Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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The End of Books?
January 23rd, 2009
I’m not exactly talking about ebooks or transitions of technology. I’m talking about Larry McMurtry’s contention that we may be living in the twilight of the novel. (Note that he happens to be giving his talk on this topic, ironically perhaps, at Rice University where I literally read hundreds of novels as an undergraduate in the late 1980s.)
McMurtry is a great writer, author of the awesome Pulitzer-Prize winning Lonesome Dove, the Oscar-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, among many other memorable stories. From the article:
Q: What will you talk about at Rice?
A: The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40.
I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries.
They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t.
On the flipside, my friend Laura Mixon emailed this to me a few weeks ago:
Here is a recent NEA survey with very promising news: reading has seen a real resurgence in the past eight years. Especially fiction, and especially among the young. They’re calling it the “Harry Potter effect.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/books/12reading.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/11/AR2009011102337.htmlThe report itself breaks down the demographics, including by ethnicity, age, and gender. A must read (PDF file):
Hmm. Has McMurtry heard of Harry Potter? Kids ARE reading. I don’t see them poking around smelly old used bookstores now or any time in my life in significant numbers. The report highlights big growth among 18-24 year olds, the ones McMurtry also doesn’t see in his used bookstore. Maybe that’s because they prefer to go to the Barnes and Noble where they can have a latte, or just order books over the internet. The report also highlights reading dips in the past associated with other forms of entertainment that have become available with new technology.
There are some real issues in here, but McMurtry appears not to have done his research on this topic. Book sales haven’t crashed and the rates of book reading are up across the board right now. There’s certainly competition for our leisure time, more so than ever before, but the demise of book culture doesn’t seem to be hovering in the near future. Maybe the in-store used book culture. A lot of younger people are reading stories and books online and don’t necessarily have to even pick up a physical object called “a book.” They’re still reading fiction, however.
(An aside. When I first released Star Dragon for free online several years ago, I received an email about eight hours later from a new fan who told me how much he had enjoyed it. He went on to explain that he never bought books anymore and did almost all of his reading on the computer, I think in an effort to make it clear that he’d never have read my story if I hadn’t have put it online, and certainly never would have bought it. The whole electronic distribution and copyright thing is a discussion for another day.)
McMurtry seems to be seeing the “graying” of the used book customer, perhaps in a similar way that we see the sf fandom community graying. It’s a cultural change, certainly, but not I think the end of novels or of science fiction in particular. However the NEA study did note this about genres:
A new question on the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts allows reporting of the reading preferences of adults who said they read novels and/or short stories. Presented with the following genres—“mysteries,†“thrillers,†“romance,†“science fiction,†and “other fiction‗ 53.0 percent of novel and/or short story readers said they enjoy reading mysteries. The next greatest percentage (40.8 percent) went to “other fiction,†while thrillers were the third most popular (32.6 percent), followed by romance (28.5 percent) and science fiction (25.4 percent).
Last? Well, being down there with romance isn’t so bad given sales in that category. The missing variable is how many people with the different genre preferences pick up more than a book a year.
The experience of reading a great novel is still very powerful today, for every generation, even with other entertainment options, and there continue to be wonderful books out there to choose from. I don’t think I’m wrong about this. Call me optimist to McMurtry’s pessimist, perhaps, but I’ve got the data on my side.
(I also noticed that Nancy Kress has a recent blog post addressing some of these issues, too.)
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Maybe a factor is, that people (me, certainly) prefer webshops. So, while I buy used books, I almost never buy them in person.
It must be said I’ve bought maybe less than half a dozen new books out of physical stores since the turn of the century, while all the rest were purchased online, often for a good bit less than they’d have cost in a physical shop. And since then there’s been a gradual increase in the number of second-hand books I buy online rather than in a used book store. I suspect McMurtry’s customers are people who don’t go online very much, if at all.
I suspect there’s a strong correlation between age and online buying habits, too.
I really love visiting a good used bookstore, but I don’t have a lot of opportunities living in Wyoming. There’s actually a really good one here in Porto Alegre, Brazil (specializing in sf/f in English) that ironically I just visited yesterday. They don’t have a very good space, unfortunately, and, get this, do almost all their sales online. I got a deal in trade for a $20 book I wanted, to write a list of recommendations from their books with a few words about each. Happy to help push some good books out there.
I’m just a data point of one, but I have been a voracious reader ever since my youth, and I never entered a used book shop until I was in college. And that was because Berkeley has used bookstores every other other block (or so it seemed at the time). As a kid, I got my book fix by ordering from Scholastic, or, when I got into high school, the library or occasionally from Waldenbooks or similar mall store.
Peggy, that’s pretty much identical to my experiences growing up. College was my first real regular used bookstore experience, as there was one close to campus and I hit it every few weeks. Seattle is pretty great for used bookstores, too, and I remember spending many hours in them during Clarion West way back when. They’ve been a lot less convenient since then, but what you lose in the browsing experience you make up for in effectiveness. I mean, pretty much any book I want to buy, I can find at some price online in minutes and order it. Before then it was a painful crawl searching, calling, asking everyone, library requests, etc. There were interesting discoveries along the way, but time is precious and sometimes I know exactly what I am looking for.