I’m traveling again today, offering a guest blog at Star-Crossed Romance—a blog for lovers of science fiction romance. While I’m not considered a romance writer by anyone, romance is nonetheless an important part of my writing. Why? (Do I really have to say why? Maybe I do.) If you’d like to know what I have to say about it, go take a look at http://star-crossedromance.blogspot.com/2011/01/guest-jeffrey-carver.html.
What with one thing and another, I seem to have forgotten to mention that I’ve started putting some of my short fiction up for sale, along with the ebooks. I’ve always had a few of them up on my website, and people do seem to read them. But this is the first time I’ve put them in format for the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, etc.—and I’m adding a bunch of other stories that haven’t appeared anywhere since their first publication. I don’t really write a lot of short stories, but you could say that these represent a brief history of my career. My first few publications were short stories, and I’ve written a new one every once in a blue moon since switching largely to novels.
For starters, I’ve put three stories up: “Shapeshifter Finals,” “Reality School: In the Entropy Zone,” and “What Gods Are These?” No, they’re not in chronological order according to when I wrote them, though that might have been clever, too. Here’s a bit of background on them.
Shapeshifter Finals — One day some years ago I got a call from Roger Zelazny, who was practically a god to me. He said he was editing an anthology of SF stories involving martial arts. He’d heard somewhere that I’d been a wrestler in school, and would I like to submit an SF story about wrestling? I stuttered something about how if I could come up with an idea, I’d send it to him. But I didn’t really expect to. But then…I got an idea about a high school wrestler facing a shapeshifter. Not by accident, but because Earth was hosting the 57,463rd Games of IIMAWL, the IntraGalactic Interworld Multicultural Amateur Wrestling League, and one Hog Donovan was competing at 138 pounds. He knew he’d be facing tough, alien competition. But wrestling a shapeshifter? With Earth’s honor at stake and his mother screaming from the stands, what’s the young wrestler to do? “Shapeshifter Finals” originally appeared in the anthology Warriors of Blood and Dream, edited by Roger Zelazny. Kindle | Nook | All-format
Reality School: In the Entropy Zone — This story had its own weird origin. I wasn’t really thinking about writing a short piece, but one day I was thumbing through the newspaper and I saw a small ad for…as I first read it, Reality School. I blinked and read it again. The ad was for realty school. But the thought stuck with me. As it happened, I had an earlier, unfinished story involving the world being swallowed up by a creeping zone of entropy. I put the two together, and decided that the reality school must be a place where kids—with their elastic minds and incredible imaginations—would have their talents harnessed to defend the integrity of reality and the world itself against encroaching, and potentially devastating, entropy. “Reality School” first appeared in the magazine Science Fiction Age. Kindle | Nook | All-format
What Gods Are These? — To be honest, I don’t remember where this story came from. I know it emerged from a time when my view of life was rather dark. At least, it’s definitely a darker story than I usually write, and all I can say for sure is that there was something dark inside me that wanted to be let out. Earth has been conquered by invading aliens—not because they want our water, or our mineral resources, or to eat us, or to use us as batteries—but because they see it as their mission to save us from our self-destructive character. All of Humanity but for a lone holdout has been killed or transported to a place of enforced peace and good behavior. And that holdout, holed up in a ruined space station, knows they’re coming for him. Can his human spirit survive in the face of the Saviors’ overwhelming force? Writing “What Gods Are These?” was a good catharsis. It first appeared in Galileo SF magazine. Kindle | Nook | All-format
More are coming. About half of them exist only on paper, so they need to be scanned or typed in. Fortunately, my daughters offered to pitch in—so stay tuned!
I’m typing this at 32,000 feet out of Charlotte, North Carolina over a beautiful cloud deck en route to Miami. (Oops, we just flew back into the clouds! Later: a stunning sunset above the cloud deck, just as we started our descent toward Miami. Layered clouds against a crimson horizon band.)
The last few days have been insane, but I’m about to rest. Aside from the usual trip prep, I was busy getting one last book up at Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. This is a new one, in a way—an omnibus collection of the first three Chaos books. Called simply The Chaos Chronicles: Books 1-3, it’s got a gorgeous new cover by Pat Ryan. I enjoy omnibus collections myself—I’ve just finished reading through a series of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan omnibuses that I bought from Baen Webscription. So I thought, why not make an omnibus of the Chaos books myself, and maybe give the publishers a hint by example? Here it is:
I got that up just in time to see it go live before dropping everything for the trip. No time to make formal announcements—so this will be my first, whenever I have time to get online and post it. (That would be at my brother’s house in Florida.)
Starting this evening, we’re with family, and kicking back a little. I hope Chuck’s hot tub is still working!
Until now, Eternity’s End has been my only book not available in the Kindle ebookstore. That changed a few hours ago, when a new ebook version went live, complete with this new cover. I had this one designed by a pro, and I think it’s great.
I’m excited to have this novel, which was a Nebula finalist, up for sale as an ebook at last. As I write, it’s working its way through the conversion queue at Smashwords; maybe it’ll be done by the time you read this. (The Smashwords edition will be of interest for folk who prefer an ePub or PDF version, or any of several others. And eventually for those who’d rather buy at Sony, Apple, Kobo, Diesel, etc. However, even if you buy the book in the Kindle store, it’s DRM-free—so you can convert it to any format you like with Calibre, my favorite free ebook software.)
This has been a long push, and I’m very happy to hit this milestone.
EDIT v.2: I had problems getting it through the system at Smashwords, but now it’s up at Barnes and Noble (Nook) and Smashwords, as well as Kindle. In due course, it’ll be in the other locations, too.
Long promised, the Google Ebookstore opened its doors this week. Naturally, I went to take a look. Also naturally, the first thing I did when I got inside was to see if they had my books. To my surprise and delight, when I clicked on Science Fiction, I found Sunborn on the first page! Whoa, wasn’t expecting that. Further examination found most of my other publisher-issued books. Unfortunately, they’re not all on one page, because some of them are under Jeffrey A. Carver and some are under Carver, Jeffrey A. (The sort of thing that drives you crazy. But they’re there, and we’ll get it straightened out eventually.)
What’s the big deal with Google Ebooks, besides their being one more bit of competition for Amazon? That’s a little hard to parse out, because the information on the site isn’t exactly crystal clear. I know this: you can buy books in PDF or Epub format, and you can read them while tied to the web, and you can read them on a wide variety of devices. There’s a feature that will somehow enable you to patronize your favorite independent bookstore, while buying ebooks from Google. (How that works, I don’t know yet.) There will be books from indie authors, and from backlist ebook types like me. But that’s really murky at the moment. (First report I heard from an author who had tried was…waiting…waiting…for the system to respond. Still waiting…)
Bottom line, I’ll probably get my self-reissued ebooks up there in time. But I’m going to wait for things to shake out a little bit first.
I took part in another one of SF Signal’s Mind Meld editions today. The theme: What are your favorite SF/F films of the first decade of the 21st Century?
Check out what I said–and what Paul Levinson, Julie Czerneda, and several other writers had to say!
My downloads page took on a whole new look yesterday. I spent the whole day pounding the keys, revamping and reordering the page to reflect the shift in emphasis from a whole bunch of free stuff…to some free stuff, plus purchase links for my new, low-cost ebook editions. Dreamweaver and the html got a workout, and so did Word as I created new sample PDFs of all the Chaos books, plus Eternity’s End. I’m now giving out excerpts of the first 8-10 chapters, which I hope will let folks decide if they like the story enough to drop a few bucks on the whole story in their preferred format.
Eternity’s End isn’t quite ready for upload of its ebook yet, but it’s close. I’m working with a cover designer on this one, and I’ve been working hard at trying to nail down the concept and the art pieces that will go into it. I hope to have the book up for sale in the next couple of weeks.
To celebrate all that work getting done, I took another crack at something I started a couple of weeks ago—writing a new afterword for the Sunborn ebook from Tor. They’re fixing some typos for me, and letting me add some value to the for-sale edition of the book while I’m at it.
And finally…some work on a particularly thorny subplot in The Reefs of Time, which—fear not—I am still hard at work on.
If you haven’t visited my downloads page in a while, I invite you to take a look.
Last time, I promised some specials. Here’s a Christmas special for you, also good for any holidays you celebrate this time of year. Did you know that autographed books (especially hardcovers) make excellent gifts for the readers in your family? You didn’t? Well, they do. And I’ve got ’em. Boy, have I got ’em. You can have ’em, too!
Now through December 14, you can order any of my hardcover science fiction novels for 25% off, and paperbacks for 15% off. Choose from any of the books listed on my Autographed Books page (note—some are sold out, and I have no way to get more). Tally up your order, apply the discounts—but not to the postage, please!—and send it to me. I’ll sign the books and get them out right away.
One exception: the four-volume set of Chaos Chronicles hardcovers is already discounted. I’ll apply the 25% discount to the list price, so that set will be $75 instead of the regular discount price of $85.
I need to have your order in my hand by December 14, or I cannot guarantee shipping for the holidays. I’ll be traveling myself after that, and this is a one-man operation.
The quickest and easiest way to order is to click the Paypal button and email the details. If that doesn’t work for you, the good old Postal Service and a check will do, too. Note: If you don’t see anything about the special on the ordering page, don’t worry. Just mention the discount when you send it.
If you want the books personalized to somebody, be sure and let me know!
It’s true. Driven by my insatiable desire to keep a roof over my head, I’m cutting back on my free-download offerings. Starting this week, I’m shifting my website to samples and purchase links for the Chaos books, and the same with Eternity’s End. I’ve already got my own Starstream Publications editions of the first three Chaos books—with new afterwords—for sale in all of the major stores for a very low price (Eternity’s End coming soon). But even a very low price isn’t competing well with free.
I’ve been running the free-downloads experiment for more than two years now. Here’s my conclusion: The free downloads have significantly expanded my audience, and enabled me to meet some very nice people electronically. But they haven’t done much in terms of pay. Yes, some people have been generous with Paypal donations, and some who liked the books have gone out and bought my other ebooks—and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. But the theory that free downloads drive sales of books, which apparently works for some writers, does not seem to have clicked for me. I don’t regret offering the downloads—not a bit—but now it’s time to try something new.
I’m asking all other sites that host my free downloads to remove all except Neptune Crossing. (I’ll still let them offer that first hit for free, heh-heh.) I’ll provide big enough samples of all the books for new readers to give them a good, fair try—not like those weenie samples you get at a lot of stores, where most of the sample is ^%$@ front-matter, not the actual book.
And I’ll keep the prices low.
With the holidays coming, I’ll be offering some specials. But one thing at a time. I’m posting this right now as last call for alcoh—errr, free books!
(Note: Short stories and Battlestar Galactica will remain free in some ebook formats.)
The SF novel I’m currently writing, The Reefs of Time (Book Five of The Chaos Chronicles), involves time travel as an important story element. Specifically, a couple of my characters need to go back in time a few hundred million years, to see what they can learn about a malignant entity believed to have originated that long ago, near the center of the galaxy.
This is a pretty demanding jaunt for anyone, even those who travel with the help of far-future alien technologies. The time-travel theory involved, which I devised after a long period of mulling possibilities (and for which the prime criteria were: Does it make sense to me? and, Does it work in the story?), posits that travel back into deep time can be accomplished through an extreme version of exploiting quantum entanglement: essentially the possibility that we live in a vast web of entangled particles spanning deep space and deep time. (If you don’t know what quantum entanglement means, stay with me for a moment. I’ll get to it.)
According to theory (of alien origin, in my story), there are a couple of limitations on this form of time travel. One is that you don’t really travel physically or materialize in the past. It’s more like projecting yourself, ghostlike, in a way that lets you observe the past without actually (in theory!) interacting with anything in a way that could change the present or future. It’s so ghostly that it’s called ghoststream transmission. The theory (being tested right now by my characters Julie and Ik, under dangerous conditions) further says that any change that might be made in the past will create only limited local ripples. Nature has its own self-correcting mechanism that prevents, for example, the grandfather paradox (where you go back and shoot your grandfather before he meets your grandmother).
All fiction, folks.
Except, maybe not. This week’s New Scientist has an article about a couple of researchers who believe they may have shown that quantum time travel is theoretically possible (registration required to read article), not by the usually-cited method of flying through a wormhole or other means requiring black holes, but by performing just the right trickery with quantum-entangled particles. (Quantum-entangled particles are particles joined in a spooky way such that an action on one—change in polarization or spin, for example—is instantaneously reflected in the state of the other, even if they are separated in distance, theoretically limitless distance.) It’s one of those weird things that makes quantum physics so mind-bendy.
The New Scientist article goes on to explain that this model for time travel has a built-in mechanism that prevents time-travel paradoxes. Effectively, an entangled photon cannot go back and kill its grandfather photon, because if conditions are such that it can actually pull the trigger on its little quantum gun and pull off the photonicide, then the time travel fails to work in the first place. How’s that for prevention of terrorism?
I started to develop a peculiar sense of déjà vu as I read this article. Didn’t I just write this stuff a few months ago, weaving a bit of world-building that would make my story make sense to me? What are they doing, talking about it now in a serious scientific magazine?
You don’t suppose the researchers took a little trip forward in time and read my finished book, do you? Hey guys—if you did, please tell me, how the heck does the story turn out?
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