I could look around and find some examples from a number of publishers. Right now there is a perfect example of the outrageous price point that one small press publisher has decided on for a release.

Clive Barker seems to have a story (a novella really, based on statements from the publisher that the typeset book runs about 135 pages) that he composed when he was around 15 or 17( the age is in dispute by the publisher). This publisher is publishing this teenage trunk story in three states: trade, signed limited and signed lettered. What makes this a perfect example of run away price point is the unsigned, hardcover trade edition is retailing at $50.

$50 for a hardcover novella written by a pretty good author.But not a novella written in his prime but when he was 17 and put it away, because we can assume it wasn’t any good. A novella that will include an introduction and some art work. A novella in a trade edition that could either collected in an affordable hardcover collection or released as a paperback in the future.

There are probably two reasons the publisher is offering the trade at this price; he needs to cover the advance he paid to Barker by pricing each unit higher in order to recoup his investment plus profit and there is 1500 (the print run of this first trade edition, which could actually become more printings if it sells out) people that are willing to slap down $50 bucks for it without even thinking.

This idea of small press published books need to have a high price point because it can be assumed that the quality is better than the large publishers or that certain authors or works would never come out in the large press so therefore you will pay premium for it, is crap. First, the quality of small press books in terms of construction has decreased recently as has extras included in the limited and lettered editions.

Trade editions should not cost $50 for a novel.  They should not cost $50 for an novella, ever.

I have Snow Crash on my shelf, just haven’t picked it up yet and I keep going back to wanting to buy The Baroque Cycle but haven’t pulled the trigger.

Maybe this will be the one that gets me going on his stuff.

A qualifying statement must be made before I move forward with this essay. I have enjoyed King’s The Dark Tower. It had its stops and starts but King was able to craft a wonderful quest fantasy rich with locales and characters.

Browning’s work, birthed from a nightmare, could be interpreted in a few different ways, as most excellent poetry should. We know, based on statements from King, that he was inspired by Browning’s poem to embark on this huge seven book journey about The Gunslinger and his quest for the Dark Tower. Roland’s quest in King’s books and the Roland in Browning’s poem share similarities in who they are, what their motivation is, and how they view the world. Though there are close similarities, the Roland of Browning’s creation affects his environment as well as the people around him more so than King’s Roland. King’s Roland may affect his companions through out the epic, usually with negative outcomes since Roland’s single motivation is gaining the Tower and any damage he causes to other people is collateral damage and not necessarily important to him. But this affect is not made by Roland but simply caused by him with no deeper meaning other than his single mindedness to make it to the Tower.

But King’s Roland does not affect his surroundings. We are shown that Roland’s world in King’s Dark Tower has already moved on. It is already in decay. Roland blames the outside forces for this decay and the possible destruction of the Tower as the main reason the “world has moved on.” To him, The Dark Tower is the center of existence and must be preserved in order to preserve reality. To King’s Roland, he is not the cause of how his world is perceived, but the savior of a dying world. To King’s Roland, The Crimson King is the antagonist to reality and bent on destroying the Tower. King’s Roland isn’t tied to the Tower.  As Roland begins to fall apart mentally and physically King neglects to merge him and the Tower together.  Showing that they are one and the same.  Roland only sees the Tower failing because of external forces and not his own internal breakdown.

We see something different in Browning’s Roland.  Browning’s Roland has an affect on his world.  The way he views the world makes it decay and “move on”. Harold Bloom states (I’m paraphrasing here from memory) that the Childe Roland in the poem embodies the world he inhabits and that his actions directly affect how the world turns out. Where King’s Roland conflict is external, Brownings Roland conflict is internal.  Which in turn changes how one would approach the poem and the book series.

With The Dark Tower, we read it to find out if the protagonists succeed in their quest.  Though many of the characters have introspective times and grow during the quest, the Dark Tower, at its surface, is a quest story.  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, is not a quest story.  It is purely introspective.  We don’t care if Roland gets to the tower, because we ultimately know the ending when he does. We are more concerned and intrigued by Roland’s viewpoint and his change or lack of change throughout the poem.

This is where King may have missed a deeper reading into the poem.  Much like Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came can be read superficially as a epic quest poem that lends itself to a grand adventure tale.  But reading Child Roland, and Rhyme for that matter, only for the surface and not for deeper meaning does a disservice to the reader and ultimately to the work.

King’s Dark Tower suffers from his examination of the external more so than the internal.  If King had concentrated on looking at how Roland could be, and in all intents and purposes,  should be the reason that the world is moving on, it would have made a deeper and richer story and would have saved King from inserting blatant pop culture in the final books.  Which completely negated any deeper reading of the series after book four.

Technorati Tags: Stephen King, The Dark Tower, Childe Roland, Robert Browning, poetry, literary analysis, literary criticism

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Lake (Trial of Flowers) envisions the universe as an enormous clockwork, put in motion by God, complete with gears and a mainspring hidden at the Earth’s center, in his intriguing first trade hardcover novel, a fantasy set in the magic-tinged late 19th century. Archangel Gabriel charges clockmaker’s apprentice Hethor Jacques with a quest: he must find the lost Key Perilous so that the Mainspring of the World can be rewound. Hethor leaves New Haven, Conn., for Boston, where he boards Her Imperial Majesty’s Ship of the Air Bassett and travels south to the towering Equatorial Wall, along the top of which run the great gears that rotate the earth. Hethor soon discovers opponents who don’t want the mainspring rewound. He must deal with dark magicians, monstrous winged savages, mechanical men and other wonders during his epic journey, which takes him over the wall and into a land of wonders. The author of more than 200 short stories, Lake demonstrates his enormously fertile imagination in this unusual book, marred only by some sluggish pacing

I had not heard of Jay Lake at all.  Which isn’t to say that he isn’t a prolific writer of short works(he is, according to his bibliography which has close to 200 works) or a established novelist (he is with a few novels under his belt).  I am not a huge follower of science fiction, hence not knowing Jay Lake.  With my recent foray into steampunk I have sought out as much in the genre as I could find and Lake’s Mainspring caught my attention; mostly from the cover which has a wonderful looking airship aloft.

After taking some time to think about the book ( I finished it about a week ago) I was set to say that Lake was examining the conflict between faith and rationality without being explicit about it.  Where the protagonist, Hethor, was faithful to the idea of a God that built the world and that it was Hethor’s job to answer the call of an angel to help God rewind the mainspring of the world.  At the same time Lake labels the opposition (if you can call it opposition since he does not do a good job in rounding out their motivation) Rational Humanists that think that the mainspring should wind down to prove that the world was not made by God but fashioned by Clockmakers.  The rational part of Rational Humanist isn’t so rational as one might expect since the main proponent of that world view is William of Ghent, who we don’t know much about since Lake doesn’t take the time to examine the character.  We are left with what rumors Hethor has heard about him.  Which makes the reader have to distrust the narrator of the story because we can’t possibly take everything he says at face value.

But I have changed my mind about the overall theme that Lake was exploring.  I think that Lake was talking more about how those of faith will go forward, unwavering no matter what contradictions occur between their belief and reality, and that they close their ears and mind to any contradicting information.  Hethor shows this three quarters of the way through the book when he is dropped off at William of Ghent’s strong hold in the Southern Earth.  Ghent tries to present his case to Hethor to let the mainspring wind down.  Hethor does not even give William the opportunity to explain his reasoning before Hethor attacks and sends William down an abyss filled with clockwork gears. Essentially stifling any opposition viewpoint to his own faith.

Hethor then resumes his quest unerred and his faith unexamined.  He has become an automoton set with one goal and no free will.

On the opposite side, William does not to a good job in presenting his reasoned case as to why Hethor should let the spring wind down.  William falls back to just imploring Hethor to stop and not complete his quest.  William does not give us any clue that he knows that Hethor is single minded in his quest. However, William does not offer any evidence that letting the spring fail would bring about what he believes, without any evidence, that the clockmakers would return and free humanity from a god.  We don’t really know why humanity should be free from this god since we are unsure of what bad things have occurred.  The Rational Humanists do not give Hethor a better alternative.

I think this resonates to our dichotomy of faith versus rationality.  At times those of fatih close thier ears and mind to any contradicting evidence at the same time humanists and those that don’t have faith in the supernatural fail to provide well thought out and clear evidence to their opposition.  Lake takes each to the extreme in his novel.  Showing a single minded Hethor lash out against any opposition to his quest without thinking.

Mainspring is well worth reading despite some short comings.  Mainspring suffers from some plot holes that rely too much on coincidence or duex ex machina.  There is a nonsensical sex scene involving Hethor and one of the female traveling companions which I think Lake added to the story to show that Hethor has come to love this woman.  Which tends to weaken the story.  Authors need to trust their readers will understand that love can be very strong and not rely on explaining that through sex.  Lake also throws in magical powers in the last minute to help Hethor overcome his final trials to get to the mainspring to rewind it.  This sudden appearance of reality altering magic coming from out of nowhere cheapens the prior quest almost to the point of making the book a waste of time to read.  But Lake just pulls it off even though he falls into cliche by having Hethor return to earth because he wants to save the one he loves from death and return to her.

This also delves into the cognitive dissonance of faith and what heaven is.  Hethor knows that heaven is this wonderful place but he chooses to abandon it and deny it for the one he loves as well because of the selfishness of wanted to spend more time with her.  If heaven is that great and wonderful why deny the one you love of it as well as yourself?

We are left at the end of the story wondering if anything was really resolved other than the mainspring being reset and life moving along as it always did.  There is no resolution to the conflict between unexamined faith and arrogant rationalism.  Which might show us that like in realy life, fiction doesnt’ necessarily have to have a resolution to that conflict.  But, unlike real life, we sometimes expect our fiction not only to mirror the real world, but to somehow be a more perfect example of real life and find solutions, even if they be imperfect.

Cemetery Dance is moving along with getting books issued and I just received a shipment from them.

• Looking Glass by Various Authors
• Windows by Ray Garton
• Four Octobers by Rick Hautala
• Dark Arts by John Pelan
• Graven Image by Ray Garton
• The Other End by John Shirley
• Sims (book 4) by F Paul Wilson
• The Shell Collector by Christopher Golden

These are all the lettered editions. The Signature Editions are interesting to say the least. The book has different dimensions from normal hardcover books. I’ll go more into it later I suspect, or not.
Technorati Tags: cemetery dance, letered editions, limited editions, horror books

What the perspective is, however, takes a little explaining and I haven’t completely understood it. I could easily say, ” The new stuff sucks compared to the old stuff and new authors seem to have neglected to realize that books were written prior to 1974 and that reading Bradbury’s or Ellison’s stuff prior to 1974 does not make you well read in the genre.” I have actually said that minus the Bradbury and Ellison part. And I think, overall, it is true, at least in horror. It seems that the newer authors are trying their hardest to emulute King. (Mostly King because they aren’t smart enough to emulate Barker or Straub). So what we end up having is all these King babies (similar to the late 90s Slayer Babies of the thrash metal music genre) who cut their teeth on King’s works growing up and they take on his voice, albeit a pale comparsion, and produce nothing of merit or originality.

Reading older works by Verne, Bierce, James as well as just being introduced to Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, and Turgenev (yes very late in life. I didn’t grow up in a reading household and I look back and see how narrow my reading was, which is another entry in itself) requires the reader (me) to be an active and attentive reader. These authors make you pay attention. You have to ingest every word they write and every sentence completely lest you miss someething. And I’m not talking about missing an entrance of a character or if the monster turned left or right. I’m referring to missing the point. Missing the themes, context, commentary, and everything else that is hidden inside the paragraphs. Most of all, if you don’t pay attention, you end up missing the utter beauty of the prose.

The more recently published works I have scattered here and there are, by and large, not worth paying attention to other than on a superficial level. They are much like summer movie entertainment. You read them fast, get the story in your head, enjoy the hell out of it, and let it go when you close the back cover. It is rare that I have to pay attention to pull more from the book. There are few exceptions. But overall, the average modern horror novel just doesn’t have the depth nor breadth to facilitate an attentive and close reading.

It came more apparent after reading some of the authors above (and a few other critical books) that reading isn’t just about transferring a story to your head. And that the reader has to be an active participant in order to own the story. To get everythign out of the story that she can. In order to do this the story has to have something of substance to garner from it. It is not an every book occurrence that the modern horror novel has much to garner from a deep reading. This doesn’t make the modern horror novel bad. Just different.

Am I missing out on some truly great works of modern SF and horror? I might be. Enlighten me. Is my superficial reading of modern horror fiction allowing me to miss teh good stuff? No, I don’t tink so. Most peopel can figure out in the first few pages whether or not they need to pay attention, or if that particular book is going to be a roller coaster ride to enjoy in a different way than say enjoying Bierce, James, or de Maupassant.

Recently, a discussion about literary criticism showed that horror readers don’t want to be forced to pay attention. And, to be candid, I don’t want to have to pay attention all the time. I like that roller coaster book or what Holden Pike dubbed “dixie cup horror”. But that is not all I want. It would be like trying to survive on grocery shopping at Candico every week.

What usually happens with how I think and operate is rather obsessive I suspect. Ok maybe not obsessive but definitely on the weird side. About a year ago I wrote this entry A Gently Mad Blog » History Books about how I get entangled in a subject and read as much as I can. It happens in fiction as well.

I think this tendency to obsess over something fits well with someone that is a bibliophile. It is a sweet obsession and something that really isn’t self destructive. So this past week I picked up Steampunk edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer and I am enjoying it. It has also set me on a course to pick up a handful of steampunk books. I don’t think there is a huge back catalogue of steampunk books (I am probably wrong) but I think with a few suggestions from the essays contained in Steampunk, I can get a little collection going for my reading pleasure.

I still have the SF bug and the cyberpunk bug. I have three shelves with newly acquired books to read through. And this coming summer I’ll be down at the shore on the weekends with the ability to read.  I can’t wait.

With such a focus on a specific genre to the point of full immersion, I get bored of it after a set amount of time.  Usually around the five book mark.  But it really isn’t”I’m never going to read that stuff again” boredom but more of a having your fill of chocolate cake and you can stand not to look at it for a few weeks or months, type of feeling.  It happens but I end up going back to a specific genre after a few months of being away.

So right now it’s steampunk and hard SF prior to that.  Horror is an underlying current, the one thing I go back to consistently. I end up doing the same thing with nonfiction as well.

The bibliophile tends to do the same thing with their collections. I have a goal to put together an excellent horror library. But during the search for those volumes that I want to add I run across little subsets horror to collect. It might be a run of Peter Straub books or soon Clive Barker first editions. IT might be obsessing over first editions of MR James’s works and his contemporaries and how to put together the funds to finish that off. I find it easier to build the collection in small blocks. It helps me to focus and not waste money or time on those volumes that might not be worth it.

So here I am looking over a list of possible purchases of steampunk (and wondering if I can stand reading Alan Moore, I’m not a big fan) and I know that in about a month or two I will be moving to the next obsession. But during those two months I’m going to enjoy the hell out of what I am reading. This, when it comes down to it, is the point. Why confine yourself to only one or two genres when there is so much more out that to read.

]]> http://gentlymadpress.com/blog/2008/05/15/on-how-i-end-up-going-overboard-reading-a-new-to-me-genre/feed/ http://gentlymadpress.com/blog/2008/04/29/75/ http://gentlymadpress.com/blog/2008/04/29/75/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:44:51 +0000 Paul http://gentlymadpress.com/blog/?p=71 What can I get for $75 that is well worth the money and is a solid buy. I will list a few things and I will avoid the small press since there are plenty of good buys from established presses like Earthling Publications and Bloodletting Press to name a couple.

Using Biblio.com, I have come up with these works that are $50 (some might even be overpriced if I took the time to search different sellers I could probably find them cheaper):

• The Fall by Simon Clark, First UK Edition
• Children of the NIght by Dan Simmons, First US Edition
• Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell, First Edition, Arkham House
• The Last Call of Mourning by Charles L Grant. First Edition
• Cabal by Clive Barker, First Edition, Signed by Author

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson

Science, when it is distilled, comes down to experimentation. In this day science experimentation is relegated to huge teams of scientists with the goal of making a profit (this is broad generalization but for my purposes it makes a good point). It is rare that there are scientists doing science for the reason of pure knowledge. This is not to say that some of the scientists featured in Johnson’s book did not hope to profit from their discoveries but they sought knowledge as the principal driving force.

I am only have way through and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Johnson’s prose is succinct and clear. He has a knack of describing the experiments in a clear and concise way allowing the reader to understand what is going on. And he seems to have a genuine love for the stories he is telling.

I may not agree with all of his decisions in terms of what experiments he has chosen and his only defense is laid out in the short introduction and boils down to, “I think they are beautiful so there you have it.” The experiments he does choose, however, are tough to argue against. From Newton’s experiments with optics to Joule’s amazing example of inductive thinking with heat and work it shows how scientists are never happy with the answer of “I don’t know.”

Reading through the chapters you run across several names that should be familiar with, if not for their contributions to science, but for how we use their names now. It read like a who’s who in scientific discoveries. Johnson also shows, in an eloquent way, how science, just works. For example, Joule was working on how heat works. Before his elegant experiment of showing that heat and work come from the same place, most chemists believed that there was a element, which then called, caloric. Items that heated up had a over abundance of the stuff, and gradually lost it as it cooled off. But as more scientists worked on the problem, Joule in particular, they found that they could not explain it with the transfer of caloric. As Joule did his experiments he gradually broke down that conception of caloric being the cause of heat. Phlogistan, as well as caloric and other discarded ideas, are good examples of how scientific ideas live and die by their evidence.

I suppose Johnson is telling these stories to show that experimentation, when you look at closely, is a dance between art, logic, rational thinking, trial and error, and moments of pure luck. Louis Pasteur once wrote that, “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” or “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” And all the scientists that Johnson writes about embody what Pasteur was getting at. Capitalizing on that moment of pure luck wouldn’t happen with any lay person. We would have missed separating oxygen from the atmosphere like Lavoisier as he burned charcoal.

Johnson also shows how brilliant all of these experimenters are. As well as their contemporaries. Albert Michelson measured, to great accuracy, the speed of light. He did it one earth in in 1926. No computers, no lasers, nothing but prisms and intellect. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to try to measure the speed of light.

Just reading this gives you a sense of how experimentation works. How scientists fail but keep on going because they have this innate ability to want to figure it out. Granted they are wrong at times. But the great thing about it is that it gets corrected and science builds on those mistakes.

This book is a short and fast read.  And very enjoyable.  I could see how hard it would be for Johnson to choose just ten experiments but he did a good job in choosing the ones he did.

A recent post on a message board I browse has given me this topic to explore. An interesting topic to say the least. The implication that buying books as an investment is something that collectors do and only do is something that needs to be explored. I spoke of something similar here: On the differences on Collecting and Reading in which I discussed collectors and readers and how they aren’t exclusive.

If you want to invest in anything I suggest the stock market. Much like any collectible market in the past, books will and do lose value. Anyone remember the comic book market of the late 1990s? You;re return on investment will be better in the stock market anyway. Plus certain stocks pay dividends.

Collectors tend to be readers. As I stated in the post referenced above. Collectors also tend to have a goal other than making money on their collections. Usually that goal may be amassing the most complete Fitzgerald Library or the most complete library of American Fiction prior to 1790. The reasons to collect are so varied and so broad and yet so specific. I have yet to read about a collector who’s main goal is to collect the most expensive collection ever and to sell it to make money (but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But I suspect it is very rare).

Granted there are specific volumes that make it to the auction houses and usually garner attention from the press. Maybe Shakespeare’s First Folio or a Gutenberg Bible. But these are rare and sought after books. And it is not unusual for a volume like that to be off the market for long periods of time only to make it to auction infrequently.

Speculators only goal is to make money. I don’t know how pervasive speculation in the book market is as a whole since book prices don’t tend to move over short periods of time. I suppose there are speculators in the specialty press. I suspect that the majority of speculators are in the specialty press. Since I can’t see how speculation on a Fitzgerald First Edition is going to make a return on investment fast enough for a true speculator to get involved. But a limited edition of a Stephen King book does have a market fluctuation that may bring the speculators in for a quick return.

Are speculators bad for the book collecting community? I can’t say. Artificial increase in a book’s monetary value is base don the market changes and probably speculation. The intrinsic value of that limited edition is encased in its production, publisher, and author. Eventually the price will decrease and only the books that are worth collecting will be added to collections.

Collectors can speculate on monetary value of a specific volume. It isn’t a bad thing. Making a few bucks off a portion of your collection doesn’t make you less of a collector nor does it go against any romantic idea about book collectors being the last bastion for saving written word.

Collectors just tend to love their books to the point that they find it hard to even part with them.

When someone states, “I don’t really buy books to collect, I just love reading them.” Implicates the collector in being a speculator and not being a reader. Which is wrong. It also tends to make the person making the statement feel a sense of superiority; the”I buy books for the purest reason unlike you people that buy to put them on a shelf or those that buy to sell.”

Though I am no fan of the speculator for purely being in the game to make money off of what is hot and what can sell at a fair rate of return, I can’t begrudge her that opportunity. The person that makes it known in uncertain terms that being a collector or a speculator is somehow intrinsically inferior based on an assumption that reading is the only pure activity with a book pisses me off. It shows a complete ignorance of book collectors of any type and makes an assumption that all collectors are speculators.