Year: 2010

It was ironic to read, a couple hours before the first Iron Blogger meet-up at the Cambridge Brewing Company that we don't blog ("we" meaning people under the age of thirty, which is to say most of the people doing Iron Blogger).

According to a just-released Pew Internet study, as summarized in the above RoughType post, "In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to."

Apparently we're all weirdos, or something. But I think we knew that already. Free beer with other weirdos never tasted so good. 🙂

I wasn't sure what to write about this week — the obvious thing is the Amazon vs. Macmillan slapfight (short version: Macmillan says "we want to change the terms on which we sell you e-books, Amazon" — to a system that makes Amazon more money per e-book sold, ironically — Amazon says "fuck you, Macmillan" and pulls all Macmillan's books off their site for a week, hilarity ensues.) Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for you my readers), it's been talked to death elsewhere by people who know a hell of a lot more than I do (and are also a lot funnier than I am). Being, y'know, writers and all. My informed opinion as a reader and a member of the book-buying public is that it was a pretty dick move on Amazon's part. I don't know why they wanted to drag us readers into their pricing dispute, but they did, and now I'm annoyed at them.

the following has been formatted to fit your screen

But that's not what I actually want to talk about. What I actually want to talk about is… science fiction magazines. A friend of mine asked me a couple days ago, "If I were to want to subscribe to a magazine of science fiction, what are my good options?" and I realized I had enough to say that there was a blog post in it. Here's what I told him:

the boring stuff, or, a little bit of history (repeating)

The Big Three SF magazines are The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (usually abbreviated as F&SF), currently edited by Gordon Van Gelder; Asimov's Science Fiction, ed. Sheila Williams; and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, ed. Stanley Schmidt (Wikipedia articles: Analog, F&SF, Asimov's). Analog is the longest continually-running SF magazine, founded in 1930 as the pulp magazine Astounding Stories, and made famous by editor John W. Campbell, Jr. from 1937 on. F&SF is next-oldest, founded in 1949, followed by Asimov's, founded in 1977, with noted science fiction author Isaac Asimov acting as editorial director. Analog and Asimov's are both currently published by Dell Magazines and share the same production staff. F&SF is published by Spilogale, Inc., founded by editor Gordon Van Gelder. (Many other SF magazines have come and gone over the past century, and even the big three have changed names, formats, and publication schedules the way you and I change clothes. SF is a notoriously hard market to stay afloat in.) SF magazines were the heart and soul of science fiction for a very long time, and all three still accept submissions from the general public, so a lot of new science fiction writers still get their start there.

All of the Big Three publish some number of short stories (under 7,000 words), novelettes, and novellas (7,000-20,000 words) every one to two months, and some number of non-fiction columns and book reviews. Asimov's also publishes poetry. Analog publishes science fact — articles about developments in science aimed at the science fiction-reading audience — and will often serialize 40-80,000 word novels, publishing part each issue. They're available on some newsstands for $5-10 an issue (I buy mine from Pandemonium in Central Square), and also for subscription for $3-6 an issue (Amazon: F&SF, Analog, Asimov's; B&N: Analog, Asimov's). Being magazines about the future, they're all also available a bit more cheaply — though with more or less DRM — as ebooks individually and as a subscription from Fictionwise (F&SF, Analog, Asimov's), on the Kindle, etc. It's worth noting, as I mentioned in my review of the Kindle DX that the newsstand and paper subscriptions run about a month ahead of the electronic subscriptions — ie. I have the March Asimov's now, but it won't be available electronically until March 1 — which is part of why I'm still on paper.

why do you read an SF magazine

I read SF magazines because they're fun. I like short stories, and I like discovering new authors, and being exposed to new ideas (see also: compulsive neophilia), and so on. There's a sense among some in SF fandom that all of the magazines are written for and read by aspiring SF short story writers — I'm not at all convinced that's true. I have some small aspirations that way, but I don't really consciously read magazines with a sense of "scoping out the market". I read them because I enjoy their stories. I stick an issue in my bag and read it when I'm on the T — most of the stories are short enough that I can read them in a few rides and simple enough that I can pick up the thread of one fast enough to enjoy it a bit before I have to get off. As a rule I don't generally read the novellas unless the first page or two grab me, because they're more complex and take too many rides, so I have to finish them not-on-the-T, which takes free time I don't always have. I seem to go through the output of one magazine about at the rate the issues come out, though sometimes I'll read through a whole issue on a plane or something, and also occasionally I'll pack an anthology, some other short story collection, or, say, ebook versions of this year's Hugo nominees on my cell phone to read on the T instead.

so which one(s) do you read

Analog I personally can't stand — I subscribed for a year in high school, and it's very much SF in the "engineering/science porn" sense, stories where the scientific or science fictional aspect is the point and the characters are secondary, which I don't hugely care for. For a while I thought F&SF was the best SF magazine available, but it seems to feature stories written for (and generally by) old straight white men, so I got bored with it after six months or so. It's fine in moderation, but reading what feel like the same stories month after month gets old. Asimov's is the only one I read regularly any more — more women writers, writers of color, and not-straight writers and characters (though by no means all), which is to say, more writers writing stories I find interesting. Generally speaking, Asimov's seems to run more stories that make me catch my breath or think or that stick with me for a while. Its stories also seem much more likely to be nominated for Hugo awards over the past five years or so (followed by F&SF, followed distantly by Analog), which are nominated by the membership of that year's Worldcon, which suggests that the bulk of people in SF fandom who read SF short-story magazines read Asimov's. Asimov's also seems to run more writers I've heard of outside the pages of the magazine — Elizabeth Bear, Charlie Stross, Mary Robinette Kowal — though of course when F&SF or Analog runs a Joe Haldeman or Geoffry Landiss story, I'll pick it up and read at least that one.

the stories themselves

It's hardly a representative sample, but here are some of what I think are the better stories that have run in Asimov's recently, with links to full or partial versions online where I could find them:

• "Shoggoths in Bloom", by Elizabeth Bear (full), published in the March 2008 Asimov's, which won the Hugo for Best Novelette in 2009.
• Pelago (preview), by Judith Berman, a novella published in the February 2009 Asimov's. One of the very few novellas in Asimov's I found interesting enough to read, and it utterly captivated me.
• "Sleepless in the House of Ye", from the July 2009 issue, which also blew me away with its alienness. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance.
• "Shoes-to-Run", also in the July 2009 issue, and "As Women Fight", from the December 2009 issue, both by Sarah Genge and both dealing with gender issues.
• "SinBad the Sand Sailor", from the July 2009 issue, for a very different take on gender issues, and also a neo-pulp style story, just to give a sense of the gamut the magazine runs.
• "Bridesicle", by Will McIntosh, from the January 2009 issue, on a potential unintended consequence of cryogenics.
• "Conditional Love", by Felicity Shoulders, on unintended consequences of human genetic engineering, and "Marya and the Pirate", by Geoffry Landiss (preview), which is a fun widescreen space opera story, both in the January 2010 issue.
• "Helping them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston (preview) in the latest issue (March 2010), is a brilliant superhero deconstruction.

Looking back over the year's stories, I find myself remembering a lot of the stories from Asimov's I don't mention here as "well, this one had an interesting premise but fell down in execution" and so on, though there are some which I remember as "I completely skipped this one" or "I completely hated this one". Everything the magazine publishes isn't to my liking, but I find the hit rate a lot higher than the other magazines. Certainly some of the stories make me uncomfortable, sometimes in useful ways and other times not. ("Bridesicle" above is a prime example of the former.)

what else is there

In addition to the Big Three, there are also a number of smaller magazines and online things, some of which are free — Strange Horizons (the granddaddy of online SF magazines), Jim Baen's Universe (online), Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (online), Electric Velocipede (offline), Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (offline), Abyss and Apex (online), Apex Magazine (both?), Realms of Fantasy (offline)… The list is pretty long, and getting longer. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is the only one I read regularly. There's also the New York Review of Science Fiction, which is the literary criticism magazine of science fiction (yes, really), though there's also a lot of litcrit, book reviews, and original short fiction online at Tor.com, a SF community site run by one of the major genre publishers.

If you're looking for short fiction with more of a continuing storyline, there's Shadow Unit, which is a free online serial fiction project structured sort of like a television show, except with short stories (and apparently soonnow a novel???). It's a police procedural-meets-the-X-files with excellent characters and brilliant writing, it's awesome (though I'm not caught up on season 2 yet), and it's inspired me to check out the other work of the people involved. And then there are webcomics, which are predominantly SFnal. At some point science fiction conquered the world, and it's taking SF fans a little while to notice and adjust to that fact. 🙂

So there's a lot of material available, and that's some of what I enjoy. Happy reading!

As I said in my last post, the Google Books settlement has some fairly serious copyright implications. I was going to write up a lengthy discussion of them, but in researching them I discovered that Prof. Lawrence Lessig has an excellent article on the subject up at The New Republic. His argument is too nuanced to capture in a pull-quote, so go read it.[1] It's well-written and not terribly long. I'll wait.

In the settlement, Google really is trying to adjudicate significant changes to copyright law, notably a registry of works and a policy on orphaned works. I've heard a number of authors, in talking about the settlement, say, "It would have been fine if Google asked me before scanning my books, but since Google didn't ask me, they can't have them." The problem is that it's impossible for Google to individually ask every author or rightsholder for every work under copyright for permission to scan their books. Since creative expression is automatically under copyright once it is created, and the United States has no central registry of copyrighted works, every book published after Steamboat Willie is presumptively under copyright to someone. That means that, for Google to ask permission before scanning, they would, for each work, need to go through a lot of trouble and expense to locate the current rightsholder, and if that person can't be found, Google would be barred from scanning the book. It doesn't matter if the book is rare and falling apart — if it's copyrighted, they can't scan it. (And the legal tangle around who got what rights when an author died, and what they did with them, is almost always a serious mess, or there wouldn't be a project up to make sure that authors have wills.)

To make it even worse, if an author has, say, quoted some song lyric in her book — and, as a good- and copyright-observant author, went and obtained the rights to use that lyric from the company which owns it — now, in this proposed world order, Google has two problems — first to track down the author of the book, and second to track down whoever now owns the rights to the song (which may have changed hands since the author did their due diligence) and clear that separately. If the author has quoted multiple songs owned by different companies, Google has to find the rightsholder for each song, no matter how small the quotation. And even if the author allowed Google to scan their book, if even one of the song companies says no, Google is faced with the choice of using the book without the offending quotation or not using the book at all. If it removes the quotation and that happened to be a major plot point? Oops, sorry. Now repeat as necessary if that lyric quotes part of another song, and so on ad infinitum, and combine with ever-increasing copyright terms (pushing a century these days), for a scary picture of what the future could look like.

Basically, if Google had asked permission first, they'd never have scanned anything. Some people would say that would be right — Google shouldn't have scanned anything. I'm too much of an information archivist and a librarian to agree with them.

Lessig is right that, considering the sad state of US copyright law, the settlement is really quite a good patch on it. He's also right that it's another worrying step in the trend towards the world outlined above, where copyright goes recursive and strangle culture abed. Then again, if the settlement falls through or gets amended as the complainants want, it will also be a step towards that world, and perhaps an even bigger one. Everybody is right that the US needs serious copyright reform, preferably spearheaded by Congress, sooner rather than later. Whether that will actually result in a better system — or any system at all — is unclear, given that body's current state of gridlock, but the current system is clearly broken, and Lessig has some good ideas on how to fix it.

[1] The Open Book Alliance's blog post on it, which brought it to my attention, misses the heart of it, I think. Their goals, in my understanding, are exactly what Prof. Lessig is worried about.

I finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman a few nights ago, and it's been bothering me ever since. It didn't turn out to be quite the book I expected it to be, and I can't decide whether that's my failure or the book's.

Read on for my horribly spoilery thoughts on the book.

As promised at the end of my last post, here are my thoughts on the Google Books settlement. As I noted before, I'm a nonprofessional librarian and involved in a number of scanning projects (including trying to get Google Books to scan MITSFS's collection), so I'm not a disinterested party. To further caveat, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV — I'm just an interested layperson, and this is not legal advice and should not be construed as such.

There are a bunch of good reasons to oppose the settlement. It needs stronger privacy protections, for one. Remember how back when the PATRIOT Act was passed we were all worried about the FBI getting reading records out of libraries without a warrant, and putting a gag order on the libraries preventing them from talking about it? Now magnify that to Google. On the one hand, Google has a lot more resources to fight a records request and a gag order if they want to; on the other hand, they're a single point of failure, and if they decide that it's not evil to give your reading records to the government, you're screwed. Having some policies specified would give private citizens a recourse.

There are also some more general points:

• There is a perception that once Google's scanning project is done, no one else will bother to scan all these books ever again, which seems naïve to me. It's not strictly a question of money, true — scanning means wear and tear on the books, and especially older and rarer volumes should undergo it as few times as possible — but I don't see how, if Google's archive is too proprietary, or too low-quality, some other company, or a non-profit with sufficient funding, couldn't come along and replicate it by doing the same work Google did of striking agreements with libraries and scanning their collections.
• A corollary to that is that, while it would be nice of Google to set up a foundation and donate the collection to it, to ensure that (as the Open Book Alliance wants) Google does not have an exclusive set of access and distribution rights to its database, I see no reason why Google should be forced to do so. Google has sunk a decent amount of money into the project, and I don't see why they should be compelled by the courts to let a competitor (say Microsoft) come in and profit off their work for free. That said, if Google agreed in the settlement to donate the database to a foundation and in return had a free license to use it for for-profit purposes (subject always to relevant copyright limitations), anyone could use the database for non-profit purposes (subject again to copyright limitations), and any competitor who wanted to use the database for for-profit purposes had to pay a reasonable licensing fee (subject again &c.), that could be reasonable.
• Generalizing from the above, I agree that the scope of not-for-profit activities allowed on the database should be expanded substantially — scholars and the general public should be allowed to do more than make "non-consumptive" use of it. (I take "non-consumptive use" to mean something like running a MapReduce query that does word frequency analysis on the corpus — as opposed to actually, like, reading the books.)
• I believe the libraries whose collections were scanned retain some rights to the scans of their books, so I'm not sure how Google could end up with "exclusive" access and distribution rights anyway. I need to read over such a contract to be sure (which should be happening RSN, actually). I guess if the library's rights only proceed from Google's rights that could be a problem, and it's something I'll be looking out for.
• There seems to be a certain amount of anger on the part of authors and publishers and legal effort from same directed at Google simply because they scanned said entities' works. This is utter bullshit. In the same way that I can legally time-shift and format-shift other copyrighted works — compare ripping a CD to MP3 or digitizing videotapes and burning them to DVD for personal use — it is legal for me to scan a book and digitize it for personal use, and I don't see how the mere fact that Google scanned these books, or that these libraries allowed Google to scan these books, is any different. Speaking now of how I believe the law should work and not how it necessarily does work, I believe that it should be legal for a library to scan its books (or get Google to scan its books) for the use of its patrons and only its patrons. (Now, redistributing the books is another matter, and these authors and publishers might argue that even allowing the public to search the books and see relevant passages, to say nothing of allowing the public to read whole pages of the books, counts as redistribution and isn't covered under fair use. That's a minefield, and I'm not going there yet.)

A lot of the more interesting complaints about the settlement revolve around the treatment of orphan works. It's arguable that in the settlement Google is trying to get adjudicated some pretty significant changes to U.S. copyright law (or, from a different perspective, trying admirably to patch the deficiencies of U.S. copyright law). I'll cover that and more about the arguments around copyright in the settlement in next week's post.Edit: The third post of this series is available here.