ASUS Zenbook: The Zen of Ultrabooks

On January 10 my ASUS Zenbook (UX31) arrived at the Microsoft Store in the Valley Fair mall in San Jose. I had to do quite a bit of hustling in order to give the store my money for this little gem. You see, back in December, when I began my search for an Ultrabook -- and eventually decided on the recently released ASUS Zenbook -- I discovered that this PC was in such high demand that they were completely sold out at all local stores¹, and online as well. Even Amazon sellers didn't have this particular model available.

The Microsoft Store at the Valley Fair mall had one on display, but none were in stock; I was told that a new shipment (though the store didn't know how many would be in the shipment) should arrive before Christmas. After the Christmas weekend came and went, I was told that the store was still expecting delivery later that week. And then, New Years weekend came and went -- and still no Zenbooks. So I contacted a number of Microsoft Stores across the country and discovered that the Zenbook was in stock in Colorado, and elsewhere. I spoke to a manager at the Colorado store: she was willing to ship a Zenbook to the Santa Clara store, but the request had to be initiated by that store. So, I contacted the Valley Fair store once again, explained the situation, and they agreed to do a stock transfer from another store; the store they chose, for whatever reason(s), was in the District of Columbia.

I was motivated to purchase the Zenbook from the Microsoft Store for a number of reasons: I liked what I saw at the store -- the layout of the store and the hardware on display that was available for hands-on use, the store personnel who were there to assist and answer questions; also, the store was running a special offer that would save me $200, and provide me with two years of free support and maintenance, along with a full copy of Microsoft Office 2010; and lastly, all PCs sold through the store go through a "Microsoft Signature" review -- the PC is tuned, bloatware removed, etc. Given the problems that had been reported with the initially released Zenbooks, I felt the "Microsoft Sig" touch would ensure that my Zenbook wouldn't have bad pixels, problems with the keyboard, etc.

As I said, the Zenbook arrived on January 10; I was handed a brown corrugated ASUS shipping box at the store, which I greedily opened as soon as I arrived home. Unfortunately, in my eagerness, I neglected to snap any unpacking pics, and that outer box has since been disposed of. However, inside this outer box was the nicely crafted Zenbook box (pictured below) -- a multi-level box that contained the Ultrabook, a padded brown fabric carrying case, and a few booklets in an envelope-like enclosure mounted to the bottom. A section along the right side of the box held the power supply, along with a matching brown fabric pouch that contained the VGA and Ethernet adapters.

Two Holes-in-One and a Bogey

This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with golf -- sorry, golf fans... -- I just happened to like this title that I came up with to represent the three recent reviews for my anthology Alien Contact (Night Shade Books).

I'll start with the two holes-in-one because we always want to boast first about the best -- our best golf swing, the humongous fish we caught, stealing home....

This first review is courtesy of Bob Blough, and published on Tangent online on January 30. After providing readers with the complete list of stories included in the volume, Bob opens his review with the following:

Alien Contact is an intelligently edited anthology of 26 first contact stories. And thankfully, Mr. Halpern has decided to mine the last 30 years for his selections, eschewing more well-known and oft-reprinted old favorites from earlier decades. So, this is a huge anthology favoring more contemporary SF and it acquits itself wonderfully. I do not agree with all of the editor's choices and can think of others I would have preferred, but so many terrific stories are gathered together in one place that everyone who likes this theme or is interested in learning more about it will perhaps find some new gems.

In the review, Bob focuses on "a few of [his] favorites." In particular, he singles out Pat Cadigan's story "Angel," which he refers to as "the best story of the batch (and one of my top SF stories of all time)."¹ Bob's other faves include stories by George Alec Effinger ("a story with the perfect title"), Neil Gaiman ("read it and revel"), Mike Resnick ("a sadly moving tale, albeit a joy to read"), Michael Swanwick ("a complex and beautiful novelette"), Molly Gloss ("bravura performance"), Robert Silverberg ("a terrific read"), Nancy Kress ("clever and a delightful entertainment"), and Stephen Baxter ("the final story is one of the best").

Bob concludes his lengthy review with this paragraph:

These are but a double handful of my favorites; others by Paul McAuley, Bruce McAllister, Jeffrey Ford and a number of others serve this anthology well. If you are new to most of these stories or want to reacquaint yourself with some favorites – get this book. I thank Mr. Halpern for his knowledgeable selections. Alien Contact was a kick to read.

January Links & Things

I returned this past weekend from my trip to SoCal, only to have to schedule yet another trip in a couple weeks. My mother's house in Anaheim, California, will be on the market toward the end of this month. In my youth I used to walk to Disneyland from that house, but it was/is a long walk, though not for a teen -- and from the house you can watch, and hear, the D-land fireworks at night, with no interference from any structures. It really is a great house. When everything becomes official, I'll post some photos and more details.

If you have an interest in my recently published anthology Alien Contact (Night Shade Books), please consider clicking on the "Like" button (if you haven't already done so) in the Facebook widget in the right column of this blog. This will add the anthology's updates to your own news stream on your FB Home page. You won't be inundated with posts, probably on average a couple per week, I promise.

And I best get to January's Links & Things before I run out of time this month as well. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern; or Friending me on Facebook (FB). Note, however, that not all of my tweeted/FB links make it into these month-end posts. Once again there is a lot of content, so please return for a second visit if you need to to take full advantage of all the links. Previous month-end posts are accessible via the "Links and Things" tag in the right column.

• Via author and friend Bruce McAllister's FB page, I learned of a new magazine with a very strange title: rFISHc. Bruce has a short-short story in the first issue. Submission guidelines, payment details, etc. at the link.

• Do you write fantasy novels? -- HUGE fantasy novels? If so, then you need to consider taking David J. Parker's "The Fantasy Novelist's Exam." Here are the first 5 of 75 questions: 1) Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages? 2) Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage? 3) Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn't know it? 4) Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme bad guy? 5) Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world? Let's just say that you don't want to be answering "yes" to very many of these questions. (via John Shirley's FB page, shared from David Brin)

• Princeton Alumni Weekly -- "an editorially independent magazine by alumni for alumni since 1900" -- recently published a feature article on books entitled "What Princeton students are reading." You may be interested in learning what their "comfort food" reading actually entails. (via Gordon van Gelder's FB page)

• From the UK's Guardian (@guardian): "YA novel readers clash with publishing establishment," and subtitled: "A row over the status of the bloggers who fuelled the success of young adult novels has been raging across the net." Apparently YA authors and their agents and publishers do not like negative reviews. I'm shocked, shocked I say.... So, among other things, they have been publicly discussing rigging the Amazon and Goodreads ratings to improve the visibility of good reviews, and thus "hide" the negative reviews. They've also been ganging up on the YA book reviewers/book review bloggers. The Guardian article concludes with a very special note to authors: "And if you can't stand the heat of the blogosphere – don't Google yourself." (also via Gordon van Gelder's FB page)

• I write these month-end recaps on my computer, directly into a blog post, because I need access to the links/articles and often reference material, etc. But the drafts of most of my other blog posts are written in longhand; that's right, I take pencil to paper and actually write (well, more like scribble, since I'm the only one seeing the draft). I do this because I have a tendency to overedit when I compose online, and thus I never complete the text because I'm too occupied with editing. (Did I tell you that I'm an editor?) But writing on paper avoids a lot of this, and words actually do get written. Yes, I'll scratch out text, squeeze in changes, draw an arrow to the bottom of the page to something I want to add -- but the energy continues to flow, words continue to be written, and eventually the piece is completed. And then I edit as I type the text into a blog post. Evidently I'm not the only writer who works this way. Timmi Duchamp, of Aqueduct Press fame, also uses longhand, particularly when she needs to write additional material that will be inserted into an existing file. In a blog post entitled "The magic of writing longhand," Timmi says: "[In the past, before personal computers] whenever I wasn't sure where the story was going, I would retype the entirety of the scene I was working on, to give me a sort of running start. It never failed. I didn't feel I could do that when I switched to a word processor. So then I'd write out some of it longhand, and continue from there. Writing longhand has thus come to seem a sort of magic...." (via @charlesatan)

Would you like to review Alien Contact?

If you would be interested in reviewing an eBook edition of my Alien Contact anthology, recently published by Night Shade Books, please read on....

I've made this offer previously and thought I would follow it up with one additional post. I have eBook editions -- mobi, epub, and pdf -- available for Alien Contact that I would be happy to provide to book reviewers and/or book review bloggers.

If you would like an eBook review copy, simply post a request below in the Comment section, along with a link to one (or more) of your online book reviews and/or a link to your book review blog. I'll also need an email addy in order to get in touch with you. If contact information is posted with your review or on your blog, no need to include that same contact information with your comment.

Any questions, etc. can also be posted below in Comments.

Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style

Back in December 2010 I wrote a blog post entitled "Writing with Style (Sheets, That Is)," on my need, as an editor/copyeditor, for the author to provide a style sheet. This blog post was the result of a series of comments to a status update that Theodora Goss had posted on her Facebook page. In addition to Dora's and my comments, Robert Vardeman and Paul Witcover shared comments as well. And with their kind permissions, I included the FB comment stream in that blog post on style sheets. Dora then wrote a complementary blog post of her own, from her perspective on the subject in question. So with my post and hers, the reader is treated to the editor's and author's viewpoints regarding a single copyedit in a short story.

I won't overly bore you with repetitions from this blog post, should you choose to read it in its entirety, but as I mentioned in that post, in the nearly fifteen years that I have been in this business, I've only had two authors -- Michael A. Stackpole and Mark Teppo -- provide me with style sheets along with their manuscripts. That's two authors in nearly fifteen years. In fact, just this past September I worked on Michael's Of Limited Loyalty, the second volume in his Queen's Command series published by Night Shade Books, and once again he provided the publisher with an updated style sheet for his book.

The second post I want to reference was published on December 10, 2009, shortly after I finished work on Charles Stross's third Laundry Files novel, The Fuller Memorandum, for Ace Books. Entitled "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service," this rather extensive blog post covered my working relationship with Charlie Stross: how it all came together, including the genesis of The Atrocity Archives, the first Laundry Files volume, and the Hugo Award-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle." (Which, by the way, is still available online -- as a PDF doc or as a web page -- for your reading pleasure.)

As he did in 2009, Charlie again recommended me to Ace Books to proof, line edit, and copyedit his forthcoming (fourth) Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex. I have a distinct advantage over an in-house or other freelance editor because I have worked on the first three books in the series, allowing me to maintain consistency across all the volumes. And Charlie and I work well together: I ask a multitude of questions, and he answers, often with links to reference material; I make content suggestions, and he either accepts, rejects, or modifies said suggestions. Just as it should be, between editor and author. In fact, regarding my work on The Fuller Memorandum, Charlie informed me that upon reviewing the marked up (i.e. change tracked) manuscript from his publisher, he didn't have a single STET on any of my copyedits. No STETs means I done good -- very good. No STETs also takes a lot of stress off both the author and publisher, since there is no back-and-forth dickering necessary over changes: I'll give you those three copyedits for my one STET; this inevitably speeds up the production process, too. (I don't know if I'll be as lucky with the the work I did on the latest volume, which I delivered to Ace Books in December.)

In The Apocalypse Codex, our reluctant hero, Bob Howard, skilled in the techniques of applied computational demonology -- as well as all things IT geekery, plus PowerPoint slide shows and departmental time sheets -- is once again called upon to save the world from a diabolical fanatic who plans to open a portal to call forth a nightmare from the vast reaches of spacetime, at the cost of thousands of lives. Sounds like a typical Laundry Files novel, yes? But there the typical ends. The diabolical fanatic is a reverend; and Bob must team up with a couple of "external assets": Persephone "the Duchess" Hazard (code name: Bashful Incendiary) and Jonathan "Johnny" McTavish (code name: Johnny Prince).

(Belated) December Links & Things

Whoa... hard to believe that we're in week four of January and I still have yet to post my December links and things. I do have a lot of excuses, like the holidays (and recovery from same), multiple computer, software, and network issues (some good, including a new ASUS Zenbook; most not so good; but all very time consuming), as well as a huge project -- 271,000-plus words! -- I just proofed and copyedited for Night Shade Books (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Six, edited by Jonathan Strahan¹) that took far longer than I had anticipated. And I'm still dealing with the aftermath of my mother's passing: emails, phone calls, photocopying, meetings, forms to complete and notarize, and yet another trip to Southern California planned for next week.

But, as they say -- whoever "they" are -- that's life. And better that than the alternative, to be sure.

In fact, by the time I finish typing up and posting these December links it will be time to type up January's links... sigh....

I want to remind you that February 3 is the deadline to sign up for the last Alien Contact giveaway, hosted by SciFiChick.com. The giveaway is open to US residents (a print copy giveaway) and non-US residents (an ebook copy giveaway). So follow the link to SciFiChick.com, read my guest blog post entitled "Twenty-six Stories, Twenty-six Weeks..." and be sure to sign up for the giveaway.

And speaking of Alien Contact: Michael at The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review blog just posted his December Reading Log, and he had these kind words to say about the anthology:

Alien Contact edited by Marty Halpern – Ranging from first contact and last contact to vacationers visiting an alien's home world and being, typically, obnoxious guests, Alien Contact compiles one of the most diverse collections of modern stories concerning the "other." Highly recommended....

Now, on to the links: This is my belated monthly wrap-up of December's Links & Things. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern; or Friending me on Facebook (FB). Note, however, that not all of my tweeted/FB links make it into these month-end posts. There is a lot of content this time around, so please return for a second visit if you need to to take full advantage of all the links. Previous month-end posts are accessible via the "Links and Things" tag in the right column.

• Since I'm encouraging you to follow me on Twitter, here are teasers from Angela James's (@angelajames) "10 things authors should know about Twitter": 1) When you start your tweet with the @ symbol... 2) If you have your tweets protected... 3) You should not, really ever, I mean never, query or pitch an editor or agent on Twitter... 4) Please don't use Twitter DMs (or Facebook messages) to do business... 5) Just because the editor/agent is on Twitter at 11pm on a Friday night... 6) When we say you should "engage" on Twitter... 7) You should be talking about other people's books... 8) And while we're on the subject of promotion... 9) It's a good idea to be mindful... and 10) Twitter should be fun. For all the details: Angela James's blog. (via @ColleenLindsay)

• In 1963, at the ripe old age of sixteen, Bruce McAllister (1988 Hugo and Nebula awards finalist for "Dream Baby"; 2007 Hugo Award finalist for "Kin") sent out a 4-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors to learn if "they consciously planted symbols in their work." Remember, this was long before the internet and email: the authors had to be tracked down, envelopes addressed and mailed, etc. He hoped the surveys would "settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren't lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery." Bruce has been sitting on 65 of those responses for all these years, and thanks to the Paris Review, we can now view many of these questionnaire responses from the likes of Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer. This is amazing stuff! Not to be missed! The PR article was posted on December 5; on December 17, less than two weeks later, PR Online reported that they had 120,000 page views of the McAllister survey article -- the most page views they've ever had!

Close to the EDGE....

Kilian Melloy, Assistant Arts Editor for EDGE, poses some difficult questions for me in this Alien Contact interview, originally posted on EDGE:Boston.

When Kilian asked:

As a follow-up to last year's Is Anybody Out There? (which you co-edited with Nick Gevers for Daw Books), Alien Contact is a logical theme. Both books pose big philosophical questions. Is Anybody Out There? examined the paradox of why, if there is alien intelligence in the galaxy (as, mathematically, there ought to be) no extraterrestrial race has yet, to our knowledge, paid Earth a visit. Do you have a personal opinion on the best explanation for this conundrum?

I responded:

There are others who are far more qualified to respond to this question than I am... I would have to agree with Paul Davies¹, whose book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was published nearly simultaneously with Is Anybody Out There? Davies states that focusing on radio signals for 50 years of the SETI project has been to no avail; we need to start thinking out of the box. One suggestion Davies makes is that ET might use biological organisms as a means of sending information, so we should dispatch retroviruses that would insert DNA into any found DNA-based organism. Coincidentally, the British edition of The Eerie Silence from Allen Lane Publishers is subtitled Are We Alone in the Universe?

You can read the full interview, including my response to this, the last question:

The collection includes a story by a well-known anti-gay writer, as well as one whose remarks on a blog got her disinvited as Guest of Honor from a convention a couple of years ago because some people saw her remarks as bigoted. When it comes to publishing a story by a writer who has generated such controversy, do you simply ignore his politics and rely on the quality of his work? Or do you have to weigh the political against the artistic when making your choices?

---------------

Footnote:

1. My previous blog post, just prior to the publication of Is Anybody Out There? on Paul Davies and his book The Eerie Silence.

To the Core...

Keith Soltys reviews Alien Contact on his blog Core Dump 2.0. Here's the concluding paragraph to Keith's review, which I believe speaks to the heart (the core!) of Alien Contact:

Alien Contact is a strong anthology that showcases the diversity of modern SF. Given how central the idea of alien contact is to science fiction, you might think that all of the good ideas were taken long ago, but this anthology demonstrates clearly that that's not the case.

Keith isn't a book blogger, per se; his blog is subtitled "Things that interest me," in which he blogs "about science and technology, music, technical communication, computers and software, science fiction, and whatever else I feel like writing about." Hopefully his review of Alien Contact will reach a wider audience than just strictly book readers, and science fiction book readers at that.

Twenty-six Stories, Twenty-six Weeks...

...is the title of my guest blog post on SciFiChick.com, whom I would like to thank for providing me the opportunity -- and the space -- to share with a new group of readers some background on my Alien Contact anthology.

Here's an excerpt from my blog post:

By April 2011, I had finalized the story order for my Alien Contact anthology. So I was ready to announce the contents list. Most anthologists accomplish this by simply posting a list of the stories. SF news sites pick it up, as do SF bloggers and tweeters, and that's how readers learn of an anthology's contents. But a list is, well, a list — and boring.

I had already invested more than two years in putting together this anthology, and I was determined to maintain that energy level until the book was published. So, after a bit of brainstorming, I decided to blog about each of the stories — one story each week, in their order of appearance — over the course of twenty-six weeks, concluding by the end of October, just in time for the book's publication.

[...]

...if the reader thinks of Alien Contact as a DVD, then these twenty-six weeks of blog posts serve as the DVD extras....

Following my guest blog post is yet another Alien Contact giveaway: An opportunity for a US reader to win a signed/inscribed print edition, and for a non-US reader to win an ebook edition. The deadline to enter this giveaway is February 4. [Note: This is the final Alien Contact giveaway!]

Please check out SciFiChick.com, read my guest blog post while you're there, and be sure to sign up for the giveaway if you don't already own a copy of Alien Contact. (And if you don't, why not?)

Ommmmmmmmmmm....

Coming soon....

Grasping at Aliens

In previous blog posts I've mentioned the significant role that book review bloggers play in today's publishing wars -- by bringing titles that aren't always reviewed by the mainstream press to the attention of book readers and buyers. Take Alien Contact for example: it's an all-reprint anthology from independent press Night Shade Books, and even though the book contains stories by such "name" authors as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name only three, it hasn't gotten a great deal of attention amongst mainstream publications, with the exception of Library Journal and The Guardian.

That's why book review blogs are so important to an anthology like Alien Contact and to a publisher like Night Shade Books. A typical reader doesn't have access to Kirkus Reviews or Publishers Weekly -- mostly because these publications are designed for libraries and bookstores and are far too expensive. But what a typical reader does have access to are the hundreds (thousands?) of free online book review blogs, such as John Ottinger's "Grasping for the Wind science fiction & fantasy news & reviews" blog.

I mention this blog specifically because John recently reviewed my Alien Contact anthology.

What I appreciate in particular about this review is that John addresses each of the twenty-six stories in the anthology. He doesn't necessarily like, or even understand, all of the stories, but he gives equal attention to each, which allows the reader to assess the overall content and quality of the book as a whole. As the book's editor, I'm gratified to see every author mentioned, not just the most popular or well-known authors.

Here are just a couple (well, maybe three) of Ottinger's individual story reviews:

Karen Joy Fowler's "Face Value" is a tragic story of a man and wife team sent to an alien planet to make contact with the moth-like intelligence found there. Taki is the xenobiologist and Hesper, his wife, a poet. Taki thrives, but Hesper becomes more and more depressed until even her poet's soul is lost. Fowler's sad story is about transcendence and the place where beauty comes from. It's about relationship too. Taki and Hesper's inability to understand one another has its echo in Taki's inability to communicate with the natives. There is a haunting beauty to Fowler's story that will leave you pondering long after you read it.

I have to admit that I don't really get "Guerrilla Mural of Siren's Song" by Ernest Hogan. The story appears to be about a street artist who encounters sirens deep in the winds of Jupiter. It's also a love paean to a dead woman. Art and experience combine in an experiential tale of whirling emotions and unreliable narration. It's likely to be the favorite story in the anthology of people with a less analytical and more artistic bent than myself, but for me it was rather confusing.

"If Nudity Offends You" by Elizabeth Moon is another story I have read before. In this one, a court secretary, living in a trailer park, finds that her neighbors have been illegally tapping into her electricity. Most of the story is about her confrontation with these odd foreigners who wear no clothes in their trailer, talk funny, and seem slightly off. The whole story builds up to a surprise ending that makes you wonder if these foreigners were not just from a distant land, but from a different planet entirely. It's a close encounter that is discovered only after the fact.

John concludes his review with the following observation:

Alien Contact is a title that might be slightly misleading. This is not an anthology of first contacts but rather a collection of encounters with the other, what we choose to call the alien, the ineffable, the different and unknowable. Halpern's anthology is an excellent collection of tales that share a theme in common, but that manage to postulate widely different scenarios

As I said, these are only three of the twenty-six individual story reviews; you'll find John Ottinger's complete review on Grasping for the Wind.

Redux: Another Alien Contact Giveaway

Just a reminder that this current giveaway [there will be yet another after the new year] ends in 4 days for a print edition (US residents) and ebook edition (non-US residents) of my Alien Contact anthology. To be eligible FTW you only need to send a very, very brief email -- no blog comment required, no Facebook "Like," no retweeting -- just an email with either your mailing address (US residents) or your country (non-US residents).

Click on over to Mad Hatter's Review blog for the details on how to enter the giveaway for a copy of Alien Contact. The deadline is midnight, December 31st.

Happy New Year everyone! And happy reading

The Meaning of "Going Home"

This is a different type of blog post for me: I'm going to promote a contest, but not one of my own. And the subject of this contest is contrary to something I firmly believe: that we shouldn't analyze fiction to death (as is done in typical high school English Lit classes... gag!) but rather to simply enjoy the totality of the reading experience. But with that said....

This contest is sponsored by two of my favorite authors: my friend, Bruce McAllister, whose Hugo Award-nominated story "Kin graces the pages of my Alien Contact anthology; and Barry Malzberg, who co-edited (with Edward L. Ferman) one of the best SF anthologies ever, Final Stage¹.

First, the caveat: This contest is open to Facebook members only. If you are an FB user, then simply "friend" Bruce McAllister and you are good to go. If not, then just sign up for a free account and then search for -- and "friend" -- Bruce McAllister. FB is no big deal, it's not painful, and you don't have to use the app after you sign up -- other than for this contest, of course.

Bruce and Barry have co-written a story entitled "Going Home" that was published in the February 2012 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. Now I realize we're still in 2011, but this particular issue has already been printed. In fact, the Asimov's website currently features this February issue. You may be an Asimov's subscriber, or you can find copies on the rack at Barnes & Noble, and certainly at your favorite SF specialty store, and online as well, including ebook editions. And Asimov's has donated 15 copies of the issue to Bruce McAllister for readers who wish to participate in this contest but for one reason or another are unable to obtain a copy.

Here's the issue, and the reason for the contest: Even though Bruce and Barry have co-written "Going Home," they do not agree on the story's meaning. According to Bruce's Facebook post on December 16:

The Asimov's issue with "Going Home" is out and should hit the stands soon. After a brief email exchange yesterday, however, Barry and I discovered we're not at all in agreement about what the story means. (Yeah, you'd think -- co-authors and everything -- but no....) So a contest: FREE copies of my novel Dream Baby and Barry Malzberg's John Campbell Award winner Beyond Apollo to the three readers out there who can come up with the most creative (read: insightful and/or deranged) interpretations of the story. 500 words max. Deadline -- March 15 [2012]. FB members only, yes. Winning entries (or excerpts) will be posted here with much fanfare. This should be fun.

So here's a chance for you to put those interpretive skills you honed in your English Lit class to good use, and possibly score a free copy of the award-nominated Dream Baby from Bruce and the award-winning Beyond Apollo from Barry. And, I assume, the authors will gladly sign/inscribe their respective books for the winners, too.

Courtesy of the authors, here's the opening paragraph to "Going Home":

Bob—

Arrogant as this sounds, I've decided I'm going to bring the Golden Age of Science Fiction back even if I have to do it single-handedly. It's been lost for a long time, and someone's got to bring it back, given what's happening. Yes, I know, Mitchell Litton has been known for three decades for his cynical, earthbound, ankle-biting, technophobic, earthbound novels—and I wrote them because they were my truth at the time (the alcohol, two divorces, Chiara's pregnancy at 16, my mother's and sister's deaths in the same year, the bankruptcy, and the awards nastiness), but I remember what it was like to be young and read those stories; and now that I'm facing, as we all are with the slow spread of this "Armageddon virus" that's taking the world, my own mortality, I see now that those stories held older and bigger truths than the ones I delivered. In any case, I want to be part of it again. Like going home, yes.

—from "Going Home" by Bruce McAllister and
Barry Malzberg, Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2012

As Bruce states on his Facebook page: "Finally, after 40 years, got to co-write a story with old friend and mentor Barry Malzberg."

---------------

Footnote:

1. If you should choose to track down a copy of the Ferman and Malzberg anthology Final Stage, be sure to seek out the reprint Penguin edition only -- not the original Charterhouse hardcover edition. There was some controversy regarding the hardcover edition because a number of the stories were revised and edited by the publisher's editor without Ferman's or Malzberg's -- or any of the affected authors -- knowledge or permission. The original texts of all the stories were restored in the Penguin reprint edition. Anthology historian Bud Webster has written a lengthy essay on the original Charterhouse edition entitled "Anthology 101: The (Non)Final Stage" that you'll find quite enlightening, with input from Ferman, Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and others.

Observed in the Wilds of San Francisco

I was hoping for a photograph or two from an indie bookstore, since the only pics I've seen so far of Alien Contact in the wild are at B&N stores....

So a special "thank you" to Jude Feldman at the best genre bookstore on the West Coast (and possibly even points farther):

Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street, San Francisco 94110

Note: When I asked Jude (via email) about the brown something in the top right corner of the photograph, she responded: "...the brown/black thing you're seeing in the background is a portion of a steampunk art piece that's mounted on the wall. It's called The Triparator and it was made by Dr. Alan Rorie."

Another Alien Contact Giveaway

If you read my guest blog post yesterday on determining story order, posted on The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review blog, then you hopefully read at the end of the post that there would be a giveaway announced the next day for Alien Contact.

Well, today is that next day, and the giveaway has gone live. Please check out Mad Hatter's Review blog for a chance to win a copy of Alien Contact. The giveaway is open to both US and non-US residents, and the deadline is midnight, December 31st.

Happy New Year everyone! And happy reading!

Story Order (Or, Developing the TOC)

Are you the type of reader who picks a story at random to read in an anthology, or do you always begin at the beginning, and read the stories in the order that they have been presented? If the latter, have you ever thought about the actual order of the stories: Why did the editor begin the anthology with this particular story? Why is the longest story in the middle (or near the beginning, or toward the end)? Why are these other stories back to back, and why does the book end with this other story?

The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Book Review blog invited me to write a guest blog post, which I gladly accepted. And for my guest post I wrote about the process I went through to determine the story order -- the table of contents -- for my Alien Contact anthology. I had 26 stories to work with, and I had to place them in an order that would both intrigue and motivate the reader to continue reading, to finish the book, and hopefully result in a positive reading experience.

Here are a couple excerpts from my guest post:

...the readers who begin at the beginning--the introduction--and then read the stories in the order they are presented, these are the readers I must be concerned with. For them, the story order--the overall experience of reading the book in its entirety--is what makes, or breaks, the anthology.

[...]

As a group, these criteria affect the flow of the anthology. Place a lot of dark, depressing, overly long stories together and quite possibly I'll lose a lot of my readers. Each story needs to encourage the reader to want to move on to the next story, and the next, and so on, until the reader reaches the end of the book.

I specify the five criteria I use to assist me in determining story order, and I also provide some thoughts on a few specific stories.

Story order is something I take great pride in....

And check back at Mad Hatter's Review for yet another Alien Contact giveaway.

Observed in the Wilds of Akron

Alien Contact

Barnes & Noble, 4015 Medina Road, Akron, Ohio 44333.

This B&N staffer hamming it up in the pic just happens
to be my cousin, David Halpern.

Alien Contact Gets the Silver Treatment

When I posted the first review of my Alien Contact anthology, I noted the importance of online book reviewers/book bloggers and book review sites such as Goodreads: all critical resources to those who read and purchase books. There will be no shortage of reviews of Stephen King's 11/22/63 this holiday season. I even found copies of King's book at Costco. But what I want to learn more about are the lesser known indie/small press titles, and authors, and so I am especially grateful to those who review and support these types of books.

One such book reviewer is Steven Silver, who publishes his reviews under Silver Reviews, hosted online by SFSite. In Steven's most recent review, for Alien Contact, he writes:

...In 1898, H. G. Wells described that first contact as a Martian invasion of England's Horsell Common resulting in death and mayhem until the aliens are brought low. Murray Leinster wrote about a less dire alien contact in 1945, in which humans and aliens worked to ensure they wouldn't destroy each other. Editor Marty Halpern has now brought together twenty-six stories of alien contact in a book called, appropriately enough, Alien Contact.

[...]

Karen Joy Fowler is responsible for writing one of the strangest first contact stories ever published, the novel Sarah Canary, so the inclusion of her story "Face Value" is quite fitting, and quite different from her famous novel. In this story, as with so many other first contact stories, part of the puzzle that needs to be solved revolves around finding a means of communication between two different species, a theme which dates back to Leinster's "First Contact."

[...]

The stories Halpern has selected not only demonstrate the different slants authors can take on...alien contact, but also explore what it means to be alien in different ways and also depict numerous writing styles, with humor, drama, military, and nostalgia all playing a role. As these stories demonstrate, the science fiction genre provides a playground in which authors cane use the tropes and styles of a wide variety of other genres in crafting entertaining, as well as insightful, stories.

In his review, Steven mentions a number of other stories in the anthology, in addition to the story by Karen Joy Fowler. Please head on over to Silver Reviews for the full review of Alien Contact, which has been published by Night Shade Books.

November Links & Things

I've been rather quiet here of late, as I just completed work on a project for Penguin/Ace Books that I had been anticipating for a couple months. I'll provide a bit of a teaser here by saying that I've just finished "the laundry" -- neatly pressed. So, now that this project is behind me (and I hope to do a blog post about it soon), I plan on being a bit more visible here. Or, at least I hope to be a bit more visible here. One can never tell, especially these days. Regardless, please don't give up on me.

Onward: This is my monthly wrap-up of November's Links & Things. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern. Note, however, that not all of my tweeted links make it into these month-end posts. Previous month-end posts are accessible via the "Links and Things" tag in the right column. 

• Ernest Hogan (@NestoHogan), a contributing author to the Alien Contact anthology ["Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song"], has recently written a blog post on La Bloga, entitled "Chicanonautica: The Lone Sci-Fi Chicano?" in which he wonders if he may just be the only Chicano science fiction writer. If you are a Chicano SF/Fantasy author, or know of an author, please let Ernesto know by posting a comment to his blog post.
• Author Andrew Fox has informed me that his novel, The Good Humor Man, or Calorie 3501 (which I edited for Tachyon Publications) has been released in a variety of ebook formats. The link here is to the Kindle edition, but you'll find the ebook at Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and other online sellers. The novel was described by Kage Baker as "a Fahrenheit 451 for the post-millennium, told with Fox's magnificent evocation of place and twisted humor..." For more details, here's a link to my blog post from 19 February 2009 on the novel, and Tachyon Publications.
• If you are a book reader and/or a book collector, then you undoubtedly are familiar with ABEBooks.com (@AbeBooks), which recently posted a concise history of Amazing Stories magazine. You can find lengthier, more detailed histories elsewhere online, but what makes this article special are the more than 25 full-color covers, including the first Amazing Stories Annual from 1927. The article falls short, however, by not mentioning that the "Amazing Stories" name has recently been acquired by Steve Davidson, who has formed an editorial board and commissioned cover art. Check out my September and October Links & Things posts for details.
• Looking for fellow gamers for your game group? NeedGamers.com wants to help by being a registry for all flavors of gamer. (via @ProfBeard)
• On November 7 I purchased the new Stephen King novel, 11/22/63. How could I not purchase a book in which time travel is used to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination? The week before the book was released, Wired Magazine featured an interview with King in which he set forth his "Rules for Time Travel." King and Wired discuss the "butterfly effect," alternate timelines, and more. At the end of the interview, when asked if he'll write about time travel again, King responds: "No, this is it. Absolutely not. No, that's done. It's like Apollo Creed says, 'Ain't gonna be no rematch.'" (via @io9)
  

Observed in the Wild

Alien Contact

Barnes & Noble, Eastridge Shopping Center, San Jose, California: