Just a quick note to let you know that my ebook short story, “The Biggest Man in Lilliput,” is now available on the Nook Store, priced at $0.99. Buy it here.
And its also available on the Kindle Store. Buy it here.
More formats to come. I’ll probably go with SmashWords for everything else. I have downloaded what feels like a prodigious amount of documentation for getting started with that.
“The Biggest Man in Lilliput
This is a huge deal for me. I’ve dreamed about being a published science fiction writer since I was a kid. And now I am. Well, sort of. This is not the way I imagined it when I was a teen-ager; I thought I’d first get a couple of short stories published in science fiction magazines, then get books published through traditional publishing. This is a different path.
And, truly, I won’t really feel like I’ve achieved the dream until I’ve sold at least 100 copies. That’s my initial goal — 100 copies.
So what are you waiting for? Buy it now! MY CHILDHOOD DREAMS HANG IN THE BALANCE!!!!! NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING THOUGH!!!!!
“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is a battle of wits to save the 21st Century nation of tiny people from a mob of human religious fanatics. Mayor Yoby of the Lilliputian City of New Mildendo has to save the day by outthinking his enemies. It’s got thrills, humor, and a little satire.
It’s a short story, 5,600 words, and should take about 35 minutes to read.
Julie did the cover, and also was my most valued first reader and copy editor. Didn’t she do a terrific job? That’s right, this ebook is a family project. SO IF YOU DON’T BUY IT THAT MEANS YOU’RE AGAINST FAMILY VALUES.
The photo on the cover is gorgeous, you can take a closer look here. It’s by Scanrail. It’s a photo of Stockholm, Sweden, standing in for the fictional city of New Mildendo, Lilliput, in my story.
I’ve submitted the piece to Barnes & Noble for availability on the Nook; I expect approval by Thursday. I’ll let you know here when its available.
Update: And now that’s done. Buy “The Biggest Man” in Lilliput on Nook for $0.99.
Here’s an excerpt to get you started.
It rained the morning the mob of Gullivers descended on Lilliput, the kind of fast, driving rain that was typical for summer storms in that country. Rain was a deadly threat to Lilliputians caught outdoors. A few unlucky Lilliputians were pummeled to death by raindrops, or drowned, every year.
But Lilliputians had centuries of experience protecting themselves from rainstorms. They dealt with the threat. They either stayed home to wait out the rain, or commuted through a network of tunnels under the city.
The morning the Gulliver mob descended on the City, Mayor Yoby stayed home in the Executive Mansion to wait out the rain, coordinating weather control by phone. When the weather cleared, he headed in to City Hall.
He rode the public omnibus to work, a long metal tube strapped to the back of a domesticated lizard. He liked to ride the bus. The political bloggers of Lilliput said Yoby’s favoring public transportation was an affectation, an ongoing PR stunt. They were right. But that was only part of it. Yoby just plain liked meeting the people of the city, letting anybody who had something to say come right up to him and say it; riding public transit gave him an opportunity to do that.
That morning, Yoby got an earful from one of his constituents, a dowager complaining about an infestation of ants in her candy store. The knee-high insects were harmless, but they terrified the children, and left their damn smelly pheromone trails all over the premises. Yoby was in the midst of reassuring the woman that the Sanitation Department would get on the problem when the bus driver paged him in a barely intelligible voice on the vehicle’s scratchy public address system.
Yoby excused himself. The bus was packed with Lilliputians, but they shouldered out of his way when they saw him coming. They recognized the mayor.
Yoby was hard to miss, a man with skin the color and texture of a well-worn, favorite boot, a bald, egg-shaped head, and a barrel-shaped body, wearing a sharp business suit. At more than six and a half inches tall, he was a veritable giant among Lilliputians, towering more than a half-inch over most of his fellow citizens.
When Yoby got to the front of the bus, he found two uniformed cops waiting for him, accompanied by the mayor’s chief of staff, Piopo, a handsome, middle-aged Lilliputian woman.
“You’re needed in City Hall,” Piopo said. “Code Rampaging Giraffe. We have a mount waiting for you here to get through the crowds. We must get moving immediately.”
Yoby indulged his only two vices. He lit a cigar and swore.
***
Gullivers were both lifeline and threat to the Lilliputians. Since the destruction of the home islands by a volcano shortly after the historic visit from Lemuel Gulliver, Lilliputians had settled in a diaspora all over the globe. Eventually, they formed a new nation, on the east end of Long Island, just a few dozen miles from the Gulliver city of New York.
Lilliputians traded with Gullivers for food, medical supplies, rare materials, and perhaps most important, knowledge.
Artwork and scientific discovery had the same value no matter what the size of the producer. Lilliputian livestock and vegetables were prized for their delicate flavors. Lilliputians worked in the movie and TV industry, especially as actors — they could do a normal movie on a tabletop, and put on an entire, sprawling epic in a single room. The entirety of James Cameron’s classic Titanic was filmed with Lillputian actors in the bedroom of a suburban house. And, with their tiny hands, Lilliputians excelled at delicate work.
Lilliputians and Gullivers were partners in commerce and culture. And yet, the so-called threat posed by Lilliputians was a constant thread running through the more bigoted wings of Gulliver politics. The Gullivers claimed Lilliputians hated America, were stealing human jobs, corrupting morals, distributing pornography, collaborating with terrorists, selling drugs, pirating music on the Internet, and every other imaginable sin.
Non-violence is one of the biggest themes of The Foundation Trilogy. Other space operas are filled with space battles and thrilling hand-to-hand combat. There’s very little violence onstage in The Foundation Trilogy. Mostly, the novels consist of people sitting around and talking.
The Foundation explicitly shuns violence. It’s founded on a planet without natural resources, by a colony of academics. They don’t fight their enemies because they can’t; they have to out-think their enemies instead.
One of the major characters of the trilogy is Salvor Hardin, a politician whose motto is, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
So the Foundation Trilogy is, on the surface at least, an extremely ethically advanced series. Forty years before the publication of the original stories during World War II, we had a president, Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war. TR embraced combat; he though war was essential to making nations great, and he said so publicly. In The Foundation Trilogy, we a philosophy of war as something to be avoided wherever possible, and avoidable by any competent person.
And yet the Foundation trades war for deceit, trickery, and cooperating in oppression.
The opening sequence of Foundation deals with Gaal Dornick, a young man from the provinces come to the capital to study mathematics under the great Hari Seldon. Once he arrives at the capital, Dornick learns that Hari Seldon has arranged to have him arrested. Any sensible person would have nothing to do with Seldon afterwards, but Dornick doesn’t seem to have much sense, because he becomes one of Seldon’s loyal acolytes.
Dornick and Seldon are on trial together, and they manage to escape imprisonment, but only by agreeing to leave the capital city, along with Seldon’s 100,000 followers, to the remote planet of Terminus. Seldon remarks that this was exactly what he wanted; his followers would never have gone willingly, so he had to force them to come with him.
Does this sound like the behavior of one of history’s good guys? Apparently so, because the Foundation reveres Seldon. They continue to revere him even after learning that the mission of the Foundation was another lie. Seldon had said he wanted the Foundation to prepare a great Encyclopedia of human knowledge to shorten the dark age following the fall of the Galactic Empire. Fifty years after the founding of the Foundation, Seldon comes back in a recorded message to reveal that, too, was a lie. He was only interested in getting all those academics isolated from the main body of the empire, unarmed and helpless, so they could use nonviolent means to start the climb to the second Galactic Empire.
The Foundation continues in the tradition of its lying founder. Faced with hostile neighbors with more military power but much less advanced technology, the Foundation gives its neighbors the secrets of atomic power. But the Foundation also starts a fake religion, with the premise that its technology isn’t the result of science and engineering but of miracles and magic. Thus, the Foundation perpetuates the ignorance and oppression of billions of its neighbors so that it can strengthen its own power.
So who, exactly, are the villains of this series?
Julie did a bang-up first pass at creating a cover for my ebook short story. It looks sharp and professional, playful and a little bit serious, capturing the tone of the story nicely. It uses a gorgeous cover photo too; it’s the one titled San Francisco Cityscape With Cookware on this page. I love the photo — I love all the photos on that page — but I don’t think they’re quite right for this particular story. And I don’t have permission to use them. So we’ll have to find another photo. That’s OK, there are plenty of public-domain cityscapes available on the Internet.
The story, by the way, is called “The Biggest Man in Lilliput.” It takes the premise that a colony of Lilliputians built a city on North America, and now it’s survived to the present day, with Internet access and political blogs and all the other accoutrements of modern life. I guess you could say it’s a fantasy-comedy-thriller. It’s short. I’ll be selling it for $0.99. Or maybe $1.09, because apparently $0.99 is a red flag that says crappy shovelware just dumped into an ebook file without even being proofread.
No, I think I’ll just go for $0.99. Pricing for electronic goods, where the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero, is hard.
I want to have the story for sale by Christmas. E-reader sales are going to be huge for Christmas, and all the people with empty new e-readers will want something to read right away. So that’s an opportunity to make some sales.
I will be using ZappTek LegendMaker software to handle the conversion, which is supposed to be automatic and easy. But I vaguely remember little quirks of ebook formatting that don’t appear to be covered by the LegendMaker documentation. For example: Covers for epub-formatted ebooks, which is the format used by most ebook readers, need to have opaque backgrounds. But the Amazon Kindle requires a transparent background. Or maybe I’m misremembering. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I need to look into this.
I don’t just want the book available in one place, though. After the Kindle store, I’ll put it up on the Barnes & Noble Nook store. Then here, adding a storefront page to this Web site. This blog runs on WordPress, and I understand it’s not difficult to set up a cash register on a WordPress site. I’ll also want to put the book up on as many other ebook sites as I can find; I understand SmashWords is good for that.
Now here’s a fun idea: Con-Dor, a local science fiction convention, is March 2-4. I’d like to print up postcards with the book cover and promotional materials to give out at the conference. Better yet: Postcards to sell, with redemption codes for the ebook. Buy the postcard, come to the Web site later, enter the unique redemption code on the postcard, and claim your copy of the book, prepaid. As if that’s not nerdy enough, I’d like to get a Square credit card reader so I can take credit card payments when I’m just walking around. But only if the convention rules allow it; I don’t want to be a dick about it.
Also: Writing. The most important part. At this point, I have a lot of material in the pipeline — several short stories written and abandoned that need shaves and haircuts, two novel drafts requiring revising, and a third novel in progress. Lots to do.
2012 is going to be a fun year.
I listened to a big chunk of the audiobook of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation while walking over the past few days. Still enjoying the hell out of it.
The series originated as a series of eight stories published in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and 1950, then published as The Foundation Trilogy in 1951-53, according to Wikipedia. I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that the very first story of the first volume of the series was actually written last, for the book publication. Let’s say that was 1950.
The publication history is important to know, because it places the series in time. When you read it today, you’re not just reading a ripping science fiction story. You’re getting a glimpse of what a leading intellectual of 65 years ago — literally another century — thought the future would look like.
And what does it look like?
As I’m listening, I’m finding it easy to imagine the Galactic Empire as an art deco science fiction world, like the 1936 HG Wells movie Things to Come.
More images from Things to Come.
The future is big. Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire, is a planet entirely covered by a single city, with 40 billion plus people.
It’s centralized. All of those 40 billion plus people are employed in governing the Galactic Empire. Here in the real world of 2011, we’re seeing a failure of big, centralized institutions. But back when Asimov was writing, the huge bureaucracies of the West had pulled the world out of a Great Depression, and kicked Nazi ass. So it was reasonable to assume that a huge, bureaucratic government would be the best way to govern the Galaxy.
It’s REALLY big. The viewpoint character of the first section is Gaal Dornick a young man from a small town in the Midwest come to New York for the first time– oh, wait, no, I mean a young man from a provincial planet on his first trip to Trantor. He is processed in a vast open office, filled with row on row of desks, a room so large that he cannot see the far wall, just desks vanishing off into the mist. A filmmaker around the time Asimov was writing used a similar image; in that film, the scene was soul-deadening wage-slavery. In Foundation, it’s a source of breathless wonder.
Everybody’s in a hurry, everything is crowded. People are helpful but in a brisk way that can be taken for rudeness. Several characters comment that nobody on Trantor goes outside, or sees the sky, ever, and they’re fine with that. One character has to consult instrumentation to find out what the weather is. People take taxis to get where they’re going.
In other words, it’s New York written large. Of course, New York isn’t like that in real life. Not exactly. But I remember a conversation with a shoestore clerk on Manhattan who said he hadn’t left that island in fifteen years. He seemed matter-of-fact about it, even proud. So it’s easy to imagine a future where the entire city is just converted into one big building. And indeed Asimov wrote that future too, in The Caves of Steel.
Some of the Galactic Empire’s technological wonders are things we take for granted today. Super-scientist Hari Seldon owns a pocket calculating machine, which is described as a featureless little slab that displays numbers in red. I remember Asimov bragging about 30 years later that he’d predicted pocket calculators, even getting the colors of the digits right (early pocket calculators displayed digits in red LEDs). It’s also a good description of an iPhone — except our iPhones today are way better than the Galactic Empire’s calculators of 10,000+ years in the future. Hari Seldon can’t play Angry Birds on his gadget.
Seldon is described as so brilliant and driven that he actually sleeps with his calculator under his pillow, in case he is struck by inspiration during the night. If he were that brilliant, he’d sleep with it on his nightstand, as most of the rest of us do today in the real world.
Other than the pocket calculator, information is presented on actual pieces of paper and microfilm. No iPads and notebook computers in this world.
So we’re more advanced than the Galactic Empire in that regard.
Indeed, our technology here in 2011 is in every respect more advanced than Asimov’s vision of the future world of 2011, except for two things: We don’t have a mathematical science for predicting the future, and we don’t have interstellar travel.
Plastic is cool. Saying something is made of plastic in Foundation is saying that it’s a luxury item, hi-tech, top-drawer. Asimov describes Galactic aristocrats wearing plastic helmets, and presenting guests with cigars in plastic boxes. This is unintentionally comical today, after decades of plastic being used for cheap consumer crap. But Asimov wrote before all that.
Speaking of that cigar box; Asimov describes it as appearing perfectly to resemble water. How would that work, precisely? I can’t visualize a box made of water.
The title of this blog post comes from a line of dialogue in Foundation where a character laments the decline of the Galactic Empire. I’ve seen it cited as an example of how clunky the book is to modern eyes. I say phooey to that. I say it’s charming, as is the characters’ use of “Space!” and “Galaxy!” in lieu of swear words.
I just started listening to the audiobook of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which I last read when I was a teen-ager. I got a bug in my ear to re-read it after a review by Jo Walton.
First impressions, based on my memory of the books and my having listened to about five minutes:
The Foundation Trilogy retells Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as space opera, with a Galactic Empire replacing the Roman, and the entire Galaxy — millions of inhabited worlds — standing in for the Earth.
It really helps to know something about Asimov, the period in which the stories were written, and how they were written. The trilogy was written during and just after World War II. This was the period when America was at its greatest power, and we often compared ourselves to Rome.
Asimov was an American, an immigrant, and a New Yorker who didn’t travel or even go outside when he could help it.
As Walton notes, the planet-sized city of Trantor is New York in the 30s, where Asimov was a teen-ager, writ large. Back when Asimov was writing, technology meant that things were going to get bigger and faster — the Hoover Dam! Skyscrapers! Airplanes and cars! Today, technology means things get smaller — iPhones! Genetic engineering! So it was reasonable to assume, in Asimov’s day, that cities would one day grow large enough to encompass whole planets.
The Foundation Trilogy assumes that the Roman Empire was good. That’s a supportable position. But the people Rome conquered might disagree with it.
I love that thing Asimov does where he starts each section with a quote from a made-up history book, the Encyclopedia Galactica, supposedly written a thousand years after the action of the novels.
The first few minutes of the book spend a lot of time talking about how travel through hyperspace works in getting starships around the galaxy. That would all be completely unnecessary today, it’s just a given in science fiction.
The viewpoint character of the first section is a young man on his way to Trantor (New York, remember?) to participate in the Seldon Project. I’ve also been listening to Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann, a spoken-word memoir of the physicist Richard Feynmann, who was Asimov’s contemporary, and also a New Yorker. Feynmann traveled from New York to participate in something called the Manhattan Project. It’s hard to avoid seeing parallels.
That’s a lot to get out of five minutes of listening. I hope I enjoy the rest of the book as much.
In my effort to get my home office looking less like a disorganized storage unit, and more like an actual office — an effort that has gone on so long that if it was a person, it would be old enough to vote — I have a new rule: Every day, I clean up that day’s new clutter and mess. And then I remove two more things from the office. Preferably, I put those things away. But usually I can’t put them away, so instead I move them to a part of the house we don’t use. And when my office is in shape, I’ll start sorting through all the things in storage and keep some of them, and get rid of most of them.
Getting rid of things is a big project. We can’t just throw them away, as we could in the Mad Men era. We have to recycle them, or sell them, or give them away responsibly. What a pain.
Among the things I’ll be giving away: About 90 percent of my books. I have no idea how many books I have; if I had to guess, I’d say 10,000. Years ago, I began to wonder why I kept every book I ever read, because it’s not like I’m going to reread 99 percent of them. And yet I keep them all. Why? Well, because it’s what one does. It’s what I’ve always done. But now with the advent of e-books I’d much rather have the space, and re-acquire anything I want to re-read as an e-book.
Where can I get rid of old books? How about electronics? Office supplies?