It goes like this: when I lived in LA I went to a gym called 24 Hour Fitness, the one in Santa Monica. Before I stopped doing cardio (the way normal people define cardio) entirely I used to do the eliptical for fifteen minutes or so before a workout. I had discovered that I didn’t despise cardio if I listened to a podcast while I was doing it, so I would always listen to something: lectures on globalization, macroeconomics, neuroscience. And then I found out that Cory, who I had heard of but never read, was podcasting a reading from Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, a book about events I remember taking place in a scene that I was a part of (80s hack/phreak BBS stuff.)

Anyway, I was excited to have the opportunity to listen to this, which was possible because Sterling had licensed it Creative Commons (thus enabling Cory’s podcast reading) and because Cory had decided to spend all that time and trouble reading it and then putting it online. What I wasn’t excited about were the little prefaces Cory began each reading with, which were filled with current events about his life that I had no interest in. Until he happened to mention one day that he was going to be teaching at CW2008 in Seattle, how he himself was a Clarion alum, and how much the process had helped him.

That was really how it all started. No Cory podcast, no Shane in Seattle. My life would be very very different than it is right now.

Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there. The real news is that Cory’s in the news again, having proposed a fascinating experiment in publishing, which he will run on himself. The idea in a nutshell: his new collection will be available in a variety of formats (including for free), with a variety of meta tie-ins, and a variety of strategies to get the whole package into stores and into your greedy little hands. But how much will he make, in the end?

To be honest, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to disclose it, all of it, every month, in a running tally in a monthly column here in Publishers Weekly. And incidentally, this article is grossing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% commission, and the columns $400 hereafter. I will then put this into an appendix, which will be added to new editions of the book and compared to the revenues from Overclocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the question: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, versus with a traditional publisher for whom he does everything he can to aid in book sales?

And that really is what this experiment shows: a best-case analysis of what a guy can do, sans publisher, in the sci-fi industry. I say “best case” because Cory is a huge name, with big talent, probably the most rabid fan base in all of sci-fi dom, and an understanding of online culture that is second to none. I’m guessing this experiment will be a grand slam of epic proportions, not all of which will be measurable simply by tallying up the benefits he accrues from the book — his pre-existing books will sell more, too, and he’ll get even more publicity, accrue more notoriety, and acquire more fans.

Naturally these secondary benefits are impossible to quantify directly. But that’s the way this world works now, which Cory knows better than almost anyone. It will be exciting to see the numbers.

On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.  She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.  She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

That’s good frickin’ stuff.  It’s pretty good when you read it the first time, at the start of the book, and then it turns really good when you read it again after you’re done with the book.  So started the really good part of Sinclair Lewis’s career.

He won the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith and then gave one of the all-time great anti-fist pumps in his refusal letter.  Here’s a snippet that would be sour grapes from a Pulitzer runner-up, but is just plain mighty from a winner:

The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

He was the first American to earn the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.  Lewis’s Nobel Lecture is really funny because he takes some shots at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he also won’t say America is hopeless.  It’s worth reading the whole thing.

It might be answered that, after all, the Academy is limited to fifty members; that, naturally, it cannot include every one of merit. But the fact is that while most of our few giants are excluded, the Academy does have room to include three extraordinarily bad poets, two very melodramatic and insignificant playwrights, two gentlemen who are known only because they are university presidents, a man who was thirty years ago known as a rather clever, humorous draughtsman, and several gentlemen of whom – I sadly confess my ignorance – I have never heard.

It is my fate in this paper to swing constantly from optimism to pessimism and back, but so is it the fate of anyone who writes or speaks of anything in America – the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.

Here was the Nobel presentation speech given by Erik Axel Karlfeldt:

Yes, Sinclair Lewis is an American. He writes the new language – American – as one of the representatives of 120,000,000 souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence.

Which brings us to the point of this post–America in its adolescence, but an adolescence that hasn’t ended.  The genius of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is that the almost 100-year-old conversations from Gopher Prairie, MN are still being repeated on every Main Street in the country.  Think back to your Christmas conversations of a few weeks ago.  Pretty similar to the conversations from Thanksgiving the month before and Christmas ’07 and Thanksgiving ’07 and Christmas ’06…  And another genius of Lewis and Main Street is in the realization that the idealists–the ones reading and thinking and typing away in their dark basements–aren’t any better or worse than the Main Street realists who don’t care about Broadway plays and different educational systems and sprucing up the town.

Lewis was so perceptive of the qualities and values that would endure in Americans, and not just in Main Street.  How about this line from the main character in his political satire It Can’t Happen Here (1935):

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?

Freedom Fries aside, the book itself is eerie in it’s description of a “common man” president with a behind-the-scenes secretary who runs the fascist show.

Is it a case of Groundhog Day, and every day is essentially the same as the last, is it a repeating loop that we need to watch for every century or so, or is it Jack Nicholson walking out of the therapist’s office and saying, “What if this is as good as it gets?”  Probably all three.

Ponder that as you go to work tomorrow and Monday and Tuesday or talk about the weather or fill up the gas tank or listen to a talking head explain the similarities between today and the Great Depression.  But most importantly, go find a Sinclair Lewis book, read it or reread it, and cherish the brilliance that Sauk Center, MN helped inspire.

“The things I do for love.”

If you’ve read the book and that doesn’t give you chills I don’t believe you’ve actually read the book.

There is also lots of talk about casting and shooting locations, which sound like they will be in northern England for the most part.

The story was everything literature should be – beautiful, sad, thoughtful, the kind of thing you put down and then think about for the the rest of the night and then, from time to time, for the rest of your life. I was trying to figure out how to make it possible to share this with you guys; was considering scanning the fucking thing, OCRing it, and mailing copies to whoever wanted them.

Turns out, Clarion pal Cory Doctorow and I are on the same wavelength again: follow this link to Cory’s impression of PoV, and a link to a podcast reading of the story, which you should download and listen to for your own good, as well as the good of the nation.

1. JK Rowling – $300m (£170m)
2. James Patterson – $50m (£28m)
3. Stephen King – $45m (£25m)
4. Tom Clancy – $35m (£20m)
5. Danielle Steel – $30m (£17m)
6. John Grisham – $25m (£14m)
6. Dean Koontz – $25m (£14m)
8. Ken Follett – $20m (£11m)
9. Janet Evanovich – $17m (£10m)
10. Nicholas Sparks – $16m (£9m)

Source is the Beeb. Maybe I should stop worrying about having to get to job and just write shit fiction for millions of dollars a year. I suppose the first step in that direction would be to finish a novel. And the first step toward finishing a novel would be starting a novel.

The world is full of those mysteries.

If you’ve wondered any of those things, or a host of other things, like what Artificial Intelligence is or might be, how humans might be enhanced by technology and how that might affect society, and, in the very large view, how modern life is mutating under technological onslaught, if any of this piques your curiosity I can heartily endorse this book, by Vernor Vinge and a host of essayists:

In re-reading this I see that I’ve completely mis-characterized the book. Well, you fucking try it: it’s a book about technology and culture and what happens when you start connecting people together. Except that sounds dry and boring and if you’ve retained any vestige of intellectual curiosity the book is neither.

Now I sound antagonistic. God damn it. Just read the book. On the new rating system, where I not only take note of _when_ I finished a book, but also rate it from 1 to 5, this book garnered the first five.

On a related note, a popular cliche has been floating around since the dawn of time that says: science fiction is about predicting the future. The slightly-less-but-still-cliched response is that science fiction isn’t about predicting the future, it’s about predicting the present. Well, if anyone ever asks you for the author most gob-smackingly superb at predicting both the present and the future make sure you direct that person to Vernor Vinge.