Desolation Road: the cast of characters

Congratulations to British author Ian McDonald, whose novel Brasyl (Pyr Books, 2007) is listed on the final ballot of the 2008 Nebula Awards. Brasyl has nothing to do with Mars, but the Nebula announcement reminds me that McDonald’s novel Desolation Road (1988), which is set on the Red Planet, is scheduled to be reprinted by Pyr Books this summer. One of the neat things about the 1988 Bantam Books paperback edition of Desolation Road is the cast of characters that appears just before the title page:

Welcome to Desolation Road

Dr. Alimantando -- The town’s founder and resident genius, he perfects his homemade time machine and vanishes forever. Sort of.

Persis Tatterdemalion -- An ace flier grounded forever in Desolation Road, she tends bar at the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel and waits for the chance to reclaim her dream.

Rajandra Das -- The railroad hobo who has a mystical way with machines -- there isn’t a mechanical object on Mars that doesn’t love him.

The Babooshka -- A barren, feisty grandmother, she wants nothing more than to settle down with a good farming man and grow herself a child -- in a fruit jar.

Paternoster Jericho -- Overthrown crime lord of the Exalted Families, he says he’s “just passing through” Desolation Road, but twenty years later he still says the same thing.

The Gallacelli Brothers -- Ed, Louie, and Umberto. Identical triplets, so identical they each fell in love with -– and married -– the same woman ...

These are just a few of the inhabitants of Desolation Road. They and their children shaped a town, a planet, and a history. And the only thing they had in common was their belief that destiny had passed them by ...

Pictured above: Cover of the 1988 Bantam paperback.

Amazon bows to Authors Guild, to allow disabling of Kindle 2 audio feature

In a stunning move in the dispute between Amazon and the Authors Guild over the legality of a text-to-speech feature in the new Kindle 2 e-reader, Amazon announced today that it will let publishers decide whether they want the electronic device to read their books aloud. Here’s the full text of Amazon’s statement, taken directly from the website of The New York Times:

"Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading."

This story is still developing, so see reports from other news sources, including the Los Angeles Times and Reuters UK.

Review of “Fly Away Home,” a new short story by Ray Bradbury

Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press in Easthampton, MA, reviews for the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury’s We’ll Always Have Paris (2009), a new collection of never-before-published stories that includes a tale set on Mars: “Fly Away Home.” According to Grant, "Fly Away Home" is "one of the weirder stories, and one that, given the renown of The Martian Chronicles, can't help but be widely anticipated ... weird in the way that only an author obsessed with small towns and space travel could make it."

A Kindle 2 interview with Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild

The Engadget Interview: Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild
February 27, 2009
By Nilay Patel

As you're no doubt aware, this week's launch of the Kindle 2 came complete with copyright controversy -- the Authors Guild says that Amazon's text-to-speech features will damage the lucrative audiobook market. To be perfectly frank, we're of two minds on
this debate: on one hand, we're obviously all for the relentless progression of technology, and on the other, we sussed out the fundamental reasons for the Guild's objections almost immediately. It's pretty easy to find the first set of arguments online, but we wanted to make sure we weren't missing anything, so we sat down with Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and asked him some burning questions. Read on!

Climbing Olympus, a novel by Kevin J. Anderson

Climbing Olympus (1994), a novel by Kevin J. Anderson

At left: Paperback (New York: Warner Books, 1994), 297 p. Cover illustration by Mark Harrison. A tale of betrayal on the Red Planet, here’s the blurb from the back cover of the book:

“They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek's adin: surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable to ever again breathe Earth's air ... And they are still pawns. For the adin exist to terraform Mars for human colonists -- not for themselves. Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their own world; their success will kill them. Desperate, adin leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to destroy the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in his glorious, doomed orgy of mayhem. Unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle
to save both the Mars Project -- and the race she created.”

Climbing Olympus was voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus magazine.

According to author, reviewer, and longtime science fiction fan Don D’Ammassa, Climbing Olympus is “A very mature, serious, even solemn examination of the possible consequences of the human drive to expand its sphere of control, even at the cost of some finite part of our own humanity. Anderson's Mars is a living world in more than one sense, and even his less admirable characters have an inner strength that we cannot help admiring."

SF megafan Blue Tyson has a different opinion: “This book was not quite bad enough for me to not finish, although it came close 3 or 4 times. Pedestrian basic economic/political struggle. Not really worth wasting your time on. What happens when humans are altered, to in turn alter a world for others to live on. What do they do when it is all finished? 2 out of 5.”

A portion of Climbing Olympus appeared in Full Spectrum 4 (1993) as the short story “Human, Martian – One, Two, Three” (1993).

Hollywood may remake the film Total Recall

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a team in Tinseltown is in final negotiations to produce and develop a “contemporary version” of Total Recall, the 1990 SF action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone.

The original film, which is based on the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966), “follows a man haunted by a recurring dream of journeying to Mars who buys a literal dream vacation from a company called Rekall Inc., which sells implanted memories. The man comes to believe he is a secret agent and ends up on a Martian colony, where he fights to overthrow a despotic ruler controlling the production of air. The movie explores one of Dick's favorite topics, reality vs. delusion, as audiences never knew whether or not the story was a dream.”

PKD's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" was reprinted in Fourth Planet from the Sun: Tales of Mars from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2005), an excellent anthology edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

Three Mars novels to compete in Third Annual Bookspot Central Book Tournament

Three Mars novels are scheduled to participate in the Third Annual Bookspot Central Book Tournament, a contest modeled on the NCAA basketball tournament in which you, the fan, vote on books, with the winners advancing to the next round.

The Martian General’s Daughter (2008), by Theodore Judson, will compete in the 64-title new-release tournament and Out of the Silent Planet (1938), by C. S. Lewis, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), by Philip K. Dick, will compete in the 32-title classic tournament.

The tournament starts on March 15, 2009. Check the posting on Bookspot Central for all the details.

Pictured above: 1965 hardcover of PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Author Philip José Farmer, 1918-2009

Sadly, science fiction author Philip José Farmer passed away earlier today, February 25, 2009, at age 91. Born in 1918, Farmer had his first works published in the early 1950s. He won several Hugo Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.

Farmer’s novel Jesus on Mars (1979), which was dedicated to his mother, will be reprinted along with two other works by Farmer in the omnibus The Other in the Mirror (Subterranean Press, March 2009).

President of Authors Guild sounds off on Kindle 2 in The New York Times op-ed piece

Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, sounds off on the text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-reader in an op-ed piece in today’s The New York Times. Here’s the end of Blount's piece:

“For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of 'Goodnight Moon.' If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.”

Pictured above: Jeff Bezos of Amazon holds the new Kindle 2.

io9 gets no love as Gawker Media crowned most valuable blogging company

In the latest sign that science fiction is seen by some as a universe of people and starships and societies where Wall Street is irrelevant, Douglas A. McIntyre of the financial commentary website 24/7 Wall St. neglected to mention the SF blog io9 when he compiled a list of the
“Twenty Five Most Valuable Blogs,” even though io9’s parent, Gawker Media, sits atop the list and several of io9’s siblings are mentioned:

1. Gawker Properties. This blog company has a number of successful sites including Gawker, Defamer, Jezebel, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Jalopnik. In combination, the sites have about 23 million unique visitors and over 200 million pageviews a month. The company’s owner, Nick Denton, says the firm’s advertising is holding up this quarter. Traffic at most of the sites is still growing, in some cases at a rate of over 50%. The average CPM for each page across all of the properties is estimated at $15. That makes Gawker at $36 million business. Based on staffing levels, the company should have margins well above 50%. With an 8x operating income valuation, the company is worth $170 million.

Interesting analysis. Unrelated, I wonder if Mr. McIntyre thinks the forthcoming film Watchmen will generate more than $100 million at the box office on opening weekend.

Kage Baker's new novel The Empress of Mars reviewed by Green Man Review

Cat Eldridge of Green Man Review reviews The Empress of Mars (2008), the new full-length novel by Kage Baker. As Eldridge notes, The Empress of Mars
“certainly isn't the first novel that's the result of reworking a shorter work [novella “The Empress of Mars” (2003)], and it works brilliantly in both forms. Now the story in both versions is that of Mary, a woman who owns the only bar on Mars. After being found redundant as the xenobotanist by the British Arean Company, she and a few loyal Mars settlers work very hard to create a bar which in turn becomes a business empire that deals in everything from barley (and beer of course) to really big diamonds.”

The Empress of Mars was published as a limited edition by Subterranean Press in late 2008. A trade edition is scheduled to be published by Tor Books in May 2009.

“Jailhouse Rock,” a novelette by James P. Hogan

Thanks to a recent post by Tinkoo of the blog Variety SF, I had a chance to browse “Jailhouse Rock” (2004),
a novelette by British SF author James P. Hogan that was first published in the anthology Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Sol System (2004).

Set on Mars and its smaller moon Deimos, here’s a summary of
"Jailhouse Rock," taken directly from Variety SF:

“A plane is carrying arms. It's being escorted by an armed military plane. A young soldier, Kieran Thane, is on-board the plane carrying sensitive cargo, & is in constant radio contact with the military escort plane. But hijackers have planned well. Soldier in cargo plane is overpowered & made hostage; escort plane is disabled; cargo plane hijacked. Soldier hostage accidentally learns of destination of hijacked plane because of loose talk among the 5 hijackers. So he's become a liability -- to be killed. An argument among hijackers, & he gets an option to live. He's deplaned enroute, at a place where he can reach civilization in a few hours. On his way to safety, he realizes something is amiss. Lot of drama, & ultimately hijackers are arrested.”

Tinkoo rates “Jailhouse Rock” an “A.”

James P. Hogan is the author of the novel Martian Knightlife (2001).

Editor Brian Bieniowski revisits James Blish's novel Welcome to Mars

Brian Bieniowski, managing editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, revisits James Blish’s juvenile SF novel Welcome to Mars (1967) in a lengthy but awesome editorial titled “You Might Go Home Again” in the March 2009 issue of the magazine. Here's an excerpt:

I can recall the day I read aloud my book report on James Blish's Welcome to Mars to Mrs. Blumenthal's seventh-grade English class. It was December 6, 1988 -- the day Roy Orbison died. I spoke with great gusto about Dolph Haertel's historic trip to the Red Planet in his bread-boarded antigravity-driven packing crate loaded with enough K-rations and bottled oxygen to allow him to survive the over-night journey there and back. Dolph appeared so adult, compared to my own eleven years, and would have had the experience obviously necessary to invent a personal antigravity ship at the advanced age of eighteen. More exciting was the high adventure of Dolph's stranding on Mars ...

Pictured above: An early cover of Blish's Welcome to Mars.

Amazon's Kindle 2 reads aloud, as Sci-Fi predicted

As Amazon begins to ship its new Kindle 2 electronic book reader, here’s an Internet article that’s worth reading: “Kindle 2 Reads Aloud, as Sci-Fi Predicted,” by Bill Christensen, posted at LiveScience.com. Focusing on the text-to-speech feature in Kindle 2, Christensen asks “How long ago did science fiction writers predict that people would prefer to have a machine read to them, rather than read the news themselves?” The answers, as provided by Christensen:

• In 1961, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem wrote about a “lecton” in his novel Return from the Stars

• In 1959, Philip K. Dick wrote about an office memo that reads itself in his short story "War Game"

• In 1934, David H. Keller wrote about a “sound-transposing machine”
in his novella "The Lost Language"

• In 1899, H.G. Wells wrote about a “babble machine” in his story
"When the Sleeper Wakes"

Read the full article for details.

“Planet Killer,” a new short story by Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier

Fans of hard science will probably enjoy “Planet Killer” (2009), a new short story by Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier that appears in Diamonds in the Sky (2009),
an online anthology of astronomy-based science fiction stories edited by SF writer Mike Brotherton.

“Planet Killer” is an astronomical murder mystery set aboard the Martian (i.e., human) starship MSV Procyon as it is dispatched by Martian Space Force on its maiden voyage in the year 2191 to a destination called the Coalsack. With characters that include a captain, XO, chief engineer, and doctor, this is an interesting
hard science story worth reading, even though it is too reminiscent of Star Trek. Not surprising, perhaps, considering that Seger and Grazier once wrote a script for the series Star Trek: Voyager.

According to an editorial note, the characters and situations in
“Planet Killer” originally appeared in The Once and Future War (2006), a novel by Ges Seger.

Forthcoming: Martian Divides, the third Martian Symbiont novel by Phyllis K. Twombly

Martian Divides (2009), the third science fiction novel in Canadian author Phyllis K. Twombly’s Martian Symbiont series should be released in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, you can read an excerpt from her first novel, Been Blued (2007), over at her blog, Scifialiens’s Weblog. Also, if you’re into glossaries, checkout Twombly’s Martian Symbiont series Glossary, which she is considering including in her fourth novel in the series, scheduled to be published in 2010.