Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  So much for the "scab" theory.

  All right. This essay is already over five thousand words long, and so I'll have to break until the next issue of the magazine coming out in December. I believe I've thoroughly demolished the "scab theory," but that still leaves the fallback argument. Which amount this:

  Okay, fine, jackass. So you're not a "scab." What you are instead is a predator, and to make things worse, a predator who is invading an ecology that's not accustomed to your methods of predation. What's happening here is that the good sales you're bragging about come as a result of predating on the sales of other authors who don't put up their work for free. And, eventually—like any voracious and out-of-control predator—you will wind up predating yourself out of existence. The day will come when the success of predators like you and other authors who do the same will drive out so many authors that the publishers will finally be able to force you to accept lower terms.

  There are so many fallacies lurking under this notion that I'll need a full essay to deal with them. But, as I break off, I will simply urge the readers of this column to spend the next couple of months—occasionally, occasionally—pondering two simple questions.

  Where is it written, and in what holy text, that the pie for commercial fiction is fixed and only so large? And, therefore, that the success of one author must come at the expense of another?

  The reality is quite the opposite, as I'll show in my next column.

  * * *

  Scattershot

  Written by Barry N. Malzberg

  Scattershot the First: Harold Bloom coined the term "Anxiety of Influence" in the 1970's, describing the situation facing the contemporary poet, but it transports effortlessly to science fiction. Poets, Bloom theorized, are intimidated by the work of previous poets, they have to write in the penumbra of that work, at every juncture their individual voice and subject treatment must compete with all of the great (or at least distinctive) poetry of the past. In order to surmount this anxiety, which can be the cause of crippling imitativeness or outright paralysis, poets must resort to a series of strategies, most of them of Freudian cast. Kill the father, overrun the castle, and so on. This anxiety has always been a problem, Bloom wrote, but it becomes weightier with chronology, with the accumulation of work, with the gravity of history. It may be the major problem confronted by the contemporary poet. There are those who will not admit to any anxiety at all, but those "poets" are for the most part non-readers of poetry. Of which, the editors of the quarterlies will tell you, there are tens of thousands.

  The problem is obviously present in dear old science fiction. Has been for a long time, certainly at any point past the furious, expansive 1930's and 1940's when (as Alexei Panshin noted) the geography of the known and unknown universe and of our collective futures was being charted. Every science fiction writer since about 1950 has had to deal with that staggering backlog of innovative material. As science fiction eased its way past a succession of birthdays, (dating that birth from the cover date, April 1926, of the first issue of Amazing Stories), the weight of circumstance, the sheer growth of the repertoire changed the way it was written, the way in which writers approached the material. You can do variations on "Nightfall" or "The Cold Equations" but you can't write them again and successors will create variations on your variations. What had happened by any mid-80's issue of Isaac Asimov's Magazine was that a reader without knowledge of the founding sources could feel helpless.

  That anxiety of influence lays then on readers no less than writers; science fiction, a literature of convention and accretion, became insistently arcane almost of necessity. There may be fewer great science fiction writers than great poets (and the history of written poetry is more than a dozen times longer) but the harrowing and increasingly specialized nature of this medium may make that anxiety even more insistent. "Most of the stories I read now are cries of pain" Algis Budrys wrote in Galaxy in 1966. (1966!) "Most of the novels are funerary objects."

  Scattershot the Second: I noted in an earlier column how little help the important writers of the 1940's and 1950's had. There were some tolerant editors (notably Boucher & McComas, as with Alfred Bester) and there were sympathetic readers, some of whom studied his work with the intensity that young Beethoven brought to Mozart, but those short stories and the two amazing novels were essentially written. The Demolished Man, as I have noted, was rejected by every extant publisher of science fiction before being placed with the fan press, Shasta.

  Under the circumstances, the body of work emerging from category science fiction in the 1940's and 1950's has to be viewed in the aggregate as a some kind of testimony to the human spirit. Thirty years ago I reminded Bruce McAllister that Kuttner and Moore stories like "Vintage Season," "The Cure," "The Code," "Rain Check," and "The Twonky" were sold to Astounding for a penny a word by two writers who (as Asimov reminisced about his parallel 1940's career) had no reason to believe that after their initial publication the stories would ever appear anywhere else. "That's remarkable," Bruce said, "And you can't say that they were writing stories like that for the money. The money couldn't justify. It had to be out of love."

  Crazy love, say I, and when you look at it that sprawl of work in its flabbergasting aggregate, if you consider the entire run of John Campbell's first decade, you have to resort to the spiritual or metaphysical to explain. Like the early Christian martyrs, this group of writers must have felt that the only true reward would be the enlistment itself, that the rewards if not on Earth would be in heaven. Duke Ellington, taking his band on the road in those decades, playing in small venues in cities far from New York, or atrocious venues in New York, would have understood this. "Gentlemen," Murray Kempton recalls him saying before he took his band out to a really disheveled Madison Square Garden to play for Mike Todd's birthday party, "It is our only responsibility to be better than what we see happening before us."

  Those troupers of the Golden Age were better than almost anything around them. They had to have known it. I cannot conceive of them not knowing it because otherwise the work would not have existed.

  Scattershot the Third: The National Aeronautics and Space Agency was almost entirely the creature of the three Presidents of the 1960's. Being so was the price of the Apollo Missions. "F--- control!" one of my astronauts shouts in the craft on the first page of Beyond Apollo. "They're all a bunch of pimps for the politicians anyway." The true purpose of Apollo in the late 1960's as the Moon landing became ever more imminent, was to divert public attention from the disaster of Vietnam, to give the populace "One of the few things to look at that they could feel came from their tax dollars and that would interest them." (Don't blame me for that line; it was John Campbell's to me in June 1969.) When the moon had been "conquered," when the Vietnam War had evanesced due to public disgust, when the disastrous and nearly fatal Apollo 13 showed how ersatz and dangerous the Apollo program could be, it all collapsed. There will be a moon landing again, and landings on Mars and maybe Jupiter, but they will not occur within the lifetime of anyone now on this planet, and if they occur at all will be in an entirely reconfigured social context.

  A statement of mine to this point and phrased more mildly in the 1969 Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin which I was then editing spurred enough loathing to get me pitched out of that voluntary position. It seems to me now to be unexceptionable. Some readers will hate the previous paragraph, but I can't imagine that many will disagree with its fundamental point. The trap of government finance is that the agency or persons so financed become the government's agents. Heinlein understood that pretty well more than half a century ago (and argued thus for space as private enterprise), and it is worth paying tribute to that insight in this year of his centenary. The old man and I had our share of disagreements, but here I am as much his acolyte and enabler as Neil Armstrong or Michael Collins were (perhaps unwillingly) Richard Nixon's.

  August 2007: New Jersey

  Mail - July/August 2007

  Written by Ji
m Baen's Universe! staff

  From Cory Caleb:

  Just a comment and a (bunch of) support for you, Eric.

  I first 'found' Baen as a publisher through David Weber's Honor Harrington books. And some of his other works, also published by Baen (first purchased at a local used-books store until I 'caught up' with the series around the time of Honor Among Enemies, and then purchased brand-new from Kepler's and Printers, Inc. And then I found your work through poking around on the web (living in Silicon Valley, I was one of the proverbial 'early adopters' of everything from web browsing in general through expensive hardware that was cheap ten months later!).

  I think it was 1999 when I first purchased anything from the WebScriptions service. I had shelves and shelves of paper books, but - silly, foolish early adopter that I was and am - I had also purchased a Rocket eBook reader. I liked the device, though it certainly had flaws. Since that time, I've bought a great many books (and frequently WebScription months). Sure, I could probably track down bootleg copies but - why bother? I get quality for an eminently reasonable price, and I get to be fairly sure that the author's seeing at least a portion of what I've paid.

  I have a job that requires I sit in front of a computer for hours on end, generally in the wee hours of the night and morning. When nothing is breaking - I'm just watching and waiting for things to break. Reading books in a web browser window is a great solution to keeping me alert. I can read a bit of something new from a new author. I can re-read a book I've enjoyed. I can see what happens next to my favorite group of characters. I can - and here, as a younger reader (I guess - I'm thirty-two) I really appreciate the work you and Jim Baen did - discover and re-discover works that were published well before I was born and had not been particularly aware of before.

  I frequent Amazon and Borders and the local brick-and-mortar shops. I buy a fair number of books (while sci-fi, and specifically military sci-fi are my favorite types of fiction, like anyone else, I read all sorts of stuff) in various formats, but I never fail to buy at least a few WebScription months each year.

  Your point about piracy and the reasons for it was fairly spot-on. One of the interesting things to note is that back in the heyday of Napster, when illegal music sharing and piracy were at their height (or so we're often told), I bought one or two CDs a week. Think about that - one or two a WEEK. Easily fifty to a hundred each year. Now, not so much. I buy almost no CDs at all, in truth. One or two a YEAR, if it's busy. I do buy from the iTunes music store, however - having one of the near-ubiquitous white rectangles and embracing the convenience of browse-sample-buy-have. The DRM issues are a little annoying, but I rarely notice it. And hey - guess what - the DRM free stuff is there too.

  I guess I'm rambling here - the danger of it being two-thirty in the morning and nothing happening!

  Just wanted to say Thank You. For putting your books up. For telling your stories. And for making the reading of ebooks not have to suck so badly. And thanks for taking your valuable time to read this.

  -Caleb

  From Maria Schneider:

  Dear Editors:

  I would just like to thank Baen and the bar for having a forum that allowswriters to get critiques, the possibility of publication--and to be read in a timely manner by professional slush readers. In a world of photocopied rejection forms, Baen offers an unmatched opportunity--feedback from well-read, big-hearted professionals.

  I hate the board, I really do. It means taking a deep breath and putting my work on the line. I know when I put it out there I am going to be asked to step up and make it better. It means...feedback on the best parts of my story and on the worst parts.It challenges me as a writer and a person--and makes both better.

  The bar is obviously a huge, huge, HUGE amount of work.

  I just want you to know it is deeply appreciated.

  Thanks to all the bar-flies and to Baen for expending time, energy, money--and heart.

  Maria

  October 2007

  Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain is joined by Jack McDevitt, Eric Flint, Randal L. Schwartz, Stoney Compton, Alethea Kontis (an editor at Solaris Books and buyer for Ingram), Doctor Aubrey de Grey (a gerontologist promoting medical life extension), Uncle Timmy (founder and chairman of the SF&F convention LibertyCon) and Walt (Bananaslug) Boyes for the September and October 2007 episodes of The Future And You.

  The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains numerous interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion about the future from a wide variety of people.

  And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains an installment in our serialization of the hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.

  * * *

  Topics in the October episode

  Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain manages to first pleasantly surprise and then thoroughly scare your host with his answers to your humble host's questions. Not questions about the war, mind you, but about federal funding of scientific research.

  The senator describes his support of embryonic stem cell research, and specifies that this support is not given lightly. He understands that the issue has split the pro-life community—a community in which the senator includes himself. "I have prayed a lot about it," he says, and explains that his support it not just in general terms; he's in favor of it receiving federal funding. He also voices support for continued federal funding of nanotechnology research.

  But it's when asked whether he favors the manned mission side of NASA or the robotic probe side that Senator John McCain says something all who favor space research need to hear. "I think those decisions have been delayed for a long time. We need more congressional hearings on them. And we should understand that it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to fund both. And our problem in NASA for a long time has been a failure to set priorities, and trying to fund everything. As president, I will make those decisions and set those priorities."

  If I understand the senator correctly, he intends to close down many of NASA's divisions and projects, and lay off many of its scientists and engineers—a scary thought for all those who believe humanity's vast future can not be squeezed into one claustrophobic little planet of questionable climatic stability.

  Eric Flint is highly skeptical of both nanotechnology and The Singularity; "Hooey," he calls them both. The late Jim Baen, he recalls, also thought nanotechnology was nonsense and yet, though it seems contradictory, was a big fan of The Singularity. (Eric laughs as he explains that "the word contradictory was made for Jim Baen.")

  While Eric Flint is optimistic about the future in general, he laments what he sees as a slowing in the rate of scientific advancement during the last half century. Instead of advancement, he says, "what we get today is endless refinements of existing technology." There was a time when we saw a parade of things that never existed before: the phonograph, the automobile, radio, TV, scuba gear, airplanes, rockets, calculators, computers; now we just keep improving the old stuff. His theory is that our modern economy is currently dominated by a small number of giant corporations; and radical scientific advancement would upset their applecart.

  Eric also admits his reaction to cryonics is a bit hostile, but explains why he feels this way.

  Jack McDevitt says he is not as optimistic about the future as he used to be and provides many concrete examples from his own experiences. For example, he laments that our government has stopped looking for asteroids which threaten to hit the earth—a project which would cost little and yet might easily save millions of lives. He also worries that "too many people think patriotism means following the President, no matter what." He feels the Singularity is a real danger for our future. And
on a philosophical note; he explains one of the secret little hypocrisies which we all share: "We say we want the schools to make our kids smart," but what we really want is for them to "make our kids think like us."

  Doctor Aubrey de Grey is a gerontologist promoting medical life extension. He speaks of extending human lives, as well as nanotechnology, AI (artificial intelligence) and The Singularity. He believes that significant medical life extension can be achieved within a few decades without requiring nanotechnology, but that extending life expectancies indefinitely will require we develop a robust nanotechnology.

  Having worked for a while in what's known as "Weak AI," he describes with some familiarity, but not a lot of confidence in its eventual success, an ongoing project which is attempting to produce something called "Friendly AI" (Strong AI which has been specifically engineered to be incapable of harming humans—apparently reminiscent of Asimov's three laws of robotics.) He mentions that he sees no need, either practical or ethical, for Strong AI (AI with recursive self-improvement).

  In nanotechnology, Doctor de Grey points out that molecular manufacturing (sometimes envisioned as smart dust or a magic box or even the infamous gray goo) can only be achieved with recursive self-replication, which we will almost surely not develop for many decades. Fortunately, biomedical uses of nanotech during the next decade or two will not require recursive self replication, and will yield many astounding benefits.