What Do West Wing and BSG Have in Common?

I wrote this days ago, and then forgot to post it! Ah, me. I got busy picking up my daughter from college, and one thing led to another, and here we are. In the U.S., it’s Memorial Day, a time to remember with gratitude those who have fallen in defense of our nation. Maybe that’s not such a bad occasion to offer some reflections on Battlestar Galactica, whose fictional crew sacrificed much in the defense of humanity.

As we all know, BSG ended recently, and my comments on that (which I posted earlier on another website) will follow in a moment. But lately my family and I have been watching another favorite show, The West Wing, from the beginning. (I picked up the complete DVD set for a relative song on ebay.) I’ve been vividly struck by two things these shows have in common:

1. Edward James Olmos! I had seen him before, as Judge Mendoza, but had not recognized the actor. Prior to BSG, I wasn’t all that aware of Olmos, although I realize now that he’s been in a lot of great stuff, including the movie Blade Runner (where, as in BSG, they talked about “skin jobs”).

2. Brilliant writing of human drama and engaging dialogue, coupled with a thundering inability to write anything about science. In West Wing, if I feel any reference to science coming on, I steel myself to groan. I know I will. Perfect example: In one episode, Sam is concerned about a UFO that’s been tracked for several hours from Hawaii to the American coast. It turns out to be harmless—a Russian rocket booster that (paraphrased from memory) “failed to achieve a high enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity.” That’s just stupid on so many levels. But let’s start with the fact that a reentering booster would burn up in a matter of minutes, not hours, and that the tracking people would know exactly what it was the whole time. In the commentary below, I mention a similar lapse in credibility from BSG. The thing is, the writing on both shows was so terrific otherwise that I was completely willing to forgive these lapses. It’s funny, because I would never overlook that kind of dunderheadedness if I were reading a work of hard science fiction. That must say something about the importance of expectations as a viewer or reader.

Here’s my BSG commentary, reprinted from SF Signal’s Mind Meld:

Much has been written about the end of our beloved Battlestar Galactica. I avoided reading most of it until recently, because I hadn’t seen the ending and didn’t want any spoilers. (Yes, I wrote the miniseries novelization, and at the time was given access to a limited amount of insider background informationthough not enough to keep me from writing a few things that shortly became “noncanonical.” But I had no more idea than you did where the story was going in the end.) A couple of weeks ago, I finally watched the last few episodes in one long burst.

Whoa. Not altogether what I’d hoped for—but powerful stuff nonetheless.

My reactions were intense and complex. On the one hand, it was a stunningly choreographed conclusion, breathlessly paced, and to me at least satisfying in the sense that we finally found resolution, and our characters, battered and bruised, finally found a measure of peace. Even Kara. Yes, even Kara Thrace, Starbuck. The change of tone at the very end was perhaps a bit overdone. But I felt our people had earned it.

That they found and settled the world known to us as “Earth” came, of course, as no surprise. Most of us, I think, had been expecting an Adam and Eve story (or should I say, Adama and Eve) all along. How could it have been different? It seemed built into the very fiber of the series, from the start. And while the “Adam and Eve” story is perhaps one of the most clichéd ideas in all of science fiction, there is no reason that even a clichéd story cannot be retold in a fresh and engaging way. So I had long ago decided to forgive that point, granting that if the BSG people could tell it in a sufficiently original way, I wouldn’t quibble.

So, did they or didn’t they? Well…yes and no.

Plausibility-wise, the notion that the fleet would agree to transport all of the people down to a wilderness planet, equipped only with what they could carry, give or take a few Raptors, and send the rest of their considerable technology into the sun, was absurd. Suspension of disbelief—come back! What else can I say about that? Except it was probably considered necessary to the plot not to have too much star technology lying around to be unearthed by latter-day Indiana Joneses.

But BSG has never been about plausibility in the scientific or technological sense. Do we all remember back in—Season 3, was it?—when the fleet had to fly through an exploding star, instead of…um, going around it? And does anyone believe that after all this time, they would have left the fleet dependent on just one Tylium ship to supply the needs of everyone? Okay, forget scientific plausibility. It was never there to be an issue. When I wrote the miniseries novelization, this was something I encountered in a multitude of small ways, and I did my best to strengthen plausibility where it felt thin. But this BSG has always been about other things, anyway—humanity at war with its own worst elements, and the dark places of the soul where people find the strength to endure, and to fight back. For all of its edges, it was never hard SF; it was pure human-drama SF, and every time it careened near the edge of a cliff even in those terms, it always somehow staggered back.

So forget the scientific plausibility part. What about the angels? Starbuck—an angel? That seemed to stick in a lot of craws, including my wife’s and daughter’s, mainly because it seemed from out of left field, and not terribly…well, plausible. For one thing, how come Starbuck was a solid, hard-drinkin’, kick-your-ass physical kind of angel, while the Six and Baltar angels were purely will o’ the wisps, here this minute, gone the next, visible to no one else? And why did Starbuck have to go through such torment, trying to discover who she was? Is she the only angel who doesn’t know she’s an angel? I grant all of those quarrels. And yet—despite my qualms, I kind of liked it. For one thing, how many real SF shows have ever been willing even to entertain the notion of there actually being a God (even if he doesn’t like to be called that, says Baltar), or heavenly or spiritual beings? BSG had the nerve to do that, and do it baldly, in midst of a gritty human drama. Did they do it successfully? Certainly not all the time, and probably not at the very end. But my hat’s off to them for trying.

Having written a BSG book in which I was invited to make up answers to some questions that the producers couldn’t, at that point, answer for me, I was perhaps a little oversensitive to certain small points in the conclusion. One that comes to mind is Caprica Six, who had no name in the miniseries. I called her Natasi in my novel (and no, I didn’t notice that Natasi was “I Satan” backwards until a reader pointed it out). That seemed fine with the BSG staff at the time. Later, David Eick was quoted as saying that he’d imagined that Baltar never knew Six’s name, even as he carried on a torrid affair with her. Truthfully, I never found that believable. Then we saw it happening, in the final chapter, and I went, “Gah!” You win some and you lose some.

I will defend the writers against charges of racism stemming from the interpretation that the fleet personnel obviously subjugated and lorded it over the indigenous population, right up through the present day. What (goes the argument) about the African origins of humanity, which present-day evidence strongly supports? Well, as I read the ending, fleet personnel gradually intermingled with the native population, as their remaining technology wore out or failed, and thus 21st Century humanity is very much a blend of the native and immigrant forms of human. So Lucy and Eve and all of our other forebears are still very much a part of the picture. As for the Cylon blood—well, I guess there’s a little bit of that in our DNA now. Somewhere along the way, we lost the glowing spines, though. Tough break, that.

But now we know: “All Along the Watchtower” is in our racial memory. It just took Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to give it back to us.

(Check out other authors’ comments on the earlier Mind Meld page.)

Carver SF on Fictionwise—Buy Now and Save! (really)

I’ve been promising for a while now that a whole bunch of my books will be showing up soon in new or revised ebook format. Well, I got word yesterday that some of my new eReads titles are now up for sale on Fictionwise.com, as well as all the older ones that have been reproofed and reformatted. That’s right, you can get ’em now. As new titles on Fictionwise, they’re 40% off for a limited time. These are multiformat, DRM-free—and the formats were recently expanded to include epub.

The new titles are:
Dragon Rigger
The Rapture Effect

Reproofed and reformatted:

Panglor
Dragons in the Stars
Star Rigger’s Way
From a Changeling Star
Down the Stream of Stars

(Several of those gorgeous covers are courtesy of the artists—David Mattingly, Shusei, and Jael—who allowed me to reuse the artwork from the original print editions.)

Still to come, early next week I’m told:
The Infinity Link
Seas of Ernathe

All these titles will appear shortly, as well, in the Kindle and Sony stores (though they will not be DRM-free from those sources). In addition, if I understand this correctly, they will appear soon at Baen Webscriptions, where they will also be multiformat and DRM-free.

Time for a book party!

Bread Loaf Without Me

I’ve blogged before about how much I’ve enjoyed being a writer/instructor at the annual New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Vermont. Well, this year, I had to miss the fun. They rotate the staff, so as to keep the program fresh, and this year I was rotated out. (Unfortunately, most of my writer-friends from Bread Loafs past were there, so now I’m afraid they’ll all be off when I’m next on.)

Having said that, I still got to spend most of Sunday making a round-trip drive to Vermont—to pick up my daughter, who was there as a student. At least, I’ve now learned the route. She reported positively on the conference, but not so much on the head cold she came down with in the middle of it. We carpooled with a couple of other families, so two other delightful young ladies rode back with us. Shortly after arriving home, I found myself in the midst of another writer’s workshop—this one in my own living room. The Advanced Workshop I’m conducting with Craig Gardner has just passed its midpoint, and we’re really seeing good stuff emerge. I look forward to reporting future successes. I have complete faith.

Thoughts on the Conclusion of BSG

A couple of months ago, SFSignal invited me to contribute my views on the finale of Battlestar Galactica to a special they were running in their Mind Meld section. I couldn’t at the time, because I hadn’t seen the ending. But a few weeks ago, I finally got a chance to watch the last three or four episodes, all in one go. And yesterday, I grabbed a little time to put together my thoughts. They’re online now at sfsignal.com. Let me know what you think!

“Fear not the future, weep not for the past.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley

Interview at Odyssey Workshop

As I’m scheduled to make a guest-instructor appearance at the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in New Hampshire this July, they put some questions to me, which I answered in an interview that’s just been posted online on the Odyssey blog.

As I answered some of the questions that I’ve probably not gotten around to answering here, think of it as Writing Question #10. (I was going to call it #X because I was too lazy to look back through the blog to see what the last one was numbered. But then I relented and checked, and saw that I’d called the last one #X-Z because I was too lazy then. So I figured I’d better check further. I think this is right.)

I have thoughts on marketing strategy, research, and other matters dear to the hearts of all who are interested in writing. Check it out.

“You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.” —Ray Bradbury

A Chat with the Authors Guild

I wrote here earlier about my reaction to Authors Guild statements that Amazon’s new Kindle 2 may be infringing on rights with its real-aloud capability. (You can hear a demo of the Kindle 2 reading here. It’s way better than Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader.) I said that having an electronic gizmo read text aloud is no threat to the performance quality of an audiobook. I still feel that way. But…

I emailed the Authors Guild to say I was worried they were picking the wrong fight, that they were only getting in the way of a technological development that could help make our ebooks more useful—and attractive—to consumers. I got a call back from Paul Aiken of the Guild, and we had a nice, long conversation.

Paul pointed out something that I hadn’t really thought of: No matter what we think about the audio experience, and whether it’s live or recorded, and whether or not it’s good for the customer and bad for the audiobook business, there’s something we need to consider—that text-to-speech function may violate existing contract terms. Which contracts? The ones writers and publishers sign with audiobook companies, which specify exactly what is meant by “audio.” Kindle might be infringing on rights, for example, that an audiobook company has paid for—such a contract, for example, defining “audio” by terms such as the use of technological means to produce a sound version of the book. These contracts already exist, by the thousands.

(None of this, by the way, has anything thing to do with the rights of the blind—which are secured by law, as they should be—or the rights of a person to read a book aloud. Those are entirely unrelated issues.)

So what does the Guild want? As I understood Paul, the Guild wants to ensure, before this whole thing goes too far, that contractual rights are honored, that parties who have reserved or purchased the right to use technology to produce audible versions of a work be paid for such a use. It doesn’t really matter whether we feel that a machine’s reading is equivalent to a professional recording. What matters is the definitions in the book contracts.

If the Guild isn’t trying to stop the technology, but simply to ensure proper compensation, how might this work? It could take the form of a small surcharge added to an ebook purchase, to enable read-aloud capability—with a royalty for having read-aloud enabled going directly to the audio rights-holder. Many ebooks already have enable/disable switches on their Microsoft Reader and Adobe editions. (My own ereads books, for reasons that escape me, have read-aloud enabled for Microsoft Reader and disabled for Adobe Reader.) If things go this way, I’d personally prefer to see the cost built right into the price of the ebook, and not make it something a buyer would have to think about at the point of purchase. But that’s a detail.

While my own gut feeling about synthetic text-to-speech hasn’t changed as a result of this conversation, my understanding of what the Guild wants to do has. There are a zillion book contracts out there that define what constitutes an audible presentation of a book. Those contracts can’t be wished away by Amazon or by the book buyer, or, for that matter, by me. Although I’ve previously compared this question to the entertainment industry’s attempts to stop the VCR, maybe a more apt comparison is the Hollywood writers trying to get fair royalties for the use of their work on DVDs and the net—not trying to stop the new technologies, but to make sure that structures are in place to guarantee them their fair share of the profit.

This, I’m sure, promises to be an ongoing story. As they say in the TV biz: To be continued…

Boskone 2009

Last weekend, I was busy at Boskone, the annual February convention sponsored by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). It was a smaller convention than Boskone of years past, but was friendly and good fun, and a chance to catch up with friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while. I spoke on a panel on “Faith in the Future” with a number of other writers, including James Morrow, with whom I have locked horns on questions related to faith and religion on many previous occasions. Jim’s a good guy. We disagree on just about every aspect of faith, God, spirituality, and application to life, politics, and fiction. But it’s a good-natured disagreement, and we’ve always stayed friendly. This year I enjoyed attending his book publication party for his new book, Shambling Toward Hiroshima, a Godzilla story (at least on some level; I haven’t read it yet). I’m a Godzilla fan from way back, and I happily left his party with a wind-up, spark-breathing Godzilla toy.

As moderator of a panel called “Angels and AIs,” I got to be the herder of cats trying to keep things moving in some direction resembling the discussion topic of whether sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences would come to seem like angels to us—or maybe like Cylons. With voices as disparate as Karl Schroeder and Charles Stross, among others, I’m not sure how well I succeeded in keeping the conversation on track. But one audience member told me afterward he thought it was an awesome discussion, so I guess it went okay.

I had long, enjoyable conversations with fellow writers Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Rosemary Kirstein, both of whom share my struggle with getting new books written in something less than geologic time frames. (They’re both good, too; check out their books.) My literary beer brought together many past members of the Ultimate SF Workshop that I teach with Craig Gardner, as well as local fan and writer Dan Kimmel, and in a surprise appearance, math professor Bruce Burdick of Roger Williams University, who—although neither of us knew the other at the time—graduated just a few years after I did from Huron High School, in Huron, Ohio.

A small world. Lots of passing conversations with others: Jane Yolen, Greg Bear, Tom Easton, Jo Walton, Mark and Shirley Pitman, people from Tor…ah, I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch—sorry. I finally got to meet the artist who produced the lovely cover for Sunborn: Stephan Martiniere. He does good work!

As do they all.

What’s Hard About Being a Writer?

SFSignal, from time to time, asks the same question of a bunch of writers and puts their answers together in an interesting post called MindMeld. They’ve done it again this week, and the question—posed to me, among others—was What’s the most difficult part of being a writer? (That link will take you to all the answers.)

Here’s what I said (but do go look at the others, because they’re interesting):

What’s the hardest thing about being a writer? That’s easy: Writing. Doing it, not talking about it. Not thinking about it or procrastinating to avoid doing it. Not checking the email for writing-related messages (hah). Just doing it. Putting. The words. On. The page. Damn, it’s hard sometimes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. Okay, nearly all the time. Microsoft’s patented Blue Screen of Death can’t hold a candle to the dread induced by the White Screen of No Words on the Page.

I’m not talking about writing in general, but writing a work of fiction. Creating a story out of whole cloth and telling it in words that make the reader want to come back for more. Okay, I’m not even talking about that last part—that comes more in the rewriting phase, which for me is easier. I’m talking about, Who is this character, really, and why is she angry, or scared, or passionate? I’m talking about, What comes next—and why is it interesting or unexpected or inevitable? Why should anyone care?

I got some interesting insight into the different creative tensions in writing a couple of years ago, when I was asked to write a novelization of Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. I had just finished a first draft of my novel Sunborn, which for a variety of reasons had been a years-long struggle. The novelization had to be done quickly. But I had a DVD of the miniseries (it had already aired), and I had a shooting script (different in many respects from the final edit). The story was there. The characters were there. I couldn’t change them, and didn’t want to change them. But I had to bring them to life. I had to add dimension and depth where I could, and I had to make scenes make sense that were fine on-screen, whizzing by at the speed of TV, but that on closer examination had issues. It was a writing challenge of a particular kind, and I enjoyed it immensely. But it was a very different experience from writing my own books.

What it was, I think, was that my story-imagining lobes were given a break, while my story-crafting and writing-craft lobes did the heavy lifting for a while. I worked hard, while at the same time, part of my brain was vacationing! And afterward, I came back to the rewrite on Sunborn with better clarity and more energy. Based on feedback from readers so far, I think I did good.

Guess what I’m doing now. That’s right, I’m first-drafting a new novel. Blank White Screen of No Words on the Page. Damn, that’s hard.

By the way, for those of you who might not be regular readers of Pushing a Snake, the book I’m working on now is the fifth volume of The Chaos Chronicles: The Reefs of Time. (Will John Bandicut and Julie Stone find each other again on Shipworld?… and other questions, to be answered.)

More on the Kindle 2 and Read-Aloud

In my last post I wrote about the controversy raised by the new Kindle’s ability to “read aloud” ebook text files, and the assertion by Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, that this constituted copyright infringement.

There’s a provocative (and occasionally surrealistic) discussion of the question at the Mobileread.com forum thread: New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir.

And from someone who apparently is an ex-copyright attorney, this interesting page on Engadget.com: Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech infringe authors’ copyrights?

I’m guessing that this is a question that’s going to drag on for a while. Wonder if it’ll make it to court. Although I find myself on Amazon’s side on this one (odd feeling), I think it’s probably a legal gray area.

Someone on Mobileread asked how I’d feel if C3PO read Sunborn aloud to a stadium full of paying guests. I said I thought that would constitute a performance, and wasn’t relevant to this discussion. (I didn’t raise the question of whether C3PO is sentient and shouldn’t be considered a machine, but maybe I should have.)

Now, if someone gathered a stadium full of people all with Kindles with Sunborn loaded, and in unison they started a mass read-aloud, with or without my permission, I would think that was…pretty damn cool!

Someone want to organize that for me? 🙂

Kindle 2

This week’s big news in books, of course, was the official unveiling of the Kindle 2, Amazon’s second-generation ebook reader. Michael Gaudet of E-reads offers his appraisal, noting some of the new Kindle’s enhancements:

  • slimmer, with more memory and longer battery life
  • faster screen refresh
  • redesigned buttons for navigation
  • faster book downloads, and “Whispersync” to keep multiple Kindles synchronized wirelessly
  • a text-to-speech voice synthesizer, to read your books aloud to you

These all sound like pretty nice enhancements. But as I look at the device, I’m not regretting my choice of the Sony PRS-700. The built-in light and the touchscreen on the Sony still put it way out in front, in my book (so to speak).

But the Kindle announcement hasn’t come without blowback. “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” (From the Wall Street Journal online.)

Well.

I’m a member of the Authors Guild, and I was a little horrified to hear Mr. Aiken make this claim—because to my way of thinking, having a Kindle (or any device) read a file aloud should be no different in copyright terms from my reading a book aloud to my family. I mean, really.

And yet, I understand why he made the statement. Authors often license audio rights separately from other rights. There’s a natural concern about anything that could cut into audiobook sales. But to me, there’s a big difference between a machine reading of a stream of text and a professionally produced audio reading by a professional reader who gives the reading inflection and expression, perhaps with the help of music and sound effects. Now, it may well be that some people who like audio books will forego buying audiobooks if their Kindle will read text aloud in a computer voice. (Given that Amazon owns Audible, I imagine there were some in-house discussions about this.) So clearly this is an arguable point. But I still don’t agree with Mr. Aiken, even though he speaks for my organization.

I’ve been frustrated for years that read-aloud is disabled on my own ebooks sold through outlets such as fictionwise.com (a retailer I am otherwise very happy with, I hasten to add). The only format, until now, in which this was relevant was Microsoft Reader format, because only MS Reader had that capability. I’ve always felt that if people bought my ebooks and they preferred (or needed) to listen to it through a computer-synthesized voice, they should have that choice. Why not? They bought the book. It turns out that the disabling of this feature is the policy of Fictionwise. But I wonder now, in light of the statement from the Authors Guild, if maybe it’s based on fear of backlash from publishers who might see text-to-speech as an infringement of audio rights.

What a crazy business. I suppose one day computer synthesized voices, combined with AI-comprehension of a book’s content, could produce a sufficiently expressive reading that it might compete with a true audiobook. But that seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

For now, my basic position is, whatever gets people buying and reading books (both e- and p-) is probably good. Whatever gets in the way of it is almost certainly bad.

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