Impossible Futures

(Last updated September 6, 2013)

Remember when 2001 was the wondrous future? Remember all the super-neat technology you once expected we'd have by now? Personal jet packs, robot servants, and the like? Not just the stuff in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, but the ideas that made the old science fiction so much fun.

cover by Duncan Eagleson

And with your help, it still can. See the Kickstarter campaign for the anthology Impossible Futures -- the excellent cover for which is nearby.

(Update: this project was funded. Read on for more ...)

Whither publishing?

I surely don't know. I doubt that anyone does -- however diligently they try. The publishing industry's future is, shall we say, murky. (I reviewed some of the complexities back in March as "Publishing (black and) blues.")

As a working author, I need to care. You may not. But if you happen to share my interest in the topic, herewith some virtual tea leaves to read ...

Amid the few nano-percent of effort the media didn't recently expend on the Martin/Zimmerman trial was this story (this particular article from Reuters): "Apple colluded on e-book prices, judge finds." After Apple's publishing partners settled out of court, Apple itself has been found guilty of collusion to reduce Amazon's (at the time) 90% share of the ebook market. Apple has promised to appeal. Stay tuned.

Thousands of folk like me, meanwhile, took a legal beating as, at the appellate court level, "Authors lose class status in Google digital books case." (That article was likewise from Reuters, via Yahoo! News.) Bye-bye to the lower-court ruling that "it would be unfair to force authors to sue individually given the 'sweeping and undiscriminating nature of Google's unauthorized copying.' " The legal battle now moves, attorneys for the Authors Guild say,  to whether Google's indiscriminate scanning (so far, of 20 million books!) falls within "fair use" doctrine. Again, stay tuned.

A wild and crazy planet

One of the joys of SF is the opportunity to Think Big. Earth, as large as it is, pales in comparison with, say, a Dyson Sphere or a Nivenesque Ringworld. But within the limits of today's technology, we humans (some of us, anyway), continue to Think Big ...

As illustrated by this CNN article: Sky trains, super bridges: 8 of the world's most spectacular infrastructure projects. Whether or not you're impressed by every one of these projects, I defy you not to be taken with the 1000-ton tunnel-boring machine being used to extend the Tube system in London.

Fate of Worlds: the MM PB

Today marks the mass-market paperback re-release of Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld. It's the explosive conclusion to the Ringworld series and the Fleet of Worlds series of epic SF adventures. With this edition finally available, all five books in the series are available in mass-market format. 

(And if you're an ebook aficionado? There's still news. In anticipation of the paperback re-release, the Kindle price just dropped. The ebook in other formats will surely follow suit.)

Check it out on Amazon

What, specifically, is Fate about? I'm glad you asked! It's interstellar conflict among five intelligent species (if you're an aficionado of Known Space: humans, Kzinti, Trinocs, Puppeteers, and Gw'oth) and an AI. It's the answer to countless questions across the Ringworld series. It settles, quite literally, the fate of worlds.

A Time Foreclosed

Last updated January 2, 2023: This 2013 chapbook was a marketing experiment. The chapbook is now out print and ebook formats (but for now still available on Audible). On the bright side, both stories in this chapbook -- having been being well received and among my favorites -- are included within 2022's The Best of Edward M. Lerner. So you might want to check that out.

As a working author, I've followed -- with more than a little interest! -- various publishing experiments and emerging sales channels. One of those experiments is the freestanding novella. What had been an impractical story length has become, in the era of ebooks and print-on-demand, eminently doable.

And so: on to my experiment and breaking news ...

A Time Foreclosed, newly released, republishes -- under a new and improved title -- my recent time-travel novella "Time Out." (It originally appeared in Analog, January/February 2013 issue.)

Or as the publisher puts it:

¿Que passa? (Maybe all of us)

What's happening? Lots! (It'll even, if you bear with me, explain that atrocious bilingual/pidgin-lingual pun.)

With the NSA's insatiable data hoovering at the top of the news, herewith a skeptical look at the perils of Big Data. From Technology Review, see "The Dictatorship of Data: Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers." A key passage:

The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.

We are more susceptible than we may think to the “dictatorship of data”—that is, to letting the data govern us in ways that may do as much harm as good. The threat is that we will let ourselves be mindlessly bound by the output of our analyses even when we have reasonable grounds for suspecting that something is amiss. Education seems on the skids? Push standardized tests to measure performance and penalize teachers or schools. Want to prevent terrorism? Create layers of watch lists and no-fly lists in order to police the skies. Want to lose weight? Buy an app to count every calorie but eschew actual exercise.

That's not to say I'm unalterably opposed to Big Data or to dot-connecting searches for national-security threats. I'm not. I worry, however, about algorithm not sufficiently balanced with judgment. I worry about data used (and misused) for purposes other than why they were first collected.

And in a bit of good news (reported by BBC News, among many others), "FBI and Microsoft take down $500m-theft botnet Citadel." Why good? Because:

The Citadel network had remotely installed a keylogging program on about five million machines to steal data ...

The cybercriminals behind Citadel cashed in by using login and password details for online bank accounts stolen from compromised computers.

This method was used to steal cash from a huge number of banks including American Express, Bank of America, PayPal, HSBC, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo.

An open letter to (a few) ebook shoppers

It happens all too often ... an online shopper looks at an ebook at Amazon or bn.com or ... and disagrees with the vendor's price. That's fair.

And proceeds to give that book a one-star review, "justified" with a rant about greed and/or the evils of ebook pricing. That's often quite unfair, and that bit of venting claims the author as collateral damage.

First, the background: opinions differ on ebook pricing. Some shoppers feel that ebooks should be far cheaper than any physical book because an ebook can be replicated for free. Authors, editors, cover artists, distributors, and publishers expect to earn something for their contributions to a book -- and that requires a nonzero price on books, even ebooks. (Especially ebooks, as that format claims more and more of the book market.) Ebook reader vendors, meanwhile, sometimes use ebook content as a loss leader. The device vendor's short-term motivation is to lure/lock customers into a particular content ecosystem.

Publishers and etailers have long tussled over these issues. Even as I type, a major antitrust suit about ebook pricing is at trial between Apple and the Department of Justice -- the big publishing houses having settled out of court.

Do I know the "right" price for an ebook? No (other than nonzero, in the belief readers want authors to continue writing). Do I know how the tussle among publishers, etailers, and the DoJ will come out? Again, no. 

Here's what I do know ...

Catching up

My virtual clippings folder is again bulging, and if I add one more article, it might just explode. (Cue Monty Python.)

So: a few items of likely interest to SF and Nonsense readers ...

Extension cord extra

From the Department of Digitally Enabled Snoops: here's yet another company's good graces upon which you (*) are asked to rely. From Fortune, see "Tesla's Elon Musk Reminds Media His Cars Can Spy On Them."

(*) If you own -- or would aspire to own -- a Tesla electric sports car.

You're diligent about malware defenses and regular updates on your computers and router, even your tablet and phone -- and you're still at risk. From PC World, see "Researchers find new point-of-sale malware called BlackPOS."