Anime Movie Review: Fafner: Dead Aggressor: Heaven and Earth

written by Laurie Tom

Fafner: Dead Aggressor: Heaven and Earth is the movie sequel to the TV series Fafner: Dead Aggressor. Having been animated six years later, 2010’s Heaven and Earth is able to take advantage of improvements in CG animation (the alien Festum really benefited) and a bigger budget as everything looks much, much better.

Unfortunate the story is not as strong. Being constrained to an hour and a half, the movie reveals that the Festum were not defeated so much as divided by the destruction at the end of Fafner: Dead Aggressor, though the people of Tatsumiyajima Island have been able to enjoy what appears to have been two or three years of peace.

The eighth graders who were not pulled into service at the end of the TV series are now older and active pilots, though without combat experience, and the survivors of the original series are now veterans, though not without scars.

Though it hasn’t been as long for me between seeing these characters, it was still pleasant seeing how they have matured and moved on. Kazuki and Maya might be a non-starting relationship, but I really like how Kenji and Sakura were still together, even after everything that’s happened.

Very little effort is made to bring anyone up to speed with the TV series. Characters come and go with little explanation of who they are and what they do. Most of the new pilots had previously appeared in the series as potential back-ups so it helped that they did not come out of the blue, with one exception. Akira seems to have been included because someone could not resist having a single mecha piloted by twins.

I realize this is a mecha anime so I can buy into neural-controlled mecha without much issue. Pilot thinks and robot moves. Simple enough. But what happens when you have two pilots and one robot?

No time is spent on how this works or why it is an advantage, and the fraternal twins of different genders, who have problems understanding each other (and don’t have the plot time to figure things out), are tossed in the mecha and they pilot it like it’s no big deal, which I had some trouble buying into. I suspect there was originally a subplot here, since it’s mentioned that their parents were the original pilots of the two-person Fafner, but if that’s the case, the two-person mecha should have been pulled along with it.

All of that is secondary to the fact the Festum have changed due to the events at the end of the TV series. Due to the influence of humans on their psyche, the Festum are trying to annihilate the island (and then presumably the rest of humanity) in greater numbers than before. There is also some creepy weirdness in that not all of the Festum are united anymore. While we saw the beginnings of that kind of schism in the TV series, it’s much worse in Heaven and Earth.

The movie is fine for revisiting characters a couple years down the road and for the visually impressive combat scenes, but otherwise feels more like a light snack than a satisfying meal. Because of the time constraints, the story just can’t play to the strengths of the TV series and its large cast works against it.

It does end on a positive note, pointing towards a possible peace between humans and that which was previously incomprehensible.

The new 2015 TV series Fafner: Dead Aggressor: Exodus is supposed to be set two years after the movie, which is why I watched Heaven and Earth (and the original TV series), but it feels very skippable to me, and if the new series does a good job it should bring newcomers up to speed.

Fafner: Dead Aggressor: Heaven and Earth is currently streaming both subbed and dubbed on Hulu. The subtitled version was watched for this review.

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published inGalaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

The Best of Drabblecast 2014

The Drabblecast!  Still my favorite publication, hitting just the right level of weirdness.  Big editorial change recently at Drabblecast with Norm Sherman handing over the Editor-In-Chief position to longstanding head slushwrangler Nathaniel Lee–sounds like it might get episodes out with greater regularity which would be a great thing.  Norm will still be host and main producer, so his talent will still make the show what it is.

The List

1.  “The Carnival was Eaten, All Except the Clown” by Caroline M. Yoachim
Starring a confectionary clown who acts as the seed for a magician to make carnivals.  The epitome of a Drabblecast episode–weird, fun, strong emotional story.

2.  “To Whatever” by Shaenon Garrity
Written as a series of notes from an apartment dweller to lurking horror that always stays just out of sight and also drinks the last of the milk from the fridge.

3.  “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon
A kind of a selkie love story, but with jackalopes.

4.  “Half a Conversation, Overheard While Inside an Enormous Sentient Slug” by Oliver Buckram
Happily, this story is exactly what it says on the tin.

5.  “My Hero: The Fisherman” by Jack Handey
Yes, this is the Jack Handey you may recognize from SNL’s Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories segments.  Hilarious story.

Honorable Mentions

“On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy” by Desmond Warzel
This is one of those that was definitely elevated by the production–amazing narration by Dave Robison as the radio DJ and others playing callers.

“Seven Things that are Better in Blue” by Jason K. Jones

 

 

Anime Catch-Up Review: Fafner: Dead Aggressor

written by Laurie Tom

fafnerdeadaggressorFafner: Dead Aggressor is a series from ten years ago, and it shows in the character designs and the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original broadcast, but those do not detract from making it one of the more unusual mecha shows I’ve seen.

While Fafner starts with the usual teenage protagonists as the pilots, what draws me in is the attention paid to their parents, who are both their commanders and their support crew in the war that suddenly finds their figurative Eden.

Twenty-nine years ago, long enough that many of the younger adults were born post-crisis, an alien entity emerged and most of Japan was destroyed. But a small group of researchers hid on a mobile, artificial island with a cloaking device, taking their research with them.

There, they built weapons to fight the alien Festum and also raised children to pilot the special robots called Fafners, that are the only weapons powerful enough to routinely destroy them. The Fafners are named after the giant in Der Ring des Nibelungen who turned into a dragon to protect his treasure, and they are finicky things that will only accept pilots that meet certain genetic criteria.

Then as the pilot ages and their brains continue to mature, they lose the ability to sync with the machine (all controls are neural). Hence one of the best rationales I’ve seen for having teenage mecha pilots.

Most of their history is unknown to the teenagers, who grew up thinking that the rest of Japan still exists and that they simply live on one of the smaller islands. This is an intentional choice by their parents, who want the children to have as ordinary a childhood as possible. The adults work as shopkeepers, teachers, craftsmen, and so on until the day a Festum finally finds them, at which point it becomes apparent that all of the adults know the truth, even those that were born on the island and were former Fanfer pilot candidates themselves.

Once exposed again to the outside world, the island’s inhabitants are forced to deal not just with the Festum, but the rest of humanity that is still out there and has been searching for them for the last twenty-nine years in hopes the advanced technology the researchers fled with will save them.

Though the protagonists are essentially tools created for the day they might be needed, it’s clear that many of their parents love them regardless of the fact they were born to be the island’s primary line of defense. One of the most moving scenes is when Commander Makabe and Dr. Tomi go around to all the parents of the best pilot candidates (most of whom have second jobs as part of the island’s military command and support staff) and let them know their child is being conscripted.

How the parents react, even knowing this day could come, touches on emotions that most mecha anime never address. One of the fathers is a Fanfer mechanic, and there’s a short scene where he tells his wife he can’t put off work that evening because of their son (who will be going into battle soon).

The result is something quite unusual, as I can’t think of any other anime that spends so much time on family, whether its parents, children, or siblings. It does make the cast rather difficult to keep track of since there are several pilots and parents for almost every one of them, but I think the effort’s worth it, as every death (and there are several) means something to someone.

That said, Fafner: Dead Aggressor does not entirely come together. The alien Festum aren’t meant to be understandable, in fact the core of the problem is that neither humans nor Festum can abide each other’s existence, but even if their mind is alien, some things about their behavior just doesn’t make sense if examined too closely.

And if one hopes for an explanation for why a giant robot is the best weapon against alien invaders, there isn’t one. It is still a mecha series at heart.

The quality of the characters varies. Lead protagonist Kazuki isn’t bad per se, but he’s not very interesting. He’s the lens through which the audience views most of the show so he’s ignorant of everything and is a little idealistic, even when the audience knows what he wants is a bad idea given the situation (granted, we’d have a less interesting show if Kazuki’s idealism didn’t keep causing trouble).

Some of the series’ most trying moments come when Kazuki decides to talk enemies into defeat, which can strain believability.

The rest of the cast has significantly less time, but enough to feel like individuals rather than cut-outs, which is an accomplishment, since there is only so much time the show can give any one character. Aside from Kazuki, the rest of the cast gets about the same amount of attention, including several of the adults, whether they are parents or previous Fafner candidates.

In a way that works since it’s harder to tell if someone is wearing plot armor and if they’re going to make it to the end of the series, but because of the greater distance between the audience and individual characters, it’s more that we feel for those who keep living than those who’ve been lost.

Even though Fafner isn’t perfect, it’s memorable for what it accomplishes, and putting a human face on war. While I initially thought it was naive for the adults to have worked so hard to maintain the illusion that the world outside still existed, by the end I understood. Fafner is a loss of innocence story for the pilots, but they are grateful they had the innocence to lose.

Number of Episodes: 26

Pluses: teenage protagonists with parents just as invested in the fight as they are, more realistic treatment of the costs of war than most anime

Minuses: not much character depth, backstory reveal is on the slow side, sometimes the amount of information withheld from the protagonists doesn’t make sense

Fafner: Dead Aggressor is currently streaming both subbed and dubbed on Hulu. The subtitled version was watched for this review.

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published inGalaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Slush Retrospective

written by David Steffen

For anyone who hasn’t been following along, Diabolical Plots was open for fiction submissions for the first time in December 2014 to pick 12 stories to publish one per month for a year as our first fiction offerings. This is my first time editing fiction or handling a slushpile of my own (as opposed to being a slushreader for a magazine run by someone else).

Also, this is a long post–I tried to give useful headings so you could skip to the parts you’re interested in.

WHY NOW?

Anthony Sullivan (my co-conspirator here at Diabolical Plots) and I decided together that we wanted to give this a try. We’d been talking about it off and on for years. So why did we actually move forward with it now? The answer to that is simple–money. We knew that if we wanted to do this, we wanted to do it big–professional rates as defined by SFWA (currently 6 cents per word). We don’t have anything against markets that pay less, but we figured the best way in our control to increase the upper quality of the slushpile is to pay professional rates. And we wanted to make a market that we would be excited to submit to.  We would love to become a SFWA-qualified professional market.

The reason we can go forward with this fiction venture now is because of generous donations both one-time and recurring from users of the Submission Grinder. Those donations go first to site maintenance costs like hosting as well as secondary costs that help us keep up with market news as well as we can. But we’ve been saving what we can to put towards projects that require money like this fiction venture. We could have run a Kickstarter campaign but we both liked the idea of providing something of value and then seeing if people would like to support it, rather than the other way around. We plan to launch a Patreon campaign in the near future–if that and the recurring PayPal donations combined reach a threshold, then we will keep publishing fiction past the first year, if we reach the next threshold above that we’ll buy 2 stories/month for the following year, and so on. I’m not opposed to something like Kickstarter, but I like the Patreon model better for what I hope will be an ongoing venture because its focus is maintenance funding, ongoing income instead of the one-off burst that Kickstarter will provide–at some point a magazine has to hit Kickstarter again and one success does not guarantee another.

MAKING THE GUIDELINES

Our guidelines are somewhat unusual for several reasons. One is that we were only open for a month to buy a year’s worth of fiction. Part of the reason for this is that we intended from the beginning to read all of the slush ourselves, and we knew this would be time-consuming, so we would rather do it on a short-term sprint than to be reading slush around the calendar.

Another oddity is that we only allow one story per author per submission window. There were a few reasons for this. One is to encourage authors to pick their very best work they have available that fits the rest of the guidelines. Another is to make any progress in the slushpile a permanent step–rather than rejecting a story by an author and getting another story from the same author again.

Of course the biggest oddity in our guidelines is the requirement for anonymity–there are a few markets that require this–among pro SF markets I believe Flash Fiction Online and Writers of the Future are the only others. But we’re even more strange in this respect in that there were only two staff members doing all the reading and there wasn’t a separate person to do author correspondence. Our homebrew submission tracking software had to be quite a bit more complicated because of this–it had to hide the author’s identity from us until we’ve made our final decision of accept or reject, and had to allow some basic way for an author to query us to make sure their story was received but without breaking anonymity.

The reason we wanted to make the slush anonymous is that we wanted story to trump all. We wanted to completely remove the possibility that personal relationships with an author would sway our decision one way or the other. And we wanted to remove the consideration of marketing concerns–it’s not uncommon for a publication, especially when starting up, to publish stories from established authors with big fan followings to attract readers. The reasoning behind cherry-picking known authors is that the fan following will get more eyeballs on the magazine and help make the launch more successful.  But personally, we felt that these stories can feel phoned-in because the story didn’t make it into the publication on its own merits. We have nothing against established authors with big names, of course. They got to be big names because they knew what they were doing. But if an author you recognize is in our table of contents, it means that we thought that story was in our top twelve and the name has nothing to do with it.

THE SLUSH

In the 31 days we were open, we received 378 submissions–34 of those on the first day of submissions, 27 of those on the last day of submissions.

17 of the submissions had clear violations of the guidelines. A few of those were stories with names attached against our anonymity requirements. Most of those were stories that were clearly too long for our 2000-word maximum, sometimes by several times. And the one submission that was a synopsis of a non-speculative children’s book that was also triple our maximum word count allowed. I did have to wonder, as I was rejecting these stories unread and with a note pointing out the guidelines violation, what these authors were thinking. Did they not read the guidelines at all? Did they think their story was so good the word count limit was irrelevant to them? Either answer is not particularly endearing . Because of our one-submission-per-author-per-window policy that was the only opportunity those authors got this time round.  Once those were taken out of the running that left 361 valid submissions.

I’ve read slush for a few different venues–Flash Fiction Online, Drabblecast, and Stupefying Stories. Overall the quality of the Diabolical Plots slush was much higher than I expect from past experience, and there wasn’t the glut of serial killer stories and stories about protagonists killing their spouses. This could’ve been because I tried to warn off these things in the guidelines, or because the one-story-per-author rule made authors more selective, or could just because we didn’t specifically ask for the offensive like the Drabblecast guidelines do.

The stories that were rejected in the first round were rejected for a variety of reasons. A slow or uninteresting beginning to the story is an excuse to start skimming–a bad sign, especially when dealing with stories less than 2000 words. Stories where nothing happened, or stories with low stakes. Or ones without strong characters. First and foremost we wanted stories that made us feel something, whether that was humor, fear, fun, love, but it had to make us feel something.

By January 8th we’d finished the first round of reading and held 67 stories for the second and final round of consideration. I didn’t keep statistics on the proportion of personal rejections–but I’d guess them at maybe 10% in the first round. I only commented if I had feedback that I felt would be useful to the author.

EDITORIAL CHANGE

Around this same time I started drafting up the contracts based on Lightspeed’s very author-friendly publicly posted contract. Up until this point we had been pretty focused on the editorial side of things and the technical side of things (tweaking the submission system), but at this point we started getting into the publishing side of things, particularly on the topic of risk and legality. We realized that Diabolical Plots should be registered under an LLC to minimize any risk to our personal finances. And as part of that discussion, Anthony realized that he needed to step down from the co-editor position. We didn’t have a falling out or anything like that. He just realized that his role as co-editor wasn’t going to work out with other aspects of his life. So from that point forward I am the editor of Diabolical Plots.

Anthony will still be a big part of Diabolical Plots and the Submission Grinder and will continue to fill the same invaluable role that he has filled since we first teamed up in 2009–handling all of the technical side of the website administration, and doing the lion’s share of the software development that has made the Grinder the useful tool it is today. In fact, he is hard at work on an overhaul of the Grinder site that will make it easier to maintain as well as providing a lot of shiny new features that will make it even better than it is now. We’re aiming to launch this site overhaul to the public around the same time that we launch our first fiction publication–that date is yet to be determined, but will probably be in a couple months.

THE HOLD PILE

By January 8th we had finished reading and resolving all the first round submissions and we only had the 67 stories in the hold pile left to resolve. By the time Anthony reached the decision that he needed to step down, I had re-read the hold-pile stories and ranked them numerically with plans to compare lists with Anthony. So when I became the sole editor, I was already ready to go and could resolve the whole pile in one fell swoop. I made sure to give personal rejections to all the stories that made it to the hold pile because I hate it when my stories are held for further consideration but then rejected without a word.

I had enough good stories in the pile, and planned to buy so few, that I didn’t venture into any major rewrite requests. If the story wasn’t good enough as-is, then I didn’t accept it–I have made a few small suggestions for small changes and will probably do a few more as I progress from acceptance to publication. There were a lot more stories in the pile that I would’ve loved to accept if the budget had allowed, so there were some very hard decisions in this pile.

In the final twelve stories I was interested to see that there were several author names that I knew from seeing their published stories in pro markets. For at least one of the authors, this was the first pro sale. Judging by names, of the final twelve, seven of the authors are women.  I’m glad to see both sexes so well represented–I know that some publications have a real problem with getting enough women-authored stories in their slushpiles (to the point where they have to make campaigns specifically to bring in more women authors) so I was glad to see that.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Before I do anything else, I need to sort out some business details, defining what Diabolical Plots actually is. Once that’s in place I can finalize the draft of our contract and send it to the twelve authors–in the meantime I’ve requested and gotten preliminary notes from all twelve to let me know the stories are still available.  The twelve authors are free to share their news as widely or as narrowly as they wish so you may have already heard a few of them.

Once the contracts are signed, then I can publicly announce the table of contents–I’m really looking forward to that. And then I can seriously consider what kind of launch date we can manage for the fiction offerings, but I’m still planning to coincide that with the launch of the Submission Grinder overhaul, so it will depend somewhat on that as well.

WHAT ABOUT YEAR TWO?

You may notice that all of our planning so far has been focused on providing a single year of fiction, talking about the budget for a year, the schedule for a year. That’s because, at this point, we don’t have the capital in place for another year of fiction. We’re hoping to change that. Ideally by gathering recurring donations of whatever size through Patreon and PayPal to give a steady stream of funds to kick off the second year and beyond. If the end of year one approaches and we don’t have this in place yet, then I’ll consider doing a Kickstarter campaign to get year two funded and continue to focus on getting recurring donations so that big one-off campaigns don’t need to be run every year. If we get enough to be able to afford to publish two stories a month, then we’ll expand to that. And beyond that we’ll consider expanding in other ways. The sky’s the limit if there is enough interest and support. I’ll be posting sometime in the not-too-distant future about our Patreon campaign to this end. In the meantime, recurring PayPal donations either on the DP page or the Grinder page are the best way to help support both our necessary costs and our harebrained schemes like this.

Winter 2015 Anime First Impressions (with Fall Bonus)

written by Laurie Tom

Unlike last fall, which had an anemic number of shows that interested me, this winter has several. It’s also becoming more common for TV series consisting of more than 13 episodes to split their cours to run in staggered seasons rather than back to back. Hence last summer’s Aldnoah.Zero and Tokyo Ghoul are both returning for their second halves this winter, and this winter’s Durarara!! x2 will take a hiatus in spring and return in summer.

With Aldnoah.Zero and Tokyo Ghoul returning, and two of the fall shows I did enjoy continuing into winter (Yona of the Dawn and Parasyte), this winter is experiencing something of a logjam and something’s gonna give, but I’m not sure just what yet.

Assassination Classroom

assassinationclassroomWhy I Watched It: It has an absurd premise where an octopoid being blows up the moon and then agrees to teach a class of teenagers to kill him within a year. If they succeed, he won’t blow up the world. The alien’s yellow humanoid octopus design is very distinct, making the show easy to recognize.

What I Thought: Despite its life or death premise, the show is largely a comedy and rolls with its bizarre premise. Kuro-sensei moves as fast as Mach 20 and none of the world’s governments have managed to kill him, so they’ve agreed to let him teach a class of students as he’s requested. Oddly enough, they’re the E class, made up of the school’s lowest performers, but their strange genocidal teacher is also the best one they’ve ever had, praising them when they do something well (even if its an attempt on his life), and honestly trying to get them to do their best. It makes for an interesting dynamic since they need to kill their teacher, but they actually like him.

Verdict: I’ll save it for later. It’s off to a good start and I liked it, but because it’s based on an ongoing manga I’m not sure we’ll get a satisfying ending and there’s too much else to watch right now.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Cute High Earth Defense Club Love

earthdefenseforceWhy I Watched It: It certainly wasn’t for the title. Rather, it looked like it might be an interesting twist of the magical girl genre in that the protagonists running around in frilly outfits and using sparkly attacks are all male this time around.

What I Thought: It’s better than the premise sounds and there are a lot of good laughs. Four male high school friends and a sudden fifth are arbitrarily chosen to save the world with the power of love by an alien that looks like a pink wombat. This includes magical girl style transformations into their frilly combat outfits, though they are wearing either shorts or pants instead of skirts (the tail of their coats is the nod to the skirts). The boys take this about as well as can be expected. But despite compulsions to pose and say weird things (they try and fail at getting their costumes off), they finally give in and fight this episode’s monster, which in frequent magical girl fashion, is a transformed classmate. I about died laughing when they used their wands and instead of calling out a magical girl-style attack they used things like “Something-or-Other Storm!” and “I Am Awesome Fire!”

Verdict: I have no idea how I’m going to find time to watch this, but I really want to. Might end up being a save for later.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Death Parade

deathparadeWhy I Watched It: Based on a previous short film, Death Parade is one of the more mature offerings this season with no signs of teenagers. It takes place in a sort of purgatory for people who have died, where visitors are asked to play a game to determine their fates.

What I Thought: Death Parade won’t win awards for originality, but the execution is spot on and beautifully animated. A couple on a honeymoon are the purgatory bar’s first visitors and are convinced to play a game of darts with their lives on the line, unaware that they are already dead, and what a game of darts! As they play the game the audience is led and misled regarding the truth about their marriage and how they died. My only concern is that the deceptively energetic opening credits features a lot of other bar employees besides the bartender who managed the game in this episode and I’m not sure I want the focus to shift off the visitors. I’m completely down with a Twilight Zone anthology format.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. Unless the format changes too much, I’m going to try to find space for this one.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Durarara!! x2

durararax2Why I Watched It: I really enjoyed the first Durarara!! in 2010, even though the series defies a convenient plot summary. The closest thing I can say is that it’s about some of the inhabitants of the Ikebukuro neighborhood of Tokyo and all the very weird, even supernatural, things that happen around them. Why and how it all happens makes about as much sense as it does in real life, and maybe that’s the point.

What I Thought: Durarara!! x2 is just as mind-bending as the original, and goes to pains to show how nothing has really changed in Ikebukuro. The style of the opening and ending credits are direct callbacks to the distinctive look of the original, and the episode itself follows the same non-linear storytelling that has encompassed all animated versions of Ryougo Narita’s novels since Baccano. I can’t honestly say I know what’s going on other than it looks like all the weirdness will probably revolve around a serial killer eventually since that plotline is the only one that is not directly a part of anyone’s life… yet.

Verdict: In another season, I would probably watch this right away, but because of the non-linear storytelling that looped back and forth, between and within episodes in the original, I think Durarara x2 would be better saved for later marathoning so I can better keep things straight in my head.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Fafner: Dead Aggressor: Exodus

fafnerexodusWhy I Watched It: The sequel to 2004’s Fafner: Dead Aggressor and it’s 2010 movie, Heaven and Earth. Presumably problems continue with the alien Festum trying to deal with their own changing nature and trying to annihilate humanity. Exodus is supposed to take place two years after Heaven and Earth which should make most of the protagonists adults now.

What I Thought: Exodus doesn’t waste time, giving viewers a breakneck intro to where humanity is in the war with the Festum before moving on to glimpses of almost everyone who survived the original series and the movie. I was pleasantly surprised by the original Fafner: Dead Aggressor because of its unusual focus on whole families being part of the military structure while still trying to be a family, and I’m honestly not sure where Exodus is going to be able to go thematically now that the original protagonists are adults. It’s not clear if they can still pilot the Fafners (compatibility slips once past the teenage years), so I’m curious how the show will continue to involve them, especially those that chose to avoid full-time military work. New pilot candidates have been introduced as well, so there will definitely be enough characters to pilot the Fafner mecha, but I’m hoping the show will focus more on the original cast and where they go from here.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. I don’t know where the show is going, but enough of the key staff from the original series have returned, along with just about all the voice actors, that I want to give this a chance.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Gourmet Girl Graffiti

gourmetgirlWhy I Watched It: I’m not normally much of a fan of slice of life shows, but Gourmet Girl Graffiti is about a girl who’s good at cooking, and I hoped to see lots of delicious anime versions of Japanese food.

What I Thought: It was definitely a good idea to watch while I was eating, and not while I was hungry. The level of detail on the various Japanese dishes was great, and the main character Ryou is obviously really into cooking so there’s a lot to be learned about how food is prepared and how leftovers from the making of one dish can be made into another just from listening to her dialogue. On the other hand, some of the animation of Ryou eating seems to have the wrong idea about what people mean when they say “food porn.” It’s a small part of the show, but very noticeable.

Verdict: Interesting side adventure, but not likely to be going back.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Maria the Virgin Witch

mariavirginwitchWhy I Watched It: The art style isn’t quite to my tastes, but I heard good things about it and the Hundred Years War between England and France is a really unusual setting for an anime.

What I Thought: There are a lot of jokes about Maria’s virginity and the naivete that comes along with it, mostly from her succubus familiar. Aside from that, this is a version of the Hundred Years War where witches exist and meddle with battles out of patriotism or for profit (or to enforce peace in Maria’s case). There are surprising historical touches, like the English giving the French the bowfinger or capturing knights for ransom, that I wasn’t expecting in what easily could have been generic medieval warfare.

Verdict: I might come back to it later. It’s not my usual cup of tea, but the historical part of the story piqued my interest.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Bonus!

Quite unusually, there was one show picked up for winter simulcast that actually started in the fall and it’s still running. Back episodes are being added at a pace of two old episodes for every one new.

Magic Kaito 1412

magickaitoWhy I Watched It: Set in the same universe as Case Closed, Magic Kaito focuses on a high school student who becomes a master thief to fight against his father’s killers. Case Closed (also known as Detective Conan) was one of my favorite anime series back in college and I always wanted to see some of the manga artist’s lead character, Kaito.

What I Thought: The opening episode feels a little dated, which isn’t surprising given that the manga was started in the 80s. Even though there are touches to show it’s modern day (video calling on a laptop), the show’s core sensibilities, how quickly Kaito both accepts and assumes his new position as a master thief appeals to an earlier time.

Verdict: I’ll be watching it when time allows, hoping that it has the same crime-solving (or crime-committing!) attention to detail that the Case Closed series is known for.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Fall Leftovers

There are the only three shows I was interested in last fall, and all of them I continued to watch. Fate/stay night is now on break and will resume in spring. Yona and Parasyte continue into winter.

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works

fatestaynightunlimitedWhy I Watched It: This is supposed to be an alternate telling of the well regarded Fate/stay night series and it has a female protagonist so I figured if I was going to jump in, this would be a good starting point.

What I Thought: Rin turned out to be a decoy protagonist, only starring in the zero episode, and it’s still the same main character, Shirou, as in the original series for the rest of it, but apparently we are going through a different storyline from the visual novel series (which has multiple endings). The series has beautiful action sequences between the mages and the Servants they command, but the worldbuilding falls down if looked at too closely. It works best as a popcorn show.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Parasyte -the maxim-

parasyteWhy I Watched It: Parasyte originated as a Seiun Award-winning science fiction horror manga that questions what it is to be human. The manga was first translated into English back in the 90s and no other story I’ve read has so eloquently pointed out the many flaws in humanity while still saying it’s okay to be ourselves. I mainly had two concerns going in. 1) Parasyte is at times very gory and will have to be censored for its broadcast run. I’m rarely an advocate for gore, but Parasyte might be one of the few stories that is less powerful without it. 2) I’m really not digging Shinichi’s new character design. It makes him look like an introverted nerd, which he never was, and I’m concerned that might mean they’re changing his personality.

What I Thought: The adaptation made some changes the bring the story to modern day, and the rapport (or lack thereof) is spot on between main character Shinichi and alien creature Migi, who has taken over his right hand after a failed parasitic invasion. There are odd additions to the story while at the same time condensing others, but it’s still coherent and I found I liked the changes more as time went on. The gore is partially on screen, but toned down, and there’s no escaping the fact people are being eaten. Shinichi initially comes off as a bit more of a wimp than in the original manga, but he’s not unbearable, and I can understand why they gave him the glasses since it allows for a later transformation to become more pronounced. If it hadn’t come out against Aldnoah.Zero it would probably be my favorite show to have started in 2014.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Yona of the Dawn

yonaofthedawnWhy I Watched It: Asian fantasy adventure story geared towards the female audience with a female lead character who does not appear to have a prominent love interest in the promotion art. Plus she’s holding a sword.

What I Thought: The early episodes are a bit slow as Yona tries to come to grips with the fact that the cousin she loves has just killed her father the emperor and usurped control of her nation in one fell swoop. But after being on the run for a few episodes she finally comes to accept that she can’t let things stay the way they are and we see the birth of a warrior. She’s not particular good at the start, but she’s persistent and I like that the show makes it a point to show how hard Yona is training every day as she and her guardian, Hak, journey in search of the legendary dragons who will be able to help her reclaim her country.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published inGalaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

The Best of Escape Pod 2014

written by David Steffen

It’s been a great year for Escape Pod with some of my favorite episodes ever after they and their sister podcasts came back from the brink of having to close due to lack of funds. The podcast is still edited by Norm Sherman, with some help this previous year from Mur Lafferty who has now moved on to edit Mothership, an upcoming Escape Artists tie-in. Just a few days ago there was a metacast that announced big new things coming up, including that Alasdair Stuart and J. Daniel Sawyer are now owners of the company.  Here’s to many more years.

(Keeping it brief on this one because, due to technical issues, this is literally the third time I’ve retyped this)

The List

1. “Rachel in Love” by Pat Murphy

2. “That Other Sea” by William Ledbetter

3. “Kumara” by Seth Dickinson

4. “A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly” by Oliver Buckram

5. “The Sky is Bright and Blue, and Full of Stars” by Edward Ashton

Honorable Mention

“Shared Faces” by Anaea Lay

 

 

The Best of Podcastle 2014

written by David Steffen

It’s been a great year for Podcastle with some of my favorite episodes ever after they and their sister podcasts came back from the brink of having to close due to lack of funds. The podcast is still edited by Dave Thompson and Anna Schwind and they’re doing a great job.Just a few days ago there was a metacast that announced big new things coming up, including that Alasdair Stuart and J. Daniel Sawyer are now owners of the company. Just yesterday I learned that Dave and Anna are stepping down from their editorial positions early this year after five years in the position–I hear that the full details are in the most recent episode along with the story Rachael K. Jones’ “Makeisha in Time” but I haven’t had time to sync my iPod and listen since I heard this, so I don’t know much more about it yet.

On to the list!

The List

1. “Heartless” by Peadar O Guilin

2. “The MSG Golem” by Ken Liu

3. “Stranger vs. The Malevolent Malignancy” by Jim C. Hines

4. “Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy” by Saladin Ahmed

5. “Gazing into the Carnauba Wax Eyes of the Future” by Keffy R.M. Kehrli

6. “Help Summon the Most Holy Folded One!” by Harry Connolly

 

Honorable Mentions

“The Old Woman With No Teeth” by Patricia Russo

“Underbridge” by Peter S. Beagle

“Ill Met in Ulthar” by T.A. Pratt

 

 

 

 

 

The Best of Pseudopod 2014

written by David Steffen

Another solid year of Pseudopod after they and their sister podcasts came back from the brink of having to close due to lack of funds. The podcast is edited, as it has been for years, by Shawn Garrett. Just a few days ago there was a metacast that announced big new things coming up, including that Alasdair Stuart and J. Daniel Sawyer are now owners of the company.

On to the list!

The List

1. “The Screwfly Solution” by James Tiptree, Jr.

2. “The Wriggling Death” by Harold Gross

3. “Shadow Transit” by Ferrett Steinmetz

4. “The Metal and Its Mold” by Tim W. Burke

5. “Prince of Flowers” by Elizabeth Hand

6. “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens

 

Honorable Mentions

“Kraken Rising” by Andrew Reid

“The Violin Family” by James Douglas

“File Under” by Lisamarie Lamb

 

Award Eligibility Post 2014

written by David Steffen

And now the gratuitous award eligibility post–feel free to skip over it if you’re not interested, but figured there might be someone out there who might want to see it. This post covers works by Diabolical Plots and by me personally.

From time to time people ask me if they can nominate the Submission Grinder. In the past, I thought the answer was “no” because most of the awards seemed to be very publisher focused–so the best way I thought to try to recognize the Submission Grinder would be to nominate Diabolical Plots. But there ARE a couple categories the Submission Grinder qualifies for in some awards, so I’ve listed those two first.

And just to be clear, no I don’t really think we have a shot at anything, but I see no reason why I can’t mention what we’re eligible for.

Writer’s Resource/Information/News Source

1. The Submissions Grinder

I wasn’t aware of this award until this year, part of the Preditors and Editors Reader Poll. Someone has seen fit to nominate the Grinder, so thought it would be worth mentioning.

 

World Fantasy Special Award – Non Professional

1. The Submissions Grinder

Likewise, I wasn’t aware of this award, but it’s another way to recognize the Submission Grinder directly if you want to see it recognized.

 

Best Short Story

1. “Catastrophic Failure” by David Steffen at Perihelion

2. “Always There” by David Steffen at Lakeside Circus

3. “Unraveling” by David Steffen at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

4. “A Switch in Time” by David Steffen at Perihelion

5. “The Thing About Analyn” by David Steffen at Stupefying Stories

 

Best Related Work

All of the articles that I’ve written here and in SF Signal are eligible for this category, but I’m not going to list all dozens of them. I’ll just mention the one that I thought was most notable:

1. The Best Podcast Fiction of All Time (at SF Signal)

 

Best Editor (Short Form)

1. David Steffen (for nonfiction)

Note that although we’ve been reading slush for fiction publication in 2014, we haven’t published any fiction yet, so only my nonfiction editing can be taken into account. And Anthony isn’t eligible this year for the same reason.

 

Best Fanzine

1. Diabolical Plots

Next year, instead of Best Fanzine, we’ll be eligible for Best Semiprozine because we’ll be a paying fiction market.

 

Best Fan Writer

1. David Steffen
–For the short fiction listed above, the large number of nonfiction articles here and in SF Signal.

2. Carl Slaughter
–Mostly for interviews

3. Frank Dutkiewicz
–Reviews of Daily SF

4. Laurie Tom
–Anime reviews

 

 

Interview: Andrew Burt

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

Critters,Preditors & Editors, ReAnimus, Advent, Nyx, SFWA, snap books. Andrew Burt is a busy guy.

 

How is Critters different than/better than Scribophile, SF Novelist, Hatrack River Writer’s Workshop, and other critique workshops? Critters is the first workshop on the web. How did that come about?

Critters pre-dates the others you mention, but I don’t know if Critters is fundamentally better or different from any of the others. The more the better! The reason I started Critters was simply that there wasn’t any critique workshop on the web at the time. I was searching for one to join, actually, but, being the early days of the web, there just wasn’t one yet. Before I started Critters someone in a forum suggested we try emailing manuscripts back and forth, which I think half a dozen of us did… once. I submitted my critiques of the others’ manuscripts, but I think I was the only one. 🙂 So I figured, well, there’s this web thing, I’ll hang a shingle and see if anyone comes.

Over time other workshops popped in and out (often off-shoots of Critters, like Critique Circle), and some of them stuck, which is terrific. The more depth of critique an author can get the better for everyone. In terms of differences, Critters’ workload is modeled after a local, in-person workshop I belonged to, begun by the award-winning and awesome Ed Bryant (himself an alum of one of the early in-person workshops, Clarion). With a monthly meeting and a rough average of three manuscripts everyone critiqued, I implemented that as a “three critiques per four weeks” ratio in Critters. That’s seemed to work well. Doing critiques of others is probably half the benefit to one’s own writing, so it’s important to ensure people do critiques. (And in-depth ones; we have minimum critique length limits to encourage people to peer deeply into every story.)

One thing I do think that accounts for Critters success has been our “diplomacy policy,” whereby those reviewing a manuscript are urged to phrase their bad news in ways that have been shown to communicate, and avoid the phrasings that don’t communicate the message but do provoke negative reactions from the receiving author’s “lizard brain.” It’s usually as simple as saying, “The pace was too slow for my taste” instead of, “The pace is too slow”; this really seems to help.

 

Why is your workshop still free after so many years even though many workshops charge?

So this all started in 1995, back when the web was young, and there probably weren’t even enough people around for anyone to make money from a web site yet. I had also been running Nyx as a free service. Nyx was (and still is) free to use, funded by voluntary donations from those who like it. That seemed like the right model, so I started Critters as a free workshop as well. It made sense since the biggest “cost” if you will, is the effort that all the critiquers put into critiquing their fellow authors. Doing critiques of others is also of huge help to improving one’s own writing craft, so we do nudge people to participate, both in quantity and quality of in-depth critiques. You can’t buy that quality; and making people pay for it may even dilute it.

For our modest monetary needs, folks who like it donate as they feel the urge (with some low-key fund drive reminders; I don’t care for the in-your-face, we’re-holding-your-program-hostage-until-twenty-people-donate kind of public TV/radio fund drives, though I understand their necessity). I also added some Google ads to the site to fill in the gaps, though I figure most people run ad blockers and never see them. Critters doesn’t need a huge budget,it isn’t my full-time job and we have a few volunteers to help with questions and such,so we do fine.

 

You mentioned Nyx, the world’s first Internet Service Provider, which you founded in 1987. How did that come about? What made you want to start the first ISP?

I’d been on the “ARPAnet,” the network that later became the “Internet,” for many years, and was active in “Usenet,” the gigantic (for its day) distributed forum system. ARPAnet was only accessible to a small number of people at academic/research/government organizations. It was so cool, though… So when our department (I was a computer science professor at the University of Denver) was donated a behemoth of an old computer,a PDP 11/70, which filled an entire room,and we had nothing really to use it for, it sort of fell to me, because I was the only professor who even knew how to run it. I put the open source operating system known as “BSD Unix” on it (a precursor to today’s Linux), connected it to the university’s network going out to the world at large, hung some modems on it, and opened it up for the general public so everybody could access what was just being renamed “the Internet.”

I’m a fan of capitalism, but it doesn’t always work as well as it should. Before the public had any way to get on the Internet, I could see the writing on the wall that they would be getting on eventually, and I was dismayed at the thought of people being gouged to access all the cool Internet stuff. The culture of the net was/is something special, with (at the time) a high degree of altruism,people helping others just because it was a good thing to do. There were many large, corporate, non-Internet dialup modem services, like “Compuserve”, which were generally extremely expensive; and I could foresee them soon connecting to the net and charging people far too much. I thought it would be a good thing if that altrustic culture could get a leg up. The university itself is a non-profit, and lots of the content on the net was freely available, so it all made sense to open the net up to the public for free to show that it could be done. I also wanted to do what I could to continue the spirit of freedom of speech that permeated the non-public Internet, and avoid the heavy-handed moderation many of the other pay dialup systems showed. (I am a bit disappointed that so many forum sites have again returned to fairly heavy moderation, but perhaps this too shall pass.) So I wasn’t really thinking, “Hey, this will be the first Internet Service Provider for the public”; more it was, “Hey, people ought to be able to get on the net because it’s cool, and they can’t, and I can do something about that.” It didn’t even occur to me until later that I’d started the first ISP, when someone mentioned it. At the time I just figured it sounded like a good idea to get people onto the net. I suppose the experiment was a success! Nyx is still going, now as its own 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, still providing free email, web hosting, etc. and I’m glad to see that the general public now has a lot more choices, with costs of access that are still reasonable (indeed, often still free).

 

How do you keep such a massive site as Critters going with no full-time staff?

Minions! 🙂 In this case, software minions. I enjoy automating things, and seem to be reasonably good at it. (My computer science background is in networking, operating systems design, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity.) So, I’ve created a ton of custom software that handles 99% of what goes on with the site. I have a small number of volunteers who help answer questions, and I fix things when the minions make a mess.

 

You recently opened the workshop to nonfiction, mystery, and a slew of other genres and categories. Give us a list and tell us how this experiment is going.

Originally Critters was just science fiction, fantasy, and horror. That made sense in the early days, given that the people on the net were still largely geek types, who tend to like those genres more than others. I always had requests to broaden the list to include everything, so recently I did. We now have 16 workshops, covering every genre and every form of creative endeavor I could fit in. The list is:

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Writing
Mainstream and Literary Fiction
Mystery, Thriller, and Adventure Writing
Non-Fiction Writing
Script, Screenplay, and Stageplay Writing
Kids Books
Comics, Graphic novels, Manga, etc.
Western Fiction Writing
Romance Writing
Adult Fiction
Video and Film
Music and Audio
Photography
Art, Painting, Drawing, etc.
Apps and Software
Website Design

The SF/F/H workshop is still by far the most active, since it’s best known for that. The others are growing, though I think I made a tactical mistake breaking them out into separate workshops at the outset. I should probably merge them back so there’s one large workshop everyone is in, and when I start getting calls to split off a genre then do that.

I had hopes that some of the non-writing workshop areas would catch hold, like video, music, art, web design, etc.; though that hasn’t largely been the case. There’s a long history of writers workshops, whereas there isn’t that depth of history in the others. But we keep trying things, alerting people they exist, so I’m ever the optimist.

 

Don’t you have to be an experienced author or editor to critique someone else’s story? If I can see how to improve your story, why can’t I see how to improve my own story, and vice versa?

Two parts to that…

1) They’re two different skills. I can tell that a computer won’t boot, and I may even be able to diagnose it as a particular blown chip, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I can pull out the board and solder in a new one. In some ways, critiquing a story is easier than writing: I can read it and keep tabs on whether I’m liking it or not. If not, I can, hopefully make some sort of guess what isn’t working for me. Too much boring text? Stilted dialog? Cardboard character? Critiquing is, at the heart of it, about explaining how you felt as you read that piece. All that requires is paying attention to your feelings as you read. But that doesn’t necessarily mean one knows how to fix it, and not break something else. (Add more detail about the character, but if not done well, may create stretches of boring text.) On the flip side, some authors may write well, but have little idea how they do it; or know how to fix what isn’t working. Hopefully as you critique a lot of other people’s work, you gain a sense of what works and what doesn’t, so you can avoid the pitfalls as you write your own stories. Both take practice, and I think both improve the other. Critiquing is often easier to get “right” to start with.

2) The Blind Spot. No matter how good you are at writing and/or critiquing, you can’t see your own work from an outsider’s point of view. You can’t have that “first time” experience, since that was when you put down the words in the first draft. You also know too much about the parts you didn’t write, which someone else won’t know. You know that the your human protagonist’s unnatural love of carrots is because he was raised by gladiatorial jester rabbits (which you never mention in the text); but the fresh eyes of a reader who only sees the text can ask the question, What the heck is it with the carrots?

 

Isn’t it dangerous to post a story for multitudes of strangers to see? What’s to stop someone from plagiarizing a story? And although manuscripts are copyrighted, ideas are not, so what’s to stop someone from stealing my premise?

Actual plagiarism is extremely rare (I can’t think of any actual cases in Critters in all the years and tens of thousands of manuscripts). I suppose it’s because (1) people know they shouldn’t do that; (2) the penalties are stiff if you do and you get caught; (3) the story in Critters is the unfinished product,why should someone want to steal a half-baked cake out of the oven?

As for ideas, right, they aren’t copyrighted. However, they’re not what make a story uniquely yours. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Most ideas have already been done over and over. (A spunky group of rebels fights against an entrenched empire… Is that Star Wars, the American Revolution, Asimov’s Foundation, Hunger Games, V for Vendetta, or… or… or…?) Even if someone has a truly unique idea, (1) without good writing it won’t matter, and (2) several authors could run with the same idea and make completely different stories.

So, nawww, nothing to worry about.

 

Is one week really enough time to read, evaluate, and comment on a story? What if I critique regularly for several members and 2 or 3 post a story at the same time?

Interesting question! Nobody has ever actually asked for more time to critique a short story. (Novels have their own slower-paced program.) I think it’s enough in that the story itself rarely takes more than a few minutes to read, and then it’s a matter of writing up what you thought about it. I’d say for a typical story that takes me maybe an hour tops, and I don’t think I’m particularly fast at it. I may let the story percolate in my brain a few days, but there seems to be time by the seventh day to get the thoughts written down. The emphasis is really on how you felt about the story; what parts worked and what didn’t; not so much about line by line edits. It’s then a matter of relating your feelings.

As for regular authors, I don’t know if I would encourage that. To my mind, it’s more helpful to both the author and critiquer’s own writing to critique a wide variety, not a “stable” of authors.

 

How many critiques might a story receive on Critters?

Historically the average has been 15. That varies quite a bit based on a bunch of factors (length of your story, for example; and middle chapters of novels have a hard time, which is why there’s a program to critique entire novels).

 

What kind of publication success rate do Critters members have?

It’s hard to measure precisely, but I once did a study and it came out that members of Critters were ten times more likely to make professional sales than non-Critters. Of course, it could simply be that the more motivated writers have joined! I can’t attribute cause and effect.

 

Have you had a lot of pro writers participate? Any Hugo, Nebula, or Campbell winners/nominees? Any Writers of the Future winners? Any members who participated in the Clarion or Odyssey workshops? A lot of SFWA members?

Lots and lots… though I really don’t keep a database of them. Pro authors tend to be busier, but many like to “pay it forward” by helping new authors. I’ve noted in many years that around a third of nominees for the Hugo or Nebula awards are Critterfolk. Probably our most decorated author is Ken Liu, who’s won a bunch of Hugos and Nebulas.

 

You’ve proposed that keeping an ebook online indefinitely can eventually bring in as much sales or more as putting a paper version in the bookstore because the paper version is pulled in a few months. But suppose ebook formatting evolves and the old formatting is no longer compatible with the new readers or new software?

There is already software that can convert between formats. Calibre is one example. Formats like EPUB are particularly easy to convert in the future, since they are basically a “.zip” file with HTML files inside, which is human readable text that software can easily operate on. Very easy to convert to some other format. Even if there were some difficult file format, since the text has to be visible to the human eye to read it, there will always be a way to convert it, even if it’s taking photos of the words and converting back to text (like ReAnimus Press does for out of print books). It’s highly unlikely anybody buying an ebook today will be unable to read it in the future.

 

Selling ebooks requires using PayPal or a credit card. Doesn’t the author have to pay a fee for these payment services? If a customer buys only one of your books, you still have to pay that fee. If 10 people, 100 people, 1000 people buy only one book each from you, you’ve paid that fee many times. How is that going to work out for you as a business model considering one of the chief advantages of ebooks is reduced price?

First off, the lions share of ebook sales today are through Amazon. They take their cut (about 30%), and that’s that. That includes the credit card fees. Many authors seem to be okay with that 30% figure. Amazon provides the infrastructure (including the payment processing as well as the web site to display and host the books), they provide a reasonably priced ereader device, they provide a sort of central market square where a lot of people congregate,which includes providing a sense of trust, which shouldn’t be overlooked for it’s value,and they provide marketing (“If you liked that perhaps you’ll like this”).

But even for direct sales the processing fees aren’t particularly painful. Paypal for example is around 3% plus 30 cents, or, with their “micropayments” account, 5% plus 5 cents. Not trivial, but for a $5.99 ebook, 35 cents to Paypal leaves $5.64 to the author. That’s a lot more per sale than you’d earn if you published through Random House.

I also imagine, as time goes on, we’ll have even better forms of payment. There are a number of concepts and startups out there to make payments even easier and cheaper. While I think bitcoins are too volatile as an investment vehicle and prone to security issues, they do have one potentially interesting use: An “instant” way to send money, even between different currencies. That is, if I wanted to send $10 to someone in Upper Nowheria, where they use Quatloos as currency, I could use a service where I send in $10, the service converts it to bitcoins at the current exchange rate of that moment, sends the bitcoins to the person in Upper Nowheria, converts to Quatloos, all within a microscopic fraction of a second, and with a very low exchange fee (a fraction of a percent, depending on bitcoin exchange fees). Currency exchanges often cost 5-10%, so this could cut that way down. Or some other virtual currency or system could serve the same function. Someone out of the US made a large donation to Nyx recently using Transferwise.com, which, including foreign currency exchange fees, was at 0.5% in total fees. The tendency is toward zero exchange and transmission cost.

 

Don’t ebooks make piracy easier?

Yes, but. First, you’d have to determine what percent of pirated copies would have actually resulted in a sale if piracy were impossible. I did a survey on that once, and it came out that most people simply wouldn’t have paid. There were very few truly lost sales. Most pirates just wouldn’t have paid, for a variety of reasons. (They may not have the money, they may not have lived in a country where they even could have easily paid if they wanted to, they may not have felt the book was really worth X dollars, etc.)

Second, you have to figure out if there’s any marketing value. I view them much like used books. Authors make no money from used book sales or books passed along to friends, etc., but readers who receive the free/low-cost used book may turn into fans who buy the author’s other books.

Third, copy protection (DRM , Digital Rights Management) software is almost always intrusive and annoying. In order to prevent a few pirated copies, it greatly limits and greatly annoys legal users. DRM can also get outdated, rendering the protected thing inaccessible. (Has happened to me.) As a legitimate user, I hate copy protection.
Many publishers have decided it’s best for their bottom lines to abandon copy protection.

 

You’ve been a strong advocate of ebooks. You’ve gone so far as to predict the extinction of publishers. Can ebook self-publishing replace the massive editorial and marketing apparatus at the disposal of publishers?

I think ebooks are wonderful. I’ve been an ebook reading person since the early 2000s, when I started reading on the old Blackberry phone I had. I would write to the authors of books I wanted to read to request copies of their manuscript (it helped that they were fellow SFWA members and often friends). I also think we’ve just scratched the surface of digital reading devices. (For example, if there were an inexpensive device that looked and felt just like a book, except every page was digital,digital ink on real paper, or digital paper,you would hold in your hand the same thing as a paper book, except it would be an e-reader. At that point, you have all the “features” of a print book, plus all the benefits of digital. We may phase out paper sooner than that, but it represents a sort of upper bound on when we’ll no longer read paper where the words on the page can’t change.)

So publishers have a problem. If they don’t remain relevant, and bring something unique to the table, they will fade away just like blacksmiths and buggy whip makers.

Anyone can now do (or hire someone to do) the traditional tasks that publishers have done to put together a book (editing, cover art, layout, etc.),and do them in such a way that the author earns a lot more of the proceeds from the sales.

I think one key role left for the large publishers is marketing. Unfortunately, publishers don’t do a lot of that for most books. To some extent, getting paper copies of a book placed on tens of thousands of bookstore shelves counts as marketing. (Readers can’t buy what they never see.) Having the economies of scale to print thousands of copies of a book inexpensively is still one of the competitive advantages that big publishers have. (Which dwindles the more people read digitally.) But if that’s substantially all the publisher does in marketing a particular book that an author can’t do themselves, then it becomes questionable if that’s worth the huge cut of the profits that they take. It’s not unreasonable to say a self-published author could sell 5% as many copies of a book and make the same money.

The question is whether the self-published author can sell that number of copies. The average self-published book sells around 100 copies over all. That’s not much. However, the flip side is that same book may simply never sell to any publisher at all, so that’s 100 compared to 0.

If an author is incredibly good at marketing, and is able to do or pay for the production work, they can probably make more money self-publishing. If not, using a publisher may make more sense.

Another factor in the publishers favor is that they put up the money for the production/distribution costs, taking on the financial risk they might lose money; and they pay the author an advance up front. Those may be more important to a given author than overall earnings.

However, the other big hiccup is in the duration: Large publishers may take the rights for the duration of copyright,that’s the life of the author plus 70 years(!). During which a publisher may not do much marketing after the initial push. Not to mention, a lot can change in that length of time. Even a slow trickle of sales could add up. (Let me emphasize that: If an author is, say, 30, and lives to be 90, the publisher will collect the lion’s share of the royalties for 130 years.)

Full disclosure: In addition to my Critters hat, I’m a publisher; I run ReAnimus Press. We specialize in digitizing out of print books for authors, though we also publish some new releases. We do our best in marketing, and we typically work with authors who for whatever reason don’t want to do the production work themselves. (That said, we pay the highest royalty rates of any publisher I’m aware of. We try to do right by authors.)

Bottom line, an author has to carefully evaluate what a publisher brings to the table, today and for possibly a hundred or more years into the future. It’s a hard decision to make.

 

As a former vice president and one time presidential candidate, do you agree with Mike Resnick’s assessment of SFWA?

“The broader the membership, the less clout is has. When I joined SFWA more than 40 years ago, we were a lean fighting machine, boycotting publishers and making it stick, publicizing bad contracts and bad agents, auditing publishers and actually winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in unreported royalties for our members. But we were all full-time writers. Then we stopped insisting on requalification every 3 years, and our membership went from maybe 150 real writers to 1,500, of which more than 1,300 are not full-time writers and do not have the same professional interests as the full-timers. As a result, we are now pretty much powerless to act as an organization whose first duty is to protect its membership, because our membership no longer consists of people who write for a living. We have not conducted an audit in 30 years; we have not publicly evaluated a contract in 25 years; we have not publicly evaluated agents in 25 years; we do not report the average wait time , above and beyond what is contracted for , for a publisher to pay the signature advance, the delivery payment, or to issue the royalty statement; and we have totally disbanded our piracy committee. All this is a direct result of becoming a less professional organization with every passing year and more of a social club, so you’ll forgive me if I think that lowering the standard even more will be anything but deleterious.”

So: Yes, I agree with what Mike says about SFWA having become less effective. I mostly disagree that the cause of this drop in effectiveness has anything to do with who the members are. I think the lack of effectiveness stems mostly from a lack of focus on the part of the leadership. Or a focus on things that don’t necessarily accomplish anything: Such as focusing ad nauseum on rewriting the bylaws and shuffling the furniture around. (The presidents have generally been authors who make a living from their writing, and they’re the ones who guide the ship, so I don’t really think the fault is lack of full-time writers making the decisions.) I think SFWA could easily do all those things it did in the past to help writers,and with 1500 members get more respect from, say, Congress, than if it had 150 members. Not to mention the much larger budget and surpluses in the bank. I’m constantly optimistic that at any moment SFWA could re-awaken as a real force for writers. There are tons of things it could do to help writers, if the leadership wanted to steer that direction.

 

How did you become the editor of Preditors and Editors and what can we expect with you at the helm?

Preditors and Editors fell into my lap mainly because I had worked with P&E’s founder, Dave Kuzminski, since the late 90’s running P&E’s annual Readers Poll. So as time rolled around to start the poll, I emailed Dave to discuss various things. And heard nothing. I kept trying, eventually getting in contact with his wife and learning that Dave had died very suddenly. They couldn’t even access the site, nor had any idea how to do his P&E magic (not being authors), they turned it over to me. My hope is to keep running P&E the way Dave did, helping authors avoid scams, though he left mighty big shoes to fill. We have added a general guide to avoiding scams that encapsulates advice about a lot of what we see.

 

You started ReAnimus Press. Why? What do you publish, and how’s it going?

ReAnimus is going great. We have about 200 titles released or in the pipeline, almost all from well known and award-winning authors. We have a couple dozen from Ben Bova (including his rare first novel, paper copies of which were going for $500 apiece), over 20 from Norman Spinrad, everything by SFWA founder and Grand Master Damon Knight, and a lot more. We just got the rights to do the ebook of edition of DEAR AMERICA: LETTERS HOME FROM VIETNAM, which is a bestselling book and basis for the Emmy award-winning documentary (letters read by Robert DeNiro, Robert Downey Jr., Robin Williams…). So it’s been an amazing ride so far.

I started ReAnimus because I had these huge shelves full of books, most now out of print, and I wished they were all still available for readers, either as ebooks or in print. I had the technical background to do something about it and some author friends asked me for help getting their backlist back out there… so it all just came together. We now have a pretty sophisticated artificial intelligence system to fix the huge number of errors that result from scanning.

While we mostly only publish established authors (where, to be honest, the risk of losing money is a lot less), we also offer the digitizing and layout services for folks who want to do their own thing.

It’s a real blast, and I’m honored that we’ve been able to bring some great books back into readers’ hands.

 

How did you acquire the celebrated Advent Publishers and what can we expect with you at the helm?

Advent Publishers is another story of reanimating books that might otherwise be lost. Because ReAnimus Press specializes in bringing out of print books back to life, one of our authors put me in touch with the publisher of Advent. They had a bunch of books still in print, but no digital files to make ebook editions. We got to talking, and it became evident that the best solution was just for ReAnimus to acquire Advent.

We’re thrilled, since Advent is a Hugo Award winning publisher that’s been around since the 1950s, having published the biggest names in SF (Heinlein, Blish, E.E. “Doc” Smith, et al.). Our plans are to create new ebook and print editions of their catalog, help sell the existing warehouse full of print titles, and, to be sure, acquire new titles that fit in with Advent’s illustrious family.

 

How’s your own writing going? Anything new?

Yes, I recently finished a novel that I’m shopping around, Termination of Species. The biggest problem I have,assuming some major publisher actually wanted it,is the same dilemma as I outlined above: Which way would I be happier with, locking up my rights for a loooong time with a major publisher who doesn’t pay a very high royalty rate, or the potential but much higher risk of self-publishing it? I’m really gridlocked on that! I’m working on my third novel, and making good progress.

 

What other projects are you involved in to facilitate activity within the science fiction community, what is their purpose, how do they function, and where do we access them.

Well, I do try to sleep sometimes. But I toss out various tools for writers, blog about stuff of interest to readers and writers, and fill in cracks of time with other sorts of things that are listed at www.aburt.com.

Within ReAnimus Press, we’re developing and patenting a way to easily sell ebooks through bookstores, called “snap books”,the name coming from the incarnation where there’s a physical, book-like-object sitting on a bookstore shelf, with the book’s cover art and description on it, and the reader snaps a picture of the QR code to buy, download the book, and put the display box back on the shelf for the next person. Has a huge number of applications.

It came into being because I’ve long wanted to find a way for physical bookstores to sell ebooks. I love the experience of browsing in a bookstore. But they’re out of a lot of titles, they don’t have ebooks on the shelf, etc. So the idea hit me how to solve that, and we’re rolling it out. So far people love the idea. (Gratuitous plug: If anyone reading this works in a bookstore, or knows people who do, or, for that matter, any place that could sell physical things, like a coffee shop, convention dealers room, etc.,drop me a line!)

All in all, I’m having a blast! Thanks for choosing me for an interview!

 

Carl_eagle Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.