Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

books

Hallowreads: Poltergeist by Colin Wilson

It’s that time of the year again, when I pull down a couple of titles from a region of my bookshelves where I keep books in a category I call “Weirdness.” This year’s leadoff volume is Colin Wilson’s Poltergeist. It’s special because my old eyes can no longer read the microscopic type in the MMPB edition I bought when I was in my 40s, and in truth haven’t read it for ten-ish years. I gave my friend Jim Strickland the MMPB last year and (later on) he gifted me a hardcover copy from 1982.

Jim had a reason for reading Wilson’s book: He’s finishing up the second volume in a series of novels about a private eye who is a poltergeist animating the body of a woman suicide, and solving, well, cold-case murders. (What? You want her to be a patent attorney or something?) Poltergeist! Ask the Dust is a terrific read, and very much in the spirit of the season right now. Get it or regret it, as they say.

I have a reason of my own for rereading Wilson’s Poltergeist. But I’ll come back to that.

The late Colin Wilson (1931-2013) covered a lot of ground as a writer, but what he’s best known for is books on, well, weirdness. Poltergeist may be my favorite, in part because he zeroes in on a handful of related phenomena in the immense pantheon of paranormal peculiarity. (The bulk of his books cover many topics, most of them briefly.) Even ordinary people who wouldn’t know an urisk from a hole in the ground know what a poltergeist is: an invisible presence that generates loud bangs and knockings and scrapings in houses unfortunate enough to host one. More energetic specimens throw things around (stones especially) pull bedclothes off beds, generate perfectly round puddles of water (usually on kitchen floors) and much more rarely speak. Their product line is basically chaos.

Wilson’s book begins with is a sampling of poltergeist hauntings from ancient days to as recent as 1968. He’s a very engaging writer, but even he admits that the more poltergeist reports you read, the more alike they start to sound. There are exceptions, of course. (An old friend of mine, now deceased, sent me regular reports on his poltergeist for a couple of years back in the late ‘90s. Its favorite trick was stealing sleeping pills and pain killers.) For detailed discussion, he chooses a few instances that stand out for one reason or another.

The well-known “Black Monk of Pontefract” poltergeist gets a whole longish chapter, because it happened in the UK and Wilson was able to interview some of the people who experienced it. The instance involved at least one phenomenon not seen elsewhere: Chalk dust appearing out of nowhere in a room and drifting down to the floor. It was unique in that the dust appeared in a plane about five feet above the floor before it fell. The air above the plane was perfectly clear. The Black Monk (whom almost nobody actually saw) created those round puddles on the kitchen floor and broke a lot of dishes, potted plants, and a large grandfather clock. Unlike most poltergeists, the Black Monk actually threw people off their beds onto the floor, and in one case dragged a teen girl up a flight of stairs by her neck.

Poltergeists rarely seriously harm people, either from thrown objects or physical mistreatment like pinches and slaps. The 19th Century Bell Witch is another atypical poltergeist Wilson covers, as the only well-known example of a poltergeist killing someone. (There is a whole book on the Bell Witch: The Infamous Bell Witch of Tennessee by Charles Edwin Price, if you’re interested. It’s weirdness cubed and very creepy.) Poltergeists are often considered demonic entities, but there’s a problem: Poltergeists are unaffected by exorcisms. They show up unannounced, have their fun for awhile, and then leave. Holy water, prayers, and crosses have no effect on them.

To fatten up the book, Wilson does stray a little from the core topic. He has a chapter on spirit possession, and another on fairies and other “elementals”. He spends more time on the Cottingley Fairies than they warrant. Google the term for pictures, and riddle me this: Don’t those supposed fairies look awfully two-dimensional? In 1917, two tweener girl cousins took photos with their father’s box camera in the woods by a stream that supposedly include dancing fairies. As fakey as the creatures looked, powers like Arthur Conan Doyle swallowed it whole. Years later, one of the sisters confessed that they’d used cutouts of figures they drew on thin card stock, kept in place by hat pins. Where the hell was Sherlock Holmes when Conan Doyle needed him?

Wilson admits that we don’t know how poltergeists “work.” Ghost hunter Guy Playfair offered Wilson this explanation: There are invisible “footballs” full of energy lying around, and when disembodied spirits find one, they play with it until the energy is all gone. Because poltergeists often haunt houses with children in mid-puberty living there, many have suggested that poltergeists draw on that sexual energy to do all their levitating and banging around. Kids grow up, the footballs deflate, and the poltergeists say bye-bye.

It’s a fascinating business, and Wilson captures this fascination very well. Don’t bother if you’ve long written off the paranormal as (like the Cottingley Fairies) a collection of hoaxes. The book is a real page-turner, and if there’s still space in your head for mysterious going-ons, I’d say get it. I looked for but did not find an ebook edition. (Only about two thirds of his books are on Kindle, and Poltergeist is one of the no-shows.) Highly recommended.

Now, I have some interest in the topic, which goes back a long way, all the way, in fact, to my novel The Cunning Blood. I postulated that our cosmos is the 3-dimensional surface of a 4-dimensional sphere, and that there are minds inside that hypersphere, the interior of which is called “metaspace.” Jamie Eigen called them “the players,” and researchers later named them “metaspatial intellects.” (MSIs.) We learn a lot more about the MSIs in my WIP, The Everything Machine. The MSIs, we discover, can create poltergeist-like phenomena by manipulating our space from their space in a higher dimension. Just like you can touch any point on the surface of a sphere without actually entering the sphere, creatures inside a hypersphere can touch any point in the hypersphere’s 3-dimensional surface. I also think that this is what “dark matter” is: 4-dimensional mass bending our space from the 4th (or higher) spatial dimension. Dark matter’s gravity bends our space, but all we see is the bending. Just good ol’ SF writer speculation on my part, but hey, you got any better theories?

Anyway. Stay tuned. If I can find the time in the next few days, I’ll try to review a couple of other Hallowreads here. And on Halloween, I will post a review of…Hallowine.

Hallowander

Halloween. Wow. It seemed like the Fourth of July was just a few weeks ago. Then Carol and I walked into Wal-Mart. We live on a street with only a few kids, and if memory serves we ended up eating most of last year’s candy ourselves. So we bought a couple of bags of stuff we wouldn’t mind finishing, if it comes to that.

And it will.

At Wal-Mart (and probably almost everywhere else in the retail universe) Halloween was already over, and shoved to one side of the Seasonal aisle. Many of the candy SKUs were gone, including every species of M&Ms but…popcorn. Huh? Popcorn flavored M&Ms? I’d like to say I’ve seen stranger things, but I’m not sure I can. (Ok, sure: Peanut butter-flavored whiskey is a contender, as is coffee-flavored Coke.) At least we got it cheap. And the rest of the Seasonal aisle–along with much of the rest of the store–was already full-bore Christmas. No surprise.

And still tiny radishes. That’s the only kind of radishes you can get at Wal-Mart. Back in September you could still get full-sized radishes at Fry’s and Safeway. Now everybody is selling miniature radishes. I like slicing radishes and covering the tops of our salads with them. Microradishes cut a little easier than big radishes, but you have to cut a whole lot more of them.

Oh–and Total Wine now sells a red blend infused with…habanero. Maybe there’s a habanero surplus because everybody with asbestos esophagi are demanding ghost peppers in everything. So the winemakers could be getting them cheap. (An aside: Witching Hour wines are decent, for cheap red blends. Why not get a bottle for your Halloween festivities? There are several SKUs. Just read the labels before you drop them in your shopping cart, ok?)

Maybe there’s a habanero surplus. I really don’t care, as long as they don’t start loading it into iced coffee. But I will tell you something else: There is a severe onion-ring shortage. Two fast-food restaurants that we haunt now and then haven’t been able to get onion rings for literally weeks. For Corleone’s, it’s been longer than that. A little sniffing around online tells me that the world’s #1 exporter of onions is…China. So the nation’s onion rings are likely as not sitting in that immense barge-clot that’s jamming up California ports, especially off Los Angeles.

There’s hope on that front. As usual, the problem devolves to idiotic regulation by government seat-warmers who’ll gladly collapse the world’s economy because a handful of whiners in LA complains that they can see containers stacked more than two high at the ports. If they’re on a ladder. And holding binoculars. Here’s a long-form explanation of how that was discovered and how it was (maybe, or might be) solved. Let us pray. I miss onion rings.

My old friend Mike Bentley posted a link to a stack rank of books about…drumroll please…the PowerPC CPU. My PowerPC book came in at #7. Mike’s was at #24. All those books were long ago and far away. Once Apple switched to Intel CPUs, the PowerPC went gently into that good night. That’s too bad; it was a solid architecture and deserved better. In case you’re interested in PowerPC books, you can get mine on Amazon. It’s a shame the mass-market paperback is now going for $877.95. I guess you’d better order the trade paperback, which sells for $4.75. A footnote: There never was a mass-market paperback edition. Maybe it’s a ghost. (More likely a daemon, heh.)

Carol has a recipe for beer bread that she wants to try, and we’re going to make it pumpkin-spice beer bread. How? By using pumpkin-spice beer. I bought a 12 oz can of Sleepy Dog Gourdgeous Pumpkin Spice Ale yesterday. You likely won’t see it in stores because it’s a local product, produced in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix. Not sure how well it will work. I’ll let you know.

A quick aside: I’m still getting old coins in change at McDonald’s and other stores when I pay cash. The nation’s penny jars are still emptying into our outstretched hands. The other day I scored a 1969-S and a 1975-D in one transaction.

Speaking of stack-ranks, Google has a search-trends stack rank of Halloween costumes. We don’t see a lot of kids in costumes anymore, and it’s been a very long time since I wore one myself. I’m thinking a lot of these popular outfits are popular with adults. #1 is Witch. (My psychic powers predicted that one.) It’s an interesting list, and starts getting peculiar fairly quickly. #10 is Chucky, the serial murderer doll from the Chilld’s Play flicks. #18 is the 1980s. Ok, I could see the 1970s as a costume. (Maybe I wore a costume more recently than I thought.) But the ’80s? What is it? A pinstriped suit with matching vest? It surprised me that Princess was down to #30. Disney may have saturated its market. I had to look up “The Purge,” which took #38. And #49: The 1990s? I got nuthin’. (The site does not provide examples, just stats.) Oh–#59 was the 1970s. Dressing a kid up like the 1970s might be considered child abuse in some jurisdictions. And that’s as far as I went.

KBAQ, our local classical music station, is going to be playing Halloween-appropriate classical compositions all day long and into the evening, including a lot you may not have heard of. You can stream it here no matter where you live. If you like classical music, it may surprise you how many compositions are about ghosts, devils, death, and wizardry/witchery–or at very least sound like they should be. (One example is the waltz from Aram Khachaturian’s Masquerade.)

In closing, on this long afternoon of the creepiest night of the year, I present a recent translation of an ancient Halloween prayer that most of you have heard many times:

“From goosies and goalies and long-legged besties
And things that grow hemp in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”

Announcing the Publication of Odd Lots

Odd Lots Paperback Front Cover - 500 Wide.jpg

It is with considerable pleasure (and a great deal of relief) that I announce the availability of my newest book, Odd Lots. It’s available in both ebook ($2.99) and trade paperback ($12.99) format.

I announced the project here last October. It’s taken a lot of time to put together in part because I had to OCR so much of it, and I hate OCRing. The other time-consuming element was trying to decide what-all should be in it. The bulk of what I’ve written on programming is now obsolete, and what isn’t obsolete is in published books that are already available. But my DDJ columns? DOS programming? Modula 2? Extinct. I suffered over those decisions more than I should have. I gave myself a 250-page topstop for the paperback. It came in at 235 pages, so I could have thrown in another Contra entry or two. At some point I simply had to say, “It’s done.”

What’s in it? Five topical sections:

  1. Essays, idea pieces, and editorials from PC Techniques/Visual Developer.
  2. Entries from Contrpositive Diary
  3. Parody (most of which came from the magazine)
  4. Memoir
  5. None of the above.

Part 1 contains pieces from the magazine that I felt had lasting interest, like “The All-Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything,” a few essays about the wearable computers I called Jiminies, “Pay Them Forward,” and “Hail the Millennium!”

Part 2 contains entries from Contra, again items I felt had lasting interest. I threw in my oddball series “50 Days’ Meditation on Writing,” which I posted on Facebook on fifty consecutive days way back in 2014.

Part 3 contains humor and parody, some of which was originally published in the magazine, and some in fanzines that now go back almost fifty years.

Part 4 contains excerpts from my memoirs, along with the very first written item I ever sold for money, which ran in 73 Magazine in December 1974. Some of that appeared here on Contra. A great deal of it is published in Odd Lots for the first time.

Part 5, well, some things don’t categorize well. Whatever didn’t fit in the first four categories ended up here. A couple are funny, including one that might be considered a parody of myself. The others might be classified as “inspirational,” depending on what inspires you.

The cover photo, some might remember, came out of a 2015 Contra entry called “Samples from the Box of No Return.” I think it qualifies as a collection of odd lots, just not written ones. It’s a shame I couldn’t photograph everything in the box, which has a lot more stuff in it than shown here.

Again, I assembled the book because I regularly get emails from people asking where they could find one or another editorial or idea piece from the magazine or Contra. I posted a few on my site. I don’t have word processor files for most of them, and had to OCR them. It’s almost a private publication for my fans, some of whom have been reading me since I launched Turbo Technix at Borland in 1987. I freely admit that some of it sounds like bragging. Hey, I really did predict Wikipedia in 1994, using technology we had in the early ’90s. Keep in mind that I wrote a great deal of that early material with a grin on my face. It was blue-sky stuff, satire, and primarily entertainment. I’ve never been one overly given to seriousness. Please read it with that in mind.

And I once again thank all my long-time readers for giving me a reason and a forum for writing interesting and funny stuff, and for (finally!) having a place to put it.

It’s done. Whew. Go get it! And if you think Odd Lots was odd, heh–just wait until you see my next publishing project. (Stay tuned.)

Review: Where Is Everybody? by Stephen Webb

41oxPnAPxHL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI have a lot of books. In general, when I buy (or somehow acquire) a book I read it right away. I realized a few weeks ago that although my sister gave me a copy of Ingathering by Zenna Henderson some years back, it got shelved without being read. My bad. My review is in my entry for 2/9/2021.

So I went hunting for other books in this situation. The Principle of Mediocrity applies here: If there was one unread book on my shelves, there will probably be others. It didn’t take long to find one: Where Is Everybody? by Stephen Webb. It’s not a new book. It was published in 2002, and sent to me for review in 2003 by an editor at Copernicus Books, Paul Farrell. 2002 was not a good year for me, for reasons you know already. In a way, it remains the annus horribilis of my life. In 2003 we moved away from Arizona to get away from constant reminders of the horribilis. (For newcomers: 2002 was the year my publishing company here in Arizona crashed and burned, through no fault of my own. Long story.) So I guess it’s unsurprising that the book went onto the shelves unread. In fact, it probably went straight into a box. I (finally) finished it an hour or so ago.

As an SF writer, it’s a topic I have a keen interest in: aliens, and the cogent question asked by physicist Enrico Fermi way back in 1944: If there is life elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we encountered evidence of it yet?

Good question. A lot of really smart people have grappled with it, but the (obvious) spoiler is that we don’t know. (Yet.) Where Is Everybody? is a systematic presentation of fifty proposed explanations for why we’ve not encountered the Galactic Confederation. The author gives each a number and takes us through them in order, explaining why none of them really answers Fermi’s question. For example, Solution 20 is “We Have Not Listened Long Enough.” There’s a lot of Universe, and we’ve only been listening to “waterhole” frequencies for an insignificant amount of time, compared to the lifetime of our galaxy. Solution 44 is “The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Transition Is Rare.” That was a new one for me (biology is not my field) and involves the jump between primordial single-celled life and the more complex form of single-celled life that eventually evolved into multicellular organisms. We can’t explain how it happened, but somehow it did. Was it a fluke? Don’t know.

Stephen Webb separates the 50 proposed explanations of the Fermi Question into three broad groups: 1. They Are Already Here. 2. They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated. And 3. They Do Not Exist. A lot of the issues are things I had read about elsewhere. A surprising number were new to me. Along the way, he talks about the Drake Equation and how it relates to the probability of finding intelligent life beyond Earth. In a sense, most of the issues discussed in the book either represent existing terms of the Drake Equation, or could be considered new ones.

All the usual explanations are taken up: berserkers, species suicide here on Earth, the Rare Earth hypothesis (which is actually taken up in several parts, each with its own number and section in the book) gamma ray bursters, asteroid bombardment, giant planets in the wrong places, lack of a Moon, lack of plate tectonics in most rocky planets, and so on.

A few of the proposed solutions may strike some as outre. Solution 7 is “The Planetarium Hypothesis,” which proposes that we are living in a simulated universe, with the superhuman aliens behind the scenes, pulling the levers and observing us. That’s an interesting one because it can be disproven, using what we know about the data and energy requirements of a simulation as good as our reality suggests. Solution 8 is “God Exists,” and He set things up just right for the universe to evolve us–and perhaps created an infinitude of other universes either sterile or fine-tuned to benefit other intelligent life. I’m reminded of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 pseudo-novel Star Maker, in which an unthinkably powerful being creates a series of universes, each more “mature” than the last. (I found the book largely impenetrable when I read it at 17. It may be worth another look 51 years later. If nothing else, I’ve developed patience in the interim.)

Webb’s writing is refreshingly clear and easygoing. He’s a natural explainer, in the same way that Isaac Asimov was. He cites a lot of researchers and their research as he explains each topic, and there is a fat section of references and pointers to further readings at the back of the book. I came away from it feeling satisfied with the time I spent, and better still, that I learned something–a lot of somethings, in fact–along the way.

Webb does not intend to prove (or disprove) the existemce of Extrarrestial Civilizations (ETCs). The point of the book (or the joker in the deck, if you’re a fervent believer in ETCs) is that we do not have anything close to enough data to form a conclusion. He does confirm the feeling I had as he explained one possible solution after another: There are a lot of very difficult hurdles between a sterile planet and a starfaring civilization. By the end, I felt that he had added a good fifteen or twenty new terms to the Drake Equation. If those new terms are as difficult as our research suggests, yes, we are indeed an exceedingly unlikely Cosmic Fluke, and probably alone in the universe.

This doesn’t bother me, even as a science fiction writer. When I was a teen and for a few years afterward, I wrote stories about aliens. However, I’ve judged only two of them good enough to put before the public: Firejammer and “Born Again, With Water.” My conclusion is mostly this: If intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe and we come upon them, we may not have much to talk about. We may not be able to talk to them at all. Shared experience, even the shared experience of being born into an orderly and comprehensible universe, may be impossible across the gulf to an alien mind.

That is, unless you count my Metaspace Saga, in which aliens create our universe as a way of obtaining a better random-number generator. Except–they’re not really aliens. No more spoilers. I’m working on it. There are some hints in The Cunning Blood. The rest will come out eventually.

In the meantime, I powerfully recommend Stephen Webb’s book. What I didn’t notice until I went up to schnarf the book’s cover image for this entry is that he published a second edition in 2015–and now he’s got seventy-five proposed solutions to tackle. I’ll pick that one up eventually. In the meantime, I’m scanning my shelves for other gems that may have been hiding from me. They’re in there somewhere. Like I said, I have a lot of books.

Odd Lots

RIP BEA

BookExpo America (BEA) and BookCon are folding. The shows’ organizers are blaming the shutdown on SARS-CoV-2, but the mask slips a little when they add, “The pandemic arrived at a time in the life cycle of BookExpo and BookCon where we were already examining the restructure of our events to best meet our community’s needs.” That’s corporate doubletalk for “The shows were both in trouble before the virus, and the virus was a plausible excuse to shut them down.”
I used to go to BEA every year. (I’ve never been to BookCon, which is a sort of combined fan and publisher gathering in NYC, targeted at consumers and mostly about fiction.) BEA was useful in a number of ways, not least of which was to see how our competitors were doing in the ’90s. I kept going for a few years after Coriolis folded, just to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry and spot trends. That pulse has been harder and harder to find in recent years. Ginormous publishing conglomerates are merging. This generally means that the smaller one is in trouble, and the bigger one wants their cash flow. Penguin Random House is buying Simon & Schuster, assuming antitrust challenges don’t emerge. What used to be The Big 5 is about to become The Big 4.
Two (related) things seem to me as behind publisher consolidation and the loss of big trade shows like BEA:
  1. The large publishers never wanted ebooks and don’t know how to deal with them.
  2. Independent publishing (indie) is catching on in a very big way.

The business model of traditional book publishing is complex, and weird. (Weird, even to me, and I worked in it for fifteen years.) The biggest single problem is that large and very large presses are fixated on hardcovers. This fixation goes back a very long way, and cooks down to the notion that hardcovers are books, and everything else (primarily ebooks and paperbacks) are secondary markets that depend on hardcovers to exist at all. It’s true that if you go back to the 1800s, vitually all books were hardcovers. Granted, there are exceptions: I have a paperback edition of Oliver Twist from 1882, which indicates that cheap books on cheap paper were there in the shadows all along, but were all too often slandered as “dime novels” that corrupted young minds. The money and prestige were in hardcovers.

Paperback originals emerged as a force in the 1950s, roughly concurrent with the emergence of the mass-market paperback (MMPB.) Because early MMPBs were reprints of hardcover editions, the notion of paperbacks as a secondary market was logical. When paperback originals emerged, larger presses used them to build the audience for their hardcovers, and to a lesser extent, a midlist from which promising new authors could be promoted to hardcover. Hardcover pricing was what kept the doors open and paychecks going out. Secondary markets were gravy.

Various forces are now turning the hardcover-centric business model on its ear. The single most important force here is not simply the ebook, but the fact that you can read ebooks on smartphones. Ebooks were dismissed early on because “nobody’s going to buy an expensive gadget just to read books on.” Well, dedicated ebook readers are no longer necessary. I have a Kindle Paperwhite because it’s easier on my eyes, but I’ve read plenty of books on my Galaxy Tab S3 and three different smartphones. Today, everybody has a smartphone, which means that everybody can read ebooks. It’s no longer a niche market.

This scares the crap out of traditional publishers. They have kept the cover prices of ebooks close to (or in some crazy cases higher than) hardcover prices, insisting that it costs just as much to create an ebook as it does to create a hardcover, dodging the truth that it’s all about physical inventory, returns, and unit cost. The unit cost of an ebook is zero. Inventory and returns no longer exist.

The second most important force is, of course, Amazon, home of The World’s Richest Man. Amazon did not create the notion of ebooks or ebook readers, but the Kindle Store allowed the emergence of independent publishing, more on which shortly. And the smartphone, in turn, created the market for the Kindle Store.

Amazon has systematically undermined the hardcover price point by allowing a nearly frictionless market for hardcovers that were read once and then sold through associate accounts for a third the cover price–or less–of the same book new. Amazon Prime created all-you-can-slurp shipping, and with improvements in logistics allows a book to be ordered in the morning and delivered in late afternoon. Why bother fighting traffic to get down to the last Barnes & Noble in town, when you can get the book just as fast (and more easily) with a few taps on your smartphone? (Yes, I’ll miss bookstores. But I won’t miss tchotchke stores.)

And last but by no means least, we have indie publishing. There are a number of platforms on which ebooks may be published, but realistically, it’s Amazon plus debris. They have wisely combined ebook and POD print book publishing into one entity. (90% or more of my sales are ebooks.) The system is straightforward enough to allow anybody with half a brain to publish their own books and short items on the Kindle store.

This means that a great deal of what is published isn’t worth looking at. We all worried a lot about that. But as it happened, people are discovering ebooks they same way they discovered print books in the old days: By word-of-mouth, which these days includes word-of-Web. Discovery sites like Goodreads help a great deal, as do Web forums with a topic focus. Amazon’s reviews are generally good, though you have to read a lot of them and average things out in your mind. Some people are hard to please, and others please way too easily. All that said, I’m very surprised at how few Kindle ebooks I have bought and then hated. Sure, some were better than others. But I did an odd kind of crosstime quality spot-check on marginal ebooks and SFF MMPBs from 50-55 years ago. Pull a passage from a 55-year-old no-name SF potboiler (easier now that the pages are coming loose as you turn them) and compare it to a no-name ebook SF potboiler you took a chance on for $2.99 based on Amazon reviews. The Amazon book wins almost every time. Why? Automated discovery, via reviews and recommendations. All we had to go on 50 years ago was the back cover, and a quick flip through the pages. Now we can be as fussy as we like, or at least as fussy as we have time for.

The bottom line on ebooks is that with automated discovery and online recommendations, you no longer need traditional publishing at all. I’ve bought some ebooks from the few traditional publishers (like Baen) who embrace them. But at least 75% of the SFF I’ve read in the last year has been from indie authors. Some books were better than others. Remarkably, all but a couple that I took chances on were worth reading.

I’ll miss BEA–a little. I had fun there and met some interesting people. I will not miss hardcover culture and its attendant weirdness. If the Big 5, er, 4 can’t shed that weirdness, the reading public will shed them, sooner than later.

In the meantime, it’s a marvelous time to be a reader–and an even better time to be a writer.

Firejammer: Go Get It!

Ebook Cover with Type - 500 Wide.png

I’m not the fastest writer in the world. If I were even modestly faster than I am, I would be a lot better-known. So as a side project while I hammer on my new fantasy novel Dreamhealer, I went back to a short novel that sat in a box for forty years. After rather more work than I expected, I uploaded it to Kindle yesterday, and Amazon approved the ebook edition last night. (The print edition is still awaiting approval, since I had to fix an issue with bleeds and the cover image.)

Behold Firejammer. I hate to call it my “new” novel, but I’m sure it’s new to all but a vanishingly small number of my readers. $2.99 from the Kindle Store, no DRM. It’s a humorous romp very much in the style of Keith Laumer, the author I imitated heavily while just getting out of first gear as a writer, back in high school. I dedicated it to him, since no other writer (with the possible later exception of Larry Niven) influenced my fiction as much as he did. Firejammer‘s mission is pretty much the same as the mission of most of Laumer’s writing, especially his Retief stories: Give the reader a wild ride, with some laughter thrown in for good measure. No sermons. No literary pretensions. Just good crazy fun.

As with most of the things I write, the story has a backstory. In 1977, I began selling stories to the late George Scithers, editor at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM). Some time in 1978, he told me that he and his publisher were about to launch a new SF magazine, one slanted to a slightly younger audience, and intended to capture the atmosphere of some of the better SF pulps, like Planet Stories. It would be called Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine. He asked me if I had any suitable concepts. Inside my head something was screaming hell yes!!! but I politely answered that I did, and would get to work on it immediately.

I did. I had gotten an idea in high school while turning into the parking lot at a Target-like store called Turn-Style (now long extinct) at Harlem & Foster Avenues in Chicago. (Yes, I remember the moment that clearly.) I was 16 at the time, and took some notes on it, but never actually started writing.

Now that I had a nibble on it, I started writing. I wrote. I wrote. And I wrote some more. I was still writing when the first issue of the new magazine appeared. I was still writing when the second issue appeared. I finished it in early 1979. I sent it to George Scithers, who informed me that, alas, the magazine had been canceled. I did due diligence and sent it to all the other existing SF magazines, all of which rejected it. The reason (where stated; I got a form slip from Fantasy & Science Fiction) was that it was just too long, by about, well twice. Maybe more. And yes, at 27,000 words, it was sitting square in the middle of what I would come to call “that hideous length.” It was too long for the magazines and too short to call a book. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. However, in 1979 I had other things on my mind: Xerox had offered me a promotion and relocation to Rochester, NY. So it went into a box of manuscripts and didn’t see daylight again for a long time.

It came out of the box in 2000, when POD services like Lulu.com began to appear. I trimmed it down to about 25,000 words and did some heavy edits. I even started talking to artists about a cover, figuring that I could throw in enough of my previously published short works to bring it up to a book of about 70,000 words or so. I played with that idea for a year or two. Then Coriolis collapsed, and once more, I had other things on my mind, like moving to Colorado. So back in the box it went, where it stayed until several years ago. I did some more rewriting, then had to set it aside (back into the box it went) because we had decided to move back to Arizona. That was a multi-year endeavor, and so totally involving that I had completely forgotten I rewrote the story in Colorado in 2015. I expected to take a piece of what (by now) I considered juvenalia, and rewrite it for the modern market. When it came out of the box earlier this year, I realized that I had already rewritten it.

So what was I waiting for? As time permitted, I created a print book design, tinkered with the layout, made some more edits, laid it out as an ebook, and finally found a cover image on WikiMedia. The image is an eruption of Stromboli, in Italy. Stromboli is my all-time favorite volcano. (Can anyone guess why?) I resisted my temptation to keep tinkering with it, but resisting temptation slows me down even when successful. So more tinkering happened.

Which brings us to yesterday’s uploads. Amazon approved of the ebook cover and body. I’m still waiting for approval on the paperback. The ebook is up there on Kindle and ready to (molten) rock.

Now it’s back to work on Dreamhealer, which is well on and should be finished this summer. So in the meantime, have fun–and don’t forget to leave a you-know-what.

Thanks!

Rant: Do You Like Kippling?

HR Binder - 500 Wide.jpg

I’ve been busy here, fighting entropy. (Yes, you can fight entropy. You just can’t win.) The fight’s even harder when you move from a largish house to a house that can (at best) hold about two-thirds the entropy. I’ve never done that before. Now I know why.

I used to have a 12′ X 12′ book wall with a rolling ladder. Book freaks can do the math in their heads; there were a lot of books on that wall. We did a very aggressive book purge before we shoveled the survivors into boxes, and we may have given away books enough to fill about a quarter of that wall. We had some empty space on the numerous other movable bookshelves around the house up north. No more. Empty space is just about gone.

And then, a week or so ago, we had the last of the storage containers delivered. It wasn’t large; just one of those “pod” things you see advertised. I knew it contained the bulk of my electronics and ham radio books and magazines. What I’d forgotten is that it also contained six or seven boxes of “ordinary” books on history, psychology, religion, and weirdness. So after I took a few days to empty the electronics and radio collection onto the two big particle board shelves I’d built specifically for that purpose (including shelves spaced for both the old and the new ham radio magazine trim sizes) I realized that I still had eight or ten boxes to deal with. (More on this later.)

Dealing with the radio stuff was tricky enough. I had bought the full run of Ham Radio back in the early 90s from a friend of an SK in Mesa. The mags were all neatly placed in those spring-rod magazine binders. It quickly occurred to me that the binders rougly doubled the space that a year’s magazines occupied on a shelf. (See the photo above.) It took half an hour of sitting tailor-style and yanking spring rods, but I reclaimed most of an entire shelf by dumping the binders.

That was easy, compared to the next decision: What to do with Wayne Green. He’s dead, as is 73, his iconic ham mag. There’s nothing quite like 73. I took it for many years, and bought the issues that predated my license at hamfests. I enjoyed reading it. Green was certifiable, but he wrote entertainingly, and did gonzo if tasteless things like publishing a rear view of a (male) streaker holding an HT on the cover, as well as any number of scantily-clad women, generally holding ham gear as fig leaves. Some of his technical articles were useful. A lot of the construction articles were sloppy, and some of the designs (pace Bill Hoisington K1CLL) were just, well, nuts. I built a 1-tube converter from 73 back in the mid 1970s. It actually worked, more or less. Most of the others smelled like trouble. I tried a couple of K1CLL’s VHF projects, both of which immediately cooked themselves in their own parasitics. The late George M. Ewing WA8WTE wrote ham-radio oriented fiction (often with SF & fantasy elements) for 73. It was a ginormous, engaging, and practically indescribable mess.

So. Keep or recycle? Tough call. Having just saved several shelf-feet of space by dumping the HR binders, I punted and piled ’em all back onto the shelf. After all, I have a soft spot in my head for Wayne Green, because in 1973 he bought the first piece of writing I ever sold for money. (He then sat on it for more than a year before publishing it.) So I’m conflicted.

Philip K. Dick coined a term for the sorts of things that accumulate in odd corners during a life of anything other than abject asceticism: kipple. 73, in a way, is kipple. So are malfunctioning (but fixable) gadgets, functional (but obsolete) gadgets, parts that roll under your workbench or fall behind shelves, and the peculiar things that lurk at the bottoms of cardboard boxes at hamfests marked “Whole box – $5.” Every time I’ve moved my workshop, I end up with a couple of boxes of stuff I’ve picked up off the floor or out of coffee cans and ratty, ripped-up cardboard boxes piled where piling was possible. I’ve always called them “hell boxes,” but kipple is what they are. Kipple, like wire coathangers, is said to breed when nobody’s looking. Having had a workshop of one sort or another since I was 13, one would get that impression.

My already-tight workshop here still has three substantial boxes of kipple for me to sort through. I’ll do that another time. For now I’m faced with a slightly different problem: Passing judgment on books that are obviously not kipple. How does one make decisions like that? I’ve spoken of this before, but have not solved the problem.

The base issue is this: How do you know what you’re going to have to look up or quote in a year, two years, or five years? How do you even know what you’re going to be interested in? How can you tell where the rabbit hole leads before you dive in? One thing leads to way more than another.

I’ve long since gotten rid of all my DOS books, as well as my Windows 2000 books. I made a special effort to get rid of obsolete books that were thick. Other categories are tougher to figure. Are books on weirdness even necessary? Well, hey, I’m a writer, and fiction is made out of nonfiction, even if the nonfiction is nonsense. Besides, how can I make fun of things like zombies and vampires if I don’t know anything about zombies and vampires?

One solution is to buy a few more shelves for the Closet Factory buildouts in our three walk-in closets. I’ll probably do that. Another is to look critically at the usefulness and/or quality of the books I still have. That would also be a good strategy, if it wouldn’t take such a huge chunk out of however many years I have left.

So I suspect there will be boxes of books here and there around our house, hidden wherever hiding is possible. As I abandon certain tracks of thought (how can there be trains without tracks?) the boxes may shrink. They will do so slowly.

There was a joke once, long ago when I was an undergrad English major:

Q: Hey, do you like Kipling?
A: I dunno, I’ve never kippled.

Well, I have. I’ve been doing it for almost two years now. It hasn’t gotten any easier. And truth be told, I don’t like kippling at all.

Review: Junk Box Arduino

Junkbox Arduino Cover - 500 Wide.jpg

Junk Box Arduino appeared earlier this summer from Jim Strickland, and I’ve been dipping into it gradually as time allows. In case you’re TL’DRing on me, I’ll give you the money quote: This is in fact the Assembly Language Step-By-Step of Arduino-based electronic tinkering. I’m a good test case: I’m passionate about electronics (some of you have seen my junkbox, which now fills one smallish garage and our repurposed tack house) and I have an Arduino board on my Heathkit ET-3200 logic breadboard box. Decades ago I did some modest embedded work with the RCA COSMAC CPU line, the most important of which was my robot, Cosmo Klein. Before that I did a lot of things with CMOS and TTL, using Don Lancaster’s books as guides.

Jim’s book is how you begin with Arduino if you have some grasp of computing (as most people do these days) but not electronics. And the book is the polar opposite of academic electronics texts with lots of equations but few photos and nothing at all in terms of bench smarts. The grit and grime of practical electronics is everywhere here: This is the first electonics book I’ve ever seen with warnings like jumper cables wear out. They do, and trying to troubleshoot a visually intact but electrically open jumper is a circle of Hell that I’ve visited more than once, in both digital and RF electronics.

Junk Box Arduino goes all the way down to the (literal) metal, and explains how to build an Arduino-compatible circuit right on a broadboard block. You don’t buy a Cestino board; Cestino (which is Italian for “recycle bin”) isn’t a board, but rather an original design from Jim that you wire up yourself out of loose parts, including an ATmega 1284P CPU chip and a 20 MHz can oscillator. Building the Cestino is in fact the first electronics lesson in the book, with Ohm’s Law looming large. The second lesson is building your own in-system programmer (ISP) so you can program the ATmega chip’s bootloader yourself. No, this isn’t a waste of time. Once you build your own ISP you will know how an ISP works, and teaching you how things work is Jim’s mission throughout the book.

The projects run from the simple and obvious (but still necessary) things like flashing an LED all the way up to highly sophisticated circuits like an ATA disk device reader, a Flash programmer, and even a Z80 CPU lashup that teaches how CPUs and memory work by letting the Cestino control the Z80 and allowing us to look at registers and memory while the Z80 executes slowly or pauses in its tracks. Along the way Jim explains assembly and machine language, object-oriented programming, transistor operation, serial communication, and much else.

Which leads to my only real complaint about the book, which has nothing to do with the writing and may be an old-guy thing: The type is fairly small and there is a great deal of material on the pages. This is really a 600-page book laid out in 400 pages, and I understand why with the sanguine clarity that comes of bloodying your own fingers (which I have) trying to get unit costs on books down.

Don’t let that stop you. The book is a helluva deal for $35 ($22 on Amazon.) It’s one of a bare handful of technical books that I wish I had published back when I was still a publisher. If you have any hopes of making an Arduino control anything electronic, this is a must-have. Highly recommended.

It’s Here: Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi

RPiBookCover-500Wide.jpg

I had just tossed a salmon filet on the barbie yesterday evening when the UPS man rang the doorbell. There it was: an author case of a book I signed in 2013, finished in early 2014, and have been waiting for ever since. I confess there were times I approached despair and thought the publisher might cancel it, but the concept had legs, and (more important than legs) Eben Upton was behind it.

It’s not all my own work. My co-authors include Ralph Roberts, Tim Mamtora, Ben Everard, and Eben himself. I wrote Chapters 2-7, which entailed about 100,000 words and 90 hand-drawn technical figures. (My chapters come to about 300 pages out of the book’s 507.) Eben wrote a few thousand additional words in my chapters on things that I don’t know well, like compiler internals. (I’m sure he contributed to other chapters too.)

The publisher hasn’t done an especially good job positioning the book, and it’s already being reviewed badly by people who thought it was something other than what it is. So let me position it for you.

Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi is an introduction to computer architecture for senior high students, and bright junior high students. It’s not a university-level treatment, though it might have application in community colleges. Like the Raspberry Pi itself, it was designed to be affordable to young people, and so it’s not 1,000 pages long. The cover price is $30 (exactly, no .95s or .99s!) and you can get it on Amazon for the inexpensive if peculiar sum of $18.07. It’s not a standalone manual for the board, nor programming the board, nor learning any given language or operating system. It’s about what all the pieces are, and how they work together.

This is important. Today’s young people are digital natives, in that there were cheap desktop computers, lots of them, since before they were born. Kids who are interested in computers have studied and experimented with those parts of the computer that interest them. This is the sort of learning that trips up autodidacts, since it runs very deep in places, but is shot full of holes, some of them huge. The way to fill those holes is to take a survey course, and that’s precisely what this book is for. The course syllabus itself may not exist yet, but I have a hunch that a lot of educators in a lot of places are already hard at work on curricula using the book as the primary text.

People who have read my other books will recognize the approach I took in these chapters: Start at Square One, at the absolute beginning, and tell readers up front that they can skip a chapter if they discover early on that they’re already familiar with the material. Chapter 2 is titled “Recapping Computing,” which goes back to the idea of “a box that follows a plan,” and continues from there. Some people will skip that chapter. Many won’t. A few may be annoyed that it exists at all. (There’s no pleasing some people.) Once you get past Chapter 2, each chapter is much more focused, and covers a specific continent on the larger world of computing:

2: Recapping Computing

3: Electronic Memory

4: ARM Processors and Systems-on-a-Chip

5: Programming

6: Non-Volatile Storage

7: Networking

Chapters 8-12 were written by others, and provide a Raspberry-Pi specific slant on things, especially graphics and I/O. I had not seen those chapters until yesterday, so I can’t say a whole lot more about them just yet. A cursory glance suggests that you won’t be disappointed.

That’s pretty much the story. I had something additional in mind that I didn’t talk about while I was writing my chunk of the book back in 2013: homeschooling. I wanted the treatment to be so clear and comprehensible that parents could use the book in a homeschool environment. I think I succeeded, but I won’t know until I hear from a few homeschoolers. Sooner or later, that’ll happen.

I needed a book like this back in 1970, but of course, it didn’t exist. Computers themselves were mysterious, and the computer gatekeepers seemed to like it that way. Not me. Nothing should stand between people who want to learn and what they want to learn. Nothing. If my lifetime mission as a nonfiction writer could be stated in just a few words, that would be it. I loathe elitism, credentialism, and exclusive-club-ism. I learned stuff, I wrote books about it, and now you can learn it too. If you haven’t started learning about computers yet, well, this is a pretty good time to start. And forgive me for saying so, but this is a pretty good book to start with.

Go for it!