Asimov's SF, January 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  One way or another, we will manage to come up with the supplies of rare earth that will be needed in the years just ahead, though it may require some political head-butting and even—mark my word—a little relaxation of certain environmental restrictions. But the key phrase here is in the years just ahead. Science fiction has taught us that it's a good idea to look beyond the years just ahead, and what we see, peering down the line into the infinite future, is a continuation of the unending war between scarcity and human ingenuity that has been driving technological progress for thousands of years. We may think of our supply of metals, both the common ones like copper and zinc and the obscure ones like samarium and lutetium, as endlessly available for our needs. They aren't. Already, as I noted at the beginning of this piece, we are seeing the first surprising signs of a shortage of copper and zinc. Samarium, lutetium, and the rest of the rare earths are even more troublesome problems, since the sparseness of supply is complicated by the political and environmental issues that I've outlined above.

  Eventually, and I can't tell you how far away “eventually” might be, all of Earth's metals, both the rare ones and the common ones, are going to be very rare indeed, and we will have pushed our recycling efforts to their limits. What will happen then? Will a time come, thirty or fifty years from now, when all the smartphones will have to be tossed on the scrapheap because there's no more dysprosium? Or will some future Steve Jobs spark the development of dysprosium-free phones powered by hydrogen or carbon dioxide? (Breathe into your phone to charge the battery!) Will we get back into space and go prospecting in the asteroid belt for gadolinium, holmium, and promethium? Will we come up with some other miraculous fix that we can't even imagine now?

  I don't know. So far, the human race has been pretty good at wiggling out of tight corners like this. But every year there are more of us and less of the natural elements out of which we have constructed our civilization. Something, I suspect, has got to give.

  Copyright © 2011 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON THE NET: SON OF EBOOKS, THE NEXT GENERATION, VOL. III

  by James Patrick Kelly

  told ya

  My wife claims this is my I-told-you-so column, and, as usual, she's probably right. However, I prefer to think of it as my even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day column. Mine was certainly not the only voice proclaiming the coming of ebooks when I first wrote a column about them way back in 2001. But here's the first paragraph:

  “Okay, it's time to get serious about online science fiction. New and reprint sites are popping up like mushrooms after a monsoon. Hardware and software companies are offering new, or at least improved, technologies to ease the strain of eyeballing print on screens.” And here's a bit from the end: “Perhaps the most difficult problem e-publishers will face is finding a way to make money selling fiction on the net. Information wants to be free, or so they say. And if it isn't free, any number of netizens are willing to find ways to set it free. Hackers and data pirates have some print publishers scared silly. . . .

  “Writers too will face challenges. Will we see a kinder, gentler online publishing industry, one that is less driven by a bestseller mentality? A publisher of ebooks has no need of a warehouse or a distribution system that deals with moving atoms from here to there. She can afford patience with a book, giving it time to find its audience. But then how will ebooks find their audiences? Even if only a fraction of the greatest hits of the science fiction backlist becomes available, it will flood a market that already offers far, far too many choices.” Skeptics scoffed, and they were the vast majority, even among the net's digerati. The astute Jeff VanderMeer [jeffvandermeer.com] conducted a survey about books in 2003, posing a series of questions to practicing speculative fiction writers. The Physicality of Books [fantasticmetropolis. com/i/books] appeared online on the wonderful Fantastic Metropolis—which has since become, alas, a ghost site. The survey is somethingof a love letter to a technology whose prime was about to pass; in it many of your favorite writers express their deep feelings for printed books. When asked whether it was necessary for such books to exist as physical objects, most asserted that it was, citing the many real failings of ebooks and their delivery systems. They weren't portable and were too hard on the eyes, too fragile, too immaterial, not at all like our dear old paper books!

  Even in 2006, true believers were thin on the ground. Here's the opening of my column from then: “Although ebooks have come a long way since we last discussed them in March of 2001, many pundits would cite their perceived lackluster performance in the marketplace as proof that they were just another dot.com fad. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Sales of ebooks rose 27 percent in 2003, to $7.3 million, according to Publisher's Weekly.” Later in that column, I advanced what I called “The Two Certainties,” cribbed from my friend Cory Doctorow: “1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day. 2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day. The consequences of The Two Certainties are profound: at some point the ascending digital line must cross the descending print line. Not if, friends, but when. The Two Certainties point to a future in which ebooks inevitably dominate paper books.”

  When, as it turns out, is probably now, or maybe next Thursday at the latest.

  * * * *

  kindling

  While those of you reading this on an iPadKindleNook are still just a fraction of all 'Mov's readers, you are an increasingly significant fraction. Which brings us to one problem with assessing the impact of electronic publishing on print publishing: it is hard to know how many of those who take this magazine in its electronic form might otherwise have bought the print version. What is clear, however, is that many of those reading ebook versions of this and other print books and magazines are new readers, or perhaps readers who have been wooed back to reading by the convenience and ubiquity of ebooks. A 2010 Harris Poll [harris interactive.com/vault/H1-Harris-Poll-eReaders-2010-09-22.pdf] found that about 10 percent of Americans owned an ereader and another 10 percent intended to acquire one shortly. Even more interesting to writers and publishers is that owners of ereaders read more and buy more books than the average.

  Polls like these have helped give ebooks some serious buzz, but even as we discounted uninformed skepticism in the early days, it's a good idea to take today's exuberant optimism with many grains of salt. There is a lot of information out there for the armchair pundit, but how to interpret it? For example, recent monthly statistics from the Association of American Publishers [publishers. org/press/38] show that adult hardcover and adult paperbacks and ebooks rank first, second, and third in revenue respectively in trade books. The hard numbers? Adult hardcover: $111.4 million, adult paperback: $95.9 million, and ebooks: $72.8 million. Obviously, it's a bit premature to crown ebooks, at about 17 percent of trade net revenue, as the new publishing champ! Monthly revenue from ebooks one year prior, however, was just $28.3 million. This 157 percent increase is even more astonishing in light of the fact that net sales for all trade categories declined 2.4 percent. Is it any wonder that the title of the 2011 annual Conference of the AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division [publishers.org/attachments/docs/library/psp winter-spring 2011.pdf] was “Digital or Die; Inventing Our Future"?

  But what inventions will help them invent that future? The research firm In-Stat [instat.com/newmk.asp?ID= 2852& SoureID=00000652000000000000] claims that ereader shipments will jump from 12 million at the beginning of 2011 to 35 million in 2014. Meanwhile it projects tablet shipments to reach “approximately 58 million” by that date. However, Informa Telcoms and Media [ blogs.informatandm.com/1420/press-release-e-readers-to-lose-out-to-smartbooks-in-battle-of-the-tablets] expects “mobile broadband ereader sales will peak at 14 million units in 2013, before falling by 7 percent in 2014 as the segment faces increased competition from a wide range of consumer electronic devices.” Will our digital libraries come to live in ereaders or tablets o
r something that doesn't even exist yet?

  * * * *

  do it yourself

  Even as publishing bosses scramble to understand the changes that the ebook revolution is making to their business, literary workers (i.e., writers) are being offered access to the means of production. Through ventures like Kindle Direct Publishing [https://kdp.amazon. com/self-publishing/signin] and Pubit [pubit.barnesandnoble.com], it is now possible for anyone to write, publish, and sell an ebook. It used to be that self-publishing was a dirty word—or was it two dirty words?—but now it's where some claim the smart money is. Established writers with an inventory of out-of-print novels and stories can bring them back under the light of readers’ eyes for a minimum amount of effort. Unpublished writers can bypass the fierce editorial trolls who once guarded the gates of Literatureland. Is this a good thing?

  Yes, lost treasures will be rediscovered. Idiosyncratic new talents will emerge.

  No, so many choices will lead to reader paralysis. The ratio of noise to signal will soar.

  All of the above.

  While many of my entrepreneurial colleagues have leapt into the digital marketplace, more have held back because they don't control their electronic rights or because they perceive epublishing as too complex and time-consuming. After all, it's a daunting enough life task to learn to write well—now we're supposed to understand the difference between an epub [wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB] and a mobi [wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/ MOBI] file? Novelists, particularly those who have managed to hold on to their electronic rights, have discovered that bringing their oldies but goodies back can be a lucrative sideline to their careers. But this is Asimov's and we're all short fiction fans here, right? The prospect for making money posting short fiction ebooks is somewhat less rosy, but that hasn't daunted some of the best and net-savviest short story writers working today.

  Take for instance, Tim Pratt [tim pratt.org], who is most familiar to readers of this fine publication for his Hugo-winning story “Impossible Dreams” from the July 2006 issue. You can read this great story today on the Nook and Kindle as a solo ebook for a mere $.99, or you can buy it in his collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, which includes the title story, selected for the Best American Short Stories 2005. Your cost for the collection: $2.99. Tim wrote some advice for would-be self-publishers: “My single stories on Amazon sell vastly better than my collection, even though the collection is a dozen stories for $2.99, as opposed to .99 cents each. So I would recommend posting stories individually. Some stories only sell a handful of copies per month, and some sell into low triple digits. I've only been selling them for two months, but it's definitely brought in some grocery money.” Or Tobias Buckell [tobias buckell.com], whose wonderful stories are not only available on the major ebook vendor sites but on his own popular site as well. He has been experimenting with unbundling his collection Tides from the New Worlds, by putting individual stories up for sale. He writes “(The collection) had settled into a forty to fifty dollars a month pattern of royalties. Since releasing the single shots, it has plunged to half that. So selling the singles certainly affected that. I saw Tim Pratt mention his own singles experiment on twitter. He released a bunch of them and flooded in quickly, and he's seeing better results. Looking also at sales and how they seem to cluster, my take is that readers are buying one, liking it, buying another, and moving through the stories quickly. Although it would be cheaper to buy the short story collection, the initial 99 cent value proposition creates demand.” For the record, my own self-published ebook sales are roughly in line with Toby and Tim's.

  * * * *

  exit

  You can get Asimov's on just about any ereader, but did you know that Sheila has started creating special e-anthologies of stories that have appeared in these pages? Enter A Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov's Science Fiction is available now; more will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, you can buy individual ebook stories for a buck by Michael Jasper, Eric James Stone, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nancy Holder, Jeff VanderMeer, David Brin, Jeff Carlson, George Alec Effinger, and Robert Sheckley, to name but ten.

  Oh, and FYI: ebooks are here to stay. You read it here first.

  Copyright © 2011 James Patrick Kelly

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  by Paul McAuley

  Paul McAuley worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and was a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University, before becoming a full-time writer. His latest novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, will be out from Gollancz in January. Paul tells us that his favorite Springsteen album is Nebraska; his favorite song is “Darkness on the Edge of Town."

  “I like your philosophers,” the alien said. “Most were unintentional comedians, but a few were on to something. Baudrillard, for instance.”

  I said that I wasn't familiar with Mr. Baudrillard's work.

  “His speculations about things standing for things that do not exist were relatively sophisticated. Perhaps you will resurrect him one day. He and I would talk about where his ideas fit in the spectrum of simulacrum theory.”

  I said it sounded interesting.

  “You are being polite because part of your profession is to listen to the confessions of strangers. But you do not know what I am talking about, do you? It does not matter. I am mostly talking nonsense. I am free-associating. An effect of this interesting drink.”

  “Are you ready for another?”

  “This one is still working on me,” the alien said.

  A shot glass of neat Seagram's was balanced on top of his tank. Somehow, elements of the whisky were making their way out of the glass and into whatever was inside. According to the alien, a teeny-tiny demon was influencing space-time, inflating the usual, vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere outside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but what he called congeners. He was getting a buzz on the complex chemicals that gave the whisky its unique taste.

  The alien was a !Cha, of course. They'd made themselves known to the human race some five years ago: the second species we'd met since the Jackaroo had given us a gateway to the stars. One moment, there were no aliens on First Foot apart from a few Jackaroo ambassadors; the next, !Cha were tick-tocking all over the place, asking questions, paying people to tell them stories, telling fantastic and improbable stories about long-dead species that had preceded us, of empires, and wars, and alien versions of the Rapture.

  This one had stalked into the Deadwood Gulch Roadhouse and Casino like it wasn't anything unusual and headed straight past the slots and video poker machines and the tables. Four in the afternoon, the place pretty much dead apart from the regulars at the slot machines and a couple of truckers playing blackjack. Hardly anyone paid attention as the alien went past, his squat black cylinder raised up on three skeletal legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine, heading to the Last Roundup bar at the back of the roadhouse's dim barn, where I was working on my own. The day manager, Li Hui, came over and told the !Cha that drinks were on the house, gave me a look that told me it was my problem, and left me to it.

  I'd seen plenty of !Cha around Mammoth Lakes, but this was the first I'd talked to. It called itself Useless Beauty, claimed that it was a collector of human foolishness. Whatever that meant.

  Saying now in its mellow baritone, “My favorites of your philosophers are Dr. Seuss and Samuel Beckett. Both are very good on the absurdity of life.”

  “I know Dr. Seuss.”

  “Seuss is very funny, but Beckett is even funnier. Especially his piece about two dispossessed waiting for the person who stands for their release or redemption. The person who never arrives. Who represents the things they can never have. Very funny.” The !Cha turned on its stool, and with a curiously human gesture flapped the terminal joint of one of its legs. “One of your customers is ‘smoking.’ An interesting transgression.”

  “Give me a second while
I tell her to put it out,” I said, and went and did just that, before Li Hui came over to give me trouble.

  She was blond and tanned, somewhere between thirty and fifty, dressed in a dark blue skirtsuit, the blouse under it just the decent side of translucent. She'd definitely had some work done around her mouth and eyes, and I was pretty sure her breasts weren't original. She'd come in a little after the !Cha had settled at the bar, ordered a vodka gimlet and asked if she could run up a tab, shrugged and paid cash when I explained that we didn't do that on the wild frontier.

  Now, when I asked her if she could put out her cigarette, she immediately stubbed it on the side of the packet and smiled and said, “I've been sitting here trying to work out how to get you away from that thing.”

  “It worked, ma'am. But don't try it again. You'll get us both into trouble.”

  There was a moment of distraction, then, as the !Cha unfolded itself from its stool and stalked off. Sunlight flashed for a moment as it went through the doors; then the roadhouse was plunged back into its perpetual twilight.

  The woman leaned close, giving me a good view of her cleavage and enveloping me in her perfume. She read my name off my staff tag, said, “I'm Rachel. Tell me about your idea of trouble, and I'll tell you mine.”