Archive for the ‘Speculative Fiction’ Category

Read: Lamentation by Ken Scholes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Full dis­claimer:  Ken is a great guy, some­one I con­sider a won­der­ful friend.  One of my regrets about not liv­ing in Portland (despite hav­ing wanted to for about 8 years) is that I don’t get to hang out with him and his wife more often.  Ken’s suc­cess is well-​​earned.  We first met at a Norwescon a few years ago, and Ken was just get­ting started again seri­ously with his writ­ing.  He’d sold a few sto­ries, not many.  We hit it off and I asked him to send along some­thing to the Fortean Bureau, which he did, and we bought it.  And a cou­ple of oth­ers.  I loved Ken’s short sto­ries.  I sup­pose that is to tem­per my com­ments com­ing next.

I enjoyed Lamentation.  However, for me at least, it suf­fers from over­hype.  It’s a good book, but so much energy was poured into call­ing it a great book that  I had unre­al­is­ti­cally high expec­ta­tions.  I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise, and I’ve thought long and hard about whether I wanted to admit that I didn’t froth over the book, because I want noth­ing more than to see Ken suc­ceed.  So lis­ten, I did like the book. I do rec­om­mend that you read it.  You are liable to love it.

Anyway–It’s very inter­est­ing on sev­eral lev­els to me.  Ken’s very good at what he does, so let me expound on how and why.

One aspect that I really like is that it’s a breezy kind of epic fic­tion.  I read the book in 2 days.  I rarely get to cut through a book that fast (although this is the first book that I’ve read since being laid off).  The book rarely dragged which is rare for this kind of fan­tasy for me.

A lot has been said about the world build­ing, which I started out dis­lik­ing and slowly grew to find more inter­est­ing over time.  It felt at first to me that not enough logic and fore­thought went into the com­bi­na­tion of echos of our world’s cul­ture.  As the book devel­ops, I see that more is going on, and I became more inter­est­ing.  I really liked how the his­tory of what had hap­pened echoed through the events of the book.   I think Ken han­dles this excel­lently.  World build­ing can eas­ily bog down this kind of fan­tasy.  Look at Tolkien, who I con­sider an inter­minable bore when it came to all his descrip­tions of land­scapes and Elvish his­tory and singing.  Ken fleshes out his world, but does it deftly, much like every­thing else he does in the book.

I do think the book suf­fers a lit­tle from too many points of view.  I found the con­cept of many of the char­ac­ters inter­est­ing, but their insights rarely struck home with me.  I spent much of the book wait­ing for a char­ac­ter who would sink his teeth into me like Tyrion from Martin’s books.  However–Martin’s books are like 5 times longer and I don’t think this is a mat­ter of skill so much as it is a mat­ter of time.  Ken’s got 4 more books to do this, and I’m def­i­nitely going to give him a chance to develop these char­ac­ters even further.

Okay, I’m enter­ing into spoil­ers ter­ri­tory next.  Behind the cut.

Continue read­ing ›

On the Amazon Kindle 2 Controversy

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Some authors have posited that hav­ing an ebook reader able to con­vert words into sounds on the fly is a good thing.  See Neil Gaiman.  Others have argued that such tech­nol­ogy should be cov­ered under audio­book rights.  And Wil Wheaton has cre­ated an audio com­par­i­sion between a human read­ing a book and the Kindle.

What a load of greedy bull­shit, and per­haps the most bone­headed idea to come along since those self-​​destructing DVDs called Div.     I’m a writer.  I like money.  I don’t get much of it for my work.  You would think that I would agree with any­thing that stands to make me more money, but I am not an insane greedy mon­key.  I am also a reader and a con­sumer and the think­ing behind this atti­tude is utterly ridicu­lous.  In case you haven’t fig­ured it out yet, I come down firmly on Neil Gaiman’s side on this.

This “par­cel out the means in which media can be con­sumed to squeeze out dimes” approach to lit­er­a­ture is going to do NOTHING but alien­ate con­sumers.  Here’s why:

When we buy a book, we believe that we can do what­ever  we want with it short of print­ing up copies and sell­ing them.  We reject any notion of tech­nol­ogy being used to arti­fi­cially limit our rights to media.  DRM is dead, just ask the RIAA.   We want to share and we want to remix.   It’s been demon­strated time and time and time again across all media.   You can­not fight the use of tech­nol­ogy to inter­act with media with more, evil tech­nol­ogy.  It’s a per­ver­sion of the nat­ural state and it NEVER lasts.  The sys­tem always rights itself.  The human infor­ma­tion net­work routes around things like DRM and arti­fi­cial rights as if they are dam­age.   All you do is frus­trate your hon­est con­sumers and waste money.

If it can be con­sumed by the human mind, it can be shifted, trans­lated, trans­mit­ted, and and all those other things that tech­nol­ogy inher­ently makes pos­si­ble and makes greedy bas­tards wake up in a cold sweat, afraid that some­where, some­one is using their “prop­erty”  in a man­ner for which they could have tried to rape your wal­let.  No.  We as con­sumers are not going to put up with it.   We haven’t been putting up with it.

When we buy an audio book, we are NOT buy­ing the book.  We are buy­ing a record­ing of a per­for­mance of the book.  It is a dis­tinct enough entity from a book that I believe the rights do deserve to be sold seper­ately.  But the text itself, that’s just one right, as far as I am con­cerned.  You sell me access to the text, and  I will do what­ever I want with it.  I will cut up your book’s pages and make a hat.  I will scan it with an OCR and put it in my per­sonal data­base.  I will even give the book away to a friend when I am done with it if I don’t want it tak­ing up space any­more.    You can’t stop me.  Publishing indus­try, seri­ously, with the decline of read­er­ship and sales, is this what you want to be spend­ing man-​​hours on?  Finding ways to LIMIT the ways that peo­ple can inter­act with your products?

With read­er­ship falling like a fuck­ing stone, with every­thing else that is going on today thanks to the Depression-​​like econ­omy, the pub­lish­ing indus­try has big­ger things to worry about than a text-​​to-​​speech func­tion, some­thing my com­puter has been capa­ble of since 1997!   Just because Amazon adds it to a ridicu­lously expen­sive e-​​reader doesn’t mean now it’s sud­denly time to hyper­ven­ti­late and claim that rights are being tram­pled and money is being lost.

If I was pres­i­dent of the Author’s Guild, I’d be focus­ing my energy on fig­ur­ing out how to get my mem­bers works printed on cereal boxes and bill­boards.  Massive dis­sem­i­na­tion, through any chan­nel I can think of.    I would be doing every­thing in my power to encour­age read­ing.  The money will fol­low if you just let peo­ple get on with the act of con­sum­ing the ideas.   We don’t mind pay­ing, but we will not be gauged repeat­edly for the access to the same material.

Anyone who thinks that the Kindle’s text-​​to-​​speech func­tion is more akin to a per­for­mance and less equiv­a­lent to show­ing some words on a screen–well, there’s not much hope for you as far as I can tell.  I hope you enjoy frus­tra­tion, because I pre­dict an awful lot of it in your future on this issue.

Similo: An SF Short Film

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is snurched straight from Irene Gallo’s excel­lent blog Tor​.com.  It starts out a lit­tle slow, but I think the pay­off is worth it.  And fan­tas­tic pro­duc­tion val­ues all around.

Why So Silent?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You may have noticed that I don’t blog much any­more except to share the occa­sional pic­ture or pile of links.  When I do blog, it’s typ­i­cally a very short entry about some other project I’ve done.  If you look back at my old blog, you’ll find a very dif­fer­ent blog­ger.  What changed?

When I built this site, I built it with the inten­tion of being a pro­fes­sional.  I was going to con­duct myself in the most pro­fes­sional way pos­si­ble, try­ing not to ever com­plain, and intend­ing for my entries to be some­thing of sub­stance, rather than fluff.  The truth is that there are a mil­lion inter­est­ing blog­gers out there.  I got tired of just adding to the noise with my inane bab­bling.  I decided that I wouldn’t say any­thing if I didn’t feel that it was some­thing truly interesting.

I’ve done this before in my fic­tion writ­ing too.  I resolved to only write the best things I could. In both sit­u­a­tions, the real result has been that I don’t write much of any­thing at all.

There are two ways I could choose to look at this.  One is that I sim­ply don’t have any­thing pro­found or inter­est­ing to say.  I imag­ine a few of my friends would agree to this if pressed on it.  The other way is that when you put pres­sure on your­self to only do great things, then you sti­fle your­self so much that you don’t do any­thing at all.  Rather than attempt­ing to do the best you can, you set the expec­ta­tion of doing bet­ter than you can, which doesn’t just hap­pen.  You do bet­ter than you usu­ally can by doing lots and lots and some­times hav­ing a breakthrough.

I’m going through a rather early mid-​​life cri­sis right now.  Probably an accu­rately mid-​​life given the aver­age lifes­pan of men in my fam­ily.  I’ve been laid off from two jobs in the last year.  The last one was a job I thought I could do for a very long time.  It gave me pre­cisely the free­doms I wanted from an employer, and while the stress was at times rather high, I didn’t feel trapped in the posi­tion, which was a wel­come change after some of the jobs I’ve worked.

I’ve toyed with try­ing to go free­lance writer/​designer/​photographer, given that my wife pro­vides our insur­ance now.  Again, I have to set these goals aside because it falls upon me to pro­vide our insur­ance ben­e­fits so that Sarah can go to school full time to receive her teach­ing degree.  This will pro­vide her with great ben­e­fits and a ful­fill­ing career.  I’m in full sup­port of it.  It just means that ulti­mately, I _​have_​ to get another job. Which I have been look­ing for, of course, but the pres­sure wasn’t on then like it is now.

The health sys­tem in this coun­try is pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble for killing my entre­pre­neur­ial spirit.  If you go ANY period of time with­out health insur­ance in the U.S., all of your med­ical con­di­tions become labeled “prex­ist­ing” which means that when you DO get health insur­ance, they won’t cover any­thing they think you were sick from before you got cov­er­age.  And even if you have insur­ance, and apply for pri­vate insur­ance, you get turned down.  Why?  Because you have prex­ist­ing con­di­tions and they would actu­ally have to spend money on your health. The only peo­ple who qual­ify for med­ical cov­er­age are those who are so healthy they don’t need it.

No mid­dle class American can afford basic med­ical neces­si­ties like pre­scrip­tions with­out health insur­ance.  I have to take a cou­ple of med­ica­tions every day.  For instance, I take an acid reflux med­ica­tion.  Without it, I become rather vio­lently ill.  Imagine throw­ing up in you mouth.  Now imag­ine doing that all day long, for your entire life.  That’s my acid reflux.  There’s no cure.  All I can do is take lit­tle pills the rest of my life so my stom­ach acids don’t boil over and give me throat cancer.

Me and the stom­ach don’t get along very well thanks to this.

With insur­ance, these pills cost me $20 a month.  Reasonable.  It prob­a­bly costs the man­u­fac­turer 25 cents to make a month’s worth.  However, should I go with­out health insur­ance, that same pre­scrip­tion becomes around $300 a month.

I take a generic, which shall remain name­less.  It’s $10 a month on a health insur­ance plan.  Without insur­ance, it’s $150 a month.

To put this in per­spec­tive, I lived in the ground floor of a small house with two very cramped bed­rooms and a liv­ing room which can barely take a couch and a TV at the same time.  My rent is $1000 a month.  If I were to not have health insur­ance, two of my pre­scrip­tions would be equal to nearly half my rent.

And that’s not even tak­ing con­sid­er­a­tion of Sarah’s med­ica­tions for asthma.

Even with­out the risk of cat­a­strophic health issues that could cost hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to be treated, just basic health main­te­nance stuff, the stuff that makes me not vomit blood all day and makes sure that Sarah can breathe would put us on the street.  We’re two intel­li­gent, col­lege edu­cated adults, and we’d be forced to choose between pay­ing the rent and pay­ing for our med­ica­tions.  And because I don’t like the taste of stom­ach acid, I would prob­a­bly choose homelessness.

Good qual­ity of health should be a fun­da­men­tal right.  I would gladly pay more in taxes if they burned our med­ical sys­tem to the ground and replaced it with one that didn’t have out­ra­geous rules of prex­ist­ing con­di­tions.  I’ll PAY for insur­ance.  Do you hear me, you con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­tar­ian ass­holes?   But the sys­tem is flawed, and it’s keep­ing me from build­ing amaz­ing things.  Countless oth­ers are chained to jobs they hate, filled to the brim with ideas for ways to change the world, busi­nesses to launch, but they can’t leave their employer for fear of  trip­ping and break­ing a toe and receiv­ing a $5000 emer­gency room bill.

Our sys­tem crip­ples us finan­cially.  It’s either be crip­pled phys­i­cally or give up every­thing to pay the bills.

If you don’t believe in uni­ver­sal health­care, if you think all peo­ple don’t deserve it, then fuck you.  Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU.  I hope you lose your job and then have a health prob­lem and your COBRA insur­ance is more than half your unem­ploy­ment pay­ments so you can’t afford it.  I hope your child devel­ops a cough late at night that won’t go away, and you lie awake in your bed lis­ten­ing to it, doing the math over and over again about how you can pay for a doctor’s visit and still feed the fam­ily.  FUCK YOU.  You have no human­ity and I hope you con­tract leprosy.

So to answer the title in my post above?  Why so silent?  Because I’m so angry, when I start to write, this is what comes out.  I’m so angry with the world right now, all I want to do is scream with rage at every­one around me.  Capitalism has failed us and the coun­try is crum­bling all around us and some ass­hole on TV is whip­ping up fury directed at peo­ple who got raped by uneth­i­cal bankers who might get some help so they don’t have to live in a fuck­ing card­board box.  That man is a pop­ulist piece of shit.  Many of us are angry right now, so angry that I worry about what hap­pens when some­one comes along and finds a way to tap into that anger for power.  Power derived from the anger of the peo­ple is too dan­ger­ous for even good men and women to wield.  It back­fires every time.  It ends with streets slick with blood and heads in bas­kets.  With peo­ple lined up with gun bar­rels to the backs of their skulls.   I don’t want that in my future.

I just want to set out on my own and inno­vate and cre­ate a busi­ness with­out hav­ing the taste of stom­ach acid in my mouth from dawn to dusk.  That’s all I want.

I’m done being “pro­fes­sional” here.  I’ll cre­ate a new pro­fes­sional per­sona else­where.   Because if I don’t find an out­let for my frus­tra­tion, I will burn up like a microwaved potato in tin foil.  I’m not going to be quiet any­more.  If that keeps you from hir­ing me for a job, then I didn’t want to work for you anyway.

The Angry Bastard is back.

How Can Your Computer Help You Write More, and Better?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The title is the ques­tion I’d like you to think about, my writer friends, estab­lished pros, aspir­ing authors, and any­one who car­ries a torch for the writ­ten word.    What could com­put­ers and tech­nol­ogy do to make the writ­ing life eas­ier for you?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.  I’d like (and am think­ing about build­ing) an online sub­mis­sion tracker soft­ware that’s as easy to use as Gmail and that can actu­ally rec­om­mend mar­kets to me for pieces.  I’d like it to track key­words asso­ci­ated with my work.  And after I sell a piece, I’d like to keep track of what rights I’ve sold, where to, and have it sug­gest reprint oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­sider.   In addi­tion, the site would pro­vide detailed sta­tis­tics on mar­kets, with graphs, culled anony­mously from user data.

2. I’d like this same soft­ware to track my head­count progress and help me set goals.  I’d like it to graph my pro­duc­tiv­ity, and com­pare it against the aver­age user of the site.   I’d like a sim­ple script to add to my site that will act as a word progress bar that updates itself auto­mat­i­cally based on what I enter in my software.

3. I’d like to be able to actu­ally load my sub­mis­sions into these pro­grams.  Then I’d like to tell it where I am sub­mit­ting next, and have it auto­mat­i­cally for­mat my cover let­ter and story in the pre­ferred for­mat and present it to me for printing.

4.  I’d like to be able to set a queue for each story, so that when a story is rejected, and I enter it into the soft­ware, it read­ies it for the next loca­tion auto­mat­i­cally.  Basically, automat­ing my workflow.

What else could your com­puter do for your writ­ing?  And yes, be fore­warned that I may bor­row your idea as a fea­ture for an appli­ca­tion I’m con­sid­er­ing building.

So what are some prob­lems you’d like to see solved?

Diamonds in the Sky: Free Hard SF Anthology

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The anthol­ogy of astron­omy sto­ries I’ve been work­ing on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally com­pleted and avail­able: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthol­ogy is free and you can go there now and read the sto­ries, most of which are orig­i­nal but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award win­ning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astron­omy and should have some edu­ca­tional value, but are hope­fully first and fore­most sim­ply enter­tain­ing and good qual­ity sto­ries. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a pub­lic edu­ca­tion and out­reach effort, and I’d like to reach as many read­ers as pos­si­ble so please spread the word!

via Mike Brotherton: SF Writer.

I did the web­site for Diamonds over a year ago.  This one has been a long time in the works, but it’s now finally live!

Federations Table of Contents

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Federations | John Joseph Adams.

John has posted the table of con­tents to Federations, the anthol­ogy to which I have made my lat­est sale.  Excuse me while I get a lit­tle starstruck and nostalgic.

The first author I ever shared with my father was also my first sci­ence fic­tion author.  When I was around 8 or 9, I stum­bled across a lit­tle book in my grade school library called Dragonsong by Anne McCaffery.   To this day, it is one of less than half a dozen books I have read more than once, an honor I reserve only for the most impor­tant titles in my life or, books I had to read for more than one class through my long edu­ca­tion. One of the first books I ever bought with my own money was an omnibus of the Dragonriders tril­ogy.    The first (and as far as I know, only) fan let­ter I wrote as a child was to Anne McCaffery.  I think she even wrote back.

My Dad and I read every sin­gle McCaffery book she pub­lished, pretty much.  She was one of those authors who the library sys­tem man­aged to get new books for, oddly enough.  Whereas I was mostly stuck read­ing Golden Age SF in the bow­els of the local library (lit­er­ally, the SF sec­tion was in the base­ment, in the back cor­ner), the new books shelf seemed to always have a McCaffery.

My Dad and I didn’t talk SF very much, but most of the time we did, it was regard­ing the lat­est McCaffery book.  We had long dis­cus­sions when [spoil­ers] Pern turned out to be a lost human colony of space far­ers.  [/​spoilers]  Later books, I haven’t been on top of.  Since her son started writ­ing them, I haven’t read them, not because of any rea­son other than lack of time, and well, nobody to talk about them with.

In one of the last con­ver­sa­tions I had with my Dad, when he was in the hos­pi­tal the day we learned that he wasn’t going to get any bet­ter and that it was time was hos­pice care (a med­ical term meain­ing ‘give up and die grace­fully’), I signed a copy of All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories for him, telling him that he could beat the can­cer like a pulp hero beats up Nazis.     He stood up, all 90-​​some pounds of what was left of him, and gave me the strongest hug I think he ever gave me and he said, “I’m proud of you son.”  I must have acted sur­prised because he said, “I’ve always been proud of you.”

That was prob­a­bly the most emo­tional moment of my life, and will remain so for a very long time. At least until I get to tell my own child the same thing,

Today, I feel like I earned that pride a lit­tle more, and I know that if he were here, he would be as excited about me being in this book as I am.

My 10 Second Impression of Fringe

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My super-​​quick impres­sion of the TV show Fringe:

SHOW INTRO

Ridiculous and bad sci­ence premise  results in some­one being gorily mur­dered, often involv­ing slime and/​or blood.

CREDITS roll.

OLIVIA

(stares emo­tion­lessly)

WALTER BISHOP

Something off the wall, either grossly inap­pro­pri­ate or involv­ing food, while exam­ing some grotesque CG crea­ture or corpse.

(The audi­ence laughs and shakes their heads).

PETER BISHOP

(smirks mys­te­ri­ously)

THE END

And yet I love this show.  I want to start a Doctor Walter “Crazy Motherfucker” Bishop fanclub.

Still, the most recent episode had some painfully bad sci­ence.  The cold is caused by a virus.  Viruses are not cells.  Come on, Fringe, that’s first-​​year bio stuff.  Don’t embarass me like that again. Or I might just have to down­load Walter high­light reels instead of actu­ally watch­ing your show.

iPhones and SF

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Has any­one thought about try­ing to build an iPhone appli­ca­tion that is a deliv­ery method for an e-​​zine? Solely dis­trib­uted as an iPhone/​iTouch app?  What kind of fic­tion would work best when read solely on an iPhone/​Touch?  What kind of fea­tures would an app need to be an effec­tive e-​​reader for short fic­tion?  These are ques­tions I am ask­ing myself tonight.

I’ve spent some time this week­end think­ing about writer/​photographer use­ful appli­ca­tions that I could develop for the iPhone.  I’ve got a slowly grow­ing list. Now I just need to learn Objective C.  Well, and C in gen­eral.  And pro­gram­ming in general.

Okay, so I am not the best guy for this.  I should find a devel­oper and go into busi­ness with them.

Jason Stoddard is Wrong about Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Jason has a nice post up about the demands placed on sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers who write believ­able near-​​future SF today.  You should read it.  I think he’s wrong, but you should read it.*

I think focus­ing on the sci­ence aspects of sci­ence fic­tion is miss­ing the point.  Science fic­tion is fic­tion first, and only tan­gen­tially about sci­ence.  Some of my favorite SF tales arguably have zero sci­ence in them.  I’d even go so far as to say sci­ence fic­tion is just a genre of fic­tion with a set of tropes that some­times involve sci­ence, or the future, but doesn’t always, and doesn’t have to.  But let’s focus on the idea of near-​​future SF.  It’s a small sub­set of what’s writ­ten, but it is a subset.

Jason says:

To write fully believ­able, near future sci­ence fic­tion today, you almost need to be vora­cious anti­so­cial poly­math, deeply con­ver­sant in half a dozen tech­ni­cal fields, as well as famil­iar with ongo­ing social, eco­nomic, and envi­ron­men­tal change.

First of all, to have any kind off suc­cess­ful writ­ing career, you need to be some­what anti­so­cial because you rarely make enough money to do it full time, which means you use leisure time to do it, and often a lot of leisure time, which means you won’t be see­ing your friends much.  It’s a soli­tary pur­suit for the most part.  But that’s not what I wanted to say about that quote.  This is:

I take excep­tion to is the notion that you need to be deeply con­ver­sant in any­thing.  I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief and I think that’s a long ways from being a poly­math.   You don’t need to be an expert on any­thing but people.

One of the appeals to a cer­tain kind of writer of SF is that they get to do research.  These writ­ers some­times have a ten­dency to inflict their research upon the reader whether it mat­ters or not.  As I get older, I care a lot less about the believ­abil­ity of the sci­ence in my sto­ries than I do about the actual story and the char­ac­ters.  I was recently read­ing a nice space opera by a friend of mine, and as I was dig­ging through info-​​term-​​dense para­graph after para­graph talk­ing about tech­nolo­gies under­ly­ing star­ship mechan­ics and such, I thought–I have been con­di­tioned to find this accept­able in a story, I kind of enjoy it because I am a big nerd, but I don’t think it makes the story any bet­ter.  Senswunda’s one thing–I dig that.  But I only care about the details so long as they relate to the core of the story, and a lot of times in this kind of SF, they don’t.  The Analog mafia might like that sort of thing, but I don’t.  I don’t need equa­tions in my fic­tion, and I rarely find that they improve it.

I also don’t like my SF to be pred­ica­tive.  I don’t like it to be real­is­tic, nec­es­sar­ily.  Neither does most of the world.  Your sci­ence fic­tion does not need to be well-​​researched, and you do not need to be an expert on quan­tum mechan­ics to write sci­ence fic­tion.  In fact, I would argue that the more con­ver­sant you are in these details, and the more you force into your novel or story, the smaller your audi­ence is.  Star Wars doesn’t trou­ble itself with the mechan­ics of FTL.  It’s pretty damned suc­cess­ful with audiences.

Jason con­cludes with a very nice zinger:

Otherwise, your fic­tion will soon read like that Golden Age lit, filled with space­ships manned by human cal­cu­la­tors and spin­ning reels of tape.

That’s the uni­ver­sal fail­ing of ALL near-​​future SF, no mat­ter how well researched it is.  They couldn’t get it right when tech­nol­ogy wasn’t accel­er­at­ing as fast in the 50s, and near-​​future SF writ­ers are prob­a­bly not get­ting it right now either with things clip­ping along faster.  So why bother?  Getting it “right” is not the point.  It shouldn’t be about any­thing the now through the lens of tools that SF has devel­oped.  You can say things about the future that you can’t say about the present. Projecting those com­ments onto the future gives you a lit­tle dis­tance to say those things.  That’s the pri­mary rea­son we set stuff in the future.  It might as well all be alter­nate his­tory, or alter­nate uni­verse sto­ries. The inclu­sion of alt his­tory in the SF greater genre just proves my point here.  You can’t write a What-​​If story with­out extrap­o­lat­ing from the present (or past).  It’s an exam­i­na­tion of what the truth really is through the fic­tion of what wasn’t or what could be (a depar­ture from the truth).

If you’re intim­i­dated by the accel­er­at­ing advance of the future, don’t let that stop you from writ­ing SF.  You don’t have to write it that way.  Personally, I take great enjoy­ment in throw­ing real­ity out the win­dow when I write my SF.    SF has only ever been about believ­abil­ity to a small sub­set of read­ers.  Believability in the con­text of tech, any­way.  It, like all lit­er­a­ture, does revolve around the believ­abil­ity of human action and emo­tion, how­ever.  Keep that in mind and you’ll write great fic­tion, and very few peo­ple will care about that other stuff. Nobody looks at the tech in 1984 and com­plains about it.

By now you should real­ize that I don’t really think Jason is wrong.  I just wrote that head­line to get your atten­tion so you could watch me hash out for myself what I think is impor­tant about sci­ence fic­tion.  Jason and every­one else who wants to can go about try­ing to mas­ter every field they want to include in their fic­tion, and try to make the near-​​future believ­able with mul­ti­ple points of advance­ment. I applaud it.  A not-​​small num­ber of peo­ple will read it and enjoy it, maybe includ­ing myself from time to time. They’ll almost cer­tainly get some­thing wrong and some  will bitch and moan about it too.  I just don’t find these kinds of sto­ries very mem­o­rable.  You might get lucky and nail some pre­dic­tion on the head and then become a foot­note in his­tory for hav­ing some fore­sight (see Arthur C. Clarke and the prediction/​invention of satel­lites. We know he did it, but I couldn’t tell you in what story).  But you don’t need it to write good stories.

My opin­ion and approach? Forget all of that.  The core of a story is time­less, and none of that really mat­ters.  Understand peo­ple before you under­stand quan­tum mechan­ics or net­work infra­struc­ture.  That’ll take you much fur­ther in fic­tion than any other knowl­edge set.  Senswunda exists inde­pen­dently of pre­dic­tion, and that is what mat­ters to me.  If that makes me more of a fan­tasy writer than a SF writer, then so be it.

So no, Jason Stoddard is not really wrong.  He’s just wrong for me.  You can make up your own mind about what you think.