February 2011

SF/F Commentary

The Eaton Conference: Day One — American Airlines Sucks

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Packing is (usually) easy enough, unless you forget something. I suppose you can guess where this is going: I forgot something. And not just any something. It’s the kind of something that isn’t exactly easy to replace, especially if you are traveling through Miami to Los Angeles. What did I forget? My cell phone. I didn’t discover this until my friend had dropped me off at the airport and left, which is wonderfully ironic. It also turns out that the wireless Internet at the Gainesville airport was on the fritz, despite having been quite reliable in the past. Without any way to get back to my house in time, I was left with the daunting task of relaying my predicament to my other friend on the other end of the journey in Los Angeles. This is the story of how Barnes & Noble and Facebook saved the day. With no cell phone and no memory of the numbers of the various people I would have called in that moment (I have terrible memory to begin with, so a cell phone makes it quite easy to avoid memorizing long strings of numbers), it came to me to figure out how to get a message to the appropriate party. In comes the Nook. For some reason, the wireless worked remarkably well on my Nook, but not on my laptop. Anyone who has a Nook knows that the device has a little browser. It’s not very good in terms of its ease of use (the Nook is an eReader, not an iPad, after all), but I managed to get on Facebook and relay a message to my friend. Wonderful. Having averted that crisis, I got on the plane and headed towards Miami, where I would catch a flight to Los Angeles.  I should mention that during this flight, which was on a plane with propellers for some stupid reason, the Captain decided that it would be a lovely idea to intentionally fly through a storm.  On top of that, he actually announced it to us, which was a tad annoying.  He could have easily gone around it.  In any case, for a good five minutes the plane was doing the equivalent of skidding back and forth, along with huge drops and other terrifying things.  Planes should not have propellers anymore.  It’s insanity.  Thankfully, we made it to Miami in one piece, but not without a little soiling on my part… The sea of white fluffy things… I realized when we landed that I only had about 20 minutes to get to my next flight, though, and so scrambled out and went to the giant board…only to discover that my flight had been cancelled and I had been moved to a flight that wasn’t leaving for another three hours. Lovely! Nobody warned me when I checked in, and I highly doubt that American Airlines cancelled the flight between check-in and arrival. And, of course, I didn’t have a cell phone and the free wireless Internet in MIA wasn’t working. Convenient? I think so. It was a grand plot by airports against me, I think. Worse still was that my Nook couldn’t get into the wireless, so I was left with either paying a ridiculous amount of money for a few hours of Internet service, or leaving my friend hanging in the wind on the other end (oddly enough, there are no AT&T stores in MIA, which meant that trying to get numbers or a new phone were out of the question). This is how I calm my nerves: Häagen–Dazs  So, I paid for the Internet. It sucked. I’m not happy. But that’s how life is. From there I went to Facebook and finally had to get a friend I met at another conference to call my other friend to give her the new flight information. It was insanity. The plane, boss, get in the plane! In any case, I managed to get the information to the appropriate parties, got some food, wandered around like a chicken with its head cut off, and eventually made it to Los Angeles and had a wonderful two hours talking to my friend while we ate at a Denny’s, drove the hour and a half to Riverside, and so on. Needless to say, the trip over was a long one, and we ended up missing the entire introductory greet-and-meet at the conference (to be fair, this might have been a good thing, since I spent half the conference bumbling like a moron). Look, it’s a Loopdilou Monster! So that was the first day of my trip to the Eaton Conference. More to come soon!

SF/F Commentary

The Eaton Conference: My Weekend Begins

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In case you don’t follow me on Twitter or don’t know me personally, I thought I should let you all know that I will be in Riverside, California (near Los Angeles) for an academic conference this weekend (and won’t return until Tuesday).  This isn’t just any old conference though.  Eaton is a science fiction (and, I imagine, fantastic literature) conference where writers, academics, and those who flirt with both sides of the aisle come together to share research (which I will be doing in my scary mailman voice), chat (which I won’t be doing, because I’m afraid of some of the authors who will be there, since I sort of idolize them), and otherwise discuss the wonderful thing that is SF, specfic, fantasy, and whatever other names you want to call such things. What will I be presenting?  A paper entitled “The Interstellar Initiative:  Space and Identity in Caribbean Expatriate Science Fiction.”  Who am I talking about?  Tobias S. Buckell and Nalo Hopkinson.  Which books?  Ragamuffin by Buckell and Midnight Robber by Hopkinson (Crystal Rain and Sly Mongoose will be mentioned, though).  I’ll also reference various theorists and writers in reference to such wonderful topics as the Frontier vs. the Final Frontier, issues of identity in postcolonial spaces, empire, colonialism, and a few random things thrown in because I think they’re amusing. I may have posted the abstract on my blog before, but I’m going to give it to you all again for the heck of it.  Here goes: Caribbean speculative fiction has historically been primarily occupied with the fantastic—magical realism, folklore, and fantasy—with traditional elements of science fiction—advanced technology, space travel, etc.—mostly left to developed and developing nations, such as the United States, India, China, and some nations of the Latin American mainland. Careful study will show that this has little to do with disinterest on the part of Caribbeans in matters of technology or space; in fact, a great number of Caribbean governments have played a part in the ratification of a number of United Nations amendments related to the space industry. There are exceptions, most notably in Cuba, which has a strong science fiction community that has gone largely unnoticed by Western mainstream audiences.  Yet the Caribbean has found a strong voice in the science fiction works of Tobias S. Buckell and Nalo Hopkinson, both Caribbean-born writers who have secured their places in a now rising multicultural shift in Western science fiction—a movement split between the increased mainstream interest in “World SF” and the inclusion of non-Western settings and characters within mainstream SF itself. What is most striking about the inclusion of Caribbean views within Western SF is that many of the authors are expatriates, and this is particularly relevant when discussing the works of Buckell and Hopkinson. Both authors have imagined futures in which the Caribbean not only has a presence in space, but is also an active participant in the colonization of other planets. These futures reflect a modern Caribbean consciousness in which identity is complicated by the postcolonial situation, the problematic nature of expatriation, and the fracturing (or merging/creolization) of cultures; this reflection, however, is relayed through a space-oriented setting where Caribbean characters and cultures have coalesced and established themselves outside of the traditional postcolonial situation, and outer space itself becomes an object through which postcolonialism and its predecessor are combated or rendered mute, thus allowing for the formation of an identity that is not predicated upon an un-chosen past.  In this paper I will analyze and discuss how Tobias S. Buckell’s trilogy of science fiction novels and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robbers, along with some of her short stories, present outer space as an answer to the issue of “space” and cultural ownership within the Caribbean context. These writers, I will argue, imagine futures in which outer space is both an answer to the postcolonial situation in the Caribbean and a “space,” in the general sense, that is part liberatory and part identity-forming. All of this means you can expect to see a few things from me in the next few days: Blog posts about my experiences at Eaton. Links to special Eaton editions of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, which will largely be unedited and sort of discussion-oriented.  Whether we’ll bring anyone else into the show is up to the limits of technology at this point.  We’ll see. Pictures (because I have things that I think are worth showing, though you likely will find them dull). You also might see some blog posts unrelated to Eaton or posts related to discussions I had at Eaton and my extended thoughts on whatever occurred.  It’s all up in the air at this point. So that’s that.  Day One will show up tomorrow at some point.  Look forward to it.  It will be crazy!

SF/F Commentary

Shooting Themselves in the Foot: A Brief Reconsideration of Traditional and Self-Publishing

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Anyone who reads this blog, or has in the past, knows that I am hypercritical of self-publishing.  In some respects, the entire industry deserves it, since it is full of shady practices, shady “gurus,” liars, scammers, and so on.  In a way, self-publishing is an industry that allows for such problems to grow and fester — not because SPing is evil, wrong, or whatever detractors want to call it, but because it is decentralized (there is no standard, no vetting, no gate-keeping, and so forth).  Traditional publishers have always been a centralized authority on “artistic” matters, determining what should and shouldn’t be put on shelves, rejecting anything deemed “unpublishable,” and maintaining a kind of minimum standard of production (though there is some flexibility here).  For the most part, this opposition was a no-brainer for people like me, who appreciate quality work, low-risk consumption, and so on. And then I read this (about cuts of editorial positions at traditional Canadian publishers): “We just couldn’t afford it,” said Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves, adding that he is happy to do the work himself. At the same time, he worries about the ultimate effect of industry-wide downsizing. “How do you cultivate a professional publishing ethic it you’re farming everything out?”  Authors, finding today’s downsized publishers increasingly unwilling to invest their own resources in the often laborious process of polishing rough diamonds into marketable gems, are now often forced to hire their own editors – before even before submitting their manuscripts for publication. Toronto literary agent Anne McDermid saw the landscape changing two years ago, when a publisher told her, “I cannot purchase a book I need to spend 40 hours editing.” As a result, McDermid added, “we are now advising our authors that the material they present has got to be closer to the final draft than it ever used to be.” Sometimes the agents themselves act as pre-editors. “Or, for those authors who can afford it,” McDermid said, “the biggest-growing sector in Canadian publishing is the freelance editor.” First things first:  I get it.  It costs money to edit books, and while I think 40 hours of editing really isn’t that much, it is still a lengthy process.  Publishers want to trim back and choose books that are more “ready to go.” But reading something like this makes me really wonder the following:  what exactly do publishers have to offer me if they’re not even willing to put in the time to help make my book better?  A distribution model?  That’s quickly becoming useless from an economic position; ebooks are growing fast and I suspect they will overtake, or at least match, print books in the next ten years (on the outside — five on the inside).  Authors increasingly don’t need publishers to make books available to a large reading market.  In fact, the only barrier beyond a professionally-designed product for authors today is obscurity, but that’s a problem that traditionally published authors also face, though to a lesser degree.  So what exactly are traditional publishers offering me, as a writer, that I cannot acquire for myself?  If I’m going to be asked to pay for editing services prior to submission, then why wouldn’t I just hire a whole crew to put together a professionally-designed book and sell it on my own?  You can’t run an entire business on distribution and book covers. In an increasingly competitive market, it seems like publishers are only shooting themselves in the foot.  They’re looking at the market around them and saying “well, let’s just cut back and hope nobody notices.”  Anyone paying attention sees that and thinks, “they’re reducing the value of their ‘service.’”  This might be the first time I’ve actually thought that the big publishers might, in fact, fragment and die.  I don’t think all publishers will go down the tubes, because there are some truly amazing small presses out there (at least in the SF/F world) and some imprints will certainly survive in some form or another based solely on the quality products they produce.  But the rest are asking to die.  You can’t go into a competitive market, offer drastically less than you ever did before, and then expect that your economic model will a) continue producing significant profit, or b) look appealing to authors.  Maybe a) will stay true, since many publishers are flocking to celebrities just like TV producers are still flocking to reality T.V.  But that’s not the reading world I’m going to be active in. The sad thing for traditional publishers is this:  self-publishers, in general, have and continue to be innovative people, and it’s not a big stretch to think that they will figure out how to help readers find the quality products that they want (i.e., reduce the risk of buying books that don’t even meet a minimum standard of quality).  Needless to say, self-publishing is looking more and more appealing to me.  I haven’t made a full 180 yet, because the side of me that is bothered by self-publishing is still opposing the new paradigm, but if things keep going the way they are, you can bet I’ll start looking at things very differently. Now, I think it’s fair to acknowledge that the piece I took the above quote from is only talking about Canadian publishers.  A quick Google search didn’t produce anything about U.S. publishers, though there were plenty of cuts during the Recession.  If anyone has links that show the same about U.S. publishers from a reliable source, I would like to see it. It also seems ridiculous to have to bring up the age-old saying again, but it’s impossible to ignore:  money flows to the writer.  Period. What do you all think of this?

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