A blog by Keith Soltys. Things that interest me: science and technology, music, technical communication, computers and software, science fiction, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
A few thousand words on The Merchant Princes
A few years ago a friend turned me on to Charlie Stross' The Merchant Princes series. This is an alternate-worlds SF story masquerading (largely for marketing purposes) as fantasy. If, like me, you were put off by the fantasy/romance book covers, don't be - it's a marvellous series that gleefully turns several genre conventions on their heads.
The sixth book in the series, The Trade of Queens, will be released next week, and I've just ordered my copy from Amazon. Stross has been working on this series for the better part of a decade, and along the way, it's changed quite a bit from his original conception, as he explains in this long and quite fascinating essay. Even if you haven't read the series, it's worth reading as an exploration of how the mind of a novelist works, and a primer on the realities of modern genre publishing.
When I raised the idea of writing some more books with my agent, her first comment was, "you realize that 'Singularity Sky' probably won't be in print for two to three years? And 'Iron Sunrise' won't be out for a year after that? Ace have a backlog, and they've also got an option on your next SF novel." (An option clause means you've got to send the next SF novel to your existing publisher, who have to reject it or sit on it for an inordinate length of time before you're free can send it elsewhere.) "On the other hand, if you really want to write for a living, can you do something that isn't specifically SF, so we can sell without breach of contract? Like, say, a big fat fantasy series?"
This made me stop and think hard. The thing is, I've read a lot of extruded fantasy product in my time, and I don't much like it. Fantasy and Science Fiction are co-marketed in most bookstores, but this conceals the fact that they're actually radically different genres in outlook. Loosely speaking, if Science Fiction is often a literature of disruption (in which change is, if not good, at least embraced), Fantasy is frequently a literature of consolation: a warm feather-bed of social conservativism disguised as nostalgic escapism, a longing for feudal certainties. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Fantasy, the marketing mechanism applied to it tends to promote those aspects of it that I really don't like: the hordes of marching sub-Tolkien clones. (I'm with China Mieville on this.) And besides, Robert Jordan is still alive and selling.
Scriptorium are having a sale on their book Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8. You can buy a downloadable PDF of the book for $14.99 or get the PDF and a printed copy for $19.99.
Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8 shows you how to:
* Use FrameMaker’s word-processing features—format text with paragraph and character tags, design complex tables, insert automatically linked cross-references, and store reused content in variables. * Design page layouts with running headers and footers, place graphics in your documents, and use FrameMaker’s drawing tools. * Import animations and 3D renderings with new support for rich media. * Implement advanced features such as conditional text, hypertext, equations, and text insets. * Use FrameMaker's new Unicode support to create content in multiple languages.
There aren't a lot of books about FrameMaker out there, so this is a really good deal if you're still using Frame 8.
The Science Fiction Writers of America have announced the nominations for the 2009 Nebula Awards. SF Site has the full list, with links to some of the stories that are online. Check back in a while, as it's likely that most of the nominees will be available online by the time the voting period ends. The awards will be announced in mid-May.
Looking at the novels, the list is missing most of the "big names". Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Charles Wilson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear - only China Miéville might fit that category. This is probably a good thing as it shows the genre is refreshing itself.
I haven't read any of the nominess for novel, although I did snag the e-book edition of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and will probably start on that as soon as I finish the book I'm reading now (John Varley's Mammoth). Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler," is nominated in the novelette category and is online for your reading pleasure.
I was surprised and disappointed to see that Robert Charles Wilson's wonderful story "Utriusque Cosmi", from The New Space Opera 2 didn't make the final list. And according to a post I read on Facebook, Rob Sawyer's Wake missed by one vote.
Update: There's an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi here (PDF link).
Here's John Scalzi's take on why publishers and publishing won't go away any time soon. It's a satirical, funny, and short three-act play.
CHARACTERS:
ELTON P. STRAÜMANN, a modern-thinking man with exciting ideas JOHN SCALZI, a humble writer KRISTINE SCALZI, the wife of a humble writer
ACT I
SCENE OPENS ON STRAÜMANN and SCALZI, standing.
STRAÜMANN: The publishing world is changing! In the future, authors will no longer need those fat cat middle men known as “publishers” to get in the way of their art! It will just be the author and his audience!
SCALZI: Won’t I need an editor? Or a copy editor? Or a cover artist? Or a book designer? Or a publicist? Or someone to print the book and get it into stores?
STRAÜMANN (waves hand, testily): Yes, yes. But all those things you can do yourself.
SCALZI: And I’m supposed to write the book, too?
STRAÜMANN (snorts): As if writing was hard. Now go! And write your novel!
Here's an article from The ContentWrangler on how traditional (that is, book) publishers can use XML to modernize their processes and help them use their books' content in new ways. From what I've garnered reading authors' blogs, book publishers are still using practices that were modern in the 19th century (some are still accepting manuscripts only on paper), so this article may be a bit optimistic. The publisher cited as the main example, John Wiley, who most readers of this blog will know from their technical and programming books is way ahead of the curve.
It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)
You can get a free e-book edition of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, a novel that may be on the SF awards shortlists later this year. This is what io9 had to say about it.
Set in Thailand's future, the book follows scientist spies hunting good genomes in a world ruined by GMO diseases.
In the tradition of politically-minded hard SF writers like Iain M. Banks and Ian McDonald, Bacigalupi follows the interconnected stories of several people caught up in great social shifts. In the case of The Windup Girl, they're all caught in the genome industry's web: We have a covert "calorie man" called Anderson who tries to sniff out uncontaminated genomes for a Monsanto-esque multinational called AgriGen; a "yellow card" Chinese refugee named Hock Seng who is trying to climb to the top of the energy-generator black market in Thailand; Environment Ministry shock troops Jaidee and Kanya, whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes, foreign imports, and dirty energy; and the mysterious whore Emiko, a genetically-engineered "windup" person abandoned by her former owner in Thailand, where GMO people are illegal.
We follow these characters through every eschelon of Thai society, from backroom meetings between government officials to backroom performances at the strip club where Emiko is fetishistically degraded every night.
You can get the book in ePub or PDF formats by sending an email to Nightshade books. (You'll also get signed up to their monthly e-mail newsletter by doing so, but you can always cancel out of it later).
I've had a quick skim through the PDF and it looks like the book might live up to the hype. I'm definitely going to read it.
The New Yorker has a long and quite fascinating profile of author Neil Gaiman. I have to admit that I've never read any of his books, although I've seen at least three movies based on his stories (Mirror Mask, Stardust, and Coraline) - all of which were excellent. One of these days I will get around to reading American Gods. But I have, along with a million or so other readers, been reading his blog faithfully for some time.
Gaiman, who is forty-nine and English, with a pale face and a wild, corkscrewed mop of black-and-gray hair, is unusually prolific. In addition to horror, he writes fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, and apocalyptic romps, in the form of novels, comics, picture books, short stories, poems, and screenplays. Now and then, he writes a song. Gaiman’s books are genre pieces that refuse to remain true to their genres, and his audience is broader than any purist’s: he defines his readership as “bipeds.” His mode is syncretic, with sources ranging from English folktales to glam rock and the Midrash, and enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies. “Neil’s writing is kind of fey in the best sense of the word,” the comic-book writer Alan Moore told me. “His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.” The model for Gaiman’s eclecticism is G. K. Chesterton; his work, Gaiman says, “left me with an idea of London as this wonderful, mythical, magical place, which became the way I saw the world.” Chesterton’s career also serves as a warning. “He would have been a better writer if he’d written less,” Gaiman says. “There’s always that fear of writing too much if you’re a reasonably facile writer, and I’m a reasonably facile writer.”
For the last decade or so, S. M. (Steve) Stirling has been expanding the story of his Emberverse, in which a mysterious event causes the island of Nantucket to be transported several thousand years into the past, and in our timeline stops electricity and high-pressure chemical reactions to stop working, resulting in the collapse of civilization and the death of about 99 percent of the human race. So far, there are nine books in the series, with the tenth, The High King of Montival, due out in September.
Much of the story takes place in and around the Willamette valley of Oregon. Steve Pate, who appears to be a serious Stirling fan, has put together a three-part video tour of some of the locations that feature in Steve's books. Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
What I found interesting, and in some cases almost eerie, was how closely my mental map of Montival (what the Willamette area ends up being called in the books) matched the actual location as seen in the videos. This was particularly true of part three, which shows the home of the Rangers (a state park lodge) and the Mount Angel monastery. Kudos a definitely due to Steve for his skill in bringing this area to life.
If you've read Steve's books, you'll definitely want to have a look at these.
I've always had a thing for libraries, and librarians (both my first wife and current wife have worked in libraries), so I can certainly agree with this list of 85 reasons to be thankful for librarians. Here's the first 10.
1. Librarians take care of libraries, which are still invaluable today. 2. Not all information is on the internet. 3. Older books still hold great cultural significance. 4. Libraries are still repositories for some of the most valuable works of literature in the world. 5. Even with the internet, the library is still the best place to do research. 6. Girls with glasses can still rock the “sexy librarian” look. 7. “Sexy Librarian” is still a popular costume at Halloween. 8. You can’t exactly find periodicals like The New England Journal of Medicine in Barnes and Noble. 9. For that matter, looking at turn-of-the-century National Geographics is still pretty entertaining. 10. Colleges need something to remodel every so often.
In November, I bought a Dell Mini 10v netbook. I wanted a netbook so I would have a small laptop that I could use when travelling and also as a reader for PDFs and e-books. Over the years, I've accumulated a collection of SF novels in various e-book formats, mostly PDFs, from sources like Project Gutenberg and the Baen free library. However, I soon found that reading PDFs on the netbook was a less than optimal experience. The screen has a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, which means that it'll only display about 1/3 of a page of text if I have it sized to a reasonable font size. And PDFs don't reflow the text column when you resize the width of the window. It's possible to convert PDFs to HTML, but reading in a browser has its own limitations.
Calibre solves all of those problems and does quite a bit more. First, it's a library management tool as well as a reader. You build a library of e-books by importing files - PDF, HTML, text, .doc or .rtf, or e-book formats such as EPUB or LIT. You can grab metadata (publisher and cover graphics, for example), rate books, and tag them by category. Best of all, you can convert PDFs to e-book formats - I've found that EPUB seems to work best, and view them with Calbre's built-in viewer, or upload them to your e-book reader, if you have one. Using the e-book reader, you can resize the window and font size to whatever you find comfortable, and the text will reflow to fit.
As an added bonus, Calibre can act like a feed reader. You can download the content of newspapers and magazines save them as an e-book, and read them offline. I've pulled in the contents of the latest issues of The Economist and The Atlantic as a test and it works beautifully. What content you get will depend on the site's subscription policy - for Scientific American, for example, you'll get abstracts of the feature articles, but the full text is behind a paywall. You can schedule downloads, so you have your favourite morning paper waiting for you when you get up.
Calibre is one of the best and most useful software programs I've come across in quite a while, and it's free and open source, which makes it all the more remarkable. I've seen many commercial applications that aren't as polished, feature rich, or useful. If you like it, you can contribute to the author via Paypal from a link on his site - I've just sent my contribution.
Recently, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target in the US have been staging a ruthless price war with best-selling novels. You might think that being able to get the latest Stephen King novel for $8.99 is a good thing for consumers, but think again. As this Huffington Post article points out, if this kind of pricing continues, it could spell the end of both independent and chain bookstores, and publishers, leaving little for consumers but a small number of best selling authors.
Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer. Some readers think that if their favorite store closes they can always buy the book they want somewhere else. But that's a dangerous delusion -- the books they want may not be there at all. In fact, these types of disruptions in how books are sold or distributed has a profound effect on what publishers decide to publish in the first place.
Think of the book business as a giant funnel, in which millions of authors are trying to reach tens of millions of readers. The image is a telling one, because the literary life of America has to go through two very narrow choke points: publishing and bookselling. Both of these choke points have become more and more constricted in recent years as a result of economic concentration and market manipulation.
Publishing is now consolidated in the hands of a few large conglomerates that control most of what is published in America. There are, to be sure, many booklovers in the publishing divisions of these giant corporations, but they are outnumbered and out-maneuvered by the bean-counters. Sadly, many of these publishing divisions could probably be shutdown entirely without having any significant affect on the bottom-line of the parent corporations. It is not an atmosphere that favors innovation or literary discoveries. In many cases the attitude seems to be to hold on and hope that declining sales and stagnant readership doesn't cost you your job.
If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favourite SF authors. His new novel, Galileos Dream, will be published next month. Shareable Life and Art has an interview with him in which he talks about his influences and why he likes writing utopian novels as well as dystopias. He also talks about the state of modern sf publishing.
TB: Science fiction writers are always complaining about the state of publishing. What do you think would be the proper role of science fiction in a proper publishing world? Would there be genres or categories at all?
KSR: I don’t know! That’s a real alternative history. If there were no genres or categories, people might be more open to trying new things. That would be good. I’d love to try it. But it’s not the world we have. Going forward from now, I guess I think every science fiction section in every bookstore should have a sign saying “Science Fiction—You Live Here, Why Not Read About It?” or “Science Fiction, the Most Real Part of This Store” or something like that. Something to remind people of reality, which is that we are all stuck in a big SF novel now, and there’s no escape; might as well accept it and dive in.
Yesterday, I posted about a Wired interview with Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's best-known writers, who occasionally dabbles in SF. SF Signal has just posted an article that interviews several SF authors about their thoughts on mainstream literature and its relationship to SF. It's pretty interesting to see the different attitudes. Here's a sample from Gene Wolfe, surely one of the most literary of SF authors.
Now and then I'm asked at cons why I don't write fiction of the respected sort. You know, he is a professor and she is a professor and they are having adulterous affairs, and they are almost overcome with guilt and angst, and there is no God, and scientific progress doesn't enter into it, and just about everybody in the world is upper middle class.
When that happens, I ask the questioner abut Martin du Gard. Have you read him? Have you heard of him? Invariably the answers are no and no. Then I explain that Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year H. P. Lovecraft died.
Wired has an interview with Margaret Atwood, who is probably Canada's best known SF writer, even if she denies she's writing SF. I haven't read Oryx and Crake, her previous SF novel (though I do have a copy), depending on how that goes I may read her latest. (I liked The Handmaid's Tale a lot, for what it's worth).
Wired.com: You come at science convincingly from the direction of fiction, and you’re pretty precise about your work, which you maintain is speculative fiction rather than sci-fi.
Margaret Atwood: I like exact labeling. Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea came Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, out of which came We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, then George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ray Bradbury’s Fahreneheit 451 was speculative fiction, while The Martian Chronicles was not.
Why won't Amazon's Kindle be available in Canada, when most of the rest of the world will be getting it soon. The Globe and Mail looks examines this question and suspects that it's due to our wireless carriers and the recent expansion of the Bell and Telus networks.
Sources say the delay may be due to newly discovered competition. Until recently, the wireless technology used by the Kindle was available only through Rogers. This week, however, Bell and Telus announced a new next-generation network that will go live in November, giving Amazon more options to choose from for their device. The two carriers announced this week that they will use the new network to begin offering Apple's iPhone, previously only available through Rogers.
“You'd think that Bell and Telus would jump at the chance [to partner with Amazon],” said Iain Grant, of the telecom consultancy SeaBoard Group. “You'd think that Rogers, now that they're no longer exclusive on the iPhone, might jump on the chance too.
Amazon today announced that its Kindle e-book reader would soon be available in more than 100 countries (not Canada, go figure). SF writer Charles Stross thinks that this is bad news for writers.
One nasty suspicion of mine is that Amazon were demanding discounts so ludicrous that publishers would be making a net loss on each book sold after expenses and royalties. It's in line with their established business practices, as far as I can tell. Speaking hypothetically: if this was the case, and nobody was willing to do business with the ebook monopsony from hell, might the monopsony from hell respond by using its market-leading position to punish the recalcitrant European publishers and bring them to heel? And if so, wouldn't facilitating grey market imports be one way to do that?
You might think that if this were the case, it wouldn't harm anyone but a bunch of fat-cat publishers. However, when war breaks out it's not just the combatants who get hurt. There is a convention in English language publishing called the trans-Atlantic rights split. A relic of the days when trans-Atlantic shipping was expensive and slow, it's a provision whereby English Language publication rights to a novel are usually licensed in two tranches — one for North America, and one for the UK and the rest of the world. These days you can also sell World English Language rights, in which case the acquiring publisher typically sub-licenses them to someone local to the other territory. If you're a writer, you prefer to sell separately — if you can negotiate, say, 10 gold pieces for North American rights, you can probably get 4-5 GP for UK/Commonwealth rights — but a world rights sale will only get you 12 GP. The split, in other words, persists because it's in authors' interests to maintain it.
If Amazon are trying to break the trans-Atlantic rights split, that's going to ultimately cost me 20-30% of my (English language royalties) income. Even if they don't succeed, they're going to trigger a damaging price war between my US and UK publishers, or a bout of "let's you and them fight" litigation as British publishers sue to keep US grey-market imports out of "their" Kindles. If this were to happen, nobody would benefit from it — except Amazon, who would get rich off other folks' income stream.
We went to see Surrogates last night, a new movie starring Bruce Willis (who was quite good, actually) based on the graphic novel by Robert Venditti. It's a better than average SF action flick with some interesting ideas. The basic idea is pretty interesting, although my willing suspension of disbelief was stretched to the breaking point in a few places. IO9 has an interview with Robert Venditti that explains quite a bit about the background of the comic that became the movie.
As far as writing The Surrogates, again when I was in grad school, we read a book called The Cyber Gypsies, which was a non-fiction book where a guy had spent a lot of time with people addicted to online games, and these people in the book had become so identified with the personas on their computers that they'd lose their jobs or get divorced or any number of things because they were devoting so much of their time to maintaining that persona that they were neglecting the basic steps of living. It was an idea that stuck with me, this basic human desire to be someone other than who we actually are. It just clicked for me in 2002: What if there was a technology that would allow you to create a persona that, instead of being bound in a machine or have a virtual reality situation, what if the technology was reversed and the machine would go out into the world and do all the things you need to do to live for you? You could be that persona all the time and still maintain all your responsibilities.
Earlier this month I blogged about the appalling situation in Philadelphia, where the library system was facing closure due to lack of funds. Now, it looks like they've had a reprieve.
Just minutes ago, the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. For all of you who have been following the saga over the city's budget crisis, this is indeed the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the "Doomsday" Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, the Toronto Public Library just celebrated the 100th anniversary of one of its branches, is about to open too more, and continues to evolve into what the Toronto Star says is the world's largest public library system.
Contrary to what you might have heard, libraries are not in a terminal state of decline, "they're not even sick," says Wendy Newman, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto's faculty of information, formerly library sciences, now known as the "I School."
"Libraries are back big-time, they're having a renaissance."
Circulation was up 27 per cent this summer across Ontario's 330 systems and 1,000 branches. Toronto, already the largest system in the world with 99 branches, is expanding with two more.
Kim Stanley Robinson takes on the literary establishment
SF author, Kim Stanley Robinson, has written an article in New Scientist taking on the literary establishment for ignoring modern science fiction. Britain's Guardian has an overview with comments from some of the gored authors.
The chair of this year's Booker judges, James Naughtie, admitted that Robinson "may well have a point", but suggested that "perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges".
"There has always been a debate about whether the prize is sufficiently sensitive to all the forms of contemporary writing. He may well have a point," he said. "We judge books that are submitted. The fact is that the science fiction component this year was very, very thin. If it is the best contemporary fiction in this country then most publishers haven't yet tumbled to the fact."
He said that judges had, collectively, been "disappointed at the way 'the new' was represented" in this year's submissions, but said that "the idea that historical fiction is fusty is absurd". "Our shortlist speaks to us about things around us, from whenever and wherever the books are set," he said.
This type of controversy comes up every decade or so, but Robinson does have a valid point. In Canada, we have several writers (Robert Charles Wilson, Guy Gavriel Kay) come instantly to mind), who are fully the equal of any of the writers nominated for the Governors General or Giller prizes, but who are constantly ignored, while Margaret Atwood's latest attempt at SF gets major press.
It's always sad to see a bookstore close, and especially sad when it's a truly great, independent store that was a significant part of Toronto's culture through the last few decades. BlogTO has an article on the end of Pages, on Queen West.
With six hours to go before they close their doors forever, the shelves at Pages are nearly empty, a testament to the quality of owner Marc Glassman's buying, and the devotion of his customers, who will have to find somewhere else to go for their cultural theory, outsider fiction and glossy design tomes when the lights go off after exactly thirty years to the day.
James, a customer for 20 years, is in shock. He'd shown up looking for a book by the psychedelic hot rod illustrator Coop only to find a bare store and depressing news. "It's bad," he tells me. "This is wrong. Indigo is everywhere and the only good bookstore is gone. I got my Anton LaVey books here. Liberal fascism strikes again."
As Glassman has been at pains to point out, his store isn't closing because of poor sales, but because the rent on the city-owned property was about to skyrocket, and he was facing the prospect of seeing his tight profits disappear. As a result, a lot of people passing through the store have harsh words for the city, and Mayor David Miller in particular, though the blame for Pages' extinction probably resides in the more abstract realm of city budget policy.
I knew the store was closing because of a rent increase, but I didn't know that the property was owned by the city. This is truly sad and a clear case of narrow financial interest trumping all else.
Anne Gentle's book on social networking and documentation is out
Anne Gentle's book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation is now published. Anne says:
I’m so pleased to tell you that my book is available now from Amazon.com and BarnesandNobles.com and for sale in Austin, Texas at BookWoman on North Lamar. Published by XML Press, this book was fun to write, difficult to finish, and a dream come true for me, a kid who read 500 books in a school year in the second grade. I love books and I love this book especially. But I do want to keep improving it with blog entries here and responses to honest and thorough reviews, even negative ones.
It's published by XML Press and they have an interview with Anne on their web site. I won a copy of the book at the STC Summit and I'll review it here once I receive my copy.
What's wrong with the Hugo Awards? In a word, they're boring, at least that's the contention of SF author Adam Roberts. A recent post by him has ignited a bit of a controversy in the SF field, and the Guardian summarizes things neatly.
Science fiction author Adam Roberts is cross with science fiction fans. The line-up for this year's Hugo awards – selected and voted for by readers – isn't very good, he says, and he's not pleased.
"What do these lists say about SF to the multitude in the world - to the people who don't know any better? It says that SF is old-fashioned, an aesthetically, stylistically and formally small-c conservative thing. It says that SF fans do not like works that are too challenging, or unnerving; that they prefer to stay inside their comfort zone," Roberts writes, before going on to criticise the five-strong shortlist for this year's best novel award.
Unfortunately, I have to say that he's right. I'm in the unusual situation (for me, anyway) of having read three of the five nominees. Cory Doctorow's Little Brother was enjoyable enough, but it's a didactic screed wrapped in a YA (young adult) novel. Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children was a pastiche of late-period Heinlein. It was better than most late-period Heinlein, but it really didn't hang together very well and had none of the strengths of his better work, such as Glasshouse.
I haven't read John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale, but I have read the other three books in the series of which it's a part. Again, this is a YA novel, probably a good one, but if it follows the pattern of the other books in the series, it's basically fluff. I haven't read Gaiman's book, as it's both a YA novel and fantasy.
The only book of the five that I'd consider being Hugo worthy is Neal Stephenson's Anathem. It's a deeply flawed work and could have used some serious pruning, but it's stuck in my memory like few other books I've read recently.
Over the years, the Hugo Awards have tended to be somewhat spotty - they are a fan-based award, and subject to popular whim, after all. But this year's list does seem to be on the weak side.
Readers of this blog will have noted my fondness for the works of SF writer Charlie Stross. There's a reason I like him - he's amazingly readable, has more ideas than most three other writers, and is quite prolific. If you haven't read him and want a good introduction to his work, check out his new short story collection, Wireless, which is now in stores. SF Signal has a review.
PROS: Stross tosses around imaginative concepts with comfortable regularity. CONS: His affinity for politics and economics weighed down some of the stories. BOTTOM LINE: This is good representative sampling of Stross' fiction; a must-have for any Stross fan and a fine introduction for the uninitiated
I'll probably wait for the paperback on this one, as I've read most of the stories already, but if you haven't it'll be a few dollars well spent.
Pablo from Tor has the details on a cool new promo they're doing to promote my next book, Makers, which'll be published in the fall (HarperCollins UK will publish it in the UK, Australia, NZ, and other parts of the commonwealth). Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries. The first 50,000 words of Makers were serialized on Salon some years ago under the title Themepunks.
There'll be three installments per week, and you can read the first one here.
We’ve designed DITA 101 for writers and managers. We’ve taken our years of experience helping organizations to move to DITA and distilled it into an easy-to-read and understandable format. And since the move to DITA often goes hand-in-hand with an organization’s adoption of content management, we’ve made sure that our expertise in developing effective content, reuse and content management, and their appropriate strategies are integrated throughout to give you everything you need to know to understand DITA.
DITA 101 is written for authors who need to understand the concepts but don’t need to know how to set up DITA nor how to modify the code. This book is about understanding structure, structured writing and reuse all in the context of DITA. In addition, we’ve also written DITA 101 for managers to help them understand the basics of DITA, the changes in roles, and the things to think about when planning a DITA project.
Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Content, 3rd edition; Alan S. Pringle and Sarah S. O'Keefe, Scriptorium Publishing Services Inc., Research Park Triangle, NC, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-9704733-7-0, 328 p., $20.00 (PDF Download), $35.95 (paper)
Almost ten years ago, in my previous job, I was asked to train a co-worker to become a technical writer. She'd been working in our Marketing department, but her position had become redundant because of a corporate takeover. One of the books that really helped me was the first edition of Technical Writing 101. She was already a good writer, but the book introduced her to the specific requirements of our profession.
Since then a lot has changed. Think of just the last decade: Web 2.0, social media, DITA, Google, YouTube and rich media, to name just a few. And the corporate environment has changed, putting greater demands than ever on writers to be efficient and productive. This edition of the book has been thoroughly updated to cover these new technologies and the demands they make on writers.
As you'd expect, the core of the book covers the basics: writing, procedures, using graphics, editing and being edited, and indexing. But, as most new writers quickly find out, writing is only a small part of the job. The book starts by explaining the many things that writers do other than writing. The second chapter explains the importance of templates and structure, and the third discusses documentation plans and outlines, both critical tools in a writer's arsenal. (A sample documentation plan is provided as an Appendix). Only one relatively short chapter is devoted to tools, probably appropriate considered many writers' tendency to obsess over tools rather than content.
Later chapters discuss more advanced topics, ones that really exist for most writers when the first edition of this book came out - structured authoring (XML and DITA), and Web 2.0 (wikis, blogs, and other social media). The final chapter is about how to get your first job as a technical writer.
Although Technical Writing 101 is aimed at new writers, topics are covered in enough detail that more experienced writers can use the book as a refresher or a reference to unfamiliar topics. For example, the indexing chapter is 15 pages long and covers most of the things any writer would need to know about the subject. The chapter on structured authoring would be a good introduction to anyone thinking about switching from unstructured authoring to DITA. Many sections include short sidebars providing tips and best practices; for example, the Getting Information chapter has a list of 30 suggestions for getting information from developers - a task that many writers, beginning and experienced, find difficult.
Technical Writing 101 would be an excellent choice as a text in college-level technical communication programs. It's hard to imagine anyone coming up with a better introduction to the field for new writers. But even experienced writers can benefit from reading this book. It contains a wealth of tips and practical information. If you have a manger who's not a writer, give them a copy. It might help them appreciate your job a little more.
Contest note: Today (June 30) is the last day to enter a draw for a copy of this book.
Toronto's Merrill Collection will be hosting a reading and signing by Robert Charles Wilson on Thursday, July 2 at 7 p.m. He'll undoubtedly be reading from his new novel, Julian Comstock. I am definitely going to try to get to this.
Also, later in July the Merril will be holding a two-day event celebrating the Chandra X-Ray Satellite mission.
Scriptorium are having a draw for two copies of their updated, third edition of Technical Writing 101. I'm working on a review of this now, and it should be up here in a few days. Trust me - even if you're an experienced writer, you'll want this book, and if you're new to the field, it'll be a godsend.
If you're thinking about a Kindle, read this first
If you're thinking about buying an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, read this first. It turns out that the Kindle's DRM has a flag that can limit the number of times you can download a book to the Kindle, and some publishers are implementing it. Users who have to replace their library because of a broken reader or because they upgraded to one of the new versions of the Kindle are getting screwed.
The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message "Cannot be sent to selected device".
"Oh that's the problem," he said "if some of the books will download and the others won't it means that you've reached the maximum number of times you can download the book."
I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren't currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it's five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here's the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.
In a deal that's sure to make SF authors all over the world jealous, Alastair Reynolds has signed a 10 year, 10 book deal for a very cool advance - £1,000,000 (that's close to $2,000,000 CDN). I'm happy to see this, as I'm a big fan of his books (Revelation Ark is my current bedtime book), and I've got three or four other books by him in the queue. If you haven't read anything by him, his recent novel, Pushing Ice would be a good place to start, or possibly his story collection, Galactic North.
Since its introduction in 2001, DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) has become the dominant standard for structured authoring. According to a recent survey conducted by Scriptorium (results discussed in this presentation), about 70 percent of respondents working with structured authoring are either using DITA now or planning to on future projects. That's pretty impressive for something that wasn't much more than an inscrutable article in Technical Communication and some poorly documented Java/XSLT code eight years ago. Yet structured authoring represents only part of the technical communication field; according to the same survey, 29 percent of respondents are using structured authoring now, more than half plan to do by 2010. That means there are many potential users of DITA who are likely going to be searching for information about it sometime in the future.
One of the barriers to implementing DITA has been the state of its documentation. Like many open source projects, DITA's documentation is scattered and inconsistent. The documentation for the DITA Open Toolkit has improved dramatically in the last few years, but it still isn't up to the standard of most commercial projects. Comtech Service's Introduction to DITA, first published in 2006 and recently updated, offers a good introduction to getting started with the DITA Open Toolkit, but may be too technical for many writers, especially those who just want to use the DITA implementations that are now included in most major writing tools.
DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers, a new book from the Rockley Group, provides a more readable introduction. Rather than explaining the nitty-gritty of how to use the Open Toolkit and XML, it focuses on explaining what DITA is (and isn't), and what are its benefits and pitfalls. Much of the books content comes from experience the members of the Rockley Group have gained in conducting training DITA and content analysis and management.
The book begins with a history of DITA and the use of XML in structured documentation, then looks at the benefits of structured authoring. The primary benefit is the ability to separate format from content, thus making it practical to reuse content in different contexts. The authors provide practical guidelines for writing structured content and discuss the different ways of reusing content, all before getting into a discussion of DITA itself. This is followed by a review of the DITA topic types, concept, task, and reference, with an explanation of the elements that make up these topics.
Planning is especially important in a DITA project and the book contains a chapter explaining the key steps, including a summary of the Rockley Group's unified content strategy (explained in much more detail in Rockley's other book, Managing Enterprise Content). The authors also spend some time discussing an issue that is often neglected when organizations move to a structured workflow - how the authoring process changes the organization and the effects it has on people's roles. One area that is given rather short shrift is content conversion - they recommend against it, but this may not be practical in organizations with a lot of legacy content. I would have liked a discussion of some of the issues and alternatives here.
The technology involved in implementing a DITA-based workflow can be quite complex and daunting. The authors provide a succinct discussion of the issues, including when and how to use DITA with a content management system.
A section called "The advanced stuff' looks at conrefs (which provide content reuse), conditional processing, relationship tables, and specialization, which is DITA's mechanism for customization. Finally, a set of Appendixes contain a reference to DITA topics and elements.
Although this isn't a long book (140 pages), it's full of useful information, tips, and guidelines. The Rockley Group is an industry leader in the area of structured authoring and content managment, and they've distilled a lot of their experience into this book. Writers contemplating a move to DITA should definitely read it, and give a copy to their managers, too. At the very reasonable price of $9.95 for the download edition, this book is a bargain.
Karl Schroeder's wonderful novel Sun of Suns is available as a free audiobook from Audible until June 12. If you're not familiar with Karl's work, or his Virga series, of which this is the first novel, do yourself a treat and grab it while it's hot. Or get the dead tree edition.
Good news for SF fans! Robert Charles Wilson's new novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, will be out next month. It's set in a future North America that's fallen back to a 19th century technological level after a political and population collapse. The first part of the novel appeared as a novella, Julian: A Christmas Story, a couple of years ago, and was nominated for a Hugo award.
Just to whet your appetite, here's a quote from the glowing review that IO9 just published:
Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.
Wilson has won the Hugo award, and written half a dozen other novels, but has yet to achieve a great deal of name recognition among SF readers. I think Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is likely to change that. Ostensibly a tale of the brave wartime deeds and eventual presidency of Julian Comstock, written by his close friend Adam Hazzard, the novel is far more than that. It's a sprawling, gorgeous meditation on the inexplicable ways that history mutates culture, from its religious institutions to its pop culture.
There's another review here that discusses some of the religious themes in the novel:
This setup also allows for a variety of depictions of faith in Julian Comstock. Adam Hazzard's father, for instance, is a minister in the Church of Signs, a snake-handling Pentecostal denomination that is tolerated but not fully approved by the Dominion. Julian's mentor Sam Godwin is a closet Jew who knows little of his tradition beyond a few snippets of Hebrew prayers—his situation is similar to that of Spanish Jews during the Inquisition. And toward the end of the novel Julian befriends (and likely falls in love with, though it's not stated explicitly) the founder of the very liberal Church of the Apostles Etc., which bears more than a passing similarity to Unitarianism. (Its main doctrine: "God is Conscience; have no other/Love your neighbor as your brother").
Finally, Tor has published a three-part interview with Wilson: One, Two, Three
Brian Francis Slattery: In essays, reviews, and popular conversation about science fiction as a genre, one of the constant questions is to what extent science fiction attempts to predict the future and to what extent it seeks to comment on the present day. This has always struck me as a silly question to ask of the entire genre, but a good one to ask of individual books. With Julian Comstock, how much are you in the prediction business and how much are you in the social commentary business?
Robert Charles Wilson: I don’t believe science fiction is about prediction, except in the sense that we try occasionally try to explore some obvious contingency like nuclear warfare or space travel. What interested me in writing Julian wasn’t the particular minutiae of change (about which I’m as ignorant as anyone), but an attempt to represent a realistic degree of change.
I mean, how bizarre would contemporary headlines look to Herman Melville or Harriet Beecher Stowe? Air war over Afghanistan, a black Democratic president, gay marriage: this stuff would never have been considered “plausible” prediction, back in the day. And yet here we are. And that’s how it works. The future is contingent, deeply and intrinsically unknowable. Much of the background stuff in Julian Comstock that seems kind of off the wall—the U.S. battling the Dutch for possession of Labrador—is there to represent the changes that are both inevitable and not linearly predictable.
I haven't been buying many books recently - I have at least a two-year backlog to catch up on, but I am definitely buying this one, and reading it as soon as it hits my hands.
Many technical writers are also bibliophiles to one degree or another. In my case, I collect science fiction, though that's more a case of hating to get rid of books I've liked than trying to build an actual collection. But I've always liked books - the look and the feel of them. (Librarians too, but that's another story). Although I own a few older books, most are less than 50 years old.
Unlike digital media, books can last for a long, long time. And they can be restored. Here's an article about rebinding a 1518 edition of Ovid. I wonder if someone will be doing this to my first edition of Ender's Game in a few hundred years?
The book was a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses printed in Venice and dated 1518, and had been rebound sometime in the early 19th century, from the looks of it. The sewing structure of the book was breaking down, the covers were badly worn and detached, the pages in good condition overall. In discussion with the client, we elected to rebind the book in a Limp Vellum Binding appropriate to the period and location. This would help to present the book in a more appropriate format, and would actually make reading it much easier, as it would open more completely. In keeping with the simplicity of the style, and since we had no original cover to work from, there would be no tooling or decoration of the cover.
In a previous life, I worked for a publisher, so I'm familiar with modern bookbinding techniques. But this is a completely different process, and far more complex than I expected. As Spock would say: "Fascinating".
SF author Cory Doctorow is also one of the founders of the Boing Boing blog and an admitted geek. In his latest column, he writes about some of the tools he uses, including a tag cloud generator and linker, and a tool to create track and store versions of his stories.
I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.
Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed.
SF author J.G. Ballard died earlier this week. He was probably best known for his autobiographical "The Empire of the Sun", made into a pretty decent film by Steven Spielberg, and the dystopian "Crash", filmed by David Cronenberg. But during his career, he wrote many edgy, intense SF stories and novels that helped move science fiction out of the pulp era. Critic John Clute has published a heartfelt and thoughtful eulogy to him in The Independent.
For 30 years J.G. Ballard had many readers in many lands. For them, everything he published was news. But after Steven Spielberg based a good though not incandescent film on his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), Ballard became publicly newsworthy over large parts of the world that his words had never reached directly.
He became a sage and prophet, whose visions of the cost of living in the modern world were an integral part of our understanding of the shape of things to come. At least one English dictionary has accepted "Ballardian" as a term descriptive of the landscape of the late 20th century: bleak, rusted out, choked with Ozymandian relics of the space age now past, dystopian – a landscape which surreally embodies the psychopathologies of modern humanity.
It's been a long time since I read or studied the Bible. When I was in high school, we had a coupple of different versions and used several large, scholarly tomes in the school library for research. Now of course, it's much easier. For an example of how much easier, see The HTML Bible, a truly excellent resource published by John Hurt of Elmwood, Texas.
If you want to see an example of the empowering capabilities of hypertext and the Internet, you would be hard pressed to find a better example than this. For a start, you get the basic bible, King James Edition, online. Along with that, there are several Bible dictionaries and research books (Easton's Bible Dictionary, Henry's Bible Commentary, Nave's Bible Index are three of several) - all cross-linked back to the Bible. Or you can read the Bible with links to several of the reference books built in. Oh yeah, the Bible is searchable too.
But wait, there's more. For the Old Testament, you can read a parallel version that, for each verse, shows the original Hebrew, modern Hebrew, Latin vulgate, and several English translations. (For language buffs, this is fascinating - I could spend hours browsing this). As well, there are several spoken versions that you can listen to (although they didn't like Firefox 3 and wanted IE). And there's an extensive set of links to other Bible reference sites and software.
This is a remarkable resource, especially considering that it's free. They do produce downloadable and CD versions of the references for very reasonable prices. Mr. Hurt is to be commended both for the effort that obviously went into the site and for making it free.
Today seems to be the day for pushing stuff about MadCap Software products. Users of Flare who need help mastering its complexities now have a third-party book to help them, Five Steps to MadCap Flare by Lorraine Kupka and Joy Underhill. The authors say:
This book is intended for new Flare users. If you’ve been using Flare for some time and are seeking a book that describes every feature and concept, this isn’t the book for you.
Our hope is that by stepping through this book, you’ll be able to successfully plan for and create a Flare project. It won’t have all the bells and whistles that you can create with Flare, but it will produce clean online or print output.
Once you’ve mastered the Flare user interface—and have a good idea of how to build a project using Flare—you’ll be able to learn more as you use Flare to create more complex projects.
Flare is like an onion. You learn it by peeling back layers one a time as you gain experience. Our goal is to help you peel back that first layer—without any tears!
Based on the PDF of the TOC, introduction, and sample chapter that's available for viewing online, I'd say that anyone using Flare would find their $50 well spent.
I've finally started reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Given that it's my bedtime reading (it's too big and heavy to take on the GO train), it'll probably take me at least a couple of months to get through it.
Stephenson has a brief afterword to the book, but if you want to read more from him about it, check out the books acknowledgements, which are on his web site. They're about 10 pages long. He discusses many of the ideas that ended up in the book, and has extensively hyperlinked them to the source material. There's lots to savour and ponder here, as there is in Anathem itself.
The staff at Locus have published their 2008 recommended reading list. You could do a lot worse as a starting point into last year's science fiction and fantasy. Scanning the list, it looks like 2008 was a very good year for SF. Here's their picks for SF novels:
# Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK) # Flood, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Roc '09) # Weaver, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Ace) # City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey) # Incandescence, Greg Egan (Gollancz, Night Shade) # January Dancer, Michael Flynn (Tor) # Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace) # Spirit, Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz) # Escapement, Jay Lake (Tor) # Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod (PS Publishing) # The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod (Orbit) # The Quiet War, Paul McAuley (Gollancz) # The Company, K. J. Parker (Orbit) # House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, Ace '09) # Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder (Tor) # Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow) # Saturn's Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace) # Rolling Thunder, John Varley (Ace) # Half a Crown, Jo Walton (Tor) # Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams (Night Shade Books)
Out of that list, I've only read one book - Karl Schroeder's excellent Pirate Sun. But I have Anathem, House of Suns, and Saturn's Children in the queue, and there are probably another four or five that I'll get to eventually when they come out in paperback.
The list also includes fantasy novels, first novels, collections, anthologies, and short fiction.
Out of all the SF authors I've read in the past decade or so, I'd probably have to pick Charlie Stross as my favourite. His books are full of ideas, they're compulsively readable, and they cover a wide range of subjects. I'm not the only person who likes him - his books sell out as soon as they hit the stands (I'm still kicking myself for not buying The Jennifer Morgue when I saw it).
The academic group blog Crooked Tree has an appreciation of Stross and his books. We're talking about some heavy hitters too - how about Paul Krugman (yes, that Paul Krugman) writing about the economics of the Merchant Princes series.
Science fiction is, more than anything, a literature of ideas. And Charles Stross has more ideas than is probably healthy for one man. How many writers truly grapple with what it is to be human, with or without post-human technology? Accelerando bravely risks alienating you from the characters by propelling them off into multiple iterations far removed from the original meat-space versions. It reminded me of the second half of Wuthering Heights, when the original cast of characters is dead or unrecognizable, and a set of translucent copies play out the same drama. Less satisfying emotionally, but it makes you grasp intuitively the big questions beneath; what is free will? Am I the same person I was before puberty, when I left home, or even this time last year?
Stross often writes about life on the other side of that black hole, the Singularity, a world that is by definition unimaginable. How can we imagine what consciousness, pain or joy might be like after we digitize our brains? Post-singularity writers remind me of Saint Paul trying to explain the transcendental nature of Christianity to a colonized under-class who’d expected the Messiah to literally smite the Romans (and the Egyptians, Persians, and Mesopotamians). There’s a distinctly religious echo to the implication that the ways and thoughts of post-singularity existence are far beyond ours. Who, in their right mind, would even try to write about this? Stross for one. But not only that, he brings on the funny. Stross is a superb comic writer, an absurdist on a par with Terry Pratchett who never slips fully into slapstick: A.I. lobsters, talking telephones, a pitch perfect send-up of communist factions, and my favourite line in perhaps any novel:
“Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”
And Stross gets a chance to respond in two parts: part1 and part2.
Review - Microsoft Office Word 2007: Essential Reference for Power Users
Microsoft Office Word 2007: Essential Reference for Power Users, Matthew Strawbridge, Software Reference Ltd., 10-digit ISBN: 0 9554614 1 3, 13-digit ISBN: 978 0 9554614 1 5, 640 pages, paper, $74.95
I have to admit that my first reaction when I saw Microsoft Office Word 2007: Essential Reference for Power Users was "Wow, who needs this?" Then I started looking at what was in the book, and I quickly changed my mind.
The Essential Reference is a big book - 640 pages on A4 paper, with a heft ot match. The author, Matthew Strawbridge says:
This book is the first attempt ever to catalog and describe all of Word's features. The whole of the user interface is displayed graphically and explained, together with cross-references to the commands, which are found alphabetically later in the book.
As you might expect from a book of this nature, it's not intended for casual users. If you're looking for a guide on how to use Word's new ribbon interface or how to set up a template, you're probably better off with one of Christine Kent's tutorial books or one of the many aftermarket replacements for the user guide that Microsoft no longer provides. So who is this book aimed at? The author says:
This book is targeted at experts and power users who need to understand how Word functions at a low level. It will be useful to teachers and trainers, helpdesk staff, technical authors writing books about Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Office programmers.
The first part of the book covers basic concepts about Word and the new Office button. Two chapters are devoted to the ribbon and one to task panes. The longest part of the book - almost 300 pages - covers all of Word's many dialog boxes. VBA programmers will appreciate the complete list of Word's commands, cross referenced to the dialog boxes, where appropriate. There's also a complete list of the default autotext entries and a section with thumbnails of all the new galleries. The index is thorough, although you may need a magnifying glass to read it.
But this book is more than just an extensive set of lists. Everything is cross-referenced; for example, the section on dialog boxes includes the VBA commands that call them, to name just one example. Usage tips are included throughout the book. And the level of detail is impressive. For example, the description of the Formula dialog, which has only four fields, is two full pages long and includes all of the possible field values as well as a page of examples, a note and a usage tip. This is typical. Every time I open this book, I find something new and interesting that I didn't know before.
Casual Word users may be deterred by the Essntial Reference's rather hefty size and price, but anyone who uses Word day in and day out will find it invaluable. Technical writers who work primarily in Word, consultants who develop templates or Office-based solutions, or help desk support staff in organizations with an installed base of Word 2007 users should definitely consider buying this book.
About the only thing that I could see that would improve the book would be a colour edition, but that would drive the price to astronomical levels. A PDF edition, with colour graphics, would certainly have a wide appeal.
This image is a visualization of the Bible. Aside from being quite beautiful in itself, it manages to convey a remarkable amount of information about the Bible.
This image, Visualizing the Bible, was created by Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University and Christoph Römhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church and was awarded an Honorable Mention in Illustration in the International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge. The lower part depicts all 1189 chapters of the Bible as a bar graph; the length of each bar is proportional to the number of verses in the corresponding chapter. The coloured arcs in the upper part represent 63,779 cross references between chapters, with different colours denoting varying distances between connected chapters.
Amazon's editors have posted their picks for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2008. I've not read any of the ten books listed, although I do have Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which I'll be reading as soon as I finish his The System of the World. Of the ten books, only a couple are straight SF - the rest appear to fantasy, alternate history, or magic realism.
Author Neal Stephenson doesn't give a lot of interviews, so this podcast interview is something worth noting.
The latest of THE WORD's occasional Backstage Podcasts features novelist and WORD favourite Neal Stephenson, author of the acclaimed three-volume 'Baroque Cycle' which explored 18th century politics, the Glorious Revolution and countless other themes with the vim, vigour and analytical skill of a prime science fiction adventure novel. He visits our Islington HQ to talk to Andrew Harrison about clocks that can tell the time over Millennia, the difference between geeks and nerds, our unreasonable fear of the Large Hadron Collider and his astonishing new book 'Anathem' – science fiction's own 'The Name Of The Rose'.
Stephenson has done very well with his latest book, Anathem, hitting the top of the New York Times best seller list and getting some good reviews. I bought my copy at Costco, not known for stocking SF, so he's obviously hit the big time with this one. It's in my reading queue, after I read the last book in his Baroque Cycle, which I've had for a couple of years and still haven't gotten around to reading.
When I first encountered the World Wide Web, sometime in 1992 or 1993, one of the first things I thought was "Wow, this is going to revolutionize the novel". That didn't turn out to be the case. There are many novels on the web and various electronic formats, but hardly any use hypertext. But readers are taking matters into their own hands, by annotating their favourite works.
And these kinds of annotations transcend the world of comics and scifi nerdery. Music journalist Alex Ross released a book last year about twentieth century music called The Rest is Noise, which he supplemented by creating an elaborate, stand-alone annotation website. A massive compendium of twentieth-century musical terms, with definitions and illustrative sound files, his site can be read alongside the book to enrich the experience immeasurably. Or it can be absorbed on its own, as a musical dictionary.
There are many other examples: Some created by the authors of books, and others like Wolk's created by knowledgeable readers. These javascript:void(0)electronic footnote sites do not replace books, but they make reading feel like an erudite discussion rather than a lecture. They also make it possible for authors to write far more complicated and nuanced books. Confused readers have an easy place to go if they want to understand a crucial reference or idea, while in-the-know readers can have fun adding their own annotations to the web.
Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals: Power-Packed Tips for Editors, Writers, Typesetters, Proofreaders, and Indexers By Jack M. Lyon 630 pages, $39.95 ISBN 978-1-4341-0236-2 The Editorium, LLC, West Valley City, UT
I'm a long-time and experienced Microsoft Word user. I've been using it since I got a demo copy of Word 1.1 from PC World sometime in 1987. It's been a more or less daily part of my life for twenty years. At work, I'm the acknowledged Word expert, and I've even had the help desk refer calls to me. But compared to Jack Lyon, publisher of the Editorium Newsletter, I'm a novice.
In Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, he collects the best articles from the Editorium Newsletter, organized by topic, such as Customizing Word, Editing, Revision Tracking and Comments, Find and Replace, and Typesetting. To go along with the articles, he's added material submitted by the Editorium's many readers. Including readers' comments, suggestions, macros, and corrections to the articles (including one by me), adds a lot of depth to the book, and provides some interesting discussion threads that help to explain a subject in ways that the original articles (as good as they are) couldn't do. There are some very high-powered contributors too - several Microsoft MVPs and long-time demizens of the word-pc mailing list.
As I've been reading the book, I've been highlighting sections that I want to go back to and explore in more detail. It turns out that I've flagged more than 40 sections. To give one example, I used the section on custom dictionaries and the explanation of regular expressions to create a macro that creates a list of programming terms in a specification document I'm editing. Now I can both spell-check the document and ensure that I haven't missed any misspelled terms - always a risk with this kind of document. The explanation of how to use Word's regular expressions in searching and replacing is probably worth the price of the book.
You don't have to be a macro programmer to get the most out of this book either, as it includes many useful macros that are ready to run - just paste them into a template and go. Some examples: a macro to swap the contents of two adjacent table spells, a macro to remove duplicate items from lists, and a macro to convert comments to inline text and paste them into the document.
As well as a being a Word guru, Jack Lyon is an editor and publisher. So the book includes more than just tips on how to use Word - there's a lot of solid editorial advice basis on his experience. For example, there's an extended discussion of the benefits of editing on the computer compared to editing on paper, and come very helpful tips on proofreading.
About the only downside that I can find with this book is that the structure he's chosen gives it a slightly disjointed feel, as he admits in the Introduction:
Here you’ll find an eclectic (and occasionally slightly repetitive) collection of disjointed techniques to make Microsoft Word do things its designers never intended and to fix things they didn’t know were broken. Also, being of a somewhat philosophical turn of mind (like the old mechanic relaxing behind the counter), I’ll occasionally throw in some thoughts about the publishing process and how some of these odd techniques can improve it. I hope you’ll find it all very, very useful. There’s lots of good stuff in here—if you don’t mind rummaging around to find what you need. You brought a wrench and a screwdriver, right?
This isn't a replacement for Word's manual. Rather it's like a cookbook, to be dipped into, sampled, and savoured. It belongs on the list of essential books for Word users, along with Woody Leonhard's Word 97 Annoyances and Jean Webber's Taming Microsoft Word.
Here's another reason to like librarians (as if you needed more). Librarians at the Twin Hickory Public Library in Glen Allen, PA have created a window display featuring readers who sit and read banned books.
"We've created a 'live' Banned Book Display at our library [Twin Hickory Public Library, Glen Allen, VA]. We have volunteer readers who sit in the display and read (silently) banned and challenged books. So far it's gotten a lot of attention – we hear a lot of 'Mom, what are those people doing in there?' The best part has been hearing parents explain to their kids what the display is all about which is exactly what we wanted to happen!"
Like the music industry, book publishers are in trouble, although for somewhat different reasons. New York has a long feature article, The End, by Boris Kacha, about what's happening.
Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.
So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.
SF author and blogger extraordinaire Cory Doctorow has released Content, a collection of essays published over the last few years.
Today, Tachyon Books and I are launching my latest book, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, my very first collection of essays. In it are 28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects. The book sports a very fine Introduction by John Perry Barlow, and was designed by typography legend John D Berry (and a fantastic cover designed by Ann Monn!).
I'm especially chuffed about John's superb design, because I'm giving the whole electronic text away in the hopes of selling more printed objects, and the fact that this is one of the best-looking books I've ever read really makes the case for owning the p-book as well as the e-book (there's an essay on this subject in the book, too, natch).
As with most of Cory's books, you can download a copy for free (PDF link), though he's encouraging donations to help librarians and teachers buy copies.
It's unlikely I'll be reading Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem for a while - probably not until it comes out in paperback. i have too many other books I need to catch up on (my reading queue after I finish The Yiddish Policeman's Union includes Karl Schroeder's Pirate Sun, John Scalzi's The Last Colony, Michael Flynn's Effelheim, Stephenson's The System of the World, and four or five Alastair Reynolds' books.) So it's not like I need to read Anathem. But I will, eventually.
In the meantime, here's a largely favourable review from IO9.
You could call Anathem a kind of meta-mystery, because it's not just about finding clues. It's about how you know something is a good clue, and how you come to gather evidence in the first place. One of the fascinating things about the culture of the avout is that they are ruthless questioners, trained from a young age to take nothing at face value and to think of intellectual debate almost as a kind of martial art. At many points in the novel, you'll find yourself getting viscerally involved in a long conversation between two avout — perhaps more involved than you are during an awesome battle scene when a huge pile of science monk fighters take on a huge pile of gangsters in a remote arctic city.
Michael Chabon is a well-known author, winner of the Pulitzer prize, who can now add the fairly rare distinction of winning both the Nebula and Hugo awards for his most recent novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. It's an alternate history novel that posits that the US gave part of Alaska for the Jews to settle in after World War II. It's also a very good police procedural. I'm reading it now and enjoying it a lot. Here's the full version of an interview with Chabon that recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
There's been a bit of controversy in the SF field about Chabon winning these awards -- there seems to be a perception among some fans that he's a "maintstream' author claim jumping in "our" genre. But it's clear from this interview (and from other articles that I've read about him) that he's as connected to SF as many other authors who've won the major SF awards recently. And you can carp about his lack of fannish credentials if you like, but one thing you can't deny is that The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a damn fine novel.
Timberg: Let’s start with some of the pulp or genre writers who have spoken to you over the years and perhaps inspired your own books.
Chabon: There are so many. Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Ross Thomas, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby, Steve Gerber, Alan Moore. And there is a whole list of borderland writers — John Crowley, Jorge Luis Borges, Steven Millhauser, Thomas Pynchon — writers who can dwell between worlds.
Timberg: Where did this bias against work created for a popular audience come from?
Chabon: In all fairness, it came from the fact that the vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is crap. It’s impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned crap. The proportion may settle down in the neighborhood of 90/10 — Sturgeon’s law said that 90% of everything is crud. [Science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, "Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud."]
Neal Stephenson's newjavascript:void(0) book, an SF novel named Anathem will be released next week and the publicity machine is gearing up. Amazon has a video introduction by Stephenson and a video of him reading from the book. There's also a short PDF with excerpts form the book's glossary (and it sounds like you'll need it).
I'll probably wait for the paperback on this one. I like Stephenson a lot but I still haven't finished his Baroque Cycle - I still have to read The System of the World.
The Huffington Post is starting a new book review column. In the first installment, Jeff VanderMeer looks at a summer reading staple - political fiction. SF fans will note the reviews of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and the anthology Seeds of Change.
It's obviously aimed at professional writers who struggle daily trying to get Word to do things its designers never intended (or intended, but the developers never got working properly). From a look through the table of contents, it looks pretty comprehensive. If it ever shows up on Amazon.ca, I'll buy it.
For the last few months, TOR books has been teasing us about their new web site with weekly downloads of e-books and wallpaper. Their new site has just gone live and it's a good one. Not only do you get an SF-related blog with posts of the highest quality (check out this one by Jo Walton about Vernor Vinge's classic books A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness on the Sky), but you get free short stories by Charles Stross and John Scalzi. And for the next week, all the e-books and artwork from the previous few months are available for download. (Quality stuff too, with books like Robert Charles Wilson's Spin and Jo Walton's Farthing.)
This is a great site and the blog is going into my feed reader right now.
Charlie Stross' latest novel, Saturns Children, is now out. According to Stross, it's an homage to late-period Heinlein. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that I've turned into a major Stross fan since reading Singularity Sky a couple of years ago, and I'm certainly looking forward to this one.
According to this post on BoingBoing, Neal Stephenson's next novel, Anathem, will come with a music CD of "spooky wonderful music" by David Stutz.
I’ve just listened to several of the songs on this CD and, frankly, this is some weird shit. I say this without reservation. The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands). Some of it is similar to Western, Christian, styles of chanting. Other tracks are more Classical vocal arrangements with singing. The rest of the tracks seem to be heavily influenced by Eastern, Buddhist, styles of chanting, especially Tibetan Buddhism with its use of harmonics and overlaying voices.
It sounds interesting, though I won't need any extra reason to buy the book.
IO9 interviews William Gibson, who is touring to support the paperback release of his excellent novel, Spook Country.
In Spook Country, old ideologies hang around and shape the initial phases of a longterm change that it will never be able to keep up with. The digital realm is inherently porous. These days we're all coming to the attention of the authorities as a matter of course. But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention. It's more difficult for authorities to keep their secrets. it's working both ways. We live in the era of the leak, the document that doesn't get wiped off the hard drive. That drive you thought was wiped shows up in a pawn shop in Vegas. It's equally porous in both directions. But individuals have a better chance of applying transparency to their lives and transactions on the internet than states and corporations do. If we continue in this direction, I believe people in the future will wield unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they'll aim them back at history. They'll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can't imagine today. There will be no more lost cities.
I used to have a pretty good chemistry set when I was young. It had real chemicals too - unlike the watered down toys that pass for chemistry sets these days. If you have a child who's seriously interested in science, you're going to have a hard time finding anything decent off the shelf. Now there's a solution.
Robert Bruce Thompson, author of the great Building the Perfect PC, switches gears from computers to chemistry, with the publication of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. BoingBoing has printed Thompson's preface, which gives a good idea of what to expect from this book:
I concluded that the only good solution was to write a new book, one devoted to learning real chemistry at home, and one that would also be useful for the many thousands of other people out there—young people and adults—who wanted to experience the magic of chemistry just as I’d done on that long-ago Christmas morning, and to do so on a reasonably small budget with readily-available equipment and chemicals. And so Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments was born.
Who This Book is For
This book is for anyone, from responsible teenagers to adults, who wants to learn about chemistry by doing real, hands-on laboratory experiments.
DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.
I've been following the development of this book as Thompson wrote about it on his web site. If it's anything near as good as his computer books, it'll be an essential purchase for high-school chemistry students.
, will be out next month. It's set in a future North America that's fallen back to a 19th century technological level after a political and population collapse. The first part of the novel appeared as a novella, 
, is now out. According to Stross, it's an homage to late-period Heinlein. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that I've turned into a major Stross fan since reading Singularity Sky a couple of years ago, and I'm certainly looking forward to this one.