Books: August 2004 Archives

Just stumbled upon Ansible E-ditions which is a company run by David Langford and Christopher Priest. They started off doing ebooks, concentrating on classics that have become unavailable in book form, but now also do some print-on-demand books.

Susanna Clark's novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" is joint second favourite to win the Booker Prize at 10/1.

An interview with China Miéville is in the San Francisco Bay Guardian . Nice quote..

"In Britain nobody bats an eye if you say you're a socialist. In the States it's kind of like saying you eat babies."

Locus Online: Neal Stephenson interview excerpts[Via Slashdot]

I don't know how long this has been up but the Popular Science article Is Science Fiction About To Go Blind? is a great discussion of modern Science Fiction (and great plugs for Charlie and Cory). I also recommend reading Vinge's original Singularity paper.

As part of my ongoing quest to read all of the graphic novels in my local library I have recently finished the first two Ultimate Spiderman collections, Power and Responsibility and Learning Curve. The Ultimate Spiderman comic is basically a republishing of the original Spiderman stories, but updated for the 21st century. The first two books take us up to about issue #15 and cover Spiderman's begginings, including that spider moment, the Green Goblin's creation, the wrestling chapter, the first encounters with Kingpin, Mary Jane finding out the truth etc. It's great stuff and I've really enjoyed it. I love the whole Peter Parker being a teenager, which kind of got lost over the years of rubbish cartoon spinoffs (but happily has been recaptured in the films). I'd recommend this to anyone who has seen the films but not read any of the comics, you'll enjoy them.

Charlie Stross has a very good theory on why allowing free downloads of novels increases their sales.

My theory is this: reading online sucks, but those of us who are readers do it anyway, up to the point at which it gets too painful to continue.

If we see a novel with an online sample that looks interesting, we may look at the sample. But if it's limited to, say, two chapters, we hit a brick wall: we have to put the book down unless and until we stumble across a copy of it in a bookshop and remember reading it. Whereas if we run across a complete online ebook we can begin reading it and, if we like it, we keep on going. Because reading online sucks, the pain slowly increases -- but we get more and more hooked. Some of us get so hooked that we finish the ebook, but in a large number of cases we get hooked enough to want to finish it badly, but pained enough to be motivated to buy the hardcopy. And in those cases, the motivation to go out and buy a copy and finish the story is a much stronger one than in the cases where the experience is artificially truncated at the end of chapter #2.

And that makes sense to me. I've been dipping in and out of Eastern Standard Tribe for a month now and I'm beggining to just want the paper book, just because it's nicer to read.

The New York Times has a great article/interview with Susanna Clarke "I wanted to write about magicians"

Fantasy rather than SF but it sounds interesting.