Dragon Awards - The Allied Vote

It's award time for fans of fantasy and science fiction, and that can mean only one thing - DragonCon ballots are up and ready for completion.  The red fiery trophy is the new hotness that all the cool kids want to win, and my on-line social circle has a heavy presence on the ballot.  Fortunately, Kai Wai Cheah already put together a handy primer and list of this year's best of the best, so I don't have to. Go read his blog post for a complete breakdown. 

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Secret Kings by Brian Niemeier
Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal): A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day
Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel: Swan Knight’s Son by John C Wright
Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: Rescue Run by Jon Del Arroz
Best Alternate History Novel: No Gods, Only Daimons by Kai Wai Cheah
Best Apocalyptic Novel: Codename: Unsub by Declan Finn and Allan Yoskowitz
Best Horror Novel: Live and Let Bite by Declan Finn

Dangerous Gamers - The Book

From day one The Frisky Pagan has been a reliable source of passionate, well considered, and funny commentary over at the Puppy of the Month Book Club.  Lately, his production has fallen off a bit (he's not alone in that), and now we finally get a chance to see why: Dangerous Gamers

You already know who these commentators are, and you have seen their works everywhere. They thrive in the worlds of on-line journalism, blogging, news aggregators, click-bait journalism, and social media. Their ranks have swollen, and they have problematized everything under the sun. And without more worlds to conquer, they have set their eyes on entertainment and video games.

If you are a regular at The Puppy of the Month, you know that Frisky has the writing chops to do a topic like this justice.  In its first day of publication it hit #16 in "Media Studies" and #27 in "Video Games", beating out some pretty impressive titles.  Be a sport and help him crack the top ten in both categories, would ya?

Comics Exposure

Comic book fandom is one of those things that I've accreted through sheer osmosis.  Love the concept, love the culture, but never had the time, never had the money, but always had friends with both.  Whether it was reading an issue or two left on a couch or thrust into my hands at a friend's house, or catching up on trade paperbacks at the library (read: five years late), or just sitting back and listening to fans talk about the things, I've managed to keep up with all of the most important story lines.  Dark Phoenix Saga, Secret Wars, Supes punching reality in the face and rebooting the DC line, you're talking to a guy who can at least ask intelligent questions about what's up with the four color tales.

Now it's the internet's favorite complaints box, Twitter, that keeps me up on the latest dirt.  Or so I thought, until somebody passed me a link to "Diversity and Comics".  It's not what you think.  It's actually a series of thoughtful and intelligent reviews of comics by a guy interesting and funny enough to be sitting next to you at the gaming table.  Just check out the title on this bad boy:



Not only is the narrator an experienced and thoughtful reviewer of comic books as a specific medium, he has phenomenal insight into storytelling, heroism, action, and the all the rest of the #PulpRevolution's greatest hits.

Forget Game of Thrones, I'll be binge watching this for the next few days.

Watch Out!

I've made no secret about my hopes to read more works by the Old Reliables out there in the #PulpRevolution blog-o-sphere.  Well, Jesse Abraham Lucas isn't content to sit around waiting.  Jesse is putting together an anthology:

Back in the day a group of SF greats, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer, each wrote a short story based on the same prologue. Apparently (I haven't read them, I'm going off the cover above just like you are) NO TWO ARE EVEN REMOTELY ALIKE. These authors had radically different styles, beliefs, and backgrounds, making it in theory an excellent idea, and the first thing I thought when I found out about it a day or two ago was, "I want to do that." So I did.

I'm not calling for submissions, I'm hand-picking our contributors, so if your name is on the list I'll publish your story, but I'll touch base with you on structure and clean up grammar and all that (of course I'm going to edit and contribute, I can't let this valuable exposure go by).

I'm so interested in seeing what comes out of this that I volunteered to beta-read whatever shakes out of his call.  It may be a few months before this title hits the market, but this also isn't the only example of this sort of organic content farming in the works.  You're going to see a lot of newcomers showing up in the market, and while their first forays might be a little rough around the edges, they'll get better.  Better yet, every one of these represents a literary cultural shift in the right direction, so I'm full-square behind them.

The Brighter Side of Indy Sci-Fi

Now is the best time to get into independently published science fiction.  Ignore what the marketing people have to say about it.  They deal only in raw, current numbers.  They look for today's hotness and promise immediate returns, but you're not interested in tomorrow, you're looking at the long haul.  It's easy to say that about you, even not knowing your name, because you're into science-fiction, which by its nature is a long-view genre.

So let's get our heads on straight here and think about the long view.  For starters, let's get the starting point right.  It's not here:

Segregating fantasy and sci-fi is loser thinking.

It's here:

Winners ignore the distinction.

It's the second most popular genre out there after romance. 

Looking into our psychohistory equations or our crystal-ball (they're the same thing, really), the near future might look bleak.  Nathan "Chicken Little" Housley has a full post where he does his Hari Seldon thing:

A survey of modern science fiction shows a repeated pattern of extinction events. In the 1950s, the pulps died. At the end of the Crazy Years of the 1970s, magazines died as the primary medium of science fiction and backlists died. The 1990s and early 2000s killed off the midlist writer. And, as the same old song plays of magazine sales drying up, rumors of publisher woes, and publisher wisdom telling authors that science fiction cannot sell, we stand on the verge of the next great crash for the genre. That this crash is happening in the 2020s and not in the 2010s is due to the 1990s' publish woes lasting into the 2000s, pushing back the date of the upcoming crash.

But he misses one critical factor in his analysis.  These extinction level events kill off the old dinosaurs, but open the way for new critters to rise up.  The big publishers, hide-bound, slow, and perfectly adapted to 20th century tech are going to suffer, but the mammalian independents, quick, nimble, and adapted to 21st century tech are going to thrive.  That's why you should get in now, while the getting is good.  Every year you wait to start, you're ceding readers to the competition.  You're letting other mammals fill in those ecological niches.

And one of the best niches in the future will be science-fiction.  The marketers tell you to play the numbers.  Romance, mystery, thriller - that's where the big numbers are.   That's true, but that's also where the swarms of writers are.  You've got to fight your way through a bigger crowd to get traction.

More to the point, fighting for what's big now, is thinking like a dinosaur.  Look at the trends.  Readers of mystery and thrillers are still well served by Bigfiveasaurus, and so aren't leaving the big five in droves the way they are sci-fi.  Look again at those bar graphs - the sci-fi field, though smaller than mystery and thrillers, has a bigger independent section.  That tells us Bigfiveasaurus isn't meeting the needs of the reader, and so they are going elsewhere.  For years, many of them went nowhere.  They just left.

With the advent of self-publishing, they are coming back into the fold.  They are finding the sorts of stories they want to read.  They are finding that self-publishers are doing the jobs the Big Five won't.  Again, we look to Nate for the future of the market:

Embrace the fantastic and the exotic. Embrace adventure. These are the key to sales in science fiction, and the shelter from the upcoming storm, just as they brought science fiction out of its previous crashes. Don't make the same mistake that drove hundreds of writers out of the field. Avoid realism.

So don't be afraid to ignore the experts.  You're not interested in today, you're interested in tomorrow and a thousand more after that.  Embrace your sci-fi mindset and look to the future.

You won't regret it.

You also won't regret reading Sudden Rescue.  It's what the future of science fiction is going to look like.

We Are All Gatekeepers Now

We're still beating up on Laurie Gough and her contention that bypassing the gatekeepers who live east of the Hudson River hurts written words.


No caption necessary.

When I pointed out that we're all gatekeepers now, Jeff Duntemann (author of the excellent Ten Gentle Opportunities) responded by pointing out:

@NotJonMollison As readers, we've always been. The difference is that we now have to be systematic (and unrelenting) about it.

— Jeff Duntemann(@JeffDuntemann) January 1, 2017

He's absolutely right.  Word of mouth has always been a cherished aspect of marketing, and bad word of mouth can easily overcome even the most sophisticated advertising campaign.  Look no further than the recent Ghostbusters debacle which resulted in a very different kind of hysterical response than the original.

For the record, my gatekeepers are legion, and I'm always on the lookout for more of them.  If you love a particular style of work, and if you want to see more of it produced, then you should become a gatekeeper, too.  You're a fan, after all, and one of the things that fans do is talk about the things they love.  The more you talk about the things you enjoy, the more people will find those things, and the more incentive people will have to make more of it.

The dirty little secret about increasing your influence as a gatekeeper is that it's really easy to do.  it just takes a little time and dedication.  All you have to do is start showing up in a few blog comments, find the blogger's Twitter feed, and join in the discussions.  You don't need to build a full blown blog or start up your own literary criticism magazine.  Just join in the discussion, and you to can help keep the gates open for the style of works you love.

Here's a quick list of the guys who make for a good starting point (in no particular order):

• Daddy Warpig
• Hooc Ott
• Cirsova
• Brian Neiemier
• Pulp Librarian
• (((H.P.)))

It's a rolling conversation that spans dozens of links, threads, and blogs, and it's a blast.  If you join in, you'll start seeing familiar faces and before you know it, you'll find your very own team of gatekeepers blowing open doors to works that you probably would have missed out on if you relied on the recommendations of snooty New York literati types.

Even better, they'll all have you to act as a gatekeeper to help them find the same.

Find Your Own Gatekeeper

Look at this thing from HuffPo:

It would be easy to go after the low-hanging fruit here.  This woman you've never heard of has written three memoirs.  Three.  Because her life is just that interesting.  She is a "journalist". Because writing a blog on HuffPo counts.  The obvious self-contradiction of a blogger sneering at self-publishing.

 

Instead of dwelling on these things, let's look at a far more mature and thorough takedown by Richard Alan Chandler.  He doesn't go for the easy insults to an obviously flawed piece, he cuts to the heart of the matter by focusing on how her wrong-headedness about gatekeepers amounts to her lament that things are better for readers today:

No, my point is that she is wrong about the lack of gatekeepers. There are actually more gatekeepers now than there are editors and publishers and agents in the entire publishing industry.

I’m talking about you, the reader – both individually and collectively. Individually, because you now have a vastly broader range of works to choose from. And collectively, through your actions on a site like Amazon. When you and all the other readers go to Amazon, you are informing each other about what is good or bad by what you buy, or not, as reflected by the Amazon ranking (conveniently divided by subgenre), and what else is good through the “Also Bought” mechanism. And individually, again, through your star ratings and reviews. Your actions are both informed by those who have gone before you, and they guide those who come after you.

To which I would add that the changing nature of gatekeepers puts the burden on the reader of choosing his own gatekeepers.  And that the process of finding, following, and supporting your chosen gatekeeper crew need not be an onerous one.  You already enjoy reading, and most of the gatekeepers out there are communication via the written word.  So if you dedicate just a few moments of your day's reading to the social media output of even just a handful of trusted individuals, you'll be able to find works that target your interests like a laser beam.

Hopping on Brown Beauty

Joe needs a little push to sit down and get cranking, so this Pulp Revolutionary is pointing to the church tower and shouting, "One if by blog, two if by Gab!" 

 

I don't know whether this kernel might grow into a book that qualifies as part of the pulp revolution or not, but Joseph Moore doesn't realize that he is really on to something here.  He's asking for feedback on a outstanding writing sample.  Go check it out, I'm confident you'll want to pepper him with encouragement to continue this narrative.

This is what encouragement looks like, revolutionaries.  Don't be afraid to show people the cool stuff and the potential that's out there considering an end-run around the grasping claws and fatass offensive linemen of the Big Five publishing houses.  They encourage doubleplusgoodthink through cold hard cash. Without the globalist bankroll encouragement like this is the only power we have to nudge people to engage in crimethink (like that contained in the story above).  Let's show him we've got his back.

Vote for Granddaddy - D&D Belongs in the Toy Hall of Fame

By way of Gamers and Grognards:

That's right. There is a Toy Hall of Fame, and this year D&D is a nominee for induction! As of right now, it has the highest number of votes. Let's keep it that way and get D&D into the Toy Hall of Fame! It might need votes as it is up against a couple that could be heavy hitters (not the least of which is Transformers.) Follow  the link and cast your vote:  Toy Hall of Fame

How is this not already in the Toy Hall of Fame?  It has to be because it's more of a game than a toy, but it's up and in the running now, so let's make this happen.  D&D is already in Games Magazine's Hall of Fame, but why not vote anyway?  Any little bit of publicity that helps grow the hobby is worth a few clicks.

Jeffro's Appendix N, A Brief Primer for New Recruits

Welcome to the Pulp Revolution. 

If you have your dog-eared copy of "A Princess of Mars" handy, you're in the right place.  How we got here is a bit of a long story, and you may have some questions.  What follows is a brief summary of how we got here - a very brief summary - which will likely lead to more questions.  Good.  Keep asking them.  Keep looking back into the original source documents...that's kind of what we do around here.  And we have enough faith in our arguments, our works, and our faith to have no fear of the light.

But be warned:  As you delve into the dank corners of the movement, you'll come to see that much of the gospel written below vastly understates the case for the Pulp Revolution.  Though our cause is just and our victory written in the starts, the situation really is worse than you can possibly imagine.

Jeffro read a series of books written pre-1980 that inspired D&D and noticed some rather striking things about them.  Instead of doing the sane, rational thing - thinking, "Huh, this guy makes some rather strange leaps, and I disagree with many of his conclusions, but as a self-confessed fan of sf/f literature, it's at least worth thinking about and talking about these things" - the internet went full "burn the heretic!" hate machine on him.  We're talking Kony 2012 levels of rage, which would have been horrible if it wasn't mincing skinny-fat fanfic writers and barely literate game nerds doing the raging.

He didn't realize that one blogger liking the style of sf/f from pre-1980 would put him in between attacks from the book scene (they realized people liking old books would mean buying less of their own books) and from the gaming scene (they realized people using old books for inspiration would mean buying less of their hack RPG supplements and settings).  [Edit:  The motives behind the attack were many, varied, and mysterious.  More details are available here.] 

Protests from the gaming community are best exemplified by these blog posts

• http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2014/10/screw-appendix-n.html. 
• http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2016/06/appendix-n-is-most-useless-dmg-appendix.html

As for the 'it' what set off the literary crowd?  That's a pretty big kettle of fish to unwrap*.  Long story short:  The nerds wanted respect so they abandoned the timeless virtues championed in the old tales in favor of Oprah-level drivel and self-absorbed literary tricks...but with dragons!  They went dark and gritty, because that's more 'grown up' than heroism and virtue.  In the process they dragged everything good about sf/f into the mud, and they did it while no one was looking for reasons that have more to do with real world politicking than anything else.  It was a pretty bleak time for anyone unwilling to engage in the latest Two Minute Hate or who cared that good quality took a back seat to good politics.  We had so little to read we turned our back on the darkness.

Well, along comes old Jeffro flicking on the lights, pulling up the rug, and showing the world all those scurrying creepy crawlies for what they truly are, and the Gollums and orcs who curse the day ball reacted with all the spittle and anger you'd expect. He started asking where the good stuff was now that the orcish gatekeepers had been superceded by self-publishing, and wouldn't you know it, a ragtag group of misfits and ne'er do wells rallied to the Howardian, Burroughsian, and Nortonian banner we waved and started doing just that.  The last year or so has seen the blossoming of a nascent movement to look back to the pulps and build a better literary culture that produces works for today that remain true to their spirit.  We fans of the old masters have gone from wandering lonely in the 'nothing to read' wilderness to an embarrassment of riches recently, and it's only getting better all the time.

If you are new to the revolution, you're in for an exciting time.

For more information, this is a good starting post for Jeffro's message that so enraged the world of supposed sf/f fans: https://jeffro.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/i-have-been-nominated-for-a-hugo/

And a bit of the old smash and bash: https://jeffro.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/withering-criticism-for-me-compliments-of-mark-from-file770/

How about a little bit more?  https://jeffro.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/file770-is-on-fire/

Those are some good starting points for the history.  If you want to see the future, take a look at Cirsova Magazine: https://cirsova.wordpress.com/

That magazine is the best exemplar of the old ways done modern that I've yet to come across.  Unlike loud mouthed bloggers who gamble nothing but a few hours of free time, a whole bunch of electrons, and a non-existent reputation, the genius behind Cirsova is betting cold, hard cash that people are longing for a return to the good stuff.

Well I'm not longing for more of the good stuff!  Not anymore.  I found it.  Right here, in...

The Pulp Revolution!

Viva John Carter!

*Yeah, I mixed that metaphor, sometimes you have to know when to break the rules, and as a self-professed member of the Pulp Revolution, I ain't afraid of breaking rules.  Gimme a reason, and I'll dangle a participle from the nearest tree, too.  That's just the sort of thing we revolutionaries do.

E-Book Covers - Let's See Some Action Out There!

A great blog post came over my transom today, and every e-book publisher needs to read. 

James Harris, of Auxiliary Memory writes:

I’ve always loved dust jacket art on science fiction hardbacks. I also love cover art on science fiction paperbacks, and cover art on science fiction magazines. But what the hell is happening with covers for ebooks? I can understand when self-published authors create their own covers and they look awful.

If you look at the cover art from 2016 – here’s a selection at the old SF Signal site, and look at a selection of cover art from the 1960s and 1970s at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations, you’ll notice, at least in my mind, that cover art is less creative.

I hasten to point out that e-book covers face challenges that print editions don't.  Pixel space is limited and the need for scalable titles that show up against high contrast backgrounds at any resolution aren't as important for print editions.  Anyone hiding lazy cover design behind that excuse deserves the low sales volume they get - just because it's harder to do it, that doesn't make it any less important.  Particularly for those of us toiling in trenches of our own digging.

And it doesn't have to be expensive.  If you have no talent for art, an evocative cover is just five bucks and 24 hours away.  Here's a list of people willing to do it for you.  Everything I produce goes through a round of Fiverr.com proofreading, and the service is easier to use than eBay.  If you're paying to eliminate typos (and why wouldn't you?) then you can just as easily do the same with your cover art.

Even those of you with great cover art already can always use the reminder, people judge books by their cover.  If you publish your own works put at least as much time, effort, and thought into the cover as you do the first chapter.  It's everyone's first contact with your book - make it a good one.

Let's Get Something Straight Here, People

When you come around these parts, and you see a lot of links to the Puppy of the Month Club, recommendations for The Good Stuff, and pointers to blogs by The Usual Suspects?  There's a reason for that, and no, it's not because I'm desperate for filler posts or trying to earn clicks by glomming onto the cool-kids crowd or even trying to ride on the coat-tails of my betters. 

This blog started off as an, I-Wanna-Be-A-Successful-Writer blog, and has subtly morphed into more of a, I-Want-You-To-Be-A-Successful-Writer blog.  The point of view of the blog remains that of a guy trying to escape the cubicle farm, but the content is more focused on reading and sorting the good from the bad.  There's a lot of great writers out there who deserve a lot more attention than they'll ever get from the big publishing houses, and most of them are part-timers writing in brief snatches when they aren't putting food on the table.  If I can direct a few more sales their way, and that helps keep them motivated to sit down and bang on the keyboard for a few more minutes every night?  Mission accomplished.

More than that, though, this blog represents another node in the greater community of readers who appreciate the rising tide of fun adventure fiction written by people who love sf/f for its own sake rather than as another club to wield against the latest social boogeymen.  It's by no means a central node, but it stands as a signal booster to support the efforts of everyone from the lone guy self-publishing his work through Amazon to the growing indie-publisher thumbing his nose at the big boys.

You see those links in the preceding paragraph?  Even if you didn't click on them, somewhere there's a bot zipping down the threads of the internet, and it will.  It will think to itself, "Hey, here's somebody else that thinks Justin's blog is worth linking to, I'd better move him up in the rankings."  Then when the next kid does a search for sci-fi writer, Justin shows up a lot sooner, and there's a better chance that this relative unknown picks up another reader.  Each link is just one little data point, but you put enough of them together and eventually you don't just have an improved search engine rating, you have a culture.

That's what we're building here - a counter-reformation of the world of sci-fi and fantasy, a revolution of pulp fiction, if you will.  As the new guys on the block, we can't sit around waiting for others to do the heavy lifting.  No publisher is going to hand a fat contract to the sorts of authors that we like.  No publisher is going to pay for fake tweets to market our crew.  No publisher is going to reach down and pluck a pulp revolutionary out of obscurity, fete them like royalty, and cart them around the country selling their work.

Which is great!  It gives us - authors and fans alike - a lot more freedom of movement, a lot more freedom to experiment, and a lot more freedom to choose.  They have to be stodgy and conservative to protect their interests, where we don't have anything to lose.  Except for the few moments it took to write up this blog post - and that's a small price to pay to lay another brick in the road to better authors, better fiction, and a better culture.

I'm a fan of the better culture that being built, and don't mind praising the guys who are building that culture.  If that results in my coming off as a bit of a carnival barker for works that fit into that culture, so be it.  There's some really amazing freaks in this freakshow, and I intend to do what I can to lure the townies in to take a look.

Signal Boost: Geek Gab With Schuyler Hernstrom

Pictured above: Me

I make no apologies nor excuses for being a raging Schuyler Hernstrom fanboy.  (The only reason that I haven't already read everything the man has written is that I'm savoring the wait.  That, and the Puppy of the Month Book Club dictating my reading list and sucking up most of my spare reading time.) So of course I'd listen to the interview that Schuyler did with Geek Gab.

That interview, below, has only enhanced my opinion of the man.  His surfer-cool attitude towards the new take on yesterday's blender approach to sci-fi is a refreshing change from the usual fare, and his point about going off and doing your own thing and letting the CHORFs do theirs hit me particularly hard.  Stoking the fuel of righteous anger at what the...expletive deleteds, have done to my beloved sci-fi and fantasy is all well and good, but only as a catalyst for the creation of work that makes more worthy heirs to the forerunners of sf/f than the drek peddled by the people who live east of the Hudson.  As the true heirs to the throne, all we have to do is keep producing and pimping the pulp revolutionary style, and trust readers to recognize the huge gap in quality between message fiction and fun fiction.  The truth will out.

I realize this video may be old news to many readers, having dropped an eon ago in internet time - five whole days! But it's well worth a listen.  Just fast forward past Daddy Warpig's intro - his affectations taper off after a minute or two and he becomes much more sufferable.

Boosting the Signal: Geek Gab

If you haven't listened to the latest edition of Geek Gab yet, it's well worth your time.  Just be ready for a bombastic introduction by Daddy Warpig; he settles down after the first couple of minutes, and while still excited, drops the slow yelling.

P. Alexander is the guest in this particular show, and he dishes out the hard sell for Cirsova magazine (two weeks left in the Kickstarter, yo), but all three men focus more on the ongoing pulp revolution and their excitement for science fiction in the Gernsbeckian and Campbellian tradition. 



As one of the new kids on the pulp revolution block, I fully understand that this has probably already been brought to your attention.  The intention of the "signal boost" posts is to add one more voice in support, one more piece of word-of-mouth-advertising for the good stuff, and one more link to aid the SEO of these deserving works.

This particular post is just another reminder for fellow revolutionaries that you are not alone.  If you long to read the sort of science fiction and fantasy marked by Heinlein's juveniles rather than Heinlein's latter works, it's coming.  A lot of people are waking up and returning to the fold after a long time away from the genre.  Which can only lead to positive developments.

Right now, we are in the early stages of a positive feedback loop. As more readers abandon the dreary 'romance in a spaceship' and 'political tract with a dragon' style of modern genre fiction, and look to the pulp revolution, more writers will experiment with that style.  As more writers produce material, more readers will learn of the revolution.  So take heart - every planetary romance and weird fantasy and sci-fi actioner you buy grows the market and helps encourage more materials for your reading pleasure.