Books
drorzel | December 8, 2009There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous situation for non-fiction is (being that I am vastly more likely to be paid money for non-fiction pieces than fiction).
Of course, I can't claim a long list of sales that I can list as my contribution to the discussion. I've only had a handful of pieces printed in commercial outlets: two pieces (so…
drorzel | December 3, 2009As a companion piece to Steve Albini's famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement:
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero…
drorzel | November 30, 2009The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three weeks from tomorrow, but a couple of new reviews have been posted, one linkable, the other not so much. The linkable one is from one of our contest winners, Eric Goebelbecker, at Dog Spelled Forward (an excellent name for a dog-related blog):
Quantum physics can be some heavy stuff, and this book teaches you the basics without dumbing it down or putting you to sleep. Professor Orzel has a gift for funny dialogue and straightforward explanation. In addition to the entertaining conversations with Emmy, there are fascinating…
drorzel | November 28, 2009The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annual rant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By LOUISA GILDER
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By RICHARD HOLMES
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places By BILL STREEVER
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Strangest…
drorzel | November 27, 2009Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.
The first comment to the…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | November 11, 2009I've gradually gotten used to the idea that as a semi-pro blogger, I will occasionally be sent review copies of books I've never heard of. These are generally physics books, and I have a stack of them sitting next to the bed at the moment, not being read nearly fast enough.
It's only recently that I realized that, having written a book in which I explain quantum mechanics through conversations with my dog, I'll probably start getting dog books as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind-- we like free books, here in Chateau Steelypips-- but it's going to be a significant change.…
drorzel | November 9, 2009There's a nice post over at "The World in a Satin Bag" on the important things editors do. The emphasis is on fiction publishing, but most of it applies to non-fiction as well:
Editors make you into a better writer. Emphasis on better. They don't make you into the greatest writer ever, but they certainly teach you a few things. Ask anyone published by a major publisher or even a small press. Ask them if their editor taught them anything. They did, didn't they? I thought so.
This won't make any impact on the "Blogs Rule, Olde Media Drool" crowd, but it's always nice to see somebody else who…
drorzel | November 7, 2009We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.
In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the…
drorzel | November 4, 2009There are at least as many ways to write really interesting essays as there are people writing really interesting essays, but for the most part, they break down into two broad types. There are the ones that completely change the way you look at some subject you thought you knew about, forcing you to change your opinion of it; and there are the ones that explain some subject in such a clear and compelling way that they change the way you think about it (even if you don't change your opinion of the subject).
Those two types account for most of the interesting essays out there, but don't cover…
drorzel | October 30, 2009No, this is not a reference to the National Academy of Sciences report from a few years ago. This has to do with the newest Wheel of Time book, because while I'm a long distance removed from my Usenet days, some habits die hard.
If you haven't read the previous eleven books, none of what follows will make any sense. If you haven't read the latest volume, don't click below the fold unless you want everything spoiled for you.
So, how does Brandon Sanderson do at filling Robert Jordan's shoes?
The short answer is: Pretty darn good. He doesn't exactly match the style of the earlier books, but he…
drorzel | October 29, 2009Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…
drorzel | October 27, 2009There's a new release today that everyone's talking about. A perfect topic for a poll:
New Jordan book by Sanderson! Your reaction?(survey)
Your opinion is important to us, so please choose carefully.
You think I'm kidding about the ruptured disc thing? Look at the size of this thing:
Today's depressing thought: The Eye of the World is copyright 1990. Which means I've been reading this series for longer than some of my students have been alive.
Sadly, I'm not able to do the full-on "party like it's 1995" thing-- I think the college would frown on my sleeping in and skipping class because I…
drorzel | October 26, 2009I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I'm going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes:
Here's a…
drorzel | October 12, 2009The Digital Cuttlefish looks at the Archie comics, and waxes poetic:
Two paths play out in a comic book,
When Archie walks down memory lane
"The road not taken" is the hook;
So now, the writers take a look
And re-write Archie's life again,
This time with Betty as his bride;
Veronica the woman spurned,
Who once upon a time, with pride,
Was wed to Archie. Thus allied,
They lived while many seasons turned.
Why am I commenting on this, given that what little I know about Archie I learned from The Comics Curmudgeon and Chasing Amy? Because he goes on to talk about the Many-Worlds Interpretation…
drorzel | September 30, 2009Over at SciFi Wire, the house magazine of the Polish syphilis channel, Wil McCarthy has a piece with the eye-catching headline "Is Mysticism Overtaking Science in Sci-Fi?"
What really excites me right now--and not in a good way!--is the recent spate of superficially sci-fi movies that are not merely scientifically illiterate, not merely unscientific or antiscientific in their outlook, but that actually promote mysticism as a superior alternative to science.
Leaving aside the irony of this being sponsored by the Dumb-Ass Horror Movie Channel (not that there's anything wrong with dumb-ass…
drorzel | September 28, 2009This book is, in some ways, a complement to Unscientific America. Subtitled "Talking Substance in an Age of Style," this is a book talking about what scientists need to do to improve the communication of science to the general public. This is not likely to make as big a splash in blogdom as Unscientific America, though, both because Randy has generally been less aggressive in arguing with people on blogs, and also because while he says disparaging things about science blogs, he doesn't name names, so nobody is likely to get their feelings hurt.
Olson is a scientist-turned filmmaker, who…
drorzel | September 27, 2009There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…
drorzel | September 24, 2009One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know and how quickly you should pick up new material. Generally, those who pour through these types of books will read and reread until they've figured things out, regardless of how well the text actually explains things. Casual intro books, on the other hand, exist…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly's breasts-- reminded me of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, a movie that figures prominently in Robert Charles Wilson's latest:
Act One was called Homology and it dealt with Darwin's youth. In this Act young Darwin meets the girl with…