Alastair Mayer's T-Space

I posted some of the below in a comment to Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, in turn commenting on one at Joe Konrath’s site. If you’re here for the science and fiction, and don’t care much about publishing or the logic and numbers behind pricing, feel free to skip this post.

Still here? There’s been a bit of buzz over the last year or so about best pricing for indie-published ebooks. (Ebooks from traditional publishers too, but we writers have less (read “no”) control over that, and the general opinion seems to be that their prices are way too high.) One school of thought is that lower is better and you’ll make it up in volume, another is that discount prices devalue the work and no, you won’t make it up in volume. I won’t go into the arguments here (go through Dean’s and Joe’s archives for much of that). I do believe in fair value for money, in both directions. I haven’t put up any of my previously-published flash fiction yet, one reason being that Amazon won’t let me put anything up for Kindle at a price less than $0.99, and I’m not going to offer a 1000-word story at the same price I’m selling one four or five times that long. (I’ll probably put a collection together soon, though — and maybe a couple as free samples here.)

But on the reader side — and I was a reader long before I was a writer — I also have a sense of what a fair price is. When I was a young teenager I used to devour paperback novels (mostly science fiction, oddly enough) at the rate of several a week — sometimes several a weekend. True, they tended to be shorter in those days (late 60s/early 70s), but I could afford that many on my modest allowance. They cost $0.60 trending up to $0.95 by the end of that period, hitting one to two dollars toward the end of the 70s. I considered that a fair price — I could afford buy as many as I had time to read — and I’d probably (no, I remember doing it, I would have) turned up my nose at something offered for a mere $0.35 or $0.40 as perhaps suspect.

With that in mind, when the discussion came up again I decided to see what that worked out to in modern currency. (Well, 2010 — I couldn’t get 2011 figures.) I can’t help it, sometimes I’m a numbers geek.

I pulled a half-dozen old paperback novels (including an Ace Double) off my shelves, with publication date ranging from 1969 to 1991 and price from $0.60 to $4.95 then ran the dates and prices through an online CPI inflation calculator.

In 2010 dollars those prices range from $3.53 to $7.82, with the Ace Double (two 50k-word stories) at the low end, and a 134k-word novel at the high end. The two 65k-word novels average $4.88 each. The top three (ranging from 83k to 250k) average $6.97 each at an averaged wordcount of 155k.

This is all stuff (especially the 1969 and early 70s novels) that I had no qualms about buying out of my meager allowance as a high school student — and I went through several such a week (sometimes propped up behind a textbook in class, grin).

So yeah, adjusting for inflation (and ignoring the media difference between mass market paper and ebook) the prices suggested — $4.99, $5.99 — are spot on.

Speaking of superluminal neutrinos, my friend Tim Kyger has called my attention to a recent paper that has to have the best abstract ever. The paper, by M.V. Berry, N. Brunner, S. Popescu & P. Shukla is entitled Can Apparent Superluminal Neutrino Speeds be Explained as a Quantum Weak Measurement? Summarizing this ten-page paper filled with the requisite mathematics, diagrams, and references, the abstract: “Probably not.”

In all seriousness, the paper raises some interesting ideas (at least, I think it does — I don’t so much follow it as get the gist of it), and further, it eliminates one possible “they’re not really superluminal” explanation. We’re definitely seeing some new science — or at least, new thinking about science, which amounts to the same thing — come out of all this. Time to go make more popcorn!

The OPERA experiment team at CERN is again reporting (as of Nov. 18) possible faster-than-light neutrino measurements. This time they’ve been using 3-nanosecond neutrino pulses, to better pin-down the timing, and they’re still reporting seeing them show up at the detector 60ns sooner than photons would. If this holds up with other labs attempting to repeat the experiment (not until some time next year), then we’ve got some interesting new science, folks. (I’ll have more to say on that soon — some of which I said elsewhere after the September announcement.)

On the other hand, the ICARUS experiment team is saying that their neutrinos have too much energy to have ever gone faster than light. I haven’t read their paper yet, just going on what has been filtered through the popular press, so I’m not very clear on the details. That said, they seem to be basing their conclusion (high energy == slower than light) on models which don’t permit FTL in the first place. Since we don’t know how the neutrinos are going superluminal (if, in fact, they are), that seems shaky ground to be building conclusions on. But maybe I’m just being over-optimistic.

More when I get a chance.

Actually I think I’ve mentioned it here a time or two before Now I’m announcing that The Chara Talisman, the first full-length novel set in T-space, is now available in e-book and trade paperback form. (First to be published. A novel set earlier in the time-line is in progress.) This is the expansion of my Analog story “Stone Age”.

E-book versions are available from Amazon (for Kindle) and Smashwords (all formats) and should be available direct from B&N, Sony, Apple and others soon. The trade paperback version is available from Amazon (or should be, by the time you read this) as well as through bookstores (you might have to special-order it — bookstores rarely take chances on newer authors these days unless the publisher is doing a mega-marketing blitz) and my publisher, Mabash Books.

There’ll be some promotions for Chara Talisman and some of my other T-space stories going on over the next month or so, so stay tuned. I haven’t decided on the rewards yet, but I’ll be offering prizes for the first person who reports to me a typo or factual error (only one prize or reward for each typo/error) in the book. It could happen — Larry Niven had the Earth rotating in the wrong direction in the first edition of Ringworld.

(Update: added link (above) to paperback version at Amazon.)

It’s Veterans Day here in the US, Remembrance Day in Canada, the UK, and other commonwealth countries. Sometimes called Poppy Day, after the traditional symbol named from the poem “In Flander’s Fields” (where poppies grow…)

I have a book coming out today too — but that will keep.

To all veterans of the US, Canada, the UK and allied countries … thank you.

Another MileHiCon — the Denver area’s annual SF convention — is underway. I have a full schedule this year, with four panels (FTL, collaborations, writing humor, and space mining), a reading — I share the slot with Kevin J. Anderson, which pretty much guarantees me an audience — an autographing — sharing the table with Vernor Vinge, so there’ll be a long line for one of us — and an interview for the Machine Readable podcast.

It promises to be a lot of fun, as always, and I get to announce the imminent release (on 11/11/11) of my novel The Chara Talisman, which I may have mentioned here once or twice already.

Hope to see you there.

(BTW, the astute among you may have noticed a gap here since the pre-Worldcon post. Mea culpa. There was plenty happening — Worldcon, Bubonicon, the report of possible FTL neutrinos, and more — and I took notes. But I didn’t immediately turn said notes into postings here, and a bunch of the other stuff happening (of lesser interest to anyone not me) got in the way. Some of those notes, particular on the possible superluminal neutrino observations, will make it here soon. Or perhaps I can figure a way to use superluminal neutrinos to post them a month ago. Cheers.)

I’m frantically packing and otherwise getting ready to leave for Renovation, the 69th annual WorldCon in Reno. I’m behind schedule in just about everything else because of a whole bunch of other crap stuff going on in my life, but this weekend is for forgetting all that, meeting old friends, new friends, fans, fellow writers, editors, and generally having a good time. I fly out right after work tomorrow, and I’m taking the train (the California Zephyr) back — I haven’t taken a good long train ride in years.

I hope to see those of you who are attending, stop me and say ‘hi’. I’ll likely be wearing an aloha shirt, and my hair’s a lot shorter than Ed Bryant’s.

I’m in the middle of prepping my story “Stone Age”, which appeared in the June issue of Analog a couple of months ago, for ebook publication. Here’s the cover, based on the Frederik Catherwood print which partly inspired the story. I’ll update this when it’s available, and probably do a special intro offer through Smashwords.

This story is, as I think I’ve mentioned before, based on a couple of the first chapters of The Chara Talisman. Publication plans for that are still pending — the traditional publishing industry moves slowly — but I’m considering making an e-version available sooner, possibly serializing it on-line. Let me know if you’re interested.

Update: “Stone Age” is now available in ebook format from Smashwords, and should be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and outlets supplied by Smashwords (such as Apple and Sony) soon. Stay tuned for an offer in connection with The Chara Talisman.

My author’s copies of the October issue of Analog just arrived (early!), containing my Probability Zero story “The Sock Problem”. This is kind of a sequel to “Light Conversation” in that both stories feature a major appliance and the first-person narrator is a bit of a tinkerer. My son Robert is urging me to do a whole series of humorous appliance stories. We’ll see.

Also in this issue is Brad Torgersen’s “The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project”. This is kind of a thrill for both of us; back in 2009 at one of Kris’n'Dean’s writing workshops, before he had had anything published and only my “Snowball” had been sold but wasn’t yet in print, we’d joked about one day both having stories in the same issue of Analog. Well, two years later and here we are. (Hey, Brad, one day we’re going to be on the Hugo awards stage together, right? )

Should be on the stands in a couple of weeks, electronic versions possibly before that. Enjoy!

Speaking of time machines (see my earlier post), news from the ArXiv today is that physicists have created a “hole in time”, the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak. Only 110 nanoseconds so far … but consider the possibilities!

Tangentially, writer Alex J. Kane, in a blog post titled “On the Use of Tropes in Science Fiction” today considers possibilities for science fiction, and quotes my buddy Brad Torgersen: “There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s all about how you use the various stock elements that makes the story.” I’d absolutely agree with Brad’s second sentence there, but I might quibble about the first. Is the above “time cloak” new to science fiction? Not exactly, if you consider stasis boxes, bobbles, or some of the ways time travel has been used in stories. But I’m willing to bet that nobody came up with something quite like what the physicists did. All kinds of interesting story ideas there.

Kane goes on to say:

Writers like Orson Scott Card have even gone so far as to reduce the genre, in a way, by saying that it’s merely “a subset of fantasy.” True, but when I heard those words [...], I couldn’t help but feel a sense of betrayal.

Wasn’t science fiction the genre that had made Card’s career, after all? Without having written Ender’s Game, would I even know who he was?

But for the sake of argument, let’s take Card’s elaboration into account. He argues that science fiction is a sort of literary dead end because there just aren’t enough new scientific discoveries — or moreover, any new ideas — out there to justify writing sf anymore. From a storyteller’s perspective, he says, it makes more sense to just resort to a magical fantasy setting. Why bother with the facade of making things like FTL travel, etc., seem plausible in a universe where we know such key tropes to be utterly impossible?

I call bullshit.

So do I.

Card (and others) miss a key point when they call science fiction a subset of fantasy. True enough, much of what gets passed off as SF (or perhaps rather, sci-fi) is just fantasy with spaceships, computers and aliens instead of horses, magic and trolls — Card’s own Ender’s Game stories could be considered in that light (although perhaps not the original short story which started it all). But the hard core of SF — and I heard Connie Willis making just this point a couple of weeks ago — is as a literature of ideas. Yes, we as readers (and, we hope, as writers) these days we expect more than just the idea; the Hugo Gernsback days when cardboard characters and cliche settings were fine so long as the idea was new are long gone, we expect rounded characters and well thought out settings as well as ideas. Indeed, the ideas don’t even have to be new if you do everything else well enough, but if you do come up with one, or put a new twist on one, you’ve got a potential award-winner if everything else holds up. (Larry Niven in his short-story heyday had this finely honed; several of his award-winning stories were near category-killers. Just try writing a crosstime-travel story these days without considering the implications he raises in “All the Myriad Ways” — which have real echoes in quantum theory.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with a good rollicking space, time travel, or zombie apocalypse (to pick three not-quite-random examples from this year’s Hugo nominees) story either.

And I’ll agree with Kane’s closing quote: “To quote George Carlin: ‘The future ain’t what it used to be.’” Ain’t that the truth!