The monopsony cometh

I realize authors always claim that times are tough ... but these times are.

Yesterday brought the bankruptcy filing of Borders Books. Borders, of course, is the the #2 bricks-and-mortar bookseller in the country -- and for a couple of months, they haven't been paying publishers. Many publishers, consequently, haven't been sending them new books. (Under the circumstances, why would they?) About two hundred stores will be closed over the next several weeks, possibly more. The remainder of the chain, operating under bankruptcy-court protection, is likely to be very conservative in their restocking decisions -- to the extent, still to be determined, that publishers take the risk of resuming shipments. For the thoughts of another author on the subject, see A Bankrupt Borders Makes Everyone Poorer, Especially Authors.

Creative Destruction

Updated 7-29-2023. 

The book was republished by ReAnimus Press in December 2022. The latest Amazon links are: hardback, trade paperback, and Kindle. Below, original cover is shown.

"Creative destruction" was economist Joseph Schumpeter's capsule description of capitalism. In a few words: good ideas and well-run companies ride roughshod over past-their-use-by-date ideas and badly run companies. Wealth from failed businesses and industries shifts to more productive uses in new enterprises.

(Contrast with: Uncreative destruction, as when governments bail out imploding companies, throwing [your] good money after bad. Seen any of that recently?)

We saw -- and continue to see -- a great deal of creative destruction as work shifts from labor-intensive processes onto computers and the Internet. As Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) once observed (citation), "From the development of the textile loom two centuries ago to today's Internet, output per hour has increased fifty fold."

(Disclosure: here we segue to a commercial announcement.)  My first collection of short fiction was computer-themed.  I named it, appropriately enough -- or, anyway, so I think -- Creative Destruction.

The title story (i.e., "Creative Destruction") is set in my InterstellarNet universe, about which I've posted before. The original/standalone novelette-length version of "Creative Destruction" (versus the expanded version that forms a section of  InterstellarNet: Origins) was in a year's best anthology and also serialized in the daily newsletter of  Telcom World 2003. (That's not just some random techie gathering. Telecom World is sponsored annually by a United Nations agency, the International Telecommunication Union.  Speakers are folks like IT corporation CEOs and national telecom ministers.)

Techno-copia

Several items of likely interest to the SF (and just S) readers of this blog ...

What if robots could share what they learn?  Is that a step toward Skynet or just towards less dumb robots?  Check out RoboEarth: a Worldwide Web for Robots. 

(Robots interacting with the real world is a hard problem. My grad-school days are long passed, but back then I shared an office with a guy whose doctoral dissertation involved programming a robotic arm to ... stack blocks.)

Of fleet Fleets and Known Space

(Updated August 21, 2012, to reflect the release of Fate of Worlds)

Readers often email me to discuss fine points of Known Space lore, including how the Fleet of Worlds series of collaborative novels relates to other books and stories within Larry Niven's Known Space future history.

Behold: the Fleet!

(No spoilers herein. In this post I'll say little or nothing about plots. For per-book descriptions click embedded links to go to the book-specific Amazon pages. For books in the Fleet series, you can also click the book covers on the right-hand side of this post page for more description.)

Erroneous web references abound that Fleet/Juggler/Destroyer of Worlds are a trilogy (they're not), and that Betrayer of Worlds is the first of a series (a new sub-series is more accurate, in that Betrayer introduces a new main character), and wondering if the series is complete (as of today's update, with the release of Fate of Worlds, #5, it is).

Other online articles -- from mainstream reviews to fan sites to blog posts -- offer conflicting opinions as to whether and how individual Fleet of Worlds series books relate to earlier-written Known Space stories -- and even to each other.

You know what? I thought I'd offer an opinion.  Being a coauthor imparts some qualifications, right?

Antimatter matters

One of the biggest mysteries of physics (and life, the universe, and everything)  is this: why is anything even here?

In physics, the question crops up at two levels. First, why did the Big Bang happen? Second, once the Big Bang did happen, matter and antimatter were, per theory, created in equal quantities. So: why didn't the universe's matter and antimatter eradicate each other and leave behind nothing but energy? 

(I'm not complaining that we're here. Merely puzzled.)

Cyber war

If you visit this blog with any regularity, you'll know that I'm a technophile. That said, for all the many wondrous things technology offers, it also creates new ways to become vulnerable. One vulnerability I particularly monitor is attacks on our increasingly networked infrastructure.

Recent years have offered inklings of cyber warfare. 

• In 2007, after Russia took umbrage over Estonia removing a Soviet-era war memorial, Estonia blamed Russia for a massive denial-of-service attack on government servers.
• In 2008, the Georgian government claimed Russian cyber attacks accompanied the more visible aggression of bombings and troop incursions.
• In 2010, Google and many other American companies were attacked by Chinese hackers. Almost immediately the rumor was that at least the attack on Google was geopolitically motivated, orchestrated by the Chinese government. A recent WikiLeaks data dump of American diplomatic cables backs the theory of Chinese leadership involvement. And it was Google who hacked right back, although as far as I've read, the counter hack was (perhaps wisely) limited to collecting evidence.
• A case can be made that the 2010 WikiLeak disclosures were a form of nongovernmental  cyber war waged against the U.S. government (and/or other governments whose laundry was aired by these leaks).  See "Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers."

Getting smashed

No, not a New Year's Eve hangover retrospective.  Rather, reflections on the near-term prospects for particle accelerators (what in my youth we called atom smashers).

UPDATED FEBRUARY 1, 2011

First came word that the brand-new, scarcely operational Large Hadron Collider would will shut down for maintenance throughout 2012. Then CERN, the trans-European organization that runs the LHC, announced the shutdown will last more than a year and that they'll also be shutting down the rest of their accelerators in 2012.

UPDATE (2/1/2011): CERN has reconsidered. The LHC will continue running in 2012. Yea!

Now comes word that FermiLab plans to turn off the Tevatron later this year.

Head in the clouds

One of the hottest ideas in information technology these days is "cloud computing."

The expression originates in an early Internet convention: customer-centric drawings that showed detail of Internet connectivity only at the end points. That is, you're likely to care how your computer (or phone) connects to the Internet. You're likely to care about the server that's providing a function to you. And the gear that lies between? The redundant components and fail-over mechanisms and keen in-the-background software that make the Internet resilient? For most end users, not so much.

To network engineers, those "between" things -- routers and comm links and protocol stacks and specialty servers for background functions like domain-name look-ups -- are, collectively, "the cloud." And so, many a network diagram (like the one nearby) shows connections into and out of a featureless cloud.