by Eric Flint
But in the long run, it's suicide. Sooner or later, electronic publishing is bound to become the dominant form of publishing. And at that point, these same expansive fair use practices will come back to haunt us. Since, obviously, it will undercut the electronic market which will someday become the main form of the market rather than the small niche it is now.
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In my next essays, I will deal with this issue at considerable length and in considerable detail. What I will demonstrate is the following:
First, the likelihood that the paper book is on the verge of extinction is very low.
Secondly, even if we presume a completely electronic market, expansive fair use will still continue to enhance sales, not diminish them.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, publishing and writing as economic activities have always been subject to change in their specific methods of gaining an income. All that electronic publishing does is simply usher in yet another such change. And, as has been true with all such transformations in the past, the new methods create new sources of income, which at the very least offset whatever losses may be suffered.
From the Catacombs
Written by Barry N. Malzberg
The Distinguished Editor in the past has had a question. (Editor's note: that's Editor Resnick, not Editor Flint). More of an objection, really. "Criticisms of, references to the science fiction of the 1950's and 1960's are of no interest to 95% of the current audience. All of us old-timers may love it but this is not the audience any more; it's as if you're at a Gaming Convention now talking about Captain Video." I think the Distinguished Editor wants me to spruce it up a little, move as briskly as possible toward the present. Charles Stross, anyone? Neuromancer itself is now 23 years old; that's four complete generations of magazine readers as the market researchers of the 1950's determined. (Most of the readership turns over completely within a five year period.)
Point taken. The Distinguished Editor understands the times and knows where this magazine must be situated in order to prosper. (And how we all do want it to prosper.) When I comment on Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Muhammed" or "Fondly Farenheit" I am discussing work which was published 50 years ago. A little perspective: I began reading this stuff in 1951, had become a serious reader indeed within a couple of years. How much interest would I have had in Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang or the early-century Argosy? Wouldn't it all have been impossibly remote? Certainly I had no interest in such material in 1952; it had nothing to do with what interested me at the time.
Robt. Silverberg calls this "The McKinley Effect." In order to
understand exactly how out of it we old fellas are, remember that Eisenhower, McCarthy, The Demolished Man or Walter Miller's "Dumb Waiter" are exactly as far behind us now as the McKinley Administration was to us in our youth. Speak of impossible remoteness! Certainly any consideration of the McKinley Effect has to be humbling. Perhaps I am indeed wasting my time (and that of the audience) in becoming as emotional and specific to decades-old science fiction as I have occasionally been in this series of columns. What percentage of the readership can relate in any significant fashion? Charles Stross, anyone? More to the point: The Matrix anyone? Inside John Malkovich? Halo?
My response to the Distinguished Editor, at least to this point, has been
grudging and uncharacteristically wistful in its optimism. "I think there are a
lot of people out there who could be made interested in literary science
fiction and its antecedents. I've got to make it relevant, certainly and I should
not wallow in a pointless nostalgia, but if I didn't think that a good part of
our audience could be brought along to wider historical understanding, then I would not even try. As the Distinguished Editor himself said, Toastmastering at the 1988 New Orleans World Convention, "For without you we have no history." He was presenting the Convention's special award to members of the Science Fiction Oral History Association, whose primary task was to go into the field, interview first- and second-generation science fiction writers and fans at length and put those interviews into permanent form for custodial care. "And without our history, who are we? what can we ever be?" the Toastmaster did not add to his statement but I wish he had. Arthur Miller, the playwright who wrote Death Of A Salesman and After The Fall would add, "If we don't know where we have been, we will be destroyed by what we have become."
We are, in sum, all here to learn. You, me, Kornbluth, Werner von Braun, the Bible-toting astronauts of Apollo 8's Boorman mission reading out Scripture as they looked upon the Earth, everybody just a simple child of our time, looking to memory for context. Science fiction, as I have so often said, has become a small special interest at science fiction conventions, but that doesn't mean that it has lost relevance. The ape in the corner must be scratched periodically, lest it tear apart the room.
So a few photographs from the family album. The odd fragments among the
ruins, recollected through rereading in the last few weeks. Small examples of the McKinley Effect. Here are Kuttner's fascist alien rabbits from his 1943 Gallegher story (one of a series of five in Astounding over a six-year period), "The World Is Mine." The rabbits have arrived as a conquering army from a secret planet far, far away. "The World Is Ours," one of them notes. "First we'll take over and then we'll make you do everything we say. More cookies please." The rabbits have a weakness for cookies and warm milk. "The world is ours?" they sing. "Could you please give us a little more?" If I were attempting to be profound I would say that this kind of reductionism, making Hitler a clown in 1943 (Mel Brooks did this too, but it took him a quarter of a century more) was not only visionary but a kind of science fiction at its best. Kuttner's mocking humor, his hollow laughter, resounds through this story; his crazy inventor Gallegher knew a thing or two even if he had to become drunk to know. Here is Sheckley's Valdusian Derg in Galaxy in 1956, pulling a protection racket on the usual hapless Sheckleyan protagonist. Of course the Derg can offer only a partial kind of protection, a Sneep emerges to advise our pal. You'd better let us help you too. At the end Sneeps and Dergs have been brushed away by an even more menacing force who warns, "You'll probably be all right but whatever you do, don't lesnerize". What is lesnerizing? our guy wants to know, but too late, everyone is gone. "I think I'll be all right," our pal writes in his diary. "It's been 48 hours and all has been quiet. Maybe "lesnerizing" is some kind of exotic alien thing. Now I have to sneez—"
That's satirical science fiction for you; fascist rabbits and outsnookered
Valdusian Dergs. The world lies before us, as John Cheever wrote, like a
bewildering dream, but here for more than eight decades now has been genre science fiction to try to make some sense of it. To put that bewildering world in a place we could apprehend if only through reduction.
Its world is ours.
—October 2007 New Jersey
December 2007
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
Authors Kevin J. Anderson and Timothy Zahn are joined by Grant Baciocco (professional comedian), Doctor Aubrey de Grey (gerontologist promoting medical life extension), Professor Paul Levinson (media commentator) and Paul Fischer (pioneering podcaster), as well as by Stoney Compton and Walt (Bananaslug) Boyes for the November and December 2007 episodes of The Future And You.
The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains numerous interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion about the future from a wide variety of people.
And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains an installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.
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Topics in the December 2007 episode
Timothy Zahn is not surprised that the SETI project hasn't found anyone because he doesn't think there's anyone out there to find. He regards the expectation that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe to be a perfectly understandable assumption, but one based on far too little data. (In addition to being a best selling author, he has a Masters degree in physics.) "Earth constitutes only one data point" he says, "and my training in physics and mathematics tells me that extrapolating from only one data point is fraught with danger."
His confidence is high, however, that we will someday have computers wired directly into our bodies. "Teenagers would love to have their music wired into their brains," he says, but adds, "I'll wait for the third or fourth generation of the technology to see what the side effects are."
He describes his ideas on a wide variety of topics such as: medical life extension, The Singularity and nanotechnology. For example, he is skeptical of cryonics for both technical and spiritual reasons. He's skeptical about the chances for faster than light travel (FTL) but admits he cannot rule it out completely. He finds it strange that schools are cutting exercise and sports programs at the very time when childhood obesity is widespread and on the rise. And he gives a number of examples to support his doubts that non-lethal weapons can be meaningful unless both sides in a war agree to use them.
Kevin J. Anderson (co-author of the best selling Dune prequels) feels that the job of a science fiction writer is not to write stories which accurately describe our real future, but to write entertaining stories which relate to people today. Even if he were able to write such stories accurately, which he emphasizes he cannot, he expects that our future way of life, fifty or a hundred years from now, will be so removed from our present way of life that today's readers would find it difficult or even impossible to relate to the characters or to their problems.
He finds cryonics interesting, and can conceive of our future nanotechnology becoming advanced enough to repair any and all freezing damage on the cellular and molecular level, but wonders if there aren't spiritual and religious questions which are yet to be answered regarding the act of reanimating those who are deceased. Even if we repair all the damage, he asks, when we flip the switch to bring the body back to life, will the person be in there? This is not just a question of data storage, but a question of the soul.
When it comes to SETI, Kevin J. Anderson is not surprised that the universe seems so empty. But he does see this emptiness as an argument that FTL may be difficult or even impossible to invent. On the other hand he says, "If SETI (researchers) came in tomorrow and said, guess what? Somebody picked up the phone. We're actually talking to an alien race. The change this would bring upon the human race is impossible to calculate."
He is also in the camp of those who see artificial intelligence eventually merging with humans rather than becoming our enemy. He anticipates that computer implants will become popular, and is willing to have one too—after other people try them first. He even anticipates that this might someday lead to humanity developing a "hive mind."
Paul Levinson feels that if cryonics works it could provide a good form of time travel as well as a good way to extend human lives. And he describes the affects he thinks it might have on society.
As to The Singularity: Paul Levinson agrees with some but not all of the concepts which are expected to work together to bring it about. He does not buy into any of the apocalyptic descriptions of The Singularity. He especially balks at the idea of artificial intelligence becoming so advanced that it is unintelligible to humans. Instead, he sees artificially intelligent machines becoming integrated with human minds; so that we become better humans—rather than the machines out-pacing us and going their own way. He uses a number of historical examples to support his ideas of how this and other aspects of our future will grow out of our present.
Is every police officer's current location a blinking dot on a computer map of the town back at headquarters? Does every police officer wear a GPS locator and carry a big red panic button? Does every police car have a computer to run the license plate of the cars the officer stops? Officers, firefighters and civilians live or die everyday based on the answer to these and similar questions, but in many places in America and around the world the unfortunate answer is "No, not yet."
Paul Fischer helped design New York City's newly installed Dedicated Data Network which is one of the most advanced such systems in America. Its powerful features and abilities can—or soon will—answer Yes to those urgent questions. Paul Fischer describes how it is used to help save lives, as well as the trends he sees developing in Police, Firefighting and other municipal computer systems.
Paul Fischer also speaks briefly about the two podcasts he and his wife (Martha Holloway) produce: The Balticon podcast (in which they interview authors, scientists and other people of note attending the science fiction and fantasy convention called Balticon) and The A.D.D. Cast (a free form podcast in which they talk about how to cope with A.D.D.). (Paul was diagnosed with A.D.D. many years ago while still in junior high school.)
And as always, each episode of The Future And You features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they let the world know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.
This episode however does not—I repeat, does not—contain another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black. This is because the final climactic installment was included in the previous episode.
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Topics in the November 2007 episode
Kevin J. Anderson feels that if nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing turn out to meet their potential they will change human society and the human race forever, and that this will be a bigger change than any we have experienced in all of human history.
He sees Vernor Vinge's Singularity as a fascinating and scary possibility. Though a long-time Mac user and early adapter, he feels the curve of The Singularity has already passed him by.
One of his worries for the future is that we have lots of smart people working on scientific advances when they have no clue what the effect on society will be. As an example, he sites a U.S. project from the sixties called Operation Plowshare in which nuclear warheads were to be used in place of earth moving equipment for construction projects such as blasting tunnels through mountains for interstate highways and for creating municipal reservoirs for public drinking water.
"Cryonics is a very good bet," says Doctor Aubrey de Grey who sees resuscitation from a cryo-preserved state as a natural extension of the work he's already doing in Medical Life Extension. He is pessimistic about cancer, however, and does not expect a cure within the next few years. He feels that cancer will be one of the most difficult problems for Life Extension to overcome.
Doctor de Grey also uses empirical evidence to make a case for his notion that because Life Extension raises people's perception of the value of life, in the future wars will become less and less common.
He also suggests that the reason the US medical system is so expensive compared to those of the rest of the civilized world is not that it is not socialized but that America is such a litigious society. A lot of the money goes to lawyers and to malpractice insurance companies rather than to those who actually provide medical care.
Professional comedian Grant Baciocco is interviewed in Atlanta Georgia where he had just accepted a Parsec Award for the podcast which he co-created with Dougg Price called The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd.
A technogeek but no transhumanist, Grant Baciocco is one of the early pioneers of podcasting. He discusses trends in comedy including the recent increase in vulgarity, his use of SeatGuru to always get an aisle seat when flying, and trends in theme parks—especially the new interactive animated characters which talk with and answer questions from their audience.
And as always, each episode of The Future And You features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they let the world know what's in the current
issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.
This episode contains the final climactic installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black.
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News Items in the November and December 2007 issues
Hank Reinhardt Has Passed Away
Hank Reinhardt, renowned weapons expert and beloved husband of Toni Weisskopf, passed away on October 30, 2007.
Many thousands of SF&F fans have enjoyed his weapons demos at various science fiction conventions. Those who knew him well described him as "a good guy, a vibrant man full of energy and life."
Here are just a few of the many possible links about Hank: a bio, an interview, a feature article. Numerous tributes and recollections have been posted on the net and are easily found by searching for his name (which is sometimes misspelled Hank Reinhart). Here is a website Hank created himself some time ago but had not updated sine 2005.
I spoke with him a few times over the last few years, and had a chance to enjoy his sword demo at LibertyCon in 2003. He was a good guy.