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oesn t mean that i m not blind to the greater problem of which realms closing is a symptom back in the day before and during and a bit after the second world war short stories were the name of the game in sf the economics of the time wouldn t have it any other way novels were expensive to print and buy but pulp magazines were cheap though that same cheap construction means that those that survive from the period need to be treated almost as carefully as the declaration of independence if they re to last back in 1939 robert a heinlein launched his writing career when he sold life line to astounding known better today as analog for the princely sum of 70 in 1939 heinlein wrote in his 1980 semi memoir expanded universe one could fill three station wagons with fifty dollars worth of groceries today i can pick up fifty dollars in groceries unassisted perhaps i ve grown stronger sure 70 is hardly chump change even today but according to the inflation calculator 70 usd in 1939 is the equivalent of 1 034 84 in 2007 i would be hard pressed today to dash off a few thousand words and pay off one month s rent with the proceeds so the market has changed and is still changing what concerns me is the shape that it s going to take on two years ago at the 2007 word on the street festival i listened to robert j sawyer s advice to new authors he said that short stories were where writers made names for themselves it s still good advice if you have well regarded shorts under your belt you ll be that much better off when you try to break your teeth on something longer but i can t help but wonder how much longer the shape of the market will make it possible for all but a few to break in that way f sf is going to a bimonthly publication schedule and analog and asimov s have reduced their size and depth of content to save on printing costs with the magazines getting smaller and some going bust it s going to be more and more difficult for short story authors to break into them and more and more stories that would have been printed in their pages in better days will have to be rejected now so what s the future i ll admit i m nervous about it myself having a story professionally published is great but when it comes time to chisel my headstone i don t want it to say he wrote one thing of consequence nor do i want good authors to have to wage battles royale for the reward of appearing in print at this point it s safe to say the future will not belong to the magazines the way the past did but there will be a future though it s not going to be what it used to be first i think anthologies may pick up some of the slack anthologies like return to luna there are eighteen short stories between its covers and since novelettes novellas and serials are frequently printed in magazines like analog or asimov s eighteen short stories would have to be spread out over the better part of a year in either of them second jim baen s universe that is what the future would look like if i was building it jbu was built around the opportunities afforded by internet and takes full advantage of what electronic publication can offer it s not entirely electronic either i d only need to pick up one of the paperback collections to read it on the streetcar just like i do anything else so there is still hope for those starting out still an era is passing that s not something to cheer posted by phoebe barton at 10 32 no comments labels cogitation writing monday january 26 2009 ph nglui mglw nafh cthulhu low earth orbit wgah nagl fhtagn i m a man who has an interest in the promise of the future and as a result i m accustomed to disappointment the apollo applications program historical footnote space station freedom a grand idea never realized the delta clipper obscure enough that i didn t even know about it until recently after which point the confident non fiction articles in 1980s issues of analog were tinged with regret and lost promises that s the main reason why every once in a while i m staggered by the thought that a space station actually does exist the international space station is an incredible technical achievement and it s my hope that in the years and decades to come if civilization doesn t collapse in the interim of course it will be to the state of the art as dugout canoes are to cabin cruisers today none of that is what i m concerned about today though i was looking at the station s mission patch and i noticed something odd eldritch in fact you might say look at that patch the station itself is obvious enough but the landforms took a little work considering that the entertainment industry is centered in california even views from space that focus on europe can be disconcerting in the sense of hey that never looked like that before maps focused on antarctica just aren t all that common but once you see it it s fairly straightforward there s the tip of chile and argentina on the lower right and on the left there s australia and new zealand and then and then in the middle of the south pacific almost squarely at point nemo there s another landmass that doesn t appear on any map i own i started wondering what is this the lost continent of mu then i realized the truth there s only one significant thing that ever existed in that lonely corner of the south pacific the nightmare corpse city of r lyeh where dread cthulhu lies dreaming is nasa trying to tell us something posted by phoebe barton at 11 54 1 comment labels stuff weird sunday january 25 2009 the widdershin ways of a wikipedia wanderer i m currently working on on the waltz a short story that i do hope to finish and not leave in the come back to this thing later when you can think clearly pile which has grown tall and tilts more perilously than pisa as of late in describing a character i found myself resorting back to wikipedia for fact checking best behavior now love said one of the guards a trim and flaxen haired man who fit as well into the shardist ideal as a male model would have fit the cover of soldier of fortune really the only fact i had to check was what the proper name of soldier of fortune was but from there the wandering impulse took over and i ended up at the article on men s adventure magazines a pulp genre i previously was unaware of but now seems like a great and unlamented loss i mean look at it how is it even remotely conceivable that something called swastika slave girls in argentina s no escape brothel camp could be anything less than awesome oh back in 1963 i m sure it was shlock one form of tripe or another dashed off a typewriter tripewriter for some cents per word that had far far more buying power back then but now it would be hilarious a glossy iron thewed version of the eye of argon i hope i never find that story or article or whatever it was i don t know what i would do if it didn t live up to these expectations i created for it right this second posted by phoebe barton at 22 05 no comments labels grignr stuff writing friday january 23 2009 just when i thought i could stop being demoralized something like this comes to my attention is there something wrong with me am i some kind of mutant for caring about a time beyond when the current show on tv ends am i the only one who sees this as indicative of a vast sprawling mind boggling irresponsibility among the public as a whole posted by phoebe barton at 00 15 no comments labels environment rabble rabble rabble thursday january 22 2009 short sf review 1 roachstompers nota bene the post below first went live on a previous weblog of mine which has since pixellated into the electronic aether in september 2007 i republish it here with minor additions i ve got a thing for short stories as i would very much like to be writing them for money in the near future i m considering putting down my used bookstore purchases as employment research once tax time comes around one of the recent additions to my accumulation of shelves is baen books new destinies volume viii published in the autumn of 1989 i bought it mainly for the cover a huge fire breathing dragon viewed from inside a fighter jet s cockpit not only do i love that sort of genre mashing stuff it has a fair chance of making mundane sf purists heads disintegrate and i love that as well in this review the first of what i hope to be many i ll be looking at one of the seven short stories in new destinies viii roachstompers by s m stirling i m well aware of the maxim that the technical definition for a person who confuses the opinions of an author s fictional characters for the opinions of the author is an idiot but in this case considering the greater context of reality i think i m justified in feeling a bit sandpaper rubbed by it as far as times go the late 80s and early 90s weren t bad ones to live through and i mean that in terms of not just experiencing them but surviving them that intersection of decades was i think the last time the world was close to going through a deliberate nuclear war rather than one started on the say so of bogus radar contacts and norwegian rocket tests living as we do in the time of wars on terror and the steady crumbling of the last superpower standing it s almost a different world especially for me considering that my tenth birthday was in 1992 roachstompers starts with the 1989 we know and runs off in a direction drastically different from the course history ultimately took in its universe the cold fusion process demonstrated by stanley pons and martin fleischmann in march of that year produced actual immediate and reproducible results the story is set in a darkly futuristic 1998 that bears little resemblance to the one i grew up in where the soviet union still exists and the development of cold fusion has cut the knees off every petroeconomy in the world oil can be got at fifty cents per barrel there but the price was a global economic meltdown that makes the great depression look like a warm bath by comparison when i first started reading the story those limited clues i got from the first couple of pages made me think that i was dealing with some kind of alien invasion scenario any thoughts i had of good old fashioned earth justice were forced to their knees and shot in the neck when beyond wonderfully dehumanizing terms like illigs or the characters standby cucuroaches it s made clear that the story revolves around a quasi military unit that exists to keep the southern us border sealed against the armies of desperate souls trying to escape the hell mexico has become the story itself pulls no punches and is greatly informed by the biases of the protagonist captain laura hunter who struck me as familiar when i first read it through in retrospect hunter feels like a prototype of marian alston an equally hard ass tough as nails female military protagonist character that stirling would introduce nine years later in island in the sea of time still even though i can accept that the narrator is perched on hunter s shoulder and giving us a digest of the world as she sees it i can t help but think that the story is a bit casual in its slaughter of starving mexican refugees and in fact it seems a lot like a post industrial edisonade it relies for its conflict upon the same sort of surrounded by barbarians mentality that was used with far greater justification in the isot series granted the end of the story wasn t what i was expecting at all and i like the way stirling pulls the rug out from under my feet and roachstompers was a well written piece of work if it had ended there i would have just moved on but it doesn t end there the context of reality intrudes i can t help but be skeeved out every time i think of it mostly because of an opinion stirling expressed on the usenet newsgroup soc history what if and later ended up defending in a boondoggle of a thread on alternatehistory com with regard to how he might achieve peace in the middle east date fri jan 22 1999 5 08pm subject re agree to disagree in a message dated 1 22 99 2 41 00 pm mountain standard time mralls w writes let s say you have a magic button in front of you if you push it it will kill every islamic person using your definition of islamic vs post islamic on the planet do you push it we re talking adults here hmmm well if it s _male_ adults like a shot the thread in question is available here personally i feel that randy mcdonald s response says all that needs to be said i don t think there s much more that can be said aside from the fact that i don t care what the introduction to conquistador said except that i think roachstompers skeeves me out with good reason posted by phoebe barton at 23 37 1 comment labels review wednesday january 21 2009 the perils and prides of public domain photography i ve already mentioned that i like taking photographs once conditions get warmer days get longer and the environment becomes altogether more amenable for photo taking you re probably going to be reminded of that a lot more you might have seen some of mine already if you read wikipedia where i release them under the name gtd aquitaine not that i m the only gtd aquitaine on internet i m not the only one who fell in love with freespace 2 back in the day i release all but a fraction of my photos to the public domain and those that i don t i send out under creative commons licenses mainly because i believe that a vital public domain is necessary in the modern age and that it is our responsibility to contribute to it not gather things up and lock them away anyone who comes across a public domain photo of mine can use it for whatever they d like and often do recently i came across an article in world news apparently drawn originally from the star tribune in minneapolis accompanied by one of my photos seeing it credited to gtd aquitaine was rewarding previously when i ve seen one of my photos used the user has just cited wikipedia which isn t a problem but the story refers to the closure of highway 401 the photograph accompanying the release is however of highway 427 public domain can make photographs free the facts will usually cost you extra posted by phoebe barton at 12 37 2 comments labels photo rabble rabble rabble tuesday january 20 2009 the mighty atom king coal and the future of australia as far as i m concerned the single most pressing problem facing the future is environmental degradation with the incoming obama administration in the states looking to take a far more forceful tack on climate issues than did the bush white house i m not quite as pessimistic about the future as i was during the night shift when the combination of long stretches of time without seeing the sun and a great deal of opportunity to trawl through the science environment sections of the new york times and bbc news among others pushed me into oncoming envirocalypse territory not that that s the realm of fantasy i still have my concerns about the arctic methane upwellings nevertheless nevertheless one of the most significant contributor...