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1968.
The Protectorate has fallen.
The nation of Andalus is rebuilding after a bloody civil war, their efforts organized by an elite set of calculating technocrats. Just when life has almost achieved a kind of normality, one of their colleagues upsets the situation.
By turning up dead.
CreateSpace / Lulu / Lulu via Amazon
This one is all mine, I'm afraid.
What, did you think I would let the world live without a science-fiction novel of my own devising? How little you know me.
Until Earthset is a story I began more years ago than I'd like to count. One early draft won me a prize, to which actual cash money was attached. Another was mailed back and forth between me and a young woman who studied literature at Northwestern and had appointed herself my editor. She convinced me that there was worth in the story I had invented and a certain degree of life in the people who inhabited it. My hobby for the next few years, off and on, was then to make imaginary people suffer.
The resulting story clocks in at 302 pages and a smidgen over 130,000 words. It begins with a few people who live in a history which is not quite ours. Fairly rapidly, they discover that they have problems: one of a scientific kind, a few of a personal nature, and one of the criminal variety.
I had let the LaTeX files which contained this novel gather dust for a while, but recently, I pulled them out again and found them not beyond salvaging. I spent a while implementing the improvements I'd thought up in idle moments, and I rooted out the weak passages I could find, replacing the sections which made me ask, "What was I smoking?" with new ones which, hopefully, will provoke a reader to inquire, "Can I get some of what he was smoking?"
Several months ago, I was browsing through a bookstore here in Boston, and I made a melancholy discovery: the only way to get your science-fiction novel onto the shelves is to make it a Star Wars or Halo tie-in. "A pox on that," thought I. Fortunately, the world has caught up with misfits like me, who know our brainchildren are destined for a niche market: we can make books by squeezing PDF files into the Tubes.
Sections of Until Earthset have been unwittingly praised by David Brin and the Digital Cuttlefish. Other portions are well nigh guaranteed to earn me vitriol from the science blogosphere, but oddly enough, I can live with that. Most of those portions were, in fact, written before I became a blogger, although in my recent revisions, I made sure to include a feathered dromæosaurid. . . and a cephalopod.
Until Earthset (2008), by Blake Stacey. Available at a website near you.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Ah ha, now we know what your little teaser is about! Congratulations on taking the plunge. I expect to have my copy autographed when you get back to Rocket City for Christmas. Now, who do I need to buy Christmas gifts for . . . folks who would enjoy a science fiction book . . . umm Joe K., John M., Ron P.
Cheers!
Posted by: Mom | December 15, 2008 8:38 PM
Actually, some of the chains also carry Warhammer 40,000 tie-ins, as well. Just setting the record straight.
Posted by: Joshua | December 15, 2008 9:18 PM
Mom:
I'll leave that decision in your hands (you might know better than me if a book I wrote will offend people you know!).
Joshua:
Ah, what would I do without my army of fact-checkers?
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 15, 2008 10:01 PM
Congratulations! I now recall you mentioning that you were working on a novel. I'll buy a copy if you agree to sign it at ScienceOnline '09!
(You're motivating me to go back and finish my novel. Nothing gets the creativity going like seeing someone else published!)
Posted by: gg | December 15, 2008 11:20 PM
It's a deal!
Ah, yes, "published". (-:
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 16, 2008 12:05 AM
Does your book also have an ISBN? And would it be available from another source than that website? If so, I'll take the ISBN to my local bookshop who has never failed to get me something as long as I provide him with some clue as to the book I am looking for. So ISBN will make it a walk in the park for him ;-)
Posted by: Arno | December 16, 2008 2:30 AM
Hmmm, I guess I know the answer now that I have browsed Lulu... But if there is a possibility to get your book in another way, let me know!
Posted by: arno | December 16, 2008 4:17 AM
I have to go through a couple additional hoops to get an ISBN, but rest assured, I will. It was part of the plan; it just takes an extra step.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 16, 2008 9:04 AM
What's with the "A Notice From The Alabama State Board of Education" page? Is that a lulu requirement?
Posted by: Nick | December 16, 2008 11:41 AM
Yes. Totally. In all seriousness. They wouldn't let it in schools otherwise. Honest. Look at me: would I lie to you?
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 16, 2008 12:12 PM
Ordered! Perhaps by the time of the next Skeptics in the Pub, I will be able to use one of my favourite (i.e., the only one I can be bothered to remember) Patton quotes on you.
Posted by: Joshua | December 16, 2008 5:02 PM
Making that day the first time I'll have been called a magnificent bastard.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 16, 2008 5:03 PM
Good work getting this one done, Blake! I will have to pick up a copy. Now I had better get cracking on my own project.
Posted by: Laelaps | December 17, 2008 7:38 PM
Woo woo! I totes have one of the first autographed copies ever right? Congrats on making it official!
Posted by: Agrado | December 17, 2008 8:23 PM
Laelaps:
Yes, you'd better get cracking! Incidentally, now that I've got at least some of this preparing-files-for-Lulu thing figured out, I'd be happy to help if you wanted to make a printed collection of your blog posts.
Agrado:
Totes! :-)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 17, 2008 8:48 PM
OMG you rock!!! Congratulations! So many people have great stories they never finish! I'm looking forward to reading this.
Posted by: The Perky Skeptic | December 17, 2008 11:54 PM
It's taken me a while to catch with the pre-Christmas/post-New Year haze so this has taken a while to show up on my radar. I look forward very much to reading it though. Congratulations!
Posted by: Jonathan | January 5, 2009 7:03 PM
Uh-oh — now I'll have someone reading it who can tell how I got everything about AdS/CFT wrong!
Posted by: Blake Stacey | January 5, 2009 8:12 PM
I was also perplexed about the notice page, trying to work out whether this was a bluff^n. Looking forward to diving into the rest of it now...
Posted by: Jonathan | January 13, 2009 6:15 PM
I want this.
Posted by: Watchman | January 15, 2009 1:32 PM
Eeek! Now I'm super excited I met you because you're not only all awesome and physics-like, you're published! Can I have a copy? Pleasepleaseplease??? Or rather, where can I buy a copy?
Posted by: scicurious | January 19, 2009 10:17 AM
You can get it via Lulu now; it should be available on Amazon and such in a couple more weeks.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | January 19, 2009 10:28 AM
PDF? Feh. But will it be in Mobi, or the Kindle format?
Posted by: whomever1 | February 13, 2009 9:12 PM
Kindle doesn't read PDFs? This surprises me (well, kind of). I'll have to look into this.
OK, it appears that I might be able to get decent-looking Kindle content if I push the document through HTML first. This might take a couple days.
Posted by: Blake Stacey
| February 13, 2009 11:08 PM
I just got my new Kindle 2 and I went to download your book and... Yeah, I could convert it from PDF, but without seeing what the file looks like I don't know how successful it would be.
The program I use to convert PDFs to .mobi is free, though, and has some really nice features. It even lets you put on DRM if you want to, I think. (There's a "home user" and a "publisher" mode.)
Kindle's native format, .azw, is basically just .mobi with Amazon's own rights management stuff in it. The .mobi files I've made work great on my Kindle. So if you could just run your PDF through that software and post the .mobi on Lulu, I'd buy it.
The reason Kindle doesn't handle PDFs natively is the fact that has a 6" screen. There'd be no way to display a whole 8 1/2 by 11 page on it legibly, and the e-ink display doesn't refresh fast enough to make scrolling around practical, even if I was willing to do it. So Kindle only deals with flowable text. (I actually have no idea how the Sony e-reader, which supposedly does handle PDFs natively, deals with this problem.)
Posted by: Mary | March 5, 2009 2:33 PM
a feathered cephalopod?
like a jet propelled flying squid, fast-camouflage invisible-cloak wings, spraying venomous ink, with a nasty beak & gripper hook tentacles?
oh oh, nightmare tonight!
Posted by: DDeden | March 27, 2009 12:48 AM