dice (3) Tea, Vicar? (4) Styrofoam. I see at least one of these in every manuscript where the author has not mastered the craft of writing before submitting his or her work. What are these four faults and, more importantly, how can you cure them?" If you want to know what these four faults are, and determine if you are guilty of them yourself, then you'll need to read this essay.

In the Company of Kage Baker

Update: January 31, 2010: Sadly, I have just learned that Kage Baker passed away this morning. My thoughts are with her sister Kathleen, her niece "Emma Rose," her extended family, friends, and readers. If I may borrow some words from Jeff VanderMeer: "I would like to think that this is not the end, that instead [Kage has] merely been assigned by The Company to some new mission." Regardless, rest in peace, Kage. I am so grateful for the time -- and the projects -- we've shared together.

**********

My friend, author Kage Baker, is extremely ill. I knew last year that Kage was ill, but it wasn't until we spoke together at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California, over Halloween weekend -- Kage in a wheelchair while her sister Kathleen looked after her -- that I learned that the evil culprit was cancer. At the con, Kage informed me that she had surgery scheduled, but the prognosis wasn't as dire then as it had become by Christmas eve, when cancer had been found in Kage's brain.

Kage had chosen not to publicly announce her illness and, respecting her wishes, I kept this knowledge to myself. But that silence has now been broken with this announcement by Kage's caregiver and sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, in which she states: "If we are lucky, the therapies will win [Kage] a few months; if we are incredibly lucky, 6 months to a year. If she gets more than that, it will be a literal miracle...."

But then, isn't that what our genre is all about: miracles, both fictional and real?

Kathleen goes on to say: "[Kage] is not giving up, though, and neither -- obviously! -- am I. I have been her caregiver for 8 months now, and am not going to surrender as long as there is the smallest chance of her living through this."

What Kathleen is asking for is your support: "Please send cards, thoughts, prayers and all the healing energy and love you can!" You can send your prayers and thoughts via email to materkb@gmail.com and they will be printed and read to Kage immediately. Letters, notes, cards and anything else you can think of can be sent to her home:
Kage Baker
331 Stimson, Apt. B
Pismo Beach CA 93449

Back in 1997 I started hearing rumblings of a new time travel novel that was soon to be published -- a story about a group of immortals who traveled back in time, saving (read: salvaging) artifacts in the past for later "discovery" in the future. Sounds like a good thing, right? Saving pieces of the past so that they are not lost and thus can be appreciated by those in the future? Except that most of the saving was being done for future profit, and many of these immortal cyborgs -- and the masterminds behind them -- were not so virtuous, or, let's just say that things weren't so black and white as they initially appeared. The novel was In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker, and it was first published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1997. I purchased the UK hardcover edition because I didn't want to wait until the following year for the US Harcourt edition.

That group of time traveling immortals -- and the masterminds behind them -- became known as "The Company" -- officially Dr. Zeus Incorporated (or Jovian Integrated Systems, if you are familiar with the Alec Checkerfield stories) and, its Victorian-era precursor, the Gentlemen's Speculative Society. In the Garden of Iden was followed by Sky Coyote in 1999, Mendoza in Hollywood in 2000, and The Graveyard Game in 2001, all from publisher Harcourt.

Though I had read the first two novels, the one story that really made me take notice was novella "Son Observe the Time," originally published in the May 1999 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection, which is where I first read the story. The events in this story take place just before the 1909 San Francisco earthquake; living in the San Francisco Bay Area, earthquakes are near and dear to my heart. [We just had a 5-pointer about three weeks ago.] After reading this one story, I then tried to read all the "Company" short stories that I could find. In May 2001, I contacted Kage Baker via email about the possibility of a short story collection; at the time I was acquiring and editing for Golden Gryphon Press. Kage responded the very same day, stating that she was intrigued with my proposal and that she has forwarded my letter to her agent Linn Prentis¹; they would get back to me on this soon. On May 9 I received an email from Linn: "We are thrilled that you are interested in doing a Baker Company collection. Kage has put together a list [of stories] and we are checking it for possible conflicts." Linn went on to ask about terms and a possible publication date.

My plan was to publish the collection in time for the 2002 WorldCon, which would take place about six or so miles from my home, in downtown San Jose, August 29 through September 2 [my birthday and my anniversary!²]. And since Kage resided in Pismo Beach, about 190 or so miles south, this would allow her to hopefully attend the convention as well and help promote the book. That may sound like a lot of time -- May 2001 to August 2002 -- but that was typical for a Golden Gryphon Press book; much of the lead time had to do with scheduling certain aspects of the publication process to coincide with the distributor's (Independent Publishers Group) twice-yearly marketing catalog. Of course, the contents had to be determined, the selected reprint stories formatted and copyedited, the original stories formatted, edited, and copyedited, original cover art commissioned, ancillary material written, and so forth.

December Links & Things

Here's to a new year (with hopes that my regimen of antibiotics helps me feel a bit more human in a few days)! And to catch up, following are my links and such for the month of December. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• Ah, the dream of spaceflight... Virgin Galactic has unveiled its SpaceShipTwo (SS2) -- "the world's first commercial manned spaceship.... Thousands of private astronauts will be heading to space once the testing and licensing is finished, with up to six passenger astronauts on each trip." Some great photos of this unique spacecraft. [Note: Well, there used to be some great photos on the Virgin site, but the original link I have no longer works, and the one link that I did find under "Press Releases" shows only one photo. The Virgin website sucks anyhow, since a search of the entire site for "Virgin Galactic" or "SpaceShipTwo" yields a "404" error page. Evidently their webmaster doesn't know how to code a search! Note the visible code at the end of the press release, too.]


• I mentioned in my last Links & Things post that every month there appears to be some type of blow up/controversy in the writing and publishing world, and this month is no exception. Canadian science fiction author Dr. Peter Watts (2007 Hugo Award finalist for novel Blindsight) was accosted, pepper sprayed, beaten, and jailed by US border guards on Tuesday, December 8, when he passed through the US-Canadian border on his way home from visiting friends in Nebraska. You can read the BoingBoing.net article, which is where I first heard of it, which links to Peter's own words on the incident. I met Peter at past ReaderCons and I cannot picture this man inflicting bodily harm on a uniformed border guard. Peter's assault charge on a federal officer is undoubtedly to cover their asses. A legal defense fund has been set up, because a) Peter is not a best-selling author, and b) such a defense, to avoid the potential of spending two years in prison, is going to be very costly. If you want to support Peter's efforts to fight these heinous charges, then please donate. If you're not personally into the legal issues and/or politics, then read Peter's Hugo Award-nominated Blindsight) -- available for free download on his website -- and then donate what you feel the novel is worth. Please donate via PayPal to this ID: donate@rifters.com.


• In other sad publishing news, PoynterOnline reported the demise of publications Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher, by reprinting a letter from Greg Farrar, President of Nielsen Business Media, owners of the two periodicals. Kirkus has always been a tough nut to crack, so to speak; when my co-edited anthology Witpunk was reviewed in Kirkus I was absolutely thrilled; and to have the review end with the words "ringingly brilliant" made all the hassles I had to deal with while putting that anthology together seem inconsequential at best. Mediabistro.com's eBookNewser reported that the Twitterverse was all abuzz with the demise of these two publications: "Ron Charles (@roncharles) of The Washington Post sounded a note of regret for the loss of Kirkus's critical eye: 'Everytime we lose a rare independent voice we grow more dependent on publicists, authors' friends clogging blogs w praise'"