Kooneiform

I’ve been poking around lately to see the extent of the SF magazine world. This will get redundant I’m sure.

Here’s an oldish list of SF small press stuff and webzines at suddenlypress.com.

The SFWA list.

Yes, the Wikipedia entry.

Found “An Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model” (though I don’t know how open source figures into that, honestly).

That got sparked by Paolo Bacigalupi’s posts on the subject, which you can find through the article linked above.

A half-fluff piece at Speculations, good enough to skim.

Anyway, so the point of this post — here is what I think would be cool: a paying online SF magazine that included IF. Call it a monthly, 1-3 IF works a month, 2-3 short stories and serials, and a weekly column of something, say around 25k words total (let’s be generous and do .05 a word, so $1250, and IF gets a flat rate of $100. Annual budget is $18k — hahahaha).

Maybe the column rotates, first week is editorial, second is SF, third is IF, and fourth is craaaaaazy.

Notwithstanding I have no technical experience to get something like that running, I would like to read something like that. And hey, this is why I get to post it on this thing and not spray it across a forum somewhere.

The magazine gets funded by general donations, and throw in a tip jar for individual stories.

It would need a web-based interpreter, so people could read it anywhere — I wonder how well a web interpreter works on a mobile device.

I just thought this was cool.

BookGlutton

I don’t know for sure but I think they’re going to have real-time chat within the text that you’re reading. Or it could just be commenting. But real-time chat would be kind of hilarious to do while you’re reading something. Talk about the ADD generation.

After the first two books off the Basic Bookcase it was looking a little grim for me and the world of classic SF, but thankfully things have picked up with Downbelow Station. Unfortunately it’s only picked up sort of, like a mime caught halfway between falling down and getting back up in null gravity, or something.

I only skipped a few of the later chapters in Downbelow so that’s saying something. While in the first couple of chapters I thought that Cherryh had anticipated the ‘New Space Opera’ by about twenty years, it soon becomes clear that really Cherryh is doing some kind of 70s soap opera simultaneously with HARD SF and a little Rousseain alien culture to mix it up a little. Nevertheless the novel does have its moments.

Bookcase worthy? yea.

There’s a nice bookstore that’s been around for a couple of years in my neighborhood, but I just started going more frequently: Jackson St. Books. Nice SF section, check it out.

If there’s one thing I can say for classic SF, some of it really sucks.

What were these people thinking? Prelude had about two interesting ideas, one of which, the concept of psychohistory, isn’t really an idea but more a gimmick. The second, the Mycogenians who claim an authentic 20,000 year old historical record. It had about one good scene, where the Mycogenian raindrop gets extremely freaky with Seldon’s skincap — and it’s later revealed that this is just a put-on.

I can admit that Asimov is a grand old man of the genre. That’s all.

Bookcase worthy? hell no.

P.S. I do remember the Mule from the later (i.e. earlier) books in the series to be a really interesting character; on the other hand I read those Foundation books when I was 13 or 14, so who knows. I’m going to skip the other Foundation books for now and move on.

So I pulled this one from Savage Review’s Basic Bookcase and as I mentioned earlier I’ll be reading every single one of them there books…well, not exactly, I only made it to page 114 of Brightness Reef before doing my usual, “hmm….let’s see what happens on page…312!”.

However as a study in sf/f, this book is a good one. Multiple POV characters, six races, multiple (English-y) languages, diverse cultures, technologies, and ecologies, those little italicized sections at the beginning of chapters, you know, attributed to ‘Rek-kwan, sixth chapter of the first pamphlet, 1204 a.y.’. Italics. In general, a lot of italics.

The writing was a little flat. I confess the whole thing left me unimpressed, and since this was my first shot at Brin I may sample some of Brin’s earlier stuff, such as Startide Rising, to give the guy a fair shake.

Bookcase worthy? Nay.

Really what I mean by that title is I’m embarking on a reading series for lack of a better word, inspired by the site of John Savage. If you don’t know that site, Savage created something called “The Basic Bookcase”, a big huge list of SF to read. I’ve always felt that I was not well read in SF despite being a big fan of reading it (and writing it if I ever get my act together).

What I’m going to do is read every book from Savage’s bookcase and then write a short impression of each book here. No, really. I’ll file it all under reading.

After busting around some bricks today, we stopped at a bagel shop for lunch (whose owner, outta Brooklyn, claimed the best bialis in town…just don’t move to Seattle for the biali, OK?). There in the P-I I read this article by Cecelia Goodnow (is that her real name?):

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades.

Pull quote: “”We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

However the article mentions:

the recent gloomy update from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that 12th-graders nationally scored lower in reading in 2005 than in 1992, with scores virtually unchanged since 2002.

Declines were seen at all levels except the top 10th percentile of students — the teens who presumably make up a good share of the book-buying public.

But remember that reading assessment is not cut and dried — how accurate is the NAEP update? What’s clear is that kids are reading more books, and kids who read turn into adults who read (until they have kids, I guess, and have no time to read).

How many kids are playing IF? I know quite a few kids play muds, but IF seems closer to YA literature than muds — most muds, anyway. Maybe this is a prime time for an IF author to write and market a YA IF. I wonder how well the YouTube and MySpace kids would respond to it…if this article is any indication, maybe the response would be pretty good.

So I was reading a thread at MudLab and Tyche had posted a list of Ruby resources. Now I’ve never really coded anything but, as I was curious about Ruby, I checked some of the links out and ten freakin hours later I wrote my first Ruby program!
This is an exercise from the really cool Learn To Program by Chris Pine, I highly recommend that site. Great job Chris! In my post all-nighter vibe I post the code with no shame:

# declare variables and arrays

word = 'start'
unsortedList = []
sortedList = []
lowercase = []
trues = 0

# say hello

puts 'Hello. Type a word, press [ENTER] after every word, [ENTER] when done: '

# get the input

while word != ''
word = gets.chomp
unsortedList.push word
end

# downcase the list so we can sort it

unsortedList.each do |i|
lowercase.push i.downcase
end

# sort the list

while lowercase.length > 0

  lowercase.each do |i|

    lowercase.each do |j|

      if (i &lt = j)
      trues = trues + 1
      end

    end

    if (trues == lowercase.length)
    sortedList.push i
    lowercase.delete(i)
    trues = 0
    else
    trues = 0
    end

  end

end

# see the sorted list

puts '-' * 60
puts 'Your sorted list, dude:'
puts sortedList

# voila

I wrote this trying not to use any other reference but Chris’s tutorial up to the point of the exercise, but I admit I couldn’t hack it and I looked up a library reference for the delete method (which I probably could have just guessed at and got right). Now this is not perfect, I know, I know, blah blah. But it’s my first ruby! It’s all mine! (insert maniacal laughter here…)

And I gotta figure out how to format that better…code tags don’t do so well — fixed.