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The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans.

INCORRECT. The Nebulas are chosen by SFWA members. The requirements for membership are that you have to have sold three 1000 word or longer stories at a nickle apiece or earned three grand from a novel.

The Nebulas are not chosen by critics. They're chosen by professional science fiction and fantasy WRITERS.

Someone please mod that incorrect post down, it's bullshit as you can see from SFWA's site that lgw has obviously never visited.

According to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, you're correct.

The short answer: Thor Power eliminated a tax dodge, and thereby made it more expensive for publishers to carry inventory from year to year. As a result, publishers have cut print runs in order to minimize inventory. They have also become quicker to dispose of inventory — i.e., pulp it — before the end of the fiscal year.

http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/how-thor-power-hammered-publishing/

We can thank President Carter for eliminating a tax dodge. ;)

I have NEVER seen a company follow through with a lawsuit once a DMCA takedown notice was contested.

How many DMCA notices have you been involved in? One only needs to file a suit if the poster files a counter claim. So many do not get to court as the filer knows they are infringing. Even then, very few copyright cases get publicity.

And you are actually talking about YouTube's process.

It is YouTube's process because it complies with Title 17 of the US Code. They didn't come up with it on their own. All US content providers follow the same procedure because it is the only one that protects them from law suits and follows the law.

But I have seen enough to know you can make your own arguments in court and your content can remain online unless they sue you.

What you "know" and what are the fact are two different things. Try reading this

And unless the DMCA issuer notified the OSP before then that they have filed an action in court seeking to restrain you from posting, the OSP must restore access to the removed material. 17 USC 512(g)(2).

The content remains of line if they sue you. The whole reason for the DMCA is to allow a quickremoval of infringing material and give the copyright holder some time to properly file the paperwork with the courts. Without those provisions the harm is done before the paperwork gets through the courts. Perhaps you might want to read the law before commenting on what you "know".

This example was about predatory journals. There are also predatory "vanity publishers" that convince aspiring authors to pay money to get their book published.

A group of science fiction authors put together a complete novel to sting one such vanity press. The result, Atlanta Nights, is a hoot!

In one chapter, Bruce Lucent is a young hotshot software developer; in another, he is an old, broken-down shell of a man. Some chapters have new characters that are never heard from again. Near the end of the book, the full text of the first chapter appears again as a new chapter. Also, someone wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream... and then the book continues for a few more chapters. And my favorite: the last chapter was written by feeding other chapters into a Markov Chain nonsense generator. Example: "Bruce Lucent walked around anymore."

Rather than using Simpsons names, they chose a fake name "Travis Tea" that sounds like the word "travesty".

Atlanta Nights was accepted for publication, but after the authors had their press release the publisher changed its mind.

http://www.sfwa.org/members/travistea/backstory.htm

They got a bunch of famous authors to give tongue-in-cheek blurbs about the book. Jerry Pournelle: "Don't fail to miss it if you can!"

Yes, I also have griped about SF that shoehorns the distant future into the mold of today, or of the past. I have special disdain for those who want to recreate the wild west, or the age of piracy, or empires of the past with space opera trappings. If you love the old west, write westerns, man!

in the turkey lexicon written by bruce sterling to help new sci-fi writers, there's a special phrase to describe the type of book where "laser pistol" replaces the word "six shooter" and "steed" replaces "six-legged mounted alien beast". it's called "The Western"!

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu...

there are many more: you are not alone in encountering badly-written sci-fi by novelists who quotes want to get in on the sci-fi genre act quote. but one that really really surprised me: a book in the "Eve Online" universe. it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one - but i kept reading and found that, actually, there was a heck of a lot of good in it. it was the author's first and only book, and he was extremely brave to attempt it, and, apart from being semi-starwars-esque in places and "film-drama-queen-esque" in others, the story worked really _really_ well, kept my attention and made really good use of advanced biotech, cloning, machine consciousness, wormhole technology and much more to actually *tell a story*.

bruce sterling wrote an extremely funny and valuable guide to sci-fi writers which i've mentioned here before on slashdot, and it has been expanded ever since. ah yeah here we go: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu... it's well-worth reading just for amusement value. the ironical thing is that this well-known sci-fi author, charles stross, is telling us that many sci-fi authors today are falling into some of the traps outlined by that lexicon and valuable guide.

whilist it seems flippant therefore to be telling them "write better sci-fi!" it has to be said that sci-fi writers have set themselves a much harder task than any other writing genre. first and foremost: they need to be good story tellers! and almost secondary to that, they need to be extremely knowledgeable about technology... *because their readers are*. whenever i read a new sci-fi novel by an author that i've never heard of before - and i do not do that often because it is a risk - i often find myself critiquing the author's style. anything where they assume i am an idiot (by doing things like explaining cloud computing to me), that's when the magic of the story is lost, and i know i just read a story by someone who is not going to ever be a successful sci-fi writer. it's a fine line to walk.

The DMCA notice concept that is mentioned on the summary is very well explained by Ken Liu on this article: http://www.sfwa.org/2013/03/th... it can be helpful for the people trying to enforce their copyrights

This idea is similar to applying a force to the sun and dragging the entire solar system. The author of that piece incorporated the idea into his novel C.U.S.P.

Amazon gives authors of e-books 70% of purchase price? When I'm ready to publish I'll pay for software to produce content in a manner that Kindle users will be able to easily read my content and sit back and watch as either the $$$ roll in or the cob-webs collect (depending on if my content is any good). Either way, I'll already have moved on to my next project.

Actually, if you're sensible, you'll first read the contract that Amazon requires you to sign. You may or may not decide after doing that that giving up substantial rights is worth seeing the material appear on a particular company's platform. Different authors have reached different conclusions on the matter.

Anent Amazon and the Kindle in particular, you may want to read: http://www.sfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Amazon_digital_publication_distribution_agreement_annotated_v3_080329.pdf.

Read this post from one of Macmillan's authors (Tobias Buckell). An excellent explanation for why tiered pricing is a good business practice.

http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/why-my-books-are-no-longer-available-on-amazon-com/

He's so right. He references the Turkey City Lexicon, which lists most of the things that make bad SF. Also worth reading is the Evil Overlord List. (" 2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through." "56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice." "67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.")

There are some other annoying cliches in SF. One is copying historical battles. The Defense of Roarke's Drift has shown up in at least four SF novels. (Nobody ever seems to do the Defense of Duffer's Drift.) Star Wars space battles are copied from WWI biplane battles, where nobody can hit targets consistently, even at short range. There's also the embarrassing fact that, historically, heroism hasn't decided many major battles. (Roman saying: "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills.") Military SF no longer reflects this, because the WWII generation, which learned that the hard way, has died off.

David Weber does battles better, but his stuff requires too much exposition for most people. His latest book in the Honor Harrington series consists mostly of transcripts of meetings, setting up the political background for the next book.

Stross himself has his moments. The Merchant's War series starts out as fantasy, but slowly, book by book, moves into hard fiction and then politics. In the last book out so far, a character modelled on Dick Cheney has dealt with a threat from a castle in an alternate universe by having his people blow up the castle with a nuclear weapon.

If the book has grown too far beyond its bounds, the correct response is to murder your darlings.

You can fault Martin for a lot of things, but being squeamish about killing off his characters? Are you NUTS? There are gadflies with longer life expectancies than a SOIaF character...

Allow me to dissent.

"A Game of Thrones" suffers from an excess of underdeveloped characters. I counted 10-12 major characters, plus dozens of supporting cast. Daenerys, the exiled dragon princess, seemed interesting, as did Arya, the waterdancer-in-training. However, I finished the book without really caring about any of them.

In some ways, the whole book felt like nothing more than background for plot lines that won't be developed until well into the second or third novels. For example, the very first chapter introduces the the undead ghouls who are evidently gathering to invade from the North, but they're barely mentioned for the rest of the book's 800 pages, appearing only briefly in the Jon Snow arc. Likewise, the extended story of Daenerys' marriage into the Dothraki tribes seems like wind-up for an invasion from the south by the dispossessed heir, evidently for one of the later books. Though the Daenerys plot struck me as the most interesting part of the book, it really had little or nothing to do with the main plot. With so very many characters to track, there was little time to develop a rapport with any of them.

The landscape and cultures are, for the most part, stock. One glance at the map in the front will have any mildly educated person thinking "Oh, they're England and Scotland divided by Hadrian's Wall." The Dothraki are clearly based on the Mongols, only slightly more hedonistic; whereas the culture of the Seven Kingdoms is stock High Middle Ages.

In short, the material was handled poorly, with little imagination, and at much greater length than it needed. The book could have benefited greatly from the tender attentions of a stern editor.

I went on to read two or three more books in the series (checked out from the library) and finally gave up in disgust when he put an explanatory note at the end of a volume saying that he'd wound up splitting the book in two because there were so very many characters to follow. I take that as a sign of poor discipline. If the book has grown too far beyond its bounds, the correct response is to murder your darlings.

I was disappointed. Some of his other work I've enjoyed very much, particularly "Tuf Voyaging" and (to a lesser extent) "Windhaven", and I'm a major fantasy fan, so I was expecting it to be enjoyable, and it wasn't. Bummer.

SCI FI Pronounced 'sky fi' or 'si fi', an abbreviation for 'science fiction', said to have been introduced by Forrest J. Ackerman, a prominent fan fond of wordplay, in the 1950s, when the term 'hi-fi' was becoming popular. Never much used within the sf community, the term became very popular with journalists and media people generally, until by the 1970s it was the most common abbreviation used by non-readers of sf to refer to the genre, often with an implied sneer. Some critics within the genre, Terry Carr and Damon Knight among them, decided that, since the term was derogatory, it might be critically useful in distinguishing sf hackwork - particularly ill written, lurid adventure stories - from sf of a more intellectually demanding kind. Around 1978 the critic Susan Wood and others began pronouncing the term 'skiffy'. In 1980s-90s usage 'skiffy', which sounds friendlier than 'sci fi', has perhaps for that reason come to be less condemnatory. Skiffy is colourful, sometimes entertaining, junk. Star Wars is skiffy.

-- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edn, 1993), ed. Clute and Nicholls

SF Pronounced "esseff", the preferred abbreviation of "science fiction" within the community of writers and readers, as opposed to the journalistic SCI FI. In this volume - as often elsewhere - it is rendered in lower-case letters.

-- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edn, 1993), ed. Clute and Nicholls

Here is an entertaining discussion of the terms sf and sci-fi with Damon Knight and others.

Interesting. I didn't know that you could get the three digest-format magazines electronically.

But even without including those, there are quite a few electronic-only magazines that pay professional rates of $.05/word or more. The Science Fiction Writers of America maintains a list of approved pro markets. The main criterion is that they have to pay 5 cents a word, but they also won't list them unless they have a regular publication schedule and a decent circulation. The following is a list of pro markets for SF (not fantasy or horror) short stories, omitting publications whose main focus isn't fiction:

1. Asimov's (print)
2. Analog (print)
3. F&SF (print)
4. Baen's Universe (electronic only)
5. Strange Horizons (electronic only)
6. Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (electronic only)
7. Chizine (electronic only)
8. Subterranean Magazine (electronic only)

I don't think there's any big difference in quality between the electronic and print markets. I write SF, and the list of magazines that I've managed to sell to is about evenly distributed between the print and electronic markets. The main differences aren't differences between electronic and print, they're differences in style. JBU specializes in action-adventure and military SF. Asimov's does mostly character-based SF. Strange Horizons publishes a lot of fiction that isn't as commercially oriented. There are also lots of differences in terms of business model. JBU is electronic, with a subscription model; they let you read the first half of each story without a subscription, but you have to pony up to read the rest. Strange Horizons is a nonprofit foundation, free to read online. Card's won't let you read anything without a subscription.

The Hugos are voted on by SF readers. The Nebulas are voted by SF authors. Occasionally the same title will win both honors.

Barbara Bauer, described by SFWA as one of the twenty worst literary agents they know of, and who has a history of threatening people who are critical of her and getting ISPs to shut down web sites that are critical of her and claiming her name is her intellectual property and cannot be published without her permission, sued Wikimedia (among others) for repeating some of the above claims about a year ago. But I've heard nothing about the case since. Can anyone comment?

There was a recent article (either Asimov's or Analog) about how some members of the SFWA feel threatened because other writers are publishing on-line, and even giving their stories away for free, to "prime the pump" for their later works. Heck, even SFWA is giving away sample stories.

The internet really is changing the way people do business. I want dead trees. I *like* dead trees. However, if someone says "check out this person's work on the net", maybe I'll read it. And then maybe there'll be a list of other stuff available only in dead-tree format. And maybe I'll want some of it.

There was a recent article (either Asimov's or Analog) about how some members of the SFWA feel threatened because other writers are publishing on-line, and even giving their stories away for free, to "prime the pump" for their later works. Heck, even SFWA is giving away sample stories.

The internet really is changing the way people do business. I want dead trees. I *like* dead trees. However, if someone says "check out this person's work on the net", maybe I'll read it. And then maybe there'll be a list of other stuff available only in dead-tree format. And maybe I'll want some of it.

I want to respond to the flurry of activity that has resulted from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) mistakenly identifying several works as infringing copyright. First, some background. There have been discussions within SFWA for several months regarding websites that allow users to upload documents of all sorts for other users to download and share. Many hundreds of copyrighted texts have been put online at these sites, and the number is growing quickly. Some SFWA members complained about the pirating of their works to SFWA's e-Piracy Committee and authorized the committee to do something about it. SFWA contacted scribd.com, one of these sites, about removing these authors' works and generated a list of infringing works to be removed.

Unfortunately, this list was flawed and the results were not checked. At least three works tagged as copyright infringements were nothing of the sort. I have personally apologized to the writers and editors of those works. If you are a creator who has had material removed and has not yet been contacted, please email me at president@sfwa.org.

SFWA's intention was to remove from scribd.com only works copyrighted by SFWA members who had authorized SFWA to act on their behalf. This kind of error will not happen again.

Michael Capobianco
President, SFWA

You seed the PDF in a torrent and sit back and wait for the word to spread. If your work is good, that word will spread, and people who like books will want the professionally printed hardcopy.

Your right on this, it isn't something I thought of. However I see a problem with this, many people don't like to wait more than a day or two. Since people want what they buy today tomorrow or the next day this means that you're going to need a warehouse to store the printed books. Otherwise, if you're going to have them printed as the orders come in it may be a week or two before you can ship the books. And to have books professionally printed and bound more than likely you're going to need a small printer or vanity publisher who will not only need the tyme to print and bind the books but will also more than likely charge a lot. Traditionally Vanity publishers charge high printing costs. And that comes directly out of the writer's pocket, frequently up front.

Their books will be seen as cheap copies and will be shunned by your main base of readers, who will tend to come to your chosen outlet.

Counterfitters can take just as much due diligence making copies or knockoffs as the owner or creator can. And the creator may not have the means or resources to market never mind print a book. I don't recall her name, but the lady who wrote the "Harry Potter" book series originally wrote the books for her son while she was on welfare. And now she's one of Britian's wealthiest people. And she had been rejected by publishers before she found one that agreed to publish the books.

Yes, there will be freeloaders (they will read the PDF and never pay you a cent). There always have been and there always will be. If you waste your life thinking angry thoughts about freeloaders then you really need to start reconsidering your mindset. They're simply not all that important.

I wouldn't mind that at all, afterall that's what libraries are all about and I support libraries. Actually the USA's first Librarian of Congress, Benjamin Franklin, was a printer. He and other printers got together and opened one of if not the first public library in the US, in Philadelphia.

Afterall what do you think the Business Software Alliance does?

It's basically a legalised protection racket. I see nothing to admire about the BSA. They make it their business to run around screwing up their customers' operations and then suing them afterwards.

Ok, so I take it you don't support or like the BSA. Guess I owe you an apology there, I thought as a programmer you may support them, but I was wrong.

Although I have some questions about your suggestion of creating a pdf for download, it seems you've got an idea I might be able to support. I'd like to learn more and get some answers to my questions answered but you've given me something to think about. Thanks.

No, I think that makes it aptly named, although correcting the spelling to Skiffy Channel wouldn't hurt.

Copyright infringement was being defined as piracy while the Black Flag still flew over the Carribean. Electronic Piracy FAQ

The usage is now deeply entrenched and in common usage. The Geek is not going to win this war of words.

Remember: Everytime you buy something from Hasboro/WOTC, you're paying money to a company screwing writers over.

- California Insider

There may be a limited number of instances where you might want to use them, but I can't think of many. Perhaps a highly technical book with a limited audience, but then you're going make a pittance from your sales since you can't even set the price of your book. The worth of your book is dictated by the amount of paper it uses, not the words. Certainly no mainstream author would ever want to use the service unless they struck a deal with the POD service outside of the scales that the other schmucks get.

There is a lot of detailed info from an author's perspective about POD here.

Writer Beware's blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read".

...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)

What's the difference between a NOVELLA, NOVELETTE, and a SHORT STORY?

From:
http://www.sfwa.org/awards/faq.htm#6

        * Novel -- 40,000 words or more
        * Novella -- 17,500-39,999 words
        * Novelette -- 7,500-17,499 words
        * Short Story -- 7,499 words or fewer
        * Script -- a professionally produced audio, radio, television, motion picture, multimedia, or theatrical script

Well they were anyway. Now that she's Dead I'm not sure.

Obscure? It's on my short list of some of the best sci-fi ever written. The short story won the Hugo, the novel won the Nebula, and the movie Charly won an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and received a fistful of other nominations. What surprises me is that it took so long for someone to mention it.

SFWA (pronounced "sif-oh-wa" I think) is an international organization, but the acronym does stand for "Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America." In order to vote for the Nebula Award, you have to be an Active member, not just an Associate member; the requirements include sales to qualifying professional markets, so not any sale will get you to that status. Thinking of the Nebula as an Oscar is not a bad idea.

If you look at the very good list of works that won both the Hugo and Nebula, you'll see there's reasonable correspondence between fan popularity and popularity among professional writers, especially when you consider how many works are worthy of the honors. Pros, just like fans, aren't immune to buzz or author reputation.

In the old days they were the only ones who could cost effectively print and distribute books. That is not the case anymore.

Respectfully disagree, for the typical case. If you have access to a tightly targeted market, sure, you can do it yourself. But for your average fiction book or garden variety non-fiction where the author isn't tied into the readership, and the author's expectation is that it will be on bookshelves across America, it is emphatically not true that one can compete with the major publishers in cost effectively printing and distributing books:

If you want to get your book on the shelves of every real bookstore in the country, you're looking at printing and shipping (and taking back, with return shipping on your nickel) say 10-20,000 copies. Let's go with 10,000 for example. Let's say you go with a trade paper edition from some reasonable POD outfit like LuLu (who probably ties into Lightning like I'd guess PA does too). Setup at LuLu is free -- you plop over your text. (Now, you ought to have paid for real copyediting, and formatting it right for print will take time or you can pay someone, and there's decent cover art, so let's say you put a piddly $1,000 into that. Your cost as author to purchase copies is, say, $8, and you want them in 10,000 stores, so you've got shipping to each store (media rate is $1.42 for a pound or under), plus the shipping envelopes at say $25c in bulk, so let's say $2 each to ship, plus you'll probably get half of them returned (50% returns meaning you've done well!), at another $2 shipping to you, so that's another $1 a copy average to factor in -- so $8+2+1=$11/copy in costs. So, you've printed and shipped 10,000 copies at $11, costing you $110,000 up front before you can see a dime ($111k with your other costs). (That's not counting your *time* in shipping these out -- at 5min a package including time at the post office, that's 100 8-hour days!) Now, the bookstore (or a distributor like Ingram) wants aroundabout a 50% discount off cover price, so if you want to get back that $11 with say $1 profit, you'll have to put the list price at around $24. If you're lucky and sell half of them, you get back, many months later, half your books that didn't sell (5,000 copies) plus payment for those that sold of 5,000 x $12 = $60,000.

Oops, you just lost $50,000.

POD, like PublishAmerica, is only economically feasible if you don't have the copies on bookstore shelves. But if you don't have the copies on store shelves, you have an incredibly hard time selling your book. (In -most- cases; exceptions are as you say.)

How does a real publisher make money at this? Volume discounts: They don't have to pay the high costs per copy for the printing, and for the shipping they lump copies of different titles together. They subsidize losses from titles that don't break even by having bestsellers that sell tons of copies (thus effectively near-zero returns). Yes, publishers often lose money on titles, especially titles from new authors. (Whom they hope will get a following and sell better in the future.)

Sad to say, but as a one-title self-publisher, it's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit. You might make a hundred bucks, but to really sell to the mass public you risk tens of thousands of dollars. Real publishers do this for you, because they believe in the book (that it'll make them and you both money). PublishAmerica is most definitely not a "traditional" publisher. Go see how many of their titles you can find in your local Barnes & Noble, compared to Random House, Tor, etc. (Lucky if you can fine one title, and if you do, chances are it's a local author and only carried in that one store.)

This isn't changing until we have *real* e-books (i.e. outselling paper books), and even then, you'll have to get Eyeballs on Product or you won't sell.

Alas. But it's PA's claims that they are "traditional" -- and the false hopes they create therefrom -- that get people's bile up.

--Andrew Burt
(VP, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.)

I see no connection between the quality of the writing of the folks who run http://www.writerbeware.org/ and their low opinions of PublishAmerica.

This began, years back, with some well-respected SF authors chiding PublishAmerica for misleading statements (which Atlanta Nights proves :-), and PublishAmerica wanting to call them names.

When you parse out the (il)logic of that quote from PublishAmerica, they're saying anyone who picks on them is a bad writer and disreputable scum. :-) In actuality, the ones pointing out the PublishAmerica isn't what they claim are folks who do an enormous amount of work to help aspiring writers get published, educate them about how publishing works, and what to avoid. They've put scammers behind bars, and deserve a lot of credit for "paying forward" (helping the next generation succeed). Check out http://www.writerbeware.org/, compare to the hype at http://www.publishamerica.com/, and make up your own mind.

--Andrew Burt
(VP of SFWA, for which WriterBeware is SFWA's Committee on Writing Scams)

What separates the real publishers from the rest are that they put their neck out for the author financially. They get thousands of copies printed, not knowing if they'll sell, and they pay the shipping to the stores, and are willing to take the copies back if they don't sell (called "returns") for free, even paying the shipping back. Self-published books don't have the margin in them to allow for that. By the time you factor in a little money for the author, the printing costs, shipping, etc. for a returnable book, the cost has risen higher than readers usually will pay. So if you have a market you can tap, terrific, go for it, self-publishing can be your friend. If you haven't the ability to tap a large enough market, then self-publishing won't make you any serious money.

I think this will substantially change for the better with the advent of inexpensive "digital paper" products, i.e. that act like a book in the ways mass consumers want [which ebooks demonstrably don't today -- or they'd sell like paper books]. At the point where you have a "real book" with rifflable pages but digital ink, cheap enough for most folks to afford -- let's say 10-20 years from now -- then this whole picture will change in dramatic ways. But we're not there yet.

And even then: what will remain a constant is the need to get Eyeballs on Product. Marketing and advertising will always be expensive so long as the "human input bandwidth" is limited like it is.

Bottom line, though -- what this sting was about: PublishAmerica makes it seem like all an author needs to do to make a living from writing is get their words into print. The reality is that a real publisher invests a lot of money into getting Eyeballs on Product, and that's the only way most books make any significant money. If PublishAmerica just made it clear how unlikely it was to make money from self-publishing, unless you have the ability to tap into a large market (which very few authors do), I doubt WriterBeware and those of us who are "Travis Tea" would have done this. SFWA and WriterBeware have a long history of helping and educating aspiring authors. Self-publishing/POD is a tool that only works well in the right (and rather limited) circumstances -- but PublishAmerica misleads authors about that, and that's what makes us mad. (If PublishAmerica has 223 new titles each month [78 new authors/mo + 145 second books/mo, from their page at http://www.publishamerica.com/facts/index.htm], each selling an average of say 100 copies over its entire lifetime, selling for say $15 each, PublishAmerica has revenues of 223*100*15 ~ $330,000/mo or $4M/year. Each author, on the other hand, gets an 8% royalty [per PA's contract] from that $15, or $1.20, for $120 total income from their book. Draw your own conclusions.)

If PA quit calling themselves a "traditional" publisher -- or acted like one, vetting work for salability because their neck is on the line and paying out advances of thousa

--Andrew Burt

(TravisTea.11 and sort of .34 [I wrote the software used to generate the gibberish in chapter 34])

Putting on my skepticism hat, I ask : Is this a cheap publicity stunt by a group of under talented people who hate PublishAmerica ??

It's a cheap publicity stunt yes, but it's worth it. Publishers who claim that SF&F is easier to write or less worthy than other genres should be shown that this is false. Just like any genre there is good and bad examples. Usually when a genre becomes popular there is a glut of product, which increases the amount of crap in the marketplace. It happened with crime, SF&F, romance and these sort of modern novels. Sigh...

Anyway, I hardly think that if it was a purely money making effort by no-talent hacks, then it wouldn't be available for download (though I'm not sure if the PDF is the entire thing as it's still downloading).

Use http://www.sfwa.org/members/aburt instead, has manuscript, blurbs, more info.

Better would be http://www.sfwa.org/members/aburt which has the full manuscript, the great blurbs, etc.

Link!

Hugo rules have varied over the years; currently they use the same criteria for as do the Nebula Awards. According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a short story is anything under 7500 words, a novelette is 7500 to 15000 words, a novella is 15000 to 40000 words, and a novel is anything longer than that.

Is there really a measurable difference in artistic impact between a 7499-word short story and a 7501-word novella? Not really. Authors and publishers like those multiple categories, however, since it increases the net number of available awards and therefore the possibility that they might win one.

Well, you could do worse than to look up Nebula winners of years past. The list is on the SFWA Web site:

Past Winners of SFWA Nebula Awards

I have to say, though, that if your opinion of SF is so low that you think only " an elusive sci-fi title (or two)" will make your cut, I'm not terribly optimistic. As someone who reads (and writes) mostly SF but does read a fair amount of other fiction, I'm of the opinion that the crap-to-good-stuff ratio is pretty much equal no matter what section of the bookstore you're browsing. A lot of readers, OTOH, tend to mark down a book simply because it is SF, rather than judging it fairly on its merits. If you're one of them, nothing I or anyone else says is going to help you.

Unlikely, unless we have some really sci-fi breakthroughs, considering he died almost 2 years ago:

Bob Forward 1932-2002

Requiescat in Pace, Bob.

I wish he could have had a chance to see this paper published: Swimming in Spacetime (I'd post the original article, but you have to pay to see it)

I think he would have found it most interesting.

Gibson is one of the all time great sci-fi storytellers.

To this day neuromancer remains one of the best sci-fi tales of the modern age. Reading it for the first time when I was 13, I didn't understand it all. In fact I didn't understand most of it until I had re-read it a few times. Perhaps this is why it was not a critical success immediately. Either way, they eventually came around, and within two years the book had won the big three.

The real reason I loved the book as a kid was because of Case! He was one of the guys who made me want to grow up to be a code cowboy (even if I didn't come close). Gibson gave the nerd a sexy and dangerous side that put the cyberpunk genre on the map, soon after every would be 'hacker' was longing for 'cyberspace' just like Case was:

A year [in Japan] and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.... He'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hot el, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.'

A master at the top of his game.

IIRC she has won more Nebula awards than any other author. Or maybe it was some other award.

Other big winners of Nebula awards are Ursula K. Leguin (with 5, with 3 for best novel), Greg Bear (with 5, 2 for best novel), Joe Haldeman (with 4, 2 for best novel), Samuel R. Delany (with 4, 2 for best novel).

The Thor power tools case impacted companies depreication on inventories, and may be one reason why spare parts are not inventoried, and products have become throw away.

SFWA (The Science Fiction Writer's Association) has an excellent page on the subject at http://www.sfwa.org/beware/subsidypublishers.html. Should give you some idea what to watch for.

Yes, Orwell was a political writer. Yes, 1984 was "about" the present. But the mode he chose to employ was that of science fiction - or more precisely perhaps, that peculiarly British mode of future-pondering that H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon and Aldous Huxley had worked in, that we have retrospectively assimiliated to what we now call science fiction. You don't need to be a proud, card-carrying member of the SFWA to write science fiction.

The future ain't what it used to be. Alas we have no paper clothes, moving sidewalks, flying cars, or orgasmatrons. Yet no one could have predicted the spork. Look at how it revolutionized our fast food industry. NOT a day goes by when I think about all those sporks I got at Kentucky Fried Chicken (before they changed their name to KFC). Truly a failure of imagination on the part of our futurists and science fiction writers.

If there is one unpredicted technological gadget that we must all worship and bow before it is the beer widget. A miracle! Of the widgeted stouts I've had both Beamish and Guiness. And Boddington's is pretty tasty too.

What makes Spider Robinson a commentator on SF, Sci-Fi or anything else other than pablum?

And as for the 'Speculative Fiction', well, he isn't a writer of that either.

1: The genre is swamped with juvenile series books!
Sorry, the genre has always been swamped with juvenile series books. The name Captain Future mean anything to you? The problem is not the volume of low end material that's being published, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be much of a high end. The question is why.

2: Authors are too interested in setting at the expense of character!
If anything, I'd say it was the opposite. Characters in SF, even the good stuff, have rarely been well developed. This is perfectly appropriate: SF writers have to spend a much higer percentage of words sketching in the background landscape than do mainstream writers. Consequently they tend to rely more on character "types" than do their mainstream counterparts. The problem is that SF writers are expected to present more well-rounded characters than they were in the past, with the result that we get a lot of tacked on sentimentality that really adds nothing to the stories. (And don't try to tell me that classic sf writers like Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke had great characters ... they were ok, but they weren't in even remotely the same league as Proust or Dickens).

3. Science has caught up with SF! ...
There's probably some truth to this, in the sense that science has made it harder for us to project our fantasies on to the future in ways that make dramatic sense. ... which is to say that science has tended to kill off genre conventions faster than it replaced them.

4. It's all been done!
Not strictly true, but it's probably safe to say that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's a lot harder to come up with anything original now than it was back when nothing had been written yet.

5. People are a lot more pessimistic about technology now. SF is all about optimism!
People have always had a love/hate relationship with technology. Yeah, the atom bomb hastened the end of WWII, but it also led to an arms race that a whole lot of people figured would probably result in the end of the world. Space travel was a pleasant fantasy ... until those commies got there first with Sputnik. DDT was great for getting rid of those pesky insects ... and birds too, as Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring (early 60s). None of which stopped a whole lot of great sf from being written during those decades, much of it far from the rah-rah gung ho optimism one might find in, say, the collected works of E.E. "Doc" Smith.

Here's my suggestion as to why good written sf has been in decline lately.

Economics: The Thor Power Tools decision essentially killed the careers of many mid-list authors. Most of the interesting sf writers were mid-list authors. Follow the money ...