Norman Spinrad At Large

IMMORTALIZING THE BACKLIST

2011-12-22T11:22:00.000-05:00

IMMORTALIZING THE BACKLIST
by Norman Spinrad
I’ve been writing about the ebook publishing revolution and experimenting with ebook publishing modes long enough now for that future to have arrived faster than I had predicted and in an even more complex form than I had imagined.

There are now many ebook readers competing with each other for hardware dominance, and while none of them are quite yet the universal ebook reader capable of dealing with all ebook formats, they’ve arrived at the point where the technology and cost is no longer an obstacle. And with one enormous exception, ePub is emerging as a universal ebook format.

But that enormous exception is Amazon’s proprietary mobi format and Amazon utterly dominates ebook sales. This is bad news for the makers of all those more open format ebook readers, since Amazon’s business model, emulating what Apple did with the iPod and the iTunes store, is to tie its Kindle ebook reader to its proprietary format and its way out in front number of ebook titles to create as close a thing to a vertical monopoly as it can get, about 75% or more of ebook sales in the United States.

On the other hand, this might be good news for writers because Amazon allows anyone to self publish ebooks on their site, set the price within certain limits, and keep 70% of the gross, and Barnes and Noble has followed the leader. More good news for writers is that there are now several freeware programs that will transform word processor output in doc or word or rtf or pdf into ePub or mobi.

So I’ve been experimenting with self publishing my out of print backlist books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble plus a few originals like an unpublished short story, an original short story collection, a collection of my critical essays in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, something over 20 titles in all, long enough to see the results over a good sampling of time.

The bad news is that I’m netting hundreds of dollars a month, not thousands by self-publishing my backlist. But the good news is that most of my backlist books are now available to interested readers as ebooks and at reasonable prices and always will be unless I decide otherwise. And this is good news indeed because, given limited rack space in book stores versus the number of new books published each year, the chances of getting a backlist of such magnitude back into paper print, let alone keeping it there forever, are slim and none.

So, since 70% of something is a lot more than 100% of nothing, this is good news for authors and also for for would-be readers, since by eliminating the rack space problem and reprinting costs it allows authors to immortalize our backlists for as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers flow. Now any book that anyone wants to immortalize will be available to anyone who wants to read it forever. For decades now, writers have been bemoaning the disappearance of their backlists, and now, however much or little money they may garner, that sad story is happily over.

But traditional ink and paper publishers are demanding control of ebook rights and 75% of the net and are mostly making this a deal-breaker. So if you can’t give them ebook rights, you can’t get them to publish the books in question in ink-and-paper format. On the other hand, if you self-publish on Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble only, you can pull the ebooks in minutes if that’s what stands in the way of a conventional deal.

But beware of small “ebook publishers” because they are really aggregators. For a percentages of the net that varies, they will create the ebooks from files or sometimes even by scanning books if need be, and in the various necessary formats, and distribute them to retail sites, not only Amazon and Barnes and Noble but the minor sites too.

This is a valuable service, and some PR may be part of it out of self-interest, and if this sounds like what conventional publishers are supposed to do, that’s because it is. And having such a company doing it for you instead of having to do it all yourself is not only a big plus, but by reaching more retailers, may gain you more money than self-publishing in the end by increased sales making up for reduced royalty percentages, which are still better than the 25% of ebook net you get from conventional publishers.

If it works. So when Reanimus expressed interest, I decided to give it a try with THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE and BUG JACK BARRON. The full results are not yet in, but so far the sales are about the same as for say THE IRON DREAM or MEXICA which I self-published on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

But there’s a catch. Even though the contract allows me to revert these rights more or less upon request, in practice it’s another matter, because there’s no practical way to free them from that multitude of minor retail sites, so in the short term at least, it would seem to preclude any volume publication.

In the medium term, however, the ebook tail is already beginning to wag the ink-and-paper dog, and sooner or later, and I think even sooner than the conventional publishers fear, ebook income is going to become more important than paper book income, and these publishers will have to either up the ebook royalty percentage they pay authors, or allow them to separate ebook rights from volume rights. And when ebook publishers begin paying competitive advances, the ball game will be over.

Indeed, it’s happening already, at least for Anglophone backlist SF books. The Orion Publishing Group, a British outfit in turn part of the international French publishing conglomerate Hachette, has created an SF ebook venture called SF Gateway at least initially dedicated to backlist titles that is revolutionary several respects.

They are paying small but significant advances. And their royalty rates have an upward sliding scale, going from 25% to 35% depending on sales, and while the top end seems presently out of realistic reach, the cumulative sales may be able to reach it over time. And what they are acquiring is separate ebook rights, not including volume rights, though they have right of first refusal on them, and, via the Gollancz imprint, the ability to publish ink-and-and paper editions. Initially at least, they had seemed to be acquiring world English language ebook rights from British authors and only requiring separate US ebook rights from American authors.

But there’s a huge kicker here, an advantage that can only apply to SF titles. First as a paper-and-ink book, and then on CD as well, they have been the publisher of THE SCIENCE FICTION ENCYCLOPEDIA, which is exactly what the titles says it is. And now they have are taken an updated third edition and putting it online with free unpaid access.

What is more, there are entries for virtually all authors of significance in the entire history of the genre, and each essay has links to every title to which they have ebook rights so that the reader can click to buy more or less instantly.

I have been saying that if publishers want writers to accept 25% cuts on ebook net instead of the 70% possible via self-publication, they have to pay advances and offer marketing services that will increase sales volume. And that is what Orion is certainly doing.

Malcolm Edwards, in charge of the project, initially offered to acquire separate British ebook rights to 18 of my backlist titles, and I accepted. This required me to remove availability for sale of the ones I had self-published from Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble, which were the only retail sites where they were available. But checking on some of the titles in my encyclopedia entry, I saw that while they were available on Amazon UK, they were, of course, not available directly on Amazon US, though the self-published versions still were.

So why not offer the US ebook rights to Orion? In other words, for another small advance, give Orion world English language ebook rights? After all, free access to THE SCIENCE FICTION ENCYCLOPEDIA is world-wide, not limited to people in the British rights area. And what is more, that would in effect include Open Market rights too. So anyone anywhere in the world could read my entry in the encyclopedia, and click on any title there to buy it. And checking on Gateway, I saw that there were already links to retail sites in non-Anglophone countries all over the world.

This time, I made the suggestion to Malcolm, and he accepted. So I’m removing all the books to which Orion now has ebook rights from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Orion has thusfar acquired something like 1000 titles, and their ultimate goal is to be as definitive as possible, so they’re publishing stepwise, not about to do everything at once, so my self-published versions of those ebooks will disappear for a while but reappear as Orion ebook titles, not just on Amazon, but on diverse retail sites all over the world.

Thusfar, Orion ebooks have already published and made available worldwide THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, AGENT OF CHAOS, and THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE, which have replaced my self-published versions on Amazon, as well as first ebook editions of THE SOLARIANS, SONGS FROM THE STARS, A WORLD BETWEEN, THE STAR-SPANGLED FUTURE, and NO DIRECTION HOME.

Soon to come: THE IRON DREAM, CHILD OF FORTUNE, LITTLE HEROES, RUSSIAN SPRING, PICTURES AT 11, JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS, GREENHOUSE SUMMER, OTHER AMERICAS, DEUS X AND OTHER STORIES, and SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD.

All of the above on Amazon world-wide directly, or via my Gateway entry, from many other worldwide sources as well: http://www.sfgateway.com/authors/s/spinrad-norman/

OSAMA THE GUN--an ebook first English language edition

2011-07-04T11:14:00.001-04:00

THE ULTIMATE EBOOK PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT
and the reason why

by Norman Spinrad

In the first week of July, I’m self-publishing the first English language edition of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. This after having had more than a score of novels published in traditional ink-on-paper editions throughout the world.

BUG JACK BARRON got me denounced in the British Parliament as a degenerate, as a communist by fascists and a fascist by communists, and THE IRON DREAM was banned for eight years in Germany, but I knew OSAMA THE GUN would surely be my most politically controversial novel and very difficult to get published in the United States because of its politically incorrect sympathy for the devil de jour.

But I couldn’t help myself. Something like OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, but no one else had done it, so I felt compelled to write the novel by a kind of idealistic transnational patriotism and in-my-face personal experience.

I had returned from Florida to New York City late at night on September 10, went to sleep in Dona Sadock’s apartment on 9th Street only a few kilometers from Ground Zero, and woke up with the twin funereal clouds of the Twin Towers right in my face. Inside the restricted zone. NATO fighters circling overhead and glad to have them. Fury. Anger. Patriot rage. Up close and personal.

I was commissioned to write about it soon thereafter by the national French newspaper Liberation, and again to reflect on it a year later, when the Hole was still smoking and there were American troops venting righteous tribal outrage against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan. By then many writers were beginning to try to write fiction explorations of this historical discontinuity, and my reputation being what it was, I began to be asked why I wasn’t.

My response was always that what I was reading in that vein was far too small scale personal reaction, and I wasn’t interested in adding one more “how 9/11 changed my life” story even though it certainly had. If I was going to try to deal with the results thereof, I would have to relate the geopolitical matrix and the clash of civilizations to the inner consciousness of the enemy, of a sincere, dedicated, likable jihahdi.

Monstrous acts by terrorists in its name had painted the religion of Islam itself demonically evil in the eyes of multicultural secular western civilization and bin Laden had successfully caused America to transform itself into the Great Satan in the eyes of the Umma, to much of the world-wide Islamic community.

It seemed to me that what was needed was a novel that did not deal primarily with the personal reactions of Americans to this transformed reality and not only the complexities of the geopolitics, but a work of fiction that put readers inside that alien alien jihadhist consciousness, that allowed its complexities and moral conundrums to be empathetically experienced from within and understood, if not applauded. Sympathy for the devil, if not for his demonic deeds.

OSAMA THE GUN, set in a not-so-far future when the “Sons of Osama” have re-established a powerful Islamic Caliphate with Pakistani nuclear weapons and Arabian oil money, is the story of one of those sons of the martyr, a naive and sincere young man named after him, who becomes a Caliphate secret agent just to escape its closed confines to see the world, and stepwise finds himself becoming the reluctant hero of the title, as told to the reader by Osama the Gun himself.

Osama becomes a terrorist leader on a small scale by happenstance, a mercenary used by Islamic forces fighting an American proxy invasion in the oil lands of Nigeria, an iconic figure in the manner of “El Che,” and all the while charms the reader as a likable, sincere, idealistic and sympathetic human doing very unsympathetic things to the interests of the United States of America.

I wanted the reader to experience the difference between odious terrorist deeds done in the name of Islam and Islam as religion, but also the moral ambiguities in the relationship between them, between the true transnational brotherhood of the Hadj and the snakepit of Arab political nationalisms, between the innocently idealistic naiveté of the young man and the Islamic terrorist icon Osama the Gun.

I wanted reader to hate the sin, but love the sinner, or at least understand the monster’s human heart enough to acknowledge than he had one.

Which was why OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, and why, as one foaming at the mouth rejection letter predicted, no American publisher would touch this book, and no doubt why the editor who wrote it has thusfar been proven right.

So after I still couldn’t find an American publisher for OSAMA THE GUN after it was published in France, and after delving deeply into contemplation of the ebook revolution as detailed on this blogsite and experimenting with backlist titles and then an original short story, I screwed up my courage to take the experiment to perhaps the ultimate belief and self-publish OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original.

I’m doing this not just as experiment in ebook publishing, which it is, not only to rescue a novel in which I passionately believe from undeserved oblivion, but also because I feel OSAMA THE GUN should be read for reasons that transcend the publishing business, that perhaps have extra-literary dimensions, that in some way are moral reasons. And I can give it a try because advent of the ebook and the ebook reader is revolutionizing what publication means at warp speed.

OSAMA THE GUN the ebook will be priced at $7, as affordable as a mass market paperback book, at least until October 1. And then we’ll see, it is, after all, an experiment. No one has ever tried to launch a literarily and politically important novel as an ebook original before.

I may fall on my face. I may end up with an ebook best-seller. Most likely something in between, which in the end may help define what a “successful ebook” might look like in the electronic marketplace. A conventional ink-and-paper publisher might be emboldened to pick it up. Or not. Or the continuation of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebookn if successful enough might turn a conventional publishing contract into an offer I might then want to refuse.

And as part of the experiment, the first third of OSAMA THE GUN may be downloaded free of charge via the link to it on Scribd below and freely distributed, even while the complete novel is on sale.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion

If that doesn’t grab you, don’t buy the book.

If it does, here's where to buy it on Amazon:

or on Barnes & Noble

And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:

OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Free electronic copies of the entire novel for critical or journalistic purposes available on an indiviudal basis upon individual request.

English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English

2011-06-02T17:45:00.001-04:00

English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English

Watch the original English version of the commercial for the French translation, OUSSAMA, featuring Norman Spinrad:

http://youtu.be/JYhWG-QSyc0

And if that grabs you, download and read the portion of the novel free, from Scribd. If you're a reader, who then wants to read the whole thing, about all you can do now is shout out loud and spread the word.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion

If you're a publisher, the rights are available from Carole Saudejaud, in charge of rights for Fayard in France because world rights were sold to Fayard due to lack of courage at the time by American publishers:
csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

But electronic copies of the whole novel maybe be had directly from Norman Spinrad if you are a reputable publisher, critic, or journalist:
normanspinrad@hotmail.com

And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:

OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Now y’all know what to do, so do it!

commercial for ACAPULCO GOLDS--America's Premium Marijuana Cigarettes--sponsor of the BUG JACK BARRON SHOW

2011-05-20T16:07:00.000-04:00

Check out the commercial for ACAPULCO GOLDS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qePEvv9HViU

BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE

2011-05-17T16:59:00.001-04:00

BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE
a comparative ebook experiment

For some time now, I’ve been exploring and experimenting with the exfoliating frontiers of ebook publishing--the business end, the hardware end, the software end. You can read all about it on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE--the complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL and THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS IS NOW. (http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/)

But on the experimental side of the business end, I’ve been experimenting only with do-it--yourself, and confining myself to titles with computer files I could lay my hands on by hook or from crooks. Meaning whatever I didn’t write on a computer or couldn’t find a scanned pirated version of could not be made available.

But that meant that BUG JACK BARRON--denounced on the floor of the British Parliament, the basis of a famous unmade movie in Hollywood held captive by Universal, more or less in continuous print for four decades in France, nominated for various awards, published in more languages than I can remember, reprinted in more editions in the US than I can remember, generally considered one of my magnum opuses and certainly the most famous--could not have an ebook edition because it was written on a typewriter.

Until now.

(more on BUG JACK BARRON, the Bug Jack Barron show, the non-movie

The Bug Jack Barron Show

Bug Jack Barron the non-movie

But now I am experimenting with ebook publication through an independent ebook publisher. Reanimus.com is a start-up company whose service to the writer is to scan backlist novels when necessary, create ebook versions in the various significant formats, place them on its own online bookstore site and on the major sale sites like Amazon directly or through aggregators like Smashwords, and hopefully help to promote the product. This relieves the author of various tedious and perhaps only marginally doable tasks that he just might perform himself, as I have with the exception of the scanning process, but would rather not.

In exchange for which, the ebook publisher takes a percentage of the gross, or rather at least in large part, the net after the major retailer and maybe the aggregator have taken their percentages of the gross, leaving the author with something a good deal less than the 70% you can get when you do it all yourself, hopefully making it up in the volume, said hope hopefully not the punchline of a very old joke.

Reanimus pays no advances, but otherwise this is much like being a traditional paper book publisher and part of a potential business model for the future of epublishing not unlike the old publishing model for paper books, except that the royalty rates are much better.

So the question is, do I come out ahead by self-publishing or by doing it through an ebook publisher? I’ve put together and self published an original ebook short story collection called NEW WORLDS COMING consisting of later uncollected stories and Reanimus is publishing THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE, my first collection, considered something of a classic and once a book club choice, but still two short story collections, so a pretty good experiment designed to answer that question.

THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Hurrah-Golden-Horde-ebook/dp/B0050SS66M/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513178&sr=1-21

THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1001

Reanimus is also publishing the first ebook edition of BUG JACK BARRON and that is something else again. A novel of a certain historical literary significance, and forty years after its first publication perhaps of more realtime political significance than ever. Published in most of the world’s major languages, still in print in several of them, including English, currently in an Overlook small press edition after a long strange trip through many other editions down through the years.

But the Reanimus edition is a first ebook edition actually published by an ebook publisher, making BUG JACK BARRON far more widely available than Overlook could with a trade paperback, and at a cheaper price too. What will happen? Quien sabe? That’s why it’s an experiment. And one the results of which should tell us something about the possible future of ebook publishing and/or ebook self publishing.

BUG JACK BARRON ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Bug-Jack-Barron-ebook/dp/B0050SS00E/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513942&sr=1-20

BUG JACK BARRON ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1002

And whether I just might take the ultimate experimental step and one way or the other publish a novel never before published in English in an ebook first edition. Way out there, and scary, but I’m thinking about it. And so is my publisher. And what happens with BUG JACK BARRON just might help us decide.

That novel is the notorious OSAMA THE GUN and why it is notorious and presently unpublished in English you can see and hear on my YouTube video series of the same name.

OSAMA 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/21/nkVgVlz0TuY
OSAMA 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/19/JnbxxBgo0eY
OSAMA 3
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/16/1nT15yiY_PE
OSAMA 4
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/15/6SaVnlJNQdc
OSAMA 5
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/11/1CVL6Qtvdb0

A VIABLE AND JUST BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE EBOOK AGE

2011-03-31T14:56:00.000-04:00

   A VIABLE AND JUST BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE EBOOK AGE
   by Norman Spinrad
   past President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

   Hubris, or not, I’ve been asked to write something like this by diverse interested parties, for the American publishing industry from top to bottom--the writers, the publishers, the points of sale--is in the middle stage of a deep crisis it cannot possibly survive in its current configuration.

   The times they are a-changing, the question of when will probably be answered after the next Christmas season as ebooks emerge at minimum as a major market force, over 20% of book sales is a conservative guess, so the answer to that one is soon.

   But into what is the existential question--for the writers who create the literary product, for the presently existing publishers and for the remaining traditional retailers at point of sales who rightly fear being evolved out of existence by the Darwinian mojo of corporate Goliaths like Amazon or Barnes and Nobel, let alone Godzilla Google.

   But unlike the question of when, the answer to the question of into what is not already pre-determined. What emerges from the shark pond and what sinks into the tarpits is in the process of being decided now, and we do have free will.

   That which best adapts survives, but vampire bats and urban sewer rats are as well-adapted as it gets, and the former are blood-sucking parasites, and the latter garbage eaters, and their engine of evolution is their prime directive, all-out slobbering and gobbling greed. Evolution has no moral imperative, it just blindly follows the objective of one bottom line or another, which, I suppose, is as good a definition of greed as any other.

   Up to a point greed drives upwards and onwards. But when greeds collide, it’s feeding frenzy in the shark pond unless the players realize that any stable order has to have survival value for the collectivity in question, that null sum games eventually destroy themselves. Which is as good a case for the evolutionary practicality of economic justice as anything fancier ponied up by Karl Marx.

   So it behooves writers, publishers, agents, writers’ organizations, and so forth to reach a collective consensus for a business model for the ebook Age, and it’s not going to be any more viable than the business model that’s disintegrating now unless it factors justice into the cold accounting equations. Otherwise the only winners will major best-selling writers, Amazon, Google, and maybe Apple, because the Big Teams are going to enter the game sooner or later.

  What goes around comes around, and the brick and mortar bookstore chains having decimated the independent bookstores, are now disappearing themselves, for with the demise of Borders, Barnes & Noble is the sole major book store chain remaining and it’s been closing stores and sucking in its gut and not exactly guaranteed to survive in any but its online incarnation.

   Barnes & Noble had long had a direct catalog business which more recently migrated online where it became a pretty feeble competitor of Amazon because Amazon was way ahead in the ebook market with the Kindle, which locked its ebooks into it with a proprietary format, ala the favored business model of Steve Jobs.

   But Barnes & Noble chose the ePub format for its ebooks and that is an open standard, and not just for the Barnes & Noble line and its Nook. The Nook will read a few other open formats as well, and most of the other ereaders will read ePub books. So here we have two strong but quite different business models competing--the vertical monopolies of Amazon/mobi/Kindle/ and I-Pad/ Apple and the open market format based on ePub and semi-universal ebook readers.

   And together, they are changing the power relations between writers and publishers ultimately in favor of the writers, to the point where if publishers don’t change the ebooks rights clauses in their contracts, they will be committing seppuku.

  Publishers have been demanding control of ebook rights and the lion’s share of the proceeds since before there were ebooks or proceeds, and now it really is a deal breaker. Their contracts presently call for giving the writers between 15% and 25% of the proceeds from ebook sales.

   But Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow any writer, previously unpublished or blockbuster best-seller, to sell their own ebooks directly on their sites and set their own prices within certain parameters. And such self-publishing writers get 70% of the price of every ebook sale not the 25%, which seems to have evolved into the so-called “industry standard.”

   Compare the numbers for an ebook put on sale directly by the writer at $9.00 and the same ebook put on sale by a publisher at say $12.95. In the first instance, the writer makes $6.30 on each sale, in the second, through a publisher and the “industry standard” about $3.25.

  Talk about greed! The publisher takes about $3 a copy for whatever it does to enhance the sales of the ebook, which, as many writers than not have unfortunately discovered, much more often than not amounts to exactly nothing.

  Nothing? publishers will now exclaim. We pay for the production of the paper books, the shipping, the promotion, and we have to eat the costs of returns and remainders! And we pay 10-15% royalties on hardcovers and about 8% on trade paperbacks out of what’s left. If we’re so greedy how come our balance sheets are not exactly flourishing?

  And they have a point. But only when it comes to the economics of paper books. When it comes to ebooks, once the marketing copies are uploaded to Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, and so forth, there are no production costs. No printing and binding costs, no shipping or warehousing costs, no returns, nada. The publisher collects 70% of the cover price, not what in the paper world would be 40% or 50% after the author’s royalties and the discount to retailers. After the set-up of the online sales points, which costs virtually nothing but some computer time and hassle, it’s all pure profit, and everything stays in cyber print forever.

   I’ve done this all by myself with backlist books that had no offers from paper publishers because of some complex tax rules which make republishing anything that’s not going to sell several thousand copies a year economically non-viable. No such problem with my self-published ebooks of previously paper published novels. I’ve been at it for less than a calendar a year thus far, making hundreds of dollars a month not thousands, which is still thousands of dollars a year for keeping titles that otherwise would disappear alive for as long as anyone wants to read them.

   When you think of a century or so’s literarily worthy novels out there in limbo because golden oldies can’t compete for finite rackspace by selling only hundreds of copies a year instead of thousands, and when you consider that electronic rackspace in cyberspace is free and infinite, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know that ebook publication is going to be the eternal afterlife of the vast and vastly growing backlist literary legacy because the way things have evolved, there is no other viable alternative business model for its survival.

   Right now these are the main spoils over which publishers and writers are contending. The publishers have long since imposed cute contract language that gives them control of ebook rights at 25% of the take for the writers as long as the book is “in print” and defines “in print” as “available for purchase” including as ebook downloads, and therefore effectively meaning forever.

  The publishers win this one for the moment. But the literary legacy will never be the dominant profit center of publishing, this is just about the future of the past, and this is the kind of victory that does not sweeten the atmosphere when the power balance shifts in epublishing in a broader sense, when a certain subclass of writers realize that it’s now coming into their hot little hands as the game moves into the main arena.

  That one is about the future of publishing.

  Let’s say you’re a major best-selling author on the Steven King or Danielle Steele level. You’ve just finished a new novel without a contract because you’re rich enough not be need an advance to finance the writing of it, but you’re greedy enough to want to make as much off it as you can. Who isn’t?

   Let’s say that it’s far enough in the near future so that ebooks are roughly half the book market. Let’s say that a hardcover would go for $30 and an ebook for $10. Let’s say you took a big advance from a publisher at the cost of agreeing to that 25% of ebook sales. To make the calculation simple, let’s say the novel sells a million hardcovers and a million downloads. At 15% of $30, you make $4.5 million on the hardcover. At 25%$ of $10, you make $2.5 million off the ebooks. Total take $7 million.

   But what if you sidestep the traditional publishing industry and self-publish for $10 an ebook at 70%? That’s $7 million on a million ebook sales alone. And you still own the paper publishing rights. Can you not then make a deal for those volume rights alone with a publisher for a lower advance or even no advance and still come out way ahead?

   The top ten or twenty best-selling authors won’t need publishers. They can hire a computer geek to do the setting up for a grand or two and another grand or two for the online “cover art” and that’s it. They’re already brand names, and in the ebook age, national net pr would be relatively cheap and easy to buy from hired guns.

  Advances? Who needs your stinkin’ advances, Random House and Simon & Schuster?

  The answer, of course, is most everyone else, including, of course, yours truly. Divide all of the above by 100. At 10,000 sales at 15% of $30, I’d make $45,000 on the hardcover, at 25% of $10, $25,000 on the ebook . Total take, $70,000 for maybe an average a year’s work.

   Same $70,000 if you self-publish and sell just the same 10,000 ebooks for $10 at 70%. But you still own the paper volume rights, and anything you can get for them is gravy.

   A successful mid-list novel published in the traditional manner won’t make a writer rich but it will at least for a year elevate you into the dwindling middle class, ditto for just the ebook sales.

   But divide that by two and you get the 5000 hardcover sales which is the average brute reality for the majority of paper novels these days and 5000 ebook sales which seems like blue sky at the moment. Total, $35,000 for a novel’s first year take, at which level a writer does need advances to keep going without a day job.

  So the superstars would lose money by swallowing the publishers’ deal-breaking demand for 75% of ebook proceeds instead of self-publishing, and the paper publishers lose the top of the best-seller list unless they either raise the already onerous advances to the superstars, or up their percentages of the ebook take to make themselves attractive again. The top stars have them by the shriveling family jewels.

   At the bottom end, the publishers still have the literary proletariat by the gonads, it’s accept the greedy ebook rights clause in the contract, or no contract. No advance, no deal, if you don’t like it, tough shit, it will be, and you’ll be in it.

  So what else is new? It’s always been that way, and it always will be in the lower levels of the minor leagues. That’s why it’s the minor leagues. But it’s also why it can only be a minor profit center for any major publisher virtually by definition. The true existential question resides in what happens to what is presently called the “mid-list” when the major best-selling authors are lost to the traditional publishers.

   The traditional publishing industry will shrink and its publishers will have to survive on so-called mid-list books, and may be able to if they play their cards realistically. “Mid-list” has come to mean anything not aimed at the best-seller list, but I’m using it to mean books that can sell something like 10,000 to 20,000 hardcovers and ebooks combined, books without the hope of even the lower end any best seller list, but that are profitable and can earn out large enough advances to keep the authors in the middle class by writing full time.

  These are the writers the old line publishers will need to keep if they are to retain commercial relevance, and these writers and their books are going be their future if they are to have one. These writers can easily self-publish too, but the down and dirty economic reality being what it is, most of us are not usually in an economic position to trade away up-front money for higher royalties later.

  So there is a mutual self-interest here, and this is where economic justice becomes pragmatic. In the real world to come, the old line publishers will not be able to afford to keep successful mid-list writers away from ebook self-publishing with bigger advances, since times are already tough and tight-fisted as it is on the balance sheets as the old order collapses.

   So the old-line publishers must offer the writers they need to retain a more just percentage of the ebook proceeds. 50% would be a nice symbol of true partnership in the trenches.

   50% would raise up the banner of communal solidarity to replace 25%’s Jolly Roger of the publishers. The writers reduce their share of what would be their 70% of ebook sales if they self-published by 20% and cede it to the publishers, the publishers meet them more or less in the middle by cutting their share of ebook money by 25%, but retain the rights to the title as long as it is still really selling some minimum number of copies a year in paper or ebook form.

  In return for which they front advances and remember what the job of being a publisher once was and of necessity return to doing it. Time was, publishing was an artisanal enterprise, and while editors might have seldom been overweeningly dominant, they weren’t as subservient to BookScan numbers, publishing committees, and the sacred bottom line as they are now.

  The work had an esthetic literary end to too, editors had a lot more to say about what their houses should acquire, a lot more freedom to follow their instincts and tastes, and at the literary and even practical nuts and bolts level, were teachers, and could be artistic collaborators.

   The business level had always been a Darwinian arena but over the last decade or two, it devolved into a Catch-22 situation, where the big best sellers who least needed it got most of the advertising and pr money, and the mid-list which needed it most got bupkis. This made a kind of ruthless economic sense when publishers owned the rights to the best sellers, but when ebooks turn the authors thereof into their own free-standing corporations dealing directly with point of sale, that business model is gone with the electronic wind.

   So the old line publishers that survive are going to live and die with what is now the mid-list because it will have to become their major profit center when authors of the top end best sellers go into business for themselves, and ditto literary agents because the best seller authors will do better hiring lawyers, pr services, and computer geeks at fixed prices than if they were paying 15% commission on their grosses.

   The good news is that the same electronic revolution that will lose such publishers their superstars, upon whose titles most of their advertising and promotion budget was spent because there was no way to buy national advertising for anything else that made economic sense, now can, and must, spread it around more widely via the online media, where you can get real national coverage at affordable expense for good mid-list titles.

  This is not the worst case scenario for the traditional publishing industry, this is the best case scenario. It survives by nurturing commercially viable non-best sellers, and giving the writers thereof a more just ebook deal:

   50% of all ebook proceeds, advances up front as before, and some sales floor under which ebook publication no longer counts as “in print.” And who knows, some writers who come up to best sellerdom through this more just system might just feel the sense of loyalty presently in short supply between writers and publishers and stick around for the paper volume rights at least.

   This is the business model publishers, writers, their agents, and writers’ organizations should be seeking to establish out of enlightened pragmatic communal self-interest.

   Those who adapt survive. Those who don’t could find themselves facing the worst case scenario:

   Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple can easily afford to pay 70% of ebook cover prices to any writer who wants to self-publish because it costs them exactly nothing to garner their 30%--no publisher’s cut, no shipping expenses, no returns, no acquisition costs. Money for nothing and the product they’re selling is free.

  What if one or all of them and maybe even Google later decided to pay advances on ebooks selected to be featured in some kind of top list on their sites, competing with the traditional publishers dollar for dollar on all professional levels, while continuing to pay 70% royalties on ebook sales and offering to sell print on demand editions with traditional volume royalties?

  Why they would become publishers themselves, now wouldn’t they? Publishers with a new business model that would either force traditional publishers to give up ebook rights entirely on anything worth publishing at all or out of existence completely along with the brick and mortar bookstore chains already reduced to one and become collectively a vertical monopoly.

  Do traditional publishers really want that to happen?

  Do writers?

  Think about it.

   But not for too long.

   The Great Wheel turns, and we turn with it, those who do not will be crushed beneath it. Those who adapt will survive.

   end

QUARANTINE--an epub experiment

2011-03-11T13:15:00.001-05:00

   QUARANTINE
   a little ebook experiment with a little ebook

   Sometimes you find yourself writing a story that you know you’re going to have trouble publishing in a magazine no matter how well told because it’s too dangerously plausible, besides which it’s way too gross. I enjoy writing in that mode while in the act, and worry about what I’m going to do with the result when the thing is finished.

Curiously enough, while I can’t say that it’s all been quick and easy, sooner or later I’ve always gotten the stories I’ve wanted to see published purchased for magazines or original anthologies, and if I waited long enough for the right karmic moment, it would probably arrive for QUARANTINE too.

But hey, it had bounced from a finger in the face first look to The New Yorker, down the steps of major sf magazines to the penny a word sub basement, and to tell truth about it, I wasn’t surprised.

  After all, QUARANTINE is the story of a terrorist attack on New York using a genetically engineered virus that spreads ambiently and gives the entire population of Manhattan Island, tourists and all, uncontrollable diarrhea. Worse still, this isn’t surrealism or satire, the biotech is all too plausible, and uh, this is what it would be like, like it or not, folks.

No way around it, shitting is a major determinative factor in QUARANTINE. No doubt that this sort of ruthless non-violent attack would not be a cit-com custard pie, but really rubbing our faces in it.

Be that all as it may, from experience I was certain that there were readers who enjoyed this sort of stuff, and sooner or later the right ass would be placed in the right editorial chair. But it might be quite a bit later, by which time magazine fiction in any medium might have dwindled beyond the event horizon.

And as you may have noticed if you care about such matters at all, the magazine publication of short fiction in general is more than halfway to the tarpits already. In the wider world, with the exception of weekly short stories in The New Yorker, there’s already not much left beyond “little magazines” that tend to pay in author’s copies or not at all. Not that long ago, speculative fiction magazines were the proud last bastion of the Anglophone short story, but there are less than 50 issues a year of such “major” sf magazines left, and “major” these days is less than 30,000 a month, and what is peeking out of the Cretaceous undergrowth are idealistic online magazines yet to evolve dynamically viable business models.

But we are well into the ebook revolution evolution now, and a business model which adapts to it can maybe allow the short story to live long and the authors’ thereof to prosper, after all.

Quien sabe?

I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!

So here’s the little experiment:

As in the macrocosm of the novel, so perhaps a cozy microcosm for the short story, a sweet little literary ecological niche.

I’ve put QUARANTINE, a 9000 word novelette on sale as epub original for sale on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/QUARANTINE-ebook/dp/B004RHB5VU/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1299861471&sr=1-19) and Barnes & Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/QUARANTINE/Norman-Spinrad/e/2940012183972/?itm=2&USRI=Norman+Spinrad ), pricing it at $3 even to make the calculations something easy to do in my head.

At $3 an ebook, my cut is is $2.10 a download. So even 500 sales would net me about $1000, which would already be more than all but a couple three remaining magazines would pay for a story, besides which it can remain available permanently rather than whisked off the stands in 30 days inside a magazine issue.

That’s the business end. A magazine with a circulation of less than 1000 copies is a dead duck, but if a writer sells 1000 copies of a short story for 3 bucks each, it’s $2000, and if you could keep even that level up regularly, it becomes once more possible to make some sort of living writing short fiction exclusively.

The literary payoff for writers and readers and the relationship between them would be freedom to write whatever you wanted to as long as 1000 people were willing to pay 3 bucks to read it for writers, and freedom of choice for readers.

In the music market these days, listeners are buying more and more individual songs and fewer and fewer albums. So why not short stories?

QUARANTINE would seem to be the perfect experimental guinea pig. Certain to gross out, disgust, and/or outrage a far greater percentage of middle of the bell-shaped curve of a mass audience, but just the sort of thing that arouses pleasure for the very same reason in a certain niche readership.

The question this experiment seeks to answer is how many readers is that? If this can work for something like QUARANTINE, it can work for all sorts of fiction by all sorts if writers, and if it does, the short story could teleport itself from condition terminal into an unexpected golden age.

Will it?

Quien sabe?

That’s why this is an experiment.

HOSPITAL TIME SLEEP DEPRIVATION

2011-02-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

   Having spent 22 days sleeping in the Memorial Sloane Kettering cancer hospital as a patient and then sleeping beside Dona Sadock who was a patient in the Mount Sinai hospital both in New York, I have been forcibly struck by both hospitals’ cavalier disregard for the human need for a proper night’s sleep.

   Mind you, these are elite institutions. Sloane Kettering has a well-deserved reputation as the best cancer hospital in the world, with the inevitable occasional exception, the doctors, nurses, and nurses’ aids were all first rate, and even the food was quite good, and the same could be said for Mount Sinai..

   But both hospitals quite literally torture patients with the sort of sleep deprivation techniques used by the CIA, the Mossad, and the interrogators at Guantanamo. In the wee hours of the morning--4:00 AM, 5:00 AM--you are abruptly awakened to have your blood pressure and temperature taken. Maybe you succeed in falling asleep again, only to be awakened 20 minutes or so later to have blood taken, after which maybe replenishing the intravenous infusions, and then doctors’ rounds, whatever, so that by a civilized hour like 7:00 AM you have been repeatedly awoken several times.

  After a few days of this, you’re chronically sleep-deprived to the detriment of your general health and of course your recovery from whatever you’re in the hospital to be treated for. If you’re savvy enough to realize this even though the doctors and nurses don’t seem to, you may try to compensate by going onto “Hospital Time,” trying to go to sleep by 9:00 PM or so in order to catch 5 or 6 hours of real sleep before you’re rousted for the first time in the very early morning, and by the time you leave the hospital, you’re both sleep-deprived and throughly zoned without leaving your time zone of origin.

   Inquiries reveal that this counterproductive practice is SOP at most hospitals. Complain about it to doctors or nurses are answered with a shrug and the explanation that this is just the way it is, like it or not, unhealthy though it certainly is, Hospital Time is an ingrained facet of hospital culture.

  Obviously it damned well shouldn’t be. It makes it harder for patients to recover, tends to increase hospital days because of the additional strain on the health of patients, and therefore also contributes to higher medical costs than if patients were simply allowed proper time for uninterrupted sleep.

  So two simple and reasonable suggestions for hospital administrators:

  1)Let the day start for patients no earlier than 7:00 AM. Forbid them to be awoken before then for anything short of true necessity.

2)Combine all routine morning taking of various vital signs, replenishment of intravenous infusions, and so forth into one continuous visit, so that if the patient do manage to get back to sleep again, they are not woken up again and again at short intervals.

  Far from increasing hospital costs, it will reduce them by speeding recovery timed , or rather not impeding them with chronic sleep deprivation. It may even make doctors and nurses more alert and competent by allowing them better sleep cycles too.

  My Dona generally recovers from minor illnesses by long sleeps, sometimes as long as 15 or even 24 hours. I’m just not able to do this, but I wish I could. A good night’s sleep may not always be the best medicine, but sleep deprivation is always metabolic poison.

PERCHANCE TO DREAM REDUX

2010-12-14T14:31:00.000-05:00

   PERCHANCE TO DREAM REDUX
   by Norman Spinrad

       from NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE

  I had a truly extraordinary dream last night, extraordinary in part because of its very ordinariness. In this dream, I was a freight broker. My job, or rather my business, was to serve as middleman between companies that had freight to ship and shipping companies.

   I sat in a small office in front of a computer and telephone bank taking orders from the manufacturing companies I serviced--what they were shipping to where, the weight, whether they wanted to pay a premium for speed or trade off slowness for low rates--and then making deals with shipping companies to fulfill them. I made my living by taking a percentage of the shipping bills for setting the deals up.

   That was all. That was the whole dream. That was the boring ordinariness of it.

   What made this dream extraordinary was that in the waking world I had never even heard of such an occupation as “freight broker,” let alone what a “freight broker” did, nor had any prior interest in learning anything about how shippers connected with shipping companies.

   This seemed to be what I can only call a “knowledge dream,” a dream in which you learn something you couldn’t have known before in the waking world, indeed even cared about, but which you take back into the waking world with you.

   Knowledge you can verify or not in the waking world, thanks to Google, easily enough. So just before I wrote this, I did. I googled “freight broker.” There were many, many sites that came up, but the top of the list showed that the business I had dreamed existed, that the business model was exactly what I had dreamt it was, and that the occupation was indeed called “freight broker,” and you even had to have a license that called you that to pursue it.

  How was this possible?

   You tell me!

I’ve had two other somewhat similar dreams before. In one, I was a major league basketball coach, something I of course knew existed, and the NBA did interest me, but I had never had the slightest fan boy interest in becoming a basketball coach, and knew little about what one did in detail, and have still never done waking world research to find out.

   The first time I experienced a “knowledge dream,” it was like watching a movie, not being the lead character. D-Day in World War II. German troops in Normandy were watching an outdoor film about a cobra woman of some kind.

  An American glider commando unit came down among them, and though they outnumbered the Americans, they freaked and ran.

   I woke up and something moved me to try an experiment, to try to re-enter the dream in the waking world in front of the typewriter and see what came out. What came out in this half-in half-out state was detail.

   These German troops were elite commandos led by Otto Skorzeny, who had previously led them in a daring raid to snatch Mussolini from the Allied Forces who held him and set him up as puppet Duce in Northern Italy.

   Crack troops.

   But they broke and fled in terror of an inferior force

  Because the unit emblem on the gliders was a cobra.

   Well, I had written THE IRON DREAM, after all, and in my researches had come across Skorzeny’s dare-devil rescue of Mussolini. But could Skorzeny’s unit been in Normandy on D-Day? Could they have been watching a film about a cobra woman? Did such a film even exist at the time? Was there an American glider unit with a cobra as its ensign?

   Could I verify these details in the waking world or knock them down as dreamtime fantasy? This being a dim distant era before the advent of googling, I wrote about this dream in a piece called “Perchance to Dream” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,” asking the readership to assist me in my inquiries.

  The results were more letters in a shorter period of time than I had ever experienced before or since. From my point of view, the results were ambiguous. Someone knew that there had been an American glider unit involved in the D-Day assault with a cobra ensign. There was a cobra woman movie. No one knew where Otto Skorzeny had been at the time.

  But the unexpected result was that I learned that many people had “knowledge dreams” of one kind or another and welcomed the invitation to tell their stories. The magazine got so many interesting letters that they asked me to write a follow-up piece, which I did, and called “Perchance to Dream Revisited.”

   In it, I mused that maybe these kind of dreams were leakages from the dreams of other dreaming people. After all, consciousness itself, waking or dreaming, is an electromagnetic phenomenon on the deepest level, so there might be occasion transient broadcasts among consciousnesses in the dream state, actual knowledge drifting about in a kind of collective dreamtime quantum soup.

  Interesting stuff, or mumbo jumbo, that was as far as I could take it.

  Until last night’s knowledge dream of being a freight broker. This dream had been all detail. It hadn’t been interesting at all, it had been boring, as if the dream of some freight broker somewhere who had been at the job way too long the day before. And this was the age of googling, and these details could be verified in a few minutes with foolish ease, which I did.

   A textbook case.

  Proof positive, it seems to me, that knowledge was transmitted into my dreaming consciousness from someone else in the collective quantum subconscious, or whatever it may be.

   I have long believed that there was an essential union between the dream state of consciousness and the creative waking state and probably most writers and artists might agree with that.

   But knowledge? Unwanted knowledge? From where? From whom? How?

  Any bright ideas out there? Any similar experiences?

The mantra, as it were, of my novel HE WALKED AMONG US is “what is, is real.”

And whatever these knowledge dreams are, they are certainly real phenomena. I proved it to my satisfaction this morning.

a review of MEXICA in La Bloga

2010-11-27T12:26:00.001-05:00

A review of my novel of Cortes' conquest of Mexica in a Chicano-centric blogsite by the novelist Ernest Hogan. Not just a rave, but personally very touching. And politically significant.
review of MEXICA in La Bloga

THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS IS NOW

2010-10-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

   The eBook revolution has been proceeding at warp speed towards the next inflection point, namely the 2010 Christmas shopping season when perhaps a dozen ebook readers will be out there competing with the Kindle, the Sony, and the Nook, which themselves have been moving towards Universal eBook Readers, thanks in large parts to all sorts of free download ebook reader programs, which will convert many formats into other formats, as long as you download files, some pirate files included, onto your computer, to files that are readable on various ebook readers.

   Amazon has one that allows you to read Kindle’s mobi format on your PC. The Nook already will read pdf, Word, and rtf, though they’re not downloadable directly from Barnes and Noble, and you have to input from your computer using a USB connection. Ditto, more or less, the Sony eBook reader. There’s an ebook reader called the Kobo which will be out in time for the Christmas feeding frenzy that appears to be able to possibly download and read eBooks in multiple formats without passing them through your computer to make the match. And if it doesn’t, it’s a good guess that some other new eBook reader or readers shortly will.

   And if you’re willing to do it through your computer, you can do it now. Open Office will do it, something called Calibre eBook Management will do it, Mobipocket Creator will convert a variety of formats into the Kindle’s mobi, and there a probably more that I haven’t found or even looked for, since these three do the job easily enough.

   What this means to readers is that right now, with a little simple computer processing, they can purchase eBooks from any online retail outfit in any format and read them on a single eBook reader. And probably sooner than later, perhaps via 3G or 4G phone networks and or WiFi, you won’t have to do any converting yourself, your single eBook reader will be able to download and read everything from everywhere directly.

   When it comes to business models, there is chaos. Major traditional publishers have grabbed control and a share of the take, sometimes even higher than 50%, and they are as often as not charging prices comparable to trade paperbacks, screwing readers and writers in roughly equal measure. To make it even more chaotic, there are what I would call “aggregaters,” adding a middleman to the chain connecting writers to retailers and dipping their own wicks accordingly.

   Smashwords is one, Kobo is another, and there are others, some of them dubious operations. Here’s how it works:

   A publisher uploads ebooks to an aggregater. For a piece of the publisher’s action, the aggregater converts the upload into several popular formats, and “publishes” them, which is to say acts more or less like a wholesale distributor, to retail outfits like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, among as many other online retail eBook bookstores as it can manage. Other publishers may sell directly on their own websites.

    Interestingly enough, what with a profusion of retail outlets offering works in a number of formats to the point where even established publishers feel they may have to distribute to them through aggregaters, the retail outlets like Amazon and Barnes and Noble can’t demand exclusive sales rights to eBooks and so they don’t.

   What this means to writers, more or less established writers at least, is that they are one step away from the catbird seat. Amazon has for some time allowed anyone to put anything that meets certain standards--format standards, not literary ones--on the Kindle store, and Barnes and Noble has just started doing it too. Ditto the aggregaters, the sleazier ones functioning in effect as electronic vanity publishers, and the really sleazy ones trying to sell you “services.”

   I’ve been moving at warp speed too, along a very steep learning curve, with the help of people teaching me who have made suggestions via comments on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE, my website, or email. Some of them comment under handles like “Anonymous” so I can’t thank them here because I don’t know who they are because they don’t want me or anyone else too either. One who put his name out there is Mike Cane, so a belated tip of my propeller beanie to you, Mike. A few others, and particular one, have given me an advance course in the technical end and are so secretive they don’t even want heir handles made public. So thanks to you too, at least you know who you are.

   Some of them are probably “pirates,” though from what I’ve been learning and how I’ve been pondering it, I’m not so comfortable with the tag any more. “Pirating” of books began before there were even such things as ebooks or ebook readers. The “pirates” scanned actual books into files and put them on freebie websites. No money was charged for downloads, and the market for actual books wasn’t significantly harmed, because only dedicated geeks would want to read whole novels on computer screens or Palm Pilots and the like, and if you printed them out, by the time you figure in the cost of paper and ink, paperback editions cost less than the unwieldy manuscript that would be the end product.

   In those days, the “pirates” really could only be idealists doing it to preserve books from oblivion as Gutenberg was doing for public domain titles, and while it was illegal, it was in effect a public service to the pirated writers. That’s the way they saw themselves, and that’s how they righteously defended themselves, and for those who have been around long enough, still do.

   But the advent of ebooks and ebook readers at least potentially changes the game. True DRM software in theory prevents illegal copying in violation of copyright but there are copies in several formats to be had and experienced hackers can get around that and maybe even put on the Web programs that will allow anyone to do it. And once there is an unlocked copy, it can be duplicated ad infinitum.

   And with ebook readers becoming commonplace now and sooner or later coming to dominate the book market, real harm can be done. There are people out there who strongly believe that copyright protection is wrong and feel morally obligated to act accordingly.

    If you’re looking for a solution, I don’t have one now,but I can suggest a possible amelioration. Chasing these hackers to Vanuatu or Russia or Romania is futile because their only address is in cyberspace. Somehow writers and readers and “pirates” are going to have to come to some sort of unstated concordat. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe it’s been happening for a while. I find it interesting that the only titles of mine that I’ve gotten from pirate sites thusfar have been books that were written either on a typewriter or dead word processing software, meaning that they had to be scanned. So if writers and “pirates” could meet each other halfway the problem might be at least mitigated.

    “Pirates” would only produce their illegal copyright violating ebooks from books that have to be scanned, in return for which writers, writers’ organizations, and their lawyers would just let it be.

    A key here is pricing and that’s what puts even moderately well-known writers and particularly those with “web presence” potentially in the catbird seat. So here’s my business model in incrimental steps. I became my own publisher for selected works.

   First I put long out of print backlist titles on Amazon and Barnes and Noble at prices competative with what the non-existent mass market paperbacks would cost, no more than $8.

   Then I published two original collections, one of previously uncollected stories, the other of critical essays-- “ebook original first editions” and priced them even lower.

   I collect 70% of the sale price, meaning from $2.10 to $5.60 on every sale. Try to get that from publisher or aggregater!

Now I’m trying a quatum jump experiment. As far as I know, the first time that a writer of reputation has launched a self-published ebook original first American edition of a major novel.

   The novel is MEXICA. The definitive story of Cortes’ conquest of Mexico. The novel was published in Spanish in Mexico where it’s been a best seller. There is a film adaptation in the works in English by El Uno productions in Los Angeles. The novel was written under contract to a British publisher and published in the British rights area, but it bounced all over New York, and I and my agent were unable to find an American publisher, the general rejections being on the grounds that American readers wouldn’t be interested in an historical novel about the key event in Mexican history, this in a country where there are at least 40 or 50 million Mexican-Americans fluent in English whose very culture and ethnic identity were the result.

   Finally, in angry desperation, I allowed the Brits to export small numbers their edition to the US. And the novel is now completely out of print in English, including an ebook version done by the British publisher and reverted.

So now I’m offering a first American edition as an ebook on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and maybe, as warranted, elsewhere. I’m pricing it at $9, way below the purchase price of what was the disappeared British ebook.

And here are links to my retail book pages:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Maybe this is blue sky or a Hail Mary, maybe it will become an ebook best seller. For sure it is a cutting edge experiment. On the other hand, follow the numbers:

   $6.30 for each copy sold. $6300 per 1000. 3000 would bring $18,900. 1000 hardcovers would bring $2500. 3000 hardcovers, a median sale these days, would bring $7500.

   Not much to lose and mucho dinero to gain, compadres!

Not to mention that the conventional book rights are still mine to sell and should this experiment really work out well, publishers who rejected MEXICA the first time around would be lining up to make a deal if I was prepared not to be too greedy.

A long shot?

Maybe.

But if it works, the future of ebooks will indeed be now, and the power will be in the hands of the currently struggling community of writers.

        end

The complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL, parts 1,2,&3 in order

2010-09-20T15:48:00.000-04:00

          (note: for your convience, here’s the complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL
           in one post. Also, since parts 1, 2, and 3 are thematically interconnected to say the least,
            if I’ve got this right, the comment section here should bring together all further
            comments on all of them.)

                             THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL
                                         part one--The Cold Equations
I know I’m going to make an enemy or two or more with this, many writers in the same position have kept their mouths shut about it publicly for fear of being blackballed. But I’m approaching 70, after 4 decades and over 20 books as a published novelist, I haven’t been able to find an American publisher for MEXICA, a best-seller in Mexico, or OSAMA THE GUN, just published in a major way in France by my major French publisher Fayard, so I don’t have much fear left since I’ve already been screwed in the United States by the Death Spiral. And I just at least temporarily slammed death’s door into the Grim Reaper’s face, which does give you a kind of fatalistic existential courage, and I’m the guy who put the words into Julius Caesar’s mouth in THE DRUID KING:
“We’ve made an enemy of someone who it would have been much better to have had as a friend.”
And so you have. And if you don’t yet know who you are, you soon will. So fuck it, and on to the barricades!
                                                      ###
Among themselves, writers already have a term for what corporate conglomerate publishing in conjunction with the major bookstore chains, all two of them, and something called BookScan, which not at all incidentally is an arm of the Nielsen corporation which runs the TV rating service, has done to writers, readers, and the literary culture and biz as a whole in the United States.
                                  We call it the Death Spiral.
Here is some recent correspondence between me an an editor who I have very good reason to believe is being totally sincere and honest about POLICE STATE, a long treatment for a novel of no projected great length.
“Norman-
Thanks for sending the attached, which is a tremendous piece of writing. In an honest world, I could publish Police State in a second and the NY Times type critics would line up to rave about the book’s virtues.

In this world, I’m afraid it’s just not a book I could get support for, so with much regret, I’m going to have to pass. Like He Walked, via the French publication and your online avenues, the Police State will gain its audience regardless and someone in the US will eventually find a way to champion the novel as it deserves.
In the meantime, thanks very much for the read which again, is truly impressive.”
       I’ve made this treatment freely available on the Net, but here is the URL again on my blogsite NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE so that you can judge for yourself whether he was whistling Dixie or not:
       click for POLICE STATE treatment

                          #####

“I'd be curious to know how such a positive and apparently sincerely praising opinion ends up as a rejection. In other words, what gives in this current publishing world that results in such a paradox? The knowledge of what the hell is going on might prove useful in the future. Or the present.
                       Regards,
                          Norman”
Not having been born yesterday, and having been three term President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, having written a book about the business end of writing called perhaps excessively hopefully STAYIN’ ALIVE, I pretty much knew what the answer would be, but also being a sometime journalist, I wanted confirmation from an independent source.
                                 ######
“Norman-
The problem really lies with your sales track. The books, unfortunately including He Walked, just aren’t selling. Thus, at this point, the only way a book like Police State could be published effectively is if the absolute head of a publishing company took a personal interest, and elected to spend the 10’s of thousands of dollars in co-op money it would take to get a decent number of copies into the marketplace. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen here.

I wish I could help. Power in this day and age in terms of “cutting edge” fiction has (as I’m sure you’re aware) largely left the hands of conventional publishers. Rather, the guys who are making it now are doing so off of their web presence, having established themselves as counter-culture figures at large on the net.”

In other words, here is an acquisitions editor displaying passionate literary enthusiasm for a novel proposal he is not only being forced to reject but is self-censoring himself by not even bothering to try to get it through the publishing machinery, in part because he knows he will fail, and too many failed efforts to champion books on literary grounds that don’t make it through the cold equations will damage his credibility with the publishing committee and/or the aforementioned honcho or honcha if there actually is one and in the end might cost him his job.

What cold equations?

The cold equations of the Death Spiral.

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to net.”

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120....

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

And there’s a further wrinkle to it because what significant independent bookstores that still survive and the non-speciality outlets like WalMart subscribe to BookScan and have access to the Death Spiral numbers too and act accordingly. If there’s a book to order at all, because in many cases if the chains’ order to net equation zeros out and they don’t order at all, the book in question doesn’t get published. Back in the day, I knew of novels that were commissioned, accepted, and paid for but never published because the chains didn’t order. Today BookScan prevents such expensive mistakes from happening by aborting them at the acquisition stage.

Voila, the Death Spiral. And I too am in it.

The aforementioned HE WALKED AMONG US only finally snake-danced its way through the Death Spiral machineries in the US after years of trying thanks to the mojo of my formidable French publisher, Fayard. But despite the great enthusiasm of the acquisition editor, thanks to the Death Spiral numbers which guaranteed it minimal support by its American publisher, the cold equations condemned it to a self-fulfilling prophecy, which in large part has made it currently impossible for me to find an American for the next novel I wrote, OSAMA THE GUN, published in French with panache and corporate enthusiasm.

Read the first third of the novel and judge for yourself whether the French knew what they were doing:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion-

Voila, the Death Spiral.

How, after four decades, twenty-five or so novels published to often glowing reviews, awards nominations, translations throughout the world, could I get sucked into this whirlpool leading down into American publishing’s version of Davy Jones’ locker?

Well, admittedly I have been something of a controversial writer, BUG JACK BARRON denounced in the British Parliament, THE IRON DREAM banned in Germany for eight years, called a Communist by Fascist sand a Fascist by Communists, OSAMA THE GUN admittedly being a red hot politically incorrect potato, and a lot of people have told me that I’ve been blackballed by the America publishing industry for being such a political punk and literary bad-ass.

I’m not that paranoid. I don’t believe it. When did controversy really ever have a negative effect on commercial viability?

Besides which, in the era of BookScan, book chain quasi-monopoly, and the Death Spiral, it doesn’t take a Village, it doesn’t take a Conspiracy. Just as “the only way a book like Police State could be published effectively is if the absolute head of a publishing company took a personal interest, and elected to spend the 10’s of thousands of dollars in co-op money it would take to get a decent number of copies into the marketplace,” a single such power at the head of a single major publishing house can easily do the opposite and do your commercial viability in all by himself by torpedoing a single novel.

The novel in my case being THE DRUID KING.
The publisher in question being lordly Knopf.
The head of Knopf being one Sonny Mehta.
Stay tuned, literary blood sport fans, for part two of THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL.

                   THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL
             part two-- My own publishing Death Spiral

Naive? Moi?

Hey, I learned the business of publishing from the gutter up as a 24 year old anonymous wage slave in the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. I’ve been president of two writers’ organizations. I’ve written a whole book on the publishing industry. I’ve been called a Communist, a Fascist, an anarchist, a punk, a bastard, an asshole, and a prick. But one thing I’ve never been called is naive.

Now I have to do it to myself.

Boy was I naive about the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf!

Boy was I naive about its maven, Sonny Mehta!

This is not only going to be a sad story, it’s quite embarrassing to have to tell it.

While living in Paris, I wrote at least seven drafts of a film about Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and the Gallic leader he defeated, Vercingetorix under the direction of writer producer Jacques Dorfmann. This was a major French national epic, which was released as VERCINGETORIX in France and DRUIDS everywhere else. In my opinion, even while I was writing them, every one after version three was a deterioration.

The reviews of the film were merciless and it bombed big time, so I cashed the checks, licked my creative wounds, and thought it was a closed chapter in the story of my career as a writer. But my good friend Richard Shorr had read my third draft screenplay, and when he saw the film his blood boiled. He told me that, whereas what had been shot was drek, it was a masterpiece and should not been lost. "You've got to turn it into a novel!" he insisted.

I had never novelized a screenplay, myself or anyone else's, and loathed the whole concept. “No way!” I told him.

"Read it and tell me that!" Richie demanded.

When I did, my own blood boiled. Richie was right. The idea that this version of the story would be lost forever infuriated me.

But novelize a screenplay, even if it was my own....?

Shrugging, I sent it to my book agent in New York, Russell Galen, who effused to the point where he compared it to Shakespeare, but said, how am I supposed to market a novel on the basis of a screenplay for an already released flop? And asked me if there was non--genre editor high enough up in publishing who might know my work well enough to make this impossibility possible.

I really didn’t know. I am not making this up.

Well, I said, I think there’s this guy who was an editor at a secondary science fiction paperback line I met a couple of times back in London in the 1960s when my novel BUG JACK BARRON was getting me denounced in Parliament, a fringie of the New Wave scene, who I think now has some kind of editorial job in New York. He would probably be familiar with my work at least by reputation, every editor in London certainly was at the time.

“What’s his name?” asked Russ.

“Sonny Mehta.”

Russ did a take.

Sonny Mehta?!

You really don't know that Sonny Mehta is the honcho of Knopf and probably the most powerful publishing executive in New York?

Uh, no. But a good and reliable friend who will not be named here for fear of possible retaliation had told me that Sonny was an okay guy when we were introduced back in Swinging London. What I only remembered much later, was that he had added: “but of course not to be trusted."

And there was a certain synergy, because as agent for the estate of Philip K. Dick, Russ had a relationship with Vintage, a subsidiary of Knopf, and its publisher Marty Asher. Sonny apparently handed off to Asher with whom Russ negotiated a $75,000 advance from the most prestigious publisher in the United States, the most I had ever gotten.

Ah yes, the literary high life! Or so I thought

I had a lot to learn and a lot of naivete to lose and it was going to cost me very dearly.

Asher insisted on a contract clause paying out a large portion of the advance upon my showing him 200 pages, like a schlockmeister Hollywood producer of old cracking the whip over a screenwriter ensconced at studio expense in the Garden of Allah motel who had to prove he could churn out the pages.

If this had been presented to me by the usual suspects, I probably would have vented my ire and blown the deal. But Asher, a naïf himself when it came to originating a novel because Vintage was a reprint house, genuinely seemed to have no idea that this was a grave insult to an author of over twenty published novels who had never even failed to deliver one on time.

Besides this was my shot at the Big Time, he was speaking for Knopf and I had no choice.

Or did I? There was a deal with Time Warner UK, a British publisher which was paying out a decent signature advance. And I had always felt that going back to rewrite before completing a draft was a creative mistake, and showing raw partial first draft was both dangerous and unprofessional.

So thanks to my British publisher I did have a choice. I could put the creative process first. I could just about afford to write a complete first draft before showing anything to Asher. Surely he would be pleased at seeing a whole first draft, something much more than the contract called for, something which could then benefit from his creative editorial input.

Talk about starry-eyed naivete!

Arrogance was no surprise at this level, but I was not prepared for editorial ignorance. Asher was not pleased with the first draft I had turned in. He thought it was sloppy.

Duh.

Of course it was sloppy. It was first draft. I’m not sure he ever quite got the concept of first draft, being mostly a reprint editor. For when I asked for his editorial input, I was told that he didn't want to comment until he had seen a rewrite of the whole novel. Like a low-end Hollywood producer, Asher had just wanted to see pages as proof that I wasn't goofing off.

In like West Coastal manner, it was made clear that Knopf/Vintage would cut me off and reject the book on the basis of what I hadn't wanted to show them in the first place unless I convinced Edward Kastenmeier, Asher's right-hand man, that I would and could take his direction.

In show biz terms, I had to pitch a rewrite to get the first draft stage pick-up to do it and the money that would then be owed me if it was. At this game I was well-schooled, so I had little trouble slinging the necessary manteca to convince Kastenmeier to tell Asher it was okay to pick up the option.

This was enough to tell me that while Kastenmeier couldn’t edit on the creative level to which I was accustomed--having previously had very good luck and learned much from the likes of David Hartwell, Michael Moocock, Nick Austin, and so forth, who were proficient in that art and knew that was an art--he might be good enough to be be useful in making the transition to my first historical novel in terms of letting me know when I was putting in or leaving out too much local color, or slipping into anachronistic modern vocabulary, imagery, and metaphor. At least he wasn’t the producer’s schmuck nephew. I took the rewrite notes and I went back to Paris and went to work.

Meanwhile my friend, French director Diane Kurys, had met the French Ambassador to Mexico, Bruno Delaye, who was an admirer of my work. I had done events for cultural programs of the French government in France and New Caledonia, Bruno wanted to meet me, and so he arranged for me to do likewise for his embassy in Mexico.

One of these events was a press conference, and when a writer does a press conference, he's always asked what he's planning to do next, and off the top of my head came an old passion to write the definitive story of Cortez’ conquest of Mexico. The next day it was all over the newspapers.

Well why not? It was to become MEXICA, the novel I would write after THE DRUID KING, and my British publisher made a deal for it on short outline.

I finished the second draft of THE DRUID KING and sent it to Edward Kastenmeier two months before a planned trip to New York in September 2001, and made an appointment to go over it with Kastenmeier on September 12th.

You do remember what happened on September 11th?

Crazy at it may sound, on September 12, I kept my editorial meeting with Edward Kastenmeier. Midtown was functioning as if everything were normal . Nothing could have seemed crazier than that, right?

Wrong again.

Kastenmeier had marked up the manuscript sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, as if he was a college teacher and I was a student. He had run paragraphs together, rewritten sentences attempting to bend the prose of an historical novel closer to his style-deaf concept of standard modern English. Worse than useless, much worse. When I dared to mildly complain, he hautily proclaimed that “you’re working with an editor at KNOPF (I could hear the capital letters), not Tor (I could here the miniscules).” Things being what they were, I held my temper well enough to refrain from telling him that if this novel were at Tor, I would be being edited not by the likes of him but by David Hartwell.

Yet despite the amazing arrogance on display, he had so little confidence in his own editorial judgement that he had had his assistant reading ahead of him and also marking up this mess in a different handwriting.

It was an editorial process that made even doing the last rewrite of script to the order of Jacques Dorfmann during a total eclipse in Bulgaria (I am not making that up) seem like a session with Maxwell Perkins. I was constrained to debate virtually every sentence with Kastenmeier, who would not deign to admit what I well knew--that he had run all those paragraphs together to reduce the page count and therefore the retail price of the printed book. After all, we are KNOPF, we do not stoop to such grubby commercial considerations. Sure you don’t.

Buildings on either side us were evacuated because of bomb threats and then reoccupied. It went on all day and into the evening, for I could not let Kastenmeier leave until the nightmare task he had inflicted on me was done and I could escape with what was left of my sanity if not my respect for the creative editorial level at Knopf or at least the Vintage imprint thereof.

I returned to Paris and put together a clean final draft of THE DRUID KING. But I was then put through literally endless picayune rewrites that accomplished nothing but cost almost a year of my life lost in agonizing wheel-spinning. Time Warner UK, long satisfied with the novel, scheduled it for February 2003, while Knopf was wasting my time, while I and my agent, thoroughly exasperated, were on the verge of pulling the book and taking it elsewhere.

But I had gone through time-wasting hell and demeaned myself repeatedly in order to be published by Knopf. This had been not only the worst editorial experience I had ever had, it was worse than anything I had imagined even while dealing with bottom-feeding publishing low life for the Scott Meredith agency. I had paid a very heavy price in time lost, aggravation, swallowed pride, and creative ennui. I had bet a couple of years of my life, and I wanted the payoff.

For surely Knopf could not have maintained its prestige and power for so long if they didn’t have the publishing street smarts to publish novels as well if not better than any other American house, if they didn’t have max mojo with the chains, the review outlets, the cultural movers and shakers, and so forth, and I knew that while THE DRUID KING would be easy to resell as a finished novel for more money (more naivete but Russ Galen believed it too), I also knew that there was no other publisher in New York who could do the actual job of publishing a novel, as opposed to editing one, better than Knopf.

By then even a former like misty-eyed naïf knew who and what Sonny Mehta was. Or thought he did.

His formal name was Ajai Singh Mehta. Sonny was the, ah, son of a middle important Indian politician who had played a significant role in the struggle for independence from Britain. That’s why he was called Sonny and by the time he hit London and landed a job as a paperback editor he had kept it. In Swinging London, a woggish name might not be a problem, but not all London swung like a pendulum do, so it was probably a good career move.

Sony made his commercial bones by extracting SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH by famously extreme means from Douglas Adams and it became a big hit. Cut to much later, and he’s called to New York to take over Knopf from the sainted icon of New York’s Brahmin literary establishment, Robert Gottlieb, a circle in which this move by Bertelsmann of Germany, which now owned it through Random House, was not exactly appreciated. How Sonny Mehta accomplished this feat of magic, or who upstairs in dear old Deutchland might have done it for him, or why, I neither know nor can imagine.

But there he was above Asher and Kasteinmeier at Knopf and there his word was law.

So I politely prevailed on Sonny to bring the forever editing process to an end, order his minions to either approve and schedule THE DRUID KING as it was (which was not exactly massively different from how it entered this tunnel of tedium) or reject it and I’ll take it elsewhere. I was not so crude as to put it in words of one syllable, namely shit or get off the pot.

Never heard anything from Sonny, but soon thereafter Kastenmeier told me that publication of THE DRUID KING was scheduled for next May, a good mid-spring month, and that there would be a buy of a partial ad in the New York Times Book Review. But that proved to be the high point of the Knopf publishing process.

First I was sent a proof of the dust jacket. Knopf’s star art director, Chip Kidd (advice to all publishers--fire any art director as soon as their name becomes known to the public) had taken photos of some gnarly twigs and photoshopped them into the letters of the book title. Murky brown against black background, no other illo. Suck City in terms of rack pop. My heart sank when I saw it. But Kastenmeier professed to love it, and anyway had to because Kidd was a greater power than he was, and I was in the same position, only more so.

To give you an idea of how bad the cover really was, when the book finally came out, Dona and I looked for it in the new books rack. It wasn’t there! We couldn’t find it. Major panic!

We finally did. It turned out we had looked past it three times without noticing it. And I was the author.

It couldn’t get any worse, you say? Naive again. It already had.

When I got the spring Knopf catalog THE DRUID KING wasn’t there in May or anywhere else.

I called Kastenmeier, but we ended in effect crying “what the fuck?” together. He himself hadn’t know it had happened, or rather not happened, until he got the catalog. He was innocent. Asher was innocent. Further inquiries confirmed that they were telling the truth.

THE DRUID KING had been moved from May and into August by the only one who could have the power to do such a thing unilaterally without the editorial end even knowing, Sonny Mehta.

The two weakest months in which to publish a novel, are January when readers and their wallets are recovering from the Holidays as best they can, and August, the dog days before the hot September launches.

A cover even I couldn’t notice on the racks until it was pointed out to me. Unilateral banishment to an executioner’s month. And a cheaper British trade paperback out a half year before the Knopf hardcover edition. I knew in my gut that the novel had been torpedoed. If I needed further proof, I had given the Knopf pr people an air-quality tape of a half-hour interview I had done with Woody Allen. I am an ace interviewer and interviewee and maybe five minutes into a 30 minute tape, we were playing off each other. Many people who had heard it said it was the best interview Woody had ever given. The point of course was to use it as a mighty demo to get radio interviews and maybe TV. And we had flown to New York from Paris on our own nickel to do pr because Knopf was not offering to pay for it. Or for anything else including advertising. Nor did they arrange a single signing. Or radio interview.

Nada. Rien de tout. No New York Times Book Review ad. No ad elsewhere that I ever saw. A perfect nothing.

If I wanted to completely tank a novel, I couldn’t have done it better. No one could have because it was a perfect job. And if I wanted to tank a writer’s commercial viability and kick his ass down the cellar stairs into the Death Spiral, I couldn’t do it any better than having the top publisher in New York publish a novel and guarantee its commercial failure. Because no lesser house, and that’s every other house in the eyes of Sonny Mehta, would believe that they could make a writer viable again after Knopf had failed.

Including Knopf itself. Time Warner had already published THE DRUID KING in Britain, and bought the treatment for MEXICA, and I was well into writing the novel. The plan had been to submit the MEXICA treatment to Knopf as the option novel when the catalog came out, but when THE DRUID KING was moved to August, I decided to wait for a complete clean draft of MEXICA to be in the strongest possible position.

When the finished first draft of MEXICA was submitted to Knopf, they had 60 days to exercise their option. The option period expired without a word, a clear breach of contract, but we decided not to press them, since by then THE DRUID KING was going to be published in a month or two, and false hope that something magical, like a major review in the New York Times Book Review, said I might as well wait for a Deus Ex Machina. In October, my agent pressed Knopf for a decision and was told "we are not prepared to make an offer at this time."   There was no formal rejection nor was the manuscript returned.

Phone calls and emails to Sonny by my agent were never even answered. Meanwhile I found out that MEXICA had not even been read by anyone but Kastenemeier's lowly assistant.

So I sent an email to Sonny apprising him of the situation.

The only reply was the return of the manuscript.

In a technical way I have to admire the perfection of the hatchet job, though I didn’t exactly admire it at the time, nor entirely understand the full extent of the grave damage that it had done to my career. So here I sit writing this, years later, with two novels, OSAMA THE GUN that was well published in France, and MEXICA, well-published in England and a best seller in Mexico, that have not been deemed publishable in the United States. Because I am not publishable in the United States.

There are those who contend that I have been “blackballed” by some publishing conspiracy. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because all it took to render me commercial unviable was what Sonny Mehta did to THE DRUID KING and the cold equations of BookScan and the Death Spiral. And it would seem that no amount of literary excellence or hot thematic material can allow me to write my way out of it in my own country.

Nor, of course, am I the only writer with a long track record to be proud of up to his neck in the tarpit at the bottom of the Death Spiral, only perhaps the first to go public with it. Why? Because I’m approaching my 70th birthday? Because I survived a stomach cancer crisis that almost killed me? Because the remnants of the cancer might still do the job? Because if not me, who, if not now, when? Or, more positively, because my French publisher, and France itself, has my back?

Quien sabe? I don’t entirely. And if that’s a mystery, ask yourself, as I have frequently since the dark deed was done, why in hell did Sonny Mehta do this to me? Does not compute logically. Sonny caused Knopf to contract for THE DRUID KING on the basis of the screenplay. When I appealed to him to end the procrastination of Asher and Kastenmeier and either accept or reject the final draft of the novel, it was accepted. It was scheduled for a good month.

And then it was executed . And the ax had Sonny Mehta’s fingerprints all over it because, given the corporate configuration, no one else could have moved it to the execution month of August so unilaterally that even Kastenmeier and Asher didn’t know it was being done until after the fait accompli.

So why would he torpedo a novel he himself had caused to be contracted for and then rescued from purgatory?   What act of lese majeste had I unwittingly committed somewhere along the line against Sonny Mehta to cause him do it? What had I done that so pissed him off?

Did he even really know himself?

Maybe not.

I mean, imagine that you are Ajai Singh Mehta. You are a lapsed Sikh in predominately Hindu India, therefore a bit of an outsider. Your father is of sufficient prominence that in his shadow you are known as “Sonny.” You migrate to Britain where Indians are still wogs to much of the unreconstructed nativists there and that putdown becomes a pragmatic name change for an outsider.

You secure an editing position with a secondary paperback house doing science fiction and fantasy at a time when the New Wave of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and so forth, and yes, prominently Norman Spinrad, and the editors publishing the new speculative fiction are something of a fave rave in Swinging London. But your job is more or less to concentrate on the traditional stuff., so you don’t quite get to be one of them. You’re can’t really be a literary hipster. You’re still not an insider.

But somehow you break out with the Douglas Adams editorial feat, and somehow you end up in New York as the head of Knopf. But the replacement of the ultimate literary icon Robert Gottlieb by a one-time Indian paperback science fiction editor from Britain is not exactly greeted with hosannas by the high falutin’ literary establishment, so you’re a still something of an outsider to the snide hides who consider themselves the insiders.

But you’re also the most powerful publishing executive in New York, hah, hah.. Now they have to kiss your ass whether they like it or not.

So ever since he was a kid in India, Ajai Singh Mehta inhabited the fringes of the moving spotlight circle, not for any lack of skill, intelligence, ambition, or editorial talent, as you finally proved by making it to the very top as Master of the Publishing Universe in New York, Sonny, but because of a series of unjust condescending attitudes, truth be told you maybe still haven’t quite cleaned the last of that shit off your Gucci bootheels.

So yeah, Sonny, you screwed me very badly indeed for no rational reason, but I’m still a proficient novelist, a calling which at its higher levels forces you to empathize with your characters, and you’re now one of mine in this context, so I can’t really not empathize with your trajectory in the acquisition of the power to do it in the first place.

How can I not? BUG JACK BARRON, the novel that finally my bones, was rejected by the SF publishers in New York it wasn’t “real science fiction” and by the mainstream publishers because it was. It was rescued by Michael Moorcock and New Worlds in Britain, where it was notorious cause celebre enough to be denounced in Parliament and for my name to be mis-spelled in the newspapers all over the place when I was publicly denounced as a fascist by a communist, though mostly what shrieking descended was the other way around. So I had my 15 minutes and then some while at the time you weren’t getting any.

I’m still getting it in France, but in my own country I’m mostly widely known as the author of a famously classic Star Trek episode, and you got the power. If I were not the victim, as a novelist, I would have to acknowledge that your life story has had a thematic happy ending, certainly from the point of view of the hero of the tale, Sonny Singh Mehta.

Not that “Norman Spinrad” is more than a spear-carrier in that epic bildundsesroman of self-made transcendent transformations, but post facto I can see how you might have grown irefully weary at being asked to plunk your magic twanger one time too often by someone letting on that he knew you when, and thereby perhaps calling up one too many sense memories of what it was to be Sonny Mehta then in the mind of the current Master of the Publishing Universe.

Which is as far as I’m about to descend here from phenomenology into psychoanalytic channeling. The salient points here are that whatever motivated Sonny Mehta to so mortally wound my career commercially in the United States and are that had the power to do it, and that that power came as much from the current nature of the publishing business as from one particular man’s position at the top of the pyramid.

Without BookScan, order to net, near monopolies on the retailing end, and a conglomeritized industry where the great idioyncratic independents like Scribners, Random House, and yes Knopf, have become mere brand names owned by a scant handful of multinational corporations, a Sonny Mehta, running on whatever motivation, would still be able to assassinate a single novel by publishing it badly, but not the author’s ongoing career.

Or not for sure, anyway. Back in the day, you could write your way out of it if you were good enough by writing a novel great enough to be recognized as a great novel by a single editor with the passion and the leeway to ignore the previous strike-out at bat and swing for the fences. Back in the day, there were many more editors like that because there were many more independent major publishers, hence much more real competition on the acquisition end, hence as much reliance on analog editorial judgement as digital Nielsen numbers.

Unlike the current situation, you didn’t need to be a Sonny Mehta to pluck a winner out of nowhere and publish it to succeed, quite a few people had that positive power, and no one really had the negative power to tank a career by tanking a single book.

Good Lord, am I backing myself into a corner where I’m forced to conclude that writers would be better off in a publishing industry with more Sonny Mehtas? I guess I am. When there were more of them, when there was more real competition among them and their independent publishing houses, the negative power of any of them to do harm beyond a single book was limited and the positive power to magically rescue orphans from the storm was much more widely distributed.

Say what you want about Hollywood crassness, the money mavens out there know one thing the publishing industry seems to have forgotten. Half the movies that get made are going to lose money and the profit will come from the ones that are hits. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that much out, even though the most puissant computer program will never get it. It may even be that the publishing industry remembers that much.

But you’re not going to really know which is going to be which until you place your bets on your own best instincts and roll the bones.

The players in Hollywood know that that’s the nature of the game. The players in the publishing industry who might know it are an endangered species and those who do know it and have the independent power to act on it unilaterally may already be just about extinct.

             THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL part three--The Death Spiral of the Publishing Death Spiral

            “It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

So maybe I’m an incurable optimist, though herein I like to think that what I’m doing is looking ahead with a cool visionary eye and extrapolating accordingly, which, after all, is what I’ve been doing in the majority of my fiction for four decades or so, besides which (see GREENHOUSE SUMMER) the mutational future of the publishing industry is going to create both losers and winners, just like the warming of the planet.

   The publishing industry, with its order-to-net, and BookScan program, and returns, and warehouses, and so forth, and the resulting Writers’ Death Spirals, will not survive the next five years in its current form, and that’s a conservative estimate, the inflection point is more likely to arrive in only a year or two.

    The words “publisher” and “publishing” and “book” won’t even mean the same thing anymore at the other side of that singularity. Ebooks and ebook readers like the Kindle and the Nook are in the early process of beaming the dominant current publishing model into the tarpits with the dinosaurs and the audio cassette but it’s really a lot later than the CEOs of the “publishing industry” think or want to think. “Publishers” will also be distributers and the point of sale retailers, and “books” will be definable not as physical objects but purely as immaterial literary content.

   You want to read the handwriting on the wall, re-read the recent claim by Amazon that it’s now selling more ebooks than hardcovers. Even if it isn’t yet quite true, a subject of some dispute, it soon will be.

    You want some cold equations, consider that Amazon, Apple, and Google each are capitalized for far more than any conventional publishing conglomerate, none of them are “publishing companies,” but they’re all getting deeper and deeper into the ebook end, the tail that is even as I write this well on its way to wagging the dog.

    No warehousing costs. No shipping costs. No returns. No printing costs. And they’ve already eliminated both the wholesale distributers’ take and that of the retailers at point of sale. Amazon and Apple could even afford to give low-end ebook readers away to assure the economic dominance of their electronic goods and Amazon may be subsidizing the price of the Kindle already.

    Soon or later, maybe even right after reading this, Jeff Bezos, or Sergei Brin, or Steve Jobs, or all of them, are going to ask themselves why they should split the ebook take with “publishers.”

    Our web stores are the retail point of sale where we get paid immediately and directly. What the “publishers” do for us is manufacture the product we sell and front the cost. Or they did. With ebooks, they no longer manufacture a physical product and there are no more paper, ink, or press time costs.

    Do we really need them?

    Well they do buy the intellectual and artistic product from the writers. They employ and pay the salaries of editors to do this by exercising their literary and commercial judgment and by working with the writers to perfect the product. This is a necessary function, since without it, we’d be swimming in an infinite sea of amateur crap ourselves trying to play gatekeeper.

    But is there a reason why we can’t do this ourselves? Wouldn’t we come out way ahead if we just paid salaries to an editorial staff of our own to do the same jobs and kept 100% of everything minus royalties?

     Duh.

    But wait a minute! The publishers front money to writers in the form of advances to allow them to earn a living while they’re writing the books. And they pay editorial staffs. And the more commercially juicy the likely product, the larger the advance commanded.

   So what? There isn’t a publisher in the world with the capital and cash that we have. We can’t hire editors? We can’t afford to pay writers advances? We can’t afford to compete with what the “publishers” can and do pay out?

    Duh.

   There you have it. There’s the inflection point. When the ebook web stores become publishers themselves that’s the ball game. The entire traditional publishing structure, business model, industry, and reason to live, gets thrown down the willy hole.

   Only those who adapt will survive.

    For while the “publishing industry” as we know it cannot survive, individual publishers could by adopting the same business model themselves. Retain editorial staffs, compete with advances, set up their own web store sites to retail their ebook titles, rather than go through Amazon, or Apple, or any other third party online outlet, and likewise keep 100% minus royalties.

   The “retailers” become “publishers” and the “publishers” that remain are those that become “retailers” and since they’re all the same thing, someone has to come up with a new name for the industry. Call it the “book industry” maybe, since every company in it will be doing the same everything as every other, from the writer’s fingers on the keyboard to the customer downloading the book onto....

Onto what?

   Is there a catch?

   Yes there is. Greed. Would-be vertically monopolistic control freak greed.

As things stand now, Amazon’s Kindle is the best selling ebook reader and was at least originally intended to lock purchasers into the Amazon online book store by locking them into Amazon’s proprietary format, and hence its online bookshelves and of course at Apple, Steve Jobs’ strategy is even more strongly vertically monopolistic, as witness what the iPod and iTunes has done to the music industry

     Indeed he current major players seem to have learned their business models from Steve Jobs. Tie your immaterial artistic and commercial products to a format that locks customers into to their online stores, like iTunes, which the customers download onto hardware whose software you control, like the iPod and iPad. Or the Kindle or the Nook and whatever Google eventually comes up with.

   But this is going to be a transient condition as time and technology advance at warp speed towards something we could call the universal ebook reader. Barnes and Noble’s Nook uses ePub as its directly downloadable format from the B&N online bookstore, but via computer link you can already read RTF and maybe DOC files too, though not via direct download by 3G or WiFi connection, so already you’re not entirely locked in.

      The prices of existing ebook readers are coming down fast, with the Kindle and the Nook leading the price war, and by the Christmas shopping season, there will probably be something available for the magic number $99. And many smaller companies are beginning to market ereaders. And there are 800 pound hardware gorillas out there who haven’t gotten into the game yet--Toshiba, SanDisk, Sanyo, Nokia, etc. Hardware manufactures, some or all, or at least one of which, will steer clear of selling the ebooks and just sell ebook readers.

   That’s the next key inflection point. The universal book reader.

    The main difference between the universal book reader and readers like Kindle or Nook is that they can read all sufficiently economically viable formats. The same book reader will let you flit from Amazon to Google to Barnes & Noble to Project Gutenberg to whatever significant electronic book sellers there be, like a hummingbird from flower to flower, just as you do on the Internet itself.

   The tech is not exactly cutting edge wizardware. In hardware terms, a standard universal reader is something companies like Toshiba and Sony can mass market for a hundred bucks. That will be the el cheapo version, with a WiFi connection, and a decent enough browser to navigate the universal book bazaar, preloaded with the software to read just about everything on the immaterial shelves. Twenty bucks more gets you 3G too, kid. Hey, call it forty, and it’s also a cell phone.

     Nothing that couldn’t have been done with last year’s tech, it’s all there laying around to be packaged together into a universal book reader, with or without bells and whistles, that will be almost as ubiquitous as upscale cell phones because it will also be a cell phone, if you want to buy a fancy model, and the stripped-down model for under $100 if you don’t.

   That’s where the tech is taking the nascent ebook biz whether the current business model likes it or not, and nothing that doesn’t adapt to that evolutionary environment will survive.

   Chaos?

   You betcha!

   But what’s wrong with that?

   When I was first visiting France, all four of the radio networks were government stations, and no privately owned broadcasting was allowed. When I came back a year or two later, the government had made a drastic change in policy, and had deregulated radio broadcasting. But that’s all they did. They didn’t assign frequencies, there were no official regulations, the government deliberately created an evolutionary chaos, the idea being to wait a while to see what emerged from the Darwinian process and then sort that out.

   That kind of creative chaos is where the “book industry” is headed, and this is the United States, not France, so the government has nothing to with it. Okay, it’s going to happen whoever likes it or not, but will it be a good thing?

The answer, of course, is what it always is, what it always has to be, another question--good for who?

    Good for readers. With no more shipping, printing, warehousing, returns, or splitting the retail price with another entity, book companies won’t need anything like the capitalization and cash flow that publishers need now, so there will be many more of them and therefore real competition on pricing, since the real cost per copy amounts to nothing really more than the royalties paid to writers, and so the price of ebooks will come way down.

     They will be the mass market books of the 21st Century as paperbacks were of the 20th and priced accordingly, and like the obsolete mass market paperbacks, easily affordable upon publication by a mass readership including kids on modest allowances.

   Good for mass market ebook reader manufacturers not tied to the economic war over content, who will sell scores of millions of universal readers and benefit from economies of scale, bringing the prices of the universal readers down even further. Instead of a Death Spiral, a rising tide that lifts all boats.

   All boats?

Well maybe not. It’s going to be condition terminal for any company trying to hold on to the old vertically monopolistic business model of locked readers and propitiatory content formats, and no one is going to miss them. Goodbye to order-to-net determining print runs and distribution since there will be no print runs or economies of scale, since once in the computer system, every copy of an ebook costs the book company next to nothing save the writer’s royalty, and none of them exist until they are already sold, so goodbye to BookScan, rendered redundant, as they genteelly put it in Britain.

   Goodbye therefore to the Publishing Death Spiral. Every title will sell according to its own individuality, with the writer’s past performance relevant only to the sizes of the advances offered. Goodbye to the disappearing backlist, since anything ever published as an ebook will be available on a one by one basis forever.

    So it’s going to be much better for writers than the current configuration. The usual competition on advances based in part on the previous track record maybe, but the midlist and the backlist will be reinvigorated, because the only real gamble book companies will have to make is on advances, not manufacturing or distribution. There figures to be hot and heavy bargaining over the amounts of advances versus the royalty percentages, and what will replace the current standard contracts will probably be no standards at all but a wide range of contracts trading off advance sizes to royalty rates, a positively chaotic environment that will probably continue indefinitely, like Mao’s concept of permanent revolution applied to the thousand paths to the bottom line.

   Better days for writers, that is, for writers with some talent who somehow manage to stand out from the white noise static of all the hopeless self-published stuff that will inundate the Internet, and take it from one who worked in the Scott Meredith Agency fee-for-reading biz, 95% of such stuff will always be crap.

    This is going to be a bigger problem than piracy. Indeed in some ways it already is. Piracy is already a problem, but a technical one, combated by DRMs and whatever their evolutionary descendants will be, a forever war that will never be won or lost but that the book business can ameliorate and live with by whatever means necessary. But getting work of merit noticed by potential readerships who would enjoy reading it is a problem that is going to be much more difficult to deal with.

    It already is. Newspapers and magazines are eliminating book reviews. Literary criticism, in the broad sense of information on the contents of books before they have been read, is moving to the Internet at warp seven, where it too becomes fragmentary and amateurish by its very nature, as witness, for example, the “reader reviews” at point of sale like those on Amazon, the fan sites targeted at every conceivable flavor of fandom, and, hey, blogsites like this one which only require a computer and a connection for anyone to netcast their opinions.

   Democracy in action to be sure, and there is no one more fanatic than me about the indivisibility of the right to sound off given everyone by the First Amendment, as witness my commitment not to censor, edit, or reject any comments here, including the sort of anonymous attack dog screeds which infest free speech wherever it is found and which are the price one should be willing to pay for it.

   But how are potential readers supposed to navigate this chaos? eBook companies like the old publishers can always buy advertising, and some of them, by exercising righteous literary judgment on what they acquire, would be able to establish a reputation for a minimal quality as long as they kept to it, the acquisition end of editing. But if it buys like PR, and barks like PR, it is just PR, and anyone interested enough to seek after commercially neutral literary journalism in the first place will be sophisticated enough to know it.

    But without serious or at least seriously professional neutral reviewing that can be trusted to be at least that and comprehensive enough to cover the full spectrum, how to make a full spectrum of potential readers aware of what they might want to read if they knew about it?

    Well, there’s a monthly magazine in France called Lire (Read, more or less in English) that’s been successful at what it does for some time now, and what it does is attempt to review as much of what gets published each month as best it can, making the editorial judgment as to what that is. The reading public buys it because it trust it. Not because they agree with all the reviews, but because the coverage tries to be as universal as practical and because it is commercially neutral.

Okay, that’s France, but this is the USA, and this is the 21st century, and such a magazine would have to be on-line these days, where it would have to live by advertising.

    Or would it?

    Not if it were subsidized.

    Someone proposes to start an English language online magazine like Lire and pitches it to the book companies or maybe some of them come together and do it as a consortium. Pay a certain annual fee and your books get reviewed. If you don’t, they don’t.

      It doesn’t buy you a favorable review or prevent a reviewer from trashing it. If it did, the magazine would be worthless. It just gets your product reported on in respected electronic ground. Like consumer reports, but with edge and point of view to make it lively reading. And because it’s an online magazine, there’s no limit to how many books are reviewed each month except how many book companies pony up.

   What about getting those reviews written?

    Are you for real? There are hordes of published writers out there struggling to make a living, and while some of them might scorn “journalism,” very few of them, by the very nature of the beast, see anything amiss in reading a freebie book (see E-GALLEYS FOR BOOK REVIEWERS) and being paid a few dinners worth to write a short critique of it. Sure beats flipping grease burgers on the night shift or driving a taxi.

And this is far beyond my business expertise, but it seems to me that the price of an annual membership can be selected, modified, and maybe even stratified to sort the wheat from the chaff. High enough so that only millionaire self-publishers will pay it, low enough so that any serious small ebook company can afford it, which is to say those who can’t afford not to.

What might such a membership price be?

   Hey, don’t you remember, it was like the racing forms for the ponies, back in the day the Nielsen company had some rating service for what they called “publishers” that gave them writers’ track records and the current bookie odds so they could run software that did the handicapping for them, or some weird shit like that and the publishers were convinced they had to subscribe to it. But now that it’s gone the way of the dodo, and so have they, and the ebook biz is isn’t looking to piss away money for information on placing bets on what to buy, but it sure needs to spend it on something to tell the customers what they have to sell.

   That’s what we should charge to get books reviewed on credible neutral ground, a little less than Nielsen charged for their service back in the day, google it and find out how much they charged the suckers to subscribe to it, what did Nielsen call their racket...?”

   BookScan or BookScam, something like that.

OSAMA THE GUN--THE WHOLE STORY IN 5 VIDEOS

2010-09-16T09:42:00.001-04:00

I’ve been asked endlessly why I’ve not been able to find an English language publisher for OSAMA THE GUN for several years, so that my French publisher, Fayard, has published the first edition in French. So here, in 5 YouTube videos in order, is the whole story, more or less, including the long historical back story---

OSAMA THE GUN 1

OSAMA THE GUN 2

OSAMA THE GUN 3

OSAMA THE GUN 4

OSAMA THE GUN 5

Still looking for an English language publisher!

TWO NEW BOOKS AS ORIGINAL eBOOK FIRST EDITIONS ON AMAZON

2010-09-16T06:13:00.000-04:00

I've put several backlist titles on sale as Kindle ebooks, now I'm experimenting with launching two new books I've created myelf as ebook first editions--NEW WORLDS COMING, a new collection of my more recent short stories never before collected in book form, and A CRITIC AT LARGE IN THE MULTIVERSE, an ebook first edition of decade or so of my critical essays in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
Direct links to their Amazon pages below, from which it's an easy jump to everything else of mine on Amazon.

click here for NEW WORLDS COMING
http://www.amazon.com/NEW-WORLDS-COMING-ebook/dp/B0042JTNEO/ref=sr_1_13/184-7767465-8862715?ie=UTF8&m=AC2OY4L5JUE2O&s=digital-text&qid=1284629067&sr=1-13

click here for A CRITIC AT LARGE IN THE MULTIVERSE

http://www.amazon.com/CRITIC-AT-LARGE-MULTIVERSE-ebook/dp/B0042JT3MQ/ref=sr_1_12/189-2320591-7976037?ie=UTF8&m=AC2OY4L5JUE2O&s=digital-text&qid=1284630936&sr=1-12

PIRATING THE PIRATES

2010-09-03T17:49:00.000-04:00

                                    by Norman Spinrad

                The Death Spiral of the Publishing Death Spiral revisited

I had no idea that I was going to write this until some of the people commenting on THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL put two ideas in my head:

First, many people suggested I put my backlist books on ebook publishing sites. I googled round and about and found that Amazon offers the best deal. All Amazon requires you to give them is non-exclusive rights to sell your ebook in their proprietary format for Kindle. So that much indeed is a no-brainer, since these are rights you can’t do anything with anywhere other than Amazon, and they tie up nothing else.

Furthermore, you set your own sale price, and Amazon pays you 70% of the sale price if you allow them to adjust it as they might see fit, and 30% if you want to lock in your own price.

So far, so good.

But I, like many writers of a certain age, and even some who are not, wrote many of my backlist books on typewriters before the era of word processors, and later with now moribund programs and/or operating systems, and/or computers, and backed them up on floppy disks, even the real floppy 5 inchers. I was an early computer writer, starting in 1985, but my first computer ran on CPM, and I wrote on Wordstar. Later I went to Windows and Wordstar for Windows, and then to something that few people know about but should, Polyedit, a downloaded word processor out of Russia (http://www.polyedit.com ) much superior to Word and at about a tenth of the price.

The point being that I had no readable electronic files of some of my primo novels: THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, THE IRON DREAM, THE MIND GAME, THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE, CHILD OF FORTUNE....

All of which are now on sale as ebooks for Kindle on Amazon, plus a few others. Link:
(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=norman+spinrad&sprefix=Norman+sp)

How was this accomplished?

Not easily. But one of the commenters, a bit shamefacedly, to the extent you can be shamefaced in print, suggested I might try pirating the pirates.

I quickly saw the reasoning, and just as quickly the justice. I knew that there were some pirated electronic versions of some of my stuff because I had seen them floating around in the bowels of cyberspace, so I started googling up some research. It wasn’t easy, it was rather tedious, and there are dragons in those virtual waters. It was a steep learning curve, but I learned a lot.

I learned that there are basically three species of literary pirates. There are outright thieves in various countries out to make money by stealing copyrighted works and selling them, making it a relatively easy matter to buy.

Then there are many Peer-to-Peer torrent pirates who put on the pirate works in fast downloading special formats that you have to download and pay for their programs to read, who can gain access to your computer thereby, and whose files themselves may contain who knows what, and who therefore are to be avoided as the plague they are.

But there are also true idealists who believe they are performing a public service to both readers and writers by making books available for free that otherwise would have disappeared. You don’t have to agree with their ideal--and I certainly don’t--to admit that they are sincere.

What previously had kept me from experimenting with ebook self-publishing of my golden oldies was that I would have had to destructively scan paper copies at no little cost and hassle to myself or pay someone else to do it for me, and since I was, and to some extent still am, skeptical as to how much money I would get back from the investment, I didn’t want to make that investment without testing the waters first.

However, the pirates all have to do it in order to come up with ebook files in whatever format with books that did not previously exist in bits and bytes form.

So--pirate the pirates!

The Peer-to-Peer stuff is more widespread, but extremely dodgy, and what you might download would be difficult if not impossible to convert to some usable format like txt, Word, rtf, or pdf.

The bastard crooks who steal copyrighted works and sell them in one of the standard formats deserve whatever you can do to them, and they have no legal ground to stand on.

And the idealists not only have no legal ground to stand on but no moral ground either, since pirating their pirated versions of your copyrighted work and selling it yourself is only performing the same public service they are. It’s not really even worth your while to try to take their free illegal versions down after you’ve pirated them, at least by my lights.

The next step is the most tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating. You have to do a lot of fancy googling to find your own pirated works in usable formats. If you find them in pdf, you’re in luck, but don’t count on it. Mostly, the files are in html.

With Polyedit, you can download html files, and strip them to txt easily enough, but you end up losing format and gaining a real mess you’d have to reformat line by line. However, with Polyedit at least (I’ve never used Word) you can copy the html text straight off the pirate site and paste it into a Polyedit file in txt or rtf format and it’s quite usable.

Well almost. Amazon wants pdf. But again, with Polyedit at least, no problem. There’s a free plug-in called Primo pdf. (http://www.download.com/PrimoPDF/3000-10743_4-10264577.html?part=dl-10264577&subj=dl&tag=buttonhttp://download.cnet.com/PrimoPDF/3000-18497_4-10264577.html?part=dl-10264577&subj=dl&tag=button ) (or directly on the Polyedit site)You mark the text, hit the “convert to pdf” button, it does the rest, and there you have it, a pdf file that the Amazon program converts to its proprietary format, and, after going through their fairly simple process, puts it up for sale at your chosen price.

Well not quite, they put a $9.95 ceiling on what you can charge. But I don’t find that unreasonable at all. The ebook business is not going to really take off until the publishers get it through their greedy heads that ebooks have to be price competitive with trade paperbacks, or maybe mass market paperbacks. And these days, that’s something like $15 for a trade paperback, $7.99 for a mass market paperback.

So if you take a look, you’ll see that I’m not selling any ebook for more than $8, some for less. Do the math, or rather allow me to do it for you. At 10% of a $25 hardcover, your royalty is $2.50. At 8% of a $15 trade paperback it’s $1.20, at 10% of a $7.99 mass market paperback it’s $.79.

At 70% of an $8 ebook you net $5.60.

If, and it’s a big if, these things sell, it’s the revolution. The only way the old mainstream publishers will be able to compete for the works of reasonably well-known writers will be with advances, which Amazon and its ilk are not offering.

Not yet.

The questionable downside to all this is that when it comes to new work, at least for now, you have to forgo an advance to collect those 70% royalties, and nobody really knows how successful ebook first edition launches will be for now.

So I’m hedging my bets, which is to say, investing neither money nor time, testing the business model with backlist books. It’s work, it’s some hassle, but otherwise you’re risking nothing.

So go thou and do likewise.

Pirate the pirates!

If it works well, we can afford to buy each and every one of them a nice parrot to sit on their shoulders.

JERUSALEM FIRST

2010-09-01T11:01:00.000-04:00

JERUSALEM FIRST--JUMP STARTING AN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE PLAN
by Norman Spinrad

This is being written, or rather revised from an earlier post, on September 1, 2010, the day when Obama is convening the opening of the opening of the latest of the endless rounds of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations aimed at a two-state solution, in the hope that it can finally untie the Gordian Knot by proposing the previously unthinkable--that the issue of Jerusalem be decided first.

Does it take a lot of chutzpah to propose such a thing? You bet it does. But American presidents and their administrations since Jimmy Carter have been trying broker a peace deal for decades and gotten exactly nowhere, and the Obama administration, by arrogantly setting a one year deadline for a peace deal is cluelessly making the situation worse, potentially much worse.

It’s long past time to think out of the box.

Starting in 1948 and continuing ever since, Israel has been kicking Arab ass in one configuration or another on a rather regular basis. Historically, the Jews were a tolerated, disarmed, small minority tribe within overall Arab empires and caliphates, whose reputation and credibility as warriors was less than zero, regarded as pussies, not to put too fine a line on it. That in the 20th Century these outnumbered Jewish pussies proceeded to repeatedly kick the crap out of Arab military forces all by themselves is something that Arab pride has simply not been able to swallow.

So the fantasy has arisen in Arab political circles and on the so-called “Arab Street” (street rather than electorate because there are no freely elected Arab leaders who might fear losing an election rather than being overthrown by a revolution or coup)that Israel is a proxy of the United States, the military hegemon of the planet, and American backing is what has enabled it to perform such feats of derring-do. This is much easier to swallow without feeling inferior to what was once a vassal tribe under various forms of Arab rule.

This has led to the perception in Arab political and diplomatic circles and particularly among the Palestinians that the way to attain statehood is by pressuring their American masters to lean on the Israelis to cough it up against their own self-interest. Again, much easier for Arab machismo to take than accepting the necessity to find some way to convince the Israelis that it would be in their own national self-interest to do so.

Unfortunately, the Arab illusion that the way to negotiate what they want from Israel is via Washington has been encouraged by a string of American presidencies, beginning in 1956 with the Eisenhower administration which indeed did strong-arm Israel, Britain, and France into vacating the Sinai and thereby creating a precedent which has encouraged the delusion ever since.

Of course this whole pipe dream based on self-serving fantasy illusion is utterly false. For the United States, this is a geopolitical policy matter, for the Israelis it is an existential matter involving the country’s very existence. No amount of American pressure is going to force the Israelis to do anything they see as endangering that.

Emphatically including giving up their undeclared nuclear deterrent which insures that any country that tries to “thrown the Jews into the sea” or threatens to nuke Israeli population centers in the measurable future knows it will be vaporized before it can try it. Call it unilaterally assured destruction. It has and will continue, if not to keep the peace, than at least to limit the aims of warfare. For this, the ambiguity of a virtual nuclear deterrent is sufficient, and indeed desirable.

But Barack Obama has somehow been conned by the Arabs, or conned himself by swallowing Arab delusions, into agreeing to a clause in the set-up language of a conference aimed at turning the Middle East nuclear free zone designed to pressure Israel to join in by giving up its undeclared nuclear deterrent and thereby announcing its existence. Of course, the Israelis can’t afford to do that, and if pushed too far, might even decide that their best course is to go openly nuclear by setting off a demonstration blast or two or three in the manner of India, Pakistan, and North Korea, something which no one wants, and certainly no Arab country.

So that’s the current impasse. The Palestinians, a defeated people in an occupied territory, are trying to act as if they are victors, and will only discuss a solution that will gain them their sovereign state if the Israelis first treat them as victors by forcing them to make prior concessions to get them to the bargaining table. Of course the Palestinians are utterly powerless to do this themselves, and want the United States to serve as their enforcer.

Anyone who understands the logic of the souk knows how delusionary this is. The Palestinians want something that only the Israelis can give them and instead of trying to pony up something, anything, to give the Israelis a self-interest in making a deal, they do exactly the reverse. It’s like a beggar telling a merchant to kiss his ass or his alms will not be accepted.

So what should American policy be? For the same reasons that cops do not want to involve themselves in domestic disputes, the United States should do exactly the reverse of what Obama is doing, which is butt out, and make it abundantly clear in no uncertain terms that it is up to the Palestinians and the Israelis to negotiate a settlement among themselves. And indeed, with Sadat’s dramatic trip to Israel, the Oslo accords hosted by mighty Norway, and King Hussein of Jordan’s approach to Israel, only when the initiative has come from one of the principals has any progress towards peace been made in the Middle East.

You don’t make peace with your friends, you have to make peace with your enemies. And you have to grow up and do it yourself without Big Brother standing behind you with a baseball bat. Of course if bilateral negotiations reach a stage where binding arbitration is the only way to settle the final details of a deal, and both sides request it, the United States should agree to supply an arbitrator as a friend of the family.

Other than that, don’t call us, and we won’t call you.

But on the way out the door it would do no harm to simply propose a settlement for pressureless consideration by the Palestinians and Israelis.

Obama is not doing this, so here it is, and indeed much of it was on the table in 2000 when Ehud Barak placed it there before Yassir Arafat at Camp David under the watchful eye of Bill Clinton and Arafat turned it down because it was an offer too generous for him to understand and he was too blinded by his own machismo to realize that the Palestinians could never ever be offered anything better.

Two states, Israel and Palestine. By now, everyone on both sides who is not a nut-case extremist believes this is inevitable and even some who are. The main sticking points are borders, the so-called “right of return” of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, the disposition of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the final status of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian government in the West Bank is threatening a unilateral declaration of independence in 2011. If the current negotiations fail by then, they should go ahead and do it. And the Israeli government should then be the first to recognize the Palestinian state and support its admission to the United Nations. They should recognize it as the legitimate government of all of Palestine including Gaza, and support it in any effort to retake Gaza from a rebel terrorist gang calling itself Hamas. Indeed if possible this should be a deal quietly and maybe secretly arranged beforehand.

Then you would have two sovereign states which recognize each other as such and must settle their differences in a series of treaties. A non-aggression pact or even a mutual defense treaty. A customs union, perhaps a common currency. Agreed-upon borders and the status of what Jewish settlements would end up within Palestine.

After all, there are something like 1.5 million ethnic Palestinians living and working as citizens in Israel. If there can be Israeli Arabs, why not Jewish Palestinians? Maybe there could a voluntary dual citizenship offered to both minority populations. Jews who wanted to could continue to live in their homes in Palestine and maybe pay taxes there instead of in Israel, would benefit by working in a first world country like Israel and paying income tax at third world levels, and the Palestinian treasury would have itself a hundred thousand or more relatively rich taxpayers. The Palestinian Jews could commute to work in Israel or work in Palestine, and Palestinian Arabs could be allowed to go back to work in Israel as part of the deal. A trade that benefits both ball clubs.

The right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israeli territory is a deal breaker that Israel will never accept, but two sovereign states have the inherent right to determine their own immigration policies, and the Palestinians will just have to accept that, admit however many they choose to Palestine, and maybe negotiate some kind of monetary settlement. Which, alas, would probably need some contribution from the United States.

Leaving the intractable problem of Jerusalem.

You will notice that the issue of Jerusalem is usually mentioned last, as I have deliberately done here, as the most difficult problem to solve, to be tackled only when all the others are resolved.

Problem? Does it have to be a problem?

No. Instead of being a deal-breaker it can and should be a deal-maker, with a little thinking outside the decades-long box. A beau geste, a stroke of magnanimity like Sadat’s unilaterial flight to Israel that will break the ice, after which, everything else, will fall quickly into place.

The Israelis adamantly declare that Jerusalem must be recognized as the undivided capital of Israel. The Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as their capital but would no doubt be surprised and delighted to have Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Palestine.

As long as this is addressed as a problem, it’s the deal-breaker. But stepping back a bit and seeing it as solution that can be agreed upon by both parties up front, it is transformed into a practical, poetic, symbolic, and spiritual one that opens the path to a two state peace agreement between Palestine and Israel with brotherly kiss.

A solution that has always been hidden in plain sight.

Just divide the city up into arrondisments like Paris or boroughs like New York, each electing its own mayor as the Parisians have it or borough president as the same office is called in New York. These local borough presidents form an elected city council. The Palestinian government and the Israeli government each appoint one member of a tripartite executive and the third member is elected by the entire city.

Israel and Palestine both recognize Jerusalem as each other’s undivided capital. And their ministries and governmental offices are not confined to boroughs where their ethnicity dominates demographically but are scattered throughout the city, Israeli ministries in Palestinian areas, Palestinian ministries in Israeli areas, throughout the undivided capital of Israel and Palestine, hostages to peace and symbols of its existence.

The Israeli and Palestinian national parliaments could be housed in buildings facing each other across a new Peace Square with the other two sides dominated by a mosque and a synagogue.

There might even be an official parliamentary dining establishment in the middle of the square where Israeli and Palestinian representatives could mingle socially at mealtime.

After all, what’s halal is kosher, and what’s kosher is halal.

After all, Salaam and Shalom are only slight different spellings of a word that means the same thing in Arabic and Hebrew.

Which translated into English means peace be upon you.

VIDEOS ABOUT AND/OR ABOUT ME

2010-09-01T10:51:00.000-04:00

A site page with videos about me, made by me, me as vocalist, among other stuff, including a hour long tv interview interview of me and my very significant other, Dona Sadock. Some of this stuff I didn't even know existed.

At:
http://spysee.com/Norman%20Spinrad/12311/summary

a complete screenplay for my novel PICTURES AT 11--free!

2010-08-24T10:48:00.001-04:00

OK, this is going to sound crazy, and maybe it is. While rooting around in old files for something else, I found a complete and very good screenplay adaptation of my novel PICTURES AT 11, written about 10 years ago. The crazy part is that there's no name on it, and I think I wrote it, but I'm not sure.

All options on PICTURES AT 11 having expired, I own all film rights myself for sure, and no one else can do anything with this screenplay even if I didn't write it. If I wrote it, of course, the rights are mine. But if someone else did, and can prove it, we'd have to be partners. So if anyone out there did, let me know.

If you're a film producer, director, or bankable actor, this is a good screenplay whoever wrote it, and PICTURES AT 11 would be a winner at the box office these days because of what it's about. And the budget necessary to make the movie would be quite low by current standards, certainly less than $25 million.

Read or download the screenplay at the link below:

click here for complete screenplay of PICTURES AT 11

WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME--the opening act

2010-08-21T12:46:00.000-04:00

                       WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME
                          the opening act
                          by Norman Spinrad

This is the opening and set up of a novel called WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME, which is more or less self-explanatory, except that the rest of the novel, like the dream fragments below, are narrated in first person, that you, the reader are the viewpoint character, as you are in your non-commercial dreams, and that the book truly is a novel that tells a developing over all story, despite the fact that six of the dreams have been published as free-standing short stories in somewhat different form without reference to what you will read here in Bain’s World, Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Paraphilia, Fantasy Magazine and Pandora.
Despite this, I, and my French publisher Fayard, who will be publishing WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME in French translation in Spring 2011, are still seeking a reputable American and/or British publisher. The full text English of the completed novel available upon request, but only to publishers.

Link to the text of WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME--the opening act--on Scribd
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36214763/WELCOME-TO-YOUR-DREAMTIME

email Norman Spinrad: normanspinrad@hotmail.com

BOYCOTT DR. PEPPER, SNAPPLE, & MOTT

2010-08-18T12:23:00.000-04:00

    A CALL TO BOYCOTT ALL PRODUCTS OF THE DR.PEPPER SNAPPLE GROUP--Dr. Pepper, Snapple, Mott, etc.
       A report in the August 18th New York times on a strike by workers against the Mott apple juice plant in Williamson, N.Y. has set my blood to boiling. The union is fighting against a demand by the company to cut workers’ wages and benefits while making record profits.

      To quote a company statement:

     “The union contends that a profitable company shouldn’t seek concessions from its workers. This argument ignores the fact that...Dr. Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all its constituents....”

   To quote a union representative quoting a company representative:

   “He said that we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down. He said that there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs and they could hire any of them for $14 an hour.”

To quote a company representative:

   “We’d prefer that our employees return to work...But we’re prepared to continue operating without them.”

    Which is what they’re doing, running the Mott plant with “replacement workers,” better and more honestly called scabs.

    In other words of few obfuscating sylables, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, while making record profits, is demanding that workers at their Williamson Mott apple juice plant accept lower wages and reduced benefits for no other reason than they believe they can can get away with it because the unemployment rate in the area is so dire that they can hire all the scabs they need to either break the union strike or quite literally “render the union workers redundant.”

   There is far more at stake here than a strike in a single Mott apple juice plant. Many major corporations have layed off thousands of workers during the recession, resulting in higher profits off lower cash flow, and continue to lay off more workers even while their profit margins soar. What Dr. Pepper Snapple Group is doing is something even worse, but at least nakedly honest, putting the screws to their established work force to raise their obscene profit margins even more, and admitting that they’re doing it not because they need to in order to save the company, but just because the horrendous unemployment rate will let them get away with it.

   They can’t be allowed to get away with it. Because if they do, their action will become an encouragement and a model for similarly highly profitable companies all across the United States to do the same thing. Wages will be driven down, and therefore purchasing power. And the so-called “recovery” from the so-called “Great Recession,” a recovery that thus far has not “trickled down” from rising corporate profits to the population at large, will stall in its tracks.

   So we all have a stake in not allowing the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group to get away with this nakedly greedy immoral and in the end nationally counterproductive screw-job.

   Fortunately, collectively, we do have a sure means of bringing the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group to its repentant knees, which is precisely where it belongs. Dr. Pepper Snapple, as the name implies, produces the Dr. Pepper, Snapple, and Mott brands, national brands which are not only widely marketed, but which have entre, and frequently monopolistic entre, to public institutions such as schools and metro stations.

   I may be a small voice here, and I confess I don’t understand why neither the Williamson local nor the national union movement hasn’t yet done it, but conscience demands that I at least try to do it for them.

    So I am calling for a national boycott of all products of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group until their demands for concessions from the unionized workers at the Mott apple juice plant are rescinded and the strikers returned to their jobs at their previous wage rates. I am calling for all concerned parties to demand that Dr. Pepper, Snapple, and Mott products not be purchased for schools and public institutions, and that their vending machines be removed from the premises until Dr. Pepper Snapple sees the light of reason and mends its rapacious ways.

They will, you know, if a national boycott is even halfway successful, because the lost income will far exceed any cost-cutting benefits to be gained by running a single apple juice plan with cut-rate scab labor.

   Back in the day, Caesar Chavez’s Farm Workers Union was successful in unionizing crop pickers by calling for a national boycott of lettuce. The American people saw the justice in the cause and by their millions gave up eating a highly nutritious vegetable for the duration of the struggle.

Surely we have not degenerated so far as to not give up a brand of sodas and a brand of sugar-laden flavored water that contribute to the obesity epidemic for a while in order to defeat an even ranker and truly rapacious injustice. Vital for the national interest, and, considering what you would be giving up, good for your health too.

Boycott Dr. Pepper. Boycott Snapple. Boycott Mott.

Let’s get well by doing good.

THE SCIENTIFIC SHAMAN

2010-08-17T15:03:00.001-04:00

                               Alternate Medicines and the Scientific Method

There are many medical systems on this planet, some of them ancient, some of them new, more of them that not based on metaphorical systems. Only “Western” or “alliopathic” medicine is based on rigorous science. But many of the traditional non-western systems cure some conditions cure some conditions but not others.

Many of these cures work in practice, but not in theory. That is they do work, but not for the reasons the theory behind them contends, metaphoric shamanic systems that over centuries evolved them over trial and error, and some of these belief-based cures can do real harm. With the ones that do work, the shamans know they work, but are mistaken as to how.

So what is needed in the 21st century when all of these systems are competing for patients who can find practioners easily enough via the Internet, some of which are snake-oil frauds, others which really do have something to offer, are what we might call Scientific Shamans, at least generally knowledgable about the full spectrum.

The point of view the Scientific Shaman is that all medical systems and their prescriptions should be taken seriously, but everything in them should be passed through the filter of best current scientific knowledge.

Scientific Shaman are “Wholistic,” but not because the “believe” in anything or everything, but because they regard all of it equally with the same analytical eye. Scientific Shamans don’t just want to know what works, they want to know why. No magic. No mumbo jumbo. No metaphoric thinking. No faith-based “beliefs.”

For examples:

Vedic medicine successfully used the leaf of the rauwolfia plant to treat heart conditions, but for the wrong reason, because that the leaf was shaped like a heart. Molecular biology much later revealed that it worked because it contained digitalis.

Chinese acupuncture works very well indeed, in many cases better than alliopathic medicine, and while its chart of the flow of chi used to place the pins may be metaphorical, it’s older than science’s ability to chart the actual nervous system, but it pretty much parallels it, having evolved via trial and error over centuries rather than via instrumentation.

But Russian acupuncturists began ask why it worked, and via scientific method, related the accupuncture points to a fairly accurate layout of the nervous system, discovered that the Chinese system was generating microelectric impulses across nervous synapses, and began putting mini-charges across the needles to improve results.

Western alliopathic medicine (what MDs are pleased to call simpy “medicine)” also evolved over slow centuries of trial and error and developed specific potions for specific disorders long before it had any knowledge of the existence of bacteria and viruses or of anything going on at the molecular level.

   They don’t call it the “practice” of medicine for nothing.

Shamans in Africa, Latin America, Siberia, and so forth likewise evolved their cures over the centuries by trial and error, with all kinds of erronious metaphorical fantasies to explain why their cures worked.

Darwinian evolution, even in this realm, eventually weeds out what doesn’t work from what does, without the need to know how. It always works in practice given enough time, and needs no correct scientific theory to do so.

So the Scientific Shaman will use anything from any medical tradition that demonstrably works, without buying into any marketing myths purporting to explain why in terms of gods, demons, vapors, ley line vibrations, Mother Gai’s little helpers. If it works, it works, but the line of bullshit that the snake-oil salesman uses to promote it should neither sell the Scientific Shaman on it or discredit it.

The Scientific Shaman wants to know why something works, on the biochemical level, on the molecular level, on the bioelectronic level, at the very least, and maybe as it may turn out, even on the quantum level.

Why?

For one answer, walk into a health food store or a major vitamin shop, and you’ll see why on the shelves, crammed full of useless or even dangerous marketing nostroms, New Age potions, and “natural steroids” endorsed by Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds, buried within which are also the real and explicable deal.

Melatonin, for example, and it’s employment agains jet lag and insomnia. The biochemistry of this is well researched and nailed down as to dosages and timing, and not by vibrating ladies or slick pills pushers, but by Phd. biologists in the lab. It’s a hormone whose place in the biochemical soup of consciousness, sleep, and time-sense is well understood. It’s dirt cheap, and it’s in the public domain. Or you can buy patented proprietery molcules that mimic melatonin for mucho dinero and the enhancement of the drug companies’ balance sheets.

Vitamin C, for another.

Alliopathic doctors are prescribing synthetic interferon as a viricide against things like herpes and hepatitus, with mixed success, unpleasant side effects, and great expense to the patient and profit to the drug industry.

Vitamin C, straight ascorbic acid, costs next to nothing as long as you don’t go for rose hip extract or other such add-ons, and it catalzyes the body’s own production of interferon. Which is why in massive doses over short times, it can abort the common cold, and over longer time periods, suppress retroviruses, among other possible things. This is not anecdotal supported only by razzmataz, how it works on a molecular level was laid out by a Nobel Prize biochemist, Linus Pauling..

The Scientific Shaman has to know things like this, but also knows all too well that there are Great Pretenders out there in all medical traditions, and these days marketing cults for them too, high colonics and live forever potions, recreational drugs pretending to be cure-alls, guru diets and tv adds for drugs that cure diseases that had to be invented to sell them.

What works, works, and what works can come from the most disreputable systems or sources as well as the modern alliopathic medical machinery, as can things that fail to work or work disastrously.

So the only way for the Scientific Shaman to make completist, non-ideological, non-marketing, non-monocultural sense of it all, is to subject all of it to the same two tests:

Does it work?
Are there statistical studies at least that say so?

Or has the Scientific Shaman applied it and seen it work himself?

How does it work?

Statistical studies admittedly can be faked and individual successes could be lucky streaks, but it’s obvious that if you know how a chemical or a technique works on at least a molecular level you can be reasonably confident that it will work the next tim. Scientific elucidation can prove the positive as nothing else can.

The scientific method and only the examination of would-be shamanic cures can separate what works in each of them from what doesn’t by learning why what works works and what doesn’t doesn’t by learning why what works works on at least biomolecular level.

Scientific Shamans may not always be able to reach that level of explanation but long before they get to the biomolecular level understanding of what does work, they will have eliminated what really doesn’t, and know why it can’t.

There are things that work in all medical traditions, the millenial as well as the latest developments in cutting edge molecular biology, and there are things that don’t, or worse, and cultural turf defending, guruhood, religious beliefs, just plain fraud, all to often confuse the ill with smoke and mirrors.

But asking science why any of it works or doesn’t enables the utilization of the whole keyboard because scientific elucidation relies not upon belief or suppostions but demonstrations and proofs. Mendelian garden genetics and Darwin’s theory of evolution were correct on a discriptive level in the macrocosm, and later ratified by being explained on finer and finer levels by the understanding of DNA, genes, sequenced genomes.

Science is a method, not a belief system, and rather that being an enemy of what truths maybe buried in all systems of medicine, it is the only real means for separating the wheat from the chaff.

“It works in practice, but will it work in theory?”

This is a sardonic put down of the French intellectual mind by the French intellectual mind, or usually meant as such. But from the point of view of the Scientific Shaman, there’s something to it.

To be confident that you understand how it works in theory is to know that it does work, to understand why it can’t work, is to know that it doesn’t.

E-GALLEYS FOR BOOK REVIEWERS

2010-07-22T12:57:00.000-04:00

I’ve been a published and fairly extensively reviewed novelist for four decades, and I’ve been a regular book reviewer for almost three decades, and so I can see both sides of the transaction.

As a novelist these days, most of the reviews I get are online, and I’m hardly the only one. The decline of the newspaper business and the lack of sufficient book advertising money to support ad bases for traditional paper media is squeezing newspaper and paper magazine review space towards the vanishing point. These days what was the online reviewing tail is coming to wag the print media dog.

Most everyone on all sides of the publishing industry--writers, publishers, distributors, book sales outlets--have by now come to realize that ebooks and ebook readers are soon going to become at least co-equally dominant with traditional publishing modes, and indeed Amazon has just declared that it is selling more ebooks than hardcovers. The handwriting has moved from the walls to the Internet, and this certainly goes for book reviewing too.

But what about the actual process of getting books reviewed? It’s still wastefully behind the curve. As a reviewer, my living space has been overrun with paper galleys and review copies for as long as I’ve been reviewing; in a house in Los Angeles, in apartments in New York and Paris, it doesn’t matter, I get many, many more books than I’m going to review or even read, I can’t give them away fast enough, and I can’t bring myself to throw books in the garbage when I don’t have a fireplace or burn them when I do.
From the publishers’ point of view, huge amounts of money are being wasted on this practice, and from an ecological point of view, many, many trees. I for one am ready to do my part in updating this whole business, and I believe other reviewers and also publishers would be happy to do likewise.

As a reviewer, I would be very happy indeed to get review copies in the form of ebook downloads instead of paper galleys or actual books, and I would imagine that most reviewers who have ebook readers would likewise be happy to dispense with the cluttering of their living spaces. And indeed, if this became an option, those who don’t have ebook readers would probably go out and get them.

Were I a publisher, I would be very happy to save the expense of printing and shipping hundreds of pounds of paper to reviewers annually, and what is more, much more, if I were able to send out ebook galleys at minimal expense in comparison, I could afford to solicit more reviews on more online sites to the benefit of my sales and hence of the writers on my lists.

But there are problems. As a publisher I wouldn’t care, but as a reviewer, I would not at all be pleased to have my email mailbox clogged with hundreds if not thousands of booklength attachments annually, which is to say every book published by every publisher, who would have no incentive not to do this.

However, I think there is a solution if publishers are willing to adopt it. Instead of spamming every reviewer with ebook attachments of everything they publish, publishers could turn it around and post thumbnail descriptions of their forthcoming titles on a dedicated website probably accessible only by passwords issued to reviewers. Reviewers then download the titles they want to consider and everyone (except for writers who get bad reviews)is happy.

Yes there are further details to work out, which I don’t really consider to be my job. What criteria do publishers use to issue the passwords? Or do they bother with passwords at all? Do they really have a problem with questionable reviewers being able to download? They do if ordinary readers are allowed to do it. What about piracy? How to handle critics who still insist on paper? And so on, and so forth.

But it sure sounds doable to me. We’re already deep into the electronic revolution in publishing, and those who adapt survive. Isn’t it time that the available technology was applied to the book reviewing process to the benefit of everyone involved?

EAT THE CANADA GEESE!!

2010-07-21T16:48:00.000-04:00

EAT THE GEESE!

In the July 24th New York Times there is an article about a government plan to reduce the population of Canada Geese in New York State from 250,000 to 85,000, a net reduction of 165,000 geese, the population of Canada Geese in New York City from 25,000 to 4000, a net reduction of 21,000 geese, and reduce the Canada Goose population in the 17 Atlantic states from 1.1 million to 650,000, a reduction of 450,000 geese.

Now it cannot be denied that geese are at least as obnoxious a bird as pigeons in an urban environment, and they are far larger creatures who produce much more shit, and they are a real danger around airports as they have proven all too often. And they frequently have such soft touches in the parks that they stick around for the free food instead of bothering to migrate. They may not be the smartest birds in the world, but they can figure that much out. So sure, something must be done to keep them under control, but--

--but the official plan is to capture the geese alive, shove them into commercial turkey crates, kill them with methods approved by the American Veterinary Medicine Association, and then bury the bodies.

I am I the only one in this country who realizes that this is not only entirely insane but marks Americans as arrogant wasteful barbarians in every country in the world where there are people who don’t get enough to eat?

I am no hunter of geese and have no immediate plan to become one, but I sure do like to eat goose. In France and Germany, where I have spent some time at the table, goose is regarded as a premium semi-game meat, more highly regarded than chicken, turkey, or even duck, taken seriously and creatively by seriously creative chefs and hausfraus, and more expensive than even quail. Goose is harder to find in American supermarkets or ordinary butcher shops and is more expensive still.

Geese are larger than chicken or ducks and at least on a par with turkeys, so let’s say your average adult goose weighs something like 20 pounds. We are talking here about 420,000 of pounds of goose that could be HARVESTED instead of buried in New York City alone, 3,300,000 pounds that could be HARVESTED in New York State, and a grand total of 9,000,000 pounds overall in the 17 Atlantic states.
=
And goose is expensive! Let me know where I can buy it for $20 a pound in New York City and I would be quite pleased. We are talking about $180 million of delicious goose meat buried in the ground at taxpayers’ expense and feeding no one.

Are we Americans so alienated from the land and creatures of our great nation that we can’t see that these geese are a natural asset as the Native Americans saw the buffalo herds before the trigger happy whites nearly exterminated them by blasting away for the pelts en mass and leaving the meat for the vultures and maggots?

At least the vultures and maggots got a free meal out of it. But according to this obscene goose management plans, not even they get a taste of goose meat, and millions of humans go hungry while $180 million dollars of goose meat is deliberately put to rot in the ground.

This is madness. The only sane and responsible thing to do is realize that these great flocks of geese are a natural resource, and a renewable one if the the flock sizes were stabilized and hunters, commercial operations, and just plain hungry folks, were collectively allowed to harvest as many geese are were necessary to keep them that way. For non-commercial harvesting for the table, the goose hunting licenses should be cheap, but commercial operations should may more, possibly in the form of a percentage share with governments.

To make the hunting in the country more interesting as sport, and to make it even possible in urban areas, maybe fire-arm hunting of Canada Geese should not be allowed, and certainly you don’t want everyone out to hunt themselves a roast goose dinner in New York City to have at it with guns. Bows and arrows. Spears. Nets. Blowguns. Whatever, as long as it doesn’t involve gunshot noises and flying bullets.

One set of my grandparents had a farm for a while, and that’s where my father met my mother, but that was before I was born, and I was raised as a city boy with only summers in the country side and have never lived outside a city for any significant period. So why does a city boy seem to currently be the only voice presently denouncing this crime against the millennial hunter and gatherer roots of the hominids who would become humans?

Feed the hungry! Inspire a whole generation of American chefs to try their hands at poultry dishes far tastier than the same thing based on chicken or turkey. Save the Canada Goose.

Save the Canada Geese by eating them.

HACKERCON (The Next Hope Conference)

2010-07-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

HACKERCON (The Next H.O.P.E conference)

H.O.P.E is the acronym for Hackers Of Planet Earth, and that is what this conference is, something like a World Science Fiction Convention or at least a large regional held every two years, this one with over 2000 attendees. I found myself at this event in the Pennysylviana Hotel in New York City knowing nothing at all about it, or the universe of what I can only called Hacker Fandom, including its very existence, having gone there only to meet Greg Newby, one of the organizers, to discuss matters to another hat he wears at Project Guttenberg, the freeware on-line public domain library.

Although, as I was to learn, Project Guttenberg is part of this hacker underground too. There is a magazine called 2600, there are conventions all over the US and elsewhere, there are zillions of websites, there is a vast transnational community of these people who forthrightly call themselves hackers, and it is rather difficult to explain, perhaps intentionally, what the commonality exactly is.

There are computer and web site hackers of course, some of them doing underground dirty work, some of them trying to combat it--such as the blog cloud creators and the people trying to shut them down, a battle in which cyberspace war I witnessed in real time at an event in Switzerland. There are some old-time Phone Phreaks (I ran with some of these back in the day)and their much more sophisticated descendants. At the huge huckster room, there were people selling hacking tools and software, some of it to produce legal effects, some of it black art, gizmos doing likewise, but also a workshop in lock picking, with maybe stuff being sold under the tables better you don’t ask. Books and magazines and T-shirts.

Bill Gibson’s famous saying in NEUROMANCER that “The Street finds its own uses,” is maybe the best haiku description. There are hackers on both sides of the law, and indeed one of the aims of this community seems to be expanding the already fuzzy and ambiguous interface between in many areas--the Internet, the Phone Nets, the battle over DRM coding in music, book and video downloads, copyright law, government and corporate surveillance systems, and so forth.

But there are also harmless and utilitarianly useless gizmos and software just slung together to have fun. There was an exhibition of Segways. All sorts of T-shirts, humorous and otherwise, books, magazines. Anyone familiar with the scene at science fiction conventions would feel right at home--panels, a huckster room, membership badges, and the attendees pretty much dressed like science fiction fans, though far fewer of them were grossly overweight.

But there is a difference here. Collectively these diverse hacker groups with their diverse specific interests have an overall ethos, a mission, a kind of politics, even a philosophy, that while they constitute an “underground” and proud of it connects them intimately and interconnectedly with the “official reality.”

This hacker world hidden in plain sight--and indeed even from someone like me to my surprise--is indeed a sort of underground in a sense, an alternate reality, but it also has its above ground members who play in the overground world, but try to play by the underground rules, and therefore also see themselves as hackers. Hacking official reality in diverse ways.

From one perspective, this can be understood as a “libertarian” community, which in the best, non-economic sense it is, but that’s not the whole story and not exactly accurate. The hacker world is an anarchist world, but it is a syndicalist anarchist world, no overall leaders or structures, but self-organizing syndics according to function, that would be right at home, ahem, in my novel GREENHOUSE SUMMER and probably would have been if I knew it it existed at the time.

H.O.P.E.?

Hackers Of The Planet Earth?

“In the long run,” I said to Greg Newby, who laughed, “isn’t that going to turn out to sound kind of limiting?”

AN AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER

2010-07-18T12:24:00.000-04:00

                                       AN AGNOSTIC’S PRAYER
                                               by Norman Spinrad

              agnostic (common definition): someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in God
              gnosis:literally knowledge
              gnosis mystical and philosophical definition: direct experience of the transcendent
              gnostic: one who believes that faith or the acquisition thereof must be based on such
                direct interior gnosis rather than dogma or scripture.

   As I write this I’m sitting in a hospital bed with stomach cancer after a serious setback, and because of who I am, all I’ve written for four decades, and my connection to extensive networks of good and caring people all over the world, I know, because they have told me, that many people, some believing Christians, Jews, maybe Muslims, are praying for me to the versions of God in which they have the sort of faith that I do not, some like me, agnostics, but giving it a try.

I am encouraged and deeply touched by all these prayers, and I somehow feel guilty for not being able to join them with prayers of my own, for obviously I would like nothing better than for my prayer and theirs to reach the ears of a benevolent, loving, omnipotent God who will then rescue me from this grave disease.

But I’m a gnostic, I suppose, I only believe in what I know or experience. I have had what I do consider transcendent experiences, and indeed over 4 decades ago one of them did save my life. But when it comes to such direct experience of the grace of Jesus, Jehovah, or Allah, I remain agnostic, having never been touched by such a thing.

And so, an Agnostic’s Prayer, 100% in public domain, do with it what thou wilt:

Dear God, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or similar caring, loving, transcendent being by whatever other name, I don’t know if you’re out there, but if you are give me a sign, touch my soul, fill me with your grace, and thereby prove to me that you exist.

By whatever means you choose, by whatever means necessary. That’s not really very much to ask from such a God. I ask for that now, and for my personal salvation afterward, only when and if I know in my heart and soul that I’m not whistling Dixie and praying a Hail Mary into nothing but the void.

All believers in you wrestle with the problem of evil and injustice rampant in a world supposedly created by a deity who is omniscient, omnipotent, loving, and just, a glaring paradox which can neither be denied nor explained by any scripture or logic. To worship such a god blindly, a god who is the moral inferior of his human creations, is to simply bow the knee to superior power.

Of course those who do not believe in such a god have no such problem, not believing that any natural morality, goodness, or for that matter evil, is inherent in the structure of the universe.

So God, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or whatever caring, loving, transcendent being by whatever other name who may be out there hearing this prayer, give me a sign. I’m not praying for a burning bush or a physical manifestation of any kind, just the grace of gnosis of your existence in my soul and in my heart.

And then I will pray to you for my salvation as so many believers already are. And then I will, like them, pray for the salvation of others in dire straights, and for the salvation of the world.

Over to you, Big Boy. If you’re out there, show me your face.

THE CANCER DIARY

2010-07-18T12:16:00.001-04:00

     This is more or less self-explanatory, written in real-time on my laptop, first at home, then from a hospital bed, and posted in real-time to a group email of friends and on Facebook, hence raw and repetative, but I believe, useful and honest in original form except for spelling check.
   I think AN AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER may be of free-standing interest itself independent of the personal story which finds me writing this, having created this blog, still recovering, but, not 100% cured and in for some more chemotherapy, so I will post that separately too.

           March 23

       I have been diagnosed with stomach cancer and told that it is presently inoperable due to involvement of a mesentery lymph node, and my only chance to even live out the year is to undergo prior chemotherapy of one kind or another to shrink the secondary in order to make the primary operable.
     I’m in the hands of Sloan-Kettering, which is supposed to be the best there is at least in the US, but I am dubious and skeptical about chemo, at least conventional chemo, which basically delivers toxins of one kind or another to fast growing cells--cancer, but also others, such as hair follicles, which is why your hair tends to fall out--hence the panoply of bad side effects.
     And the paradox of it is, except for an anemia which I’ve successfully been treating with mega Iron and mega B-12, I have no real symptoms. Can’t say I feel 100% all the time, but some days I do, and the rest maybe 80%. So I have some difficult scientific and existential decisions to make, and any wisdom or knowledge would be appreciated.
      I learned of the situation yesterday, as y’all might imagine, slept badly, and what came to me was something that seemed totally obvious, namely what I called the “cryogenic needle.” Real simple, but it is sort of rocket science. Shorn of bells and whistles, it amounts to bringing the temperature of a needle down to cryogenic levels using liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen and sticking it in a tumor to crystallize it. Unlike cutting with a scalpel, zero chance of releasing cancer cell to metastasize, and when the tumor comes back up to room temperature, it’s long dead and perhaps even disintegrated.
     Dona, who long ago had the process, reminded me that something similar has long been done to remove pre-cancerous cells from the cervix. And today I did a little more research and found out that something like it is already being done on some cancers as front-line treatment.
So if anyone knows more about this, or where I just might go to try and get such treatment, do let me know. Conventionally speaking, and I’m being treated by as good a conventional oncology program as there is, the prognosis is otherwise pretty dire.
   Unless, of course, someone out there has an even more brilliant idea.
       March 23

     Y’all forgive me for this forthright group email, but it’s not impersonal at all from my point of view, and I can’t think of any better way to deal with the situation. Many of you on this list already know that I’ve been diagnosed with stomach cancer, many of you have lent me much welcome and touching psychological, spiritual, and practical support, and many of you have asked to be kept up to date.
      As y’all might imagine, telling this dire news to friends over and over again on a one-on-one basis is rather agonizing, and, however bizarre it may sound under the circumstances, actually boring. Hence this mode...
     It it does not mean than I won’t communicate individually by email or phone, just that this bulletin from the trenches and whatever may follow will avoid my having to be repetitive, and of course any of you who want to be removed from this admittedly bummer update thing have only to ask, and I will fully understand.
    I have now been told that my stomach cancer is presently inoperable due to involvement of a mesentery lymph node, and my only chance to even live out the year is to undergo prior chemotherapy of one kind or another to shrink the secondary in order to make the primary operable.
    I’m in the hands of Sloan-Kettering, which is supposed to be the best there is at least in the US, but I am dubious and skeptical about chemo, at least conventional chemo, which basically delivers toxins of one kind or another to fast growing cells--cancer, but also others, such as hair follicules, which is why your hair tends to fall out--hence the panoply of bad side effects.
   And the paradox of it is, except for an anemia which I’ve successfully been treating with mega Iron and mega B-12, I have no real symptoms. Can’t say I feel 100% all the time, but some days I do, and the rest maybe 80%. So I have some difficult scientific and existential decisions to make, and any wisdom or knowledge would be appreciated.
     I learned of the situation yesterday, as y’all might imagine, slept badly, and what came to me was something that seemed totally obvious, namely what I called the “cryogenic needle.” Real simple, but it is sort of rocket science. Shorn of bells and whistles, it amounts to bringing the temperature of a needle down to cryogenic levels using liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen and sticking it in a tumor to crystallize it. Unlike cutting with a scalpel, zero chance of releasing cancer cell to metastasize, and when the tumor comes back up to room temperature, it’s long dead and perhaps even disintegrated.
      Dona, who long ago had the process, reminded me that something similar has long been done to remove pre-cancerous cells from the cervix. And today I did a little more research and found out that something like it is already being done on some cancers as front-line treatment.
     So if anyone knows more about this, or where I just might go to try and get such treatment, do let me know. Conventionally speaking, and I’m being treated by as good a conventional oncology program as there is, the prognosis is otherwise pretty dire.
      Unless, of course, someone out there has an even more brilliant idea.

                                      March 25
   The update on my condition is that as of now, the primary stomach cancer is not now operable, due to spread to some lymph nodes. I’m starting chemo on Monday to try to reduce that, and if it works, a month or two from now at least, it may then be operable. I am at least now convinced that I’m in the hands of the best there is, at least in the US, and the doctor, himself rather bald, says that with what’s being tried now at least, I’ll keep my hair. So as an article of faith, I’ve just gotten a haircut.

                        March 31

      Had my first chemo infusions two days ago, plus pills, more traditional stuff plus an advanced monoclonal antibody therapy. So far none of the dreaded side effects at all. But a mysterious positive one--I’m physically stronger that I have been in months. And I know this precisely because I’ve been doing hard hatha yoga for decades and know what relative shape I’m in every day. Plus I started hand weights again after years off, and since the chemo am able to do 25% more. Maybe it has something to do with the things I’m taking on my own, which the doctor does not disapprove of. Never heard of anything like this. Hope it lasts.

                       April 1
      I’ve been asked (by Greg Benford) just what it is I’m taking, scientific curiosity, or whatever, so:
     Two fairly traditional drugs, Xeloda and Oxaliplatin, which basically attack fast-growing cells, cancer or not, which is why the usually expected side effects, for instance, losing hair because the folicules are fast growing.
      Herceptin. This is the cutting edge, a monoclonal antibody (“humanized mouse molecule”) that attacks only cancer cells, and only cancer cells with a certain gene, by stopping them from reproducing. First approved for aggressive breast cancer (this form has the gene), now beginning to be used on gastric cancer, potentially for more general use. But only about 25% of cancers have this gene, and I lucked into one that does.
      That’s the Sloan-Kettering cocktail.
      But what sold me on SK, and particularly on my oncologist, Dr. David Ilson, is that he had no objections, with minor adjustments that made sense, to also continuing my own witch doctor treatment:
    3000 mg Vit. C
     500 mg curcumin--derived from turmeric, which both Vedantic and traditional Chinese medicine have used as anti-cancer medicine for a millenium or two with different questionable theories, but its usefulness verified in some refereed western papers.
     2000 mg Arginine/Ornithine. These are body (muscle)building amino acids, big dose, been taking it for a while before the diagnosis, in conjunction with my (mostly)daily 45 minutes or so of Hatha yoga and now with a hand weight regime.
    That’s how I can know that I’ve thusfar been getting stronger. I count breaths with the asanas, and I’m now holding the strength ones longer and longer, and speedily upping the number of light weight lifting repetitions.
    So what I’m doing is complicated, and it’s hard, if not impossible to sort out the synergies. But scientifically interesting to try.

                               April 8
     Well, it’s been a first week of chemo, then a first week of rest from it, the regime being one week on, one week off, and thusfar none of the feared and warned of nasty side effects. This turned out to be not that much of a surprise to my doctor, who said that a lot of progress has been made in that regard.
    The strange thing is that my growing strength has continued to grow, and rapidly. I’m now doing more strenuous yoga than ever before in my life, and after years of laying off, back to hand weights, and very rapid progress in terms of repetitions and increasing weight. Is this the way it usually goes? Any one of y’all into this weight stuff?
      Also a shift in perception of cancer as a condition. Serious and life-threatening though it is, at least right now, it seems more like a chronic condition that has to be dealt with long-term, something like, say diabetes, or Dona’s own sciatica. The doctor talks about months of chemo before, if it even works well enough to satisfy the surgeon, to make my condition operable.
      But manageable. We’re already making plans to go to Paris the end of May for the launch there of OSAMA TGE GUN, and Los Angeles in July for Dona’s niece’s wedding, and maybe in the late fall, when the climate there is tolerable, New Orleans for necessary research for a novel.
Oubla-di, oubla-da, and all that jazz....

      May 16--from the hospital
    After five weeks of chemotherapy with no ill effects, I got whacked about 10 days ago by an upper intestine blockage that has made it impossible to eat or even drink. First attempt to clear it has failed, some procedure next week. I’m on IV and suction, losing a lot of weight. Dona, bless her mighty loving courage is camped out here with me. I am not at death’s door, but the situation is serious, scary, and very unpleasant and unconfortable.

                                                      May 16-from the hospital
                                  Report & thoughts from dire straights

    Well, after over a whole month of chemotherapy for my stomach cancer without any negative side effects, indeed getting stronger and stronger thanks to 45 minutes of Hatha Yoga and 20 minutes of hand weights daily, I got whacked by an intestinal blockage which had me unable to eat or drink without puking and has landed me in the Sloan Kettering hospital for the past week. The first attempt to at least deal with this intermediary condition failed and they’ll be trying to do something else next week.

      Sloan Kettering has an apparently well-earned reputation as the best cancer hospital in the US, just as the US has the well-earned reputation as having the worst health care system in the developed world. It’s an almost luxurious place, or would be if it weren’t a hospital. But if I weren’t on Medicare, I would be entirely fucked, I couldn’t possibly afford it, and Obamacare would be no help.

     Until I ended up here, I was doing my own witchdoctory in addition to the chemotherapy--curcumin, certain vitamins, etc. Now I can’t do it and am entirely in the hands of the hospital and the medical establishment, and there is a great feeling of powerlessness and frustration.

       This is compounded by the rigid and basically inhumane rules, protocols, and schedules of even this, the best of hospitals. Unimportant vital signs measurements at 4 am. Various people barging in and out with paper to sign, this and that, without a by your leave. No recognition that even a healthy person needs their eight hours of sleep. They don’t call someone in my position a “patient” for nothing! Patient is what you are forced to be. The doctors, the nurses, and maybe half of the orderlies, are sympathetic human beings, but the system itself is not only programmed to be heartless but even indifferent to some counterproductive health consequences of its unfeeling bureaucratic bullshit. The interruptions of sleep for example, having to wait 2 hours for some simple eye drops to be authorized by a doctor who never even saw me for another.
    I don’t know whether I will survive this hospital stay, or for how long afterward if I do--weeks, months, years--but this experience is certainly memento mori that will not allow me to ever forget that I am mortal, and so are you, and so is everyone.
        And whatever you do or do not believe, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, or even agnostic like me this is surely the genesis of all religion.

                             May 18--from the hospital
          Dire straights have gotten more existentially dire. I have not been able to eat or drink for over a week now, on saline & glucose IV and vacuum tube down my nose and into my stomach. If nothing is done, this is slow death by starvation.
    So Thursday I will have an operation. The surgeon, Dr. Daniel Coit, is top drawer, and unlike some of the lower orders here at Sloan Kettering, a man of honest truth and gentle compassion. There’s a Plan A and a Plan B.
    Plan A is to remove part of the stomach above the blocking tumor, and part of the small intestine below, and hook them up, in which case I will be able to eat and drink and get my shrinking ass out of here. On plumbing level, this would be a no brainer, but there may or may not blockages further down, and rather to my surprise, I was told that that none of the advanced scanners can tell. So the surgeon says he won’t know if he can execute plan A until he opens me up, and gives me a 60-40 chance.
          Plan B, if that doesn’t work, is a feeding tube and an exhaust tube. I could hang around slowly deteriorating that way, but it wouldn’t be much of a life.
      So it’s scary on that level, and made worse by my existential dread of general anesthesia, of being made unconscious not know if I would wake up. So I don’t know if I’ll be around for a Friday update, or whether this will turn out to be hail and farewell.
                                                      May 18--from the hospital

                           DOCTORS, HOSPITALS, CANCER, AND EXISTENTIAL REALITY
     I’ve been getting a lot of hospital horror stories since I barely alluded to mine, and been told any number of times that I was doing a public service. So, some balanced thought....
     Sloan Kettering is acknowledged as the best cancer hospital in the US if not the world, and I can’t deny that on a scientific level, and it’s very well endowed because it’s the cancer hospital of choice for the world’s elite patients.
     But it is also a huge establishment run, as most such operations are, according to rigid, often counterproductive rules and protocols which are cold, unfeeling, unspirited, and turn much of the lower staff levels into acting like inhuman robots--this is the schedule, this is my routine, and if you don’t like it, tough shit. So they wake you at 4 am to administer unimportant tests, depriving you of sleep, likewise with room cleaning, housekeeping, etc.
    There is a so-called “Patient’s Representative,” who here in SK is really the bureaucracy’s representative, an ice-cold, slick as goose-grease bitch whose really job is to stone-wall patients by quoting arbitrary rules to keep complainants from any administration pooh-bahs with the power to fix anything.
     This is a national disgrace, it wouldn’t be that hard to fix if there was a will, a heart, and a public demand to do it. All it would really take is to rewrite hospital rules and protocols based on the prime directive, that the patient’s physical, health, emotional, and spiritual well being, or as much of it as can possibly be maintained, comes first, not the convenience or arbitrary rules of the administrative ass-covering bureaucracy.
     That much being said, something both more positive and not so positive must be said about the doctors, nurses, and researchers working in the field of cancer treatment. The cold equations are that in terms of actually curing cancer, they succeed less than half the time. So in order to stay sane in careers where failure is really more prevalent than true success, they redefine “success” in terms of additional months of patient life.
     I can see how they must do this, they really are heroic, but I can also see why tons of money have been wasted in the so-called “war on cancer” in terms of research and why there is so much mealy-mouthing and obfuscation when confronting human beings in dire straights.


                                       AN AGNOSTIC’S PRAYER
                                               by Norman Spinrad

              agnostic (common definition): someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in God
              gnosis:literally knowledge
              gnosis mystical and philosophical definition: direct experience of the transcendent
              gnostic: one who believes that faith or the acquisition thereof must be based on such
                direct interior gnosis rather than dogma or scripture.

   As I write this I’m sitting in a hospital bed with stomach cancer after a serious setback, and because of who I am, all I’ve written for four decades, and my connection to extensive networks of good and caring people all over the world, I know, because they have told me, that many people, some believing Christians, Jews, maybe Muslims, are praying for me to the versions of God in which they have the sort of faith that I do not, some like me, agnostics, but giving it a try.

I am encouraged and deeply touched by all these prayers, and I somehow feel guilty for not being able to join them with prayers of my own, for obviously I would like nothing better than for my prayer and theirs to reach the ears of a benevolent, loving, omnipotent God who will then rescue me from this grave disease.

But I’m a gnostic, I suppose, I only believe in what I know or experience. I have had what I do consider transcendent experiences, and indeed over 4 decades ago one of them did save my life. But when it comes to such direct experience of the grace of Jesus, Jehovah, or Allah, I remain agnostic, having never been touched by such a thing.

And so, an Agnostic’s Prayer, 100% in public domain, do with it what thou wilt:

Dear God, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or similar caring, loving, transcendent being by whatever other name, I don’t know if you’re out there, but if you are give me a sign, touch my soul, fill me with your grace, and thereby prove to me that you exist.

By whatever means you choose, by whatever means necessary. That’s not really very much to ask from such a God. I ask for that now, and for my personal salvation afterward, only when and if I know in my heart and soul that I’m not whistling Dixie and praying a Hail Mary into nothing but the void.

All believers in you wrestle with the problem of evil and injustice rampant in a world supposedly created by a deity who is omniscient, omnipotent, loving, and just, a glaring paradox which can neither be denied nor explained by any scripture or logic. To worship such a god blindly, a god who is the moral inferior of his human creations, is to simply bow the knee to superior power.

Of course those who do not believe in such a god have no such problem, not believing that any natural morality, goodness, or for that matter evil, is inherent in the structure of the universe.

So God, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or whatever caring, loving, transcendent being by whatever other name who may be out there hearing this prayer, give me a sign. I’m not praying for a burning bush or a physical manifestation of any kind, just the grace of gnosis of your existence in my soul and in my heart.

And then I will pray to you for my salvation as so many believers already are. And then I will, like them, pray for the salvation of others in dire straights, and for the salvation of the world.

Over to you, Big Boy. If you’re out there, show me your face.

                  May 27--from the hospital
                                             GOING HOME
   I'm still in the hospital, will go home Monday or Tuesday. The operation went very well, maybe curative, but I've got a lot of recovering to do even at home, visiting nurse, nightly feeding tube to supplement what I eat, having lost a lot of weight. Gonna take a month or so, and then really getting aback into shape. Just dawning on me how close I was to buying the farm, if the operation hadn't work, it would probably have been terminal hospital on the feeding tube slowly starving to death.
This I will remember when the recovery process gets too depressing. And I will remember all the love, support, prayers, and energy sent my way by so many people by various means.
And maybe being open about this and writing about it in real time will pay some of it forward and help and encourage other people finding themselves in the same boat.
But I don't plan to make this the centerpiece of the rest of my writing career, and/or, become some kind of guru of some kind of cancer fandom.

CORN AND SMOKED DUCK SALAD

2010-07-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

Okay, I said I would do cuisine from time to time, so here's the short form recipe (I don't do measures) for one of my favorite of my own culinary inventions, CORN AND SMOKED DUCK SALAD:
   In a bowl of appropriate size to how much you want to make, mix 50-50 olive oil and dark sesame oil (the Chinese kind NOT pallid health food store stuff)with chili garlic paste (more Chinese stuff) and cumin powder to taste. Stir in canned corn, cilantro leaves, and walnut pieces, and marinate for several hours in the refrigerator.
    Roast fresh sweet red peppers or use the jarred kind if you must. When ready to serve, lay out tomato slices on plates along with greens (endive is best). Add vinegar (red wine, maybe balsamic, nothing fancy flavored) to the corn and mix thoroughly, adding bits of thin-sliced smoked duck breast.
   Spoon onto the plates, slice up the roast pepper and arrange artistically atop the corn mixture, along with larger smoked duck slices. If you can't get the duck, you can fake it with prosciutto, Black Forest ham, Serrano ham, or other thin-sliced heavy-smoked fancy ham, NOT Danish ham, or anything in plastic packaging.
Voila, a French-Chinese-Mexican entre or full meal single plate salad.

RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE TO $10 AN HOUR

2010-07-17T09:53:00.001-04:00

   Nothing would give the depressed American economy more of an immediate lift than raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $10 an hour, and it wouldn't add a penny to the Federal budget deficit.
   As things stand now, full time employment of 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year at the current Federal Minimum Wage puts a family of 2, let alone 3 or 4, well below the official poverty level, which itself is set unrealistically low.
   Putting this extra money into the pockets of millions, maybe tens of millions of pockets, of people who will immediately spend it on necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, consumption not investment, would give the economy a huge boost and it would cost the tax payers nothing.
   Corporate business interests and their political mouthpieces will claim that it will cost jobs and raise unemployment, but this is just not so because the current minimum wage is paid almost entirely to service workers flipping hamburgers, cleaning floors, harvesting crops, working as clerks in supermarkets and small stores, serving as hospital orderlies, and so forth, none of whose jobs can possibly be lost by outsourcing overseas to low wage countries.
   It's not only an economic no-brainer, it's a matter of simple justice too, and a sure-fire platform plank to any individual candidate for political office and any political party as a whole.
    But don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.

Congressional elections

2010-07-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

This is out on a limb, apparently with no one else, but I believe that the Democrats have a good chance of not only holding control of the House and the Senate but even gaining seats in the House thanks to the Tea Party.
Just as science fiction publishing, about which I know all too much, is sliding down the tubes because the publishers are marketing to a narrow and dwindling fan base in a manner which alienates everyone else, so is the Republication Party doing likewise, in large part due to pressure from the Tea Party movement.
   In many states, Tea Party candidates have won primaries over comparatively rational experienced professional Republican politicians, taking over the Republican Party itself at least locally. But these candidates are, not to cut it too finely, mostly nut-cases, far right extremists, paranoiacs, and so forth, with no coherent positive ideas, who will turn off, indeed frighten, the key independent voters, and indeed the remaining rational Republican voters in the general election.
    What the Democrats have to do is have the balls and foresight to come after these people in no uncertain terms in individual races, and nationally, pin the Great Recession tail on the Republican Elephant where it belongs.
   My significant other, Dona Sadock, was the originating producer of the Firesign Theater, one of whose comedic schticks was a candidate for office whose only slogan was "Not Insane." Good for a laugh then, but not so funny now. Given what the Republican Party is turning into, it would be a winning slug-line for a lot of Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole.

2010-07-15T20:47:00.000-04:00

This the first posting on my new blogsite. I've done all sorts things on the web, but not this. So to start it off, here's The Transformation Crisis, a proposal for a book that never got written, that became an essay, that become a speech, that in retrospect is the core philosophic base for much that I have written over decades--Riding The Torch, GREENHOUSE SUMMER, SONGS FROM THE STARS, for instance, and my latest to be published in English, HE WALKED AMONG US:

THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS
by Norman Spinrad

We are living in the most critical period in human history,
indeed the most critical epoch in the evolution of life on Earth, an
ongoing evolutionary crisis which came into full flower over
Hiroshima in 1945, and which will probably persist well into the
21st Century, if we don't destroy ourselves and the terrestrial
biosphere itself first.
That we have the nuclear power to do just that is the most
starkly obvious aspect part of what I have come to call the
Transformation Crisis, but far from the only ultimate evolutionary
responsibility placed in the hands of generations now living.
Nor is such a Transformation Crisis likely to prove to be a
uniquely human phenomenon; rather, I believe, it is an evolutionary
inevitable that any intelligent species anywhere is sooner or later
going to confront.
Perhaps twenty billion years ago, the universe exploded into
being from a dimensionless singularity in a presently unimaginable
nothingness of quantum flux, and began to expand, cool, and evolve
towards ever-increasing complexity, and with ever-accelerating
speed.
The primal quarks condensed into subatomic particles, the
particles clumped into hydrogen atoms, which condensed into galaxies
of first-generation stars. Fusion processes produced the heavier
elements in the cores of these first-generation stars, the stars
went through their life-cycles, and exploded into novas, enriching
the interstellar medium with elements and compounds.
Proto-stellar nebulas formed out of this material, condensed
into second-generation stars, many of them attended by planets,
gaseous and solid, if our present understanding of cosmological
evolution is correct.
Given a planet of roughly terrestrial mass and chemical
composition orbiting its star at a distance allowing liquid water to
exist on its surface, the universal physical laws would seem to
deterministically dictate what happens next.
The planet begins to evolve.
Outgassings from the interior and/or cometary bombardment give
it oceans and an early atmosphere. Pre-existent complex carbon
molecules rain down from space. The universal laws of organic
chemistry cause them to link together in chains of every-increasing
length and complexity....
Whether the next stage is inevitable or the result of a chain
of random recombinations we do not yet know, but given the
likelihood of billions of suitable planets, and given the certitude
of billions of years of time, it seems likely that what occurred on
Earth can hardly be unique.
Molecules eventually evolved that were able to organize
duplicates of themselves out of the raw materials of the nutrient
soup.
On Earth, these molecules were RNA and DNA or the chemical
precursors of same. It seems likely that different but functionally
analogous chemical structures would have evolved elsewhere. But
whatever the chemical specifics, the evolution of such replicating
complex molecules, the simplest viruses, represents the birth of
life.
Cosmic ray bombardment and random accidents cause variations in
some of these copies. Those that are better adapted to duplication
and survival increase their numbers at the statistical expense of
the others.
Life begins to evolve.
On Earth, at least, viral cores evolve protective envelopes of
increasing complexity, become cells. The chlorophyll molecule
evolves within some of them, enabling them to use the energy of the
sun directly to turn simpler compounds, mainly carbon dioxide, into
more of themselves--the first single-celled plants.
Evolution itself begins to evolve as living organisms alter the
chemistry of their planet, replacing much of the carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere with free oxygen.
Driven by this radical environmental change, the pace of
evolution quickens, as the planetary biomass rapidly expands.
Predatory microbes evolve to feed off the simple plants. Colonial
organisms. Multicellular organisms, then sexual reproduction, which
increases variation, and speeds up the pace of evolution yet again.
Primitive nervous systems evolve to coordinate activity. Spinal
chords with neural nodes evolving towards central brains....
Vertebrates, fishes that crawl up on the shore, evolve into
air-breathing amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. And all the
while, driven by the need to prey and avoid being preyed upon,
nervous systems and brains evolve greater and greater complexity
until....
Primates start picking up sticks and stones and using them as
weapons, later as tools, requiring the evolution of still larger and
more complex brains to coordinate these activities. Perhaps at the
same time, they begin hunting in coordinated groups, using sounds
and gestures with differentiated meanings.
These become language, a means of conveying information from
one animal to another, but also a medium within which internal
information processing can take place between stimulus and response,
which is to say thought.
Consciousness has evolved.
How universal is this evolutionary process? Given the
diversity of starting conditions and the abundance of random factors
inherent in such long evolutionary chains, it seems highly unlikely
that sapient beings evolving on other planets will bear much
physical resemblance to ourselves. But given billions of planets
and given billions of years of time, and given the universal
evolutionary drive towards greater and greater complexity, it would
seem likely that consciousness will evolve at the pinnacle of many
if not most biospheres.
And that is the point.
The point at which physical evolution produces an end product
that transcends the physical evolutionary process itself.
Billions of years for planets to evolve from the Big Bang. A
billion or two more to quicken to life. Perhaps another billion or
so for microbes to become creatures that think and speak and use
tools. But once they do, once cultural and technological evolution
begins, it proceeds at blinding speed, mutating faster by many
orders of magnitude than anything possible in the cosmological or
even biological realm.
A million years or so from the first words and tools to the
first cities. A few thousand years from early communities to the
nation-state. A millennium or two between the birth of science and
the industrial revolution. About a century between the first
primitive mechanized transportation and the airplane, and about six
decades later, men on the Moon.
Men who, biologically speaking, have hardly evolved at all
beyond the inhabitants of the first humans to master fire.
And who now, for better or for worse, hold the power of nuclear
fire in their hot little hands.
Which bring us back to where we find ourselves today.
As surely as the Big Bang implied the formation of planets, as
surely as organic chemistry led to the evolution of life, as surely
as consciousness arises out of the evolution of the biomass, any
sentient species which develops science and technology is going to
is going to get its hands on the power of the atom, is going to find
itself in possession of the power to destroy the biosphere which
gave it birth.
Atomic destruction is certainly not the only means for
destroying life on Earth, but it is sufficient, meaning that our
species entered its mature Transformation Crisis with the first
nuclear explosions in 1945.
How lucky we were!
Humans developed and used the first primitive nuclear weapons
at the tag-end of a great war. If this technology had arisen a
decade or two earlier, both the Allies and the Axis would have been
in possession of large arsenals of fusion bombs and ICBMs when the
war started, and the Earth might now be a dead planet. If the
development of nuclear weapons had been retarded by a decade or two,
if the Soviet Union and the United States had built up their nuclear
arsenals during a Cold War period without benefit of the relatively
cheap lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the result might have been
much the same.
Fortunately for us, we seem to have successfully negotiated the
crudest and earliest challenge of our species' Transformation
Crisis. For nearly half a century, we have lived with the power to
destroy our biosphere without so doing. But that does not mean we
have transcended this aspect of the crisis. We never will. For as
long as our species endures, we will possess the power of total
self-destruction.
As Robert Oppenheimer exclaimed in dismay upon viewing the
awfulness of that first primitive nuclear explosion, "Now we have
become Shiva, breaker of worlds." Forever.
For better or worse, we lunatics are now fully in charge of
the asylum. Permanently.
And the nuclear aspect is only the most obvious and dramatic
consequence of the Transformation Crisis. Hiroshima brought us to
full conscious awareness of that one, but the Transformation Crisis
is a complex of inter-related evolutionary nexuses we are only now
beginning to understand.
Prior to the evolution of photosynthetic cells, anaerobic
fermentation of the organic soup, an inherently limiting chemical
energy-source, provided the life-energy of the biomass. The mutant
photosynthesis-oxidation process allowed life to switch to much more
abundant solar energy, but it changed the atmosphere, and the free
oxygen released was toxic to most previous forms of life. There was
an evolutionary crisis that lasted millions of years, and which
might have destroyed life on Earth.
The terrestrial biomass transcended that crisis, and the result
was a much larger total biomass operating at a higher energy level,
and a consequent increase in the pace of evolution.
Beginning with the first use of fire, technological
civilization has produced a similar evolutionary crisis, but in a
much more compressed timeframe. In a very real sense, the use of
larger and larger amounts of energy via the burning of fuels is the
story of the rise of our technological civilization, enabling us to
smelt metals, occupy hostile climes, build great cities and
sophisticated machines, make medicines to conquer disease, travel at
supersonic speeds, go to the Moon, increase our numbers
exponentially.
And all the while, as blindly, until quite recently, as those
first photosynthetic organisms, we have been changing the atmosphere
in ways that may ultimately prove fatal to life on Earth.
So too, in obedience to the evolutionary drive of any organism
to replicate itself as widely as possible without regard to the
survival of competitors, have we been diminishing the diversity of
the biomass, mindlessly destroying complex webs of ecological
interaction in our natural passion to fill every available
ecological niche with more of ourselves.
Physical evolution unfolding on a geological time-scale has
been superseded by immensely more rapid cultural and technological
evolution, the mindless "natural" evolutionary process by choices
made by consciousness. What we do now dominates the composition of
the atmosphere, the albedo of the planet, the climate, the nature of
the biomass.
Indeed, for centuries, via selective breeding, we have been
consciously crafting the evolution of species, as a quick visit to a
modern barnyard or pet store easily enough demonstrates. Now, via
the infant science of genetic engineering, we are beginning to
control evolution on an ultimate molecular level. Presently we are
tailoring the genetic material of bacteria for our own purposes,
experimenting with mammalian chimeras, but we are already thinking
about playing with our own genes.
A "DNA synthesizer" already exists. Projects to map the
complete human genome are already under way. In a few years, if it
is not possible already, we will be able to synthesize simple
viruses from off-the-shelf chemicals. A decade or two later, we
will be able to do the same with human life.
And before that, we will have the capability of creating
Artificial Intelligences whose consciousness transcends our own.
With the growing ability to take all of the above beyond the
bounds of our native planet, to colonize other worlds, to terraform
them, to create new artificial habitats in space.
The evolutionary process which began with the Big Bang has
produced a race of conscious beings whose transformational powers
exceed those of that evolutionary process itself.
But, alas, power does not inevitably imply wisdom.
The evolutionary process, via science and technology, has
placed these awesome powers in human hands, without regard to
whether the minds behind those hands have evolved the moral and
philosophical maturity to wield them wisely.
That is the crux of the Transformation crisis, a crisis that
must come on any planet where consciousness arises as the crown of
the biosphere. Consciousness must evolve full self-awareness of the
godlike ultimate responsibility such godlike powers imply or it will
die.
Science fiction, no less than current events, elucidates many
paths to extinction. Nuclear destruction. A runaway greenhouse
effect that destroys the viability of the atmosphere and the
climate. The stripping of the ozone layer, exposing the planetary
surface to lethal radiation. The release of some lethal artificial
organism. Unforeseen results of genetic tampering. Worse things
waiting.
But science fiction, unlike current events or any other form of
literature, also presents a vision, or rather a series of visions,
of transcendence, of what could, indeed must, emerge out the other
side--the next stage in evolution, a dynamically stable
transformational civilization capable of enduring for millions of
years.
What would such a post-Transformation Crisis civilization be
like?
Science fiction presents several alternatives, some of them
much more attractive than others.
If we do end up destroying the natural biosphere, it would be
at least theoretically possible to construct a stable successor
civilization on a dead Earth, even as it is possible to construct
entirely artificial habitats in space, and by much the same means.
Nuclear fission and fusion as sources of abundant energy, an
artificial atmosphere created and maintained by industrial means,
food sources based on artificial photosynthesis, perhaps eventually
a new biosphere created in the genetic engineering labs.
Few people would advocate such a desperate solution as a matter
of choice, it would give the familiar cliche "Spaceship Earth" an
ironic and highly unpleasant new meaning.
The Greens, or at least the more extreme wings of the movement,
advocate a reverse course to long-term stability. Give the
preservation of the biosphere top priority, and cut back world
energy use to a level sustainable by renewable ecologically benign
sources such as solar and wind power. Eliminate the use of
pesticides and genetically-engineered organisms and return to
"natural" and organic means of food production.
Such a civilization could indeed survive indefinitely, but
would only be capable of supporting a much lower standard of living
or a much smaller human population, and probably both. Even if one
agreed that such an end result was desirable, getting from here to
there would require a government capable of ruthlessly enforcing
limits on living standards and population, as well as the deaths of
billion of people now living. Hardly a utopian alternative either.
As both of these dystopian alternatives make clear, energy is
the key to the construction of a viable long-term civilization. The
continued reliance on any form of combustion as a major energy
source even at present levels is not a viable long-term option.
Sooner or later, the carbon dioxide inevitably produced even by so-
called clean fuels will render the atmosphere toxic to our form of
life.
A Transformational civilization must be based on one or more
"Ideal Energy Sources." An Ideal Energy Source is one which is
abundant, environmentally neutral and inexhaustible, at least in
relatively cosmological terms, say over a time-span of several
million years.
Wind power, hydroelectrical power, and solar power, fulfill two
of the three requirements of Ideal Energy Sources--they release no
chemical wastes into the environment, and are, for all practical
purposes, inexhaustible.
Wind and water power, however, will never provide enough energy
to replace combustion on a world-wide basis. The sources may be
inexhaustible, but the available energy is limited, and could only
support the energy needs of a much smaller and/or poorer population.
Nor does solar power seem to offer a viable alternative at least on
a planetary surface. One would have to cover much of the Earth's
surface with solar cells, and even then energy production would be
constrained by the theoretical limits of photo-electric conversion,
even with a future ideal technology.
In space, however, the sun could indeed serve as an Ideal
Energy Source. Surface area constraints no longer apply, immense
collecting surfaces need not be immensely massive, there is no
intervening atmosphere to attenuate sunlight, and so it would be
merely a matter of some formidable engineering to construct
collecting surfaces large enough to secure the desired amount of
solar energy, conversion systems to turn it into microwave energy to
be beamed to the Earth's surface, and receivers to collect it.
Indeed, Freeman Dyson has suggested that sufficiently advanced
civilizations may deconstruct whole planets and use the materials to
enclose their suns in a spherical shell--a so-called Dyson Sphere--
in order to collect all of the available solar energy.
For the present and the practical future, though--meaning
before our reliance on combustion destroys the biological viability
of the atmosphere--the only available Idea Energy Sources will be
nuclear.
Despite the horror of the Greens, fission reactors are Ideal
Energy Sources. Heat from entirely-contained nuclear reactions
boils entirely-contained water into steam to generate electricity,
and nothing is released into the environment. Breeder reactors can
turn relatively abundant uranium-238 into more fuel than they
consume, and if we mine other bodies of the solar system, fission
can provide abundant energy for millions of years.
The problem, of course, is that a malfunction at a fission
reactor can release truly deadly poisons into the environment that
can persist for thousands of years. And the burned-out cores of the
reactors we already have have already piled up huge mountains of
deadly radioactive wastes.
At present, nuclear power represents an uneasy stopgap wager--
convert to fission power at the risk of an environmental catastrophe
sooner or later, versus continued reliance on combustion and the
certain destruction of the atmosphere within a century or two.
Perfected nuclear fusion, however, would be another matter.
Heavy hydrogen extracted from water would release energy by being
fused into chemically inert helium. There would be no toxic fuel
and no toxic waste product for even an accident to release into the
environment, and no possibility of a China Syndrome meltdown or a
runaway chain-reaction.
What is more, at fusion plasma temperatures, any material
injected into the so-called fusion torch would be dissociated into
its constituent atoms, which could then be collected as pure
elemental material. A perfected fusion torch technology would not
only provide an abundant environmentally benign energy source, it
would serve as the perfect waste recycler for all byproducts of a
Transformational civilization.
A long-term stable civilization might and probably will
eventually develop other and even better Ideal Energy Sources--
direct conversion of matter into energy being the theoretical
ultimate--but it seems clear than any civilization that successfully
transcends its Transformation Crisis must have something at least as
good as space-born solar power or the fusion torch.
So, without really having to predict the technological
specifics, we can indeed imagine in a general way what such a
Transformational Civilization would have to be like in order to have
survived a hundred thousand years or so of its own history.
For all practical purposes, it would have access to nearly
unlimited, virtually inexhaustible, environmentally neutral energy.
Fusion torch technology (or something even better) will mean that
virtually anything can serve as raw material for the production of
anything else, and it will all be perfectly recyclable, even food,
via artificial photosynthesis, or some even more efficient process.
If it so chooses, and it probably will, it will be a solar-
system wide civilization, able to terraform planets, and construct
huge artificial space habitats.
Given another few decades, we ourselves will be able to
synthesize living organisms out of off-the-shelf chemicals, so,
given the inclination, a Transformational civilization will even be
able to construct new living planets with their own tailored
biospheres.
Given even ten thousand years, a Transformational civilization
will be able to do just about anything that is possible within the
ultimate limits set by the universal laws governing the interactions
of mass and energy.
The final question, of course, is how do we get from here to
there? How do we transcend our Transformation Crisis?
Vast shelves of science fiction novels could and have been
written around the question, several of which I've already
published, so perhaps I should close with a brief consideration of
what a long-term civilization would have to be like in political,
psychological, and, yes, spiritual terms, to survive thousands of
years of its own history.
One thing is immediately clear--such a civilization will not
engage in warfare, for the simple reason that any civilization
possessed of such physical powers will be unable to survive such
behavior. Indeed, given unlimited energy, unlimited raw materials,
unlimited room for territorial expansion, no rational reason for
warfare can exist. Only a bout of cultural madness could lead to
war in such conditions; such a civilization might survive one such
war, two, maybe three, but over thousands of years, war will either
disappear, or the beings that cannot give it up will.
As with warfare, so with other all forms of self-destructive
cultural and technological activity capable of destroying planets,
stars, or biospheres. Given even another thousand years, we
ourselves, like any other sufficiently technologically advanced
civilization, will possess nine and sixty ways of ending our
species' days, and every single one of them will be wrong.
So finally, the next step in our evolution, the one we need to
make to get us through the Transformation Crisis that is the
consequence of all that has gone before, is neither biological,
scientific, technological, nor even merely political.
We must evolve the level of moral awareness and spiritual
consciousness needed to attain long-term viability as a species.
This is no airy pious hope but a cold hard evolutionary inevitable.
Any species that does not achieve it will sooner or later destroy
itself and its biosphere. Those that do will be the survivors.
There will be no others.
And while the development of the technology to achieve a long-
term stable Transformational civilization may lie in the future, the
power to destroy our species and our biosphere exists in the
present.
So we can't fob off the responsibility for achieving this
necessary moral and spiritual transformation on our hypothetical
descendants,
We are the Transformation Crisis generations.
We get the job done right, or we won't be having any.

end