Entry tags:

books, reviews, rpgs, talks

Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk, The Pleasures of Counting, Peril in the Jungle!
Just one book review this week, but I have a few other things to put up, so I'm calling it a set.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: In recent weeks they've had the teachers at Clarion West giving talks on Tuesdays downtown. I hadn't heard of most of the people, but I recognized Patrick Nielsen Hayden (the internet means editors can be famous too), so I figured I'd go to the talk. I think most public speaking by sf editors ends up roughly the same -- you have the bit where they talk about declining book sales and the decline of sf as a genre popularity-wise, you have the bit where audience members gripe about what lousy covers books have, you have the bit where they say "no, you probably don't want to try to guess what the public wants to read, just write the book you can write"*, and so on.

*Although interestingly, this was the first time I'd heard somebody say that as just a probably, not an absolute -- he called out Scalzi and a couple other authors as people who can, in fact, work out what the public wants to write and write it. It's just not a skill that everybody has.

Anyway, some quotes and noteworthy observations and so on:

• "Marketing isn't evil, it's just applied literary criticism."


• "There's a very real sense in which sf as a commercial publishing genre is over"


• "The good thing about the old ID [book distribution] system is they put out tons of copies of anything that fit the genre, no matter how good"


• [One of the big problems facing entertainment companies today is] "Nobody has 'nothing to do' any more"


• The real competitor to sf books these days is boingboing


• Making Light has a couple of thousand readers a day and makes a couple of thousand dollars a year from ads


• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell sold 400k-odd hardcovers


• 80-95% of book sales are from 1) people buying another book from an author they liked or 2) people buying a book from an author their friends like


• Newspaper ads are basically wasted money designed to show off to bookstore chain buyers; he called it the potlatch principle (but arguably it's more like those absurdly-long-tailed widowbirds)


• He said that Iain Banks, for whatever reason, doesn't sell worth beans in the US, which explains why I can never find copies of any of his stuff. PNH had an option on The Algebraist and passed it up (or, rather, figured he couldn't make a decent enough offer based on Banks' sucky sales in the US and it being an A- rather than A+ Banks novel (which I would agree with, having read it). But then Nightshade picked it up and it sold like 3000+12000+second printing -- but they're just two guys, so this was their big book for the year and they can put more energy into it than Tor can.


• Baen was (is?) making a fifth of its revenue from online sales (can that really be right? it sounds nuts) and has a really active forum community despite the ugly website


• ...in fact, it sounds to me (not PNH) like Baen is the Palladium of book publishers. Conclusion: Honor Harrington always survives because she is the only one with M.D.C.


• "Everyone I know loves short fiction, and I can believe I know a significant fraction of the people who love short fiction"


• He said the Washington Post has the best sf book review section in the country (and that, generally speaking, revenue loss to craigslist was leading newspapers to cut book reviews -- I guess I should check out the post before it's too late).


• And, of course, somebody asked about Harry Potter: (quote but may have missed a few words in the middle) "JK Rowling does one thing superbly well -- she's unbelievably good at timing her in-clueing; you're never asked to take on something new ten or even one second before you care about it" "the average sf reader has highly developed in-clueing tracking muscles" (whereas the average reader doesn't, and hence JKR's books open up a big world of crazy new fantasy stuff to the average person in a much more accessible way). I was discussing this with some folks, and one guy commented that he thought perhaps this was Harry Potter didn't feel like a world to him -- it felt like the author was making things up as she went along (and then contrast this with Tolkien). Somebody else pointed out the RPG analogy: there is a commong GMing style where you throw a lot of stuff in on the theory that it'll make sense to the players later on.

So, yeah, good time (and though the quotes don't really show it, PNH sounds like he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the sf world and has plenty of polish on his lines, so even stuff I knew was good to hear).


The Pleasures of Counting (TW Körner): With a title like this, it is no surprise this is from ghira. And it does seem like exactly the sort of book he'd find appealing -- a combination of anecdotes about math and mathematicians, interspersed with actual math problems to solve. Hang on, that's exactly the sort of book I'd find appealing too. And indeed it is hard not to be charmed by something with, say, this bit in a discussion of the Enigma machine:

Those who still objected to the employment of mathematicians were told that everybody knew that mathematicians were good chess players and everybody knew that chess players made good code-breakers. It must also be said that the stresses of the time resulted in the recruitment of several experts on cryptogams.

And although I mentioned the Enigma machine, the book probably has a bunch of stuff you haven't heard of as well -- there's a lot about convoy strategy in WWI and WWII, radar development, persistence of last names, and odds of military conflicts between countries. It's not all gems, and I think the quality of stuff I was interested in tends to decline as the book goes on (or, rather, what happens is the ratio shifts -- you get more and more "real math" and less anecdotes, until the final section is just a long socratic dialogue between two kids and their math teacher). But if you're at all interested in working on the math exercises, then I expect the book will just keep getting better for you.

This was, incidentally, previously reviewed by Adam, who didn't much care for it. It's hard to work out why a book doesn't work for somebody, but I think the issue here may have been one of specificity vs generality. I got the vibe Adam was interested in math in an abstract way and in knowing the answer to a particular problem or two, but what Körner wanted to teach in the book was math in general, as exemplified by these particular problems, but the specific problems were (for him) not the point. So it's ok to expect the reader to have to get a lot of general background, because that'll be useful for their future math studies or whatever. I personally just skimmed over the proofs and examples and was 100% satisfied but I can see why some people might not want to do that.


Peril in the Jungle!: Ok, my first Spirit of the Century game has occurred, and it went pretty well. I talked about the system in a previous post, and it worked pretty similarly here (albeit with no social combats and several physical combats).

There were a few play glitches that got noted in the after-game discussion. lpsmith pointed out folks were relying on their top few skills an awful lot (though he got stuck making a lot of not-very-good athletics rolls himself!), and Roger mentioned that nobody really got beaten up too badly or too low on fate points (next time I'm totally throwing more and tougher cultists in). Also, I hand-waved a couple system aspects that I didn't feel like trying to teach at the same time as everything else (zones, most notably), and maneuvers didn't get used as much as I would have liked. But! Overall, it worked pretty smoothly. As a GM I felt like I usually knew what skill to have people roll and what difficulty to set, and the success/failures were about what I wanted them to be. The characters had the right amount of niche overlap (though partly this was my effort designing them to not have overlaps in their top skills and stunts) and I think everyone got into it.

The best part about the game for me, though, was the scene cutting. I've always had problems running two groups at once in the past and this time it worked a zillion times better than usual. I don't think this was really due to the system, but more from better use keeping things moving and switching at strategic times.

Anyway, transcript up here if you want to see it. A couple quotes:

HankWright makes a snide little opium-smoking mime action as Frank leaves
Frank says, "My vote is to commandeer the laser cannon, blow the crap out of the base, and then fly away."
SamFlax declares ladder to have the aspect watch out for the fourth step--it's a doozy.
Leslie asks, "och, ein weiser Guy, a"h?"

For the curious, here were my notes -- everything else was ad-lib. You'll note I tried to work out a rough timeline for the thing, which was of course totally wrong -- in practice we got to the "get plane" step at the four-hour mark, and everything after that was either cut or compressed into the last hour (which, I must admit, was only about half as awesome as the previous hours; if this was intended as anything other than a one-shot I would/should have just quit then).

premise: in town looking for a statue that disappeared; similar statue reported in cairo

0-1:00: cult attack; investigation; cult lair (mountain, nazis!), research mountain
1:00-1:45: train trip to other city, sabotage!, get plane, take off, crash!
1:45-2:30: survival, captured!, escape, explore camp, see zeppelins, warehouse 13 w/clay warriors, enter caves
2:30-3:15: explore ancient temple thingy, huge natural cavern down below w/walls lined with empty niches, giant statue to fight, (mountain collapses?)
3:15-4:00: chase after zeppelins full of nazis, have air battle, the end

cult of the red hand

Kampala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kampala)
Baron Josef Szaniawski (undercover US agent?)
Greta Mialle (nazi agent)
- two are travelling together after "accidental" meeting
Tex & Rex (cowboys)

Oh yeah, and since there was some boggling at the die roll odds, here's how it shook out:

-4: 3
-3: 8
-2: 16
-1: 20
0: 16
1: 12
2: 15
3: 2
4: 3

So a little not in your favor, but not hugely out of line, I think.


Next time: well, I'm almost finished with Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, so that. Probably also at least one of The Ghost Brigades and Soon I Will Be Invincible, too.