Rethinking Ebooks

The other day I bought The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson because of a review I read by Eva at A Striped Armchair that was so compelling that I had to buy the book.  I went to Amazon and found the trade edition for $12.21 while the Kindle edition was $9.87, and I thought for $2.34  I’d spring for the beautiful New York Review Books Classic paper edition.  Now that I have that book in my hands, which is a very nice trade paper copy, I’m wishing I had gotten the Kindle edition.  Or waited until just when I was ready to sit down to read it before buying it.  I’m finding several ways the Kindle is making me rethink my book buying and reading habits, and I’m not sure publishers and writers will like these changes.

the-long-ships

The addiction to own beautiful books is one thing, but to read them is another problem, and I’m discovering that it’s much easier to read books on my Kindle.  Mainly I’ve been using my Kindle to get free and cheap books, because I’ve always liked to collect books, and owning the Kindle edition doesn’t feel like I own the book.  This is an emotional conflict.  I like holding the real book until it’s time to sit down and read, and then I wished it was on my Kindle so it would be easier to hold and easier to read because I can magnify the font.  But I hate the thought of spending $9.99 for electrons.

Ebooks look better on my iPad, but it’s actually harder to hold than a hardback.  Ebooks are easiest to read on the Kindle.

I took some extra days off here at Christmas and I’m cleaning  up my bookshelves today to make room for all the books I’ve bought in the last few months that are just sitting in piles around the house.  Which brings me to problem #2.  I buy far more books than I read.  I figured I’ve got 40-50 years worth of books waiting for me to read.  I really should stop buying books altogether.  Especially since of the 50-60 books a year I do read, most are listened to as audio books. 

Okay, I’m crazy.  Yes, my name is Jim, I’m an addict.  I’m addicted to book buying.

If I was wise, I’d stop buying books in 2012.  Or not buy any book until I’m in my chair ready to read at which time I can order it from Amazon.  The Kindle really does facilitate a chain reading habit.  Finish one book, order another and start it in 30 seconds.

Collecting ebooks is just plain no fun.  If Amazon kept all my books online in some kind of virtual library where I could admire their number, see their colorful dust jackets, and flip through their pages and feel like Midas with his pile of gold, then maybe it would be fun. But as it stands now, my growing number of books on my Kindle is only annoying because it makes finding a particular book more difficult.  Note to Kindle developers – invent some kind of interface for organizing books into various collections and topics.  Just archiving isn’t good enough.

If I become a total Kindle reader then I’m not going to buy books way ahead of time.  I’m going to assume that anything I want to read that’s in print as an ebook will stay in print as an ebook and I can get it when I actually feel like reading it.  I doubt the Amazon planned for this when it started pushing ebooks.  They probably thought we’d buy books just like we’ve always had but just electronically.

Instead of buying ebooks ahead of time, I might just download the sample chapter.  That will leave a place holder that reminds me that I want to read that book someday.

I bought two more books today, and all my Christmas presents I’ve asked for from my wife are books.  But the two I bought today are picture books, books about western films.  That’s not something I’d want to read on the Kindle.  But I would like them on the iPad if they were fully multimedia.  Whoops – Amazon doesn’t sell iPad app books.  I bought a special iPad edition of The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins.  I’m not sure it would even look good on a 7” tablet like the Kindle Fire.  Now I have to worry about two virtual libraries – one at Amazon, the other at Apple.  And the book by Dawkins is an app, so it won’t even be in the iBooks library.  What a pain for the future.  I’m also thinking about buying the multimedia edition of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, but now I wonder.  How do I save such books for the rest of my life?

I have a wall of books that sits across from my La-Z-Boy where I read.  It’s quite wonderful to gaze at, and to think about all the wonderful books I have sitting there.  Old friends that go back to when I was a kid, and all the unread books that will be uncharted territory to explore.  What will it be like if my library was in the cloud?  Can computer programmers ever develop a virtual library that’s fun to gaze at, or offer just as much fun to pull titles down from a virtual shelf and flip through their pages?  I don’t know, but I suppose some brilliant young programmer will think of something.

mybooks

[click photo to enlarge]

First, ebooks have changed the way I read.  Now they are changing the way I buy books.  Next they will change the way I store and collect books in my lifetime library.  What will an ebook reader look like five years from now, or ten?  What are the possibilities of a virtual library?  And where will my virtual library reside?  At a bookseller’s server farm?  Or will I pay to keep them elsewhere?  Can we trust our lifetime of book collecting to Amazon, B&N, Google or Apple?  And would I want to have multiple libraries?  That’s already the case now that I have books at Amazon and Apple.  And will I continue to own books?  I stopped buying music because I rent it from music libraries like Rhapsody and Rdio.  Could that happen to books too?

Has anyone really thought what the ultimate results of ebooks mean?  If I stick with Amazon will it be around in 30 years, or 50?

I wish it was possible to rip books like it is for music.  Digital music is so much nicer to manage.  Whenever I move my collection of books and CDs they’re a pain in the ass to box, ship, unbox and re-shelve.  I wouldn’t mind the simplicity of going completely digital, but what will that mean?  If I was a child getting my very first digital book, what’s the chance of me keeping it my whole life?

One way publishers could solve this problem is to give away an ebook edition with the purchase of a hardback edition.

JWH – 12/19/11

1001 Classical Recordings: Carmina Burana

Today I started reading 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die, edited by Matthew Rye.  I know next to nothing about classical music, and when I saw this book on the remaindered shelf I bought it thinking I’d go through the recommendations and try them out on Rhapsody or Rdio as an exercise in music auto-didacticism.   But starting with the first album, Carmina Burana quickly showed me what a vast undertaking this will be.  I thought I might could do one album a day, but that won’t be practical – not if I actually want to learn something.  I mean, I could just play the album and be done with it, but researching Carmina Burana on the internet has been a trip, and I think each album is going to take some work to appreciate.

To me, music as time traveling.  Up to now my adventures into old music has only taken me back to the jazz music of the 1920s.  Carmina Burana jumps me back to the 11th and 12th century – that’s quite a cultural shock.  Now here’s the problem with classical music – it’s old, sometimes very old, and unless it’s 20th century classical we don’t have recordings of the original artists and performances.  Classical music for the modern world is really listening to cover bands, and there’s lots of interpretations.  I hit a snag with the very first recommended album, Camina Burana, performed by Clemencic Consort, directed by René Clemencic, a 3 CD recording from 1975 that’s out of print.  Bummer.

CARMINA-CLEMENCIC

The 1001 Classical Recording guide recommends this recording because it’s supposed to be more authentic.  Of course that’s both subjective and theoretical because we don’t know what a bunch of monks sounded like from the 11th and 12th century.   However, there is a movement in classical music called historically informed performance which means they use research and scholarship to guess what the original music might have sounded like.

Please read this Wikipedia entry on the history of the songs.  But we’re pretty sure they don’t sound like the monster chorales of the Carl Orff interpretations.  It’s when I heard “O Fortuna” that I realized I’ve been hearing this old music all my life, making it the oldest of the oldies I know.  Here’s how most people hear something from Carmina Burana today:

I did find some Clemencic Consort recordings on YouTube to illustrate the contrast of interpretations.

And these guys even look like they could be monks if they had the right outfits.

Another problem is knowing that the singers are singing about.  Here are the lyrics to the Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  In all, there are 254 poems and dramatic texts that are open to musical interpretation.  I really do like Orff’s “O Fortuna” sound because the music goes with the lyrics:

O Fortune,
variable
as the moon,
always dost thou
wax and wane.
Detestable life,
first dost thou mistreat us,
and then, whimsically,
thou heedest our desires.
As the sun melts the ice,
so dost thou dissolve
both poverty and power.
Monstrous
and empty fate,
thou, turning wheel,
art mean,
voiding
good health at thy will.
Veiled
in obscurity,
thou dost attack
me also.
To thy cruel pleasure
I bare my back.
Thou dost withdraw
my health and virtue;
thou dost threaten
my emotion
and weakness
with torture.
At this hour,
therefore, let us
pluck the strings without
delay.
Let us mourn together,
for fate crushes the brave.

I’m nearly positive the monks never sounded like Orff’s mind-blowing space opera interpretation, but I can picture a bunch of guys singing the song above in medieval times and it might have sounded like the Clemencic Concert. 

Here’s what the original manuscript to “O Fortuna” looked like:

CarminaBurana_wheel

Rhapsody and Rdio have many productions of Carmina Burana, although most of them are based on the Orff interpretation, which are more fun because they are so emotional.  Orff does rock out, but the old monk sound is appealing, I’m just not sure I’d put any those cuts on a playlist to listen to regularly, but that might change as I learn more about old music.

JWH – 12/17/11

Best Revenue Model for Musicians: Sell or Stream?

I’ve bought thousands of LPs and CDs in my life, and a surprising number of them I only played once.  Now I rent music from Rhapsody and Rdio – total cost $15 a month.  In my heyday of buying CDs, I’d usually spend 10x that or more per month.  I never got into stealing music.  I want the artists and record producers to make their money like they deserve.  However, it’s doubtful I’ll ever go back to buying CDs, and since I’ve acquired the streaming music habit, I have no desire to go back to buying music at all.

The question I’d like to know is:  Can the artists and producers make as much money by streaming as they do by selling?  Finding out about revenue from various music distribution sources is difficult, but there are some clues.

Problem #1 – Artists Used To Make a Lot of Money Off of Crappy Songs?

If I buy a CD for $15 and whether I play it once or a million times, the musicians and producers earn the same amount of money.  If I go to iTunes and sample an album and buy one song I like for $1.29, again it doesn’t matter how many times I play the song, they’ve gotten their money.

Now if I go to Rhapsody and play an album or song, the artist and their record company will get a tiny payment, I assume.  Now if I find one song that I love so much I play it 20 times a day for the entire month, that song should theoretically pay the creators of that song more money for my extra love.  But does it pay the music people enough?  Evidently not, according to The Black Keys, who have pulled their new album from streaming services.

I’m pretty sure selling CDs was the best way of making the most money.  Music lovers had to buy everything pretty much on faith.  The money was up front.  Money from streaming comes after fans play the songs.

Problem #2 – Can Streaming Succeed if Too Many Groups Pull Their Catalogs?

Artists and record producers want to sell albums.  But let’s be honest, how many albums in your collection are ones you like to play straight through and love all the songs?  Or even half the songs?  Or even one song?  Music lovers want to find songs push their music loving brain cells into ecstasy.  But we don’t know which songs do that until we play the album.  In the old days you bought a CD and rushed home hoping to find at least one, and hopefully several great songs on an album.   I’m through with that.  Those days are over.  I’ve been burned too many times.  Streaming music lets me try out all the albums I want, and the songs I love get added to playlists.  Life is easy, but will it last?

If music producers start pulling out of deals with the streaming music services it won’t.  Now we could see a tiered delivery service like we see for movies and DVDs.  Netflix is a cheap all you can eat service, but content comes there last.  This might work for streaming music, where albums go on sale for a period of time before they go to streaming.  I can dig that, but then I’m old and patient.

To get some idea what streaming music does offer, read “Spotify vs. Rdio: Who Has The Exclusives?” over at Wired.  I wished Rhapsody had an API to let it be compared too because I feel from just daily use Rhapsody has the best catalog.  What Wired did was look up 5,000 albums at both services to see which had the most.  Rdio was the winner to me, but Spotify had some much loved exclusives.

It also revealed the holdout groups for streaming music:  The Beatles, King Crimson, AC/DC, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa – but hell, I’ve already bought those, some more than once, some even three times.  Streaming music still has millions of albums, so for $4.99-$9.99 it’s a great deal.  But, how many groups have to pull their catalogs before people give up on streaming music?

Problem #3 – Can Artists Make Money Only On How Often a Song is Played?

To make money on streaming music services artists must create songs people want to play and play and play.   If you create an album with 10 songs and people only play one of them, then 9 songs won’t be earning revenue.  Streaming is a dog eat dog world of music competition.  Hit songs will make money.  But will they make the same kind of money as selling hit songs?  I don’t know, and I can’t find out.

Problem #4 – Can the Music Industry Convince People to Buy Music Again

Because of stealing sharing songs free on the Internet, a whole generation feel music should be free.  The convenience of streaming makes getting music for $5-10 a month far easier than stealing, so it might be a viable revenue stream, but can it compete with convincing people to buy music again?  And now that I’ve spent years using streaming music, I don’t know if I’d want to go back to buying music.  But then I’ve got 18,000+ songs I’ve already bought and I’m 60 years old, so I could coast awhile without buying.  If I did go back to buying music I’d buy single songs at Amazon and hope Amazon stays in business for the rest of my life.

Problem #5 – What Happens if Most Fans Go With Streaming?

Even though I own the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Eagles and others on CDs, I no longer play their music.  I went out and bought all the remastered Beatles CDs when they came out and then didn’t even play them.  Streaming music is too convenient and great.  I just don’t mess with my collection anymore.  I recently uploaded it to Google Music, but I don’t play it.  Spotify will call up my library when it can’t find it in theirs, and that’s cool, but I wished Rhapsody and Rdio did that.  I want all my music in one place – in one search engine, and I want it in the cloud, so my playlists work from any computer or mobile device.

Sorry Black Keys, but I’m not going to buy your new album.  Leaving Rhapsody and Rdio doesn’t make me want to go buy your album.  My world of music is now streaming.  If the song ain’t there it ain’t anywhere, at least in my musical reality.

Sources of Streaming Music News and Reviews

JWH – 12/14/11

The eBook Price War!

When the Kindle first came out a lot of people bought one thinking the price of books would go down.  Amazon advertised that most ebooks would be $9.99 or less.  When the average price of a hardback was inching closer to the $25-30 range, and mass market paperbacks disappearing in favor of $12.95-14.95 trade paperbacks this seemed like a wonderful gadget for bookworms.

Then Apple entered the ebook business with the iPad and iBooks, and the prices of ebooks shot up.  Now at Amazon I can sometimes get physical books cheaper than the ethereal ebook, and often get physical books within a couple dollars of the ebook price.  Following that, publishers started making plans to reprint their backlist titles, books you used to buy as cheap paperbacks, for $9.99.  It started looking like the book industry was going to put the squeeze on all us folks buying ebook readers figuring it was a fad that was going to lead to a new gold rush in publishing.

Now all of this is cool – I want the book publishing business to thrive.  But for hardcore bookworms, who consume books, rising prices have always been a problem.  We tend to get books from the library or used bookstores to help us keep the cost of our word habit within reason.

But another trend developed concurrently with ebooks – new authors are seeing ebooks as a way to break into publishing by side-stepping the traditional route of finding an agent and selling their book to traditional publishers.  To grab the attention of readers they started selling their ebooks cheaper and cheaper, with prices like $2.99, $1,99, 99 cents and even free.  Then established writers started jumping ship from their regular publishers to go the ebook route thinking that getting 70% of a smaller list price with more sales was better than getting 12% of $25.95 and smaller sales.  Even big name authors started using free ebooks as promotions.  All of this is pushing the average price of an ebook down again.

To further complicate the issue of calculating the average price of an ebook is the fact that there are thousands, if not millions of free ebooks.  It used to be just old classics, but look at this 1966 Doubleday edition of John W. Campbell’s Collected Editorials from Analog.  It’s elegantly reproduced for reading on the web, or available for download in a variety of formats.  Not only does the Internet offer more and more free books, becoming the Library of the World, but old fashion local libraries are offering free ebooks through OverDrive and NetLibrary, and Amazon, being the pesky disruptive influence that it is, is offering to lend ebooks to its Amazon Prime members.

Bookworms are taking notice.  Look at this discussion thread over at Amazon called “What are you willing to pay for an eBook?”  The consensus seems to be people are willing to pay a fair amount $9.99-$14.99 for a new ebook if they are really anxious to read it, but for the average backlist title they want it to be as cheap as possible, and $2.99-4.99 seems to be a commonly mentioned price range. 

Many people leaving comments state they can’t afford to buy many books so they go after the cheap ebooks, or free ones, but a common response is 99 cents is too expensive for a crappy book.  So they want good books priced low.  They expect old books like Agatha Christie and Rex Stout reprints to be cheap – but understands why the latest John Grisham is $12.99.

I discovered this thread while reading Amazon’s 100 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less ad.  Nothing struck me as something I had to buy, but the prices were very tempting.  But my Kindle is already jammed with more unread books than I can read in years – some I paid top prices for and others I got for low prices or free.  Writer’s Digest gave away 7 books about writing novels during NaNoWriMo – a very kindly gesture I thought.  Over at SFSignal I often find free SF/F novels to add to my collection because authors are using them as promotions.  Getting the new Greg Egan was impressive.  I’ve bought several of his books in hardback.  What I’d like is some of his out-of-print titles reprinted as reasonably priced ebooks.  I assume his publisher is trying to get more SF fans to become Greg Egan fans, and I hope they succeed.

If you look at Amazon’s Best Sellers in the Kindle Store you’ll see a dual column of the two top 100 book lists, on the left, the most popular Kindle ebooks people buy versus on the free ones on right.  You can see 99 cent bestsellers competing with the full price books, such as Stephen King’s new 11/22/63 for $14.99.

Over at Ebook Friendly I found “Kindle Ebooks by Price: More than 100,000 Cost $0.99” which shows a pie chart that says 30.9% of Kindle ebooks sell for $0-0.99.

On my daily reading of Zite on my iPad I constantly read essays and blogs that mention free ebooks.  There are even blogs now that track ebook deals.  If you have a book-a-day reading habit, it’s gotten a whole lot cheaper to be a book addict.

This does not mean I’ve stopped buying paper editions of books.  Eva over at A Striped Armchair reviewed The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson so positively that I had go out and buy it.  My choice was $9.87 for the Kindle edition or $12.20 for the trade paper, so I picked the paper edition.  I figured the deluxe New York Review Books Classics trade edition was worth $2.43 more.  If the Kindle edition had been $4.99 – $5.99, I would have picked it.

What this means, and I have no idea if I’m typical, is when I spend more than $9.99 I’m more likely to buy the hardback or trade edition.  And to be honest, I’d rather buy a $4-8 used hardback than pay $7.99-8.99 for an ebook.  Some people on the forum also mentioned that.  Like I said, I don’t know if I’m typical, but that means I’m most likely to buy an ebook is it’s $0.00 – $4.99.  So in the war for ebook pricing, I tend to think the average price will be coming down.

The question is, how many people aren’t like me?  How many bookworms would rather buy a slightly cheaper ebook than the hardback?  If there are lots of those people, it will push the average price of an ebook up.  And how many people will pay $9.99 for a reprint of an old book as an ebook edition, books that people used to get as a mass market paperback?

I don’t think ebooks will kill off the book, at least not the hardback, and probably not the trade paper, but I bet it kills off the mass market paperback, which is averaging about $7.99 now.  I don’t like saving paperbacks, and the convenience of an ebook outweighs the value of a mass market paperback.

So in the ebook price war, I would guess ebooks are the new mass market paperback and have to be cheap.  For a certain percentage of readers they will pay $9.99-$14.99 for an ebook edition if it’s a hot new bestseller.  I predict lots of free ebooks, especially older out of copyright books naturally, but also new books being given away for promotional reasons, and older midlist books that help promote authors newer books, like those found at the Baen free library, or books that have little chance of making sales, but would be valuable to rare readers, like the John W. Campbell book I mention above.

There’s no reason why any book should be out of print anymore.  As books lose their popularity they can be priced lower and lower, even priced free.  What will be really fascinating is forgotten classics that start regaining popularity and maybe even reigniting sales.

Guides to Free Kindle Books

JWH – 12/11/12

What Do We Want From Science Fiction?

This month over at the Classic Science Fiction book club we’re reading and discussing Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany, and some of us are enjoying the story and others are finding it lacking.  We all take it for granted that people have different tastes, but do you ever wonder why?  One of the themes of Empire Star is about asking questions, and one of our members, Andreas, found this article by Theodore Sturgeon called “Ask the Next Question.”  Some of us even wondered if Delany had gotten the idea dealing with questions from reading Theodore Sturgeon.  In fact, we found many elements of Empire Star that had been used in other science fiction books – but more on that later.

Delany_Empire-Star

Discussing Empire Star got me thinking:  What do we want from science fiction?  Did some of the book club members enjoy Empire Star because it contains certain elements they seek out in science fiction?  And the reason other people disliked the story is because it lacks those elements they normally seek?  Jo Walton really loves Empire Star or so she says in her review at Tor.com.

I didn’t just like the book a lot, the way a sane grown-up might like a book, I fell head over heels obsessively in love with it. I made myself a t-shirt of it. I read it several hundred times. I was a one-Jo Empire Star fangirl. I had a sign on my bedroom door saying “Entry for J-O Type Persons Only” which is a quote from it.

Evidently Empire Star rubbed Jo Walton in just the right way if she’s read it hundreds of times.  Really?  I haven’t read it that many times, but I have read it four times since 1968.  I keep coming back to Empire Star.  Why?

I think most of us generally think we read books because we want to be caught up in a good story and characters – and beyond that we assume all books are different.  But what if there are specific fictional flavors we crave like our favorite ice creams?

My all-time favorite books are the twelve YA novels Robert A. Heinlein wrote for Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, and while I was reading Empire Star for the fourth time I noticed many elements in the story that reminded me of Heinlein.  Did Delany include them in the his novel because they were elements he liked and thought they belonged in any novel he wrote too?  Empire Star came out in 1966, so he wrote it when he was 23-24, and still quite young.  Delany and Heinlein don’t seem like they have much in common as people or writers, but there are some common elements in their stories that attract me, and that maybe they do share some things common.

Circular Plots

Heinlein wrote two classic SF stories with circular plots, “—All You Zombies—“ and   “By His Bootstraps.”  In each story one character turns out to be several in the stories.  In Empire Star three characters turn out to be many.  In fact all three stories might be considered Mobius strips.  I love circular plot stories, and repeating loop stories, like Replay and Groundhog Day.  This is definitely a science fiction element that will always hook me.

Alien Pets

Heinlein’s young adult novels sometimes had alien creatures that appeared to be pets but were really something else, like Willis in Red Planet, Lummox in The Star Beast, and Chipsie the spider-puppy in Starman Jones.  Empire Star gives us a devil-kitten D’ik, which eventually grows very large like Lummox.  Remember “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek?  Almost an exact copy of flat cats in Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones.  If puppies and kittens are cute, so are alien animal babies.  I guess I’m sucker for alien pets.  And that makes me think about how much fictional mileage J. K. Rowling gets our of her magical pets.

Running Away to the Stars

Now there’s one huge theme that appeals to a lot of science fiction readers, and that’s about a kid who gets to run away to the stars.  Isn’t that the core of science fiction?  My all-time favorite novel is Have Space Suit-Will Travel.  Empire Star follows the classic template as Starman Jones about a farm boy who heads out to explore the galaxy.  What that’s you say, didn’t George Lucas invent that motif for Star Wars?  Sorry, but it’s been around a long long time in a galaxy far away – but it’s probably why Star Wars is so successful and so much better than the other five films.  (I hate referring to it as A New Hope.)

Galactic Empires

I’ve written about this before but galactic empires are probably the most loved of all science fiction elements.  Read, “Are Galactic Empires the New Middle Earth” I wrote last June.  I don’t think I’ve really scratched the surface of that theme yet – there’s something deep there, that really needs to be explored.  Empire Star is about a galactic empire that uses slaves, and Comet Jo is going to free them, but after a long epic struggle that will take years.  However, Empire Star is a slight wisp of a novel, really a short novella, and if Delany wrote it today it would be 800 pages, and probably the first in a long George R. R. Martin like series.

Intelligent Machines

Stories about intelligent computers like Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and the current Wake, Watch and Wonder trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer really push my science fiction pleasure button.  So is it any wondered I loved Empire Star with Lump, a computer Comet Jo meets living on the Moon?  And I can’t help but believe Delany was inspired by Mike, a computer living on the Moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Other Elements

Delany doesn’t stop with just these five classic science fiction elements.  The whole book seems inspired by the weird humor of Robert Sheckley.  But I also hear from other readers that they see elements in Empire Star that remind them of Theodore Sturgeon – such as the theme about asking questions.

I wrote in “My Kind of Story” that I knew there were certain kinds of stories that appealed to me, but when I wrote that I thought I was dealing with narrative style and writing techniques.  But now I’m thinking that like some people with very specific sexual desires, I might actually crave very specific kinds of science fiction stories, or more precisely, stories with specific elements.  Which makes me wonder why I don’t seek to write stories with those elements?  Did Heinlein and Delany uses the elements discussed above because they believed they would sell more books?  Or because the were pleasuring themselves?

I need to contemplate if I have a limited number of fictional buttons I liked pushed, or are there endless possibilities. I’m really enjoying Once Upon a Time, the new TV series on ABC, and one of the things that excited me most about the story is that it’s told out of sequence, that the narrative double backs over itself, somewhat like a circular plot.  And like PKD, it’s about a town that doesn’t know the real reality of things.  If I kept looking I’d probably find several other story elementals that are my kind of groovy.

Now back to Sturgeon’s idea about asking questions. I’ve only gone one layer deep by asking what do we want from science fiction. If the answer is we love stories with certain themes or ideas then I should go to the next question: Why do I like those ideas? The answers would be too long to put into a blog post, but if you think about it, the question is important. For example, why is running away to go into space so appealing? During my adolescence that was a huge button to push with me. I had alcoholic parents that dragged me and my sister all over the country, so the real answer there is I wanted to escape from my own life. And as I got older and learned what it meant to be a real astronaut and what the right stuff was, I realized I would hate living in space – at least under present conditions.

The point is to keep asking question. Go deeper. Because if I did, I’d learn a whole lot about myself, and maybe stuff I didn’t even want to know. Why do I love the idea of intelligent machines? Is it because I don’t like emotions? Where’s that going? See what I mean?

Well, this blog is over – I’ll have to write more about this in the future.

JWH – 12/8/11