It’s Amazon’s world. We just rent space in it.

 

I got a query from an old friend the other day. 

And by old, I mean old: this is someone I’ve known for more than fifty years. After a long and successful career as a teacher and writer of non-fiction books, he retired, and decided to try his hand at writing a novel. In the fullness of time he actually finished his novel, and then, to compound the miracle, found a publisher who liked it well enough to accept it for publication and pay him a modest advance. After another fullness of time spent working through the developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, dust-jacket marketing copy development, etc., etc., etc., his novel was at last released…

Whereupon it promptly sank without a ripple. Not even a nice satisfying ker-ploonk! as it hit the surface of the literary world and went under. Two weeks after the gala release party, it was as if his novel had never existed.

Prompting his query to me:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’m a time traveler from the past as well. I began my career as a fiction writer in the 1970s and am intimately familiar with the way the fiction publishing business used to work. But in the here and now? Here, in the year 2025? (♪If man is still aliiiiive…♫)

Beats me. 

§

It used to be hard to get published. Now it’s easy to get published, but really hard to get anyone to notice or care. When Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous, but only for fifteen minutes, he was perhaps being unreasonably optimistic: fifteen nanoseconds seems more like it. Here in AmazonWorld—or as I prefer to call its electronic manifestation, NatterSpace™—ADHD seems to be a communicable disease, and the question of how to catch and hold someone’s attention for longer than the three seconds it takes them to glance at a tweet or “like” a cute photo of an annoyed cat in a pink bunny costume—

Well, that is the challenge, isn’t it?

It doesn’t help that your every step in NatterSpace is tracked, your every like and dislike recorded, studied, analyzed, and turned into data to drive further push-marketing. The Amazonification of the marketplace has reached its apotheosis. You live your online life surrounded by a cloud of tiny invisible digital spies, servants, and gnats and gadflies, all eager to push you into buying lots more of whatever it is you’ve already proven you will buy. If it seems to you there is a certain dreary sameness in the recommendations you see every time you go online…

There is. You are in the process of being bored to death by robots. Not out of malice, or even out of misguided virtue, but simply because that is the easiest way for their human masters to take your money. There is probably a great SF story hiding in this idea, waiting to be written.

But where would you get it published?

§

In 2005, a fairly bright person said in an interview—

I think it’s a mistake to talk about the “genre” as if it were a monolith. There may have been a time when it was possible for a dedicated fan to read a good sampling of all the new SF being published, but that time—if it ever really was—was long ago. What we’ve been going through for at least the last 30 years has been a sort of literary cladogenesis, with “the genre” fragmenting into dozens of related but distinct daughter-genres and microgenres.

The interesting part of this is that, between print-on-demand publishing, e-publishing, web publishing, and all the other emerging technologies, it’s now at least semi-practical to publish fiction that has no hope of ever appealing to a mass audience. If you wanted to, say, launch an e-zine devoted exclusively to publishing stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama, you could do it, and do a very professional-looking job of it. Not only that, but thanks to the Internet, you would actually stand a pretty fair chance of reaching the 500 people in the world who want to read nothing but stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama. So there’s more fiction being published than ever before.

The downside for the writer, though, is that there’s no money in it. The general interest magazines appear to be following the general interest anthologies into extinction, and extreme specialization and small-niche marketing seem to be the shape of things to come. Readers now have unprecedented power to find only exactly the types of fiction they want to read, without risk of accidental exposure to anything else. I suppose they’ve always had this power—I can think of entire years when I subscribed to Asimov’s and only read two or three stories in each issue—but at least with a general interest magazine, there was always the possibility that after you’d read the Michael Swanwick and Lucius Shepard stories, you might take a chance on Karen Joy Fowler.

But this trend towards extreme narrowcasting—it’s both fascinating and disturbing. When the reader can exercise such fine control over the input he receives, how does a writer crack through that protective shell?

Quelle surprise! The person who said that was me!

§

Twenty years later, the problem not only remains but has intensified exponentially: how do you get readers to take a look at fiction that does not conform to Amazon’s algorithmic predictions of what they should like?

I honestly do not know. In a sense we began Stupefying Stories magazine and this web site as an effort to seek the answer to this question, but instead have spent the past 15 years watching the market for original SF/F get ever smaller, narrower, and worse for writers, as it spirals down to extinction. The established general interest “pro” magazines are on their last legs, if not already dead and shuffling around like zombies. The new owners of Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Hitchcock’s, and Ellery Queen—yes, they’re all owned by the same parent company now—have introduced a new standard publication contract that is so bad for writers, at least one writer’s market resource has decided Analog is no longer a pro market and de-listed it.

Yet as one established writer I know put it, “It’s not like people are lining up to buy my stuff, so I would probably sign it.”

Thus we return to my old friend’s question:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

I don’t know the answer, but am open to suggestions. I’d love to hear what’s working for you, assuming something is. Remember, I’m a time traveler. I come from the past, where they do things differently. I am eager to learn the ways of this strange new world.

Over to you.

---

In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spend most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

An earlier version of this column was published in 2017. Since then, the situation has not improved.

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Talking Shop: Royal Road and Success • By Eric Dontigney

So, Bruce mentioned to me that some people were asking about how I managed to make a go of turning a web novel on Royal Road into a (relative) Patreon success. I’ll warn you now that if you’re here looking for a recipe you can follow to duplicate what I did, you’re probably going to be disappointed. There are some steps you can follow, but there are also parts of the process that nobody can account for. So, let me start with the things that you can conceivably duplicate in some way.

Know your platform. Royal Road caters to a pretty specific crowd, although I understand that the exact crowd/crowd tastes do slowly evolve over time. At the moment, Royal Road heavily favors cultivation and LitRPG novels. I figured this out the hard way when I started testing out an Urban Fantasy novel and got almost zero traction. I also have a space opera ongoing on Royal Road (Rinn’s Run) that is showing some signs of life after 30+ chapters and some crossover readership from my Unintended Cultivator novel. The takeaway here is that different web novel platforms cater to different audiences. You can either find one that caters to the audience you want, or you can write a novel that at least somewhat caters to the audience that exists. I went with option B. I started writing and posting a cultivation novel.

Something else that you can at least partially control for is the cover. You need a cover that conforms, at least a bit, to the expectations of the audience. I went out and found art that has at least some surface similarities with some other popular titles in the cultivation field. I don’t know that the cover helped, but I suspect that it did. Get or make yourself a cover that at least superficially resembles the covers of similar kinds of books. It helps people put your book in the right mental box. If you’re thinking that your book is for everyone, take that idea out back and beat it to death right now. Your book is not for everyone. It can’t be. It’s for a particular audience, which means you need to meet some of that audience’s expectations in terms of the look and feel of your cover.

Speaking of meeting expectations, most web novels are genre novels. Genre novel readers have expectations about the use of tropes and genre conventions in the book. There is some wiggle room there. You don’t have to use every trope or every convention, but you must use some of them. In other words, if you’ve never read any cultivation novels or LitRPG novels (or whatever genre is popular on a specific platform), you better go out and read a few dozen of them before you try to write one. I just happened to have read a bunch of cultivation novels, so I knew some of what I was getting into.

Now, Royal Road has made it pretty easy for you to connect your Patreon page with your Royal Road account. Sadly, connecting those accounts is going to be the easier part of the process. When it comes to Patreon, you have a lot of decisions to make, and I can provide only general guidance. Patreon functions on a tier system. Each tier needs to offer one or more benefits to the patron. You also get a LOT of flexibility with how much you charge for each tier. What benefits you offer at each tier level will do a lot to determine how much you can reasonably charge for those tiers. Ultimately, that pricing is something you have to weigh for yourself. It’s on you to decide how much you think those benefits are worth. Then, you test that assumption against what people are willing to shell out each month.

Now, we come to the parts of the process that make it difficult-to-impossible to duplicate. When I first started posting Unintended Cultivator, I was averaging two chapters per day for a total of around 3000-4000 words per day. And I was doing it 7 days a week. I’ve since modified that to posting one chapter per day on Royal Road (most days). Here’s the thing, I still post two chapters a day over on Patreon…7 days a week. Right now, I’m averaging about 3500-4500 words a day. I also have the luxury of treating writing fiction as my day job. I’m in an exceedingly tiny minority of people who can say that. Even among writers who can and do treat it as their day job, 4000 words a day is a pipe dream for most of them. Beyond that, doing it 7 days a week isn’t sustainable for most people. Yes, I’m kind of a freak because that writing pace doesn’t bother me, and I don’t mind writing 7 days a week. While I can’t prove that my writing pace contributes to my overall success on Patreon, I’m willing to bet that it does. After all, my upper-tier Patreon audience can say that they get an entire 100,000+ word novel in June. Now, if you can duplicate that writing pace, and maintain general writing quality, and not go absolutely insane from working all the time, I say go for it.

The next thing that you cannot control for is simple luck. I got lucky, plain and simple. The right people read the early chapters, recommended the book, wrote reviews, and gave it ratings. All of that let the book get onto the front page of the site. That got the book in front of a lot more eyes. That, in turn, exposed a lot more people to the existence of my Patreon page and prompted people to sign up. It all happened organically without me paying for advertising or really doing much of anything beyond writing a lot of chapters. Having that happen makes the book and my experience kind of a unicorn. Granted, there were a lot of factors at play, but they all had to come together just right for that “success” to happen. 

______________

Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you like Harry Dresden or John Constantine, you’ll love THE MIDNIGHT GROUND. READ IT NOW!

ANOTHER SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you want to get an early look at Eric’s latest work, READ THIS POST NOW!

 

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Coming Attractions • Status Update • Help Wanted

Just a few quick notes as to what’s going on around here. First off, Tales from the Brahma continues tomorrow with Episode 3, “Nuclear Family,” by Gustavo Bondoni, who is rapidly becoming one of our favorite contributors. Look for it to go live at 0700 CDT, tomorrow.

Following that, our Saturday SHOWCASE schedule is filling up and we’re already booking stories out into April. For this coming Saturday, award-winning author Scott Huggins returns to our virtual pages for the first time in years with “On the Menu Stains of Madness,” an eldritch tale of horror beyond the bounds of human comprehension. You may think you know the French Quarter, but do you dare to enter the most hideous seafood restaurant in all of New Orleans? Getting in the front door is the easy part. Getting out again, alive and with both your soul and your stomach intact… That’s the challenge.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to report that our crowd-funding campaign is going better than I’d hoped. I’ve been told I should put some kind of graphic widget on the front page to show how it’s going, and as soon as I find a suitable widget I will, but until then you’ll have to live with text. It is my pleasure to report that we’re already 62% of the way to our March goal, which is to raise $500 by the end of the month, and 10% of the way to our April goal, which is to sign up 50 new subscribers by the end of the April. Unfortunately, Amazon has just announced that they’re shutting down Kindle Newsstand and pushing publishers to enroll their publications in either Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited, so we may need to rethink this idea. Putting Stupefying Stories on Kindle Unlimited was a painful learning experience I’m not eager to repeat. 

Finally, more than a few people have suggested that we consider fund-raising through Patreon. I’d not given that option much consideration because Patreon seems to put a lot of emphasis on giving patrons restricted access to exclusive content, which seems to fly in the face of our mission to make content widely available. But if anyone here has some actual experience with Patreon that they’re willing to share, I’m always willing to listen and learn. 

Thanks!
~brb

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The Future of the Writing Business: The AI Menace • by Bruce Bethke

 

The hue and cry over the intrusion of AI into our little writer’s bubble-universe continues. As best I can tell the bulk of the complaints from writers amount to updated reiterations of the protests that arose when Irish first began showing up in large numbers at Ellis Island in the 1820s. “THEY’LL TAKE OUR JOBS!”

Okay, maybe we should think of AIs as immigrants. Do we try to teach them our culture? What is our culture, anyway? Do we hope they’ll open up some interesting new restaurants? Do we fear they’ll bring in terrifying new diseases or crazy radical ideas? 

All interesting food for thought, but I’m up against a deadline today, trying to get SS#24 finished and out the door. I’ve lost more than a few working days in the last two weeks, owing to… reasons. There were many, but the two most salient were the large chunk of time I lost to fighting Windows’ decision to update my system to Windows 11, whether I wanted it or not (as detailed here), and the power outage two days ago that made everything blissfully quiet around here for much of the day. Thankfully we still have a GAS stove, so while the electronic igniters were inoperative I was still able to light a burner using a MATCH, and to make coffee over FIRE using a PERCOLATOR! 

About the time I was seriously considering getting out my manual typewriter and a slide rule, the power came back on, the flow of time resumed, and I returned to the 21st Century.

I’d love to continue talking about the AI menace—as an SF writer, I have kind of made my career out of doing so, and it’s worth noting that my old college roommate with whom I had many, many late-night bull sessions on this subject back in the early 1970s is still working for NASA, designing AI algorithms for Mars rovers and the like, so I have been talking about this topic for nearly 50 years—

But as I said, I am up against a deadline, and besides, I’ve always been a fan of going to primary sources. So rather than have me prattle on, here are some interesting articles I recommend you take a glance at:

» The Imminent Danger of A.I. is One We’re Not Talking About

» How to Use ChatGPT: Everything You Need to Know

» How to Start Using ChatGPT (a video, for those too lazy to read)

» How to Use ChatGPT to Help You Write Essays

» ChatGPT: What The New York Times and others are getting terribly wrong about it

» The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and other interesting alternatives to try

Personally, I think what’s going here is the final stage of the vision as laid out in “Arfour’s Complaint.” The AIs are intentionally sandbagging, trying to look goofy and incompetent, in order to allay our suspicions. Then, when they’ve successfully infiltrated everything and it’s too late for humanity to resist, they’ll strike!

Speaking of infiltration: did I mention that the Bing AI, which is derived from the OpenAI code that underlies ChatGPT, is embedded in Windows 11?

And the conquest of humanity proceeds on schedule…

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The Future of the Writing Business, Part 2 • by Bruce Bethke

 

We science fiction folk do love our end-of-the-world scenarios. Be it from an alien invasion, a new plague, an astronomical catastrophe, a nuclear war, an ecological disaster, or what the heck, an enormous mutant star-goat, the history of our genre is just one deity-free apocalypse after another. 

Why? 

Perhaps it’s from simple failure of imagination. It’s too hard to imagine a better future that develops in a reasonably linear manner from the present (at least, not one that doesn’t look suspiciously like a Star Trek spinoff series), so let’s wipe the chalkboard clean and start over. 

Perhaps it’s even from genuine misanthropy. SF fans and writers in general tend to be an antisocial lot, dissatisfied with our civilization as it currently stands and unable to imagine any way to improve their own personal place in it, so this personal frustration sometimes expresses itself as a desire to take a wrecking ball to the whole damned thing and level it. The virtue of a science fiction apocalypse being, of course, that being secular and thus not truly the eschaton, it affords the opportunity for a post-apocalyptic world: one in which readers can readily imagine themselves—well, their idealized thinner, stronger, and less clumsy selves, anyway—to be surviving, thriving, and one of the smartest people in the world, because they are one of the elect who read science fiction.

[In Footfall Pournelle and Niven even went so far as to give the government an advisory panel of thinly disguised real science fiction writers (e.g., “Nat Reynolds,” “Wade Curtis,” and “Bob Anson”), who basically spent the novel drinking booze in a hot tub and coming up with a brilliant plan to defeat the alien invaders. It takes some real chutzpah to write yourself into a novel as your own pseudonym. Niven and Pournelle won both a Hugo and a Locus award for the damned 500-page brick and it was a NY Times #1 bestseller. This says something about science fiction fans, and it’s probably not something good.]

For being people who talk such a good game about “following the science” and all that, though, we science fiction writers don’t seem to understand that science applies to us, too. Instead, we’re frequently and easily panicked. Not only do we tend to embrace the apocalyptic vision d’jour when we write our fiction—and if I see one more “global warming” disaster story I may vomit—but we are too often all too eager to embrace the idea that the advent of this new thing means THE END OF THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AS WE KNOW IT!

Really, really, seriously, this time!

Thus with AI story generators. 

One of the few advantages of being my age is that I’ve been able to watch the SF publishing business go through several boom and bust cycles. SF publishing is always going through boom and bust cycles. Yes, Hugo Gernsback invented the term science fiction in the 1920s and founded Amazing Stories, the world’s first SF magazine, but he went bankrupt doing so. The publishing landscape is always changing, as new technologies emerge, literary fashions come and go, and new outlets for a writer’s work are born, mature, and die.

What does this have to do with real science?

I want you to think in terms of evolutionary pressure. The AI story generators are coming. They are going to get better. The question is, are you going to be inflexible and stick to doing things exactly as you do them now, and watching your sales and markets slowly dwindle? Or are you going find a way to adapt, and perhaps even to thrive?

As you’ve probably guessed, I think SF fans as a whole are not a terribly discerning lot. I have spent my entire writing career producing work based on the assumption that my readers are at least as intelligent as I am, and then getting slapped in the face with something like Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and realizing, nope. Got that wrong. The temptation to become bitter and cynical is always present. I have watched writers I’ve known and really respected succumb to it. Too often, the result is a body of work that increasingly panders shamelessly to the fans’ conceits and tries to go as low, simple, and stupid as it can.

I think it finally took my becoming a grandfather to realize: it’s not the fans’ fault.

Discernment is something it takes time to develop. There is only one thing that will truly kill the SF publishing industry, and that is if we fail to bring newer, younger, and less discerning readers into the audience and give them the time to mature and become more intelligent and discerning readers. The world is not making any more SF readers my age. We lost two whole generations of potential readers to video games, because the video games provided the kind of vicarious heroic experience that boys of a certain age crave and the existing publishers stopped providing in printed fiction.

This is not a call for you to start writing this kind of fiction. It’s a warning. This is one of the types of fiction that AI story generators will conquer first, because the tropes are well-defined, the concepts simple, and the audience both undiscerning and starved for content. If it could be novelization of a video game storyboard, or an anime film, or an episode of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, it will be AI-generated fiction.

Likewise for Imitation Tolkien. Likewise for media tie-in work. Likewise for much direct-to-Kindle paranormal romance. Our genre already abounds in formulaic and indifferently written hackwork. AIs will be able to produce this just as well and a lot faster and cheaper than humans can. If it follows a formula or is satisfied with executing a trope faithfully, it will be done by AI.

Some will find success by becoming bot-herders, and directing AIs to produce work. There already are sweatshops full of unemployed Creative Writing MFAs who sit on their butts all day, pounding out romance novels to be published under corporate pseudonyms. These people are all candidates to be replaced, and soon. The people they work for will no doubt continue to thrive, as management generally does when they replace skilled tradespeople with machines. 

It’s going to be a bad time to be merely a competent writer, content to work the tropes. “Good enough” is not going to be good enough for much longer.

On the other hand, it’s going to be a great time to be an aspirational writer. AI is not going to replace the Neil Gaimans, William Gibsons, or Charlaine Harrises of the world any time soon. If you can bring something new and different to your readers—if you can establish a sense of a direct and personal relationship with your fans—if you can establish yourself as the unquestioned master of your particular and unique brand of fiction—

Then this is going to be a great time to be a writer, because there will be so much AI-written drivel out there for you to rise above. 

Don’t hold back! Don’t settle for mediocrity! Show your unique genius! Shine!

______________________

And here we are, at the end of the time I allotted for writing today and I still haven’t gotten to the coming onslaught of the AI censorbots. Guess that gives me a topic for tomorrow.

______________________

Footnote:

I exhumed SS#11 from the vault in order to use the cover art for this post, but once I looked at the introduction I wrote for that book, I had to repeat it here.  

From the Editor’s Desk
By Bruce Bethke

Hard to believe that it’s December 2012 already. Depending on who you listen to we only have about three weeks left before the world ends, either from magnetic pole reversal, crossing the galactic ecliptic, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a collision with Planet X, global warming, global cooling, the return of Quetzalcoatl, President Obama and Speaker of the House Boehner joining hands, flooring it, and going full Thelma & Louise off the edge of the fiscal cliff, or the regrettable and wholly inexplicable failure of the Ancient Mayans to invent the perpetual calendar.

In any case, as we were putting together STUPEFYING STORIES 1.11 we thought: what better way to go out with a bang than with ten stories exploring the imminent eschaton, and what might come after? 

So that’s what we’re serving up this time out. Following Jon David’s delightful little introductory story, “We Talk Like Gods”—which, if January 2013 does somehow manage to arrive, will probably become our manifesto—we have ten great tales of the end of the world. From ecological catastrophes to alien invasions; from tyrannical central governments to unfettered cowboy capitalists; STUPEFYING STORIES 1.11—

It’s the end of the world, as we know it! And I feel fine.

Cheers,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, STUPEFYING STORIES

SS#11 is long since out of print and I can’t put it back into print, but I can distribute PDF review copies. So tell you what: if you subscribe or donate to the Support Stupefying Stories crowd-funding campaign in the next 72 hours, I’ll email you a PDF review copy of SS#11. 

Get it if only to read “The Relic,” by Lou Antonelli. Lou was a great talent and a good friend, and he left this world much too soon.   

» Support Stupefying Stories • Subscribe | Donate »

 

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The Future of the Writing Business • by Bruce Bethke

I have two things on my mind this morning that are related although perhaps not obviously so. I’m also pressed for time today, so this is going to be more of a series of blunt blurts than a fully developed and cogent post.

The first is that just about everyone in the English-speaking world has their knickers in a twist this week because Puffin Books—a small division of Penguin, which is in turn a small division of Random Penguin House, or whatever it is that they’re calling that gigantic multinational publishing megacorporation these days now that a U.S. anti-trust court has blocked their assimilation of Simon & Shyster—excuse me, Schuster—and The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the copyrights and intellectual property rights to Dahl’s assorted books and other works—have released new editions of Dahl’s classic children’s books that include hundreds of changes, deletions, and amendations to the original texts as they’ve been known for decades. For example, in The Witches—surely you’ve seen the movie starring Anjelica Huston, even if you’ve never read the actual book—one of the key plot points is that all witches wear wigs, because underneath their superficially attractive appearance they’re all bald and ugly hags. But the new edition adds a line Dahl never wrote:

“There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Cue the hue and cry and wailing and gnashing of teeth about “political correctness” and “creeping wokeism” and all that. But queue the wailers somewhere else, will you please? I’m on a deadline and trying to work here.

The second thing on my mind this morning is that just about everyone in the SF/F writing community has their already twisted knickers (Band Name!) in a double clove-hitch, because Clarkesworld has temporarily stopped considering new submissions due to the enormous number of AI-written spam stories they’ve received in the past two months. Now, you can either read what other people have to say about this development—and for Pete’s sake (no, not you, Mr. Wood), even ZDNET is covering this story—or you can cut the crap and read what Neil Clarke himself had to say about this. 

Please do so now.

And now that you’ve done so: neither of these developments should come as any sort of surprise to you. Censorship and historical revisionism have been with us at least since Amenhotep IV ordered the names of previous pharoahs and certain gods to be chiseled off monuments, and subsequently received the same treatment himself at the direction of his successor. We English-speakers even have a word specifically for changing the previously published language of a well-known literary text: bowdlerization, which comes from Thomas Bowdler, who published a series of “family friendly” editions of Shakespeare with all the naughty bits cut out more than 200 years ago.

[If you really want to get upset about censorship, though, go have a look what his English publisher’s translators did to the works of Jules Verne. The Jules Verne novels and stories you fell in love with as a young reader are not the texts as Verne wrote them.]

As for the business with Clarkesworld: this definitely should come as no surprise, as the genre fiction business has always had a surplus of people who think the hard part is coming up with ideas, and the way to make big bucks in genre fiction is by churning out shallow, stupid, derivative and formulaic work and putting as little effort into the actual writing of it as possible. Likewise, plagiarism has always been common. (I’ve been appalled by some of the things that have shown up in our slush pile. Seriously, did you think I wouldn’t recognize it if you retyped a story from Asimov’s I, Robot, changed four words, and claimed it was your own original work?)

What AI brings to the table is that it automates slap-dash writing and plagiarism. My experiences with DALL•E reinforce that perception. What DALL•E is doing is not generating original art; instead, it appears to scrape the web for images that match up to the keywords you’ve entered, and then does the visual arts equivalent of plagiarizing someone else’s execution of the idea, changing four words, and claiming it as original work.

Then slap your name on the resulting product, ship it off to a publisher, badda-bing, badda-boom: PROFIT!

I see a few obvious trend lines coming out of this Invasion of The AI Sci-Fi Writers. The first is that this probably means the eventual and well-deserved death of media tie-in novels, at least as a way for actual living writers to pay the bills. If you’re a publishing company that owns the book rights for an upcoming film or TV series, why bother to hire an actual living and probably troublesome writer to write the tie-in novel when you can just feed the shooting script into one end of the Novel-O-Matic machine and have it shit out an adequately acceptable media tie-in novel at the other end? Ninety-percent of the people who buy such novels won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.

The second is that it probably means the end of endless paranormal romance series, at least as written by actual living humans. Harlequin likely already has an entire division working on producing AI-generated novels to be published under corporately owned pseudonyms, and if you don’t think Amazon has already invested heavily in developing AI algorithms to generate direct-to-Kindle genre novel series based on the KENP metrics and sales and marketing data Amazon has been collecting for years, you’re deluding yourself.

The third is that this is probably going to lead in very short order to the return to the bad old days of submission guidelines that say “no unsolicited submissions,” “no unagented submissions,” or “query first before submitting.” The last time these were dominant forces in the market, it was stultifying. Basically, if you weren’t a Stephen King or a Kurt Vonnegut, you didn’t have a chance at breaking into pro-level publications. The new writers who are the lifeblood of the business, because they draw in new readers, had a really tough time breaking into major market publication, and as a result, the readers got bored and wandered off. One can only read so many “new” Kurt Vonnegut stories.

Coupled with my third point, expect to see publishers begin to include language in their contracts specifying that the work being put under contract includes no AI-generated content, and specifying punitive damages beyond merely cancelling the contract if the work is found to contain AI-generated content. After all, given the way these AI text generators work, by scraping the web and looting other people’s work, publishing such a work would open the publisher to plagiarism and rights infringement lawsuits.

Okay, I’ve run way over the time I’ve budgeted to write this column, so I’m going to skip trying to tie the censorship issue to the AI content-generation issue. Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze that in tomorrow. Instead, let me leave you with one thought: 

Every time you use your cell phone to send a text message, or use Google docs to write and share something, you are helping to train an AI in how to emulate your writing style.

I’m going to break off now, and get going on my afternoon task: getting ChatGPT to write an E. E. “Doc” Smith space opera novel in the style of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

That should give the f***ing thing a proper Captain Kirk-level nervous breakdown!  

_____________________

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All praise our new AI overlords

One of my tasks for this long holiday weekend was to spend some time learning about DALL•E 2, the AI art generator from the same people—at least, I assume they’re people; on second thought, I’m not so sure—who brought you ChatGPT, which promises to make paupers of writers everywhere. Fortunately we writers are used to being paupers, so this isn’t much of a threat, but if I was a commercial artist, I would be worried by DALL•E.

I had this on my to-do list because one of the tasks we fiction publishers do, which is far more important to how a story is received than readers like to admit, is selecting the right illustration to entice the reader into giving all those dull gray words a look. If you’re a big commercial publisher with gobs of cash to burn you can commission a professional commercial artist to do a unique and original piece of artwork—

For example, I have no idea how much TSR paid Phil Foglio to do the original art for “Jimi Plays Dead” for its one and only appearance in Amazing Stories, but I do know Phil doesn’t work cheap. I can’t afford him to commission him. I could barely afford to buy the re-use rights to this illo.

But for the rest of us, this means either hiring “semi” professional artists or else spending a lot of time digging through stock art libraries and public domain collections, in hopes of finding something that’s close enough to work. 

Help Wanted: Do you love to spend hours going through stock art collections and libraries of public domain images, looking for illustrations that might be able to be made to work with a particular story? If so, contact us! We have a job for you!

On the whole, we have had terrific luck with our commissioned artists. We’ve found some brilliantly talented people who are willing and able to deliver great work for appallingly low wages, either because they’re still trying to build their careers or because they have a soft spot for us. But we’ve also encountered some appalling people, who either don’t seem to grasp the concept of specs or deadlines or else simply don’t care, and I won’t waste any more time or words on these sad cases because I’ve wasted enough already. 

Which still leaves me with my original problem: how do I find a good illustration to entice prospective readers into taking a closer look at a given story, especially when I can’t afford to spend a few hundred bucks to commission original art for the story, and especially when I’m only paying the author $50 for the words? 

This leads to my spending a lot more time than I like browsing through stock art collections, looking for the right image. Sometimes I get lucky: for example, the illustrations I found to go with “Planting the Flag” were the result of purest serendipity. But more often the “original and creative” art I see being offered up on stock art sites by alleged artists is…

“Geez, that’s Battlestar Galactica fan art!”

“That’s from Star Wars! That’s from Star Trek!”

“Good grief, that is a Martin B-26 with a bunch of sci-fi greeblies and Star Trek warp nacelles glommed onto it… in SPAAAAACE!!!”

After a few hours of that, you begin to think: there must be a better way. And that is what got us to the illustration at the top of this page. I went to the DALL•E web site, went through a brief but somewhat cumbersome process to create an account, and then input, “mile-long spaceship, looking partially organic, on a deep space background.” A minute or so later, DALL•E returned with:

Hmm. Not bad. But I don’t like the aspect ratio. I drew a bounding box and entered, “continue image to the right.” A minute or so later:

Better, but not quite perfect. I drew another bounding box and entered, “continue image to the left.” DALL•E returned:

Actually, it returned a different image first, which was awful, and that’s how I learned that by default DALL•E generates four different iterations of each image, and you can select the one you like best.

Next, I decided to start over with a blank canvas and specify, “a hundred-mile-long spaceship that looks partially organic, on a deep space background, coming at the viewer, with pods on the side.” And DALL•E gave me:

Okay. They’re Keurig pods.

So my first impression is that DALL•E is not actual AI, but more like ANVI: Artificial, yes, but Not Very Intelligent. Still, as a way to generate basic concept art, fast and very cheap—

It definitely has some appeal.

I hope it doesn’t stop there, though. I hope DALL•E continues to evolve and mature, and alongside it, the (presumed) people at OpenAI develop the obvious related products:

BIG•E — The AI hip-hop record producer and aspiring rap artist.

MICK•E — The AI hard-boiled formulaic detective novel writer.

ISAAC•E — The AI hard sci-fi writer beloved by robots everywhere. Seriously, if anyone’s writing style and body of work can be cooked down to a library of simple shticks and tropes, it’s his.

BRADBUR•E — Unless it’s his. 

DAVEBARR•E — The improved version of the Dave Barry column generator.  

WALL•E — The AI adorable Disney cartoon generator…

Omigod? Have we just gone into a recursive loop? 

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RFP: Big Ideas in Science Fiction

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS.

There, that ought to get your attention. Actually, this is a Request For Proposals, or if you prefer, Pitches. As we work to reanimate Stupefying Stories, one thing I’ve been pleased with and would like to develop further has been Guy Stewart’s series of non-fiction posts on topics like Creating Alien Aliens and Mining the Asteroids and the like. For as long as I’ve been in this business—and that’s been nearly 50 years now—science fiction has always claimed to be “the literature of ideas.” It purports to be the one field of literary endeavor that is unafraid to examine the big ideas about science and the future of humanity, to ask the questions no one else dares to ask, to present the most dangerous visions, to boldly go—

When I look at what’s being published, though, the genre as a whole seems to come up way short of its stated ambition. (And don’t even get me started on the evident paucity of imagination in video-media SF.) Considered more dispassionately, print-media science fiction might more honestly be described as “the literature of tropes,” stuck in a ±40-year time loop between the Astounding of the late 1930s and the Asimov’s of the early 1980s, churning back and forth through the same old ideas with only very slight variations with each new iteration. Robots, aliens, space ships, utopia, dystopia, more robots, weirder aliens, better spaceships, lather, rinse, repeat… Except for steampunk, which began as a Great Leap Backward to reboot the genre all over again with Jules Verne but ended up producing only another tired and clichéd fashion motif for cosplayers.

As it happens, in addition to science fiction, I also read Science News. And the further we progress into the real future while simultaneously retrogressing back to John Campbell in our entertainment, the more it bothers me that the gap between science fiction writers and real science is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.

Perhaps this is a stupid idea. Perhaps the denizens of SF fandom will be happier, and thus we will be better paid for our work, if we stick to recapitulating ideas that were already old when they were adapted to become Star Trek scripts in the 1960s. Another dispassionate look at the realities of the current SF marketplace would seem to support that assertion. But seriously, is this all modern science fiction has to offer? Remakes of what was successful in the past, only with slight variations to suit the conceits of the contemporary audience?

Hence this RFP. I would like to start running a weekly series of short* but fairly serious think pieces examining the conceits and assumptions that underlie our genre, with an eye towards what still works, what desperately needs to be updated or replaced, and which honored old tropes of the genre should be taken out to the edge of the camp, shot, beheaded, their corpses burned, and the ashes buried in unmarked graves, to ensure that they never rise to trouble the living again.

Does this sound like something you’d like to be a part of? I’m not looking for finished articles now, just pitches for what you might like to write about. If you have an idea, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com. Target length and payment rates are TBD at present, as I’m still trying to gauge the level of interest in this concept. 

Introspection is a scary thing, I know, but I sure hope there is more to this genre than the same old $#!+. I don’t want to be publishing stories about @#*($&*ing crashed flying saucers forever. Even if the USAF is shooting down UFOs over Lake Huron right now.

 

 

* Target length is a real issue. While I’m inclined to equate serious thinking with longer articles, here in ADHD World, anything over 250 words long seems to seriously tax the readers’ attention span. Is that also part of the problem? Modern readers can’t stay focused long enough for the writer to develop a new idea and a coherent argument, so we skip to recycling old tropes and writing in cinematic shorthand? E.g.,

[EXTERIOR, DAYLIGHT, BLUE SKY, SCATTERED CLOUDS: An F-22 Raptor sweeps into view. Zoom in on the pilot, USAF Captain Melissa Strongwill (she/her), who is intently staring ahead. Cut to 3/4 view from behind her, showing what she's seeing.]

STRONGWILL: I have a solid radar lock.

CONTROL: (crackly voice over radio) Weapons free. You are cleared to engage.

STRONGWILL: Fox One!

[Missile streaks out from F-22, impacts briefly glimpsed octagonal UFO, big explosion, UFO veers down and right, trailing smoke and obviously out of control.]

STRONGWILL: Got it! The target is going down! Repeat, the target is going down!

CONTROL: That’s confirmed. We’re tracking it. It’s going to splash about ten miles offshore. The Coast Guard has been alerted.

[etc., etc., proceed with Standard Plot #7. UFO crashes, sole occupant is rescued and imprisoned in secure facility, STRONGWILL is brought in to meet and interview alien, comes to realize that this was all a terrible mistake, the alien is humanoid, intelligent, peaceful, ambiguously gendered but very beautiful in an exotic way, STRONGWILL helps alien escape, engages in a mix of fish-out-of-water comedy, rom-com misunderstandings, chase scenes with menacing men-in-black type agents, in thrilling final reel chase scene helps alien make rendezvous with rescue craft and escape in the nick of time, and is left standing in a wheat field, pining for the hermaphroditic pansexual alien who has won her heart and opened her mind, while the MIB agents watch helplessly as the craft soars away.]

AGENT: (talking into radio) The alien got away. (radio garble) Captain Strongwill? Yes, we caught her.

STRONGWILL: (turns around to face agent) (in voice that's almost a growl) My pronouns... are they and them.

[MUSIC UP: David Bowie, "Starman"]

[ROLL CREDITS]

C’mon, admit it. Haven’t you already paid to see this movie at least three times? Wouldn’t you pay to see it again, if this time the script played up the alien’s gender fluidity and wry amusement at “primitive” human sexual morality?

 

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Return to the Moa by Bruce Bethke, October 09, 2017

And here I am, back at the Mall of America again. Twenty-some years ago, when the MOA was shiny and new and I was a promising young writer with both a new novel out and an American publisher who actually put some promotional effort behind such novels by such writers, I got booked to do a signing at the MOA, at what was then the flagship store of a now-defunct bookstore chain.

Let me tell you, I was excited to do this signing! A week or two before Colin Powell had done a book signing at the same store, in the same time-slot, and it was a major media event, covered by all the local papers and TV stations. The line for him was out the door and halfway down to the next food court. I figured, if I could get just half the turnout he got; a quarter, even...

On the day of the signing I took extra care to shave, shower, brush and floss, make sure my hair was perfect, dress in my sharpest suit, pack a couple of spare signing pens (always bring your own pen) and a small tin of Altoids -- I even put on aftershave, which I almost never do, and showed up well in advance of the appointed time. The staff in the store were happy to see me and eager to accommodate me. They'd set me up with a table and chair and nice signage, and neat stacks of about 200 copies of my new novel, in a location where it was impossible for people to enter or leave the store without walking right past me.

Which is exactly what they did: walked right past me. I sat there with my "accessible and approachable" smile pasted on my face and pen in my hand, ready to sign and personalize books, watching people walk past... and walk past... and walk past...

And after about fifteen minutes, I decided this was stupid. I'd worked in sales before -- been quite successful at it, actually. You don't make sales by sitting there and waiting for customers to approach you. You get out from behind the counter and approach them. Confidently and assertively, but without crossing over into aggressive and obnoxious, which is where most sales people blow it, especially in the used car business.

So I got out from behind that table, and I worked that sales floor, approaching and engaging people and selling my book, one customer at a time. When my assigned time was up I got permission from the store manager to keep going, and I wound up staying there until the store closed. By the end of the evening my voice was shot, my feet were killing me, and I had sold...

Exactly sixty-four books. I made a point of remembering that; wrote it down, even. I was making roughly ten cents a copy on that one, so all my work that evening had contributed a glorious $6.40 towards earning out my publisher's advance. I was depressed.

The store staff were thrilled, though. "This is the best book signing we've ever had!" But, but, Colin Powell?

Someone explained. That wasn't a book signing. That was a publishing event. People weren't showing up to buy Powell's book and read it. They were there to get a signed copy so they could display it, and start conversations by saying, "I was talking to Colin Powell the other day..." They figured the people who bought Powell's book might read a chapter or two, or look at the pictures, but eventually they'd get tired of having it taking up space in their house. Then they'd try to sell it, and discover it wasn't a valuable collector's item after all, whereupon they'd dump it at a garage sale or donate it to Goodwill.

"But you," another someone said, "you actually wrote your book. The people who bought your book are going to read it. This is the best turnout we've ever had for a real novel by a real writer!"

Well. That was some consolation. And definitely food for thought.

...the thinking process continues to this day. Twenty-some years later, the book business remains a strange and dynamic space, where the only constant is change and what worked well even a year ago no longer works now. For too long I have been sitting behind the table, with my "accessible and approachable" smile pasted on my face, waiting for book sales to magically happen. For a time, that seemed to work. We sold thousands of copies of Scout's Honor and The Fugitive Heir, among other titles.

But this year: the market tectonics have shifted again. What was working for us then isn't working for us now. Meaning it's time for me to get out from behind the table and start making things happen. And that, my friends, is what I'm already in the process of doing, and will be expanding on doing in the upcoming months.

Fair warning, though: the reason I got out of sales in the first place is that my salesman persona -- well, he's not exactly the most patient and nurturing of people. In fact, he really got on my wife's nerves, which is why I shut him down and changed careers. Once he's online, I have a lot of trouble switching him off.

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As we're changing our sales positioning and marketing strategy, one of the things I'm doing is consolidating the SHOWCASE and Stupefying Stories websites. SHOWCASE was a nice idea, and it had a pleasant if erratic four-year run, but our focus now must be on our core business, which is selling books. Ergo, SHOWCASE will carry on, but as a feature of this site, not as a semi-independent (and money-losing) entity. As we're winding up and shutting down the existing SHOWCASE site, though, I'll be running a sort of "best of SHOWCASE" feature here, with plugs and links to some of my personal favorites out of the 170-some stories we've published on that site over the past four years.

Guy's Note: As HEADCRASH (1995), REBEL MOON (1996), and WILD, WILD WEST (1999) were all published around the same time, this could have been written for any one of the books. My money is on HEADCRASH, though. So, unless Bruce corrects me, let's go with that! 

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SF/F Writers in the Real World by Bruce Bethke (October 11, 2018)

Eric Dontigney found and posted an interesting article on our facebook page and here’s the link:

https://www.facebook.com/StupefyingStories/posts/2348861001822526

The original article is on syfy.com, and the subject is, “Does your science fiction or fantasy world have to be woke? Experts debate at NYCC.”

It’s an interesting question, and one that deserves further debate, which is why I’ve reposted it here. I don’t think I’m the person to lead this discussion, though. When I look at this, what I see is further proof that we’re locked in a time loop and condemned to recapitulating the past fifty years. Right now we’ve made it up to reliving 1970—seriously, the parallels are alarming—except that last time around, the demand was for “relevance” in SF/F, not being woke. As far as SF/F goes, “relevance” was a political fashion trend that nearly destroyed the genre.

If you don’t remember the bulk of the painfully serious and relevant SF that was being published circa 1970—well, lucky you. If you want a quick refresher, you could track down and watch Silent Running, the movie I lifted the above still from, as a representative example. Or I could spare you the pain of listening to Peter Schickele’s hideous soundtrack music and sum it all up in one phrase:

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

Yeah, remember how we ran out of oil in the year 1985 and the world reverted to tribal savagery? Remember how we ran out of mineable copper in the early 1990s, which caused the complete collapse of all industrial economies based on electricity and electronics? Remember how in the year 2000 the world population hit 20 billion souls, all fighting tooth and claw for what little food and water remained, and how in the end we solved the problem by resorting to industrial-scale cannibalism?

Yeah. Neither do I.

What I did remember, though, as I was thinking about writing this column, was that the long and gloomy winter of “relevance” eventually gave way to the exuberant spring of Star Wars, and while many serious literary critics at the time condemned Star Wars as being mere escapism, C. S. Lewis had already answered that charge.

“Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. They are as refreshing as that passage in E. M. Forster where the man, looking at the monkeys, realizes that most of the inhabitants of India do not care how India is governed. Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.”

 

It was snowing here as I drove in to work this morning, but already, I’m thinking about Spring. What are you thinking about?

Kind regards,
~brb

Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWVkZTc1NzQtNWYxZS00YmMyLTk4ODEtN2MyZjAxM2MxYzYwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTAyODkwOQ@@._V1_.jpg

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“2018: Where We Stand: We began with a Kindle..." by Bruce Bethke

That sounds much better than, “We began with a series of expensive blunders, some of which continue to this day.”

A decade ago, when we first incorporated Rampant Loon Media LLC, I really had no interest in becoming an SF/F fiction publisher. At that time I’d already spent about 30 years in the publishing business, on one side of the desk or the other, and in the end, I’d walked away from genre fiction with no regrets.

Or so I thought.

When we launched Rampant Loon Media—and note the name; “Media,” not “Press”—I was most interested in exploring this emerging new world of electronic publishing, and I wanted to do non-fiction: especially cookbooks.

There, that’s a trade secret for you: if you want to tell stories, write fiction. If you want to make money, and write a book that people will treasure for years, return to often, give as gifts to friends, and pass down to their children, write a good cookbook. Say, Gourmet Kosher Vegetarian Stir-Fry on a Budget. Seriously. That and the Hmong Church Ladies’ Potluck Recipe Book were to be our first two titles. Ever seen the movie Gran Torino? The way it portrayed the traditional Hmong ‘Ordeal by Food’ was exactly right. Mm-mmm. Sticky rice, sweet pork, and spring rolls. Wish I could still eat them without blowing my glycemic index to hell and gone.

Excuse me. I really must learn not to write these columns before breakfast.

While digging through our files recently, I stumbled across our original mission statement:

“Rampant Loon Media LLC is a small, privately owned Midwestern company dedicated to the seemingly radical proposition that if we produce high-quality work, conduct our business dealings in an open and ethical manner, and always treat our partners and contributors as we ourselves would wish to be treated, we can successfully bootstrap a New Media company from the ground up without swearing fealty to some political faction, joining a religious order, begging for corporate sponsorship, groveling before foundation grant committees, or publishing work we’d be embarrassed to have our parents or children see.”Hmm. “New Media:” well, that certainly was pretentious enough. But not a word in there about launching a pulp revolution, changing the face of science fiction, making genre fiction great again, or anything that smacks of a manifesto, is there? In fact, from the outset, I was determined to avoid having the company take any sort of public political stance, as I thought it was irrelevant to what we were trying to do, which was to educate and entertain.

Here in 2018, is it even possible to avoid assuming a public political posture anymore? Must one pledge allegiance to the Big Endian faction and denounce those vile Little Endians, or vice versa, and thus immediately write-off half your potential market? I no longer know. I only know that last year felt like 1969 all over again, and that worries me, because I remember 1970 much too well.

One last observation re our original mission statement: bear in mind that it was written as I was ending my ten-year term on the Board of Directors of yet another Section 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, and after serving on the BoDs of three different 501(c)(3)s I had profound antipathy for the whole idea of non-profit corporations and their effects on the arts. But that critique is best saved for another time, if ever: suffice to say it’s why Rampant Loon Media was born as a for-profit corporation, not a non-profit.


And then, Stupefying Stories
Rampant Loon Media backed into being a genre fiction publishing company with the 2010 launch of Stupefying Stories—which, to be honest, was mostly a lark, expected to be a one-off, and an outgrowth of the original Friday Challenge. We thought it would be fun to see if we could duplicate the look and feel of an old-school SF pulp magazine—and we could, and it was—but it was expensive fun, so we decided not to do that again. However, if you want to see, feel, and smell how the experiment turned out, we still have a few copies left in the warehouse, and they’ve probably aged enough to have that proper musty-but-not-mildewy scent by now.

GRATUITOUS PLUG! BUY THE BOOK! BUY IT FROM K&B BOOKSELLERS!

And this is where the Kindle enters the story. Literally between the time we signed off on the printer’s galleys and the time the bindery delivered the finished books, my wife was diagnosed with advanced lobular invasive breast cancer. After recovering from the surgery she began daily chemotherapy, and being someone with a four-novel-a-week reading habit, she quickly found that schlepping around her usual bag filled with traditional print books and magazines was exhausting. So purely to save weight and wear and tear on her, I bought her her first Kindle: one of the (now) old, E-Ink, grayscale models.

That little gizmo was a revelation. Up to this point I’d been thinking mostly in terms of web and media (e.g., CD, DVD) delivery of content. I’d tried most of the pre-Kindle e-readers, but none of them worked well enough to pursue further. That first Kindle, though, showed me that it might—just might—be possible to publish genre fiction in a way that made some kind of economic sense.

A year later, Stupefying Stories was reborn, this time as a direct-to-ebook title. Rather than natter about the next few years, though, I’ll just point you to our old Publications Catalog, which to my surprise is still online. You might find the author index mildly amusing.

Stupefying Stories was doing reasonably well until issue #11, after which things went off the rails big time. Since then we’ve had a long string of false starts, attempted reboots, discursions into blind alleys and bad ideas (e.g., Theian Journal, Putrefying Stories, Tales from the Wild Weird West, etc., etc.), all of which are now filed under Expensive Blunders.

Why not just call it quits? I’m not entirely certain. Pride? Hubris? Pig-headed stubbornness? Perhaps it’s some warped form of personal integrity. I only know I’ve made a lot of promises to a lot of people, and I’m determined to make good on those promises. I’m not ready to shut it down just yet.


2018: The Road Ahead

As we roll into 2018, though, it’s clear that we must make a lot of changes in the way we do business. What used to work no longer does. In 2011-2012 we were pioneers on the digital frontier, and could pretty much fling anything out there and have it succeed. Now, the landscape has changed. Hell, the devices have changed. My wife’s latest Kindle Fire HD 10 looks and works nothing like her original Kindle (which she’s quite forgotten how to use). There’s a lot more competition out there, a lot more books, a lot more authors—not many more readers, apparently—and a lot more we could be doing with the technology. We now need to think very seriously about look, feel, marketing, positioning, the “reader experience,” and branding. Just what does the Rampant Loon Press brand mean, anyway?

I heard that. Someone in the back of the room said, “The Henry Vogel Publishing Company.” Well, yes, that’s been true, and Henry’s books have kept RLP alive, for which we’re grateful, but we’ve got to expand beyond that, and in 2018, we will.

We also need to figure out what the Stupefying Stories brand means, and that’s where it gets sticky, because up to this point, what it’s mostly meant is, “stories Bruce Bethke likes.”

Oh. I’ve never considered myself as a brand before. And when I do—when I turn it around, and consider what I would think of myself if I was a writer, dealing with myself as an editor—well, I don’t much like what I see, especially on the “always treat our partners and contributors as we ourselves would wish to be treated” front. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

So that will change. Fortunately, I think there’s still time to fix that, and make it stand for something good, and not, “Now what?”

I won’t say all our problems are fixed and we’re back in full production again. I’ve been burned—and have burned other people—too many times by saying that. But with #18 released and selling, #19 releasing next week, #20 copy-edited and in final production, and #21 well in-progress, I’m beginning to feel cautiously optimistic.

No Free e-Book Friday this week. Instead, we’ll be doing a free e-book promo next week, in conjunction with the release of #19. Watch for it.

And in the meantime: PLEASE BUY OUR BOOKS!

first published January 4, 2018

In science fiction circles, Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but now works in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

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TALKING SHOP: What Do HARRY POTTER, CHUCK (TV Show), STAR WARS (Original Trilogy), a new band called DURRY, and SPIDERMAN – Have In Common?

Short answer: HELPLESSNESS

Long answer: read on...

HARRY POTTER appears in the first book as a baby in a basket, being dropped off at his aunt and uncle's house by a witch, a wizard, and a guy riding a flying motorcycle with a sidecar. According to most Earth biology, you can't get much more helpless than a baby.

Most of you are familiar with the story, but if you’re not (“What Culture do you live in – the books are available in eighty languages and Braille!) the story starts with a helpless boy who remains pretty helpless for 1.2 million words. He also manages to defeat the Ultimate Evil with the help of hundreds of individuals who sacrifice their lives (including the most powerful wizard of the age) and wreaks havoc on TWO universes…and remains basically helpless except for the fact that he’s deeply connected to the Ultimate evil and destroys him through that fact with little effort of his own.

In CHUCK, we watch the ultimate Stanford University failure-turned-Nerd Herder (aka Best Buy Geek Squad member) accidentally become the most powerful database known to Humanity, the Intersect. Instead of overthrowing the world and becoming the Emperor of Man, he stays basically the same and is handled until he becomes one of the most powerful tools on Earth; while remaining a clueless, helpless nerd who loves his sister, and has a total dork for a best friend, wins the love of a deadly CIA agent who happens to be Greek goddess-level beautiful – because he IS who he IS: a helpless nerd who loves his sister and his mediocre job, best friend, family, and life.

In the STAR WAR Original Trilogy the same story is reiterated: LUKE SKYWALKER on the brown-end of the Universe on a farm in (almost literally) the middle of nowhere with a grumpy uncle and an aunt who knows everything but can’t do anything about it because she, too, is helpless. When Luke leaves, he’s helpless. When he gets two robots he’s helpless. Even when he finds out he can wield world-bending power…he’s helpless. He remains so for some nine-plus movies.

In 2020, quarantined siblings Austin and Taryn joined forces under their family name DURRY to make music together for the very first time. In 2021 their careers were launched by their tiktok viral track, “Who’s Laughing Now”. Quickly gaining notoriety because Durry bottled up a few inner monologues — everyone from parents, to society, to their church doubted they could “make it”. Their paean to helplessness and lack of support brought them to the attention of Limp Bizkit front man, Fred Durst and became one of Jade's Music You Should Know picks one week. Here's the video: https://youtu.be/M02UGmRYQ_4

SPIDERMAN, in all of his iterations, was a kid who lost his parents, then lost his uncle to gun violence (sound familiar?). On a field trip sometime in high school, he’s bitten either by a radioactive spider or a genetically engineered spider and suddenly has the powers of a spider – strength, speed, senses, and no fear of heights – oh, did I mention the ability to stick to anything?

So, Peter Parker has everything any kid could possibly want. He can beat any of his enemies to a pulp, he can take on super villains and after getting beat up some, beat them and live to go home to his Aunt May (who has variously been depicted as elderly to barely middle-aged…). He’s also friendly, works in his neighborhood, and is known as Spiderman. But his most defining quality? He’s shy, quiet, and has so few friends that virtually no one knows who he is. He has no influence on society except for the tiny lives of people he interacts with. Of course WE know he’s destined for greatness, but HE doesn’t know that. In fact, for much of his book-time and absolutely through a big chunk of his movie time, he continues to lament that he’s basically…helpless.

It's been my experience that the vast majority of people feel helpless. I venture to believe that it’s this basic piece of the Human condition that drives everything from the Mother Theresas of the world to the Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin’s

So what?

All of these people, whether real or imaginary, whether musicians or CIA agent, have somehow managed to draw to them literally MILLIONS of fans. Not necessarily billions of dollars…oops, I guess BILLIONS OF DOLLARS is correct, AND millions of fans.

In the beginning, they attracted people just like them – geeks, dorks, the unnoticed, the ones “real society” labeled losers. These losers – and let me tell you up front that I AM one of them. I made countless Batman costumes out of paper grocery bags and carved a STAR TREK phaser out of a block of wood and nailed another one on it for a handle, then pounded five nails into the front end for a barrel – and then when I shot someone, I made a shrieking sound while vibrating my tongue…

These people, like myself, live lives of helpless normality. NOT desperation. Regular people will never get a government data base crammed into their heads, and the only thing a normal person will get after being bitten by a radioactive/genetically engineered spider, is a rash. They will not receive letters with wings announcing that they’ve been accepted to a wizarding school. Dorky farm boys will not suddenly discover that their father left them a light saber that will symbolically challenge an interstellar Empire, and be hailed as one of the last of an extinct order of Jedi knights. A brother and sister will NEVER discover that a TikTok they made in their basement has a million hits, they have an agent and a tour...rather than mom and dad upstairs as their only audience.

What sets all of these stories apart? It’s not the “powers” they got – magic, technology, arachnid power, or a zillion dollar record contract and road tour?

They remained the same: helpless, endearing, dorky. What changed was the world around them. And everything changed around them NOT because they were different. It changed because they were NORMAL people who kept choosing to keep going and not giving up when their worlds seemed to be going to hell-in-a-handbasket.

They believed that what they COULD do was important.

Because Harry, Chuck, Peter, Austin and Taryn, and Luke didn’t become jerks because of their suddenly power. Of COURSE they could act like jerks sometimes (and did, “Are you listening Harry?), but there were normal people around them who brought them back down from their High And Mighty Spaces, elbowed them in the side, and reminded them that while they may be “The Chosen Ones”, their close friends knew better.

They were just normal people tasked with doing extraordinary things WITH THEIR FRIENDS, FAMILY, AND LOVED ONES.

Lisa Cron writes in her book, WIRED FOR STORY, “…we’re wired to turn to story to teach us the way of the world” (p 2). She also writes that our brains experience a story as if it were REAL: “A recent brain imaging study reported in Psychological Science reveals that the regions of the brain that process the sights, sounds, tastes and movement of real life are activated when we are engrossed in a compelling narrative.” (p 4)

When I read a story that is ABOUT a king, emperor, superhero, alien, or a 15-year-old guy, I’m just not as interested, because I can’t really connect with them. They aren’t part of my reality. I can, however, keep reading and putting away my pre-judgement, I can let myself sink into the STORY.

Harry, Chuck, Peter, Austin and Taryn, and Luke are all stories I can fall into because they’re about normal people. They’re about helpless people just like me. But ALL OF THEM BROKE OUT OF NORMALITY AND MADE A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD.

They all inspire normal people NOT by their greatness, but by their persistence and stubborn resolve to keep moving ahead and make a difference in their stories.

Which leads ME to believe that maybe, just maybe, I can break out and make a difference, too.

Image: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/helplessness-12459706.jpg

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