Tag: In the News

Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Neal Asher

Anybody watch the Dimbleby lecture from Terry Pratchett ‘Shaking Hands with Death’? Or rather the Pratchett lecture delivered by Tony Robinson because this brilliant and wise writer is too buggered up by Alzheimers to deliver something like that. Here’s a bit about it, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find more if you do a search. He’s feels the terminally ill should be allowed to kill themselves, that the means should be made available – assisted by medical practitioners if necessary – and I thoroughly agree. The government doesn’t own our bodies (though of course it would like to) and it is our choice to make. In fact I’ve always agreed with this, but it’s even more plain to me after seeing both my father and my brother on their death beds. I want the option Pratchett is after for himself: sitting in a chair in his garden with a glass of brandy and exit potion of choice. No damned way do I want to end up dribbling and pissing my pyjamas in some stinking old people’s home, or tubed up in a hospital with those supposedly looking after me afraid to give me enough painkillers for fear of being accused of killing me. In fact that will not happen to me; I intend to ensure it won’t happen.

What do you think?

Ebook Thoughts.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’m just thinking about this; throwing a few ideas about. I don’t know, so don’t assume I really know what I’m talking about, though I’m pretty sure that many in the industry don’t know what’s going to happen either.
I’ve been reading up on this row between Macmillan and Amazon about ebooks, but now want to step back and consider what it all means. The ebook market is going to grow, every time someone buys a Kindle or an Ipad or any other the other readers out there, that’s a dead tree customer gone. This is not like the fight between Betamax and VHS, since with them the information, the entertainment, was a physical product that wasn’t interchangeable. The makers of these readers will try (using stuff like DRM), initially, to corner the market for their e-reader, but it is a losing battle. The more restrictions put on ebooks sold or what e-readers will accept, the more piracy and the more likely people will buy product with less restrictions. By making restrictions publishers and e-book manufacturers will lose market share. The eventual winners will be the e-readers that will accept any ebook and the ebooks that can be loaded to any e-reader. Piracy will be easy and rife. Publishers will have to accept that to sell ebooks they’ll need to reduce the price, because high prices will push customers towards piracy. So what does all this mean to me, the writer?
Things are going to change, and drastically. The market for paper books will continue to survive, hopefully until I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil, but it’s going to get smaller and smaller. Hopefully people will still want to read my books. This is what I must think. Books as we know them are just the medium through which the story I tell goes from my mind to yours. Even if that medium changes, I have to presume that you still want that story.
I wonder about the shape of a future market. Maybe the book publisher as we know it is going to die. Maybe a writer will publish his book on the Internet, without much in the way of middlemen, incidentally taking a larger cut of the cover price than present paltry royalties, which will be necessary to cover the losses through piracy. After a book has sold well on the Internet, has been proven as a product, that’s where the dead tree publishers step in. People will read many ebooks, and some they will decide are keepers.
Maybe.
Another scenario I see is the end of writers being able to make a living through writing books. If the main source of books is the Internet, without the middle men, where is the guarantee of quality? How is anyone going to be able to sort the wheat from the truckloads of chaff? A dead tree book you pick up in a bookshop has gone through a process, the first part being people in the publishing industry looking at the typescript and deciding they are prepared to risk spending thousands of pounds to get that book into print. (For those who say that publishers produce a lot of crap, let me give you a wake-up call: for every Daniel Steel or Jeffrey Archer book you sneer at, please remember that the publisher has rejected skiploads of the most appalling drivel you can imagine.) There’s your guarantee.
Perhaps the guarantee will be simply through sales, electronic bestseller lists, trusted reviewing. Even publishers admit that word-of-mouth is the best advertising available and, once the middlemen are out of the way, this would be the ultimate in word-of-mouth. Let’s face it, despite the ‘is this going to make us money guarantee’ publishers still quite often get it very wrong. How many publishers rejected the Harry Potter books?
What do you think?

Macmillan/Amazon Row

Posted on by Neal Asher

I think this concerns Amazon.com only, since my books are still available through Amazon.co.uk. You can find more about it over on John Scalzi’s Whatever.

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

I regret that we have reached this impasse. Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future. They have been a great innovator in our industry, and I suspect they will continue to be for decades to come.

It is those decades that concern me now, as I am sure they concern you. In the ink-on-paper world we sell books to retailers far and wide on a business model that provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably. Looking to the future and to a growing digital business, we need to establish the same sort of business model, one that encourages new devices and new stores. One that encourages healthy competition. One that is stable and rational. It also needs to insure that intellectual property can be widely available digitally at a price that is both fair to the consumer and allows those who create it and publish it to be fairly compensated.

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

Amazon and Macmillan both want a healthy and vibrant future for books. We clearly do not agree on how to get there. Meanwhile, the action they chose to take last night clearly defines the importance they attribute to their view. We hold our view equally strongly. I hope you agree with us.

You are a vast and wonderful crew. It is impossible to reach you all in the very limited timeframe we are working under, so I have sent this message in unorthodox form. I hope it reaches you all, and quickly. Monday morning I will fully brief all of our editors, and they will be able to answer your questions. I hope to speak to many of you over the coming days.

Thanks for all the support you have shown in the last few hours; it is much appreciated.

All best,
John

We’re going to see more of this sort of stuff as companies try to corner the Ebook market, but the amusing thing is that there won’t be any cornering, or at least not for long, since this is not a fight between the producers of Betamax and VHS. That aside, again, US book buyers, you can get my books through The Book Depository. They ship for free and are offering some big discounts on there. I just bought New Moon & Eclipse for a total of £6.90.
 

Injustice

Posted on by Neal Asher

A millionaire businessman jailed for attacking an intruder who kidnapped his family and held them at knife-point was freed by the court of appeal today.

This man should never have been put in prison in the first place, and his brother shouldn’t be there now. You know, we are citizens of a society so surely the police and judicial whine that, “You must not take the law into your own hands,” is anti-society, it’s a charter to renege on any societal responsibility, it’s an excuse to say, “Nothing to do with me mate.”

This is all about the state not wanting any of its citizens to have any power at all because, really, its power over you is more important to it than its power to prevent criminals harming you. If some shite kills you in your own home, the state isn’t threatened, but you having personal responsibility, the power to act for yourself and think for yourself is plain dangerous to it.

Hussain, 53, had discovered three masked men in his house when he returned with his family from prayers at their local mosque. The burglars forced them into the house, tied them up and threatened to kill them before Hussain managed to escape and alert his brother, Tokeer Hussain.

The pair returned to the house in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire and chased and caught one of the gang, Walid Salem, a criminal with more than 50 previous convictions. The court heard Salem was then subjected to a “dreadful, violent attack” during which he was hit so hard with a cricket bat that it broke into three pieces, leaving him with brain damage.

So, because of the time delay this is a revenge attack. Revenge is only something the state is allowed, when it is being harmed. It’ll throw you into prison for tax fraud, for example, but nutters with knives threatening someone’s family get a get-out-of-jail-free card:

Walid Salem, 57, was set free by a judge while Munir Hussain, the householder, was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

Oh, and apparently Walid Salem’s brain damage was not sufficient to stop him going on to commit further crimes:

Salem was arrested on January 4 this year carrying 20 counterfeit credit cards, a false driving licence in the name of Gamal Ben Ghali, a stolen driving licence photocard in the name of Brenda Gray, and a stolen driving license photocard, National Insurance Card and Halifax card belonging to Lucie Taylor. It is thought Brenda Gray and Lucie Taylor are the names of two crime victims.

I think there are some definite lessons to be learned here. The first and most important is: buy an aluminium baseball bat – it won’t break.

Deathray and Borders.

Posted on by Neal Asher

The credit crunch (silly name) continues to bite, though maybe in the case of Borders that’s credit crunch plus Internet and supermarket competition:

Borders UK, the bookshop chain, went into administration last night, putting 1,150 jobs at risk and raising the prospect of a firesale before Christmas.

It also seems we might not be seeing further issues of Deathray, which is a shame:

As some of you may have heard, and others who popped along the shops to pick up the latest issue of Filmstar may have feared, Blackfish’s two magazines, Filmstar and Death Ray, are currently ‘on hold’. What this means is that there will not be another issue of either of them along for a number of weeks – or, likely, months. Indeed, whether there will ever be another issue of either is a moot point, and at this moment in time impossible to answer. But we hope so.

Flood

Posted on by Neal Asher

It is a terrible thing to have your home flooded, and your belongings destroyed. It is a terrible thing when one of those working to save people’s lives is killed. And of course it all looks like a disaster of Biblical proportions … if you believe the press. And nothing like this has ever happened before … if you believe the press. Hell, has no one read any history books, or even any history novels? This is Britain, it rains here, it floods here, and it always has. Go on the Internet and check up on some history for goodness sake!
Cockermouth – Rivers Cocker and Derwent
Description

Cockermouth at the confluence of the Rivers Derwent and Cocker has been designated a ‘gem’ town by the Council for British Archaeology to be preserved as part of the National Heritage. It has an extensive conservation area within the town and numerous listed buildings/structures. The Flood Warning Area covers an urban area of 0.77 square kilometres. Number of Properties at Risk in FWA 574
Flooding History

Earliest recorded flooding was in 1761, since then flooding has occurred in 1771, 1852, 1874, 1918, 1931, 1932, 1938, 1966, 1999 and 2005. (and now)
In 1938 flooding under Cocker Bridge washed away a section of sewer and Barrell Brewery Bridge collapsed (Waterloo Bridge stands there now). The town centre and Main Street were badly affected. It was claimed that trout and even a large pike were caught on the High Street.

On 7th and 8 th January 2005, although the River Cocker was in spate with a return period of 1 in 25 years, the main source of flooding was the overtopping of the defences by the River Derwent with a return period estimated at 1 in 100 years.
… Flooding then extended onto the northern half of the Main Street and then covered the whole of the Main Street to a depth of 100mm. Parts of Waterloo Street suffered flooding up to 900mm deep. 113 properties flooded in the Waterloo and Main Street areas and 2 properties from Tom Rudd Beck (Main River). In the Gote area, which is undefended, initial flooding occurred to a low level area of Sandair from a rising water table. Shortly after this the area in front of the allotment gardens started to flood, initially from highway drainage connected to the river. River levels continued to rise and reached the rear of Gote Road, flowing through the properties onto Gote Road. At peak river levels a flow route was established via the entrance to the cricket ground down Gote Road to the low point. At roughly the same time a flow route was established to the river from the north end of Gote Road. Some 34 properties suffered internal flooding with the maximum flood depth on the road being some 900mm
Note the parts I’ve highlighted. These things are cyclical and the only reason they are getting worse in Britain (if they are) is because we’ve concreted over vast swathes of this country and the water has no where to soak away. But come on now – this sort of thing, historically – was not uncommon:
Thames flood in 1869:

Victorian floods in Windsor 1869, 1872, 1875, 1877, 1891 & 1894
and how about

The East Coast flood of 1953.

Science Fiction Laser Beam Nonsense!

Posted on by Neal Asher


This was passed onto me from my brother Bob. It’s on Tom’s Guide.

In September, we reported that Boeing successfully defeated a ground target using its Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft. Now the company has shown its laser prowess again by tracking and destroying small, unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. A single laser beam, fired by the U.S. Air Force-sponsored Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), shot down five UAVs at various ranges.

Squids in space next maybe?

Water on the Moon.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Remember NASA dropping spacecraft on the moon with the intent of analysing the dust plume created? It was all very disappointing for those accustomed to Hollywood CGI mega-bangs and received a fair bit of ridicule in the papers. Well, it was an experiment whose importance and results is immediately apparent to anyone like me, and readers here.

A small NASA spacecraft and its companion rocket did indeed strike water when they slammed into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole, NASA announced November 13.

Water available on the moon means the possibility of a base like the one depicted in that old series Space 1999. And we’re not talking about a bit of damp here:

But analyses since then reveal that the impact kicked up at least 100 kilograms of water vapor and ice, or 25 gallons. LCROSS project scientist Anthony Colaprete of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., reported the finding during a briefing at Ames.

Go read the whole article at Science News.

Letters to Athens News

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s some I’ve letters sent to Athens News, a paper in English focusing mainly on Greek news:

Dear Sir,

A previous writer to this paper expressed disappointment at the ‘windows’ in the coming smoking ban here in Greece. This person was apparently looking forward ‘with bated breath’ to the time when he or she could go into a taverna, bar or club without the result of ‘stinging eyes, my clothes and hair stinking and the air suffocating me’. I have to say I read and heard much of the same sort of hysterical nonsense prior to the British smoking ban: many non-smokers shouting about their ‘right’ not to have these dirty, evil smokers inflicted upon them. These vocal anti-smokers also happily repeated the propaganda of the government and organizations it funds, like ASH, which stated that there would be no loss of trade to pubs and clubs because the smokers leaving such establishments would be replaced the non-smokers flocking back. However, we see the true results of the British ban now.

Prior to that ban, in 2007, the rate of pub closure across Britain was four every week. After the ban it rose to twenty-seven every week as all those belligerent anti-smokers failed to return to the pubs. Many bingo halls and working men’s clubs have also gone to the wall, and tens of thousands of those previously employed in all such places lost their jobs. Many pubs even lost non-smoker customers because they didn’t want to go to places now empty of their smoker friends. For those who have hung on we even have the ridiculous situation of non-smokers following smokers outside so they will still have someone to talk to. And perhaps they are right to go outside because, as many discovered, the smells from the toilets and the stale beer are now no longer disguised by the smell of cigarette smoke.

Outside, of course, they might also spot the owner of the pub who, having paid hundreds of thousands for the place, now cannot smoke a cigarette on his own premises. Such blanket bans are totalitarian – the bar owners should be the ones to decide whether or not they will allow smoking. The justification, of course, is ‘health’ and the lies about passive smoking. The reality is that only politicized ‘science’ came up with any figures on passive smoking and, as has already been proven by bans elsewhere, they in no way reduce the number of smokers. And those inflicting such bans are utterly two-faced, as we know by the smoking room at the London G7 Conference, and the failure to enforce non-smoking in the European Parliament.

The smoking ban in Britain was an unmitigated disaster for the pub trade and, if enforced in the same way here, it will kill tavernas, clubs, kafenions and restaurants. No arguments: people will go out of business, jobs will be lost, the government will lose revenue and more freedom will be destroyed by an autocratic state.

Sincerely

Neal Asher

Crete.

Dear Sir,

A blossom from a hot pink bourgainvilla blew in through the front window and settled in my lap. It was dried out like ricepaper and it almost seemed to me that Crete was saying, “Sorry, this is the only consolation I have to offer.” Before considering that this might be a keepsake – something as insubstantial to remember this restaurant by as the promise of a politician – I ground it to dust on the tablecloth. None of the owners or waiters saw or complained, since they were sitting at one of the few outside tables smoking cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke on their own property.

Yes, the smoking ban has arrived in Greece, and the bansturbators have won another battle for totalitarianism. I wrote a letter to this paper before about it and there they were, whingeing about their clothes smelling of cigarette smoke after they’ve been in a bar, totally ignoring the point that in many cases their choice is likely to be a bar that allows smoking or no bar at all.
So, there you have it: until such a time as I see ashtrays back on the tables of this restaurant I have enjoyed for a couple of years, I won’t be eating there. It’s a shame but what can I do? Just as so many pub owners (or rather, erstwhile pub owners) have discovered in Britain, a lot of people don’t protest loudly enough, but given the opportunity always vote with their feet.
I wish I was living in a British or a Greek democracy but, really, in Europe democracy drew its last terminal-smoker asthmatic breath about twenty years ago as the EU project built up momentum.

Understand this, Cretans, in five years time there will be no smoking licences and there will be no exceptions, and the bansturbators will be after your raki next. Do you for one moment think all those stills, all that unregistered, unmonitored and most importantly, untaxed fun is in any way part of the EU plan?

Sincerely,

Neal Asher