Penguin Canada is my new Canadian publisher; I’m about to turn in Wake, the first volume of my upcoming WWW trilogy, to them. Good to know that they’re doing fine, as you can see in this Publishers Weekly article.
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One of the coolest things about Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader is the ability to download content directly to the reader, without having to use a separate computer. (Although, as I mentioned before, it was really the old Rocket eBook devices that pioneered this notion, delivering eBooks just by plugging your reader into a phone line.)
In order to compete, eReader.com now is offering their flagship eReader Pro software for free for Windows Mobile PDAs and Windows-powered smartphones, and they’ve added “OTA” — “over-the-air” — technology to let you download books directly to the device.
But what about us folks with Palm OS devices? Well, if yours has WiFi (as mine does) or you have a Palm OS smartphone, try this for an easy experience downloading public-domain and Creative Commons ebooks straight to your device: the mobile-optimized mnybks.net, a simplified portal to the manybooks.net site I raved about earlier:
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Happy New Year, Everyone!
This past year was spectacular for me, I must say. In approximately chronological order:
Now, onward to 2008!
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Besides writing in good old WordStar for DOS, I
also use a legacy program for maintaining my contacts database: I use Alpha Four for DOS version 1.1b (from 1990), which stores its data in the old dBase *.dbf format.
(I use it because WordStar can read data from .dbf files, and because it works well, and because I spent a lot of time many years ago creating forms and templates for it, which still do exactly what I need.)
Anyway, yesterday I found a very nice Palm database viewing/editing program that supports (among other formats) dBase *.dbf, and syncs the files between my Palm OS handheld (a Sony Clie TH55) and my Windows XP computer: Database Viewer Plus (or “DBViewerPlus”) from Cellica. It works well, so I registered it.
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I’ve always been fascinated by studies of identical twins separated at birth, because they shed so much light on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. This one is particularly fascinating, in part because of the questionable ethics involved.
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… can be found here, over at The Breathing Corpse blog.
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I’ve just started experimenting with EverNote, a way cool program good for (among other things) organizing all those little research clippings a writer grabs from various places on the Internet.
It has a really slick interface, and I think it’s going to be quite useful — so I went ahead and registered it. It’s on sale until January 15, 2008, for US$19.95, instead of the usual US$49.95 price.
And I gotta say I like their Google AdWords ad (you’ll see it if you google “evernote”:
www.EverNote.com: Info management that’s so good our competition buys the keyword.
The competition, apparently, is Microsoft’s OneNote, but the reviews I found online seemed to generally agree that EverNote is a slicker, more-feature-rich product. So far, I like it a lot.
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The January 2008 edition of Report on Business Magazine — one of Canada’s top glossy magazines, distributed for free with the Friday 28 December 2007 edition of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper — contains a series of emails from the future by Robert J. Sawyer, along with comments from a bunch of other people about the future.
You’ll find some of the pieces, including mine, here.
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Remember that Classic Star Trek episode about the Greek god Apollo?
The title of that episode is not “Who Mourns for Adonis?” — despite the fact that you see it rendered that way frequently.
No, the title actually is “Who Mourns for Adonais?” It’s a line from the poem “Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” by Percy Bysshe Shelley; you can read the poem here.
“Adonaïs” is Shelley’s own coinage, apparently a blending of the Greek “Adonis” (beautiful young man) and the Hebrew “Adonai” (used in place of YHWH as a name of the God of the Hebrews during prayer recitation).
Now you know. :)
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Canadian fans of my work: grab a copy of The Globe and Mail on Friday, December 28, 2007. It will include the January 2008 edition of the monthly Report on Business Magazine, which has … well, it’s not quite a story, but it is a creative piece by me in it.
Remember, Friday is the only day you can get the ROB Magazine — it’s free with The Globe, but only on that day.
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Egypt has decided to essentially copyright its antiquities, according to this article from the BBC. How they’re going to enforce this, and why other countries should pay any attention, I’m not quite sure …
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Carolyn and I started the day by visiting her mother’s house, where her side of the family had gathered, and then it was off to the home of my brother Peter and his wife Jacquie for a wonderful turkey dinner. A really nice day.
Among Carolyn and my presents were some TV shows on DVD, including:
plus Battlestar Galactica: Razor and the new “Quantum Edition” of What the Bleep do we Know?, plust the new tin-box The Monkees Collector’s Edition CD set, Spock vs. Q — the sequel on audio cassette, and a lovely model Parasaurolophus, gift cards to our local cinema and Chapters, and lots of nice sweaters and shirts.
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Over at manybooks.net, you’ll find 19,000 ebooks available in all popular reader formats, including my own favorite, eReader, plus Kindle, Mobipocket, Rocket, Palm DOC, HTML, and many more — the site will even produce a custom PDF to your exact specifications (font, type size margins, line spacing).
Included are almost all the Project Gutenberg offerings (but formatted for your favorite reading software) and a lot of more recent Creative Commons material.
What I’m reading now, courtesy of manybooks.net, is “Valley of Dreams,” the little-known sequel to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s SF classic “A Martian Odyssey.”
The manybooks.net site is the work of one guy, a fellow named Matthew McClintock. He offers all the books for free, but I just sent him a small PayPal donation to show my appreciation.
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My great friend Jeanne Robinson — co-author of Stardance with her husband Spider — is going to get a zero-G flight experience next week. Read all about her adventure in her new blog — and about the Stardance movie project here.
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The very first Doctor Who serial I ever watched was “The Time Warrior,” featuring the third (and still my favourite) Doctor, Jon Pertwee.
When I first saw it, I had no idea that it was a turning point in the series: it contained not only the first-ever mention of the name of The Doctor’s home planet (Gallifrey), but also the introduction of one of his most popular companions, Sarah Jane Smith — and was also the introduction of what, to this day, are my favourite aliens from the series, the Sontarans (of which Linx or Lynx [you see both spellings online although the actual call sheet for the production of the episodes uses the former], played by Kevin Lindsay, shown above, was the first).
A site called The Mind Robber gathers everything we know about Sontarans under the title We Love Sontarans, and also contains the news that in the fourth series of the new Doctor Who, the Sontarans will follow in the footsteps (treadmarks?) of the Daleks and the Cyberman, returning to the show, with a new, updated look:
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Check it out:
For me (and I’m right-handed) she spins clockwise, unless I focus on the lower-left corner of the frame, in which case she spins counter-clockwise, or “anti-clockwise,” as they say on this Australian site — which prompted Carolyn, who is also right-handed and also saw the dancer spinning clockwise, to quip that maybe she spins the other way south of the equator due to the Coriolis effect … ;)
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Save The Cat!, subtitled “The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need!” …
… now has a sequel!
(But both books — Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies — are excellent. More info at author Blake Snyder’s website)
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I’m getting tired of ebooks that aren’t properly formatted, and so I posted the following on the Fictionwise discussion forum, in response to Fictionwise’s founder Steve Pendergrast saying it only costs $20 or $25 to convert a title to an ebook, and they can convert 50 or so a week, with just one staffer doing it:
If I may be so bold, both your in-house and outside service-bureau converters are doing a crappy job of late on conversions. It used to be if you bought an ebook in a secure format, footnotes or endnotes were properly formatted as hyperlinks that you could jump to; now, they very often aren’t — making the ebook harder, not easier, to use than the printed version, because of the difficulty of flipping to the footnotes.
A recent example: Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
For an ebook that you’re charging six dollars more for than Amazon charges for the print edition, that the notes aren’t hyperlinked is just unacceptable.
Rather than getting the process down to the cheapest, most quick-and-dirty method, I respectfully submit that the long-term health of ebooks depends on making the ereading experience more rewarding and user friendly than the print experience. But have a look at, say, your mutliformat release of this book, which you say you did in-house:
The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction.
Your hyperlinked table of contents is completely useless in this anthology of articles, because there’s no clue as to what topic the links will take you to. All the chapters actually have titles and individual authors. Chapter Four, for instance, is “The Many Faces of Science Fiction: Sub-Genres” by Kim Richards. But your quick-and-dirty table of contents just gives a useless list of non-descriptive hyperlinks:
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
etc.
No doubt it did cost you only $20 or $25 to do this conversion, but spending a little more to get it right would have been preferable from the consumer’s point of view. Touting the hypothetical benefits of ebooks over printed ones but not actually delivering those benefits in the finished product is no way to grow an industry.
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Plus the complete Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, consisting of:
And (as they are released in print form) my complete upcoming WWW trilogy, consisting of:
I won’t be recording the narration myself; it’ll all be done by professional voice artists.
I really do listen to material from Audible.com all the time, and I’m thrilled to have them making such a big commitment to me. My thanks to them, and to Chris Lotts, my agent who handled the negotiations.
(Audible.com is the world’s leading retailer of downloadable audiobooks — their titles can be played on iPods, Palms, desktops, mobile phones, many MP3 players, etc. etc., and can be burned to CD.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I still write with WordStar for DOS, and I note that today marks the 15th anniversary of the file-stamp date on the last version ever released: WordStar for DOS 7.0 Revision D was finalized December 21, 1992.
I’ve customized the hell out of WordStar over the years, and love it. It’s fast, rock-solid, wonderfully optimized for use by touch typists, feature-rich, and much better at text manipulation than Word or WordPerfect in my humble opinion. And, since it can save files in RTF, which every Windows wordprocessor can read, I can’t think of any reason to switch.
Sure, someday new Windows computers will stop coming with any DOS support, but (a) there will be an endless supply of old ones on eBay, and (b) Linux or other platforms will always have decent DOS emulators, I’m sure.
Anyway, time to put WordStar to work — as I myself go back to work on the homestrecth form Wake, the 18th novel I’ve written with WordStar.
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Today is the last day my wonderful publicist Janis Ackroyd will be with H.B. Fenn and Company, the Canadian distributor for Tor Books. A great many of the good things that have happened to me in the last few years have been the result of Janis’s very hard work. Janis is moving on to new challenges, and I’m going to miss working with her … but she’ll always be my friend.
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Spoiler alert! But if you’ve read my Calculating God you might enjoy these questions a grade-12 student just sent me. Needless to say, I told him he’d have to come up with his own answers. :)
1. Who did you mean your audience to be when you wrote this book and what did you want them to get out of it after they read the novel? In short, what was your goal in writing this novel? Does the development of any of the characters symbolize this goal?
2. How would you classify the enlightenment of Tom’s character at the end of the novel? In the last few pages, Tom reminisces about when he first became fascinated with fossils. What did he find in that first fossil? (A sense of mystery? His love for science?) His last words are that he has found something he hadn’t known he was looking for. What has he found at death? (True friendship? The meaning of life?) Does he finally believe in God or the purpose of faith? How are Hollus and the other aliens affected by finally finding what they have been searching for?
3. Who or what event/circumstance had the greatest affect on Thomas Jericho’s enlightened character? What influence ultimately led him to make this decisions he does at the end of the novel?
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Gabriel McKee’s blog “SF Gospel” has this fascinating list of The 10 Best Science Fiction Stories About Religion.
I’m particularly pleased to see him skipping such simplistic fare as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” which usually choke such lists; and I’m delighted to see him including Michael Bishop’s unaccountably little known “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis.”
(However, my own list would have included Michael Moorcock’s original short version of “Behold the Man,” which I think is a better, tighter work than the later novel; in a note at the end of the blog entry, McKee says he’s excluded it because of the existence of the novel, and that’s fair enough.)
McKee wrote the wonderful nonfiction book The Gospel According to Science Fiction — a fine choice to keep in mind for the “Best Related Book” Hugo Award as we gear up to nominating works from 2007 in the next few weeks.
(As for short work of my own about religion, Fictionwise.com has my “Come All Ye Faithful” and my short-short “The Abdication of Pope Mary III,” which Publishers Weekly called “gobsmacking.”)
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My friend Shoshana Glick mentions in a comment to this post of mine that those weren’t really very hard Star Trek questions on Jeopardy! a few days ago. I agree.
So, here are a few super-hard ones of my own devising, with suggested Jeopardy! dollar values. If you know the answers, put them in a comment to this blog entry.
$200: James Kirk’s middle name is Tiberius, as established in the animated episode “Bem” by David Gerrold, and reaffirmed by General Chang in the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. But where in The Original Series do we see his middle initial as something else? And what initial was it?
$400: We all know that Jim Kirk eventually ends up wearing eye glasses, because he’s allergic to retinax — but where do we see a member of the Enterprise crew wearing eye glasses prior to that? (Which episode, and in what room?)
$600: “The Conscience of the King” and “The Immunity Syndrome” contain glaringly contradictory statements about the history of the Vulcan people. In what way do they disagree?
$800: Gene Roddenberry has a cameo of sorts in one episode of the original series. What was it? (Which episode, what role?)
$1,000: Kirk tells Captain Christopher in “Return to Tomorrow” that the Enterprise‘s command authority is “the United Earth Space Probe Agency,” a name never heard again. But Kirk refers to the organization by its acronym UESPA (which he pronounces “yoo-spa”) in one other episode — which one?
Final Jeopardy: Jim Kirk’s brother George Samuel Kirk — called Sam — is established in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Sam’s family appears in “Operation — Annihilate!” Although he’s referred to only as Sam in dialog in that later episode, there’s still an acknowledgment that his full name really is George Samuel Kirk. What is it?
(Yes, I really do know my Star Trek — in fact, back in the early 1980s, I even wrote part of a Star Trek novel, which you can read here.)
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The great British SF magazine Interzone joins Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF in being available in all standard ebook formats at Fictionwise.com. For Interzone, see here.
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What ever happened to WordStar, the grand old word-processing program for CP/M and MS-DOS? And what about its clone, NewWord, published by NewStar Software?
John C. Dvorak explains:
What ever happened to WordStar?
What ever happened to NewWord?
I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0 (and have been a WordStar user for 24 years, as of this week!), and love it for all these reasons. WordStar 7.0 was built on the NewWord codebase.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Stumbled on this fascinating database, which quotes various SF and fantasy books about real religious groups, including excerpts from my Flashforward and Calculating God.
I’ve just sent them an email, though, because they had an amusing typo. In Flashforward, a character says, “Souls are about life immortal” — but they transcribed that as “Souls are about life immoral,” which is quite a different notion … :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
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I get all kinds of interesting questions in email, including this one:
For several years, I have been collecting 1st, 2nd and 3rd printings of the original Ace Science Fiction Specials pb of “Neuromancer” (William Gibson).
The ISBNs are 0-441-56956-0, 0-441-56957-9, and 0-441-56958-7, respectively.
I’m very much interested in knowing how many copies of these early editions – the only ones with cover art by Andy Warhola – were printed.
Any advise you can provide on how I might go about seeking an answer to this question would be much appreciated.
My answer:
That’s a very good question. William Gibson himself might know, but publishers actually only report copies sold, not copies printed, to authors. His editor on Neuromancer, Terry Carr, would have known, but he’s dead. Gibson’s current editor, at Penguin USA (Ace’s parent company), is Susan Allison, and she might have access to the old print-run figures (but, then again, they might be in long-archived paper files), although publishers normally consider that sort of information proprietary, and so she might not give it out.
If I had to guess, though, I’d say the first printing of a 1984 first novel in mass-market paperback for which the publisher had high hopes (which they did have for this book; that’s why it was done in the Ace New Specials Line) would have been between 20,000 and 50,000 copies. Back then, it wouldn’t have been economical to do any mass-market title in fewer than 10,000 copies, so that’s the absolute minimum, I should think.
If anybody’s got a better answer, I’ll pass it on to my correspondent.
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There used to be a guy online called Blackmask who formatted Project Gutenberg public-domain titles for various ebook readers. He folded his tent, but his old DVD of 10,000 titles for Mobipocket reader (a format supported by Amazon’s new Kindle, the iRex iLiad, and just about every other ebook-reading device) is available again from a nice lady in England.
Yeah, you could scrounge all this from other sources — but it’s neatly organized here (with a browser interface that makes it easy to find what you want), and includes, in addition to the Mobipocket versions, HTML versions of each ebook, too — so that you can convert them to other formats in future. With fast shipping to North America included, it’s just US$23.99 — worth every penny, in my view.
Cut and paste this line into eBay’s search box to find this disk (don’t worry if it wraps on your screen; it’ll paste fine as a single line — and, yes, that’s a period, not a comma, in 10.000):
ON DVD 10.000 MOBIPOCKET ebooks for the KINDLE READER
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