M-BRANE # 3 RELEASED

I couldn't be prouder of #3. As I write this, I think that all writers, sponsors and subscribers should have received their PDFs via email.  Be sure to check out and hopefully patronize this month's sponsors Zumaya and Apex, two fine, fine smallish-press book publishers.  I'll have more about each of them on this blog within a day or two. I want to thank, also, the writers: this issue is so good it brings tears to my eyes (especially after staring at it all day), and it's due to all y'all.

Ah, memories

On the brink of the release of issue #3, I have been revisiting issue #1 this afternoon because I am trying to repair its files for the Lulu POD version which I put up there a long time ago but haven't been able to sell because it was thoroughly frakked. I'm so proud of the new third issue that everyone is about to see, that I had almost forgotten how great the first one was, and it seems weirdly long ago even though it's only been two months. Writers featured in that issue--stars of the genre, all--will be glad to know that I resisted any sort of temptation, while dicking with the source files, to create any sort of "Special Edition" or "re-imagining" of issue #1, such as to include giant CGI dewback lizards and Imperial walkers or a non-puppet Yoda.  I also did NOT change the content of any of the stories by adding alternate endings that were left on the "cutting room floor" (such as the alternate ending of Brandon Bell's "Do Men Dream of Bloody Sheep?" in which: "Lauri's clear, dark, android eyes locked with Andrew's and she turned her back on him. She walked away, far, far away into the dead white city, and Andrew never saw her again."  Or the alternate ending to Rick Novy's "Road Rage" in which Robbie, instead of stabbing that dude to death with a screwdriver, instead gave him a stern yet tearful lecture on social responsibility.)  Hey, blog readers, if you still have somehow not read issue #1 yet, it's free to you over there on the right!

Blog post labels

I didn't really get in the habit of labeling my posts (or really see much use to it) for the first three months or so of running this blog. Now that there are getting to be a fair number of posts, I am starting to see some groupings that make sense and I have made a pass through the history and labeled some of those that lacked labels with an eye toward creating these logical groups.  Now that I am more conscious of it as a thing to do on a blog, I'll try to maintain it better for any readers who may want to search backward on a general topic.  I will also try not to use labels that will probably only ever apply to one post, which was a mistake that I made early on and still lingers in my labels list. For example, this post doesn't need a label at all, unless I want to create a new one called "Chris wasting time when he should be working on something important."

Response time on submissions

In my writers' guidelines on "Page 2", I state that I try to answer submissions quickly, certainly in not more than two weeks.  I made an amendment to that today asking writers to cut me some slack on that for the near term.  I am concerned that I have issues booked too far ahead. Issue #3 releases tomorrow (or perhaps later today), but I am fully stocked for #4 and #5, probably for #6, probably for #7, and I have plugged a couple of things into #8 already. So I might need to give myself a bit longer with stories that are in the "maybe-to-probably" accepted category after the first reading. I will probably still be able to be pretty rapid with rejects. I don't think anyone has a submission sitting with me longer than maybe a week right now, but if it gets past two weeks, then know that the chances that I am considering it for publication might actually be greater, but that it also might be a in a larger pool of "good" stories under evaluation. I'm just getting more submissions nowadays than I was in the first couple months, and I need to be careful not to find myself scheduled out so far that a newly-accepted piece can't see publication for a year. It would be unfair to the writer, and rather tedious for me. I remain confident that I can manage all this without having to resort to having periods where M-Brane is closed to submissions or has "reading periods."  I don't dig it when other zines do that.  I understand why they do it, but I don't want it to be my practice.

POD update

It appears that the print-on-demand version of M-Brane #3 will be able to release at Lulu at the same time as the PDF. I also have figured out to to fix the frakked up Lulu versions of #1 and #2, and will be doing that as well so I can let the "store" re-open.  I have just spent some tedious time going back to both of those issues, and I think perhaps another hour of messing around with them will do the job. I discovered that I really didn't know as much about how to use my computer (it was brand new) when I was making that first issue.  The original file elements for #1 were a serious mess compared to how cleanly assembled #3 is. It has been a learning experience. I'm sure it will continue to be.

Twitter, so far

I've been on Twitter for a few weeks  now, and I have decided that I am sold on it as a way to communicate and network with people.  A number of M-Brane writers are also regular users of it, and I think it would be great if more were.  I am also pretty pleased that I started tweeting just days before discussion of Twitter became all-pervasive in the media on every TV and radio talk show because I felt like I was finally somewhat up-to-date on something.

Despite my endorsement of Twitter in principle, I would offer a word of warning to people who haven't started using it yet but are considering it: there is a clear and present danger of it being a hypnotic time-waster. You really have to watch out for that.  It has happened to me a number of times already where I somehow, without even realizing it, transition from doing some legitimate work on the computer to mindlessly staring at the Twitter screen, refreshing it every five seconds, waiting to see what someone might say. And then waiting some more.

Contributor on DoorQ

Ok, I am ready to move past the Recent Unpleasantness (the Duesberg/Pournelle Affair) and share some good news related to the gradual expansion of the brane. I have been invited to be a contributor on the DoorQ website, which will give me another forum in which to promote the zine and the reading of sf in general. I'll be posting news there related to the magazine, probably do some reading recommendations and probably put up teasers for the issues ahead of their release. DoorQ is an sf/fantasy/horror resource and social site geared toward gay fans of the genres.  Again I display my unerring talent for finding ever-narrower markets for my product: first readers of science fiction, and now gay readers of science fiction. But seriously, it will be cool to have another place to shill for M-Brane and the genre. I don't have anything up on it yet, but probably will in a few days and I'll mention it here and link to it when I do.  Where my posts over there are pertinent to business over here, I'll probably duplicate the info here so everyone who is used to reading this page doesn't have to necessarily visit another site to see what's going on. Listen to me acting like there's a bunch of people who might feel compelled to keep up with me wherever I am! (Well I do have, like, 30 Twitter followers now).

When SF writers fight the future and make me mad

It won't come as any kind of surprise to regular readers of this blog that I am irritated by (and usually try to avoid reading) Orson Scott Card's prolific politics columns. I have huge respect for the guy as an author and, as I have said many times, Ender and Bean have a special place in my heart. He does good work with the Medicine Show and his "bootcamp" for writers (I think there's at least a couple alumni of that among writers for M-Brane). I even give him a lot of credit for presenting his views in a tone of civil debate and respectful disagreement with whomever he is disagreeing with. A couple weeks ago when I heard that flap about the TV show Big Love depicting a particular Mormon temple ceremony, a thing that church members generally consider to be private and sacred and not for public ogling, I immediately said to myself, "I bet Card has a post about this somewhere." Ignoring my usual self-imposed ban on deliberately seeking out things that might piss me off, I looked it up.  As expected, on the National Review website, was Card's comment on the Big Love incident. It turns out that his reaction to it wasn't angry and his advice to other Mormons was to just let it go and not get all bent out of shape.  Very calm and reasonable...but he just had to cast it in terms of what he characterizes as the "open season on Mormons" created by opponents of California's Proposition 8. How about letting that go, too? His side may have won a vote on a prop and they may win some more court battles in the days ahead, but let's face it: there's eventually going to be equal marriage rights for everyone in this country whether you think it's a "sin" or not. It's an inevitable fact, just as it's inevitable that Card's church is going to continue. So how about we give peace a chance.

But that's not even what I was planning to talk about.  The writer I wanted to mention is Jerry Pournelle. I've known since the time it was actually going on that he was part of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy which advised the Reagan transition team on space matters in 1980 and boosted the Reagan administration's desire to build the Strategic Defense Initiative. Other sf members of this group were Gregs Bear and Benford, Robert Heinlein, Jim Baen, Steve Barnes and Poul Anderson. So I always knew he was generally on a different side of political matters than I have ever been.  That's fine, it doesn't bother me.  I haven't even read much of the man's solo work anyway, though I have read a lot of his collaborations with Niven, such as the one in the picture, so it's not like it even makes me see his work through a distorted political lense. But then a piece of information crossed my screen last night that really gave me pause: the Wikipedia article on Pournelle, in the section about scientific contrarian views, says that he "has advocated research to directly investigate Peter Duesberg's controversial views on the cause of AIDS." I hope this does not mean that Pournelle actually endorses Duesberg. If that is what it means, then I don't want to know about it.

Duesberg believes that HIV has nothing to do with the cause of AIDS. The retrovirus is harmless and incidental, he says.  This idea has been roundly rejected by the entire scientific community save for Duesberg and a few other psychopaths. What causes it then? Well, in Africa, they're just getting sick from malnutrition and bad water and other diseases, he says. He sat on a panel to advise South African president Thabo Mbeki on AIDS policy, and his views are considered influential in that country's failure to provide anti-retroviral drugs, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary AIDS deaths and new HIV infections.  I'm not saying that Duesberg is culpable in a sort of passive mass murder of thousands of people. But some people have said that. Oh, you might be wondering what his explanation might be for "all those gays in San Francisco" getting AIDS. This is it: use of recreational drugs, in particular amyl nitrite ("poppers"--yeah, over-the-counter poppers caused AIDS). That's why I'm not going to read Pournelle's blog anymore because I'm afraid he'll endorse this lunatic idea right out in the open and I will scream.

This counts as this week's Science Friday post.

Afterwords

To writers with stories scheduled for publication in M-Brane SF from issue #4 onward: if you would like to provide an afterword for your story (some thoughts on what inspired you, or the circumstances of writing it, or whatever else you might like to say about it), I will publish it. It's too late to add these for #3, but for #4 onward it's possible. If you don't wish to do that, no big deal.  I'll see what I get just by announcing it here, and I'll probably send an email reminder of it as production commences on each issue.  I would like contributions for #4 ASAP, however, because that will go into pre-production shortly after #3 releases.  I won't impose any word-count or content restrictions on these afterwords either. I'm easy like that.

Our taboos discussion caused me to browse through Again, Dangerous Visions, the Ellison-edited sequel book to the famous Dangerous Visions, because I was looking for James Tiptree's stunner of a story, and then I got caught up (once again) in reading Ellison's intros and the writers' afterwords.  I know that this sort of thing isn't everyone's bag, but I really enjoy getting those peeks into writers' craft and thought processes, and I figure that readers who don't need that extra stuff can still just read the fiction and skip over the other stuff if they wish. Ellison says as much in A,DV, stating that the book holds 250,000 words of fiction that the reader paid for and another 60,000 in other material offered for "free."  Aside from all the fascinating intros and afterwords, I was reminded of the sheer number of astounding stories in that book. In addition to the great Tiptree piece, other highlights include Kate Wilhelm's beautiful "The Funeral," Piers Anthony's startling "In the Barn," Gene Wolfe's utterly Gene-Wolfeish triptych "Mathoms From the Time Closet," Richard Lupoff's burning mess of a novella "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," and, of course, Kurt Vonnegut The Man Himself with "The Big Space Fuck." Yeah, mom, it's a story by a Big Name Author!

Cordwainer Smith

During our discussion of taboos (started a couple posts ago), I was reminded of how excellent the science fiction of Paul Linebarger--better known within our genre as Cordwainer Smith--is, and how bizarre and mysterious I found it to be when I first read some of the stories as a kid when I would encounter them in anthologies. Most of his sf stories are set in the universe of the "Instrumentality of Mankind," and form a sort of future history of an era many millennia in the future where the Instrumentality is guiding and manipulating the course of interstellar civilization. I remember being a quite young kid and reading stories like "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Burning of the Brain," and "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal" and being like "what the frak did I just read?  What is this?" I am pretty sure that it's that sort of reaction that helps make a kid into a lifelong reader.

I found this site, www.cordwainer-smith.com, maintained by Smith's daughter Rosana. Housed within it is her blog. I haven't read through much of it yet, but a recent post points to some Smith stories that are now free for online reading. So if you've somehow missed out on Cordwainer Smith or don't have of his stuff on your bookshelves, there's a chance to check it out. That image up there is the cover of a collection that compiles all of the Instrumentality stories in one book.

Where to live?/ Taboo

1) When Jeff and I moved to OKC, we decided we'd commit to it for a minimum of two years. The two-year point will be reached in September, so we've accepted that it's probably more like a three year period that we will live here. We had about five thousand bucks to move with when we came here and more than blew through it all before we had new income happening, so we figure we need at least 10K for the next move. So far, our savings stand at zero. That being said, I've decided it's not too soon to start researching our next home town--and, of course, the future home of the M-Brane Tower (pictured on left), the brane's world headquarters (I expect to hear solicitations from chambers of commerce any day now, don't you know...).  Moving back to St. Louis has not been taken off the table completely, but we're more than open to other options.

Our criteria for a fresh new city include: 1) a climate relatively free of winter weather, or at least no more than what we endure here; 2) a dense city center with goods and services, including our residence, within short distances; no suburbs need apply; 3) a reasonable cost of living because we're not likely to be rich any year soon; 4) sufficient ethnic/immigrant diversity to allow for ethnic grocery stores (we're cooks, and need that selection close at hand, and both STL and OKC have been great in that regard); 5) cultural/ religious/ political diversity, or at least a population that is not ninety percent right-wing fundamentalist Christian and feel that they need to tell me about Jesus every day. STL was fine in that regard, but OKC gets a D-minus for it. We understand that criteria 1 and 5 run into conflict often in this country, but I'm sure there are options for us.

2) Feel free to keep talking about the taboo subject (last post).  I'm still trying to think up a real hair-bleaching, paint-peeling, vapors-inducing shocker of a premise, and when I do, I'll post it in the comments (but y'all'll need to provide your own smelling salts).

Taboos

Sf Signal, in its Mind Melds section, recently posed a question to some writers about whether they have had difficulty getting something published or found themselves self-censoring due to some sort of taboo that they were violating. Are there still such taboos in science fiction, they were asked. Way back in the day, especially before the New Wave, sex and swear-words were rare in sf, but are there new things that arouse similar uneasiness now? The writers had some varying opinions on the topic, and then there were a bunch of comments by site readers. The comments were mostly fairly tiresome and unenlightening (as people arguing with each other in blog comments tends to be) but it got me thinking about the subject.

If you're a reader or a writer and can think of something That Dare Not Speak Its Name in an sf story, go ahead and leave a comment here. I'd love to hear what you think.  And if you're a writer, maybe go ahead and write the controversial tale and send it to me and I may publish it in the zine. I haven't turned away a story yet due only to its subject matter (unless it was just not in the genre, like a story about the Ghost Hunters guys finding evidence of the ghost of the Loch Ness Monster), and I am having a hard time dreaming up a subject that would make me blanch and say, "No, this story is waaaay too controversial and taboo-ridden." Obviously it would need also to be an entertaining story, not just some piece of prose constructed just to be shocking. Writers for and readers of M-Brane already know, of course, that I don't buy into the "rated PG-13" mentality that has overrun almost the whole culture. I don't think everything needs to be for kids, and I don't think it would be even in the least desirable for me to try to tailor it for such an audience.  Most everyone else seems to be servicing the kindergarchy already anyway. So there have been and will continue to be (as soon as 4/1 when #3 comes out) some swear words and sexual references published here and there in M-Brane. And there are some stories in upcoming issues that get fairly edgy in their subject matter. But I don't think I've published or scheduled for publication yet anything particularly "taboo."  I probably would, however, if someone came up with it. But would I even recognize it as such?  Let's find out.

BSG finale: loved it

The main reason I don't frequently bring up TV shows and movies on this blog is that my focus and main area of interest in the sf genre is in its written form.  And the M-Brane zine, of course, is exclusively about the written form. Another big reason that I stay away from the other media is that I tire quickly of hearing/reading snarky fanboy comments about TV shows and movies.  I almost got sucked into reading some that online regarding last night's Battlestar Galactica series finale, but quickly realized what I was doing and quit it.  I don't care what anyone says about it: I loved the finale. It may not have wrapped up every little thing to everyone's liking, but it did wrap it up in a stunning fashion. And so ends for me the only show that I was faithfully following. Friday nights are free again. Frak yeah.

Science Friday: Gravitons and Buckyballs

The second hour of today’s installment of NPR’s Science Friday was chockablock with science fictional science, the cool stuff you want to hear about if you’re a reader or a writer of the genre.

Physicist Lisa Randall talked about gravity and explanations of the universe involving physical dimensions beyond what we can directly observe. Specifically, she discussed the fascinating idea that gravity’s relative weakness as a force might be explained by gravity existing primarily in a fifth dimension but leaking into our observable universe. She speculated that when they finally get the Large Hadron Collider running, it might be possible to verify the existence of a thing known as the "Kaluza-Klein mode of the graviton." This means (I think) a graviton—which is theoretical particle that transmits the force of gravity—that would be “heavier” because it has “momentum from the extra dimension.” Detection of such a weird thing would be a straightforward (in terms of particle physics) way of verifying experimentally some of these ideas that are indicated in the math but which there has been no way to study so far. Go Hadron Collider.

The next segment featured chemist Harry Kroto, the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of buckminsterfullerene, or carbon-60, the buckyball. Readers who have read much hard sf written since, say the mid-90s, have run into buckyballs and things like carbon nanotubes again and again. Kroto said that the next big thing—the discovery that will change everything—will be when science gains an understanding of how “self-assembly” works. He said that it should be possible, for example, to dip a disc into a solution and come out with a DVD, or mix some chemicals together and end up with transistors for micro-processors. Self-assembly is the way life works, and it should one day be a thing we can achieve artificially. Think of Mars’ space elevator in Robinson’s Red Mars building itself out of carbon nanotubes, or the all-pervasive nanotechnology of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age creating everything ranging from fanciful playthings for the rich to mundane household items. During the segment’s opening, they said they’d talk about other applications for the buckyball, like “bucky paper,” but they didn’t get to that. I heard of the “paper” a couple of years ago, however, and selected it recently as the material that the soldiers’ body armor in my story Neglected Project is made of. Cool stuff. Kroto was highly entertaining during this segment and even found an opportunity to take a swipe at Creationism--funny because it somehow did not come up during the first hour of the show...which was all about Darwin.

That soccer ball-looking image is a crude representation of a buckyball.

Hugo nominees announced

The list of nominees for the next Hugo awards is up on Locus. I'm still working on Anathem, nominated in the Best Novel category.  Other novel nominees included Doctorow and Scalzi, whose nominated books I have not yet read, but have been hearing a lot about lately. I'll point out that Elizabeth Bear is nominated in the novelette category for "Shoggoths in Bloom," published in Asimov's. I haven't read a lot of her novel-length stuff yet, but her shorter fiction is achingly beautiful, and if I got to vote in this, she'd have my vote for the Hugo. Just saying (in case any of you are voters).

Populist rage

I guess today's a good time to suspend for a day my usual resistance to having real-world-crap being the subject matter on this brane. I've always felt that the American public is rather docile, even when pushed really hard, as compared to some other publics, like the French, who have never hesitated to call a general strike over things that barely make the news when they happen here. Apparently the AIG bonus payment situation, however, has been some kind of grotesque icing on the cake of shit that has been baking for the last couple of decades and has now driven everyone totally bugfuck. On today's Talk of the Nation on NPR, some time was spent on this and there were many on-air guests and calls and emails all saying the same thing: this is crap, it's unfair, we're mad and not going to take it anymore. Now that the populist rage against the obvious fraud that the so-called financial system has been for a long time has finally manifested, I find (to my disappointment) that I am already sick of it. Why?  Because the AIG bonus crap is trivial, ephemeral and utterly insignificant in comparison to the stuff that people should have been enraged about long ago.

A tiny number of examples, in no particular order: 1) How did it slip past everyone that making millions and billions of dollars in salaries and bonuses and corporate profits without making a tangible product or offering a service that any sane person wants to buy is plainly unsustainable (derivatives, credit default swaps, stupidly inflated house prices, the idea that the economy will always grow at a crazy rate forever, etc.)? We're all pissed off about it now, but I said it years ago and was always  laughed off as some kind of communist. The rage should have started years and years ago.  2) Millions more people lose their ability to have health insurance every year. How about some more populist outrage about that? I know I'm enraged: I lost mine a couple years ago and have not been able to get back into it since. 3) Thousands of our soldiers have, in recent years, been put in coffins: a general consensus now exists (save for in the extreme extra-chromosome right wing) that the Iraq War was, at best, a huge tactical blunder and a mind-boggling boondoggle of  bad situation management after the initial invasion. I have yet to meet in person anyone who is screaming with rage about that. I hear about them in the media sometimes, I guess. 4) Every President since Nixon has sworn that America will quit being enslaved to Middle Eastern dictators by oil dependency.  The problem has only gotten worse with each passing administration.  I fear now that Obama won't be able to do anything about it either, because all his political capital may be stripped away in short order now that everyone has been pushed over the edge by some insurance company douche-bags getting some bonuses. Yeah, it's outrageous and stunningly tone-deaf on the part of the the company, but it's small potatoes compared  a lot of what we should have been pissed off about all along. President Obama wasn't kidding when he said it'd get worse before it got better.

Book View Cafe

I meant to mention this a couple days ago: writer Sue Lange (whose fine story "Zara Gets Laid" will be a highlight of M-Brane #5 in June)  wrote a blog post at Book View Cafe about M-Brane and also about Cynthia Ward's Market Maven Newsletter. Please go there and read it.  Sue is right on in what she says (and not just because she agrees with my remarks in M-Brane #2's editorial). And while you're there, take a minute or two and browse around Book View. It's a really neat thing with a lot of really impressive talent participating in it.

Research and revision

I'm a bit more than mid-way through my first-ever reading of Haldeman's The Forever War. I'm also in the middle of Neal Stephenson's Anathem--the lethal two-books-at-once situation. But Haldeman's book is a fast-paced page-turner while Stephenson's is decidedly not, so they fit different reading needs and moods at different times.

Haldeman's book is widely regarded as a major classic of both the sf genre and the war novel genre, and I am reading it with special attention to the way combat is depicted and how the off-duty culture of soldiers is handled as compared to some other military sf stories that I was more familiar with. I'm also comparing it a lot with those things in the story I've been writing.

I used to mention more often on this blog my novel-in-progress, now code-named Neglected Project. It's set in the pre-history of a far-future milieu that my friend Pat and I co-devised a while ago (the universe of Really Neglected Project). Anyway, I got inspired and started banging it out last summer and it emerged as largely a military sf story--or at least with a lot of the trappings of such being used to convey the main idea. The manuscript now stands at a bit over 60,ooo words and it probably needs another 30-40K to be done. My progress has been very, very slow of late, and I realized that some of what's stalling it is that I haven't been sure how to dig into some of the scenes that still need to be finished or, in some cases, first-drafted.  I've had what I felt were a lot of false starts with some the combat sequences that my plot demands occur in some detail and which need to have a real feeling of wild action. 

But I've been looking back at some scenes in other sf war lit and reading this new-to-me book by Haldeman and glancing over some portions of Neglected Project...and starting to think that maybe I wasn't doing too badly to begin with and just need to revise and polish rather than start over.  That's an encouraging way to feel, and it makes me feel like diving back into it. I may even come up with a real title someday.

M-Brane writers' links updated

I just added a few more new writers to the M-Brane writers' links list (in the right-hand column a few kilometers down under Twitter and the archive). If you have had a story published or are scheduled to have one published in M-Brane SF and have a site but don't see a link to you, let me know via email or Twitter or a comment to this post and I'll add it promptly.

Reminders: M-BRANE #2 still exists even though #3 is coming soon

I set a goal at about the time of the release of issue #2 that I wanted to see 25 new subscriptions or the equivalent in single-copy PDF sales or print copy sales of that issue by 3/15.  We didn't quite make it: there was a serious slow-down in new sign-ups for a couple weeks...but it has picked up again slightly. And I did go ahead over the weekend and show it to a bunch of VIPS and sf bloggerati and other genre-interested folks in much the way I did with issue #1 (though without the fully free public posting of it). So between the regular readership and all of that extra promotional stuff I did, we've gotten a really excellent exposure for the issue #2 writers, and I'll keep at it the rest of the month.  But it's in no way too late to make it a bit better: readers of this blog who may not be on the magazine subscription list yet can go ahead and start 

up the astounding year with issue #2 right now or purchase just issue #2 (click over there on the right on that "subscribe" link, be transferred over to PAGE 2, and there you'll see all the options currently being 

offered). 

Issue #3 is set for 4/1 release and it is going to rock out.  People will love it. They'll blog about it.  The Twitterati will tweet about it. (Something that I just noticed about it a few minutes ago: writers Catherine Gardner and Garrett Calcaterra are both in it, and they both happened to also be published together in the recent Arkham Tales #2.) I think I might even have a special surprise lined up for the third issue, but I don't know for sure yet, so I'll shut the frak up about it for now.