Luck + Death at the Edge of the World — Click to preview it now!
Never let it be said that, when I create free stuff to add an extra dimension to my books, I do it in anything like half-measures.
After much work and planning, the free soundtrack album for Luck + Death is now available. Fourteen tracks by artists in eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Hungary, Sweden, Turkey, and the U.S.A.).
This is a varied array of musicians and composers, from independent musicians like guitarist Jason Brock and saxophonist Stefan Thaens, to film composer Nathan Fleet, to veteran performer John Pazdan, to classical composer (and music professor) Russell Wilson.
Styles range from dreamy electronic to jumped up funk to electronic classical, all of it spiced up with spoken word performance and bookended by field recordings from the streets of Shanghai.
Here’s a sample, track number eight:
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08 Distrito Federal (Stefan Thaens, Belgium) 4:18
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All tracks are available for streaming or for download as MP3s and the album comes with the choice of two different versions of the cover art, This Version (above) and That Version (below).
And this is a project that appreciates music as more than just a spectator sport. One track is a mix by the author called El Paraíso Perdido (Paradise Lost), which has been posted on ccMixter.org with an invitation to anyone and everyone to remix it, deconstruct it, or reinvent it. New mixes will be posted on the soundtrack home page.
The first three issues of ISF. Issue #2, which includes my story Siren Songs in Deep Time, is at right.
Now all my fawning and exorbitant praise has paid off because editor-in-chief Roberto Mendes recently asked me to step in and fill a vacancy that has opened up at ISF as its non-fiction editor and I’ve accepted. My plan worked!
Of course, I’m joking. Sort of.
I would have been willing to lie about the quality of magazine in order to become an editor, but I frankly didn’t have to. The folks at ISF–of whom I am now proud to be one–made it unnecessary by publishing great work by top authors.
My willingness to engage in florid mendacity remains untapped.
What actually happened was this:
Roberto Mendes solicited a story from me via the infamous time-suck of Facebook and then published it in Issue #2, causing me to actually discover the magazine and try reading it.
I thought it was excellent, though it needed a good copy editor, especially for its translated material. I happen to be a good copy editor over atIndieBookLauncher.com. I told Roberto about this and we reached an agreement and now IndieBookLauncher.com provides copy editing and ePUB formatting services to ISF.
After I’d edited Issues #2 and #3 and the upcoming ISF Annual Anthology (I have yet to do the web site content), non-fiction editor Fábio Fernandes indicated that he wasn’t going to fill that role any more.
With Fábio on his way, Roberto–who had by then published my fiction, seen my editing, and been impressed by my awesome intellect–offered me the position. I accepted and here we are.
An ISF article on pulp science fiction under totalitarian governments
ISF has an excellent track record in this department, with past articles like:
Fábio Fernandes on Brazilian science fiction (Issue #0)
Jess Nevins’ great article (pictured above), Pulp SciFi under German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish Totalitarism (Issue #3)
I am going to have to keep up. And to that end, I’m looking directly at you.
Do you have some secret bit of scholarship on the history of African science fiction tucked away somewhere?
Do you know someone whose prediliction for fantastic fiction from Japan is distracting them from their dissertation?
Was your grandfather an underground publisher of horror-themed samizdat in the Soviet Union before it fell apart and do you possess his unpublished memoirs?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions–or if you or someone you know have produced some equally crazy bit of writing about speculative fiction that has an international flavour–then get the heck in touch!
I am now reading the first non-fiction submission I’ve received, but I want to see more, so have at it.
You can submit through the regular ISF channels (as found on the ISF submissions page) or directly to me at nas@nassauhedron.com.
Luck + Death at the Edge of the World — Click to preview it now!
Seriously, asteroid mining companies are so thick on the ground these days I’m tripping over them.
Deep Space Idustries introductory video screen shot
The other day I was finalizing the Facts in the Fiction section for the new ebook edition of Siren Songs in Deep Time.
Facts in the Fiction (or FITF) is a bonus section in my ebooks that’s the equivalent of a behind-the-scenes DVD extra–it gives you details about factual stuff that forms part of the fictional story.
The FITF section of Siren Songs required some information about asteroid mining, a favorite science fiction trope since (believe it or not) the 19th century.
Deep Space Idustries introductory video screen shot
No problem. I know a little about this–hell, I’ve been following the topic long enough. Plus I did research for the story. I write a draft.
I cover the fictional roots of asteroid mining, I talk about the NASA study in the 1970s, and I touch on a recently formed private initiative (Space Wealth, founded 2008).
Then I come around to the present day and the big topic: last year’s announcement that the honchos at Google, plus a few of their high-powered friends, like James Cameron, had gotten together and used their gazillion-dollar bank accounts to cherry pick some experienced hands from the aerospace industry. They formed a company, Planetary Resources, to make the dream come true: real-life, boots on the ground asteroid mining.
Deep Space Idustries introductory video screen shot
The very day that I’m editing the piece, Planetary Resources releases a video update on their work. Well, that’s a coincidence, but no problem, I can incorporate it.
Then, the same damned day, another announcement: a whole new asteroid mining company has been launched. Deep Space Industries is headed by space industry veteran and NASA contractor David Gump.
The DSI introductory video is embedded below, along with a video of the media conference announcing DSI’s formation and a video of the Q&A session afterward.
Deep Space Idustries introductory video screen shot
Like Planetary Resources, DSI has some in-house expertise in space ventures, although possibly not on the same scale.
They also appear to have a few catchy publicity angles up their sleeve.
Like the fact that their project involves spacecraft that just happen to share a name with the the fanatically beloved Joss Whedon show Firefly (the eminently singalong-able theme song of which can be found here).
Above: the Firefly-class vessel “Serenity” from the show Firefly. Below: the real-life Firefly-class probe from Deep Space Industries. Not the same thing, but still.
Or the fact that DSI’s motto appears to be borrowed almost directly from midnight movie cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “If you can dream it, you can be it” bears more than a passing resemblance to the title and spirit of the song “Don’t dream it, be it” (YouTube link here).
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on DSI, in part for their progress on the scientific and business fronts, but in part also just to see how many more catchy pop culture references they can cram into their marketing plan.
With all that said, I’m going to finish the Facts in the Fiction now. If nobody plans on announcing any more asteroid mining ventures just this minute, that is. The new edition of Siren Songs will be available starting tomorrow (January 28, 2013).
The videos are below, but don’t forget to check out the Siren Songs Bonus Material page for more asteroid mining information and other cool stuff, including embedded videos, links, and free PDF downloads.
Luck + Death at the Edge of the World — Click to preview it now!
My story Siren Songs in Deep Time was originally published in Albedo One, the award-winning Irish magazine of genre fiction. Now it’s been picked up again–with enthusiasm–by International Specualtive Fiction.
ISF is a quarterly publication founded in 2012 with a mandate to publish science fiction, fantasy, and horror originally written in languages other than English (but published in ISF in English translation), as well as fiction that comes from non-traditional sources (geographically speaking) or that has a particularly internationalist bent.
Siren Songs fits into that last category, with a setting that ranges from World War II Greece, to 1970s Chile, to near-future New Jersey, and ultimately to deep space in the far future.
The first three issues of ISF. Issue #2, containing Siren Songs, is at the right. (Click image to go to the ISF home page.)
ISF has managed to rack up an impressive array of authors so far, from well-known folks with impressive awards under their belts–like Lavie Tidhar (Israel), Ken Liu (US), and Aliette de Bodard (France)–to less familiar but very impressive writers like Rochita Leonen-Ruiz (Philippines), Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (from my second home, Brazil), and what appears to be a small street gang of Romanians (Marian Truta, Liviu Radu, Cristian-Mihail Teodorescu), among others. Even ISF‘s cover illustrations are top notch.
Why am I letting ISF publish a story that I’ve released as a commercial ebook?
First, because their line-up of authors was just too impressive for me to turn them down. In my issue alone the three authors have won two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, a British Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award–and believe me, I haven’t won any of those things. And the issue also features an interview with Rachel Haywood Ferreira, author of The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction, a wonderful book that I’m in the middle of reading at this very moment. I’m going to say no to a party like that?
The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction by Rachel Haywood Ferreira
Second, I love what ISF is doing. I grew up with a deeply internationalist perspective and it’s only become more central to my outlook as I got older. As a child I was given a bilingual education in French and English. As a young adult I studied Russian, though most of it is now lost to me (although Russian swearing is still the most elaborate, detailed, and florid of any cursing I’ve ever encountered and I retain a few choice expressions). And while my internationalism has never been theoretical, it’s more concrete now than it’s ever been, as a Canadian married to a Brazilian, dividing his time between the two countries. My children will raised speaking Portuguese, French, and English, possibly combining these with a few pungent Russian words they’ll learn without my meaning them to and which they won’t understand until they’re older.
Finally, I’m about to release a new edition of Siren Songs that will include one of my now-famous, patented Nas Hedron Facts in the Fiction bonus sections. This is an addendum to the fictional story, sometimes more extensive than the story itself, that gives you the low-down on some of the factual elements that lie behind the ficitonal story. So for a dollar or less (depending on what currency you use) you can buy the ebook of Siren Songs and get the story that’s in ISFplus the bonus material.
You might think that Siren Songs, being a short story, wouldn’t provide a lot to work with, but you’d be mistaken. The new section will include material on:
the concept of deep time as applied to the future, including a look at the Long Now Foundation
the historical setting for the story, Part I: occupied Greece in World War II
historical setting, Part II: the 1973 coup in Chile
the future setting: the science fiction and science fact of asteroid mining
So, for the price, it might well be worth picking up the ebook even if you already have a copy of ISF #2 just to get the bonus material. You can find a sample of the Facts in the Fiction section on the Siren Songs home page.
(Speaking of which, aside from that sample the Siren Songs home page gives you even more material, including some excellent video content and a free PDF library, so you might just want to check it out.)
Siren Songs in Deep Time, the ebook.
Getting back to ISF, did I mention that despite oozing quality, it’s free to download?
Go here and get the first three issues immediately.
Luck + Death at the Edge of the World — Click to preview it now!
In each of my books there’s an About the Author page. It gives a few details about me, more oblique than specific. One part that is very specific, though, is a list of folks I find particularly inspiring. The current list goes like this:
He reveres, in no particular order: Vincent Price (actor, icon, gourmand), Salvador Dali (painter, human exhibit), Andy Warhol (painter, partyologist), Franco Mondini-Ruiz (installationist, magician), Kenzaburō Ōe and Kōbō Abe (novelists and madmen – the first won the Nobel Prize and the second ought to have), Ray Kurzweil (scientist, prophet), Tadanori Yokoo (poster artist, alien), and Jack Johnson (heavyweight boxing champion and maximum disturber of the peace).
In an ebook there isn’t really room to expand on this capsule description, so I’ve created a new page on this blog called Revered, In No Particular Order, that gets into the detail. The first installment dealt with artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz. The second deals with author Kōbō Abe.
The page is a work-in-progress, so be sure to visit from time to time and see what’s new. Here’s what I have to say about Abe.
Kōbō Abe (Nobel Laureate Manqué)
Japanese novelist, playwright, and provocateur Kōbō Abe (or Abe Kōbō, in the Japanese format) holds a very special place in my heart and my library.
Abe may be my favorite author of all. I normally accumulate books to read, not as fetishistic collectors items, but I do own a first American edition of every one of his books (at least all the ones that have been translated into English). Moreover, when I moved from Canada to Brazil and had to dispense with virtually my entire library of non-digital books, when space to bring anything with me was at a critical premium, those volumes were among the few dead tree books that made the trip.
Kobo Abe
Abe was the de facto head of a group of radical young artists–including writers, painters, architects, and filmmakers–called The Century Club, formed in the new freedom that came with the end of the American post-war occupation of Japan. He was a close friend and collaborator of another member Hiroshi Teshigahara (son of Sōfu Teshigahara, the legendary founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana).
Poster for the film of The Woman in the Dunes
Teshigahara made films from two of Abe’s novels, The Woman in the Dunes (book, film) and The Face of Another (book, film). The movie of The Woman in the Dunes won the Special Jury Prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, with Teshigahara nominated for Best Director.
The Face of Another
Abe’s writing is jarringly different from the kind of realistic, autobiographical writing that was common amongst Japanese authors of his generation. His writing has a magic realist flavor, often blending a notably fantastical element into an otherwise naturalistic narrative.
The Woman in the Dunes (1962, left) by Teshigahara and The Graduate (1967, right) by Mike Nichols. I’m just sayin’. (Click image to enlarge)
His works also tend to feature a prominent metaphorical construction or symbolic element.
In The Woman in the Dunes, a man who is wandering some dunes collecting insects is forced by some villagers into a sandy pit in the dunes from which he can’t extract himself. A widow lives there in the pit, spending her time endlessly digging up sand, which she passes to the villagers above to be sold, and the digging simultaneously saves her house, which is under constant threat of being buried. At first the protagonist tries to escape, but eventually he comes to make a life with the widow and to dedicate himself to the only task that’s open to him: the Sisyphean task of digging away the sand. Among other interpretations: he is like any of us, jostled by circumstance into a particular relationship with a particular person (when he might just as easily have ended up with someone else), and into a trade that seems pointless but in which he engages nonetheless, ultimately making his peace with both.
In The Face of Another, a man whose face has been badly burned is given a new, artificial face, modeled on the face of another man. He’s warned that wearing another person’s face might alter his identity, as indeed it does, with his physical alteration impinging on his inner self. Again, this might relate to any of us: the mask of public identity that we wear for the benefit of others alters and distorts our internal identity.
This is the kind of big, broad metaphor that’s easy to do badly, and for that reason is sometimes scorned, particularly by literary snobs. But just because something is obvious, and easy for a mediocre artist to screw up, doesn’t mean the thing itself is intrinsically flawed.
Just because talentless artists and as-yet-unskilled novices are instinctively drawn to paint faces doesn’t make portraiture any less valid an artistic endeavor. The Mona Lisa and Francis Bacon’s studies for portraits of Lucien Freud (1965 version, 1967 version) are just a couple of examples of a trite form being executed by a master.
The Woman in the Dunes, flanked by two editions of Inter Ice Age 4
When this big-metaphor approach finds its fullest expression, it results in works that have a particular kind of genius: bold and arresting. It’s the kind of effect achieved by Kafka (The Metamorphosis: guy wakes up an insect in a metaphor for alienation), Conrad (Heart of Darkness: guy voyages up a river into the heart of a wild continent while also journeying into the heart of man’s own darkness), or for that matter, David Cronenberg (The Brood: a woman gives literal, fleshy birth to her inner demons).
Abe is one of those who does it best–he is at the Kafka end of the scale.
But don’t take my word for it. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994, has said that Abe ought to have won it as well, and he’s a pretty discerning guy.
Cover Designs by Christer Guillergan inspired by Abe (click image to go to the site)
Kōbō Abe is someone I return to over and over, and likely this reflection on him will likewise be something ongoing.
For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with Abe, this should be enough to get you started. For those of you who are, or who read this and find that you’re interested in him, you might want to check back or subscribe to the blog, since I’ll almost certainly add to his entry on the Revered page in the future.
Selected Links
The Scriptorium has an excellent page on Abe, including links to essays on his work.
The Horogai page also has a great Abe page with links to some fascinating material, inlcuding a detailed interview with his daughter and biographer, Abe Neri.
iBiblio has a wonderful Abe page, including a link to a very detailed timeline of his life.
The now defunked Litweb.net had a decent page on Abe which you can still read courtesy of The Wayback Machine.
Roger Ebert is, as usual, pithy and interesting in his review of The Woman in the Dunes.
You can watch an excellent, short documentary on Teshigahara the filmmaker and his buddy Abe the writer in three installments, below. (Be sure to turn on the “captions”on YouTube since some of the interviews are in Japanese–it’s the little red rectangle in the cluster of controls at the bottom right of the screen.)
The Virgin Birth of Sharks — Click to preview it now!
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the future of the book in the age of the ebook. Journalists, publishers, authors, readers, and others are asking questions like:
What business model (if any) will allow publishers to survive?
How can authors (like musicians) make a living with a product that’s easily copied?
What will the next stage be in the technical evolution of the ebook?
Some of the proposed answers are nostalgic nonsense, while other approaches amount to little more than utopian hand-waving. Most of this unproductive “debate,” in which people with different positions frequently talk past one another rather than actually engaging with each other’s arguments, comes in response to the first two questions.
Jonathan Franzen: An amazing writer who should know better talking utter nonsense about ebooks.
Where the answers get a little bit of traction is on the third question.
If the best business strategies remain uncertain and the application of ethics to newfound technologies is still hotly debated, at least the technology of delivering stories is something concrete we can get a grip on. So here are a few answers (for books in general, as well as for my own books in particular) to the question of what lies ahead for the book.
Riffling Pages
First, the enhanced (but still purely digital) book. The video below will give you an idea of what lies ahead for readers using tablets, smart phones, and similar portable devices to read.
Before you watch it, ask yourself:
Do you miss the good old days when you could riffle through the pages of a book by running your thumb along the edge?
Do you wish that ebooks would allow you to hold your page with a finger while flipping ahead or back, the way a paper book used to do?
Do you sometimes wish you could jump ahead in your ebook by several pages at once without having to scroll through the intervening pages or having to exit into a separate interface?
The convenience of riffling the pages of a codex.
Well, fear not.
When carmudgeons start ragging on ebooks for the things they can’t do, remember that today’s ebooks are the Model Ts of the ebook world.
They’re functional in a basic kind of way, but they’ll be embellished with plenty of cool stuff as the technology develops — the equivalents of air conditioning and power steering. And at least some of that cool stuff will self-consciously reproduce the best aspects of the bound paper book, grafting its virtues onto the ebook.
Take a look.
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Plugging In
I personally favor the purely digital approach to enhanced ebooks, as in the video above, but there are competing models of the future book and it may well be that more than one model will find a niche.
Here’s a different conception of the future of ebooks. Instead of grafting the virtues of the codex onto the ebook, it transplants the best aspects of the ebook into a codex. You take a bound book with paper pages — one that also contains artfully concealed wiring and circuitry — and plug that into your computer.
When you turn the pages of the book, your computer display advances, showing material that supplements the content of the book, or perhaps showing the same content with added functionality. Hell, you can trace your finger across the paper pages to manipulate the information displayed on your monitor.
Like any prototype this book is handcrafted (a process you get to watch in the video), but there’s no reason to think that its production couldn’t be automated.
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Giving Readers More
At this point the enhanced ebooks in the videos aren’t commercially available, and even once they are there will be a period where the technology is too expensive for small publishers and indie authors to access. So how is the little guy to keep up?
Maybe you have an answer of your own. My answer is: use your imagination and give readers more for their money.
Here’s what I’ve done so far.
(1) Bonus content in the book: Several of my books has a bonus section at the back called Facts in the Fiction that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the real world facts behind the fictional story. Soon all of them will have it.
These sections are not a quick afterthought. I do a lot of research when I write a novel, novelette, or even a short story, and I spend extra time above and beyond that researching and writing FITF. Plus, if a reader is interested in any particular issue, each topic has multiple links to relevant web pages, PDF documents, and videos.
For instance, my novelette The Virgin Birth of Sharks has a FITF section in eight parts, dealing with topics ranging from the titular issue of sharks procreating without mating, to a section on the bandits in India known as dacoits, to a look at the rules for keeping a great white shark as a pet in Toronto.
A view from two different Facts in the Fiction sections. On the left is FITF from The Virgin Birth of Sharks, with links to web pages and PDFs in blue. On the right is FITF from Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, showing an illustration from the section on Alan Turing. (Click to enlarge.)
(2) Bonus content online: Each of my books also has its own companion web site. The sites have a couple of functions.
For people who don’t yet own the book, it provides sample chapters from the story, as well as a sample from the Facts in the Fiction section for that book. Sure Amazon and other sites let readers “look inside,” but their previews:
cut off at an arbitrary point, sometimes in the middle of a chapter
are too short, and
can’t include both the beginning of the story and a sample from the FITF at the back of the book.
The site solves all of these problems.
A screenshot from the Virgin Birth of Sharks web page. (Click to go to the page).
For readers who already own the book, the site allows me to provide updates on the factual sections as new information becomes available without issuing a new edition every few months.
It also lets me provide a volume of material that I could never pack into the ebook.
For example, in the prologue to Luck and Death I said that the novel was written on a steady diet of Mexican music, both current and traditional, which suited the book since a large part of it is set in Mexico City. But in the ebook I couldn’t play that music for readers. The site, on the other hand, has a jukebox of embedded videos.
The Luck and Death site also has a video of a reading of the first chapter of the book (the audio can also be downloaded as an MP3).
Screenshot showing the Luck and Death site with video and MP3. (Click to go to the site.)
One more bonus available online is a library of free PDF reading material. This is a feature of both the Luck and Death site and the site for Siren Songs in Deep Time.
I’ll continue to build and add to all of these sites into the foreseeable future.
(3) Bonus Content that keeps on giving: Finally, not only are the web sites updated from time to time, but a day will come when I do issue a new edition of one or all of the books. This already happened with Luck & Death, which was originally published without a FITF section.
If readers choose to, they can subscribe to any given title by email. They send in a copy of their receipt for any book of mine, along with their preference of ebook format, and when a new edition is published it will be emailed to them free.
And when I issue free material, as I plan to do now and then, that will be sent out to all subscribers, no matter what title they’ve bought.
What all this means is that each book is an ongoing multimedia experience. With each title you get to:
read the book,
read the FITF to get a look behind the scenes,
use the links in the FITF to tour through curated online material
go to the specific web site for the book to find free PDFs and audio and video material
subscribe to the book, so that you’ll get any new editions sent to you free, automatically, and
receive free unrelated material from time to time if you’re a subscriber to any title.
As much as I love an old-fashioned paper book, that’s a package I could never have delivered between the covers of a codex.
I may not be able to make the pages riffle just yet, but I can give you a whole lot of bang for your buck.
He is partial to malls, hotels, airports, and other man-made environments.
He loves exotic food, disposable goods, and shiny objects.
He prefers bright colors to subdued ones, passion to equanimity, and directness to subtlety.
He reveres, in no particular order: Vincent Price (actor, icon, gourmand), Salvador Dali (painter, human exhibit), Andy Warhol (painter, partyologist), Franco Mondini-Ruiz (installationist, magician), Kenzaburō Ōe and Kōbō Abe (novelists and madmen – the first won the Nobel Prize and the second ought to have), Ray Kurzweil (scientist, prophet), Tadanori Yokoo (poster artist, alien), and Jack Johnson (heavyweight boxing champion and maximum disturber of the peace).
In the ebooks there isn’t really room to expand on this capsule description, so I’ve created a new page on this blog called Revered, In No Particular Order, that gets into the detail. You can find it here, but the first installment is contained right in this post.
The page is a work-in-progress, so be sure to visit from time to time and see what’s new.
I loved the exhibition and bought a copy of the program, which has survived periodic culls of my bookshelves and which I’ve lugged with me from one country to another to this day. My copy cost me about $40.00 at the time of the show, but you can now get it on Amazon, new, for about $5.00 (and even cheaper for a used copy).
I was taken with Mondini-Ruiz’s art from the moment I saw it and it stood out even in a show that included a lot of standout artists.
His work was lighthearted, even cartoonish, without being vapid. It was bright and colorful — I’m a chromophile — without sacrificing depth. It played with everyday objects and images, but it imbued them with a unique spirit (and, on the scale of the gallery, even with grandeur) without ever making them remote or untouchable in the way that snobbish art can do to an otherwise charming object.
You can find his home page here and his book of Tex-Mex fairy tales, High Pink, here.
