Now this is a good idea. The StarShipSofa boys are going to podcast all five of the short stories on the shortlist for this year’s BSFA Awards.

The first one will appear on Monday 10th March, with one daily after that - which means they’ll all be ready well in advance of voting time at Eastercon.

So none of your “I was too busy to read ‘em” excuses*!

If you aren’t too busy to read them, here are the links:

• “Lighting Out” – Ken MacLeod (disLocations)
• “Terminal” – Chaz Brenchley (disLocations)
• “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” – Ted Chiang (F&SF, September)
• “The Gift of Joy” – Ian Whates (TQR)
• “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” – Alastair Reynolds (Interzone #209)

So, who’s psyched for Eastercon, eh?

[ * OK, to be fair, this is usually my excuse. ]

OK, ladies and gents; the cat is out of the bag.

Yours truly is now publisher and editor-in-chief of Futurismic.

This is a very big deal for me, and also more than a trifle scary. But I’ve been talking the talk about web publishing for a long time - so when the opportunity arose to take the wheel at Futurismic I figured it was high time I walked the walk as well.

I hope those of you who’ve been following Futurismic for a while will stay on-board - we’re going to start publishing fiction again next month, and non-fiction columns will follow shortly after that.

Those of you who don’t already follow Futurismic, I hope you’ll subscribe and come along for the ride.

Thanks for reading, folks.

Well, the Readercon panel on book reviews seems to have generated a lot of dicussion around the issue … kind of the inverse of the Eastercon panel, which took place after the worst of the smoke had cleared from that particular salvo.

But here’s the inestimable Paul Kincaid, hitting the nail on the head and describing my own standpoint on how and why I review books almost exactly:

“My own credo is simple. A review should be honest (any reviewer who allows her opinion to be swayed by friendship, bribery, peer pressure or whatever, is not worth reading), defensible (I don’t mind if people disagree with my judgement, I am quite used to being the only critic to hold a certain position, pro or con, on any particular book, but I want to be sure the readers can see why I reached that particular judgement), and, so far as I am able, well written (a review is also an entertainment, the reader should be rewarded for taking the time to read the piece). This credo, it should be noted, is an aspiration; I have no idea how close I ever get to achieving it.

Notice I say nothing about reviews being good or bad, positive or negative. It is part of the honesty of a review that if you don’t think a book is any good you have to say so. It is also part of the honesty of a review to recognise that very very few books are entirely wonderful or entirely terrible, and the job of a reviewer is to identify and note that balance. Because of that I do not believe I write positive reviews, or negative reviews – but I hope I write honest reviews.”

Result. Paul Kincaid is one of my newly-inherited reviews team at Interzone, which - given his pedigree and experience - is quite bizarre, because by rights he should be the person editing me. Though I doubt he wants the administrative headaches that come with the post - another indicator of his native common sense!

He and I (and others) are keen to see what comes from Jonathan’s plans for Son of Scalpel, too. This debate - for better or for worse - probably has a good few years mileage in it yet.

Having been out of town on the relevant evening, I’m late to the field in trumpeting the launch of Scalpel Magazine (although I actually mentioned it ages ago, and let the cat somewhat out of the bag in the process). Most of the genre blogosphere appears to have taken the news of a new reviews and criticism outlet fairly positively, notwithstanding Nick Mamatas and friends. There’s some fine content on there, too. I for one hope it will last the course - and not merely because I want another venue to send my own work to, either.

Pat Cadigan’s guest editorial for Scalpel mentions the decline of book reviews in mainstream print media, which is a hot topic at the moment, especially in the US. I’ve found that the Print Is Dead blog has had some wise things to say on the matter. Meanwhile, the UK’s very own Grumpy Old Bookman has added his dime to the jukebox:

“Finally, however, let us remember one simple fact. However erudite the print reviewer may be, and however exquisite his taste and critical judgement, he is handicapped by comparison with the most humble blogger. Our print man cannot link directly to other sources.

This is, I would suggest, a major problem. Twenty years ago, of course, no one could even imagine it. But now it has to be faced.”

That’s about right, I think. I’m not gloating about the declining relevance of print media (in reference to book reviews or anything else), but nor am I willing to shut my eyes on what, to me, is an obvious and irresistable trend. Selah.

There’s no need to feel jealous of Google employees for getting to see lectures and presentations by the great and the good on work time - because the Big G has decided to share the wealth and let us lowly web-heads watch the events in video form. I knew they had to be buying YouTube for a reason …

Of most interest to genre fiction fans will be videos of Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, and the incredibly recent visit by John “If rocks stars can tour, so can I” Scalzi.

There’s lots of others interesting people in the selection too; I’ve not watched them yet, but I’m guessing that Lawrence Lessig and Chris “Long Tail” Anderson will be well worth watching, too - whether you’re already interested in copyright issues and internet marketing or not.

Here’s a handy little post; in the course of reviewing all (yes, all)the nominees for the short fiction categories of this year’s Hugo Awards, SF Signal provides links to every single one, as they are all available online for free.

I wonder if I could hammer through the whole lot in a weekend?

SF Signal have been running a poll on the ‘do people buy books after reading the free electronic version’ question, and they’ve posted the results up.

Have you ever purchased a book that you first sampled as a free eBook?

No. Why should I pay for it when it’s free?
11.7%
   (12 votes)

No, because I did not like (or finish) the book
2.9%
   (3 votes)

Yes. I prefer to own the books I read and/or I prefer real books over reading on a screen.
41.7%
   (43 votes)

I don’t read eBooks.
43.7%
   (45 votes)

(103 total votes)

While it’s a valuable set of results, I can’t help but feel the methodology was a little flawed. I don’t know much about sociology and the designing of questionnaires, but I think the questions should have been separated out:

• First asking “do you/have you read ebooks”, then
• asking those who answered ‘yes’ whether they’ve ever paid for an ebook,
• whether they bought a physical copy of the specific book they read for free, and
• whether they bought other works by the same author on the strength of the free material, or from a sense of wanting to pay for something that they didn’t necessarily have to.

Then follow that up with the question about the totemic or practical value of the book as media platform.

Obviously, these results aren’t entirely transferable beyond the arena they’ve been gathered in - specifically genre fans, and more specifically blog-reading genre fans - but it’s still interesting to note that less than half of the respondants have never read an ebook, and only a little over a quarter of those that have read them decided not to pay for it, for whatever reason.

Pricing is going to be an issue with the ebook format, and it’s possibly the one thing holding development back. And I’m not talking about ebook reader hardware (although Charlie Stross made some great points about the problems with that), but the pricing of the actual files themselves - Tobias Buckell has some thoughts on that, and he brings the perspective of a young author at the start of his career arc, enabling him to say what might be unpalatable or less obvious to an older professional:

“Other than Baen’s rational approaches, no ebook program has made sense to me, and as an author, looking over the money made by ebooks by Baen authors, my opinion is that the inability of publishers to price ebooks properly and utilize them is probably costing me money that could be being made.”

That’s the argument of someone who loves their craft, but who also treats it as a modern business. We’ll be hearing more like this, sooner rather than later.

I’ll bet SFWA Vice-president Howard Hendrix is feeling more than a little silly right now. Or perhaps he’s sat at home railing at what he sees as the blind stupidity of his fellow professional writers. Either way, he should have worded that ‘pixel-stained technopeasant’ rant a little more diplomatically - his essential argument had some validity, but the signal got lost in the noise, and the opprobrium generated hasn’t done him any favours whatsoever.

Inadvertantly, though, he’s done a great favour to the genre fiction readership. After Jo Walton declared April 23rd to be International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, the science fiction weberati have come out in force and inundated the intertubes with free fiction for us to read - Andy ‘SFBC’ Wheeler has what appears to be the best roundup for those of us not connected to the web-within-the-web that is Livejournal, though there’s probably a few others floating around: leave links in the comments if you’ve spotted anything that’s worth a mention.

I’ll be bookmarking them all for a rainy day, myself - I have waaaay too many dead-tree books waiting to be read at the moment - but the prospect of being able to read Stross’s Missile Gap after missing out on the Subterranean paper edition is most satisfying.

Your added bonus material comes in the form of a podcasted panel from Penguicon (the open-source software / science fiction convention - why don’t we have one of those here in the UK?) - it features the aforementioned Mr. Stross, John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell talking about the pros and cons of giving away fiction for free as a marketing strategy. Enjoy!

Well, what do you know - Locus Online has been running for a decade. They must have been one of the first sf publications to dip a toe in the digital waters. I wonder if they’ll be among the first to take the plunge and abandon print entirely?

I love free stuff - fiction especially. You’re reading this on the intarwebs, so my guess is you like free stuff too. And I like to think you have some standards - why else would you be subscribed to this esteemed (if erratic) website, hmm?

So, free fiction:

• The second issue of totally-free-to-read ad-supported webzine Darker Matter has four stories in it, one of which is by Jason Stoddard.
• The the first part of the latest instalment (they do it in a kind of endearingly piecemneal fashion) of Subterranean Online has stories from Jay Lake and Bruce Sterling.

There’s more and more good material available as the months go by. I wonder if maybe there’s a future in this online publishing thing, after all?