A speculative mind

One of the most important things that affect the marketing of a book is the cover art. That’s what people see. It is supposed to catch the eye and make a person go, “hey, what’s this?” There are a lot of different schools of thought about what a cover should look like. Some people opt for extreme simplicity, like just a solid color with the title. There are artistic reasons for going with simplicity, and as long as it is an artistic reason that is driving it (and not a financial one) that is fine. It’s all art anyway, the novel and the cover. Other people go for a showy, eye-catching cover. In the realm of science fiction and fantasy books there have been some wonderful covers and cover artists over the years. The Hugo Awards started giving awards to artists in 1958. Prominent cover artists include Frank Frazetta, Kelly Freas, Boris Vallejo, Michael Whelan, and many others who are giants in their field, but whom the public may not know by name (though they probably know their...

I just finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. This book is an alternate history (I wrote about alternate history in another blog a few weeks ago). In this novel, history is the same as ours until about the late 1940’s, then there are some subtle changes. Then there is a dramatic change as a large meteor slams into the ocean just off the eastern seaboard of the United States. I am not really giving away a spoiler here as I think the meteor is mentioned in the first sentence of the book. The meteor and ensuing climate change caused by it force people to accelerate the drive into space. There is a drive to set up colonies on the Moon, Mars and other places as a Plan B, in case Plan A (Earth) becomes uninhabitable. There is a nostalgic feeling throughout The Calculating Stars . For me I got the thrill of sort of reliving the space race (even though it is a different space race than the one we went through). We are watching this happen from the inside as the main...

What makes something a hit, and something else a flop? Quality, obviously is the short answer, but not all hits and misses can be differentiated based on how good they are. Sometimes the whims of the buying public are just plain . . . well, whimsical. Geroge R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) was a young writer whose first three novels had been reasonably successful, each one doing better than the last. When he produced his fourth novel, The Armageddon Rag , his publishers were very enthusiastic. They gave him a big advance. They publicized the book. It was met with critical acclaim. Movie rights were optioned. And then in George R. R. Martin’s words, “nobody bought it.” The failure of that book almost destroyed Martin’s writing career. Suddenly nobody wanted to publish anything of his anymore. George eventually landed on his feet and, as it turned out, has now done quite well for himself. I have not read the Armageddon Rag myself (though it is on my to-read list) so I c...

Not to be confused with historical fiction, alternate history is a fun subgenre of science fiction that starts with a “what if?” What if Oswald never shot Kennedy? What if Hitler had not declared war on the Soviet Union? What if cheese was never invented until the 21 st century? Sometimes alternate history comes about in a science fiction story because of time travel or dimensional travel or some such. In The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, a time traveler falls off a levitated path and crushes a butterfly. The death of the butterfly caused changes to the timeline thousands of years down the line. This story is not strictly speaking an alternate history since the main characters live in the future, but a similar mechanism has been used as the impetus for stories in the alternative history genre. (By the way The Sound of Thunder has erroneously been attributed as the source of the phrase “the butterfly effect”. Actually it comes from weather modeling and chaos theory. Meteoro...