Primary endosymbiosis is rare, but it’s happening right now with an algae and a cyanobacterium, which are merging to form an organelle that can fix nitrogen directly from the air.
Among other events, BaltiCon will feature an SFF-themed short film festival. (Thanks to File 770.)
Fallout has been renewed for another season on Amazon.
Nerds of a Feather interview Cheryl Ntumy about Mothersound, a science-fantasy anthology based on African folklore, and the Sauutiverse collective.
Reactor offers an excerpt of James Logan’s new epic fantasy novel The Silverblood Promise.
This is old news, but I heard it today on CNN. The Voyager spacecraft is still sending a message now and then.
As part of her “Bestiary” column for Reactor, Judith Tarr discusses a Bigfoot movie from the late 1980s—Harry and the Hendersons.
The war in Gaza is reverberating through the literary award community as PEN pauses its annual award process in response to many of the nominated authors.
This is a nice article on the new generation of independent booksellers. Maybe those who were wringing their hands over the demise of the bookstore were premature.
One commenter chosen at random will get a hardcopy of Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee.
There were two interesting articles about publishing that I ran across, the first via a link in the second:
No One Will Read Your Book (https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth)
No One Buys Books (https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books)
The picture it paints of the industry is that thinking, with sufficient smarts and hard work, that you can make a living as a writer is about as realistic as thinking you can, with sufficient practice and athletic training, become a star pro basketball player. Best sellers are mostly by writers who have already hit the big time or by celebrities. And a best seller may have sold no more than a thousand copies in the week that it makes the best seller list, and then fade away after a few weeks. Not to say some writers aren’t supporting themselves at a low pay level, but for most aspiring authors it’s a delusion as a career choice.
Genre fiction, especially romance but also fantasy and crime fiction, are what sells, but only a small set of authors dominate there. Literary fiction is a tiny niche. And poetry probably has more writers than readers (meaning, the many people writing poetry read their own works and a handful of past well-known poets, and nobody else reads what they’re writing). The author of the two articles says that Amazon is an existential threat to the dead tree publishers, but I’m not sure I believe that subscribing to eBooks will ever be that popular.
I read the most recent Elysian article. I tried not be bummed out, because I already knew most of it, but it still bummed me out a little. Since I know I’m not doing it for the money, I’ll probably keep doing it.
It’s discouraging that even somewhat successful authors rarely seem to be able to keep publishing for more than about 10-12 years before dropping out of sight. And works that are by no means perfect but at least interesting, but that are out of step with the fashions of the day, get no recognition in the field and are quickly forgotten, or so it seems. I think of J. N. Stroyar’s The Children’s War and A Change of Regime, two hefty tomes set in a “Nazi Germany wins World War II” world after Hitler’s death, when alternate histories of World War II were pretty much passé. Or the Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis with its magical alternate World War II.
There are books going back to the 1990s that did something slightly different from what was dominating the market and paid the price of permanent obscurity as a result; just a few I can think of: Easy Travel to Other Planets (Ted Mooney), Winter’s Daughter (Charles Whitmore), Dream Science (Thomas Palmer), and A Scientific Romance (Ronald Wright), where the authors got at most one other genre novel published, or Mitchell Smith’s Snowfall trilogy, which was all he published in the genre.
Meanwhile we are inundated with works of YA “romantasy” (infatuation p0rn) or retellings of old stories updated with a 21st century American sociocultural sensibility. Publishers, as the Elysian article says, ride the fashion waves looking for the next blockbuster to slot into the line-up of their existing blockbuster and celebrity authors. Some comfort is that at least we still have Small Beer, Tartarus, NewCon, and the other independent publishers out there.
Wow, I’m really impressed by the 15- and 20-year old owning and running their own bookstores! I loved books as a kid but never would have thought that was possible for a young person to do what they’re doing. I’m glad they thought beyond the limits of conventional thinking–and that they put more bookstores into the world. In general, I feel like books are enjoying a major renaissance at the moment, and I’m going to savor it while it lasts.
Me, too! I think independent bookstore are enjoying a golden age, and I plan to continue to support that.
One of the things I like about younger folks today is that they are willing to take chances and think beyond restrictions. I wish them all the best.