Odd Lots
- 2014 was a lousy year for adult fiction and nonfiction sales both. SF was down 7%; fantasy down 13%; computer books down 12%. To sell anything at all, you need to be chasing all those bookish kids who are supposedly all off somewhere playing computer games. Or something.
- A “fix-up” in the SFF universe is a novel constructed out of shorter works, with some edge-smoothing to make the whole thing hang together. Having seen the big list of SFF fix-ups on Wikipedia, I realize that I’ve read a fair number of them without ever realizing that they were in fact fix-ups. So I guess the techniques work. Should I perhaps begin The Everything Machine with a slightly modified “Drumlin Boiler”? I’m now seriously considering it. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Too much salt may kill you. So may too little. And it may not kill you at all, in any quantity. So why all the kvetching about salt?
- We may live in a much bigger galaxy than we thought–and a corrugated one, at that,
- A new class of drugs called orexin antagonists have begun to be marketed as sleeping pills, but may also confer resistance to Alzheimer’s Disease. New and still tentative studies suggest that orexin antagonists may also be used to reduce appetite. (PDF; Read the whole paper, or at least find the section on orexin.)
- The first 3-D printer for metal is about ready to mass-produce. It’s an odd system in that it uses metal clay, which must then be…yes indeed…baked. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Tom Naughton of Fat Head fame reviews Malcolm Kendrick’s book Doctoring Data, and if you’ve ever had a suspicion that medical studies are a stretch (or in some cases completely bogus…remember Ancel Keyes, the consummate medical fraudster?) it sounds like a great read.
- A guy snuck into several Ivy League universities and acted like a student for four years without being noticed. It’s unclear how much he learned, but the article makes the (to me, obvious) case that today an American college education has far less to do with education and almost everything to do with credentialing, and sorting Americans into populations of winners and losers.
- And he didn’t invent the concept. There was a TV sitcom in 1965 called Hank, about a good-natured campus food-truck guy with a secret life sneaking into classes, so he could someday have a better job than driving a food truck. I followed the series, and remember it fondly. Alas, Dick Kallman, the lead, was murdered in 1980.
- Now that I know they’re out there, I’m going to start watching for abandoned microwave towers. So is this primarily a California thing? Ever seen any east of Nevada?
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · health · making · sf · TV · writing
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> lousy year
Ten years ago we had a bookstore here in town, one at a mall in the next town, and a couple of bookstores in the next town. Now: zero. And we’re down from half a dozen used book stores to two, both in the next town.
I like to hold a book in my hand, read the blurb and front page, and maybe flip through. At $8 to $10 for a paperback nowadays, that’s an expensive mistake if I don’t like the book. “Curated lists” and reviews are, in my opinion, no better than random chance, so buying something online isn’t an attractive proposition.
In order to sell a book, you have to connect to your customer. And for fiction, that’s something I want to inspect before I buy, and by the time the mail brought an online order in I’d probably want to read something else.
> fix-ups
I’ve read quite a few of the books on that list. Van Vogt is a no-brainer; the majority of his books were pasted together out of pieces of other books or stories like a Mr. Potato Head. Books like Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (not on the list) were definitely collections of disparate short stories jammed together with some bridgework. But most of the books on the list are novellas that were expanded into complete novels, not pasted up from multiple stories.
> doctoring data
My wife’s insurance company sent us a letter a few years ago. It essentially told her if she didn’t start taking some particular anti-cholesterol drug they would cancel her policy. We had a “marital dispute” about some actuary at the other end of the country having the gall to practice medicine, but she saw her doctor and got a prescription anyway.
About a year later someone mentioned a problem with the drug in passing, and she had most of the symptoms. I spent hours on fda.gov chasing links until I found the original approval study, which had something like 36 subjects… and on 3/4 of them, the drug had both aggravated the problem and had serious side effects.
So they approved the drug anyway…
> snuck into… universities
Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley that I’ve read of, and I would assume most others, not only don’t care, but actively encourage this. It’s called “auditing.” They also have their entire curricula online for anybody to click on.
Universities aren’t in the business of selling education. You can get an education anywhere. What they’re selling is their name on your transcript.
> abandoned microwave towers
How could you tell? And given the costs of cell towers, why wouldn’t there be at least a cellular repeater on it?
I’ve always disliked the term ‘fix-up’ as it seems to imply that the original stories were somehow broken. That;s just not the usual case.
Van Vogt, who is credited with coining the term, seemed to do more ‘fixing’ than most. Some of these books are little more that the original stories with a few pages of linking, e.g. Foundation, or even none at all, e.g. Men, Martians and Machines.
As the linked tesxt says, the fix-up book as mainly an artifact of the change from magazine stf to book stf after WWII, but Burroughs and Merritt were doing such well before the war.
re: corrugated galaxies:
Wasn’t Dark Matter postulated to explain the “missing mass” of galaxies? If they’re all corrugated, I wonder if it’s still necessary.
-JRS
TV Tropes calls the fix-up a Patchwork Story, and has multiple examples of it, including not just books, but a D&D module, a video game, and the Robotech cartoon series.
Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder how many people who criticize the value of a four year university degree actually have one?
Not many people can successfully manage a project that takes four or more years, but that is exactly what getting a degree is all about.
Most critics have at least a four-year degree (as I do) and some a good deal more. We question the value of the education for reasons of grade inflation, fluffy or downright bizarre curricula (“Leisure Studies”) and the cost, which is not generally related to the career potential of the credential. Management of a degree program wasn’t much of a challenge, as I recall. There were requirements, I took the classwork, and I graduated. Managing your time could be a challenge, and there are some who never catch on to that particular skill or don’t consider it important. However, if you can’t impose enough self-discipline to score a college degree, you probably won’t score much else in life either.
AT&T built a huge microwave network in the 1950’s and 60’s. There’s a map at http://long-lines.net/places-routes/maps/MW6003.html of the 1960 system. There’s a great deal of interesting reading at this site, by the way, so check all of it out. http://long-lines.net/
At that time, the long haul was TD-2 microwave, in the 3.7-4.2 GHz band with up to 1000 voice channels multiplexed each microwave path. Voice channels were USB, with pilot carrier frequency lock to avoid the “Donald Duck” effect of frequency error in SSB systems.
Many of these were hardened sites intended to survive a nuke strike against the US. In addition, AT&T had some underground survivable switching centers tied to an improved survivable microwave and buried cable network to link government relocation sites and military bases.
Many of AT&T’s towers in the flat midwest were built with a concrete “grain silo” type base and steel lattice antenna support at the top.
Whoa, that’s a cool site. Spent some time there just now.
I do need to mention for my non-radio readers that “USB” in this context means “upper sideband,” which is a form of AM modulation optimized for efficient use of the radio spectrum by removing the carrier wave and one of the two (identical) sidebands. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation
Re. book sales
From the site that you linked:
“… print book unit sales”
I do not know whether you were aware that only dead tree book sales were included. I would not be counted among the sales even though I bought more than 10 books last year–not sure exactly how many. I read only ebooks.
> Men, Martians and Machines.
I overlooked that the first time around…
MMM was a short story collection, not a fixup novel. Depending on what edition you read, it might not have been packaged that way, though.
I don’t seem to encounter them any more, but at one time it wasn’t unusual for an author to write a number of connected short stories that later got collected in a single volume. George O. Smith’s “Venus Equilateral” stories, John Campbell’s “Wade, Arcot, and Morey” stories, or Colin Kapp’s “The Unorthodox Engineers” stories, for example. Even novels like Zelazny’s “My Name is Legion,” which was just three connected short stories.