From Bookriot:

Recently, Slate published an article with the title “Yes, Adults Should Be Embarrassed To Read YA” because I sweartogod it isn’t a week in the book world unless someone is spewing something out of their hatch about what people should and shouldn’t be reading.

. . . .

I got to thinking about books I own which I am embarrassed to be reading. There are a number of them, and it took me a while to work out exactly what the problem was. It’s entirely irrational and pointless, but us humans are really good at both of those things, so I’m afraid the embarrassment persists even though I’m aware of it.

I just recently finished reading David Mack’s Star Trek: Destiny trilogy of books. I got an omnibus of the three books at Christmastime and just finished them this past month, doling them out to myself slowly in between reading other books. I really enjoyed them, they were excellently written and fun adventures. They were the most fun I’d had with a Star Trek novel in a decade or more (not because of anything with quality, just because I had wandered off and never wandered back, that’s all).

But an interesting thing happened every time I finished a different book and went back to one of the three Star Trek novels, and that was that my reading speed plummeted. It took me well into book two before I realized that it was because I wasn’t carrying the book with me the way I might with other books. Trips to the bus stop in the afternoon to wait for my son’s school bus happened with my phone, or a notebook or something. Normally, I brought novels. So why wasn’t I? At first, I thought it was because it was a big, heavy omnibus, but come on. It’s three novels in one volume and I’ve still read thicker books without issue. I’ve lugged Stephen King books around. I like big books (and I cannot lie).

Eventually, I realized I was embarrassed about it because it was Star Trek.

. . . .

Why am I telling you this, other than to reveal my own neurosis to the widest possible audience, like a less-scummy Woody Allen? I’m telling you this because I want you to know, it’s okay to be neurotic about books, and it’s okay to be embarrassed by them sometimes, for whatever irrational or not reason you happen to be. Are you an adult and embarrassed by your fervent and ongoing love of Young Adult fiction? I wish you weren’t, but I wish I weren’t too. I understand. You can be embarrassed.

Link to the rest at Bookriot

From Ad Age:

Lowe’s is looking to the future of home improvement, and it’s using physical lab spaces, along with a team of science-fiction writers, to help it envision what that might look like.

About a year ago, the retailer quietly began staffing up Lowe’s Innovation Labs, a group meant to lead innovation by testing and creating technologies, as well as partnering with startups. Kyle Nel, executive director, leads the labs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as another under construction in Boulder, Colo. The labs focus on “uncommon partnerships” with Singularity University and SciFutures, for example.

. . . .

“A lot of companies have outside spaces, but we approach it in a different way, through science-fiction prototyping,” said Mr. Nel, who reports to Lowe’s Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay. “You take all of your market research, all of your trend data and hire professional science-fiction writers. And they write real stories with conflict and resolution and characters. We turned it into a comic book and created possible stories or visions of the future.”

One of those visions involved giving homeowners the ability to envision remodeling projects with augmented reality. “Because it was a sci-fi story, it really opened up people’s imaginations to understand what was possible,” Mr. Nel said. “Now that we’ve gone through it, it seems weird we wouldn’t work in this way.”

“We look at emerging tech, consumer insights, unmet needs and pain points, give them to sci-fi writers and create preferred futures,” said Ari Popper, founder and co-CEO of SciFutures, a self-described “technology, research and foresight agency” that counts Hershey, Del Monte and PepsiCo among its clients. “Technology removes a lot of the barriers and unmet needs and pain points associated with the visualization of home improvement.”

Link to the rest at Ad Age and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From io9:

Supposedly the thing that characterizes science fiction as a genre is its interest in, well, science. And yet a lot of the very best treatments of science in novels lately have been in works that are classified as fantasy.

. . . .

 

Of course there’s the old adage that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Certainly a lot of fantasy novels have mined this idea fruitfully, from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials saga, to Richard K. Morgan’s recent fantasy/SF mashup The Steel Remains. But I’m not talking about the idea that advanced science looks like magic — that is, after all, an excuse for writing about science in a way that is handwavey and unscientific. I’m talking about fantasy writing where the plot actually hinges on scientific issues.

The prime example of this is Marie Brennan’s new series that begins with the novel A Natural History of Dragons. It’s set in a vaguely Victorian world whose geopolitics are a lot like our own — except that there are several species of dragon, ranging from giant, poison-belching swamp wyrms to tiny dragonfly-like creatures. Our hero is a naturalist who studies these dragons, and makes a number of startling discoveries about their taxonomic relationships to each other, as well as their place in the environment. That’s right — the main plot of these so-called fantasy novels is building a realistic taxonomy.

. . . .

Biological accuracy has become a kind of secret subtext in a number of fantasy novels about dragons, actually, including Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books. Both authors try to imagine, realistically, the lifecycle of an entirely new species, including how they fit into their ecosystems and how they’ve been changed by domestication. You can easily read the Temeraire books as a chronicle of dragon-centric environmental science, with an enormous amount of commentary on how different breeds have been domesticated and why.

Link to the rest at io9

From Wired:

The horrifying deaths on Game of Thrones have provoked a lot of feelings in fans of the medieval fantasy series: anger, sadness, grief… jealousy?

If you’ve ever stared at the severed heads and mutilated bodies of the Westerosi dead and thought “hey, I wish that were me,” then you’re in luck! In order to raise funds for two charities, The Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and the Food Depot of Santa Fe, Song of Ice and Fire series author George R. R. Martin has come up with a rather creative crowdfunding prize: Two lucky Game of Thrones fans with $20,000 will actually get a character in a future Game of Thrones novel named after them—a character that will, naturally, die a horrible death. As the description for the “Martyr” pledge level explains:

There is one male character and one female character available. You can choose your character’s station in the world (lordling, knight, peasant, whore, lady, maester, septon, anything) and you will certainly meet a grisly death!

Link to the rest at Wired and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From Tor.com:

“Ultimately it comes down to the desire to be where our customers are, to play fair with them in the assumption that they’ll play fair with us. And you know something? It’s worked.”

Tor Books president and publisher Tom Doherty had a lot to say during his speech at the International Digital Publishing Forum at this year’s 2014 Book Expo of America, but the main item on the agenda was Tor/Forge Books’ decision to strip Digital Rights Management software from the ebook versions of their titles and whether, two years later, that decision has had any negative impact.

In the case of Tor Books it appears that it hasn’t, but as Doherty pointed out in today’s speech, the implications of DRM go beyond the financial impact to publishers, authors, and readers. Insidiously, it chips away at the very connectivity that the entire publishing community has always relied upon.

. . . .

During the speech, the publisher related a story about how the success of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time was built on the excitement that every aspect of that publishing community brought forth:

“…like any #1 fan, I just wanted the whole world to know about this story, this world [Jordan] was creating. From page one of Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book “The Eye of the World,” at about the length of a novella, there was a natural breakpoint. To that point there was a satisfying story that really involved me. There was no way I was going to stop there and I didn’t think others would either. So we printed I think it was 900,000, long novella-length samplers, and gave them to booksellers in 100-copy floor displays to be given free to their customers. We gave them to fans with extras to give to friends, to semi-pros, and readers at conventions and anyone in the publishing community who we thought would feel the excitement that we felt. [...] We’re a community of many people, many of them here to talk about the stories that we find to be terrific.”

And from there you get #1 New York Times bestselling writers like Brandon Sanderson, notably inspired by The Wheel of Time. You get communities like Tor.com, where readers have been talking non-stop about the fiction that excites them. You get authors like Jo Walton finding new fans by engaging in a substantive manner with those communities. Although we now have digital spaces to house this kind of interaction, it has always been taking place in the physical spaces of the science fiction/fantasy publishing community, Doherty argued. It is, in fact, “a connection they make naturally. Barriers, whether it’s DRM or something else, disrupt these natural connections.”

. . . .

And from a marketplace perspective, it appears that Tor Books has achieved the same results. In a decisive statement, Doherty declared:

“…the lack of DRM in Tor ebooks has not increased the amount of Tor books available online illegally, nor has it visibly hurt sales.”

Link to the rest at Tor.com and thanks to Laura for the tip.

From Charlie’s Diary:

It has become customary in recent years for authors of Hugo-nominated works to provide the members of the World Science Fiction convention who get to vote for the awards with electronic copies of their stories. The ball started rolling a few years ago when John Scalzi kindly took the initiative in preparing the first Hugo voters packet; since then it has become almost mandatory to distribute shortlisted works this way.

Unfortunately, as professionally published authors, we can’t do this without obtaining the consent of our publishers. We are bound by contracts that give our publishers the exclusive rights to distribute our books: so we sought their permission first.

This year, Orbit—the publisher of Mira Grant’s “Parasite”, Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice”, and Charles Stross’s “Neptune’s Brood”—have decided that for policy reasons they can’t permit the shortlisted novels to be distributed for free in their entirety. Instead, substantial extracts from the books will be included in the Hugo voters packet.

We feel your disappointment keenly and regret any misunderstandings that may have arisen about the availability of our work to Hugo voters, but we are bound by the terms of our publishing contracts. The decision to give away free copies of our novels is simply not ours to take.

Link to the rest at Charlie’s Diary

From author Andrew Fox:

Who would be the most recognizable living literary celebrity to the average man on the street today?

I would guess Stephen King, and that being mainly because so many of his novels have been turned into popular films (and the fact that he, himself, has appeared rather frequently in movies and on television). I would give the runner-up spot to Maya Angelou, and that mainly for her poetic recital at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration and for her political activities on the behalf of Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama since then.

But would the average man on the street recognize the faces of any of the last twenty recipients of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Best Novel, or even the Nobel Prize for Literature? Would they recognize any of their names?

I highly, highly doubt it.

Such was not always the case in the United States. As recently as the 1980s, the face and name of Norman Mailer were immediately recognizable. Now, admittedly, Mr. Mailer was famous for more than his books – he was also famous for stabbing one of his wives and for ticking off a couple of generations of feminists. But in the decades prior to the 1980s, literary celebrities, of whom Norman Mailer was one of the last ones, were not at all uncommon. The names and faces of writers such as Arthur Miller (also famous for his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe), Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway frequently appeared on the covers of such popular periodicals as Life and Time.

But there was a golden age of literary celebrity, prior to the pushing aside of novels as the favorite mass media of cognoscenti and commoners alike, and that was the latter half of the nineteenth century. Then, celebrities such as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens could have lived very, very comfortably off just their speaking fees. Before the advent of the movies, radio, and television, they were the Charlie Chaplins and Clark Gables of their day. Then, unlike today, when any potential literary celebrity must have an easy faculty with television, a literary celebrity did not even need to have a pleasant-sounding voice.

. . . .

In 1987 or thereabouts, I was browsing among the long aisles of science fiction and fantasy books at Forbidden Planet, a huge SF, fantasy, and horror books, comics, and toys store located at Broadway and East 13th Street in Manhattan, when I happened to see Harlan Ellison also browsing on the very same aisle. Trying to be as discreet as possible, I spent the next ten minutes following him around the store, staying at least three quarters of an aisle away, checking out what he was checking out. Then, having selected a few books, he went to the register to pay.

With his back turned toward me, I felt liberated to openly stare at the man and his purchases (none of which I can recall). I hid at the edge of an aisle and watched him head for the exit. But just before he left the store, Ellison swiveled around sharply, stared right at me with a sardonic smile, and offered me a little wave. Then he walked outside. Just like Dostoevsky’s narrator, I was left feeling like a fool in my own eyes.

In the science fiction world of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Harlan Ellison was the science fiction world’s Norman Mailer, equally as famous for his outrageous conduct as for the stabbing quality of his writing. His name and face were instantly recognizable to the great majority of science fiction fans, thanks, in part, to his photo appearing on the back dust covers of such seminal anthologies as Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions and for his having written one of the most fondly remembered and honored episodes of Star Trek, the heart-rending “City on the Edge of Forever.”

Link to the rest at The Fantastical Andrew Fox

From author Larry Correia at Monster Hunter International:

A few days ago the finalists for the Hugo were announced. The Hugos are the big prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy. One of my books was a finalist for best novel. A bunch of other works that I recommended showed up in other categories. Because I’m an outspoken right winger, hilarity ensued.

Many of you have never heard of me before, but the internet was quick to explain to you what a horrible person I am. There have been allegations of fraud, vote buying, log rolling, and making up fake accounts. The character assassination has started as well, and my detractors posted and tweeted and told anyone who would listen about how I was a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, a rape apologist, an angry white man, a religious fanatic, and how I wanted to drag homosexuals to death behind my pickup truck.

. . . .

Of course, none of this stuff is true, but it was expected. I knew if I succeeded I would be attacked. To the perpetually outraged the truth doesn’t matter, just feelings and narrative. I’d actually like to thank all of those people making stuff up about me because they are proving the point I was trying to make to begin with.

Allow me to explain why the presence of my slate on the Hugo nominations is so controversial. This is complicated and your time is valuable, so short explanation first, longer explanation if you care after.

Short Version:

1. I said a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work. Those openly on the right are sabotaged. This was denied.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.

I’ve said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheer lead for left wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

. . . .

We always hear about how fandom is supposed to be inclusive… Only apparently my fans are the wrong kind of fans. They don’t care about the liberal cause of the day. They don’t care about Social Justice. They like their books entertaining rather than preachy. They probably vote incorrectly. That sort of thing.

. . . .

Bias and Motivation: In this business, most writers who are conservative, republican, libertarian, or devoutly religious have needed to keep their head down so as to not rock the boat and damage their careers. This damage comes from two directions, the publishing industry which is based in Manhattan and which is uniformly left wing, which will hurt careers out of spite, and also from the small, but extremely vocal left wing fans who swoop in to crush all dissent. I like to call them the Social Justice Warriors.

If right wing authors share their opinions, they will be openly chastised and attacked by very vocal, very angry people. Any deviation from the approved narrative is met with scorn, mockery, character assassination, and because the author doesn’t want to damage his career, he will usually fall back into line and shut his mouth. Basically if you step out, they form an angry mob and attack you until you roll over and apologize for something that shouldn’t be apologized for. Once you’re apologizing for your principles, they own you. They really don’t know what to do about people like me.

Link to the rest at Monster Hunter International

PG has read some of Larry’s books and enjoyed them. If you check out Larry’s Amazon Author Page and the books listed there, you’ll discover he’s prolific and libertarian.

PG is opposed to ad hominem political attacks on authors whether those attacks originate from the right or the left.

From Rolling Stone:

On a cold night in January, George R.R. Martin sits inside the Jean Cocteau Cinema, a revival theater that he owns in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has lived since 1979. The Cinema had been showing the first three seasons of HBO’s megahit series Game of Thrones, which is based on Martin’s still-in-the-works saga A Song of Ice and Fire. After viewing the ninth episode, “Baelor,” in which the story’s apparent hero, Ned Stark, is unexpectedly beheaded, with the screen falling to black, Martin sits quietly for several moments, then says, “As many times as I’ve watched this, it still has great effect. Of course for me, there’s so much more to the books.”

. . . .

Later on, Martin takes me to a small house with a book tower that serves as his office and writing space. (The home where he lives with his second wife, Parris, is nearby.) Martin has been writing since childhood, and started publishing science-fiction short stories just out of college in the early 1970s. They quickly established him as a serious and imaginative writer, telling tales of tragedy and, sometimes, of uncommon and hard-won redemption. He spent much of the Eighties and early Nineties working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Then in 1991 he began A Game of Thrones, primarily a story about power and family, about the disastrous nature of both war and the human heart, and so far it has shown nobody – including the audience – any mercies. As is apparent in the fourth season, there are no guarantees that anybody in this story is safe.

At his office, Martin escorts me to the den where we would talk. The room’s walls hold glass cases, full of hundreds of beautiful miniatures of medieval figures and fantasy characters and scenes from Martin’s books. Near a staircase that leads to Martin’s library – at 65, he remains a voracious reader – stands a full-size and operational model of the famous Robby the Robot, from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. “Robby the Robot,” he tells me, “it was a great kick to buy him and to show him off. A bunch of money sitting in a pile – what do I get out of that?”

. . . .

One of the more dominant themes in Game of Thrones is family. It’s what gives the characters purpose, but it also ruins them. What was your own sense of family and home like?

I was born in 1948, and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is a peninsula just south of Jersey City. By bus, it was 45 minutes to the heart of Manhattan, but Bayonne really was a world in and of itself. New York was very close, but we didn’t go there very often. From the age of four I lived down on First Street, in the public-housing projects, facing the waters of Kill Van Kull, with Staten Island on the other side.

My father was a Martin, but he was of Italian and German descent. My mother was a Brady – Irish. I heard a lot from my mother about the heritage of the Bradys, who had been a pretty important family at certain points in Bayonne history. I knew at a very early age that we were poor. But I also knew that my family hadn’t always been poor. To get to my school, I had to walk past the house where my mother had been born, this house that had been our house once. I’ve looked back on that, of course, and in some of my stories there’s this sense of a lost golden age, where there were wonders and marvels undreamed of. Somehow what my mother told me set all that stuff into my imagination.

. . . .

Where does your imagination come from?

Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it’s the execution that is all-important. I’m proud of my work, but I don’t know if I’d ever claim it’s enormously original. You look at Shakespeare, who borrowed all of his plots. In A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own. But I don’t know where it comes from, yet it comes – it’s always come. If I was a religious guy, I’d say it’s a gift from God, but I’m not, so I can’t say that.

. . . .

You’ve talked before about the original glimpse of the story you had for what became A Song of Ice and Fire: a spontaneous vision in your mind of a boy witnessing a beheading, then finding direwolves in the snow. That’s an interesting genesis.

It was the summer of 1991. I was still involved in Hollywood. My agent was trying to get me meetings to pitch my ideas, but I didn’t have anything to do in May and June. It had been years since I wrote a novel. I had an idea for a science-fiction novel called Avalon. I started work on it and it was going pretty good, when suddenly it just came to me, this scene, from what would ultimately be the first chapter of A Game of Thrones. It’s from Bran’s viewpoint; they see a man beheaded and they find some direwolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write, and in, like, three days it just came right out of me, almost in the form you’ve read.

How long did it take to do the world-building work?

Basically, I wrote about a hundred pages that summer. It all occurs at the same time with me. I don’t build the world first, then write in it. I just write the story, and then put it together. Drawing a map took me, I don’t know, a half-hour. You fill in a few things, then as you write more it becomes more and more alive. In the meantime, I still pitched shows in Hollywood, but this Ice and Fire thing wouldn’t leave my head. I kept thinking about it and scenes for these characters. It was just never far from me. I realized I really want to tell that story. By then I knew it was going to be a trilogy. Everybody was doing trilogies back then – J.R.R. Tolkien had sort of set the mold with The Lord of the Rings. Around 1994, I gave the hundred pages to my agent with a little two-page summary of where I saw the book series going. My agent got interest all over town – about four publishers bid on it. Suddenly I had an advance and I had a deadline, so I was able to say to my Hollywood agents: no more screenplays until I finish this novel.

Link to the rest at Rolling Stone and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

PG isn’t sure this has anything to do with books (sci-fi, maybe), but he was intrigued.

From Yahoo News:

Can’t be bothered to show anyone what you’re thinking? Then a Japanese scientist has the answer — a pair of digital eyes that can express delight and anger, or even feign boredom.

. . . .

“I wanted to build a system that is capable of carrying out social behaviours for humans,” he told AFP.

Just as robots can reduce the need for physical labour, the AgencyGlass — which looks like two small TV screens set in spectacle frames — aims to cut down its user’s emotional demands by carrying out their eye movements for them.

The two organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, which are connected to motion sensors and an external camera, show a pair of eyeballs that can appear to be making eye contact while the wearer is looking somewhere else entirely.

The wearer has to choose their emotion in advance — if they want to appear “attentive”, for example, they must switch it to this mode before putting the glasses on.

Link to the rest at Yahoo News