Open Mic Saturday

G'morning all, and welcome to Open Mic Saturday. This is the place to share your news and perhaps do a little bragging. If you're writing a novel: how much progress did you make this week? If you're writing short stories: did you finish anything or submit anything this week? If you've sold or published anything recently: when is it coming out and where can we find it?

In short, as a writer, what kind of progress did you make this week?

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Me, I'm going to gracelessly evade the question and point you to some interesting articles and factoids. In sheer business news, Amazon has unveiled the Kindle 2, which is considerably slimmer and better-designed than the original and also includes a rudimentary form of built-in text-to-speech, so actually being able to read is now optional. The Kindle 2 remains locked into Amazon's proprietary file format, however, so in a counter-move, Google and Sony have announced an agreement to release some 600,000 titles in the Open ePub format. Given that Google has been making a serious effort to scan and digitize everything printed everywhere, copyright be damned, this should prove interesting. Also, if you're one of those iPhone cultists, you should be delighted to learn that both Google and Amazon have announced versions of their respective ebook readers for the iPhone. I really can't see—I mean, I literally can't see—reading screen after screen of tiny text on an iPhone, but if I younger, I'd be investing in corrective lens and hearing-aid makers. Those are the growth markets of the 21st century, my friends. In the future, there will be millions upon millions of myopic and near-deaf iPhone and iPod users, urgently demanding that somebody do something to save them from themselves, and oh, there will be money to be made.

Speaking of the future, the BBC asked four leading British SF writers (Arthur C. Clarke being dead and all) to answer the question, Can science fiction keep up with modern science? The answers are worth reading, if only to see a few paragraphs from old friend Ian Watson, who is always charming and a delight.

Also on the BBC, Bruce Sterling does a scattershot interview that is none the less interesting. Either Sterling is my evil doppelganger or I'm his, and I've often sometimes thought he now is how I would have turned out, had I taken myself excruciatingly seriously thirty years ago. One thing we're in full agreement on, though, is this:

[...but] he is worried that his novel-writing days may soon be at an end.

"I am not sure I am going to be allowed to do it. American publishing is in distress. The book stores are going, the big centralised publishers are very heavily indebted and they are small sections of the centralised American media apparatus that have lost social credibility."

He adds: "People don't pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse.

"You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary."

And so we merrily progress along our path to being a post-literate culture...

In other business news, Barnes & Nobles bought ebook publisher Fictionwise, for whatever that's worth. Slightly less than 16 million dollars, apparently.

Finally, I just have to close by sharing this photo of the Helix Nebula, which lies about 700 L.Y. away in the constellation of Aquarius, and which was taken by the La Silla observatory in Chile. Some people are starting to call this astronomical formation "The Eye of God," for obvious reasons.



Thank goodness La Silla had red-eye reduction turned on when they took the snap.