Fledgling

The novel Fledgling, and its sequel Saltation, are two of the biggest success stories of the “Storyteller’s Bowl” e-publishing format. As we reported before, the idea behind this format is that the writer agrees to post one chapter per week as long as reader donations hit a certain threshold. (Here is a PBS Mediashift article on the practice, including an interview with Lee & Miller.)

Necessity

Necessity is considered a powerful force by Liaden characters; these characters often use the phrase “necessity exists” to explain why they must take some risky action.

Thus, it seems entirely appropriate that the idea for Fledgling was born out of financial necessity: when Lee & Miller’s publisher Meisha Merlin went under without paying the royalties it owed them, they needed a quick source of income to get them through the winter.

At the same time, they needed to explore the backstory to a mysterious character introduced on the last page of the last “main plotline” Liaden novel published back in 2002. Since the character would feature prominently in the next “main” novel (were a publisher to be interested), they needed to “meet” her and learn more about her and her world.

The problem was that such side-story books are generally “expected to be of little interest, except to stalwart fans of a series,” and do not tend to sell well to publishers. Thus, Lee and Miller decided simply to publish it themselves. In lieu of an advance, they would write and post the draft using the “Storyteller’s Bowl” format.

The idea was that once the draft had been fully written, they would pay to have it professionally edited and then printed, and send copies to those people who had donated at least $25 each. Happily, the book and its sequel were eventually picked up for publication by Baen making that no longer necessary.

As Lee and Miller write in the book’s Afterword:

We figured, you see, that we would start off strong, then donations would slope away, and we’d be posting a chapter every, oh, two or three weeks.

Before December was over, readers had funded ten chapters. By the time the first chapter was posted, we were committed to writing twenty weekly episodes in the life and times of Theo Waitley.

In the end, they wrote 31 chapters, which became 42 in the final book.

The Liaden Universe

Fledgling is set in the Liaden Universe, a setting that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have been living in for decades. The Liaden stories combine an amazing number of genres—science-fiction, space-opera, fantasy, romance, espionage, military, wild-west, and more. It is one of my favorite settings, and I like to reread it from start to finish every so often.

Centuries after fleeing a collapsing universe, humanity is split into at least three sub-races: Terrans, Liadens, and Yxtrangi. The galaxy is still very much a frontier, like the wild west, and Pilots are a highly-respected cross between long-haul truck driver and samurai.

The main five-book arc tells an epic story, and the other books and short stories weave many threads through and around that story to create a universe that feels like a rich tapestry. Baen is reprinting these books in omnibus form, and already offers “e-omnibus” bundles of all the novels prior to Fledgling and most of the related short stories.

Fledgling

Much as I do highly recommend reading them all, no knowledge of these earlier works is necessary to enjoy Fledgling. Having read them does enrich the experience, but apart from one or two minor references to past continuity (such as the way Professor Jen Sar Kiladi converses with a woman named Aellianna inside his head), the book is quite self-contained. It is a coming-of-age story for a character who is herself being introduced to the larger galaxy, so readers can be introduced to it at the same time.

The protagonist is a girl named Theo Waitley, who was introduced in the Back to the Future style “here we go again” ending of I Dare—a young woman who runs up to the main characters, out of breath, with a problem that she can only describe as “kind of complicated” before the book ends.

Fledgling is set several years earlier, when Theo is on the cusp of adulthood, just a few months away from her coming-of-age ceremony. She lives and studies in a university on the planet Delgado, a “safe world” renowned for its scholarship. And she has problems fitting in.

Theo has just had to move out of her father, Jen Sar Kiladi’s, house back to the cramped, sterile confines of the university itself. And as a half-Liaden (and more importantly, half-Korval Liaden, though she does not know it), her reflexes are a problem. Though she actually has extremely good reflexes, they do not mesh well with the average reflexes most other students have—so she is the one who is labeled “clumsy”.

At the same time, her mother Kamele has problems of her own: cases of academic dishonesty and document alteration have been found that threaten the reputation of the entire university. She and Kiladi must intrigue to uncover the conspiracy behind it before it is too late.

The Perils of Academe

Perilous academic settings are a staple of the Liaden books, perhaps because the authors come from academic backgrounds themselves. One book featured a university where “defending one’s thesis” was done with swords and daggers.

The world of Delgado is not quite that dangerous, but it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time in the way that good settings often are. Since it is a “safe world,” emphasis is placed on the safety and conformity of its inhabitants. There are strict curfews, and security police who record all incidents.

The world is “safe” for most of its inhabitants—but it poses a challenge to Theo, since she does not conform to the society’s norms. This provides an interesting chance to examine the practice of “tranquilizing into normality” that some people practice even today.

Another interesting twist to the setting is that Delgado is decidedly matriarchal: women are the ones whose rights take precedence. Cultural norms vary from world to world, of course (the idea of “local custom” taking precedence is one of the major themes of the setting), and Pilot culture is something else altogether. All these different cultures give the setting a very interesting flavor.

First Draft vs. Final

I first read this book in its serialized draft form as it was posted chapter by chapter, in 2007. Since I donated $25, I recently received my autographed hardcover copy of the finished book, which I read over the last day or so.

It was a good book, but the inconvenience of carrying it around with me made me long for the electronic version. The e-version does also exist, of course. Thanks to Baen Webscriptions, it can be bought and then downloaded in a variety of formats. I will probably purchase it eventually, but could not justify it given that I had the print book already.

The change from draft to final form is definitely noticeable. The final book is a lot more polished, and takes into account ideas that formed during the writing of the sequel, Saltation. It also fleshes out a subplot that I seem to remember appearing only vaguely in the draft and not actually coming to any sort of fruition.

Conclusion

If Fledgling has a problem, it is that it really only tells half the story. As is often the case with books, the original tale grew in the telling until it was necessary to create a sequel project, Saltation, to tell the second half—and Saltation will not be published by Baen until April, 2010. It does not end as abruptly as Peter David’s Darkness of the Light, but it still stops at a point where the reader wants to know what happens next.

For those who are really impatient after finishing Fledgling, the draft form of Saltation is still available to read on-line at Lee & Miller’s website. (I might just go read it again myself.)

And some other good news: it was recently announced that Baen has contracted for the book that will continue Saltation and follow I Dare, tentatively titled Ghost Ship. We Liad fans can hardly wait.

As a well-written coming-of-age story about a fun character in an interesting setting, Fledgling is well worth checking out.

That being said, I’m giving this book a positive review because I like it, not out of any sense of obligation. I do realize I’ve reviewed an awful lot of Mr. Melton’s books here, but on the other hand I feel that as a small-press publisher he needs all the publicity he can get—and for writing such good books, he deserves it, too.

A Foreign Country

L.P. Hartley said “The past is a foreign country,” and most time travel stories seem to take that literally: they treat it as just another place that happens to be separated by years instead of miles. Far too often, time travel is used as a cheap device for exposing characters to “future shock” (or “past shock”) without thought to the consequences that should occur from someone being displaced out of his own time.

Stories that give serious consideration to the issues of paradox and causality in time travel are few and far between. After all, just thinking about that kind of thing too much can make your head ache. Far easier just to sweep it under the rug like Doctor Who, Quantum Leap, or the later Star Trek series’ time travel episodes (though the first time travel Trek story, “City on the Edge of Forever”, is considered one of the greatest time-travel stories ever).

But Henry Melton’s latest young-adult book, Golden Girl, is one that treats time travel the right way. It starts from an interesting premise, adds a unique time travel mechanic, and puts a teenaged girl at the center of an interesting dilemma—with nothing less than the survival of the entire human race at stake! (Minor spoilers below the jump.)

The Premise

The story begins when 17-year-old Debra Barr wakes up not in her bedroom at home, but decades into the future when a team of scientists working covertly have pulled her forward in time.

The chief scientist explains that a few hours after the time from whence she came, Debra and a friend will make an embarrassing video that ends up on the Internet—in which a nearby meteor strike knocks Debra down and makes a laughingstock not only of her, but of the proposed legislation in Congress that would fund an initiative to watch for dangerous asteroids.

The initiative goes unfunded, and twelve years later a huge, previously-undetected meteor hits earth and kills most of its population, dooming the rest to slow starvation as their resources fail. But, the scientist explains, Debra can prevent all that if she simply moves a few steps away from where she had been standing, so the meteor will not knock her down and make her look ridiculous. That video, when posted to the ‘net, will assure the sky watch bill’s passage.

Naturally Debra agrees (who wouldn’t?), and the scientists send her back to her own time. Except that she overshoots and finds herself swinging back and forth through time like a pendulum—stopping in the past, then the future, then the past, then the future, each time a little bit closer to home. And when she finally does return home, her real troubles may only be beginning.

Not Your Usual Time Travel Story

Time travel is, as I mentioned, a popular trope in our fiction, even if much of the time it isn’t explored to its fullest potential. All the same, it may be a useful shorthand to call this book “a little bit Quantum Leap, a little bit Back to the Future, and a little bit ‘City on the Edge of Forever’”. Not to say it steals from any of them, but there are some elements also used by each of these in the way Golden Girl treats time travel.

But unlike all of these, Golden Girl’s time travel process does not simply place people in different times. As part of the physics of the process, the relative “reality levels” of people or things displaced in time are different.

Because changes to the past can affect the future, objects from the past are “more real” than anything from future times. When she is first taken into the future, Debra can punch through walls as if they are paper maché—but when she is sent into the past, leaves and grass hurt her feet like sharp gravel. Being in the past is hazardous to Debra—but in the future, she is hazardous to those around her. This is a refreshing change from the sort of story I mention above.

Melton’s Young Adults

One of the things I have always enjoyed about Henry Melton’s books—and Golden Girl is no exception—is that they feature intelligent, self-reliant teens who are by and large able to solve their own problems. They may make mistakes, but they are the mistakes any teenager might make—not dumb, contrived ones that happen merely to further the plot.

It is fun to watch the characters work through their problems, using just their minds and any special abilities they might have—not least because they generally work through the implications of special events, powers, or technologies they have happened upon. If something seems obvious to the reader, chances are it will be obvious to the characters, too—and it will be remembered for later use.

There is nothing “juvenile” in how these young-adult novels are put together. Henry Melton is a master storyteller, and I will be anxiously awaiting his next work.

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence, Peter Christian Hall does, and doesn’t stop there. The story of a flu-obsessed blogger who predicts a flu pandemic and then records its ravages, Hall taps into a deep literary vein of paranoia. Having previously ventured into the epidemic-as-apocalypse genre myself, my expectations were high. True to form, this novel-as-blog soon had me wiping down every surface in reach with disinfectant. 

Hall grapples with a thorny problem: how to create a live novel. The “hypernovels” of the 90s were dismal failures, I’m not sold on e-book chapter mashups, and Vooks manage to be both unreadable and unwatchable. American Fever is by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen. It also makes clear that live novels (livels?) have a ways to go. Someday when we’re reminiscing fondly on the dawn of e-books, American Fever may very well occupy pride of place among the original innovators. Its sophisticated approach, however, is not is not always backed by prose equal to its packaging. 

American Fever’s hero is a blogger-turned-“flugitive.”  Observing the pandemic’s progression from his Brooklyn apartment with growing disbelief and anger as the sickness cuts down friends and strangers alike, he caustically comments:

“All I ever do is google.  What else is there to do … pray?”

A self-taught influenza expert, the Ayn Rand-loving blogger operates a “personal protection” business out of his apartment, selling masks and gloves and the like. Gradually he becomes something of an online hero, calling out an increasingly totalitarian American government for its misdeeds. Arrested and tortured on trumped-up charges, he flees the country with his socialist girlfriend and fellow flu survivor, but not before watching his beloved metropolis descend into barbarity.

American Fever is the first novel I’m aware of that is written entirely in a blogged epistolary style, complete with rabbit-hole references, pop culture innuendo and cutting sarcasm: 

“For the sake of innocent readers I’ve acquired, I’ll explain that I don’t want to have to monitor the site for abuse. Nor will I host debates about what politician would make a worse president, or which movie star or pop singer is doing more to fight bird flu (“I feel stupid and contagious/here we are now/ entertain us”).”

The epistolary style has a built-in weakness: nothing can be experienced directly by the characters, only described afterwards. It’s a tough hurdle to leap, and Hall doesn’t always clear it.  The very structure of the book keeps us out of the heat of the action: the main character always has to return to his laptop. So we get secondhand reports, emotional recountings, snatches of scenes. 

“Disorder has turned universal. Armed hospital invasions are common in blue states, red states, border states, states of anxiety, hopeless states. Is the State itself in danger?”

A single taut, well-written description of an armed hospital invasion would suffice for any number of notifications of such. Replete with Googled Wikipedic tidbits, the chatty tone and truncated sentences take American Fever dangerously close to pedestrian blog territory: 

“So far my ‘hood merely looks like a police state war zone. We all still love one another. I didn’t feel afraid when I went out. The worst thing that happened was that I seem to have exacerbated my back injury climbing over debris on B. It hurts like heck. No, worse: It feels unprintable. 

The East Village can survive this. It survived crack and yuppies.”

The end of American civilization witnessed via the witticisms of your neighborhood blogspotter: it rings a little hollow. I’m not sure this is the best vessel for a novel. I’m not saying it isn’t, either.  But the net effect is, when Hall does reach for more sophisticated language, he strikes a tinny note:

“Time melds itself like freshly bruised enamel paint, smoothes my days. I could run down the street naked and no one would remember, so long as I was back in my perch tomorrow.” 

Nonetheless, American Fever gives us some tantalizing hints as to what a blogged novel could be, and to my mind represents a real advance in e-lit. The blog is chock full of lit savvy, which serves to further blur fiction and reality with links to Hall’s flu blog on the Huffington Post.  He also sells personal protection gear and “Cultural Merchandise.”  Add in the fact that the book has an RSS feed to subscribe to, and what you have is a novel direction for the novel.

Books are meant to be finished, permanent projects; American Fever bristles with links (though these thin out as the plot progresses). How to keep the links current, and relevant?  Today’s fascinating article on Avian Influenza Age Distribution is tomorrow’s 404 Error. Should the effort even be made? I mean, I can imagine that in the near future aggregator bots will automatically update e-book links. (Which brings up another question: can you really be said to “own” an e-book if its links are constantly changing?) But if a book relies on constant link updates, or links at all, is it a book? And if not, what is it? American Fever doesn’t answer these questions. But it certainly puts them out there in a fascinating way.

For now, American Fever is live online. As of this writing, it’s on Day 156, of 220. I do wonder why you can only subscribe to the novel in-progress. Why not adopt an asynchronous approach, as in DailyLit?  How many readers are likely to read 156 blog entries to catch up with the story?  Not this one—I read American Fever on my Kindle via a PDF advance copy. (Which, in keeping with the FTC’s new book-reviewing guidelines, I hereby note is extant in my email, two computers, and my Kindle, so it is thereby safe to say I intend to keep it.)

All gripes aside, you’re missing something if you miss American Fever.  Start your reading here. 

American Fever will be complete by December 2009.  The print / e-book release date is as yet undetermined, but the blog project will remain online indefinitely. 

Today, worries about vanishing newspaper book review sections—and vanishing newspapers—have only accelerated the pace of gloomy headlines. But it’s unclear whether a golden age of book reviewing ever existed.

Then again, with the emergence of sophisticated online book reviews, the golden age could be yet to come.

These reviews aren’t like Amazon customer recommendations. “The best advertisement for a book has always been word of mouth,” says Steve Wasserman, Managing Director of the Kneerim & Williams New York office and a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “The internet only makes more formal the rumor mill that had always served to spread the good news about this or that book. [But] that isn’t exactly criticism, it’s the enthusiastic acclamation of ordinary readers who don’t want to keep the news of something worth reading to themselves.”

In the info box, I have linked to several places the books can be purchased. If you are planning to buy the dead-tree version, I suggest purchasing direct from the author; he will autograph it for you, and will make more out of the deal than from an Amazon sale. Alternately, if you buy one of the DRM-locked e-books and send Melton proof of your purchase, he will e-mail you a DRM-free version.

Rather than review each book individually, I’m going to cover each of them separately, then talk about what they have in common.

Roswell or Bust

Two teenagers—third-generation hotel worker Joe Ferris and second-generation Person-in-Black Judith Winston—are thrown together by a string of emergency circumstances, and must drive eleven Roswell aliens cross-country with the forces of the “Men in Black”-like Trust agency in hot pursuit.

The story reads kind of like a cross between a more realistic Men in Black and Escape to Witch Mountain. (It was written well before the movie Race to Witch Mountain came out, and it is amusing to compare their stories.) Certain elements are very clearly borrowed, such as the Trust agency having a method of inducing amnesia (though its pharmacological nature puts it more in line with Torchwood than Men in Black).

But for all that, the story does not feel unoriginal. Joe and Judith are well-realized characters, and they fit well together. Like real people, they do not always agree or get along, but they manage to work together where it counts. Melton shows a lot of attention to detail; it’s clear that he has personally traveled to many of the places that the characters visit over the course of the story. (In fact, this is true for all of his books; Melton travels half the year according to his Amazon page.)

Extreme Makeover

Teenagers are no strangers to mysterious changes to their bodies—but some changes are more extreme than others. Deena Brooke, a senior in high school, is infected by alien nanites, giving her strange new abilities at the same time as they start making her doubt her sanity. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend Luther has some mysterious, dark, and possibly criminal secrets of his own.

I’ve written some stories of my own involving nanites and read a lot of others, and they are one of my favorite mcguffins. (For more extreme examples, see Charles Stross’s Accelerando and Glasshouse.) Melton does a credible job with them here, presenting their alien nature (and alien thought processes) very well. Luther’s predicament is somewhat less credible (strange as it is to say in comparison to an infection by alien nanites), but I’m prepared to suspend some extra disbelief in the name of a good story.

Extreme Makeover is not my favorite of Melton’s books—but I do not think he is capable of writing a bad story, so it is still very enjoyable.

Lighter Than Air

When a next-door neighbor inventor leaves high-schooler Jon Kish with the keys to his workshop, Jon decides to use the anti-gravity material they created together to build the ultimate high school prank: a real live flying saucer. Meanwhile, his younger sister Cherry is getting into big trouble on the Internet—trouble which could have major repercussions.

Melton clearly knows enough about science to make the antigravity material seem believable. He also knows a great deal about computers (as mentioned in my review of Emperor Dad) and so everything Cherry does on the Internet, or with the LiveCDs her Internet pen pal sends her, is recognizable and believable to those who know in exactly the way that “Hollywood” computers are not. At the same time, the true nature of Cherry’s pen pal is a little hard to swallow—but again, the rest is good enough that I can suspend the extra belief.

It is also nice to see a sympathetic portrayal of government agents. It has become fashionable (especially in the wake of the PATRIOT Act and the Second Gulf War) to portray them as evil torturers and violators of the right to privacy, but in Lighter Than Air they end up working together with Jon Kish for a number of good reasons.

Falling Bakward

Jerry Ingram, high-schooler and sixth-generation South Dakota farmer, has an interest in archaeology that will lead to interesting consequences. He has been excavating a mysterious spot in his parents’ field, uncovering strange tools and stranger bones. Then he finds a flying saucer—and unwittingly opens the way to a possible alien invasion.

Along with Emperor Dad, this is one of my two favorite books of Melton’s. I am not sure whether it is coincidental that this is the other one that involves teleportation portals, and in fact these portals share some common elements with the ones from Emperor Dad. Falling Bakward is part mystery, part lost-world story, and part alien-invasion tale, and each element is executed just as well as the others. There are still a few sour notes, however.

Most notably, though most of Melton’s books tend to border on hard science-fiction, this one also involves a couple of “softer” SF elements that are never explained in such a way as to fit in with the harder elements. It is nowhere near as jarring as the intrusive fantasy element I complained about in my review of Darkness of the Light by Peter David, but it did detract a little from my enjoyment. Still, this is an excellent book on the whole.

Falling Bakward is also available as a free audiobook podcast, read by the author.

Young-Adult Books

As I mentioned in my review of Emperor Dad, properly-written young-adult novels are by and large every bit as compelling as “adult adult” novels. They are not written down to the reader (despite what some people think). The only differences are in the age of the main characters, and often the subject matter they cover.

Melton’s books are no different; they all involve young people trying to work out ordinary young-person problems (often having to do with parental authority figures or relating to the opposite gender) at the same time as they have to work out larger problems (such as how to rescue a bunch of aliens, or prevent other aliens from invading the Earth).

Adults are not presented as universally helpful or obstructive, and sometimes first impressions can be misleading. The young protagonists also know when to seek the help of their parents or other adults—and usually, those adults take them seriously (though it may sometimes take some convincing).

These books help teenagers imagine what it would be like to have adult responsibilities—and the rest of us imagine what it would be like to be teenagers again. I highly recommend all of them.

Henry Melton has a new book coming out: Golden Girl, a novel about a girl who wakes up to find she is an unwilling time traveler. I have not had the chance to read that one yet—but I am quite looking forward to it.

There are a number of people who complain at the use of the term “piracy” to encompass the illicit downloading of mp3s and other digital media—because they feel it muddles the issue with the street vendors who sell knock-offs for profit, or even with the predatory ships that still ply the seas around Asia and Africa. (I try to avoid using the term as much as possible myself.)

Those people may not be pleased with this book, as Mason extends the definition of “pirate” to cover anyone who carves out a new niche outside of established markets, threatening the models of businesses already in those markets. This includes the punk music scene, graffiti artists, disco, rap and hip-hop artists, pirate radio and rave clubs, the Free Software movement, peer-to-peer, flash mobs, and others. In fact, as often as “piracy” is thrown around to describe peer-to-peer these days, readers may find it pretty surprising that peer-to-peer only gets a fairly small portion of the book.

The Dilemma Then

The dilemma that Mason discusses is a “remix” of the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a famous element of game theory that suggests people will tend to act in their own self-interest. In short, businesses faced with “piracy” (whether it’s illicit MP3 downloading or an entirely new genre of popular music) face the choice of trying to shut the pirates down legally or else to out-compete them at their own game—that is, whether to try to beat them or join them.

Through the different movements Mason covers, a pattern emerges: a new countercultural movement is founded, takes the “establishment” by surprise—and is then co-opted by the establishment, after which the original movement more or less dies out.

Just a few examples: The ripped-up clothing and outrageous hairdos of the punk scene, whose entire purpose was to rebel against consumer culture, suddenly started being sold in stores—and punk bands signed with major record labels. Advertising agencies started using methods and styles pioneered by graffiti taggers. Disco’s beginning as a serious dance club scene was eclipsed by the cheesy polyester excesses of Saturday Night Fever. The BBC shut down pirate radio stations only after starting their own station to play the genres of music popularized on pirate radio.

And—eventually—the widespread downloading of mp3s led to the creation of Apple’s iTunes music store, which has since become one of the largest retailers of music in the world.

The Dilemma Now

It is not hard to see the sort of dilemma Mason talks about playing out now—in the continued problems the record labels claim are caused by music “piracy,” the problems the movie industry has with movie “piracy”, and the widespread opposition to the Google Books/Authors Guild settlement. In all of these furors, the establishment is attempting to “beat” the “pirates”. Is there a way they could “join” them instead?

If The Pirate’s Dilemma has a problem, it is that it is put together (as one Amazon reviewer notes) like a textual version of the “mix tapes” that Matt Mason would have created as a pirate DJ—a collection of unrelated anecdotes from all over the map, tied together thinly with connecting material. They do share common elements, but sometimes the unifying theme is a little hard to get at.

On the other hand, all of these anecdotes contain interesting information. I learned a number of things about these different youth movements that surprised me—for instance, I had never considered graffiti as an actual art form before, as opposed to a bunch of hooligans tagging out of malice or gang affiliation. On the whole, the book is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

As pointed out in the info box above, a PDF of The Pirate’s Dilemma can be downloaded free from the author’s website. Other e-book forms, however, must be purchased—and, ironically, are all encumbered with Digital Rights Management. Mason has harsh words for DRM himself (in a footnote on page 156, he says it is “flawed” and “treats fans as criminals”), but this has not stopped every e-book publisher from instituting it on his book.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

Vinge’s Other Work

Those who only know Vinge from his recent work prior to Rainbows End might be surprised at his return to the relatively-near future, more commonly the province of Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, and Neal Stephenson. After all, his books A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky take place thousands of years in the future, when Earth is barely even a memory and humans have spread out across the galaxy.

But long before he wrote those, Vinge wrote another near-future book, The Peace War—and before that, his 1981 novella True Names helped to define the entire cyberpunk genre. With Rainbows End, Vinge returned to the near-future, adjusting and updating his predictions to fit the present-day.

(It is refreshing, by the way, to read a near-future extrapolation story for once that is not written in the present tense, or bombastic in the way that the authors like Doctorow can be. Vinge is old-school in his writing approach, which means I can appreciate his technological extrapolations all the more.)

The Plot

The story of Rainbows End is a third-person narrative woven together from the perspectives of several characters. The overall plot concerns an intelligence agency’s infiltration of a research lab that someone is using to perfect a workable mind-control technology—but unbeknownst to most of the intelligence agency, the mind-control mastermind happens to be the very man in charge of the search.

The infiltration plays out against a backdrop of fascinating new technology, culture clashes between fandoms, and protests against destruction of old media in favor of new. There are a number of memorable characters who get caught up in all these events.

The closest thing to a sole protagonist the book has is Robert Gu, an Alzheimer’s victim who is returned to lucidity by one experimental medical process, and returned to a youthful body by another. He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Alice, and his grand-daughter Miri (another character of importance). Robert starts out as a fairly unsympathetic character—he used to be a real bastard, abusive of his wife and others around him—and it seems as though he is set to resume where he left off…until something changes him.

Since he was last lucid in our era, and has spent fifteen years or so in a mental fugue before being revived like Lazarus, he serves as a viewpoint character for modern readers. We learn about the startling technological advances in this new world just as he does, and we can sympathize with his future shock as he gradually grows accustomed to his new life.

Another important character is the mysterious Rabbit, a shadowy fixer (and trickster)from the Internet world who specializes in getting things done by getting people with complimentary talents together. His identity—indeed, even his very nature—is unclear, as are his motivations. However, he is a vital part of the plot to infiltrate the lab—whether the intelligence agency thinks it’s a good idea or not.

There are actually several different narratives within the story that interweave and cross over with one another in the most unusual ways. Characters watch others in secret, and exchange private messages to hold conversations behind each other’s backs. In the end, it all comes together in ways that are unexpected even by the participants.

Vinge’s Cyberspace

Rainbows End is an expansion and reworking of ideas found in Vinge’s 2001 short story, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (found in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge). “Fast Times” features characters who would later appear in Rainbows End, though some of them have different names (or even entirely different species), and the plots are almost entirely unrelated. The technology is the same, however, as far as it goes.

However, Rainbows End also owes a lot to True Names. Both feature consensus fantasy realities constructed within computer networks. Both of these fantasy worlds have geographical correspondences to real-world locations—though True Names’s world is one that can only be observed from within while Rainbows End’s can be seen by anyone wearing special glasses.

Interactive Fiction: If You Build It, Will They Come?

And both True Names and Rainbows End also feature interactive “books”. The protagonist in True Names writes what another character refers to as “games” but he calls “novels”—apparently advanced multimedia versions of the text adventure games that were just reaching the height of their popularity at the time True Names was written.

Vinge has long held that the e-book medium of the future would be “interactive” in some respect. In 1993, when Vinge wrote an introduction for an “annotated” edition of his book A Fire Upon the Deep, he believed that hypertext (at the time, the newest new computer thing) was going to be the future of fiction:

I believe hypertext fiction will ultimately be an entirely new art form, as different from novels as motion pictures are from oil paintings. […] Guessing: There may not be hypertext sequels so much as the instantiation of new windows on the “reality” of the story. Group participation both during initial construction and in expanding the ongoing reality may be one of the most striking features of the art form. […] Hypertext fiction may evolve into immense art works that combine the essence of professional production teams with independent artists with the interests and efforts of the ultimate viewers.

This has, of course, never really come to pass. (And, as pnh noted in his interview, probably never will.) I always think of it as an example of the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy—projecting the popularity of something based on the ability to do it rather than the demand for it.

We can do hypertext fiction today very easily—but apart from a few Internet writing sites like Ficly or Writing.com, nobody seems to bother. Wikis would seem to fit best of all with Vinge’s vision for expanding upon someone else’s story, but there have not been many uses of them exactly like the ones he imagined. The closest things would be the forest of wikis that have sprung up to cover select interests or fandoms, such as the Avatar: The Last Airbender wiki, but these are usually reference rather than creative works.

On the other hand, there has been at least some serious study of the idea, as I found when searching TeleRead for another link. But it does not seem to have led to any commercial success outside of a few isolated experiments.

Belief Circles

With Rainbows End, Vinge’s conception of the interactive book of the future has evolved again, into a fully multimedia, virtual reality experience—though in most other respects it has a lot in common with his hypertext prediction quoted above. In Rainbows End, fans of published works create “belief circles”, which seem to be a mash-up of fanfic, Internet shared-universe writing circles, live-action roleplaying, and virtual multi-user environments such as Second Life.

In the virtual world that overlays the real world (and is viewed through displays embedded in contact lenses and controlled via sensors in clothing), fans of a given fictional or historical setting (members of that setting’s “belief circle”) create their own avatars and overlays for themselves and everything around them based on that setting. A skyscraper might be painted as a medieval tower, and cars might become horse-drawn carriages or low-flying magic carpets. Multiple different belief circles’ worldviews can overlap the same area; onlookers can switch between them like changing channels on a TV set.

For settings that are still under copyright, micropayments are charged to belief-circle members and credited toward the owner for each use of something relating to that world. (Though apparently there has been some copyright reform in Vinge’s cyber-fantasy world: at one point movies are said to have five-year copyright terms. I guess we can at least dream.)

One of the central conflicts of the book involves a clash between two belief circles over which one will dominate the University of California San Diego Library building—the “Dangerous Knowledge” setting in which librarians are knight-guardians of knowledge, and the Pokémon-ish “Scooch-a-mouti” children’s-fantasy-monsters setting. At one point the clash escalates into an out-and-out battle, with millions of viewers world-wide tuning in to see the outcome.

An Object Lesson in Obsolete Objects

The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before.

Vinge wrote Rainbows End just as Google was beginning its own massive scanning project (which does get a mention in passing in the book), but well before the settlement with the Authors Guild (and the attendant controversy) was on the horizon. Thus, some of the predictions are already slightly obsolete. (It is amusing how little controversy there is over the idea of China digitizing the entire contents of the British Museum and Library, compared to how much uproar there is in Europe right now over Google.)

Still, it’s easy to see how this global scanning project inspired Vinge’s future version—scanning books a page at a time is a time-intensive process, even if you saw the spine off and put the stack of paper in a sheet-feeding scanner. With better computers it would be much faster to scan them in windblown fragments, and digitize all the world’s knowledge in a matter of weeks.

This does, of course, depend on printed books getting so deprecated that nobody minds if scores upon scores of them—some possibly valuable antiques—go through the shredder in the name of digital reincarnation. It is difficult to see that happening now—but on the other hand, if technology marches on as quickly as Rainbows End predicts, before long entire generations may come to think of printed books as akin to papyrus scrolls and stone tablets. (Even for an e-book fan like myself, that’s a scary thought.)

Faulty Crystal Balls

Still, I’m doubtful it will happen. Predicting the future is always an inaccurate game—if we go by True Names, we should already have direct-brain-stimulation cyberspace and mandatory computing licenses by now. Rainbows End is set as far in our future now as True Names was then—and if it seems like books written now are “more accurate” predictors, that is only because hindsight is 20/20. Things that didn’t come to pass in a book written thirty years ago are easy to spot—but those same things in a book written now will have to wait another thirty years.

There are already a few “predictions” (for the 2005-2010 years) that did not come true—and one irony. At one point in Rainbows End, a character refers to a (fictitious) Terry Pratchett book written after Robert Gu succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease. Of course, we now know that Terry Pratchett himself has been diagnosed with latent Alzheimer’s.

But as far as prognostication goes, Vinge also isn’t above poking a little fun at himself. As the battle between belief circles rages at the library, one character reflects:

There had been a few debacles in the late Teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought?

The Tines and Zones of Thought are, of course, major elements from A Fire Upon the Deep.

Conclusion

Rainbows End is an interesting book for the future it predicts. It presents a fully-realized world, very well fleshed out and with more interesting predictions and characters than I have been able to cover in this review. I highly recommend it.

Ironically for a book where e-books are important, Rainbows End does not seem to be commercially available as an e-book—not on eReader, Fictionwise, or even for Amazon’s Kindle. The HTML version at the Internet Archive appears to be the only way to read it electronically.

And so we turn to the review of Digital Barbarism that Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has just turned in. It is clear from the very first line (“Some books beg to be read; others beg you to stop reading them”) which way this review is going to go, and it goes there with gusto.

I don’t have a lot new to say about this subject—it has all been said already in the links from the first paragraph. But Anderson’s review is just as enjoyable in its way as anything Mystery Science Theater ever did to an Ed Wood movie, and I highly recommend checking it out.

FiledBy has added a new pre-publication website feature to its growing list of online marketing tools for authors.  Writers publishing a new book now have a low cost, effective tool to pre-launch their book online.

The new feature allows both first time and published authors to quickly and inexpensively build a pre-publication web presence on FiledBy.

“Bookselling experts agree that authors should start promoting a new book well before it arrives in bookselling channels to build interest, community and sales,” said Peter Clifton, FiledBy CEO and president. “FiledBy’s new website feature makes it easy for authors to get ahead of the marketing curve by setting up a comprehensive online marketing presence in advance of their book’s publication date.”

Many publishers start pre-promotion 4-6 months in advance of a book’s publication date but often the process of building an effective online marketing presence is left to the end of the publishing cycle. And, with the rapid increase of self-published authors whose time to market is much faster, having access to a tool that quickly builds an effective web presence is mandatory.

FiledBy’s pre-publication websites organize everything an author needs to pre-promote – a biography, photograph, book information and cover art, links so that people can order the book in advance, links to organize an author’s social networking presence on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn or a blog.  Readers can connect directly with the author through a message wall and reader lists. The FiledBy site can be further built in stages over time by adding event listings, electronic press kits, sample chapters, testimonials and endorsements, banners, resumes and other tools important for an author to build an effective web presence.

FiledBy features nearly 3 million websites linking authors, co-authors, illustrators, photographers, artists, editors, translators and other listed contributors to a published book together under one virtual roof.  Every subject and publishing category is represented on the FiledBy including general trade, academic, professional and education.

More than 8 million books are available for sale through Amazon, Amazon Canada, B&N.com, Powells, Borders, Indigo and IndieBound. The data used on the site is licensed from trusted industry sources and supplemented by data from publishers and content provided by authors and other contributors.

FiledBy is the largest online directory of author sites providing web tools, e-commerce and community-building solutions for published book authors and contributors — co-authors, illustrators, photographers, artists, translators and editors. FiledBy provides authors and readers with social tools to connect with each other and includes more than 3 million author websites and 8 million book pages that can be discovered through a single database.

A Chicago-born writer named Isaac Rosenfeld could have been a Saul Bellow. Michael Dirda tells how Rosenfeld was “a front runner in the race to produce the Great Jewish American Novel.”

Instead, however, Rosenfeld, the subject of a new biography by Steven J. Zipperstein, too often forsook GJANs for talking, drinking, partying, and writing notebook entries.

In 1956 Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at the not-so-ripe-old-age of 38. His friend Saul Bellow—who’d lived just blocks away and even written for the same high school newspaper—went on to be Saul Bellow.

“According to Hemingway,” Dirda aptly says of Papa, “more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of talent.”

How Paula can help you avoid being Rosenfeld

Enter Paula Berinstein, host of The Writing Show, an ever-informative and -inspirational podcast, who recently self-published a short book called Unlocking Your Creativity: 52 Exercises for Writer (e-book available for $2.60 from Lulu and Amazon). Might her book unlock and unblock many kinds of writers, not just the GAJN variety?

By way of disclosure, I’ve been listening to Paula for many months; in fact, probably years. I often played her show on my iPod when I drove over to see my mother, who was dying in an assisted living center. So I was thrilled when, out of the blue, Paula invited me to discuss The Solomon Scandals and TeleRead—the latter show will be online in late July.

Creativity as a spur toward actual writing

Now back to the business at hand. Creativity isn’t the same thing as the willingness to write. But if you feel creative, you’ll be a lot more eager, and beyond that, Paula’s advice is just plain timely in this age of so many distractions—not just TV, YouTube and blogging, but also Twitter. Isaac Rosenfeld was sidetracked enough in the era of old-fashioned partying.

Within Paula’s book, I myself would have enjoyed horror stories like Rosenfeld’s. But that’s just gloomy me. Most readers will cotton far more to Paula’s sunnier approach, which lays out 52 exercises for writers.

What works: Highly individual

It’s highly individual, what works. Unlike Paula, I myself am not so sold on creating a ritual; I fear that it might actually be distracting. But you yourself may very likely agree with her if, say, you can associate writing with a trip to your favorite coffee shop—with your spiral notebook or netbook in hand. “Some rituals can function like a stimulus to Pavlov’s dog,” Paula wisely observes. “They become associated with a response so that every time we experience them, we respond the same way. A school bell rings and we’re ready to settle down and learn.”

Here are 19 more of the first 20 of the 52 exercises.

“2. Vary your routine. 3. Appreciate the chaos. 4. Get curious. 5. Use your senses. 6. Get ridiculous. 7. Free associate. 8. Play with words. 9. Observe. 10. Change your environment. 11. Go psychedelic. 12. Think geographically. 13. Recognize opportunity. 14. Immerse yourself in your favorites. 15. Increase awareness. 16. Look around your house or environment. 17. Go to the library. 18. Mix it up with images. 19. Listen to music. 20. Go from micro to macro and back again.”

Fave tip: #33

My favorite tip from Paula B would actually be #33, “Turn yours life into a dream… Picture scenes from your life. Now, change them. Substitute different people—even imaginary ones or people you don’t know personally—for those who were there. Change the settings. Make the people say things they never said; reply in ways you never did. Have new characters walk on. Change the outcomes.” You can do this with your life or with others or, better, with a mix of others.

Graciously Paula allowed herself to be a guinea pig for the above. Fact: She is a daughter of a professional investor in, among other things, oil leases. Fact: Her parents divorced. Fact: Paula majored in English and worked as a librarian. How to make a plot out of all this if, say, she wants to write a adventure novel as opposed, say, to something more psychological?

Well, let this-here oil stuff pan out big, and then Paula can inherit some or all of her father’s holdings, except perhaps we can move the oil and her from California up to Alaska (“change the settings”), where she uses her librarian skills to research the bad guys who are trying to deprive her of her legacy. Maybe throw in a sibling squabble, too? Perhaps along the way she falls in love with a sexy so-called friend who… No, that isn’t the complete plot, but we’re off and running.

Heeding your muses right at home

Paula’s guide is far from the only creativity-related book at the popular level—there are zillions in various areas, such as Syd Field’s guides to screen writings, where he offers handy nuts-and-bolts advice on creating plots and characters, information applicable beyond Hollywood. Also check out John August’s motivational advice for scriptwriters. What’s more, you can always take creative writing courses or, if you’re loaded, jet down to a workshop in South America.

But if you’d prefer to heed your muses right in the comfort of your own home and along the way develop your powers of observation—for many purposes, writing-related and not—Paula’s e-guide could be just the ticket. At $2.60, it’s cheaper than one to Brazil.

* * *

Meanwhile, for my fellow Writing Show fans, here’s a Paula B bibliography

• Point of View in Fiction
• A Self-Mentoring Checklist for Novelists
• Writing Dialogue #1: The Importance of Character Agenda
• Writing Dialogue #2: Combining Narrative and Dialogue
• Writing Dialogue #3: Compression
• Writing Dialogue #4: How to Use Tags
• Writing Dialogue #5: Individualizing Your Characters
• Unlock Your Creativity: 52 Exercises for Writers
• Writing Fantasy: How to Introduce Your Make-Believe World, with examples from Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien

Lessig proceeds to demolish Digital Barbarism at great length, in terms of both argument and writing style. He points out that Helprin apparently did not research his book at all beyond reading blogs and the Internet, and makes a number of errors and fallacies that stem from this lack of research.

The review makes for interesting reading, especially if you have an interest in copyright term lengths.

While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how you can lose. And not just any old e-book. This one features possibly America’s greatest satirist wondering if “Jane Austen’s goal is to ‘make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters?’” And:

Twain plasters the city with ads to promote his talk at the Cooper Union (he is terrified no one will attend). Later that day, Twain encounters two men gazing at one of his ads. One man says to the other: “Who is Mark Twain?” The other responds: “God Knows—I Don’t.”

Be sure not to miss John Lithgow reading a selection wherein it is revealed how Twain determined which manuscripts to publish, and which to burn.

I’ve read pretty much everything Twain has written up to this point, and as a writer, I’ve taken his 19 Rules of Literary Art much to heart. I don’t usually buy hard covers, but this one comes in at a reasonable $19.99 and with the e-book to boot, I think I’ll make an exception. Maybe I can give the hardcover away …

One thing I’m very curious about: All Twain’s writings have long since passed into the public domain. So can Harper Studio hold a copyright to these 24 essays? They’re handpicked by Robert Hirst, General Editor of The Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley, so possibly they’ve been edited. If so, does that mean they can be copyrighted?

What if your father is Ben Bradlee, your mother’s Sally Quinn, and you’re stuck with a learning disorder that disrupts even prosaic activities?

Never mind growing up to help expose another Watergate or skewer pretentious socialites. Suppose you have trouble understanding most books or face memory problems.

Just what to do, especially in a brutal, hierarchical place like Washington, D.C.? In politics and media, the generals and their families are expected to put on a good show for the troops. How to respond? Should your family hide you from the public or gloss over your shortcomings?

Luckily the parents of Quinn Bradlee, a plucky 26-year-old born with Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, let him and a skillful collaborator tell the whole story or at far more than we might have anticipated. Ben Bradlee and wife had apparently envisioned their son writing a buttoned-down book without earthy language—perhaps a respectful look at the young man’s ancestors, since Quinn is a genealogy buff. But Quinn and his not-so-hidden ghost wisely avoided this PRish tack.

Much more than just the S word

The two paid due tribute to Bradlee and Quinn forebears, but kept in the S word. In fact, they even wrote a scene set on a Caribbean island, Saint Martin (photo), where Quinn loses his virginity to a hooker with skin "as black as the night sky and black curly hair that came down to her shoulder." Quinn’s hooker story would be mere titillation by itself; but A Different Life is full of, say, his reflections on women and life in general—naïve in places, but just the same, genuinely his. He does not merely share his triumphs at a boarding school for people with disabilities; he also tells of the vicious hazing there. Honesty is the salient trait of this work. What Quinn’s story misses in eloquence at times, he more than makes up in credibility of voice.

Beyond that, Quinn and collaborator skillfully weave into the book insights on VCFS: how to spot it, how to cope with it, how to accept it. At length they quote Dr. Robert Shprintzen, who, besides having helped Quinn, wrote of the first paper to describe the heart-related syndrome, in 1978. Some 150,000 people here in the U.S. suffer from VCFS, which comes with a whole range of mental and physical complications; only Down syndrome is more common as a genetic multiple anomaly syndrome.

Quinn is into film, not traditional journalism; but with the help of his friend, tutor, and ghost, Jeff Himmelman, he appears to have made a solid contribution in the area of health coverage, efforts that go on via a stylish, useful Web site promoted in the book. FriendsOfQuinn.com also educates visitors about other learning disabilities. 

Clever play on father’s book title

A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures, the full title of the book from Public Affairs Books, is a clever play on the one for Ben Bradlee’s autobiography called A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. Without meaning to slight the father, may I suggest that to many readers, the son’s book may be more memorable? The older Bradlee, born into an aristocratic Boston family, suffered from polio and had his own struggles. But they paled beside those which the young Quinn has faced, does face, and will face. Quinn’s biggest challenge, of course, will be his destiny after his parents die. His father is 87; his mother, 68.

The good news for the parents is that the origins of Quinn’s disease, while genetic, apparently haven’t anything to do their ages at the time of conception. No need for guilt in that respect or probably most others. Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, as stated in the book, never hesitated to spend money on Quinn’s tutors and other special advantages; and even more importantly, they gave him time rather than just locking him in an institution as an "expert" had suggested.

The e-book angle

Still, is there anything more that the parents can do? Perhaps I’ve overlooked something; but I can’t recall any mention in A Different Life of the role that the right technology might play in truly nudging Quinn into the world of books. Quinn can read out passages from books and is even a fan of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, drawn in by the conversational style, but he generally has trouble processing printed information. Imagine the benefits of text to speech. Has Quinn ever experimented with that capability on a Kindle or other machine?

I’m thinking of Amos Bokros, a TeleRead volunteer who—with the help of software that read words aloud to him as they showed up on his laptop computer screen—turned himself from a Wal-Mart clerk into a teacher. I doubt that Quinn could effect a transformation of that magnitude; but tech is worth a try if he and others like him are to learn to enjoy more books. Searching FriendsOfQuinn.com, I didn’t find one reference to "e-books" or "ebooks" with sound capabilities in use. If, in fact, nothing is there, perhaps Quinn and his Web community could explore those digital options.

Within the employment area, here’s a possibility for Quinn himself although it could apply to others in his situation. Imagine Quinn as a Web usability tester working directly for the Washington Post itself, not just the company that created FriendsOfQuinn.com. If he can cope with a certain kind of interface, there is a good chance that the rest of the world can. Coal mines and canaries and all so on. That’s just one tiny example of how people like Quinn can contribute to society and businesses.

Meanwhile bravo to Quinn for a heartfelt and informative book, and to his parents for raising him to make such achievements possible.

OK, do you have other ideas, beyond the ones above, on how e-books could help Quinn? Meanwhile I’m curious if anyone has spotted Quinn’s book in text formats besides those for the Kindle and the Sony Reader? If not, is this going to be a trend—initial priority given to device-linked formats? And do you have thoughts on Quinn in the context of the Kindle’s text-to-speech controversy?

Start with the title story to see the absurd in action. My Kindle sat untouched for a couple weeks while I transitioned back to the U.S. from Thailand.  When I got back to my Kindle’s homepage again, I did a double take—Password Incorrect?  What password?  I never needed a damn password before!—until it all came back to me.  My reaction is strikingly similar to the befuddlement of the uniformly oddball characters of Password Incorrect confronted by the unexpected repercussions of their tech-doings. 

Nearly all the 25 stories are flash fiction; that is, under 1000 words.  My favorite was “Wishes Shovel Best.” 

On Christmas Eve Slawek Przekosniak received an SMS with these wishes: “Wishing yo good ping super new”.  He didn’t know who sent him that surprisingly enigmatic message. 

Inspired, he creates software to manufacturing randomly bizarre messages, starting an online phenomenon that makes him the 67th-richest man in Poland.  Until a curmudgeonly official is offended by an SMS which reads “Wishes shovel best” and turns him over to the Inquiry Board, the Board of Inquiries, and the Special Security Agency.  Black limousines appear at his house on the night he is to receive a lobbied-for Site of the Year Award.  In the Age (Moment?) of Twitter, this seems less a merely imagined story than another possible permutation of reality.

Evening elementary school

“Part-time Evening Elementary School” features a school designed for kids “too busy to learn during the day due to the time spent on the difficult task of maintaining our country’s high ranking in the very competitive field of computer games.”  A school where PE classes are for stretching the spine and practicing joystick skills and English is considered vital because it allows “for quick mastery of games not yet translated into Polish.” 

“Happiness in a Four-Pack” is about a revolutionary new product, “ingestible energizing happiness”.  Unfortunately, after an initial burst of popularity, sales soon collapse.  Consumer studies reveal that “customers don’t want to be happy.  They are much more effectively motivated by misfortune.”  Not to worry.  “That’s Sad” quickly comes on the market.  Its wide popularity causes the company’s owner to throw himself from a bridge in, you guessed it, a fit of happiness.

Outlandish characters are the order of the day. A sampling includes a professor from the Department of Westernmostenatatious European Polonisation, hockey-playing bacillus, and a Dr. Kaliszewski: “He entered the room happy as a lark, which normally accompanied him when he was happy as one. Now the lark was somewhat tense and you could feel it in the air.”

These are the sort of tropes, I think, that a native-English author would reject out of hand as clichés, but in Kowalczyk’s hands, manage to find new life. Gustave Flaubert, in teaching writing, counseled writers to find the “unexplored” element in the commonest of things, and I think this is what Kowalczyk has done here.  Password Incorrect abounds with literary dexterity without ever sinking to the merely clever.

A couple of the pieces don’t quite measure up, as in the one featuring a middle-aged man who regresses into an embryo and the one with a talk show host who is “So sensitive and so sweet at the same time.  Handsome.  Appetizing.  Just like a spring onion.”  Kowalczyk stretches quirky to the very edge of its readable definition, and, in a couple cases, beyond.  The collection would not have suffered from having only 20 stories. 

Translated from Polish by Anna Etmanska, there are several spots where the English is, well, quirky.  Generally these are very minor, but still noticeable.  For instance: “He imagined Czeslawa Ceracz using this liquid and kept dreaming for good.”  Truth be told, I’m of two minds about this.  On the one hand, these are nothing an editor couldn’t quickly fix up.  On the other, they seem to me characteristic of the international English that is the world’s actual lingua franca, as opposed to that of the Queen.  So long as the text is readable, I don’t see any point in standing on ceremony.  The English of Password Incorrect reflects its origins in the mind of a non-native speaker, and the idiosyncrasies never seriously detract from the meaning or humor of the stories.  Therefore I don’t mind them.  Just bear in mind that as you read these stories, you will notice them.

We have so quickly come to take the internet for granted that I think we forget just how recent and radical a phenomenon it is.  As much as anything, these stories serve as a reminder.  Issued up from the heart of Poland by a wired writer in translated English making absurd light of situations unimaginable even a decade ago, ones fraught with the danger of banality.  But this nimble writer deftly zigzags to humor and sheer wackiness.  It has been suggested that multimedia “books” could be literature’s future, and that may well be.  But I think more likely candidates are the sort of short stories you’ll find in Password Incorrect, which exploits the networked world’s novelties while remaining true to the universal commonalities of the human experience.

You not likely come across anything quite like Password Incorrect any time soon.  Unless this work receives the wide audience it deserves and imitators spring up.  By  which time, I hope, Kowalczyk will have delivered another collection to our e-readers.

Note: For more of Piotr Kowalczyk’s tilted take on the world, including a one-second book promo, see his blog Password Incorrect. 

Update, March 31, 4:30 a.m.: Let me add that Evan, a big Kindle fan, is not saying that publishers should avoid e-books. Rather he wants them to modernize their ways of doing business. See Logan Kennelly’s comments.