Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Cathy Macleod, 31 January 2009.

Agatha Christie, Fay Weldon and Ann Morven have all embraced electronic publication as the ebook revolution gushes into the new year of 2009.

For evergreen Christie characters, such as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, it entails a reformat from the hardprint titles. But new Weldon and Morven titles, exclusively digital, can be read only on an electronic device. These may be handheld, laptop or desktop, the worldwide appliances that have changed reading habits.

Ann Morven, diva of the short whodunit, said her publishers had decided to issue her latest mystery in digital style only. It is a short story, “Birthday Snakes”, featuring the heavyweight chump of crime fiction, a female sleuth with   bumbling instinct for human frailty.

“My publishers have attracted on-screen readers for the past year by means of texts below 6000 words,” Ann Morven said. “This means short stories and serials. The reason  is simple. Booktrade watchers believe that to absorb a long digital novel needs practice when we are all used to paperbacks. People are still just bonding with their megabyte machines, whether mobile phone or a book-friendly computer.”

She revealed her own preference remained a hardprint paperback, but said she achieved “something of the same intimacy” reading a laptop loaded with the free Mobipocket Reader software.

Fay Weldon’s efiction is also being introduced in short takes. It appears in serialized episodes at YouGov.com, under the title “Woodworm”.

Fay Weldon says she welcomes feedback and is writing the chapters in a continuing plot that can be influenced by what followers of the serial suggest to her.

She is not the first to follow this course. Alexander McCall Smith began the interactive formula with “44 Scotland Street”, a serial in The Scotsman newspaper. Later, it was published as a hardprint book, and several more Scotland Street titles have followed involving the same characters.

McCall Smith is currently writing a similar serial for London’s Daily Telegraph. It features London dwellers and appears under the title of “Corduroy Mansions”. Significantly, the chapters are available for digital download at the newspaper’s website.

Books by the late Agatha Christie that will appear in digital format are, of course, already popular in hardprint. The digital publisher, Penguin in the United States, believes there is a new market in the electronic field.

Initially, ten digital titles will be published by this publisher, one of the global giants to recognize that ebooks are here to stay.

Up until 2008, it was small publishers who led the trend into ebooks. This was mainly an economic choice to avoid the crippling overheads of printing, binding, warehousing thousands of books, distributing them to bookshops, and receiving just 40% percent of the cover price. That 40% had to pay for all those things plus advances and royalties to authors and, perhaps, leave a small profit for the publisher.

Such an impossible business formula encouraged small publishers to try the alternative digital market, selling direct to readers. Their pioneering endeavour has shown the way to the global giants who now suffer in the world recession.

The year 2009, therefore, is going to mark out fresh focus on ebooks following dismal earnings from traditionally printed titles. The business world is well into electronic documents, so is the world of education, where text books now come on a screen.

Fiction will enjoy its best digital year yet, because what was once a trickle has become a torrent.
Note this: “Read an ebook week” is March 8-14. Lots of promotional goodies offered! Details at www.ebookweek.com

Happy reading!     This from Cathy Macleod at booktaste.com

About the Author:

Cathy Macleod is an independent literary critic at www.booktaste.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Fiction Heavyweights Go Digital

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Science-fiction novels are generally based on imagined or actual scientific discoveries. The creation of self-aware robots, space travel, the discovery of other intelligent beings in space are some the common subjects for science fiction. English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often considered as one of the precursors to science-fiction novels. The novel is the story of a doctor who constructs an artificial man making use of body parts.

Influence on the Science Fiction:

H. G. Wells, in the late 1800s, served as a great influence on science fiction. He gave thrilling novels like The Time Machine (1895), a tale about a man who travels forward in time; The Invisible Man (1897), a story about a man who invisible; and The War of the Worlds (1898), about a Martian invasion of Earth.

In the early 20th century, the best science fiction was written and published in magazines. In mid-century, some authors revived the genre in the novel form. They were Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, 1961; translated 1970) and Isaac Asimov (The Foundation Trilogy, 1951-1953), and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969).

Cyberpunk Authors:

In the early 21st century, one movement in science-fiction novels came on the surface called cyberpunk. The authors of cyberpunk constructed action-oriented plots and featured hardcore scientific technology in their novels. Some of the major cyberpunk writers were Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling.

Humanist Writers:

There are some science-fiction novelists, also known as so-called humanist writers. They focus on characterization and pay little attention to scientific developments. These humanist writers are Orson Scott Card, Ian Watson, and Vonda McIntyre. Other science-fiction novelists like Terry Brooks, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Michael Moorcock are also the influential writres.

Rakesh Patel is an aspiring poet, freelance writer, self-published author and teacher. Read his blog http://typesofpoetry99.blogspot.com

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Science Fiction?

I’m working on a science fiction novel about a group of college students who are being hunted down by people in another country. How can I present large quantities of information at the beginning of the book without it sounding cheesy or boring?

if you really wanted a better answer I would say to supply a little more detail. Is it absolutely necisary to supply all this information in the begining or for that matter even a good idea? As someone else explained presenting as little as possible in the begining and finding excuses throughout to present small bits at a time is generally more usefull. Also keeping an audience in the dark, particualrly in science fiction, and treating them as if they should know the facts can engross you faster into a storyline. Then if you really must clarify details, having characters discuss poitns or have flashbacks or simply think to themselves works well. Robert Heinlien for example loved to write about social problems in his stories but being of an engineering background he insisted on having as much pratical science as possible in his stories and he damn well wanted the reader to know the trouble he went through thinking some stuff up. Most commonly he’d use the newbie concept. Introduce a newbie charachter that needs to have things explained to him by the more experienced members and the reader gets the lecture at the same time. For example a good film use of that technique in a storyline similiar to yours would be the film Red Dawn. The filmakers actaully put together a painstaking and realistic scenario to explain how this world war three could come about. In fact it had been supplied by a former secratary of state and based upon alternate timeline prodections of geopolitical events formed by the U.S. military. However most of the information wasn’t needed to get the action rolling, as the audience ddint need to know anymore then the teens the story focuses on. Later though just so that we wouldnt think that this plot was completely off the wall we get introduced toa downed pilot that looseley fills in the kids with details leading up to the war. Just enough mind you. In the end the producers left most of the information out simply because it was directly pertinent to the storyline. In fact ever wonder how much gets left on the cutting room floor by any science fiction author? Ever wonder why they often write more then one story within the same “universe”? You could also, I suppose, if you really needed all the information to presented right away, have an early charachter discover the information (even if they allready know it) through finding a journal, propaganda film, text book etc. vica versa an old gag popular in the eighties was a non-essential charachter presenting the buildup to the storyline then having an “accident” murdered etc, or as reflection from their current point aka. “at this time this happened the world was etc and we were etc untill the day of whatever when the blah blahs atacked, but i’m getting ahead of myself. I suppose it really began when….” this kind of reflection can be done in a cold narritive but also spiced up a bit more like “we should of seen it coming. When they enected blah blah blah we should have seen the signs. At that time the federated blah was ruling. Myself I was only a and doing whatever and what have you” By throwing a little sub story with your narritive as a complete chapter or two it can keep it from sounding like the intro to a star wars movie. Good luck.

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We humans have an uneasy relationship with perfection. We strive for it — but we’re not always sure we want it. If something is close to perfect, it seems suspiciously smooth or, as commentators invariably say when an athlete or performer is at doing the best possible work, “he/she makes it look easy.” Of course, nothing is harder than making something look easy — but a lot of us still don’t quite trust anything that seems too effortless.

And, if you’re like some of us who’ve been to swank hotels on business (not that it’s something we do often at our product design firm), but then have to switch to more downscale accommodations for personal or family trips, a kind of cognitive dissonance takes over as we try to adjust between the smooth, apparent perfection of staying at a place like Four Seasons and the sometimes infuriating but also somewhat comforting feeling of a Motel 6.

At the high end hotel, if they’re doing their job correctly, every need seems to be almost anticipated, sometimes with such alacrity that it can be a little disturbing. At a lower end place, usually nothing is done with much smoothness and everything is a roll of the dice. If a genuine problem arises, you are at the mercy of the fates: is the desk person good-natured or mean, perky or hung-over? Most of the time, even when the staff is trying their best, you’re basically on your own — but that’s okay, you’re a grown-up and you didn’t pay enough to expect to have your hand held.

Of course, at the high end place, you’re kind of hoping to be treated a bit like a highly esteemed infant whose needs must be anticipated and fully catered to. And the kind of hotels that cost several hundred to over a thousand a night are forever working on new conveniences, even regarding something as simple as hotel check-in. (It was reading Jeff Howard’s thoughts on that bugaboo, which we’ve seen in even some outstanding hotels, which got us thinking about this in the first place.) But, for all their usually outstanding service, we never feel fully comfortable.

If you’re used to flying Southwest Airlines, taking a private jet might be a fantasy come true, but it’s also going to be a little weird. The same may apply to the inveterate fan of In-’n-Out Burger who suddenly finds himself downing true Kobe beef at some super expensive restaurant. Genuinely fine gourmet food can sometimes have a sense of unreality about it, particularly if it’s way too expensive.

Which is what takes up to the thoughts of Adam Greenfield, reflecting on a review of the new Motorola U9 phone by writer and actor Stephen Fry. Greenfield keys in on Fry’s use of the word “witchcraft” in describing the effect of the phone/MP3 player’s use of a newfangled OLED type display — which seems to exist in a kind of never-never land; there is no apparent “screen,” and therefore a sort of odd “like magic” effect is created.

For Greenfield and for us, such talk immediately conjures Clark’s Third Law, i.e., Arthur C. Clarke’s famed assertion that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, written about thirty years before Clarke was born, illustrates this concept pretty well.)

While Greenfield takes a mostly benign view of the phone itself, he does have some problems with the avid pursuit of magical seeming technology, as he explains to a commenter on his view of this supernatural metaphor as perhaps “disempowering”:

“In this context, I think of magic as the ultimate in seamlessness, and while of course I’m not entirely opposed to the use of metaphor in explaining complex systems to their users, neither do I think that’s anything like the right one.”

Which is perhaps another of saying that he fears this sort of magical seamlessness infantilizes consumers to a certain extent. Is that why, no matter how many adults are hooked on the Harry Potter books, they’ll always be seen as children’s fiction, no matter that J.K. Rowling might be a better writer than, say, Stephen King? It’s true that there is something tremendously appealing to young children about the idea of magic. As we get older, magic is still kind of fun, but it’s often more enjoyable s to try and figure out the secret to the trick than to pretend it’s really magic.

Being an infant isn’t all bad but, as adorable as two-year olds are, it’s not a good idea to be one forever. Is that why some of us are both delighted and vaguely creeped out by extremely high end hotels, or is that our adult fear of the bill talking?

About the Author:

Bob Westal represents Nectar, an award winning product development consultancy and industrial design firm helping clients create products that connect to their users and expand their markets. For more information, please visit us at http://www.nectardesign.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Seamlessness and Delaying Childhood’s End

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