Harper Voyager Open Call – Consequences

Harper Voyager have during last week put up another post, saying they have completed the first round sift on their open call as of last October. That means they have evaluated 4,543 submissions, rejected 3595 as being not right for them and kept 948 for further consideration. That’s about 1 in 5 submissions!

Those are the facts, now for the observations and comments.

Their call was for the full range of speculative fiction that included horror and fantasy. From the graph below, which is the number of new printed  books published by genre, you could say the ratios are science fiction 1, horror 1, fantasy 3, paranormal romance 2. Of course this ratio may not extend to what Harper Voyager intend, but if they did and if those ratios were reflected in what they’ve kept back for further consideration, then we are talking about talking about only 1 in 7 being science fiction, or only 136 books.

 

But let’s look at this the other way around. There are 136 science fiction books of good enough quality for one of the big 5 publishing houses to seriously consider taking them on, and all of them are UNAGENTED!

The implications of this are, in a business sense, staggering. There has to be at least a serious fault somewhere in the publishing process if the agents cannot match what the publishers are looking for. Where that fault lies and exactly what it is, I don’t know.

[Yes, I know there will always be some unagented authors because new authors continually come along, but they are a small percentage of this.]

I have long since said there was a mismatch between what the science fiction readership wanted to see and what was being published… and I say good on Harper Voyager for trying to do something about it.

They got a lot more submissions than they expected. They initially said they would get in contact with those authors they wanted to take further by 15th January, but it took another four months to finish the first reads. One consequence I anticipate from all this is that they will NOT be holding an open door later on this year as they initially anticipated, because they are still dealing with last October’s. Another consequence is that they are likely to take two year’s worth of novels up for publication to backfill the year they are missing out on.

But there have been immediate consequences. For instance, Tor UK has opened its doors to unagented submissions, though if I remember correctly, they said they were swamped at one time.

So, with more opportunities for the unagented authors to put their work before the publishing houses, where does this leave the industry as a whole? Obviously there will be less reliance on agents putting forward sifted good books by the publishing houses, even if it means more work for them. As to what else will change, well that is dependent on which unagented books the publishers decide to put out for the general public to read and what takes the public’s fancy. But whatever happens, the what I now call traditional science fiction themes will be joined by new ones. After all, why else would Harper Voyager have had an open call?

Ripple Effect – the Official Response

I wrote to my MP about the concerns my science fiction short story ‘Ripple Effect’ published in Jupiter 38 threw up. He was kind enough to ask the Secretary of State, the Right Honourable Edward Davey MP for a response. This is what the Secretary of State had to say:

“Small-scale local weather effects tend to dissipate quickly within the genral turbulence of the atmosphere. In theory a small-scale effect could result in consequences at much larger scales but this is generally only seen in grossly simplified chaos models. Complex models used by meteorologists confirm that much larger changes than those at the smallest scales are needed to make a real difference to the weather.

“The main reason why meteorologists are currently unable to forecast the weather accurately more than a few days in advance relates to the need to represent (or ‘parameterise’) some of the crucial physical processes governing the weather but which operate on small space scales (such as cloud formation). Parameterisation is needed because of limited available computing power. Also, model sensitivity to initial conditions is characteristic of highly non-linear systems, including the weather. Observations are necessarily limited, resulting in imperfect initial conditions for model runs. Such inaccuracies can grow over a few days to a week and reduce the skill in forecasting the weather than far ahead.

“Nonetheless, it remains essential that we take urgent action to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases, as certain weather events are projected to increase in frequency and/or intensity as a result of climate change.”

My thanks to both my MP and the Right Honourable Secretary of State for the time and trouble they took to reply to me.

… um… why do I think there will be further chronicles from Hermione? Or put it another way, one of friends who read my short story before it was published suggested I expand it into a novel entitled, “Climate Wars”. I’m now thinking he was right…

Happy 40th Jupiter

That small science fiction magazine has reached its 40th issue. It has now kept to its 3-monthly schedule without fail for ten, yes TEN years! CONGRATULATIONS, Ian Redman… a job well done!

I’m even more pleased to see one of my fellow authors, Dean Giles, with TWBPress has had a short story published in it.

It has of course had numerous good reviews. So those of you who haven’t yet cottoned onto this wonderful publication, see here!

May the Fourth be with You!

Sorry, the resistance force in me weak is!

I’ve taken a look at the Amazon websites (plural means both the UK and US ones) and found new reviews for C.A.T. – thank you. They are by people I don’t know who have bought the e-book. Which means the word about how good the story is is spreading. In a way it’s a kind of milestone to actually know that complete strangers have taken enough of an interest in C.A.T. to buy it.

Needless to say C.A.T. is having a serious session of self-satisifeid smugness at the moment!

The other day I dug out a small piece of work that I did many years ago. I cringed at the style and wording, but still liked the ideas (yes plural again) behind it. So I rewrote it in a couple of evenings. Then it dawned on me… the science has since discovered things that make my scenario all the more probable. Again! I get the distinct feeling that there is something in the understanding of science and how it progresses that allows some people to accurately work out or have an intuition about how it will develop in the future. It’s  as if the force had been with me when I originally wrote that piece.

And yet as I look around at some of the hard science fiction that is being written today, this element of predictive science just seems to be missing. It’s as if the authors are rehashing, or is it rehearsing, old ideas. Where is the new science in science fiction?

So yes, I’m working on something new – a real combo of science to make life a little more bizarre. But in looking forward in science fiction, I’ve also looked back! I’ve realised that if I put my invention (for want of a better description) in a certain setting I could use a classic story line that Jules Verne wrote. Well that’s how it started out… dag nab it… the thing’s taken on a life of it’s own. All I can say is the force is with it!

Women in Science Fiction

The controversy about the lack of female science fiction writers and protagonists is likely to come to the fore again with Radio 4′s Women’s Hour on Friday talking about ‘what happened to tough women in science fiction‘.

This debate will not go away until either a reasonable explanation for the lack of women in science fiction is given or there are more women writing and portrayed in the genre. The fact that even after all this time no explanation has been readily forthcoming speaks for itself.

Yes, there have been initiatives to encourage and report more women in science fiction, and whilst they have made a few inroads, they have not solved the issue.

My take on it?

The stats speak for themselves to say the bias against women has and continues to exist (see e.g. wiki on Women in science fiction). I haven’t got to the bottom of the reason behind this, but I do know of quite a few new lady science fiction writers who are finding it very difficult to get a foothold in science fiction. And yes, their writing is of the quality I would like to see in the bookshops, so we are not talking about sub-standard work here.

But the one thing I can be sure about is that in due course the historians will ask the self-same questions and will eventually work out where the fault lies… if there have been any untoward biases, the guilty will pilloried.

 

Flight of Fancy?

Faster than light? (Photo credit: AZso)

There was I at lunchtime, enjoying a peaceful cup of coffee thinking about what I could do with my newly designed spaceship – story-wise that is – when a thought struck me, “What if I did that?”

Nah – it won’t work, definitely not. What I need is that. Well yeah, that’s fine, but it’s still impossible. It has to be impossible. It just can’t be done.

Hold on a mo… there’s nothing wrong with the principles in the design, is there? No. It should work then, shouldn’t it?

Nah, it’s out of the question, absolutely and totally. Everybody says it is… well as good as…

But the tendril of thought keeps sneaking back… it’s a goer, a real super-duper goer.

Something has to be wrong… but what? It’s time to get out the textbooks again to find out where I went wrong. Otherwise we’ll have a way of travelling faster than light.

And it’s an interesting design for a spaceship… a design that may explain why we haven’t seen spacefaring aliens in our neighbourhood. Um… I’m getting that strange feeling that things are starting to fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle to explain lots of questions about existence and the universe.. And when you or I get that feeling, we both know we’re onto something… even if it’s only a cohesive background for a science fiction story…

But that tendril of thought keeps creeping back… it could just work…

Place, the Protagonist in Science Fiction

Sketch of Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It may be just my biased, warped outlook on science fiction, but it suddenly dawned on me that there really hasn’t been any new places in science fiction for quite a while. Now by new I don’t mean variations on a theme, but somewhere so unusual that it surprises the reader.

The last place WOW that anyone got from me was when Geoff Landis proposed the colonisation of Venus using aerostats, followed by floating cities, because at c. 50km altitude its atmosphere is very much like Earth’s at sea level. That proposal is now ten years old.

Before that it was Alastair Reynold’s massive light huggers, a very logical hard science fiction approach to travelling to the stars. Revelation Space of course was published in 2000. And before this? We’re into the ’80s with Niven’s Ringworld and Integral Trees, inside the computer courtesy of Tron and cyberpunk.And before that… well there were lots. So why aren’t we seeing more new places now?

One answer may be because we have explored a lot of places during the middle of the last century and there are very few to find that aren’t a result of a variation of a theme.

But it’s not the answer I would go for. There seems to be a distinct lack of imagination about place in the genre today. I can think of several places I’ve tried to write about that are new… yes really new. But with the trying also comes the explanation and that slows the story down somewhat. So these new places with their sense of wonder are not taken up by the publishers. But I’m sure better writers than me would succeed in smoothing in the explanation much better.

Place should be considered as a protagonist in any story. Mostly it is a passive onlooker to what is going on, but in every story it does one way or another interact with the main protagonists of that story. Take for example the harsh environments of the desert, the Arctic and space and think about each of them in turn. You react differently to each, don’t you? So much so, that it brings out the point that every place engenders a different reaction and there ought to be oodles and oodles of new places in science fiction.

But I come back to the point that there isn’t and to the question of why?

Is it because writers (the professionals that is) have to push story upon story at such a fast pace that they can’t give themselves time to think up new places? Yes, it takes time to develop them, answering the why and what if questions about ‘the world’ you are developing. Could this be the real reason?

 

 

 

In with the New Science Fiction

new dawn (Photo credit: new 1lluminati)

I got me another novel to write… a lovely whopperful of surprises… it’s been creeping up on me by a little twist of fate here, an innovation there and the growing frustration with the science fiction that’s being published at the moment.

Whoa! you say. What about my completed novel? My view is that if nobody’s willing to publish a book that deals with real four spatial dimensional physics (not your common or garden Einstein variety where the fourth dimension is time), then I’m not willing to part with it or even self-publish it. And believe me, there’s nothing like that physics seen in science fiction… I’ve looked, searched and scoured the book shelves, electronic and physical. So that novel was entering a new dimension in science fiction! But sorry, folks, you ain’t going have chance to read it, ‘cos the publishing industry ain’t interested.

So what’s got me excited about the new novel? It’s all based on ideas I’ve been working up… one of them I thought was very silly, until I found an all too practical use for it. Suddenly the missing ingredient to make them merge into a story clicked in my tiny little braincell. [By now, one of my beta readers will be quaking in his boots, 'cos I know he quietly reads my blog... te he he...]

But first, I must finish C.A.T.-3… well the original C.A.T.-3 was really C.A.T.-3 AND C.A.T.-4. I’ve completed the draft of C.A.T.-4 as far as I can take it without working up C.A.T.-3. But having a new novel to do research for, thrash out my ideas on and put ink to paper will incentivise me to complete these two stories.

And there is another short story in the wings on a completely different mathematical topic…. it’s driving me round in circles.

So don’t be surprised if I start spouting bits of interesting physics and science on this blog… this is gonna be one screamer of a ride! Science fiction as you’ve never known it before…

Mrrroowwww…. I’ve taken over the site

Mrrrowww…. I’m not satisfied with my so-called author’s services. Definitely not. Especially after all the things she’s put me through… on my fur and whiskers, definitely not. And now she’s got this weird idea that I’ve got investigate why a body appears out of nowhere in the middle of space. What a load of twaddle and pure fantasy.

So I’ve decided to take over this site and start running it a way a blog should be run! And if you people out there think I’m joking, let me tell you about consciousness… awareness is the ability to know that you know. Got that. Good.

First thing up, is an image of myself. Aren’t I handsome?

Of course I’m intelligent. I’m not a chimp. If I were I’d just be collecting a series of images, like you humans used to collect postage stamps. I can collate, put the images in an indexed order and identify patterns out of them. And more importantly I can use those patterns to shortcut the filing system looking through all those images.  Which means I’m intelligent…

And as for the worlds of science fiction… they need a massive sort out. I’m fed up of the space operas the pseudo-solars (the development of and inhabiting of the solar system – hands up who didn’t know that? … none… good), the climate change and killer virus dystopias, and cyber- steam- or any other kind of punk. I want something new.

I said NEW! Really NEW! SO I’m going to start a SCIENCE FICTION REVOLUTION.

No, not evolution. REVOLUTION!

Watch this space. No not the stars. This announcement space.

 

 

Ideas and the Moon in SF

I came to the logical conclusion this morning that mankind must return to the Moon soon. Notice the MUST in the last sentence.

It has nothing to do with mining scarce minerals or running away from the effects of climate change… these aspects could be side effects for the main purpose. And what is that main purpose you may well ask?

Well, I’m not going to tell you. Why? Because me writing on this blog would be like a voice in the wilderness, lost in the noise of a sandstorm or in the case of this blog, periodically drowned in spam. Nobody’ll sit up and take notice. Nothing will be done about it… despite it having serious consequences for humankind.

So why bother mentioning it? Well, it’s because I think there is a serious problem about the way we treat the currency of new ideas. People grab and use whatever you come up with without a bye or leave. It’s disheartening to see this happen time and again. So much so that I’m not going to mention my ideas in the future without some recompense, like getting a story published and even better getting paid for it.

Have others taken this road of silence before me? I haven’t seen any evidence to this effect, but it would not surprise me. If it happened in Greece c. 500BC when it came up to inventing new food dishes, it certainly could happen to science fiction ideas now.

The consequences of science fiction ideas drying up, if others pursue this same path, is that the science fiction publishing industry will lose what little momentum it has for going to market. Is that a bad thing?

Well as I’ve said elsewhere, the publishing industry is interested in making money. At the moment because of the recession it is very conservative in what it publishes, variations of previous best sellers, authors with track records. But I have to admit that recently a lot of my favourite authors have disappointed me with their latest publications. It’s the same old, packaged up in a different way.

So if we break this circle of rehashing the norm, I don’t think it will be a bad thing. In fact, it might even be a good thing. Because once the publishers realise that that can’t get away with regurgitating ol’ stuff, they will be forced to experiment or whither. Some will experiment with publishing the new ideas. But I feel this is a long way off yet. And until that day comes, I’m going to stay quiet about why we so urgently need to get back the Moon.