What’s not to like? There’s 
Galaksija
The above gem is a piece of cover art from a vintage issue of Galaksija, a science and SF magazine published in the former Yugoslavia. A huge gallery of this retro SF-style art can be found on Flickr. Just about all of it is wonderfully insane.
(Via 50 Watts.)
Book Links
Just a few things I’ve spotted online recently. First up, one of the most criminally underrated genre writers, Daniel Abraham, writes a private letter from genre to mainstream literature.
I saw you tonight. You were walking with your cabal from the university to the little bar across the street where the professors and graduate students fraternize. You were in the dark, plain clothes that you think of as elegant. I have always thought they made you look pale. I was at the newsstand. I think that you saw me, but pretended not to. I want to say it didn’t sting.
Looks like the Kindle Fire could hit the UK in January, although it’s probably the usual finger-in-the-wind analysis when it comes to Apple releases. If it’s similar to the Nook, which quite a few places suggest it is, it’s not likely to be much to get excited about. When I tried the Nook in the US I found it a huge disappointment: really slow, clunky, and a terrible interface, especially when compared to the iPad (which, let’s face it, I’m going to).
There’s an interesting Top 10 ‘writings from the edge of language’ in the Guardian:
From The Waste Land to Jabberwocky, the poet picks his favourite writing from the ‘conversation between words and silence’
And for those interested in children’s fiction, there’s a special feature in the Telegraph at the moment. It starts with an interview with Jacqueline Wilson and even gives a bit of review coverage to things like adventure or historical children’s fiction
Cover Art – Nacht über Villjamur
Here’s the rather lovely cover art for the German edition of Nights of Villjamur, Nacht über Villjamur, which is published by Egmont-Lyx in April 2012 – and which you can pre-order here.
The extra good news is that my editor at Lyx, Anja, also enjoys single malt whisky. (I’m not sure that was a requirement of rights contract, but I’m considering making it one for all future deals.)
Gollancz Samaritans Auction
Esteemed Brit SFF publisher Gollancz are doing a mighty fine thing. They’re holding an eBay auction to raise money for the Samaritans. The auction includes some cool stuff, plenty of books, and opportunities for unpublished writers out there – having thousands of words reviewed and edited by Gollancz editors. Books, editorial guidance and marketing help – plenty for everyone. I am, however, disappointed that editor Simon Spanton didn’t offer himself up for a cosy dinner…
It’s a fantastic cause, and comes at a time of year (and a period where the economy is really starting to suffer), when the Samaritans could probably do with a bit of help. If you don’t fancy bidding, then please do spread word to anyone who might be interested.
Interviews & Links
There’s a brief chat with me over at Rowena Cory Daniels’ blog, in which I say Many Things, and talk a little bit more about the new series:
The lead character, Lucan Drakenfeld, is a bit like a young lawyer-slash-detective, and certainly the polar opposite of a private eye (if anything, he’s a public eye). I’m really trying to steer away from noir pastiche because I feel that would be disrespectful to crime readers. The book is as much a crime novel as it is a fantasy novel. Imagine a mainstream writer trying their hand at a fantasy novel, and filled it with a paint-by-numbers story – they’d be strung up by the fanbase, which is why I’m not doing a paint-by-numbers crime novel, either.
There’s a video interview with my agent, John Jarrold, for those of you who are interested in tales and tips of publishing.
And I review a book about making compost for the Ecologist. More interesting than you might think…
The City & The Corporation
The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London’s mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.
- George Monbiot writing in the Guardian.
Great to see lots of stuff finally being aired about the City of London Corporation, something which I blogged about earlier in the year.
Amazon vs Publishers
The New York Times asks if Amazon will kill of book publishers:
Traditional publishers, unfortunately, don’t have a relationship with the reader — or if they do, it’s extremely tenuous. Ask most consumers what publishers their favorite authors are aligned with, and 9 out of 10 couldn’t tell you. If you don’t have a relationship, you can be cut out, and this is what Amazon knows and what writers are learning.
Well that’s clearly bollocks, as anyone in the genre will tell you, but I think there’s something to be said about Amazon’s clout in cutting out the middle man:
Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.
Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.
Publishers aren’t allowed to share what’s on the Amazon rate card (what they charge publishers to promote their books), but the costs run into the thousands for sending out customer emails, putting books in prominent places, and so on. Standard industry practice, of course. They charge publishers to do this because they can, and what’s the alternative? Let books die without exposure? Exactly.
And rates go up each year (times are tough, after all). The danger of this is that writers become less and less profitable for publishers – which means, when it comes to accountancy time, if the numbers don’t add up for said writer… You get the idea. But I suppose if Amazon are cutting out publishers, we don’t have to worry about the numbers game.
Amazon have long held the upper hand against bookstores, too: it’s much more cost-effective when you don’t have to pay for walls, staff etc, in quite the same way. They able to undercut publishers on price in the ebook business (some might say it devalues the physical product, though not quite as much as piracy and the expectation of books being free – but that’s another rant entirely). So with fewer bookstores, that means more people turn to Amazon. It means publishers will need to spend more money with Amazon, too.
Amazon are also cleverly seducing self-published authors into marching in time with the corporate giant, as it’s clearly far simpler to upload your work to Kindle then going through the hoops that traditional publishing presents. This is doubly clever because it means thousands of indie writers are all singing the praises of Amazon, and pointing people their way.
I’m not complaining about any of this – it’s all par for the course if you’re a company looking to dominate the writing and publishing industry, and I openly confess to buying most of my books through Amazon (even though I do love to browse a real bookstore). But I merely mean to highlight these points to suggest yes, I can see Amazon not quite killing off publishers in the next few years, but certainly marginalising the traditional industry beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Happy Halloween
Classic films aside, if you’re in the mood today for dissecting the nature of horror in fiction and film, you could do worse than look at this massive article in The Psychologist journal:
Psychology can help explain why horror takes the persistent form that it does, but that still leaves the question of why we should want to scare ourselves through fiction in the first place. One suggestion is that, like play, it allows us to rehearse possible threatening scenarios from a position of relative safety. ‘Movie monsters provide us with the opportunity to see and learn strategies of coping with real-life monsters should we run into them, despite all probabilities to the contrary,’ says Fischoff. ‘A sort of covert rehearsal for… who knows what.’ Despite its fantastical elements, Clasen explains that successful horror fiction is usually realistic in its portrayals of human psychology and relationships. ‘That’s where horror matters,’ Clasen says; ‘that’s where horror can teach us something truly valuable.’
Read the rest of ‘The Lure of Horror’. It’s fascinating stuff for any writers out there, horror or otherwise.
I’ve never been a huge fan of writing horror fiction, to be honest, though there is an immense amount of pleasure to be found in creating the odd creepy segment. For the most part, my fascinations have been to make weird, perhaps horrific or otherwise unsettling things, seem quotidian, which is maybe why I enjoyed films such as Ghostbusters.