Ace Double Review: F-119
Posted by DLThurston in Ace Doubles on May 16, 2012
It’s time for another Ace Double review. This time up it’s serial number F-119, a double dose from author Gordon R. Dickson, better known for his Childe Cycle, inspired by the same poem that inspired The Dark Tower. Some of these Childe stories appeared in the Ace Doubles, but not in F-119. Instead we’ve got giant bears and quasi-imaginary people as we look at Spacial Delivery and Delusion World. Published 1961. Original price: 40¢.
Spacial Delivery
“Rendezvous with a double-sized Goliath.”
Posted to a monster’s mailbox.
The Dilbians were humanoids with a difference. They were over nine feet tall and built more like bears than like people. But they weren’t bears…and it was important to the Ambassador from Earth to see that they and their planet remained good friends.
So when one of that feuding race of highly rugged individualists kidnapped an Earth girl, the problem called for a trouble-shooter with the patience of a saint and the agility of an acrobat.
John Tardy, who hadn’t thought of himself as having either of those qualifications, learned them fast when he found the only way to reach that monstrous criminal was to be sent to him by mail as a registered packaged marked SPACIAL DELIVERY
As these reviews evolve, things will change around. For example, I’d actually like to start with the covers on these two books. Largely because they combine to be my least favorite pair of covers in the bunch. Which is odd, as an online database of Ace Doubles suggest they are both by the artist of the Tombaugh Station cover I was enamored with in my last review. I’ll talk more about him next go round, as he’s also drawn the cover of the Double half I’m currently reading. Spacial Delivery’s story offers little by way of the exciting cover imagery, because this really is the book. It’s a guy riding around on the back of a giant bear-like alien. That’s a good 60% of the book. 40% is him sleeping, and 10% is him engaged in the actual political undercurrent of the book, which is never quite thrilling enough to be called a “thriller,” but does underpin all the action.
Yes. I’m aware those percentages add up to more than 100. That’s not a failure of math, it’s a recognition of the fact that occasionally he’s sleeping while riding around on the back of a giant bear-like alien. John Tardy is just that kind of crazy multitasker that he can be passively involved in the story in two different ways.
The bits of the plot not involved with riding on bears and sleeping center around John Tardy, human decathlete, being drafted as an ambassador to Dilbia in an attempt to open up relations with the massive ursine creatures of this world. Working against the humans are the Hemnoids, squat muscular creatures from a high-gravity world that are more physically similar to the Dilbians. Tardy is sent to rescue a human who is being held captive by a Dilbian with a nasty personality and the name Streamside Terror.
That’s the fun of the book right there. Streamside Terror. Dilbia is, in many ways, an inherently silly place. The society is based entirely around nicknames. John Tardy becomes Half-Pint Posted to the Dilbians. The woman he is sent to save is Greasy Face due to the Dilbian confusion over make-up. He is sent out by Little Bite. His escort through Dilbia is the Hill Bluffer, and one of the prime antagonists of the story is Streamside Terror’s girlfriend Boy Is She Built. Dickson clearly enjoyed the world he’d built, as he revisited Dilbia two more times in his novels Spacepaw and Law-Twister Shorty. All three have since been published together by Baen under the title The Right to Arm Bears.
Between naps and bits of bear riding, the plot of the story is about humans showing Dilbians they can be strong, while learning at the same time that the Dilbians can be crafty. It’s about saving the damsel in distress, who really ends up with no defining characteristic other than damsel in distress. But the fun in the story is seeing John Tardy with his implanted knowledge of Dilbian society trying to make his way among the bear-like creatures. I’m seeing a real pattern in these books. It’s the third story I’ve reviewed, and it’s the third one where I’ve fallen back on the world building when the story line left me a little flat. In this one it’s hard not to. The book exists as an excuse to show off this inherently silly culture, and the ultimate conclusion isn’t about saving the girl, it’s about how these apparently simple creatures were the actual chess players within the story. Which I gather is the underlying theme of the entire Dilbian series.
It felt like a story written with tongue firmly planted in cheek. I suppose in the end I wanted either a little more or a little less out of the story. It exists in an odd middle ground, and thus gets a middle grade.
3 out of 5 giant space bears.
Delusion World
“If you don’t look, she’ll go away!”
The disintegrated damsel and the disbelieving spaceman.
There had to be a reason why that isolated human colony had been able to survive right in the heart of the stars held by mankind’s implacable enemies. But nobody had been able to get to the quaintly named Dunroamin to find out.
If they had a secret defense, it could be the answer to a hundred planets’ prayers. And Feliz Gebrod realized as he came in for a crash landing that he’d know the secret sooner than he’d expected.
Except that what he encountered was a life-and-death riddle that had nothing to do with stellar defense. It was this: how can two mutually irreconcilable Utopias occupy the same space at the same time.
I’ll admit, that might no be the best scan of the cover. I bought this book in slightly worse shape than the other Ace Doubles I’ve gotten my hands on. It suffered a little water damage, which you can see in the crinkling. However, the cleaner versions of the cover still don’t grab me in the way that giant floating heads and chessboards in space do. Yes, I know, don’t judge books by their covers, but part of what has drawn me to the Doubles (and I’m not the first) are the fantastic covers. I picked this particular Double up to read on my wife’s insistence because both halves are Gordon R. Dickson. So I tucked in.
Delusion World is a fantastic example of what I like to call the in-and-out story. No, that’s not a sexual reference, nothing like that. The story is just 95 pages long, which means it gets in, it stirs around an interesting premise that wouldn’t work for a novel, and it gets out again having not over stayed its welcome. This story is what I’m looking for when I said above I could go for a little less out of Spacial.
We’re back to another world lost during humanity’s expansion into empire. This is a trope that I’ve never come across before reading these Doubles, but has now shown up in two of the first four. I don’t know if that’s coincidence, or if I’m going to come across more of these lost planets. They make for good story settings, as their isolation allows for odd cultural evolution within a technologically advanced culture. In the case of Dunroamin, our hero Feliz Gebrod comes across two societies that occupy the same plot of land while each seemingly unaware of the other. One wears only black, the other is dressed in bright colors. Gebrod is compelled to stay by the psychic nature of the leader of the color-wearers, so the book follows his attempt to escape.
Which, oddly, resembles building a fountain in the center of town. Because that’s what most escape plans typically look like.
The secret to the coexisting societies comes from a political disagreement generations before the book took place. The two sides simply refused to acknowledge each other, then fully ignored each other, and finally grew up with a mental block that wouldn’t let them even see their opponents. Which let the authoritarians be comfortably authoritarian, and the anarchists to be anarchic. The built in delusion even allows for the complete disintegration of people. Those who are cast out are ignored and never seen again. It’s one of those things it’s best not to think about for too long, because it becomes more and more horrific. We only see one disintegrated individual, our requisite silly woman to run through the book allowing the male lead to show off how above frivolity he is. She’s a character I didn’t come across in the first Ace Double, but found in both halves of Dickson’s writing. She ends up being a trope, an archetype, or even just a prop, rather than an actual character.
Both halves of this Double feel like stories that exist entirely to show off the worlds Dickson created. Each throws an outsider into the insanity and watches them cope. I like the execution better in Delusion World. Perhaps its because both the world and the lead character’s goals are inherently sillier. The world survives internally by lying to itself, and externally by refusing to acknowledge that they have any enemies. Gebrod survives by building a fountain to power a device that will vaporize everyone’s clothing in an instant, making them see each other and creating enough confusion to escape the psychic bonds holding him. It’s a suitably ludicrous plan for a ludicrous setting. It’s also the first of the four halves I’ve read that I would consider re-reading, largely to see if my positive opinion of it holds up as I read more of these Doubles.
4 out of 5 nude bombs.
Four Humors in The Avengers
Posted by DLThurston in A Writer Reviews, Character Thoughts on May 15, 2012
I’m working on my next Ace Double review, so it’s going to be a longer post that requires extra time. So a quick post today. Finally saw the Avengers, and what I suspected before I went to the movie was confirmed by the movie itself. There are four superheros, there are four humors, and they map quite well.
- Choleric. The natural leader. Captain America. His own movie was subtitled “The First Avenger,” and he’s the one giving orders when the group is actually working together.
- Phlegmatic. The emotional follower. Bruce Banner. It’s hard to assign a personality to the Hulk, but Banner is chock-a-block with personality quirks. Which is why everyone is raving over the portrayal of the character.
- Melancholic. The introvert. Thor. The natural outsider, being the only of the four not from Earth, he’s accustomed to being self reliant and independent.
- Sanguine. The fun one. Iron Man. He’s the easiest of the four to pin down, he’s the charismatic one. The billionaire, playboy, genius, philanthropist. Those are all sides of the sanguine personality.
It’s interesting, I’ve seen comparisons of the movie to Lord of the Rings, and there is the same fellowship of nine characters. The listed four, plus the SHIELD characters: Hawkeye, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, and Maria Hill. In this analogy, I supposed the superheroes would be the four hobbits, most of the SHIELD characters would be the other members of the Fellowship, and Nick Fury would be Gandalf, the overarching Choleric who brings them all together. I’m sure someone much more versed in film deconstruction could really pull this apart in-depth, but I’ve got my other post to focus on.
Kickstarter Postmortem, Part 1
Posted by DLThurston in Kickstarter on May 14, 2012
I’ve decided to split this postmortem into two halves. This first half will focus entirely on my thoughts. Part two, sometime next week, will include a back-and-forth with the editor of The Memory Eater anthology to talk about the decision to go Kickstarter, and what he thinks of it as a way forward for fiction and anthologies.
First and foremost, I want to say thank you. From the absolute bottom of my heart, thank you. I recognized several names on the donors list that I know are followers on Twitter, readers of this blog, friends in real life, or who I otherwise pointed to the Kickstarter. It’s been overwhelming each time I see one of those names come up. If you are reading this and you donated, or you helped spread the word, or you simply put up with me becoming a single-focused Kickstarter monster for 40 days and 40 nights, I cannot thank you enough. I hope that the end product of our campaign justifies your faith in the project.
I didn’t want to go any further without saying those words.
The Kickstarter experience was a hell of a roller coaster, and I wanted to give people a look at what it’s like to be part of a project that doesn’t have A Name attached to it. What do I mean by A Name? Let’s look at some of the most successful projects on the site. The same day we got funded, Steve Jackson was funded just shy of a million dollars to resurrect his classic game Ogre. During our campaign, Amanda Palmer hit her $100,000 goal in a matter of hours. The classic example, at least until someone beats its $3.3 million haul, is Double Fine Adventure, which got $300,000 in just eight hours. In all of these cases, we’re talking about individuals (Jackson, Palmer, and Tim Schafer) who have rabid and devoted followers.
Who were we? We were a rag-tag collection of authors and illustrators who combined didn’t have the prestige that any of Jackson, Palmer, or Schafer have in their pinky fingers. In the end we became the 84th most funded Publishing/Fiction project in the site’s short history, well behind juggernauts like Dinocalypse Now and Steampunk Holmes. Compare that to the three projects above, which all had two things in common when compared to The Memory Eater. Both had more backers than we had dollars backed, and both had, and sold, rewards worth more than our entire project. Hell, then some of our stretch goals, even.
There’s another Kickstarter postmortem out there, as web video legend Ze Frank broke down his experiences in funding his new show through the site. His project and ours have a few differences, namely just about everything except that we both used Kickstarter. He’s an established name online, with an established fan base, and he chose to go for an 11 day project largely because Kickstarter itself was interested to test short-term projects as they saw most money raised in the first and last three days. In his postmortem he has a hunch:
:: HUNCH :: My guess is the shape of the blue curve is mainly defined by pretty basic network properties of information spread – a short period of exponential growth followed by exponential decline. The initial spike has to do with novel interest and many overlapping points of broadcast (initial marketing, retweets, blog posts, sharing) Once you are in the phase of exponential decline, you will have to fight to maintain interest, either by enlisting larger broadcast nodes (news articles, bloggers) or by creating shareable events (new reasons to share your campaign.)
My hunch, before our Kickstarter opened, was that the initial spike seen at the beginning of a Kickstarter from a known quantity, A Name, is due to a period before the information about the project is saturated. It doesn’t take nearly as long for Ze Frank, Jackson, Palmer, or Schafer to largely exhaust their ability to mobilize an existing fan base. The long tail is due to funding goals being reached, so there’s a decreased excitement. Those trickling in at this point are those who are curious or somehow missed the opening blast trickle in, then the big finish is from those who were holding out but decided they really wanted to be in on the whole thing. The concept of exhaustion and diminishing returned interested me as we went into a project where we were reliant on hard fought word of mouth and people stumbling upon our project being curious. And one that likely wasn’t going to get 72-hour funding. So, since I like being obsessive, and I like charts, and I like numbers, I put together The Infamous Graph.
Each morning at as close to 7:55am eastern time as possible (the time we launched, so our Kickstarter midnight) I grabbed the total contribution from the Kickstarter and scribbled it down. They all went into an Excel spreadsheet, and I tracked the overall progress (blue bar, left axis) and the daily change in pledges (red bar, right axis). The other extraneous lines are a green line tracking our overall goal and a purple line representing an even progression towards the goal, so I’d know if we were ahead of or behind pace. Please note, this is unofficial in every possible way, and I know it’s flawed as I somehow ended up with 39 data points coming out of a 40-day Kickstarter project.
Yes, we did have two days where we lost money, including nearly $50 the last Saturday of the campaign. We had three more where there was absolutely no movement. Ze Frank raised 2/3 of his total in those first three days. We raised just shy of 20% in our initial push. Ze Frank had a “slight increase” in his last three days. We raised over $1000, nearly 1/4 of our final total, in a frantic and wonderful last four days. Ze Frank had a comparative drop off (though his worst day far outstripped our best) and never really shot back up. Our project kept experiencing fits of activity that kept the blue line right around the purple line.
The projects, in short, couldn’t look much different. Then again, they couldn’t be much different. One wanted $50k, the other just over $4k. One was a single person, the other was a team of artists and creators. One was a known quantity, the other was more of a gamble for the contributors.
So we experienced some giddy highs. At the end of that first week when we were on pace to double our money, we started talking stretch goals. I like stretch goals, and we all had visions of The Memory Eater 2 swooping through our heads. Yeah, we never even came close. We were never in as good shape as our best days looked, we were never in as bad shape as our worst days looked. I’ll be honest, after that bottom out there on day 33, I didn’t expect we would be funded. Yes, I’d heard of last minute pushes, but I didn’t think they could be as powerful as I’d heard.
They are. And then some. I suspect it helped that we were at 80% when we started showing up on Ending Soon pages. The last 96 hours featured people who were holding on to see if their support was needed, and those Kickstarter regulars who like to push a project over the top.
The project went largely as I expected. We had a strong start, a strong finish, and some setbacks in the middle. It took longer for us to reach a point of saturation, because it took our voices so much longer to spread. We experienced some diminishing returns, but not nearly those represented by Ze Franks graphs. But then…we also funded on the second to last day, not on day three, so there was never a point where we weren’t in danger. Hell, up until about 7 hours left in the project there were two backers who could sink us by virtue of the size of their donations, and even up to the finish line there was still just one. I didn’t expect they actually would, that would take an amount of spite that I would like to think doesn’t exist on Kickstarter, but worrying about things like that is one of my various unhealthy hobbies. I don’t smoke, so this is what I get.
In the end I wanted to let people see what a Kickstarter project looked like when it had nothing but tenacity and the promise of some excellent short stories going for it. Plus a couple dozen people who really believed in a thing and wouldn’t say die. In the end, 166 people joined us for the ride, which is all flavors of exciting. Where do we go next? Well, our fearless leader CP has some questionnaires to put together and the rest of us get to take a deep breath and stop spamming our Twitter followers. Which is one more thank you I owe, to everyone who simply put up with me talking about this project so endlessly. Especially my wife, who got the best view of my mania.
I’m not sure I’m excited to go through another Kickstarter project. I liked getting somewhat dragged into one, having a stake but not being the key figure. It was fun, but it was also nerve-racking, exhausting, and focus drawing. My writing productivity dropped precipitously near the end. This isn’t a reason for writers in general not to do Kickstarters, it’s a reason only for writers who are me to never spearhead one. Which…honestly…if this had gone a lot bigger and better, if we’d hit those stretch goals, I was considering two different projects I’d like to do that might benefit from a Kickstart. Now, I might still do them, but they won’t be crowdsourced.
I’m looking forward to talking with CP a little more next week. We’ve been in touch through most of the campaign, I know some of his thoughts on it, but I’ll be interested to get some more formal answer to what he thinks we did right, did wrong, and what lessons other writers and anthologists might take from our experiences before launching their own Kickstarter. Keep an eye out, I hope to have it up by Friday of next week, but mine is not the only calendar for that.
Flash Fiction: Escape from Io
Posted by DLThurston in Flash Fiction on May 11, 2012
This week Chuck Wendig has challenged us with pulp.
Crazy pulp shiznit.
Because it’s awesome.
So!
Your task this week is to go apeshit.
To go moonbat.
To go cuh-razy with the over-the-top pulp weirdness.
Whatever that means to you — “pulp insanity” — just run with it. For up to 1000 words.
Perfect, this let me work out a few, uh, issues that I’ve had while listening to an audiobook version of A Princess of Mars. So join interplanetary adventurer Jack Lincoln in his Escape From Io.
An Ode…
Posted by DLThurston in Kickstarter on May 10, 2012
…To The Final 48 Hours of a Kickstarter
By DL Thurston
F5.
F5 F5 F5. Woo!
F5. F5 F5.
F5.
F5 F5 F5 F5 F5.
F5. Woo!
F5 F5. F5.
F5.
On Men and Heroes
Posted by DLThurston in Uncategorized on May 8, 2012
I do what I can to avoid politics on this blog. Oh, not completely. Anyone could find my posts about SOPA and PIPA and see where I stood on those issues. But if I’m going off on an opinion, it’s more likely one about corn shuckers in the grocery store than anything that the Republicans or the Democrats have done. This is entirely a personal decision, one made for myself that I don’t think all writers could/should/would follow me up on. I do plenty of political opinioning in real life, it gets me riled up at times, and it’s nice to have my blog as a place for calmer discussion.
There’s also that one sticking point when it comes to political opinions. Lots of people have them, and not everyone agrees with them.
This past week has seen two very prominent writers delivery two very impassioned editorials. The first was Stephen King when he called on the government to “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!” and the other comes from Orson Scott Card asking “What Right Is Really At Stake?” with regard to North Carolina Amendment 1. Neither man has ever shied away from the political spotlight in the past, and these editorials are both well in line with their previous opinions on these subjects. King does not hide his liberalism, nor does Card hide his conservatism. I’m going to just state, because I think most people who know me know where I stand on these things, that I agree with Mr. King and disagree with Mr. Card. This entire post is going to be so much easier to write if I don’t pussyfoot around that.
Even though neither man has made a secret of his politics in the past, both surprised some readers and fans with there editorials. If you peruse the comments for both articles, each include several examples of “you’ve lost me as a reader.” Those six words scare the shit out of me. Certainly King and Card, both stalwarts of genre fiction, can sustain a few losses in the readership department without any major changes in their royalty checks, but I’m still trying to win people over as readers, and the thought of losing them before I even have them? That’s what keeps me away from getting too political in my posts.
But what are we as readers to do when we learn that our literary heroes don’t share our personal opinions?
It’s a tough question, and one that I’ve been churning over in my head this past day. I’m going to be honest, I’ve only read one Orson Scott Card novel. I recently found a hardback of Wyrms at a thrift store and thought I should give it a try. It was neither in the top ten or bottom ten of books I’ve read, and ultimately stands out in my memory for the rather, ahem, interesting climax the story reaches deep within the bowels of the post-industrial planet. I’ve not read the Ender series. I haven’t actively avoided it, it’s just one of those things that has never made it onto my pile. In that way it’s like The Godfather, which I’ve never seen for no reason other than I’ve never seen it.
This editorial hasn’t made me any more likely to read Ender. Perhaps it’s made me less, that’s hard to say. He hasn’t lost me as a reader, per se, but he’s made it that much harder to win me as a reader. I don’t know where I would stand if I were an existing fan of his work. I’m certain that a percentage of the readers he has “lost” with this opinion weren’t his readers to begin with, but some of them were. And it’s left them in a very difficult position, seeing a world that they potentially grew up with colored by the opinions of the author, even if those opinions may not translate to the page.
Does that mean that Card shouldn’t have said what he did? Absolutely not. Orson Scott Card is entitled to have and speak his opinions, just as Stephen King is. I doubt anyone reading this blog is going to question that fact. I’ve never understood the notion that celebrities aren’t supposed to use their celebrity to promote political opinions. Especially because what people tend to be saying is that they shouldn’t use their celebrity to promotion political opinions I disagree with. However that freedom of speech goes every which way, and I’m just as much in my right to be less interested in picking up his books, and someone else is well within their rights to put them down entirely. To stop reading the Ender series because they believe that firmly in marital rights. To stop reading the Dark Tower because they believe that firmly in tax reduction. There are also liberals out there who will go right on reading Card and conservatives who have no problem picking up King. It is neither a failure of character to walk away from these writers because of what they said, nor a failure of conviction to stay with them in spite of what they said.
This is a hard post for me to write, because I do feel like it exposes a part of me I’m not entirely comfortable with. It’s the part of me that doesn’t talk about politics because I know I’m the kind of person who might put an author down if I learned his politics varied too greatly from my own. It also forces me to look straight in the face of the part of me who disagrees categorically and completely with just about every word of Orson Scott Card’s editorial, and yet sees a certain bravery in it. Perhaps more so considering the general trend towards liberalism within genre writers. Or is that only my personal perception based on who I follow on Twitter and G+? A man who makes his living on selling himself to others through his fiction and who believes thoroughly enough in his convictions to use his significant megaphone even when he knows they’ll make him unpopular to many. It doesn’t change my opinion on his position, change my likelihood of reading him, but it is an odd moment of clarity. Which is uncomfortable and makes me twitchy, but there it is nonetheless.
Writers aren’t heroes. They’re people. They will, at times, disagree with us or even disappoint us in their opinions. Perhaps to a point that those words of theirs we read before are forever changed in our minds. This is the risk that always comes when people put themselves out there, and one of those odd bits of collateral about deciding to write. One of those things we might not all think of when we’re putting word to paper. I still stand largely where I did before on expressing my own political opinions, you’ll see them few and far between. But there is an argument for letting the chips fall where they may. No writer should ever be forced to be what they aren’t to attract or keep readers. As long as they remember they are not entitled to readers, either.
Unrelated Weekend Things
Posted by DLThurston in Beekeeping, Kickstarter, Short Stories on May 7, 2012
Thing the first: We are now officially beekeepers. Saturday afternoon my wife and I picked up our nuc from one of our fellow members of the Beekeepers Association of Northern Virginia. The bees were just chilling in the dining room when we showed up, well secured in their cardboard travel case and humming away like mad. There are few things that make me a safer driver than having a hatchback full of bees, apparently. The buzzing was always just a little louder than the radio, especially when a stop or turn made their little cardboard box slide around.
It was raining when we got home, so we immediately broke my first and most sacrosanct rule of beekeeping: no bees in the house. The cats were exceedingly concerned about the box, I suspect the sound of the bees humming sounded different to their ears. I picked up our younger, stupider cat and let him have a good look from about five feet away. He wanted no closer than that, tensing as I held him and scampering off when I let him down. The rain tapered off, so we took the opportunity to suit up and get the bees into their new hive. This meant doing things faster than intended, so we didn’t have time to identify the queen, even though she has a little yellow dot on her back. We’ll need to go in again by next weekend anyway, we’ll get another chance then.
We were told to expect productive and gentle bees. True to form, they only buzzed around us curiously while we assembled the hive, and by yesterday were already coming back to the hive with huge saddlebags of pollen, even with a patty of artificial pollen sitting right in their hive. We did come across one bee who was a little braver than her sisters. This is the bee that will hover right at eye level with us, really staring us down and just daring us to come in closer to the hive. We’ve long planned to name one bee “That Bee” who we could blame any problems in the hive on. I think we’ve officially found That Bee.
It’s unusual to harvest from a hive in its first summer, but this colony apparently produced around 100 pounds of honey last year, so it’s not out of the question that we might, might, get a taste of some honey in late August. Of course by then I’ll be beekeeping solo for a few weeks, so we might just let them keep all the honey this year so they have more than enough to overwinter with.
I have some photos, but I’m having a hard time wrangling them at the moment. I’ll update this post later in the evening and send a ping on Twitter when it happens.
Thing the second: Late yesterday I got word of a short story sale to an upcoming anthology. I’m never sure if I’m supposed to share details of just which anthology, so I’m going to hold off until I see something official on their website or get a green light on email. I will say I’m one of two Unleaded contributors on the author’s list, which is awesome. Because of that, it’ll probably be over there not over here that I give more details, when they exist to give. This is my third sale since getting serious about submissions, which is fantastic. Means I need to write more short stories so I can have more rotating through markets. If you’re a fellow Cat Vacuumer, yes, it was that story.
Speaking of anthologies, we are in the last week of the Kickstarter for The Memory Eater, and what was once moving fast and furious is now stalled out just shy of 80%. It’s not too late to get in and preorder a copy. I’ve seen Kickstarters pull in impressive last week numbers, but there’s certainly no room for complacency. If you’re still considering, time is running low. If you are already in, please consider giving us a signal boost on Twitter. Doing so can even earn you free reward-tier prizes, check out the contest here. Our deadline for funding is Saturday morning at 7:55am eastern time.
Flash Fiction: Dinosaur Hall
Posted by DLThurston in Flash Fiction on May 4, 2012
This week the Chuck Wendig challenge celebrates the release of Dinocalypse Now with the theme of DINOSAURS! It’s the typical 1000 word cap, must include dinosaurs in one way or another. Check out the links others are putting up for their stories back at Terrible Minds.
And do check out The Memory Eater on Kickstarter. Just over a week left, and we’ve still got a march ahead.
Ace Double Review: D-479
Posted by DLThurston in Ace Doubles on May 3, 2012
Welcome to a new feature of the blog. I’ve been meaning to get into reviewing the books I’m reading for awhile, and since I’m currently reading Ace Doubles, I’m going to start by reviewing those. I may review other material in the coming months, but this isn’t a step towards this blog being review-focused. The format of these reviews may change as this feature grows and evolves, but I am aiming at reviewing both halves of each Ace Double as a single entity.
˙ǝlqnop ǝɔ∀ ǝɥʇ ɟo lǝǝɟ ǝɥʇ uıɐʇuıɐɯ oʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn sʍǝıʌǝɹ ǝɥʇ ɟo ǝuo ƃuıʇsod ʇsuıɐƃɐ pǝpıɔǝp I pɐlƃ ǝq ʇsnſ
With that prologue out of the way, let’s slip into Ace Double D-479, original price 35¢, featuring Wilson Tucker’s To The Tombaugh Station and Poul Anderson’s Earthman, Go Home!
To The Tombaugh Station
“Was his spaceship haunted — or merely booby-trapped?”
Kate Bristol was a born huntress. Her keen senses and steel nerves were infallible, and nobody knew it better than her superiors at Interworld Insurance. They took it for granted that when they put Bristol on the case she would bring back the man — and the facts!
But even Kate began to doubt her ability when they handed her the job of tracking a murder suspect on board the spaceship Xanthus. One, the ship was bound for the farthermost outpost of civilization. Two, there would be no one on board the ship but Kate and the suspected murder-pilot. And three, the trip would take at least two months!
For Kate this assignment was more than just a challenge — it was life or death. She had always to stay one step ahead of the suspect or she might never live to return from that trip TO THE TOMBAUGH STATION.
Right out of the gate I expected a roaring thrill ride from this novel. How could I not? There’s a potentially haunted space ship! Guys go into space with bare hands and frilly boots! It mentions an insurance company right there in the second sentence of the blurb! Alright, the third one is plainly unfair. This novel gets plenty of mileage out of the concept that any job is more fun when the words “IN SPACE” are tacked on to the end of it. Thus we have a story of Kate Bristol, Insurance detective IN SPACE sent out by her boss, an insurance claims adjuster IN SPACE, to determine whether Irvin Webb, long haul trucker IN SPACE, is a murderer IN SPACE. Alright, I guess potential murderer typically stands as interesting enough on its own without “IN SPACE”. She does this by securing a one-way trip as the freighter’s only passenger on the way to the Tombaugh Station, an observatory on the planet Pluto.
The setup is fantastic. Space is one of those rare ways to completely isolate characters together within a story. In this case we have the female detective and the male murder suspect locked in a ship, isolated together, for nearly two months. Unfortunately I didn’t get quite the drama out of the story that the premise promises. Even as she’s talking her way onto the ship, the bigger concern isn’t whether or not he’s going to kill her but rather whether or not there’ll be a door hung on the lavatory closet. There are those moments when Kate must sneak around behind Irvin’s back, no mean task with the confined conditions, but at no point does she strike me in the least bit worried about her life. Perhaps this is because at no point did I feel that Irvin was guilty of murder. A foul and cantankerous man who’d been into space one too many times, certainly, but not a murderer. We spend too much time in his head, and his thoughts are never “I could kill her like that last guy,” but rather “gosh I wonder what’s under that green plastic onesie.”
The world? Now the world I enjoyed. Within Tucker’s view of solar system travel, there’s a cost involved. The radiation is an absolute bitch, and those who have taken too many trips develop worsening skin cancer. It puts space travel out of reach for all but the determined or the fool-hearty, and is appropriate to the year, as we were still working out just how lethal space was. It also deepens the feeling of isolation. Oh, certainly, there are inconceivable distances between planets even at their closes approaches to each other, but coupled with a paucity of civilization beyond earth and it further ramps up the frontier feel of setting out into the nothingness aiming at a distant point with no help in between. Even when you get to Titan you find out it’s been entirely colonized by New Zealanders.
So the world was interesting, the plot wanted for more tension, and the ending weakened the story. The mystery plot wraps up well enough. I can remember all the details that Kate pieces together, even if I didn’t recognize them as clues, and there’s even just enough room in the 45000ish words for one red herring. The problem lies in the ending of the plot not being the ending of the story. And I’m not talking about a denouement. The plot ties up cleanly a chapter early. That gives plenty of time to tack on a more exciting ending as the Xanthus crash lands on Pluto, leaving Kate and Irvin marooned and waiting for rescue. It serves only to play one little card the novel was holding onto, an emergency rescue beacon hidden about Kate’s body. Where, you may ask? “Don’t be naïve” she answers as the last line of the book. It wasn’t a card that needed to be played in this way, however, since it was the cause of the radar echo early in the book, something she doesn’t learn until after the problem has fixed itself. Another lost chance for drama if she has to decide between shutting off her only lifeline to the world beyond the Xanthus and potential discovery of her true purpose on the ship.
Does the book utilize this drama? Don’t be naïve.
So it was a thriller with not quite enough tension, and an ending that felt tacked on to provide a requisite amount of excitement. This is largely what I expected out of the Doubles, though I’m not yet through enough of them to know if this is what I should expect or not. It’s getting a neutral score just because I have only itself and Earthman, Go Home to score it against.
I love the covers of these books too much to not talk about them as part of the review. First, as to the question in the teaser, “was his spaceship haunted?” No. Absolutely not. The word “ghost” is used several times in the first half of the book, but it’s very clear every time that it’s purely a metaphor for the radar echo caused by Kate’s concealed radio. The scene in the illustration happens, but I do love the absolute attention to detail. This book came out in 1960, a year before the first manned space flight, but I think even by then we knew you might want to put some gloves on when you leave your spaceship. If nothing else so you don’t catch your death of explosive decompression. That scene does happen, Irvin the suspected murderer saves a man from a disabled ship, but only because it’s convenient and pays well. It’s perhaps the only visually interesting scene to depict. You know, unless you want to use the exciting hanging-a-door-on-the-lavatory scene.
3 out of 5 lavatory doors.
Earthman, Go Home!
“This quarantined world resisted change.”
When Captain Sir Dominic Flandry heard of Unan Besar, he thought carefully of the possibilities the planet might offer. It had been a Terran settlement, but in the vast confusion of galactic colonization, it had been lost in the shuffle.
Lost? Well, perhaps not so much lost as kidnapped. For a civilization can develop in strange ways over three hundred years — and it looked as if this one had deliberately withdrawn from the rest of the universe.
It was the kind of situation that Flandry liked. And because he knew there was profit in intrigue, he decided to invade the planet — alone. But as soon as he had landed he found himself playing a game for his very life — with all the rules made by his world-wide opponents!
Few of these doubles have obvious A-sides and B-sides. This one does. Earthman, Go Home! is the only of the two titles listed on Goodreads, suggested for rescue on Save the Sci-Fi, or included in any later digital releases, though by the alternate, less pulpy title A Plague of Masters (cover of dubious work safeness). It falls near the middle of Anderson’s Terran Empire series, and near the end of the timeline for main character Dominic Flandry, after he’s been apparently promoted to captain and knighted. It was my first exposure to Anderson, Flandry, or the Terran Empire. Yes, that’s the sort of secluded literary life I’ve lead.
Captain Sir Flandry, as I’ve gathered from Wikipedia, was influenced by James Bond, whose first appearance predates Flandry by two years. He’s not quite James Bond IN SPACE (really, I’ll stop that now) but he does exemplify several elements of the Bond character. Which…is not so much a good thing. I’ve made a few attempts at the original Bond novels, and the character on the page is not the suave and debonair Sean Connery being charmingly Scottish all over the world. Or even the more world-weary modernized Daniel Craig. No. Bond is a bit of a dick. And Flandry? Yeah, also a bit of a dick, at least in terms of this story. He exemplifies why a main character needs a flaw.
Alright, he has a flaw, but not in the modern literary sense where a character has some element of his character he needs to overcome. No, Flandry’s flaw is just flat out narcissism, which the novel makes very clear is entirely justified. It’s hard to go a chapter without Flandry thinking just how awesome he is at one skill or another, or otherwise expounding how he’s the only one who can deliver this poor backwards world from its oppressive oligarchy. At no point does he fail. Even when he gets captured, he’s captured nobly to save others.
So not only do we get the personality flaws of James Bond, we get the broader John Carter theme of a single earthling being awesome enough to enact global change.
Just a moment, let me back the hell up here. I’m getting harsh on this book, and in many ways it deserves it, but there is some good. The story is set on a planet colonized by humanity as it went through a hyper expansionary phase throughout the galaxy. It was then lost as the Empire slipped towards decline. The atmosphere harbors a deadly bacteria that every man, woman, and child is protected against by a monthly pill, thus providing control over the population (I was convinced the pill would end up being a placebo, I was wrong). The planet is an odd mix of the classic backwards world like Barsoom, right down to universal toplessness, and modern technology as the pill dispensary system includes a world-wide computer network with biometric inputs. I love this planet! Notice a theme already of me liking the world building better than the stories?
And that’s what carried me through the noble tree-living savages, the savior from the stars, the narcissism, and the love-em-and-leave-em attitude. Well…that and the campiness of all those elements. It’s why I watched Mystery Science Theater, it’s why I’m reading Ace Doubles: the expectations of a certain level of campiness. Earthman will likely serve as my barometer for the time being, so the score of three below defines this book as being exactly as good as itself. I only hope I don’t decide this book should have been my five.
To the cover! The world isn’t exactly quarantined, that implies that a conscious decision to leave the people to their own devices. They were forgotten, and I think the phrase “forgotten colony” is so much more intriguing than “quarantined planet.” The illustration is another faithful rendition of a scene in the book, as Flandry escapes with the help of the mugger-with-a-heart-of-gold Kemul. Yes, Flandry falls in with criminal elements in the story, one who delightfully doesn’t so much have a heart of gold and ultimately doesn’t give a shit about anyone. It was the right lust interest for Flandry, because “love interest” implies his interests go beyond the physical. And for god’s sake, the title. At no point is he called an “earthman” he’s very clearly called a “Terran,” as this is the point in science fiction where “Terra” and “Terran” were all the rage. But now I’m just splitting hairs.
3 out of 5 earthmen, going home.
Next time F-119, a Gordon R. Dickson double-header with SpAcial Delivery and Delusion World.
State of the Author: May 2012
Posted by DLThurston in Kickstarter, Nickajack, Short Stories, State of the Writer on May 1, 2012
Hermes and Maia
2012 Goal: Query Nickajack. Big progress in April: the rough draft is complete! It came in at 90,054 words, right at the lower end of my target range for the novel. This is just the first step, but it’s a big first step, as the entire novel exists as a full length narrative. The next step is turning it into a first draft. Especially for something as long as a novel, I consider the rough and first drafts as two different creatures. The rough draft is the first version of the story that takes the plot from beginning to end with no holes in the middle. The first draft is the first draft we’re willing to let others see as a completed project. There are three major steps between here and there:
- My wife and coauthor is taking three weeks to punch up Act Three with more description, as there were points in the narrative where I was concentrating more on getting to the end than stopping to smell the roses. Or to look at, feel, taste, or listen to the roses either. It’s largely about dividing the labor to play into our strengths.
- Rewrite chapter one to fit the theme and conclusion of the novel. We want to make sure we’ve got good bookends after all.
- Redefine a character. She was: a nurse. She will be: a Luddite-style reactionary. As she exists now, the first half of her appearances she’s the one, the second half (after we decided to change her character, and knew the new version would have a far different plot interaction) she’s the other. So we need to make sure to unify her purposes.
Can we get this all done in May? Maybe. May-be. See what I…nevermind. Actually, probably not, but I’ll be thrilled if we get the first two steps done, and get the third done by mid-June. Then we’ll actually consider something that’s altogether new and scary to me: alpha readers. I’ve never had an entire novel beta read as a single unit.
This also means I’m going to be more hands-off than hands-on for the next two or three months. Which is fair and I knew would be part of the process of coauthoring. It makes me twitch a little, but I’m hoping to use that nervous energy to get a few other projects done. So with that in mind…
Looking forward to May. Yesterday was day one of the first hands-off period. I’ve got four projects lined up, though I’m not sure what order they’ll get done in, and which will get pushed back to the month long alpha reader hands-off period.
- Find the next destination for Vampire of Mars and kick it out the door. This one languished awhile before getting an entirely tacit rejection, which was harsh. My first choice of markets is currently closed, so this will include some research and not just polishing.
- Finish the series of eight Nickajack side stories. I’ve written the first three, my wife wrote the last one, so there’s four in the middle to fill in. 500-1000 words each.
- Create a novella-length outline for Ghosts of Venus. I think it can take it, and I’ve got some ideas for potentially tripling the length.
- Create a novella-length outline for Unnamed North Carolina Time Travel War Story. Plus…come up with a better title. This is the story that had its origins in my accidental world building, though I may not use quite the same time period.
Novella-length stories will be an experiment for me, which is part of why I’d like to give them a try. I’ve seen the market for them re-open lately (though largely through self publication) and I think the two stories I have in mind can support longer narratives but not novel length adventures. I’ve also been considering them thanks to dipping my toes into one of the stronger novella markets of the 1960s, those Ace Doubles I’ve been snatching up (11 more inbound from an eBay auction, though one’s a duplicate). If I like them, I might bundle them together and slap on this little logo that I made in a moment of insanity when things such as self-publishing something in the style of an Ace Double sounds like a good idea.
State of the Kickstarter. I’ll be honest, we’re in the doldrums right now. I don’t want to get pessimistic, but I’m certainly not as optimistic as I was when I suggested throwing some stretch goals into the mix. I’m still excited about the project. If you haven’t read the sample, give it a shot. If you haven’t pre-ordered, please consider doing so. We’ve got ten days left as of this writing, and still 30% of the project left to fund. We’re exactly on pace, but that leaves us no margin for error. I’ll put together a full postmortem, for better or worse, in two weeks when everything is done.
UPDATE: Since writing this earlier today, the Kickstarter is having a great day. If you’re reading this and you’ve supported us, either today or in the past, I owe you a massive thanks. We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m a hell of a lot more optimistic at 3pm than I was at 9am.
State of the Writer’s Bees. The first nuc arrives this weekend. Expect a post about them next week.
Everyone have a productive month, and we’ll meet back here in 31 days to say what we’ve all done.
These are badges
I have badges now. Badges are cool.
