Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Readers of The Chara Talisman (and there are a bunch of you out there, thank you!) already know that the sequel, The Reticuli Deception (working title) touches on mysteries in addition to those of the millions of years ago Terraformers and the more recent Spacefarers. Namely, whether there was anything to some of the UFO contacts reported in the 1960s. Since these books are set 150 years after that, there’s some question as to whether the original Blue Book files can still be located, and they do try, although that’s a side story to the main plot. In particular, they’re curious about the Betty Hill incident, and the star map she drew.

Sometimes, though, truth can be stranger than fiction. I’d heard that the Project Blue Book files were all transferred to the National Archives when the project was shut down in 1969 (or 1970, depending on which report you read). It’s not quite that simple. They were first transfered to the Air Force Archives at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, where they resided for about five years, although nominally available to the public. It was in 1975 that they were transferred to the National Archives, but only after redacting witness names and similar personal information. The Air Force kept a microfilm copy (also censored) for their own use.

It turns out, though, that uncensored microfilms also exist, discovered in the National Archives in 1998, and that “these rolls also contain some pages that are not on the NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] rolls” (– bluebookarchive.org). Curiouser and curiouser.

Eagerly I began to browse through Blue Book Archive’s list of microfilms. These are on line. Fantastic! I’d love to read the actual Betty Hill files. Pages one through four of their listings cover the pre-Blue Book projects, Sign and Grudge, as well as all the Blue Books up to 1954. The Hill contact was in 1961, I’m getting close. Page five … begins in mid-1968. Wait, what?.

So I dig a little deeper. Flip back and forth through various rolls. Search for “Betty Hill”, and find nothing relevant. Search for “Pease Air Base” (where they supposedly reported the incident) and find many interesting reports … from 1965. Ah, but what’s this? One of the first rolls has an index to all the cases. Great! Skip ahead 25 pages at a time: 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960… I’m getting close, slow down. Page 498, 16-30 April, 1960. Page 499, 1-15 May, 1962. Nineteen sixty two? What the…?

Okay, flip back and forth some more. Ha! Page 497 of the index is also 1962, page 498 must have been misfiled. Not a good sign (and at this point all the microfilm images are very faint, it’s near impossible to make out the text), but I’ll keep looking. Page 489 looks like it might be August, 1961, but the typewritten text is ghostly, and there’s an ominous hand-scrawled “missing” beside several of the cases listed. The next few pages are even less legible. (For example.)

I incline toward the sentiment “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence,” and that’s probably what’s going on here (not, let me hasten to add, on the part of Blue Book Archive, who are doing an admirable job, but on the part of whatever bored Airman or clerk was microfilming this stuff in the first place, and other clerks who may have misfiled things). On the other hand, as Ian Fleming supposedly said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” I wonder.

For the record, I don’t really think Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by aliens. On the subject of UFOs as alien spacecraft overall, I’m a skeptical agnostic. I’ve seen enough strange things in the sky that I couldn’t identify at the time to have no doubt that plenty of people see unidentified flying objects. I think that to immediately identify them as alien spacecraft is silly. Some might indeed be, but the burden of proof is pretty high as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s also silly to say flat out that alien spacecraft are impossible. We just don’t know enough.

As far as research for The Reticuli Deception goes, I may not be learning anything new about the Hill incident or the supposed Zeta Reticuli starchart, but I am gaining a good insight as to how my characters feel when they’re looking for this stuff: frustrated.

Readers know that none of my characters take frustration well, and they tend to come up with creative solutions to it. This is gonna be fun.

The title pretty much says it all. Next Saturday Who Else! Books, part of the Broadway Book Mall, is hosting a book signing for four Colorado SF authors, including yours truly. The others are Robin D. Owens (Hearts and Swords), Courtney Schafer (The Whitefire Crossing), and Rob Ziegler (Seed). Of course I’ll be signing copies of my The Chara Talisman as well as Space Horrors and/or Footprints.

That’s the Broadway Book Mall, 200 S. Broadway (in Denver, just north of I-25) at 3:00 pm on Saturday, February 11. Come on out!

Some of you will have already heard by now that I sold another story to Analog magazine. I’m pleased to say that I had help with this one, my friend and now collaborator Brad Torgersen. The story, “Strobe Effect,” will have both of us on the by-line, and I can honestly say that I couldn’t have done it without him. I know, because with this particular story I tried, and while Dr. Schmidt (the editor) liked my earlier solo version of several years ago personally, it was a little too technically focused even for Analog readers. Brad has admitted that he couldn’t have written this story alone either. Brad — who won the AnLab readers’ poll for his first Analog appearance and scored the cover with his most recent — took the core story, gave it the Torgersen touch (and a few thousand more words), and then both of us did some final polishing. I think both my fans and Brad’s will enjoy the result. It would seem Stan Schmidt thinks so too.

This is a buzz for both of us. Back in 2009 Brad and I met in person for the first time at one of Kris and Dean’s workshops on the Oregon coast (we’d met online already, in the Writers of the Future forums). Neither of us had published any fiction at that point (I’d just sold my first story, but it wasn’t in print yet), yet we joked about both being in the same issue of Analog some day. Well, that day came with last October’s issue. Now we’re sharing a byline. Coincidentally, this is also the fifth sale to Analog for each of us, but the first collaboration*. We both hope it’s not the last. (Indeed, we already have a few possibilities in the works.)

(*First collaboration with each other. Brad has also written stories with such illustrious authors as Mike Resnick. Technically I’ve collaborated on non-fiction with the likes of Poul Anderson, Jerry Pournelle and a host of others in preparing reports from the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, back in the day. But that’s not the same at all.)

I’ll be in Colorado Springs, at the Crowne Plaza hotel, for this year’s COSine Science Fiction Convention. I’m not scheduled for any panels but I’ll be around at least for Saturday. It’s a small but fun con.

Who Else! Books will have a presence in the dealers’ room at the con, and they’ll have copies of my The Chara Talisman for sale — as well as a wide variety of other books, particularly by Colorado authors. On a related note, on Saturday, February 11, Who Else! is hosting a multi-author book signing at their Broadway Book Mall location (200 S. Broadway, Denver), and I’ll be there to sign copies of Chara or anything else someone wants me to sign. Well, excepting maybe blank checks.

I posted some of the below in a comment to Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, in turn commenting on one at Joe Konrath’s site. If you’re here for the science and fiction, and don’t care much about publishing or the logic and numbers behind pricing, feel free to skip this post.

Still here? There’s been a bit of buzz over the last year or so about best pricing for indie-published ebooks. (Ebooks from traditional publishers too, but we writers have less (read “no”) control over that, and the general opinion seems to be that their prices are way too high.) One school of thought is that lower is better and you’ll make it up in volume, another is that discount prices devalue the work and no, you won’t make it up in volume. I won’t go into the arguments here (go through Dean’s and Joe’s archives for much of that). I do believe in fair value for money, in both directions. I haven’t put up any of my previously-published flash fiction yet, one reason being that Amazon won’t let me put anything up for Kindle at a price less than $0.99, and I’m not going to offer a 1000-word story at the same price I’m selling one four or five times that long. (I’ll probably put a collection together soon, though — and maybe a couple as free samples here.)

But on the reader side — and I was a reader long before I was a writer — I also have a sense of what a fair price is. When I was a young teenager I used to devour paperback novels (mostly science fiction, oddly enough) at the rate of several a week — sometimes several a weekend. True, they tended to be shorter in those days (late 60s/early 70s), but I could afford that many on my modest allowance. They cost $0.60 trending up to $0.95 by the end of that period, hitting one to two dollars toward the end of the 70s. I considered that a fair price — I could afford buy as many as I had time to read — and I’d probably (no, I remember doing it, I would have) turned up my nose at something offered for a mere $0.35 or $0.40 as perhaps suspect.

With that in mind, when the discussion came up again I decided to see what that worked out to in modern currency. (Well, 2010 — I couldn’t get 2011 figures.) I can’t help it, sometimes I’m a numbers geek.

I pulled a half-dozen old paperback novels (including an Ace Double) off my shelves, with publication date ranging from 1969 to 1991 and price from $0.60 to $4.95 then ran the dates and prices through an online CPI inflation calculator.

In 2010 dollars those prices range from $3.53 to $7.82, with the Ace Double (two 50k-word stories) at the low end, and a 134k-word novel at the high end. The two 65k-word novels average $4.88 each. The top three (ranging from 83k to 250k) average $6.97 each at an averaged wordcount of 155k.

This is all stuff (especially the 1969 and early 70s novels) that I had no qualms about buying out of my meager allowance as a high school student — and I went through several such a week (sometimes propped up behind a textbook in class, grin).

So yeah, adjusting for inflation (and ignoring the media difference between mass market paper and ebook) the prices suggested — $4.99, $5.99 — are spot on.

Actually I think I’ve mentioned it here a time or two before 😉 Now I’m announcing that The Chara Talisman, the first full-length novel set in T-space, is now available in e-book and trade paperback form. (First to be published. A novel set earlier in the time-line is in progress.) This is the expansion of my Analog story “Stone Age”.

E-book versions are available from Amazon (for Kindle) and Smashwords (all formats) and should be available direct from B&N, Sony, Apple and others soon. The trade paperback version is available from Amazon (or should be, by the time you read this) as well as through bookstores (you might have to special-order it — bookstores rarely take chances on newer authors these days unless the publisher is doing a mega-marketing blitz) and my publisher, Mabash Books.

There’ll be some promotions for Chara Talisman and some of my other T-space stories going on over the next month or so, so stay tuned. I haven’t decided on the rewards yet, but I’ll be offering prizes for the first person who reports to me a typo or factual error (only one prize or reward for each typo/error) in the book. It could happen — Larry Niven had the Earth rotating in the wrong direction in the first edition of Ringworld. 😉

(Update: added link (above) to paperback version at Amazon.)

Another MileHiCon — the Denver area’s annual SF convention — is underway. I have a full schedule this year, with four panels (FTL, collaborations, writing humor, and space mining), a reading — I share the slot with Kevin J. Anderson, which pretty much guarantees me an audience 😉 — an autographing — sharing the table with Vernor Vinge, so there’ll be a long line for one of us — and an interview for the Machine Readable podcast.

It promises to be a lot of fun, as always, and I get to announce the imminent release (on 11/11/11) of my novel The Chara Talisman, which I may have mentioned here once or twice already.

Hope to see you there.

(BTW, the astute among you may have noticed a gap here since the pre-Worldcon post. Mea culpa. There was plenty happening — Worldcon, Bubonicon, the report of possible FTL neutrinos, and more — and I took notes. But I didn’t immediately turn said notes into postings here, and a bunch of the other stuff happening (of lesser interest to anyone not me) got in the way. Some of those notes, particular on the possible superluminal neutrino observations, will make it here soon. Or perhaps I can figure a way to use superluminal neutrinos to post them a month ago. Cheers.)

I’m in the middle of prepping my story “Stone Age”, which appeared in the June issue of Analog a couple of months ago, for ebook publication. Here’s the cover, based on the Frederik Catherwood print which partly inspired the story. I’ll update this when it’s available, and probably do a special intro offer through Smashwords.

This story is, as I think I’ve mentioned before, based on a couple of the first chapters of The Chara Talisman. Publication plans for that are still pending — the traditional publishing industry moves slowly — but I’m considering making an e-version available sooner, possibly serializing it on-line. Let me know if you’re interested.

Update: “Stone Age” is now available in ebook format from Smashwords, and should be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and outlets supplied by Smashwords (such as Apple and Sony) soon. Stay tuned for an offer in connection with The Chara Talisman.

My author’s copies of the October issue of Analog just arrived (early!), containing my Probability Zero story “The Sock Problem”. This is kind of a sequel to “Light Conversation” in that both stories feature a major appliance and the first-person narrator is a bit of a tinkerer. My son Robert is urging me to do a whole series of humorous appliance stories. We’ll see.

Also in this issue is Brad Torgersen’s “The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project”. This is kind of a thrill for both of us; back in 2009 at one of Kris’n’Dean’s writing workshops, before he had had anything published and only my “Snowball” had been sold but wasn’t yet in print, we’d joked about one day both having stories in the same issue of Analog. Well, two years later and here we are. (Hey, Brad, one day we’re going to be on the Hugo awards stage together, right? ;-))

Should be on the stands in a couple of weeks, electronic versions possibly before that. Enjoy!

Speaking of time machines (see my earlier post), news from the ArXiv today is that physicists have created a “hole in time”, the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak. Only 110 nanoseconds so far … but consider the possibilities!

Tangentially, writer Alex J. Kane, in a blog post titled “On the Use of Tropes in Science Fiction” today considers possibilities for science fiction, and quotes my buddy Brad Torgersen: “There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s all about how you use the various stock elements that makes the story.” I’d absolutely agree with Brad’s second sentence there, but I might quibble about the first. Is the above “time cloak” new to science fiction? Not exactly, if you consider stasis boxes, bobbles, or some of the ways time travel has been used in stories. But I’m willing to bet that nobody came up with something quite like what the physicists did. All kinds of interesting story ideas there.

Kane goes on to say:

Writers like Orson Scott Card have even gone so far as to reduce the genre, in a way, by saying that it’s merely “a subset of fantasy.” True, but when I heard those words […], I couldn’t help but feel a sense of betrayal.

Wasn’t science fiction the genre that had made Card’s career, after all? Without having written Ender’s Game, would I even know who he was?

But for the sake of argument, let’s take Card’s elaboration into account. He argues that science fiction is a sort of literary dead end because there just aren’t enough new scientific discoveries — or moreover, any new ideas — out there to justify writing sf anymore. From a storyteller’s perspective, he says, it makes more sense to just resort to a magical fantasy setting. Why bother with the facade of making things like FTL travel, etc., seem plausible in a universe where we know such key tropes to be utterly impossible?

I call bullshit.

So do I.

Card (and others) miss a key point when they call science fiction a subset of fantasy. True enough, much of what gets passed off as SF (or perhaps rather, sci-fi) is just fantasy with spaceships, computers and aliens instead of horses, magic and trolls — Card’s own Ender’s Game stories could be considered in that light (although perhaps not the original short story which started it all). But the hard core of SF — and I heard Connie Willis making just this point a couple of weeks ago — is as a literature of ideas. Yes, we as readers (and, we hope, as writers) these days we expect more than just the idea; the Hugo Gernsback days when cardboard characters and cliche settings were fine so long as the idea was new are long gone, we expect rounded characters and well thought out settings as well as ideas. Indeed, the ideas don’t even have to be new if you do everything else well enough, but if you do come up with one, or put a new twist on one, you’ve got a potential award-winner if everything else holds up. (Larry Niven in his short-story heyday had this finely honed; several of his award-winning stories were near category-killers. Just try writing a crosstime-travel story these days without considering the implications he raises in “All the Myriad Ways” — which have real echoes in quantum theory.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with a good rollicking space, time travel, or zombie apocalypse (to pick three not-quite-random examples from this year’s Hugo nominees) story either.

And I’ll agree with Kane’s closing quote: “To quote George Carlin: ‘The future ain’t what it used to be.'” Ain’t that the truth!