Author Archives: Keith West

Amazon Overcharging for Ebooks

David Gaughran  has posted a disturbing essay on why ebooks cost more through Amazon than in the US and a select few other countries.  You should read David’s post, especially if you live outside the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Ireland, and a few other countries.  In most of the world, including France, Spain, Israel, South Africa, India, and Brazil just to name a few off the top of my head, there’s a $2 surcharge added in addition to any sales tax or VAT.  This surcharge goes directly to Amazon, not to a government, and certainly not to the author.  While most of my readers are American, I know there are a few in countries in which Amazon slaps this surcharge.  David is encouraging his readers to buy through Smashwords or iTunes, because there surcharge isn’t added there and the author gets more money.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve recently become an Amazon Associate.  You may be wondering:  Will Amazon be displeased with this post, will they revoke my Associate status, and will I lose a revenue stream in they do?  The answers to those questions are:  Almost certainly, maybe, and not at all.  If Amazon were to even notice this small blog, they would almost certainly be displeased and could very well revoke my Associate status.  But at the present time, I wouldn’t lose a dime.  Because so far I haven’t made any money by being an Associate.  (Considering a recent post which stated that Locus Online, which probably gets more hits in a month than both my blogs combined have ever gotten total, only generated a few hundred dollars a month from links to Amazon, I’m not exactly planning my retire on my earnings.)

I’m less concerned about ad revenue than I am fair trade practices.  What Amazon is doing is hurting authors in the long run, as David so eloquently explained.  Since I hope to begin doing some indie publishing myself within the next year, I’m taking the long term approach rather than the short term by not offending Amazon.  Plus it’s just the right thing to do.

Obituary for Martin H. Greenberg by Fred Pohl

I posted a notice about the passing of Martin H. Greenberg a few weeks ago.  This morning I found this remembrance of him posted by Fred Pohl, telling how they met.  Fred has been updating his memoir, The Way the Future Was, over at his blog, The Way the Future Blogs.  If you’ve not checked out his posts about the people and events from over 70 years of being involved in the field of science fiction, you should.  Fred hasn’t just observed much of the history of the field, he’s made a great deal of it.

Amazon Piracy: A Disturbing Case of a Writer Being Ripped-Off

Passive Guy over at the Passive Voice posted this disturbing news story a little while ago.    It seems author Ruth Ann Nordin is having a problem getting a pirated copy of one of her books removed from Amazon.  They seem to be dragging their feet about removing the stolen book and giving her the runaround.  In an act of solidarity with Ms. Nordin, I’m passing this information along in hopes that enough people will raise enough of a stink that Amazon will respond quickly and do the right thing.  They did for her other two books that were stolen.  Good luck, Ms. Nordin.  As an aspiring author, you have my full support.

Why You Soon Won’t be Able to Find a Good Book in a Store

I was reading one of Kris Rusch’s columns over at The Business Rusch the other day, the topic being shelf space disappearing in book stores.  At that reminded me of an unpleasant experience I had the other day in Wal-Mart, one that is now repeated every time I walk into the store (which isn’t nearly as often as it was a few weeks ago).  If you haven’t read Kris’s column, please go read it now.  I’ll wait.

There, that didn’t take too long, did it?  Ms. Rusch brings up some very disturbing points, and while some of them are negative, others are mixed.  For what it’s worth, here’s my take on things, including why I’m not going to be shopping at Wal-Mart as much in the future.

For starters, I understand the point Kris makes about Barnes and Noble trying to drive customers online.  It helps their bottom line for two reasons.  First, in the short term, it provides an incentive for Nook purchases.  Eventually that market will saturate, either because everyone will have one and the technology will mature to the point that repeatedly releasing an updated version will no longer be cost effective, or more likely that a new technology will come along and make the Nook obsolete.  The second reason, and the one that bothers me, is that it will allow B&N to either close more stores to get out of expensive leases or devote more shelf space to non-book items such as toys, games, stationary, and greeting cards.  Along with more floor space to sell the Nook.

Borders, even before it declared bankruptcy, was undergoing this at a disturbing rate.  When I started graduate school at UT Dallas back in the early 90s, the Borders at the intersection of  Royal and Preston was one of the two go-to bookstores in the Dallas area, the other being the Taylor’s near Prestonwood Mall, although living at what was then the northern edge of the suburban sprawl, i.e, in the other direction, I tended to frequent the Bookstop in Plano near Collin Creek Mall rather than drive an extra hour.  All three had excellent selections of science fiction and fantasy, mystery, and scientific and technical books, and all were willing to order titles not in stock (although Taylor’s charged to do so).

Then Taylor’s closed, Barnes and Noble bought the Bookstop chain and closed the one in Plano to open a B&N on the opposite side of the mall, and suddenly Borders was the only good place to get almost anything in print.

That didn’t last long.  I’ve only been in that Borders a few times in the last five years, and usually it was to find a magazine I couldn’t get at the big B&N on Northwest Highway.  I don’t know if that particular store is still open.  I’ve bought very few books there in the last half decade or so.  Each time I went in, it seemed the fantastic literature had been moved to a different area and had less shelf space.  Along with all the other books.  And there more titles turned face out, which is one of the points Ms. Rusch made in her essay.  Books facing out take up more space, meaning the shelves hold fewer books.  The last time I was there, it wasn’t worth the gas to drive over.

So how does Wal-Mart figure into this?  It’s simple.  They’re committing the same type of stupidity as the major chains, but they don’t have the excuse of an ereader to fall back on.  I live a little over two blocks from K-Mart, four or five blocks from Target, and about a mile and a half from the nearest Wal-Mart (there are four in town).  I’ve been going to this Wal-Mart for one reason.  They have had a section of their book department devoted to science fiction, meaning that the section was labeled as such.  Now the selection was at least 50% fantasy, but I’m not complaining.  I read considerable amounts of both. I’ve seen Wal-Marts that devote some shelf space to a few sf/f titles before, but this is the only one with entire section devoted to the stuff.  A number of them have sections for westerns, which I’m not knocking, except I don’t think westerns sell as well as sf & f.  Maybe Wallyworld is different, because the westerns section in my local Wal-Mart is still intact.  And none of the employees, excuse me, associates, I talked to could tell me who made the decision to remove the fantasy and science fiction.

What did they put in its place?  They moved the romance section over and put “Books” where the romance previously was.  They’re still putting the display together (they’re anything but quick here), but it appears to be mostly children’s books and cook books.   All face out.  I guess they think fewer titles with more visibility will sell more books.

So now I have one less venue I can walk into, pick up any one of several books, and browse through them.  As far as I’m concerned, electronic browsing isn’t worth the time it takes.  I like to flip through the book.  I’ve bought plenty of books at that Wal-Mart, some of which I’ve reviewed at Adventures Fantastic. And I like a good selection, which, given its size, this one had.  But it’s no longer worth the time and gas to drive over and put up with the crowd for the books they have now.

My local B&N has a decent selection, meaning I can find something that interests me.  But I can’t find everything, including much of the stuff I want.  Kris Rusch wrote about not being able to find her latest science fiction novel, City of Ruins, in a B&N but being told it was in the warehouse and she could order it.  The local one here didn’t stock it either.  Nor did they stock Howard Andrew Jones’ The Desert of Souls or Scott Oden’s The Lion of Cairo.  They had a novel by Paul Finch which I wanted to review, only they sold it before I could buy it and didn’t order a replacement copy.  It was a zombie novel; the replacement would have sold.  I’m going to have to order all of these books.  And that’s a hassle.  I ordered the Oden, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.  The other three will probably get ordered sometime before the end of the summer.  I want to review and discuss all four of them, but I’ll probably review other things I have at hand first.  It’s easier and faster that way.

I could go on.  There’s a locally based chain with a number of stores in Texas called Hastings I could write an entire post about, but this is negative enough as it is.  The more I write, the grumpier and more depressed I’m getting.  If you’re like me and like to spending time in book stores just browsing to see what treasures you can find, I don’t hold out a lot of hope of being able to do that much longer.

This essay has been cross-posted at Adventures Fantastic.  

Independence Day Greetings

I’m on the road this weekend and will have limited computer access, so I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to wish everyone a safe and happy Independence Day.  If you are a citizen of a country that doesn’t celebrate American Independence, please accept my wishes for a good weekend.

Long Looks at Short Fiction: "Coordinated Attacks" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Analog, July-August, 2011, $5.99

I know, I know.  That’s the previous issue of Analog.  The new issue came out last week.  I’m a little behind.

Anyway, you can still buy this issue in electronic format from Fictionwise by clicking on the link above.

I wanted to look at the novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch in this issue.  It’s a science fiction thriller set on the Moon at least 200 years or so in the future.  (The exact date isn’t given but there are references to historical events that require that sort of time frame.)  If you haven’t read it, it’s worth your time to do so for reasons you know I’m going to explain.

The story has two plots, with one of them taking place four years in the past.  The story in the past concerns a police detective, one Bartholomew Nyquist, who is called in to investigate a murder.  He’s between partners, and the latest candidate, Ursula Palmette, is waiting for him when he arrives.  Bartholomew tends to be rather hard on partners, so he tends to go through them on a higher than average basis. 

In the present (at least as far as the story is concerned), the mayors of several of the Domes have been assassinated, almost simultaneously, and all in the same bizarre and horrifying manner.  Nyquist is involved in this case as well, although he’s not in charge of it and doesn’t show up in the present until the story is well-progressed.  Also involved in the investigation are Detective Savita Romey and Noelle DeRicci, Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon.  DeRicci and Nyquist are romantically involved, although that aspect of their relationship doesn’t enter into the events.

Maybe in the sequel Rusch will explore that aspect of her characters’ lives.  I’m sure there’s going to be a sequel.  Rusch started both her Retrieval Artist series and her Diving into the Wreck series as novellas in magazines, the former in Analog and the latter in Asimov’s.  This story has the same feel as the inaugural stories in those series. 

This is a gripping thriller.  You know the events of the case four years prior will come into play in the present and have something to do with the assassinations.  The way the two cases related was unexpected.  There’s some closure, but there are plenty of questions left unanswered.  Some of these questions are major plot points, others relate to background details that could become important as the series develops.  For instance, more than one reference is made to the fact that Nyquist has recently returned to active duty after healing from injuries he suffered in a major case the previous year.  Rusch never specifies what the exact nature of either that case or his injuries are.  But since it was a case involving terrorism, and the current case involves terrorism, I suspect a connection will develop at some point.

While the scenes set in the present have multiple viewpoints, including Nyquist, all the of scenes from four years ago are told from his point of view.  He’s a fascinating, complex character.  From what I picked up, he’s undergone some changes in the intervening four years, some due to the case four years ago and some from the case in which he was seriously injured.  I’d like to see more of those changes, just like I’d like to see more of Nyquist.  Not to mention have the mystery resolved. 

Kris Rusch is one of the best writers working today in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and (although I haven’t read any) romance.  If you haven’t read her work, here’s a great place to start.  If you have, then you know “Coordinated Attacks” is going to be worth your time.

Gods of Justice

Gods of Justice
Kevin Hosey and K. Stoddard Hayes, ed.
Mark Offutt and Joel Gomez, ill.
Cliffhanger Books, 205 p., ebook $4.99, print (forthcoming)

This is turning out to be the summer of the superhero.  Not only are we seeing more superhero movies than we ever have in a single summer, but print-wise superheroes seem to be on the rise as well. 

Case in point, Gods of Justice, edited by Kevin Hosey and K. Stoddard Hayes.  This the sophomore publication of Clffhanger Books, a new small press.  Their first publication was an anthology of paranormal romance.  It was a nominee for Best Book of 2010 for The Romance Review.  That means they set a high standard their first time out.

The question is, do they live up to it in this book?


The answer is “Yes, they do.”  The book’s webpage summarizes the stories, so I won’t try to do that here.   Instead, I’ll give you my overall impressions.

First, these stories are not set against a common background or universe.  Of the ten stories, one is set in a dystopian future and one on a distant planet (that one is a Western, of all things, and one of the best in the book).  The remaining eight take place on Earth, with one occurring in No Man’s Land in World War I. 

The tone and settings vary widely.  So do the characters.  Some are about scared people trying to do the right thing when the right thing isn’t always clear or could be quite costly.  Some deal with the obligations of heroes and power, while others examine the corrupting effects that power has on the hero and how heroes can sometimes become villains.  More than one author deals with time travel, a popular theme in superhero tales.  Although there’s no explicit sex, a couple of stories contain mature themes and language, so if you’re thinking of giving the book as a gift to a young reader, you might keep in mind age-appropriateness.  I’d say the book is a PG-13.  But if your reader is mature enough, you should give the book.

I met editor Kevin Hosey back in February at ConDFW.  When the review copy showed up, I had let the book slip my mind, so it’s arrival was a pleasant surprise.  The next pleasant surprise was in reading it.  With the exception of DC Comics writer Ricardo Sanchez and Star Trek author Dayton Ward, the lineup seems to consist of fairly new authors.  At least I wasn’t familiar with the authors names, so I was a little unsure about what to expect.  I needn’t have worried.   

While one or two entries didn’t do much for me (primarily for reasons of personal taste), I found the quality quite high over all.  If most of the writers are at the beginning of their writing careers, they should only get better with time.  I’m going to watch for some of these people.  The variety makes this another diverse anthology, meaning most readers should find plenty to like here.  I certainly did.  I seem to be blessed with a number of this type of anthology lately, with one more I should have finished in a few days.  A couple of stories committed what I think of as comic book logic, which threw me out of the story, but the level of craftsmanship is better than what you would find in most anthologies with a high percentage of new writers. I think this is the first time I’ve read a western set in space in which I want to read more.  While I like westerns, I’ve found they usually don’t work well on other planets.  This one did, and it couldn’t have been set in the Old West and worked.  The story about the time travel murders was a refreshing twist as well.  And “The Justice Blues” had one of the best character developments of the book. 

Most of the stories have an illustration, which was a nice touch (particularly the one on p. 71).  But the focus here is on the stories.  As it should be.

All in all, I found this to be a fun book.  The contents were well-written, thought provoking, imaginative, and entertaining.  I was sorry there were no more stories when I reached the end of the book.  If you like comics and superheroes, by all means give this one a try.  This is the first in a series with at least two more planned, although I have no idea when they’ll be published.  Hopefully soon.  I’m looking forward to them. 

This review was also posted at Adventures Fantastic.

RIP, Martin H. Greenberg

Dean Wesley Smith is reporting that Martin H. Greenberg passed away this morning after a long illness.  If you’ve ever picked up an anthology is the last twenty or thirty years, there’s a good chance his name was on the cover, usually following the name of a well known author or editor.  (Isaac Asimov comes to mind as the most prominent, but he was far from the only one.)  If the anthology was published by DAW books, then his name was almost certainly on the cover.  Greenberg was the publisher of Tekno Books, one of the leading book packagers in the world.  (A packager puts the project together, then sells it to publisher.)  While his work was often behind the scenes, he was a major player in fantasy and science fiction publishing, as well as a number of other genres.  I never met Mr. Greenberg, but I’ve always heard only good things about him.  His passing is a major loss to the science fiction and fantasy fields.  Think of him the next time you read one of the anthologies he put together.  Dean Wesley Smith worked with Greenberg and has written a moving eulogy.

Engineering Infinity

If you’ve been reading science fiction for any length of time, the name Jonathan Strahan should be familiar to you.  He’s edited or co-edited an number of successful  and critically acclaimed anthologies, such as The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2, both co-edited with Gardner Dozois, and the Eclipse series (the newest, Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, has just been published) as well as a Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year series, now up to Volume 5.

The book at hand is Engineering Infinity, a collection of original stories that are clearly science fiction.  Not speculative fiction, not fantasy, not slipstream.  Pure science fiction, much but not all of it of the “hard” variety.  It’s been on my shelf for a while, something on the general order of about five or six months.  I recently decided to stop dipping into it and finish it.

Let’s take a quick scan of the contents, shall we?

There are 14 stories, plus an introduction by Strahan.  Peter Watts starts us off with the tale of “Malak”,  a self-aware attack craft in a future war.  Kristine Kathryn Rusch introduces us to a little girl to whom music really is her life in “Watching the Music Dance”.  Karl Schroeder takes us to a post Cold War Kazakhstan haunted by “Laika’s Ghhost” to see dreams reborn from the ashes of weapons.  Stephen Baxter gives us a ringside seat for “The Invasion of Venus.”.  Hannu Rajaniemi tells of an AI who plays God and discovers the serpent in the garden, so to speak, in “The Server and the Dragon”..  Charles Stross tells the tale of “Bit Rot” on a slower than light interstellar ship.  Kathleen Ann Goonan introduces us to “Creatures with Wings.”  “Walls of Bone, Bars of Flesh” is a quantum excursion into observation and time travel by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar.  Robert Reed questions what is real in “Mantis”.  John C. Wright takes us to the last night on Earth, on “Judgement Eve”  David Moles examines a far future space habitat and what happens to “A Soldier of the City” when terrorists strike.  In “Mercies”, Greg Benford introduces us to a time traveling serial killer who hunts, what else, notorious serial killers.  Gwyneth Jones gives us a very disturbing look inside a multispecies society that has a very ritualized form of cannibalism in “The Ki-anna”..  In the final entry, John Barnes examines new forms of life, such as “The Birds, and the Bees, and the Gasoline Trees.”

So how do the stories stack up?  Quite well.  I found three or four of them to be a little slow because they tended to focus on the internal lives of the characters more than the fantastic or futuristic elements of the story.  One story I should have read earlier in the evening rather than at bedtime.  But by and large, I though this was a solid anthology with a number of exceptionally strong pieces.  I tended to prefer the entries with a hard science and space opera slant, because that’s the way my tastes run.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the character driven stories.  The Rusch, Benford, and Jones tales in particular were character driven and some of the best in the book.
This was a strong anthology, but that’s to be expected since Strahan usually puts together a top notch product.  Even if there are a few stories that don’t quite click for you, there’s enough here that most readers should find plenty that they like.

Don’t be surprised if you see some of the stories from this book on award ballots next year or showing up in the tables of contents of next year’s crop of annual best anthologies.

Opening Salvo

Welcome to Futures Past and Present.  This blog will be similar to my other blog, Adventures Fantastic, only instead I’ll be focusing on science fiction here. 

There will be some differences, though.  For one, as far as fantasy is concerned, Adventures Fantastic tends to stick to relatively new fantasy (or at least recent), with the exception of certain classic authors, such as Robert E. Howard.  The historical adventure and occasional historical fact post there are a little more broad ranging.  I’m going to take a more historical approach here in that I’ll strive to have a fairly even mix of old and new science fiction.  There are a number of authors who have been forgotten that I’ll try to bring to your attention.  If you’ve ever read one of Bud Webster’s Pat Masters columns, you know what I’m talking about.  Where Bud tends to focus on the authors and their oeuvre as a whole, I’ll look more specifically at individual works. 

Of course I’ll review as many new science fiction books, stories, and magazines as I can.  That should be about a third of what’s covered here.

And the final third will be me blogging about whatever I have on my shelves that I either finally get around to reading or read again. 

In other words, this is going to be a wide ranging blog focusing on as many aspects of science fiction we can reasonably cover.  I’m going to do more experimenting with the format and layout than I do with Adventures Fantastic, so don’t be too surprised if things change on a regular basis.