Full Review: "The Martian"

I checked out some of the other reviews of The Martian, by Andy Weir, and they are overwhelmingly positive. A lot of that strikes me as a collective relief response.  Surprisingly for a civilization allegedly obsessed with happy endings, we've been concentrating on nihilistic shock in both book and film for a very long time now (think Mad Max, The Road, Hunger Games - a whole library of just how miserable fiction can make us.)

Weir's novel does act as a corrective to all that. It's suspenseful, although in the same way as Apollo 13 is suspenseful; we know everything will come out okay. And it is indeed fun getting there. The story is knowledgeable about science (I teach chemistry, and there's some fine instruction here) and innovation (try, fail, try again), and teamwork. I liked it.

But I also get where the few naysayers are coming from. Very little uncertainty, pedestrian sentence structure, almost textbookish narration - there's not a lot of psychological depth here. This is adventure science fiction from the early days, when we thought we could do anything we put our minds to. We need that, no question about it, and it's time we got off our self-flagellation kick, but just a little more nuance or character development or elegance next time? Please?

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Short review: "Empire of Sin"

 
You think we have a problem today with racial violence, government corruption, and embedded injustice of epic scale? Take heart. It's nothing compared to Victorian-era New Orleans. 

Gary Krist's book is a spellbinding piece of writing. Hard to believe it's non-fiction, but Krist used original news reports and other historical documents to craft this true story of mayhem. After a prologue, the book starts off with the murder of Josie Lobrano's brother, in front of her, at the hand of her paramour in their brothel, and the subsequent crooked trial in which said paramour is let off the hook. Things get worse from there, and continue to be worse for at least four decades, through several city administrations and various heroic attempts to clean up the mess. Between minute by minute descriptions of murders and lynching, we learn about the culture of New Orleans, the roots of jazz, the founding of Storyville, and much more. 

Very highly recommended.

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Introducing Brad Warner

I am a fan of Brad Warner, punk rocker and Buddhist practitioner. My favorite book of his (he has written several) is Sit Down and Shut Up. Here's his latest post at his website, HardCore Zen.

http://hardcorezen.info/staying-hungry/3019

 

The Manifesto of Speculative Posthumanism

Bruce Sterling notes that a real posthuman would find this very funny...

http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661427/s/36a5b6eb/sc/7/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbeyond0Ithe0Ibeyond0C20A140C0A20Cmanifesto0Especulative0Eposthumanism0C/story01.htm
“Over the last decade the possibility of innovations in areas such as artificial intelligence or biotechnology contributing to the emergence of a ‘posthuman’ life form has become a focal point of public debate and mainstream artistic concern. This multi-disciplinary discourse is premised on developments in the so-called ‘NBIC’ technologies – Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. The transhumanist claim that human nature should be improved technologically is likewise predicated on the NBIC suite affording the necessary means for enhancement...
(continued at above link.)

There's a big argument going on in the news and the blogosphere about Amazon (indie publishing) vs. Hachette (legacy publishing). My only contribution is to note that this isn't David and Goliath. It's more like Goliath and Goliath. I took up fiction writing recently, but by the time I'm ready to publish they'll probably be working on a different lawsuit, so my overall plan is to get out of the way and let them fight it out. (I thought I could finish a novel in a summer...hah! I'm only on the third chapter and it's already July.)

The question I do consider, though, is whether to go with independent publishing (like the Amazon Kindle and Smashwords and so on) or the legacy publishers (Hachette and the other Big Five and their minions). I spent (and spend) a lot of time reading about writing, and one interesting book that helped with that decision is The Business of Science Fiction, by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg. These two guys are archetypal professionals in the field, with many dozens of novels, short stories and screenplays between them. If anyone knows how to get published with a legacy publisher, it's them. Excellent book, and after reading it through, I had an interesting reaction. 

No way do I want to do this. 

Go to conventions and butter people up, send out endless query letters and proposals, try and get an agent, watch while they auction it off, scrutinize contracts, adhere to publisher's rules and word counts, go on book tours, wince while the publisher sets the book price too high, get only about a third of the money it makes, and then have no say in when, where, or whether the ebook gets published.

When would I get any actual writing done?

Current status: leaning heavily toward indie publishing. Yes, I'll have to hire and pay my own editor, and no, I won't get an advance. OK on both counts. 

QuiBids

Trying out yet another auction site - for buying,  not selling. (http://www.QuiBids.com) Very interesting - you pay for every bid you make, so the effort is to find a strategy to bid as little as possible. Here's what I've figured out so far:

• wait to bid until something you actually want comes up. Makes it worth the time you'll need to actually get it, and it means that if you lose the auction, you won't mind paying the full price plus shipping. (They even recommend this.)


• don't bother with the voucher style bids...they cost a little less to buy, but once they're gone, they're gone. With regular style bids (you buy them...they're $0.60 apiece) the site subtracts what you bid from the full cost of the item if you don't win it, and offers an identical item to you at that lower cost. You don't get a bargain, but it minimizes loss - the gift cards (which I highly recommend as a training option) are particularly good . You might have to buy the card if you lose the auction, but the shipping charge is minimal, and you get the money you bid back to spend as you want.


• unless you're prepared with many hundreds of bids and a lot of spare hours, don't even bother with the real high ticket items like iPads and such. High PRICED items often go for very little, but high STATUS ones go way up and take a long time to stop. If you're determined, wait until the high status item is at least at 80% of what the next highest winner paid. Then you might have enough bids to win at reasonable cost.


• Do not scatter bids hither and yon, or wander away once you've started bidding on something. You might as well throw money out the window. This is not eBay.


• Don't bid right away on any item. Wait until the clueless run out of money. The exception to this guideline would be in the middle of a workday - the number of people bidding is much lower, and high priced items often go for pennies.


• In fact, don't bid at all except when the timer is at 1...on anything! And then stick with it. Every bid posted gets 10 to 20 seconds added to the clock, so there's no reason to bid anything at 8 seconds or 3 or even 2. And if the timer jumps back up, don't bid...someone else did it for you. The only thing I would recommend is to click "Bid" AS SOON AS the timer gets to 1 - I've lost a couple expensive auctions now by waiting just a split second too long.


• Watch yourself. When you're winning, move your mouse away from the Bid button. I've bid myself up a couple times by accident. (the timer was at 1, so I clicked...duh! I might have won it if I hadn't clicked.)


• Check the history of the item before you even start (there will be an identical one tomorrow, don't worry.) What was the price range it sold for? WHEN during the day or night did it sell? Is the price related to the time of day? (In many cases it is...middle 5 hours of a workday is the absolute best, at least for the things I've been looking at.)


• Make certain you have enough bids...you don't want to have to buy more in the middle of an auction.


• If there is more than one "Bid-o-matic" active, don't bid at all. If there's only one active, bid only (at 1 or 2 seconds) when the Bid-o-matic is currently winning.


• The most likely auctions to win are those where only one or two other people are still bidding, and they're smart enough to wait until the last seconds on the timer. If you're focused, you can outlast them. The ones where idiots are bidding at 10 or 15 seconds might be worth watching, but don't click "Bid". Remember: the goal is the FEWEST bids, because you're paying for them. The actual "price" of the auction is usually very low, but also completely irrelevant - FEWEST NUMBER OF BIDS is your goal to save money.


• If your bid total is approaching the item value, stop bidding when you get to the item value MINUS the shipping charge - you'll still be able to buy it, but you won't exceed the MFRP plus shipping. For God's sake, don't spend bids worth more than the item is worth.

Bargains at Auction End

It's become clear to me that the best auction bargains are often at the end of the auction, not at the beginning. At the end, the bidding is just less intense - whether due to exhaustion on the part of the audience, or a thinning out of dealers, or a lack of any more cash on the part of the remaining people, or whatever. It didn't occur to me that attending the end instead of the beginning deliberately might be a good strategy until I was forced to do so because of work. Coming in late, and fresh, really helped (I got a set of Candlewick cups and saucers for next to nothing in one, and several boxes of good glass at another), so I've started going late - very late - to auctions.

The Job Auction

Now that I'm on the job market, I feel right at home, just like I would at an auction, only with those funny glasses that generate multiple copies of what the wearer sees. The people in possession of job openings have not one but dozens of recruiters casting around for bids. The job-seeking audience is huge, competitive, and bidding urgently, although in some cases it looks like the job owner is just kidding, or dyspeptic, or was drunk when writing the job requirement description.

It strikes me that the researchers in the audience are likely to be better at this than the engineers. After all, a bridge has to stand up to traffic first time out, whereas good research usually requires a very large scrap heap of failed tries. A job search is a lot more like the latter.

Getting away from retail...

One of the things I don't like about this business is retail selling. That sounds ridiculous - why even start a business selling china if you don't do retail?

Well for one thing because packing china properly for shipment is an exacting, exhausting, frustrating chore. Because putting things up for auctions online is extraordinarily time-consuming. But mostly because customers can be a problem, and not just for non-payment. After all, if they don't pay, I don't send them anything - we're even, no hard feelings. Nor would I complain about the people who report breakage. It happens no matter how well packed, and I send a partial refund immediately.

No, worst is the customer who gets a box full, tells you it's all broken, fails to send clear pictures of the breakage, and then insists on all the money back. I can see from other feedback that this person has pulled this stunt with other sellers, and then smeared them up and down if there was any other outcome than a full refund. It's unlikely everything in the package was broken, but this person knows darn well my reputation is worth more to me than the fifty bucks, and my time is worth more to me than the arduous process of proving a pattern of such behavior, so I refund the payment. All of it. And then feel sick for awhile.

But I don't want to give up on selling, either. I was able to provide nearly an entire set of Noritake china at a very good price to a family who wanted it for a wedding gift. Many times I've been able to replace individual pieces from beloved heirloom dinnerware sets - and have regularly gotten thank you notes from those buyers. You can't beat that.

I'm getting hints, however, that you can avoid selling directly to the consumer, but still keep in touch with them. It's harder to make money than on eBay, but it's do-able. Any consignment shop or antique mall, for example, takes the retail off your hands; they collect the money, deal with problems, answer questions, secure your merchandise, mail anything that needs to be mailed, and submit the sales tax to the state. You don't even need a tax ID number. I can still direct previous good customers to them and help out my fellow vendors at the same time with good marketing practices. The couple of thefts I've endured at the mall are somehow not nearly as creepy as being cheated online by someone in direct contact with me.

And I can sell from my own website, where I can make my own rules and develop a smaller, but better customer base. Yet another possibility is selling directly to specific collectors or dealing with collector's organizations. I don't know enough yet to do that, but it's an idea.

Finally, another venue I'm trying out is re-auctioning items at a higher-end auction house. Fingers crossed. First try this summer. The problem here, of course, is that the customer is kept at too great a distance, if not cut out altogether. That's not what I had in mind. If the main point of this business is getting something no one wants into the hands of someone who does want it, another auction disrupts that process, or at least lengthens it. I think what I'll do is put new things up either in the mall or on my website for a specific period of time and then take them to be re-auctioned if they don't sell there. Rotates the inventory, too.

Stay tuned.

--Gail

The Microsoft TechEd Auction (or maybe circus sideshow)

Just got back from a gigantic information technology conference sponsored by Microsoft (TechEd, for those of you in the field). Educational from several perspectives, some of which don't seem apparent to the typical attendee.

There are extremely few women in technology. I think we knew that, but I didn't get the full force of it until I saw it in action. The only woman on stage during the entire keynote address headed up the entertainment - an excellent African-inspired percussion ensemble - and she did not speak words, only musical calls and shrieks. The technical session leaders were virtually all male (Carolyn Chau an exception), although there did seem to be a larger female contingent at the vendor booths. Among the attendees, maybe 1 in 20 was female. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the "Women in Technology" luncheon was standing room only, but unfortunately that wasn't because so many women were there but rather because the room was not particularly large.

Now lest you think I'm about to start on some shrill rant about the evils of male domination, forget it. Despite scholarships, trade organization initiatives, spotlights, programs and downright begging on the part of some tech sectors, there still aren't many women in technology (with the exception of biochemistry, which is about half women now). The innate ability exists, the educational opportunity exists, there are many welcoming open doors in industry, and still women usually spend their talents elsewhere. I don't know why either, but it might be wise to look for some new angle on cracking this open.

It's easy to see how Tech-Ed is like a circus sideshow, and the whole event is a giant marketing campaign, but how is it like an auction?

• To start, there is a lot of diverse material for sale, with a specific theme. And they're selling more than just software. they're selling community, comraderie, and friendship


• The auctioneer - whether session presenter or keynote speaker - whips up interest in the material itself, but also strokes the buyer. (An astonishing amount of effort went into convincing the attendees that we were heroes - an important, underappreciated tribe who get impossible things done.)


• The audience bids not directly with money but with brand loyalty and purchasing potential. We take home a sense of community and a staggering amount of useful technical information, but also a determination to buy.

Think about it the next time you're at a conference.

--Gail