Free sf online: a failed experiment

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I'm always open to trying something new on social media, and sometimes it works (eg my posts on the best known book set in each European country) and sometimes it doesn't. This is the brief story of something that didn't.

During a conversation at work on 1 September, the Bob Shaw story "Light of Other Days" came up. I found an online version and shared it with my colleague; and then thought, why not share it more widely? So I pinged it onto Buffer to post to Twitter and Facebook at an hour of the day that I thought might get people looking; and then got all enthusiastic and found a few more great sf stories available and shareable online.

I must admit that part of my motivation for this was a reaction to the debate some are trying to wage about "real sf" vs "message fiction", but I was also just curious to see if posting links like that to Facebook and Twitter would engage people's interest.

The full list, as posted to Twitter, is as follows:

All pretty well-known stories (except perhaps the last). But I was a bit disappointed by the rate of clicking through. The "Seventy-Two Letters" link was mangled going through Buffer, and got a massive 99 clicks, none of which will have worked; apart from that, the best performer was the Pat Cadigan story with 19, most of which will have been because the author herself retweeted it.

It's a non-trivial effort to find a reasonably balanced selection of stories which are both reasonably well known and available online, and since this wasn't generating a lot of feedback I have decided to stop the experiment. On Facebook I got the odd comment, but basically I get better feedback from content that has taken less work to produce. Thanks to those who did comment – I did appreciate it..

The important lesson is that just posting a link to a story (or to any online content), without much in the way of explanation, isn't going to get a lot of attention even from the most devoted of my readers. If I'd planned and announced this mini-campaign in advance, with a hashtag like #SeptemberFreeSF, and perhaps with more of a unifying theme than "stuff I like", it could have caught a bit more resonance. Of course, it might not have – you never know – but the chances would have been higher. A lesson learned for when I start my grand rewatch of Here Come The Double Deckers.

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The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. Roger Woodard

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Modern scholars recognise a dialectal distinction which fundamentally parallels the ancient tripartite division. Prior to Michael Ventris' decipherment of the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean Greeks (see §2.1) in 1952 (see Ventris and Caswick 1973:3-27), the ancient Greek dialects (i.e., of the first millennium BC) were broadly separated into (i) Attic-Ionic; (ii) Arcado-Cypriot; (iiii) Aeolic; (iv) Doric; and (v) Northwest Greek. Each of these, in turn, shows some lesser or greater degree of internal differentiation.

I bought this on impulse a few years ago; it turns out to be the European chapters extracted from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, with a foreword explaining that the languages treated here are those with written records from before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press have generously put the whole thing online). That gives a shorter list than I would have thought, the chapters of the book covering Attic Greek, other Greek dialects, Latin, other Italic languages, Etruscan, continental Celtic, Gothic and ancient Nordic. I had not realised that written Irish was later than that. Obviously the chapters on Attic Greek and Latin have the most to say, but they are reasonably disciplined and establish a framework for the other languages that the reader may be less familiar with.

My discovery here is the weirdness of Etruscan, the only language on the list which is not from the Indo-European family. I'm intrigued by the numbers from one to ten – θu; zal; ci; huθ (or śa); maχ; śa (or huθ); semφ; cezp (probably); nurφ; śar – we don't even know whether huθ or śa is four or six. It's fascinating that the Etruscan word "zatlaθ", meaning axe carrier, became Latin "satelles" meaning bodyguard and is the origin of our word "satellite". I'm interested that like some Finno-Ugric languages, nouns take a lot of suffixes but have no gender. (Wikipedia says that the nouns did have gender, but Helmut Rix in this book says not.) And this language, long extinct, is a substratum for Latin which in turn has influenced every European language spoken today.

It is impressive that we have been able to reconstruct as much as we have, and I would have liked to read more about the process by which the ancient scripts were decoded. Most of them are at least vaguely related to the Latin and Greek alphabets which survive today, but only vaguely; if I were trying to decode them, I wouldn't know where to start. Some mysteries remain; the Gaulish letter known as the Tau Gallicum could have been pronounced st, ts, θ, or perhaps an emphatic t' like the Georgian ტ. Or possibly different Gauls pronounced it in different ways at different times.

And all of these languages are a melancholy reminder that life is short, and we have no idea what will survive. Many of the few surviving inscriptions in the lost language of Venetic are dedications to the goddess Reitia. Among other things, she is supposed to have been a goddess of writing, which is just as well as the other Venetic gods have been forgotten, as has any speaker of the language who did not leave their name in writing. And these languages, spoken by hundred of thousands who we could not now understand, are the exceptions rather than the rules. Humans have used language for hundreds of thousands of years, and the earliest European writing is the Linear B referred to in the extract above, from 3500 years ago, and the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs are a thousand years older. So more than 95% of the thoughts ever thought, the stories ever told, the songs ever sung, are forgotten and cannot be retrieved.

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The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day; Tempest, by Christopher Bulis

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The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dark clouds are gathering – both literal and, if I might be permitted so fanciful a notion, symbolic – and I do not happily watch them as they form.

One of the last of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, seems to have got rave reviews from a lot of people though I am with who warned me last year that it is alright but not stellar. The Doctor is involved with two different timelines in the same mental hospital, in one of which he is ostensibly a mysterious patient called Smith. Supporting character Laska is nicely done, though at the expense of regulars Fitz and particularly Trix.

Tempest, by Christopher Bulis

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The mainline trains typically comprise fifteen or sixteen large double-decked cars, linked by spherical airlock coupler modules. They’re built more like ground-level spacecraft – not surprising since they have to function in total isolation from Tempest’s poisonous atmosphere for several days at a time, recycling their air and water.

A Bernice Summerfield novel in which she is dragged into investigating a crime committed on a train circling a storm-tossed planet. Not brilliant – some rather sexist elements in the subplots, and I feel the formula of Bernice Summerfield Ace Detective has been done better elsewhere.

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What I do with LinkedIn

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The story of a lawyer who was sexually harassed on LinkedIn is in the news. There’s not much more to be usefully said about that than “Don’t be a dick online, and don’t be surprised by the blowback if you are.” But it has helped crystallise my own thoughts about LinkedIn generally. (For those of you don’t know it, it’s a social network which is a grownup version of Facebook.) I find it both useful and frustrating, with the useful outweighing the frustrating, but the frustrations still there.

First, I like the fact that it’s a good way of not just staying in touch with long-lost friends, but also seeing what is going on in their lives; as long as people keep their own profiles up to date, it is very useful to see who has changed job or country recently. It’s also handy to see who and what you have in common with new professional contacts. Maybe once a month, someone I haven’t been in touch with for ages uses it to contact me, and usually it’s someone I’m glad to hear from.

Second, I often need to quickly locate people with knowledge of particular countries or subjects, and a LinkedIn search is by far the easiest way of seeing who I know that might fit the bill. (For example, the guy in the next seat on my plane flight yesterday turned out to be a bodyguard by profession. It’s unlikely, but not completely impossible, that I may need to find someone offering those services in the future, so I’ve added him.)

Third, I find the news/blog updates much the best source of information about the mechanics of management that I regularly read, particularly the pieces about recruitment and retention of skilled colleagues (I often feel that hiring people is the most difficult thing to do in my line of work). This probably just shows that I’m not a regular reader of Forbes or the back pages of the FT. But…

Fourth, I find the actual newsfeed of LinkedIn very annoying, even though the content is useful. I would like to be able to choose to view just blog posts, or just updates from my contacts, or just job changes. But LinkedIn is actually worse than Facebook in controlling what you are shown without giving you any choice, which is why I spend much less time browsing it than I do other networks. And…

Fifth, LinkedIn is far too promiscuous in encouraging people to make connections with people they simply don’t know. The value of the network is in the strength of its links; LinkedIn asserts this strongly in theory, but in practice strongly encourages people to click the box next to someone who sounds interesting. I get literally a dozen connection requests every week. I reply to all of them, “I’m afraid that I cannot remember how we know each other. Can you remind me please?” Maybe one time in fifty it does turn out to be someone I knew – Hi there, John in Tbilisi! – but otherwise it’s a waste of electrons. I won’t report good faith invitations from people who I have never met, but I won’t accept them either.

If I were more of a freelancer, I’d find LinkedIn even more useful (and perhaps I would find ways of dealing with those frustrations). As it is, I wish they would just fix the obvious problems of giving users more control over the content they see, and encouraging sensible restraint in contacting strangers.

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The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As always, the player sat invisible in one corner of the studio, its face hidden by an androgynous porcelain mask that fitted so close it could really only be skin. A wide-brimmed, black hat cast a crescent shadow across most of its bone-white features except for the mouth, a painted-on slash that either curled up or down at the edges depending on what Natty was painting. Its body was wrapped in a shawl of a thousand patchwork colors that looked part Romany, part Tibetan, all Faerie. The instrument, a battered old friend from the foothills of Spain, was cradled across its lap like a child, and the hands that caressed it were ghost-pale and wrinkle-free. Ageless.

I think I’m getting very unforgiving in my old age; I put this aside after fifty pages of Celtic muddle, with an emotional setup for the two protagonists (fairy king and mortal woman) that did not make sense to me and bordered on some potentially abusive territory (he is wooing her by bonking her in her dreams). At the point I gave up, the narrative was about to switch to Australia with potential for hilarious culture-shock japes. Not for me, sorry.

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The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The words were still ringing in the old man’s ears when he walked down the steps to leave and stood still, blinded by the fierce autumn sun. As his pupils slowly shrank, he held on tight to the handrail and breathed in, slow and deep. He listened to the cacophony of cars, trams, the beeping sounds telling pedestrians they could cross. And voices-the excited, happy voices which hastened by to the accompaniment of the clatter of shoes. And music. Had he ever heard so much music? Nothing managed to drown the sound of the words though: You’re going to die, old chap.

Both and (with reservations) recommended this after I really enjoyed The Snowman, and The Redbreast also features Norwegian detective Harry Hole dealing with a very complex murder plot which in this case has political implications going right to the top of the Norwegian government and reaching back to the grim reality of Norway’s relationship with Nazi Germany during the second world war. It’s grittily described and the eventual solution makes sense, with an unresolved plot thread which apparently leads to two more books in the Harry Hole sequence. I was not completely convinced by the use of multiple personality disorder as a major plot point though; it seems to me a bit of a magical cop-out for a mystery writer, and I suspect even though everyone in literature with MPD is a murderer, this may not be true of everyone with MPD in reality! Still, I enjoyed it.

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It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, by Seth

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Second frame of third chapter (set in the Royal Ontario Museum dinosaur gallery):
dinosaur skull
A classic graphic novel from the early 1990s, claiming to be autobiographical, about a Toronto comics artist who becomes fascinated with a Canadian cartoonist of the 1950s and 1960s, and goes on a voyage of discovery about both his predecessor and himself. I’m trying to identify who recommended this to me, or whether I just picked it up because I liked the title; I really enjoyed it, though I hope that the writer is a nicer person in real life than he comes across as being here.

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Thursday reading

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Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Ancient Languages of Europe, by Roger D. Woodard

Last books finished
Girls in Love, by Jacqueline Wilson
The End of All Things, by John Scalzi (did not finish)
The Shadow in the Glass, by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole
It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, by Seth
The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø
The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon (did not finish)
The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day
Tempest by Christopher Bulis

Next books
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard

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The Shadow in the Glass, by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘I was sorry to leave the pre-fab,’ he continued stoically, ‘but since Mags went, well… didn’t need so much space. Got a bedsit, now. You know.’

At the height of the Arthur C. Clarke shortlisting, I rather dropped out of the habit of blogging my reading of the older Doctor Who novels here; I don’t have Thoughts about very many of them, but I may revisit one or two in days to come. Anyway, new term, time to start again perhaps with this story uniting the Sixth Doctor and the Brigadier in investigating the true facts of alien involvement in the death of Adolf Hitler. It’s generally well-researched, but there is a little bit of a sense of historical box-ticking, and a particularly egregious fridging at the end.

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The End of All Things, by John Scalzi

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thank you, I thought. I have been trying to live up to my end of our deal.

One of the books that is being talked about as a potential Hugo nominee next year, which I grabbed without thinking too hard because it was going for only $4 on Kindle. It is well-known that I have bounced off Scalzi’s prose in the past, though I did very much like Lock-In which was kept off this year’s Hugo list by the slates. This is another book in the series that started with Old Man’s War, about an unfortunate human chap who becomes a brain-in-a-box starship pilot unwillingly involved with evil alien plans. However when I got to the stage that the alien characters sounded just like everyone else in almost every Scalzi novel I have read (Lock-In being the exception), I decided that this was not going on my own nominations list and stopped reading it.

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A Vampire Quintet, by Eugie Foster

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Second paragraph of third story:

Maggie and Feng tried to wedge me between them, to keep Joe from noticing the shakes and twitches running in trails over my body. But even through my buzz, I could still count.

A short collection of short vampire stories by the late and much-missed Eugie Foster, each of which managed to cast the concept of vampires in a slightly different way – drawing on Buffy, of course, but also on other vampire tropes (I suspect including also Charlaine Harris, who I haven’t read) and turning it into something different and original.

(In March last year, I copied the second paragraph of the third chapter of every book I read into my reviews, on an idea of ‘s. I thought I’d try this again for September.)

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The Twenty-Two Letters, by Clive King

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Clive King is best known to my generation of readers for Stig of the Dump, in which a modern (ie 1963) boy makes friends with a caveman who has mysteriously appeared in the neighbourhood via a never-explained timeslip. It must be forty years since I last read it. It may be forty years also since I last read The Twenty-Two Letters, in which a family living in a city-state on the coast of what is now Lebanon about 3,500 years ago is torn apart by war and natural disaster, and start to rebuild their society by inventing the alphabet. The author worked for the British Council in Syria in 1951-55 and Lebanon from 1960 to 1966, when the book was published; and his fascination for the history of the region, and how it fed into world culture, is a warm underpinning for the slightly didactic themes of how three technological innovations (writing, celestial navigation and horse-riding) come together with the Thera eruption to create the foundations for Western civilisation.

It was a good book when I read it in the 1970s, and it’s a good book now. There are some lovely asides, some of which I picked up at the time (the character who is obviously a Hebrew, without that word ever being used; the casual racist disdain of the sophisticated Mediterranean types for the incomprehensible pale-skinned northern Europeans) and some of which I was able to get only now with help from the Internet (the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions). The copy I had as a child had some beautiful internal illustrations by Richard Kennedy

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The Shepherd’s Crown, by Terry Pratchett

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The last Terry Pratchett novel, written in the full knowledge that it would be; death and its consequences are a major part of the book (with a much spoilered plot development near the beginning setting the tone). But another large part of the plot centres around the battle between Faerie and technology, the essential conflict between magic and modernity expressed in a way that I don’t think we had seen Pratchett do before. It’s quite a difficult feat for a fantasy novel to make the case for rationalism and tech against superstition and brainwashing magic, and I think Pratchett managed to thread the needle here with his usual humanity and compassion.

It’s not one of the greatest Pratchett books, but – unless the Pratchett family indicate in public that they do not want it to be considered – it will be significantly more likely to get one of my Hugo nominations because it is the last. That said, if I do read as many as five other novels that are mindblowingly better, I will consider the options carefully.

The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown

11/22/63, by Stephen King

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As a teenager, there was a period when I read literature about the Kennedy assassination with great interest – starting with Harold Weisberg's classic Whitewash and then working through various others. Like a lot of casual readers, I was easily seduced by the notion that Something Big Was Behind It All; the explanation that one lone individual with an imagined grudge did it seemed too easy. The inconsistencies in the official account are numerous, and it's easy enough to understand that, having got hold of a narrative, the investigators fitted the evidence to it rather than vice versa.

However, other books like Gerald Posner’s Case Closed swung me back again to the notion that Oswald had acted alone, in particular by exposing some of the rhetorical dishonesty on the pro-conspiracy side. (For one concrete example, compare the analysis of Oswald's "curtain rods" story by pro-conspiracy and pro-lone-gunman partisans.) I retained some niggling doubt about the ballistics until I saw a BBC documentary in 1993 that set my mind at rest on that point too. So basically I now accept that the Warren Commission, William Manchester, Norman Mailer and all those guys got it right.

Also a friend of mine interviewed Oswald's friends in Minsk as a researcher for this documentary, and came to the conclusion that Oswald was loopy enough to have done it alone (though would still have needed a lucky shot).

So now Stephen King gives his protagonist a way of going back in time from 2011 to 1958, with the mission of preventing the assassination, and therefore stopping the Vietnam War in its tracks and bringing about a better fifty years for American history. Our hero loves, fights, loses, wins, and then discovers that when he gets what he wants, it may not be what he wanted it to be. All the time travel cliches are there, but all done really well; I've often found Stephen King nostalgic for the 1950's/60s, both the good and bad parts of that time, and here he is able to indulge himself as a tourist of the past. The level of circumstantial and emotional detail is tremendous; one can almost smell Texas. (The time portal is located in Maine, which allows King to employ his love of his home state to great effect.)

With all that, I was a bit disappointed with the end of the book, where the real conspiracy is revealed and the story defaulted back into all the things I don't like about Stephen King's writing. But that was only for the last few dozen pages of a very long book. People who like King more than I do will like the book more than I did, and I liked it a lot.

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Links I found interesting for 06-09-2015

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Links I found interesting for 05-09-2015

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Thursday reading

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Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø
The End of All Things, by John Scalzi
The Shadow in the Glass, by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole
Girls in Love, by Jacqueline Wilson

Last books finished
Letters to Tiptree, eds Alissa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce
Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories, by Michael Moorcock
11/22/63, by Stephen King
The Shepherd’s Crown, by Terry Pratchett
The Twenty-Two Letters, by Clive King
And Another Thing…, by Eoin Colfer (did not finish)
A Vampire Quintet, by Eugie Foster

Next books
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon
The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day

Books acquired in last week
The Shepherd’s Crown, by Terry Pratchett
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Links I found interesting for 01-09-2015

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