Voyager by Stephen J Pyne

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne is a book that aims to set the West’s exploration of the Solar System in its historical context. Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University, has an “organizing conceit” for looking at this context based around three broad ages of discovery.

The first began with the great voyages of discovery by Renaissance explorers of the fifteenth century and was led off by Portugal. The second began in the Enlightenment, when mid-eighteenth century Britain and France led the way with scientific expeditions to measure the transit of Venus and measure an arc of the meridian. The third Great Age kicked off in the mid-twentieth century, tackling the exploration of the last great wildernesses of Earth—the Antarctic and the oceans—and space. Driven at first by the cold war, the great voyages that distinguish this new age of discovery are marked by technological sophistication to the point where the explorers themselves are often robots.

Whether we accept Pyne’s categories or not does not matter much. The framework provides the author with a means to explore many parallels and similarities he finds between the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern worlds and the West’s attitudes toward the three great motives for pursuing these difficult, dangerous, and expensive voyages: discovery for its own sake, the ability to do science that you can’t do at home, and finding new worlds for people to colonise or exploit.

What results is a broad and sweeping investigation of the very nature of exploration, with the larger-than-life adventure of the two Voyager spacecraft’s “grand tour” of the Solar System to give it all shape and direction.

After the introductory chapters, which do an excellent job of setting the ground for the three Great Ages and the Voyagers’ role in the present Great Age, Pyne follows the journey of the two robot explorers from their launches in 1977 to the present day and beyond.

The only way it was possible to slingshot these spacecraft to the outer reaches of the Solar System, through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, was to take advantage of a once in 176-year alignment of the outer planets. That the science and technology, as well as the political and social climates were just right at just this moment made this amazing, 33-year (and counting) voyage perhaps the defining journey of exploration of our age. Long years of cruising between planets, punctuated by brief and frantic encounters as each ship swings around a planet and moves on, gives the book its structure and its style, activity and reflection, leading us step by step into the future. As Pyne puts it, the book is “an interpretive history whose internal rhythms mimic those that led to Voyager’s launch and journey.”

We meet a number of characters along the way, not just the luminaries of the Voyager mission, including a succession of project leaders and technical specialists, and key figures like Michael Minovitch, Gary Landro, and Carl Sagan, but also the explorers of previous Great Ages: Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, Cooke, Lewis and Clarke, Shackleton, and many others.

But the people are essentially incidental to the story. This is a history book and rarely dwells on individual stories. Institutions and nations also appear. Portugal’s struggle with Morocco, the USA’s struggle with the Soviet Union, JPL’s struggle with NASA, the Royal Society’s competition with the Paris Academy of Science—all provide the impetus to the great waves of exploration, discovery and, sometimes, colonization.

It is a book that leaves no stone unturned as Pyne’s focus moves from one aspect of exploration to another—the naming of newly-discovered places, the treatment of space exploration (and especially the fantasy of colonisation) in science fiction, the legal treatment of new worlds, the people who speak out for and against exploration.

Sometimes the comparisons between the Voyager mission and earlier explorations are interesting and instructive. Pyne’s discussions of the political and social, even the psychological bases for exploration are often fascinating. Sometimes they verge on the bizarre, as when he compares the physical dimensions of the Voyager craft with those of Lewis and Clarke’s nineteenth century keelboat, and Columbus’s caravel Niña.

While the writing is generally precise and very nicely done, Pyne has a small tendency to sound overblown and somewhat poetical (e.g., “[Voyager’s] trajectory has the arc of a hero’s quest.”) In his defense, he has taken on a huge and quite magnificent subject, and a little exuberance in the writing should probably be forgiven. Even when he swings the other way, rattling off transmission bit-rates, speeds, distances, and broadcast signal strengths, he uses technical terms with complete confidence and clearly understands the engineering, the communications jargon, and the celestial mechanics he is talking about.

Yet there is only so much that can be done with words. As Pyne himself says, “The Voyagers spoke to the public primarily through images, for which words served more as captions than as stand-alone texts.” So it is extremely odd that the book contains not one single image from among all the thousands that the Voyagers sent back to Earth. All we get are a few (simply drawn) diagrams and graphs in an appendix. It is true that many of the Voyager images Pyne talks about are so well known that anyone who has been watching the news for the past 30 years will recognize many of them. Yet the lack of images is a striking and unfortunate omission.

Voyager is a thoughtful and reflective book in which Pyne brings a wide and frequently detailed knowledge to bear on one of our more interesting human traits: the urge to explore. It is not the book to look in for the human faces of the people who discovered and dissected new worlds. It is a book that considers the broader sweep of history in counterpoint to the detailed technical, scientific, social, and political minutiae of this one, exceptional voyage.

Today, May 4th, is the second anniversary of the commencement of this blog. I started it on my return from a writer’s retreat which I credit for kick-starting my career as a published author. So this anniversary is my day for taking stock of how all that is going.

Here is what I wrote in the initial post, and here is what I wrote last year on this day.

In the past year:

• I have had my debut novel, TimeSplash, accepted, edited and published. I only have complete data from the first two weeks of sales at the moment, so I can’t even tell you yet if it is selling well.
• I have been promoting TimeSplash as much as I can online. I built TimeSplash its own website and it even has its own blog. For the past two months I have been running a blog tour which has had eighteen stops on it, Before that, I did a 24-hour, non-stop, round-the-world Twitter tour.
• I have had seven short stories published – two in anthologies
• I’ve won prizes in two short story contests – one being the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest 2009.
• I have continued to earn a trickle of money from short story publishing – but my production of short stories has dropped considerably. I wrote only six last year.
• I finished writing and editing my novel The Credulity Nexus and have begun querying agents for it. (I’ve written to two, so far, the second only about three days ago.)
• I have begun writing a new book, Loner’s Deep, which is a space opera set in the far future (and a sequel to my not-yet-complete Emissaries trilogy. (If fame ever comes knocking, I’ll have two great space opera trilogies ready to hand it.)
• I went to a writer’s festival.
• I have been increasing my presence in the various online social networks. My blogs (this one and the TimeSplash blog have over 1,000 unique visitors a month, and my Twitter following has gone from 0 to 987 in the past year. I’ve become a little more active on Facebook and quite active on Goodreads.
• In an attempt to raise my profile (and my writerly credentials ) I’ve joined the New York Journal of Books as a reviewer. I’ve done them 5 reviews on science and science fiction books so far. Early days. If this is successful, it will also one day become a writing income stream.
• I wrote a children’s story, Hangin’ With the Monkeys. I don’t want my career to go that way, so, rather than just throw it away, I’ve self-published it, and I’m giving it away free on Smashwords.

It all adds up to a very busy year – and a successful one. I’ve finally achieved my goal of having a novel published. I’ve made some great online friends. I’ve done loads of interesting things I didn’t expect I’d be doing. I’ve learned so much about writing and about the industry.

There are two things I didn’t manage to achieve this year – and that makes them my goals between now and next May. The first is to get an agent. It is patently obvious to me, even at this early stage, that TimeSplash would have done so much better if it had been agented. The second – and it may be related – is to start making some real money from my writing, not the dribble that has been coming in so far. And that is probably more a wish than an actual goal, but it’s what I have my sights on, so let’s see what can be done.

May the Fourth be with you too.

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 28th April 2010.)

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steampunk fairytale set in an alternative twentieth century. It is the story of a reluctant hero, Harold Winslow, whose life is controlled by the mad genius, Prospero Taligent. Harold’s sad and dysfunctional family leave him ill-equipped to deal with the interest shown him by the powerful Taligent family. While Harold falls under the spell of Prospero’s closeted and lonely daughter, Miranda, her father plans to fulfill Harold’s heart’s desire—no matter what it may cost them.

Like most alternative histories, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an allegory. The connections between the names of the characters and Shakespeare’s The Tempest are not coincidental; the discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses late in the book only really makes sense if you are aware that it was one possible source for the bard’s play. This novel is a literary work, and the allusions are important to understanding it. Not that they are heavy handed, but they are always present. Miranda’s ”brother” Caliban, is a monster, yes, but the ”beast,” imprisoned as he is in Taligent Tower—Prospero’s island in the city’s heart—is also part Ariel.

Like most allegorical novels, this one has a message. It is about us having taken a wrong turn, having spurned the lamented “age of miracles,” and having embraced an age of machines. Harold’s own father and Prospero Taligent suffer parallel but divergent declines into madness, one pining for the time when angels and devils walked the Earth, the other longing for a perfect future of progress and mechanization. Harold himself, an emotionally stunted writer of greeting cards, walks an unhappy path between the two extremes, studying creative writing yet putting his skills to use in creating ”modular” doggerel for use in cynically manipulative products.

It is, overall, a gloomy novel. The clanking, steam-spurting mechanisms—including mechanical men—and the heavily industrial nature of the city itself are oppressive. There are several dark and disturbing themes involving obsessive control, loss of ”purity,” a cynicism toward heroism, and a pervasive fear of change. Yet the book is not without humor—or, at least, whimsy. There is a deliciously brutal lampooning of feminist, post-modernist art criticism, and Miranda Taligent’s tenth birthday party almost turns into a pastiche of a Hollywood treatment of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The choice of steampunk as the style for the book’s background is itself, I suspect, an ironical joke—a world that has supposedly rejected magic has, in fact, embraced a magical, impossible technology, brought about by the wizard Prospero.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is big-L literature, wrapped in steampunk fantasy, served on a bed of good old-fashioned hero-quest storytelling. It is an interesting synergy and a bold piece of writing (very good writing, too, by the way) for a debut novel, but I wonder if any of the potential audiences for literature, fantasy, or adventure stories will be wholly satisfied with it.

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ‘social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.

A book to treasure

Sometimes, as you near the end of a book, you start to feel sad that there isn’t much more of it left. Sometimes, a book is such a pleasure to read that you wish it could go on forever. Well that’s how I felt about The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, by Richard Dawkins (ed.).

I know it’s not a prepossessing title and the cover is pretty dull but this book is full of wonderful, marvellous things. It is written – and written well! – by some of the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st Centuries. It is a joy to read.

The book is a large collection of short extracts from the writings of many, many great scientists. There are scores of extracts and every one of them (barring just one or two) is a gem. Every one of them made me wish the extract were longer. Every one of them made me want to go to the original book and read the whole thing. (Fortunately, I already have a good many of them in my library, or have read them already.) But what a collection! Think of a big name in any field of science and they are likely to be represented in this book. Dawkins has done an excellent job of discovering and collating some beautiful, fascinating, and inspiring pieces of writing from a very broad spectrum of scientists. I wish that more writers of fiction could write as well as these scientists! My personal favourite scientist-writers were all there, from Edward O. Wilson to David Deutsch, Loren Eiseley to Peter Medawar, along with all the most popular and gifted scientist-writers of our age (including Stephen Pinker, Donald Johanson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, and so many others.) What’s more, Dawkins introduces each and every piece with a few comments of his own, setting it in context, explaining its inclusion, or simply reminiscing about the author – more than compensating for the fact that Dawkins has, modestly, not included extracts from his own brilliant corpus.

It’s not a perfect collection – it could have run to four volumes – or ten! – and never have done full justice to the wealth of great science and science writing that is out there. It could have included more scientists (it was sad that Max Born wasn’t included, for example) and, perhaps, had more from fields such as psychology – there was a slight biological bias, I must say. There is probably scope for a companion volume to include only science writing for young people, since little of that was included in this book.

Yet it was a book I will always treasure. One that will become well thumbed over the years as I dip into it to savour again some of my favourite pieces (the last three were very well chosen.) Books like this should always have ebook editions so that they are easily searchable. An ebook edition that linked to all the source texts, writer biographies, and writer bibliographies, would be a treasure indeed!

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

Don't judge this one by its cover.

When Jeremy C Shipp asked for people willing to read the ARC of his forthcoming novel, Cursed, I was keen but nervous. I’ve been following Shipp on Twitter and enjoying his quirky humour. I’d noticed that Jeff Vandermeer – whom I greatly admire – thinks highly of him. And I’d read an interview Shipp gave in which he described the themes of the book – sounding intelligent and articulate in a way most authors don’t. It all made me want to get my hands on that book! But… Shipp is known for writing weird, bizarro, paranormal stories and, as my regular reader will know, I’m not really into that.

What if I hated it? Shipp seems like a really nice chap. The last thing I want to do is take his book and then trash it.

But I needn’t have worried. From the first page, no, from the number at the top of the first page (#12), I was hooked. The writing is light, clever and witty. The characters are painfully human, touchingly self-aware, and really nice, in a dysfunctional, I wouldn’t really want to spend an evening with one of them, sort of way.

It is a book about being cursed. Ostensibly a story about Nicholas and his friends Cicely and Abby who are trying to find who cursed them so they can get their lives back, there is another book just beneath the surface, about people who are damaged and hurting and the cruelties they suffer in a world that blames them for being who they are. It’s about the real-world curse of being what life made us.

It is dark. For all its tight writing, flashes of insight, and sprinkles of lovely humour, the book never lets you forget that our hero and his friends are suffering, that this is not a nice world they inhabit, that bad things are happening to them and everyone they love. All the time. Relentlessly.

So I’m very relieved to say I can recommend this book to everyone. Shipp has obviously stared into the abyss of the human condition and the abyss has just as clearly invited him over for a drink and a chat.

Hell, most people will like the paranormal stuff anyway.

You can order your copy of Cursed from the publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Hyattsville, MD, USA. ISBN (hc) 978-1-933293-86-8 (pbk) 978-1-933293-88-5.