I’ve just received Chapter 18 of Shadowrise, by Tad Williams, in the mail, and it’s really rather good.

Simon & Schuster are offering a free download of the first novel in their Vampirates sequence, for a month from today.

I’ve been vaguely interested in these, and a free ebook really caught my eye – it’s a marketing strategy that’s worked well on me in the past, when Tor gave away a series of first-books and I ended up buying a half-dozen more and not regretting it. And it’s nice seeing a publisher have the confidence in their books to give away a decent-length taster for free.

However, it’s DRM-laden, which means two things. First, there’s a complex process to go through before I can even read the book – I need Adobe Digital Editions, and/or specialised ebook reading software. This is something I’ve never had any interest in acquiring, because I like reading in PDF or HTML for preference.

And second, it presumes to control my reading experience – the link I skimmed to find out what on earth a .acsm file was said something about activation profiles, software used, and so forth. Unless I end up with a book I can freely backup, copy, change format, and read with any device I please, I’m not interested. This kind of DRM (like all DRM) is easy to break, but again, that’s unnecessary hassle – so the end result is that I still don’t have a copy of Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean, and I’m now slightly less interested in reading the series than I was before.

To summarize: 10/10 for intentions, 3/10 for execution, FAIL for marketing.

I’m not going to comment on the recent Amazon/Macmillan flap, because smarter people than I have already said it all, and you can find that anywhere.

What this issue did inspire me to do, on the other hand, is to look at The Book Depository again, and – hey, free delivery worldwide, and equivalent discounts to Amazon on the things I was looking at. I picked up a couple of Steven Brust books I’ve been wanting to catch up on – reading Jhegaala for the first time, and Issola (in which Vlad starts channeling Khaavren) to fill in the one hole in my collection.

I also went over to Webscriptions and got some nice cheap ebooks to read on my phone – Baen’s HTML format books come in multiple files, with sensible length chapters, which are perfect for reading on the screen of a phone which can’t do multitasking and thus won’t let you skip out and keep your place. All of these are re-reads – The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game by Bujold, and the first three books in the Serrano Legacy sequence. If you haven’t read them, I recommend them – spaceships, sensible engineering stories, and horses. It’s military SF, but bearable.

Or rather, a few sketchy notes of things I’m going to have to acquire in the near future.

Spellwright, by Blake Charlton. (website) Complex written magic, disability, and murder mystery.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by NK Jemisin. (website) I’d been planning to pick this up since I first heard about her work, but it went abruptly up the list after reading her short story The Narcomancer on Transcriptase.

Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry. (website – annoyance warning: Flash, with embedded sound) The first plug I heard for this was “a reallly cool China Mieville meets Raymond Chandler with a dash of Jasper Fforde fantasy detective story”, and how could that not appeal?

Nights of Villjamur, by Mark Charan Newton. (website) A brief look over the material online – since when I know I want to read something, I prefer to stay away from reviews and extracts till I’ve read the whole thing – gives me the idea that it’s rather like China Mieville or Liz Williams via TS Eliot.

Hm. Most of these seem to be murder mysteries. Perhaps there’s something in the SF/murder mystery intersection for this year, or perhaps it’s just me. Bujold’s GOH speech at Denvention makes a passing reference to a blood type system of genre, where SF is a universal acceptor and mystery a universal donor; I’m still of the opinion that they’re on orthogonal axes, somehow.

I started blogging here in the middle of May, and since then I’ve made 58 posts, 26 of which were about books which were new to me. I haven’t written about everything I’ve read, by a long way; I haven’t even written about everything SF-related I’ve read, if I couldn’t find anything I particularly wanted to say, or couldn’t get my thoughts into a suitably coherent order. Now I look back on it, 26 new-and-interesting books over 30ish weeks isn’t nearly enough; I shall have to do much better next year.

The prize for 2009 (this is “out of my 2009 reading”, of course, not “published in 2009″) goes to The Dazzle of Day, by Molly Gloss, while Unnatural History, by Jonathan Green strolls off, nearly unchallenged, with the wooden spoon. Both of those will be a tough contender for any future challengers, but I’m confident we’ll see some.

So where do I see SF going in 2010? – basically, I think that’s a meaningless question. We’ll see more of everything we had this year, and some other things, and the one safe prediction I’ll allow myself is that something new and interesting will happen.

Yet another exercise in sweet-ghu-those-people-are-taking-over-my-genre – well-known homophobe John C. Wright, author of such fine schoolgirl spanking fetish stories^[1] as Titans of Chaos takes a few pages to whinge about “perversity”, waggle his huge fannish dick around, and generally show off his insecurity.

He may well protest about “homosex activists” infiltrating other areas of life; I don’t know. That would involve reading more of his non-fiction writing^[2] than I absolutely have to. But it’s clear he feels very defensive and possessive about SF, probably because he feels himself to be the heritor of a Tradition.

The thing is… so does everyone else. The SF I grew up with is about strangeness, about encountering the Other and getting used to them and mastering your instinctive reactions, learning to find the similarities and celebrate the differences and learn from everything. It’s about challenging boundaries and preconceptions, and finding the alien within yourself.

And so much of it was written by people who didn’t fit in, who felt themselves alienated, who wanted to understand why or make other people understand that it happened.

I don’t know which SF Wright grew up with; it may have been about rich white middle-class American guys blowing shit up, discovering new worlds, and looting the inhabitants’ corpses. But one of the first examples that came to mind was a passage in ‘Doc’ Smith’s book First Lensman, where Virgil Samms talks to an incomprehensibly strange female entity from Palain Seven. The text takes great pains to explain how very incomprehensibly different she is… then explains how cool Virgil is, because he hadn’t any thought of her as an “it”, but instead as a woman. For its time, that’s pretty good.

And you know the thing about the authors who wrote that shit? They’re pretty much all dead, or not writing any more, or (best of all) writing interesting things instead.

And the future is us. It’s chromatic, LGBT, disabled, working-class, with complex hyphenated identities, and it’s too big for anyone (or any one clique) to control, or even to judge.

And yeah, they’re all entitled to their opinions, no matter how incorrect or repellent; but you’d think that one of the first things they’d learn from SF was that you don’t get to assert objectivity. The world is problematic, and if you as a narrator (and are we all not narrators?) look upon something and see that it is Bad and Wrong, that doesn’t tell us about it. It tells us about you. There are, after all, always other narrators.

[1] And later in the book, we learn that the schoolgirl is a hyperdimensional tentacle monster, and the headmaster is a Greek god (and we know what they’re like). I mean, it’s not as though there’s anything wrong with any of these things. Just… from what he’s whinging about, I’d tend to assume he did.
[2] He’s not actually a bad writer. The Chaos trilogy has some really interesting ideas. He just acts, all the time, as though he wants to be Heinlein when he grows up. And oozes self-satisfaction with his own rhetoric.

I’ve been reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana recently, prompted by a friend asking me to write something about it, and making notes. Sometime in the nearish future I’m going to write them up in a series of posts – one for each of the five parts – and put them up spaced a day or two apart. (I’d probably have finished the notes by now, but got slightly distracted by H1N1. Messy, but not dangerous for me, thank goodness.)

So if you want to refresh your memory of the book, or start reading along, you have time!

NB: if you’re the kind of person who dislikes spoilers – and most scifi & fantasy fans seem to be – then you’ll definitely want to read the book first, or avoid these posts. You Have Been Warned.

Q: OK, so why this one? Who are you, and what’s the title for?

A: I decided I wanted to write about SF, and in a way my existing blogs wouldn’t really support. The rest is on the “about” page.