You will excuse me if I mention my own work here, but I am myself a card-carrying Pixel-stained Technopeasant. I have podcasted two novels and more than a dozen stories. I recently redesigned my website jimkelly.net so that, with a single click, you can download PDFs of an array of content including previously published stories from 'Mov's, back numbers of this column, craft essays on writing, appreciations of various luminaries in our little corner of literature, and a clutch of poems. I'm an advocate of the Creative Commons license. And I've been giving my stuff away pretty much since the dawn of author websites.
Let's pause here for an infodump on Creative Commons creativecommons.org: Briefly, the Creative Commons license offers a middle ground between an author enforcing the sometimes draconian rules of copyright (You stole my work, swine. Now talk to my lawyers!) and the self-denial of releasing work directly into the public domain (Information deserves to be free and I don't really need to eat, la, la, la!). Under Creative Commons, I grant permission for anyone to distribute my content for free to anyone they choose as long as they meet three conditions: They must attribute the work to me, they must not alter it, and they can't charge anyone for it. I continue to reserve the right to cash in on my stuff for myself. End of infodump.
And yet—and my fingers quiver over the keyboard as I type this—I wonder if at least some of the points Hendrix was trying to make might warrant further discussion.
But before I utterly sabotage my credibility online and call the fury of the blogosphere down on my head, let's look at some of what was written in the aftermath of Hendrix's rant.
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wrathful
The reaction was heated and swift. It should come as no surprise that several of the luminaries who have championed giving fiction away for free should take Hendrix to task in their blogs. Most made the point that they were using their freebies as marketing tools for specific books or as a promotional tool for their overall careers. The always-readable John Scalzi community.livejournal.com/sfwa/11289.html responded in depth, going through the impressive list of free work available on his site. “The fact is, I got paid—well—for all the writing on that list above. The fact is that other people got paid as well.” David Wellington brokentype.com/ davidwellington/2007/04/message froma.html explained, “I published on-line, for free, to develop a readership.” Michael A. Stackpole michaelstackpole.com wrote, “The internet allows authors to provide samples of their work. It allows them to get readers and listeners excited about a story or some characters."
But perhaps the most delicious retort in the Hendrix affair came from novelist Jo Walton papersky.livejournal.com/318273.html. “In honour of Dr. Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online.” Writers of all stripes signed on to celebrate IP-STD. For example: Amy Sterling Casil members.aol.com/asterling/amypage.htm, William Shunn shunn.net,Sheila Finch sff.net/people/sheila-finch, Will Shetterly and Emma Bull shetterly.googlepages.com/home, Robert Reed robertreedwriter.com, Jennifer Pelland jenniferpelland.com, Matt Ruff home.att.net/~storytellers/index.html, Charles Stross antipope.org/Charlie, and Karina Sumner-Smith karinasumnersmith.com—to name but ten of the over seventy writers who posted short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, samples of novels, poetry, lyrics, non-fiction, audio, video, art, comics, and clothing. Clothing? cafepress.com/technopeasant.
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forever free
Although I wear my pixel stains proudly, I do wonder about the future of giving fiction away on the web. First of all, let me say that there is no way to stop the practice, nor should there be. I intend to keep doing it myself. In my opinion, writers can ill afford not to have a web presence and I am convinced that offering free stories is essential to creating a website that is worth clicking. And I agree with those who say that we have an unprecedented opportunity to promote our careers by giving content away—for now. However, one reason why this marketing tactic works for the moment is that there are comparatively few writers doing it. When Cory Doctorow craphound.com released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom craphound.com/down for downloading under a Creative Commons license simultaneously with its publication by Tor, he was making copyfight copyfight.corante.com history. Since then, Charles Stross has released Accelerando accelerando.org and Peter Watts rifters.com has released Blindsight rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm as Creative Commons texts—and yet they are seen as indulging in risky literary behavior. By all reports, when these folks made e-versions of their books freely available, it actually increased sales of the paper versions. However, will this still remain the case once hundreds of writers adopt this tactic?
If the experience of the authors in the Baen Free Library baen.com/library is any indication, the answer would seem to be yes. Begun in 1999 and spearheaded by First Librarian Eric Flint ericflint.netand the late Jim Baen david-drake.com/baen.html, this bold experiment in electronic publishing would seem to have paid off handsomelyfor the dozens of writers who have posted their books there, free to download. Like those writers releasing their work under a Creative Commons license, participants in the Baen Free Library have seen their sales go up. Meanwhile, Eric Flint scoffs at the threat of on-line piracy that has given so many other writers pause. “Don't bother robbing me, twit. I will cheerfully put up the stuff for free myself. Because I am quite confident that any ‘losses’ I sustain will be more than made up for by the expansion in the size of my audience."
Currently, all of these writers make their money on the paper books that traditional publishers produce, which is how they can afford to give the e-versions away. But what of those writers who don't have a book contract with Tor tor-forge.com or Baen baen.com? Some have argued that since readers of e-books have come to expect that they will be free, there will be no way for writers who are trying to publish digital-only versions to charge for their work. The waters here are very muddy, it seems to me. For one thing, e-publishing is still a small slice of the publishing pie chart, and absent the invention of a cheap e-reader that will replace the paper book, is likely to remain so. By the way, the Sony Reader www.learning center.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader is not that invention.
There is a way to monetize purely digital publications. Scott Sigler scottsigler.net has parlayed his podcast novels into a publishing phenomenon, with a multi-book contract and a movie deal. In 2005 Scott began podcasting his unpublished novel EarthCore podiobooks.com/title/earthcore. It was the world's first podcast-only novel. Since that time Scott claims that fans have downloaded over three million files of his fiction. And now some of those files include advertising. This would seem to be a promising business model, as long as a writer can deliver eyeballs or eardrums in numbers sufficient to attract advertisers. It may well be that someday you will be reading the latest Connie Willis story courtesy of Microsoft HyperVista 4.0.
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you get what you don't pay for
And just why would you pay for science fiction when you could get it for free? Well, the easy answer is because you want to read the best writers. They tend to tell the most interesting stories, the ones with bold ideas and memorable characters and clever plots. The ones who can make marks on a page—or a screen—dance in your head. Say you go to some free website where writers who have just obtained their poetic licenses are practicing their craft. You can still have a science fiction experience, but it may not be of the quality you have come to expect here at ‘Mov's. But the thing is—and don't tell Sheila that I told you this—not every story in this issue is going to be selected for a Year's Best anthology or get nominated for a Nebula or Hugo or get displayed behind glass at the Science Fiction Museum sfhome world.org. Some misguided readers might assume that the “average” Asimov's story is really not all that much stronger than the top story over at Astonishingly Free Science Fantasy Webzine. They would be wrong, of course, but it is not an unreasonable assumption. And therein lies a danger to all flavors
of traditional publishing. Allocation of one's reading time is a zero sum game. Every minute spent reading free fiction is a minute lost to reading fiction that some author got paid for. Yes, there are many, many circumstances in which writers will benefit from giving their stuff away, but in all things, a balance must be struck. It says here that in the turbulent times to come, that balance may be difficult to maintain.
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exit
Warning! I'm going to talk about myself some more.
It would be a shame if people dismissed Howard Hendrix on the basis of a few intemperate remarks. He volunteered to serve SFWA and I honor that service. He has opinions worth considering, even if I don't agree with all of them. But I have a personal data point to offer with regards to the efficacy of giving fiction away on the web. I recently published a novella called Burn with Tachyon Publications tachyonpublications.com, a small press that gave me a small press print run. I was able to convince my editor Jacob Weisman to let me podcast the book, a chapter a week for sixteen weeks, beginning right around the pub date. Many, many more thousands listened to Burn than read it. I was astonished when it made the Hugo ballot and got the thrill of my career when it won the Nebula. Would my little book have gotten this kind of recognition had I not given it away for free?
I don't think so.
Copyright (c) 2007 James Patrick Kelly
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Novelette: DARK INTEGERS
by Greg Egan
Our new story from Greg Egan is a stand-alone tale that follows on the events of “Luminous” (September 1995). It's also the first story we've seen from Greg since “Oracle” appeared in our July 2000 issue. The author tells us, though, that “after spending a few years away from writing, trying to assist some of the asylum seekers that Australia imprisons in remote detention centers, I recently completed my seventh SF novel, Incandescence, which is due to be published by Gollancz in the UK in May 2008.” We hope that this return to writing means we'll soon be seeing more of his brilliant fiction.
“Good morning, Bruno. How is the weather there in Sparseland?"
The screen icon for my interlocutor was a three-holed torus tiled with triangles, endlessly turning itself inside out. The polished tones of the male synthetic voice I heard conveyed no specific origin, but gave a sense nonetheless that the speaker's first language was something other than English.
I glanced out the window of my home office, taking in a patch of blue sky and the verdant gardens of a shady West Ryde cul-de-sac. Sam used “good morning” regardless of the hour, but it really was just after ten A.M., and the tranquil Sydney suburb was awash in sunshine and birdsong.
“Perfect,” I replied. “I wish I wasn't chained to this desk."
There was a long pause, and I wondered if the translator had mangled the idiom, creating the impression that I had been shackled by ruthless assailants, who had nonetheless left me with easy access to my instant messaging program. Then Sam said, “I'm glad you didn't go for a run today. I've already tried Alison and Yuen, and they were both unavailable. If I hadn't been able to get through to you, it might have been difficult to keep some of my colleagues in check."
I felt a surge of anxiety, mixed with resentment. I refused to wear an iWatch, to make myself reachable twenty-four hours a day. I was a mathematician, not an obstetrician. Perhaps I was an amateur diplomat as well, but even if Alison, Yuen, and I didn't quite cover the time zones, it would never be more than a few hours before Sam could get hold of at least one of us.
“I didn't realize you were surrounded by hotheads,” I replied. “What's the great emergency?” I hoped the translator would do justice to the sharpness in my voice. Sam's colleagues were the ones with all the firepower, all the resources; they should not have been jumping at shadows. True, we had once tried to wipe them out, but that had been a perfectly innocent mistake, more than ten years before.
Sam said, “Someone from your side seems to have jumped the border."
“Jumped it?"
“As far as we can see, there's no trench cutting through it. But a few hours ago, a cluster of propositions on our side started obeying your axioms."
I was stunned. “An isolated cluster? With no derivation leading back to us?"
“None that we could find."
I thought for a while. “Maybe it was a natural event. A brief surge across the border from the background noise that left a kind of tidal pool behind."
Sam was dismissive. “The cluster was too big for that. The probability would be vanishingly small.” Numbers came through on the data channel; he was right.
I rubbed my eyelids with my fingertips; I suddenly felt very tired. I'd thought our old nemesis, Industrial Algebra, had given up the chase long ago. They had stopped offering bribes and sending mercenaries to harass me, so I'd assumed they'd finally written off the defect as a hoax or a mirage, and gone back to their core business of helping the world's military kill and maim people in ever more technologically sophisticated ways.
Maybe this wasn't IA. Alison and I had first located the defect—a set of contradictory results in arithmetic that marked the border between our mathematics and the version underlying Sam's world—by means of a vast set of calculations farmed out over the internet, with thousands of volunteers donating their computers’ processing power when the machines would otherwise have been idle. When we'd pulled the plug on that project—keeping our discovery secret, lest IA find a way to weaponize it—a few participants had been resentful, and had talked about continuing the search. It would have been easy enough for them to write their own software, adapting the same open source framework that Alison and I had used, but it was difficult to see how they could have gathered enough supporters without launching some kind of public appeal.
I said, “I can't offer you an immediate explanation for this. All I can do is promise to investigate."
“I understand,” Sam replied.
“You have no clues yourself ?” A decade before, in Shanghai, when Alison, Yuen, and I had used the supercomputer called Luminous to mount a sustained attack on the defect, the mathematicians of the far side had grasped the details of our unwitting assault clearly enough to send a plume of alternative mathematics back across the border with pinpoint precision, striking at just the three of us.
Sam said, “If the cluster had been connected to something, we could have followed the trail. But in isolation it tells us nothing. That's why my colleagues are so anxious."
“Yeah.” I was still hoping that the whole thing might turn out to be a glitch—the mathematical equivalent of a flock of birds with a radar echo that just happened to look like something more sinister—but the full gravity of the situation was finally dawning on me.
The inhabitants of the far side were as peaceable as anyone might reasonably wish their neighbors to be, but if their mathematical infrastructure came under threat they faced the real prospect of annihilation. They had defended themselves from such a threat once before, but because they had been able to trace it to its source and understand its nature, they had shown great forbearance. They had not struck their assailants dead, or wiped out Shanghai, or pulled the ground out from under our universe.
This new assault had not been sustained, but nobody knew its origins, or what it might portend. I believed that our neighbors would do no more than they had to in order to ensure their survival, but if they were forced to strike back blindly, they might find themselves with no path to safety short of turning our world to dust.
* * * *
Shanghai time was only two hours behind Sydney, but Yuen's IM status was still “unavailable.” I emailed him, along with Alison, though it was the middle of the night in Zurich and she was unlikely to be awake for another four or five hours. All of us had programs that connected us to Sam by monitoring, and modifying, small portions of the defect: altering a handful of precariously balanced truths of arithmetic, wiggling the border between the two systems b
ack and forth to encode each transmitted bit. The three of us on the near side might have communicated with each other in the same way, but on consideration we'd decided that conventional cryptography was a safer way to conceal our secret. The mere fact that communications data seemed to come from nowhere had the potential to attract suspicion, so we'd gone so far as to write software to send fake packets across the net to cover for our otherwise inexplicable conversations with Sam; anyone but the most diligent and resourceful of eavesdroppers would conclude that he was addressing us from an internet café in Lithuania.
While I was waiting for Yuen to reply, I scoured the logs where my knowledge miner deposited results of marginal relevance, wondering if some flaw in the criteria I'd given it might have left me with a blind spot. If anyone, anywhere had announced their intention to carry out some kind of calculation that might have led them to the defect, the news should have been plastered across my desktop in flashing red letters within seconds. Granted, most organizations with the necessary computing resources were secretive by nature, but they were also unlikely to be motivated to indulge in such a crazy stunt. Luminous itself had been decommissioned in 2012; in principle, various national security agencies, and even a few IT-centric businesses, now had enough silicon to hunt down the defect if they'd really set their sights on it, but as far as I knew Yuen, Alison, and I were still the only three people in the world who were certain of its existence. The black budgets of even the most profligate governments, the deep pockets of even the richest tycoons, would not stretch far enough to take on the search as a long shot, or an act of whimsy.
An IM window popped up with Alison's face. She looked ragged. “What time is it there?” I asked.
“Early. Laura's got colic."
“Ah. Are you okay to talk?"
“Yeah, she's asleep now."
My email had been brief, so I filled her in on the details. She pondered the matter in silence for a while, yawning unashamedly.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Page 3