The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970)

Written in 1970, this pessimistic time travel novel, a Hugo Award finalist, begins in 1978 when Brain Cheney is more or less drafted into a mysterious government project. Chaney is a Biblical scholar of sorts whose book debunking certain ancient scrolls has irritated many Christians around the country but he is also a professional demographer and has already produced one report for the government predicting how current trends will impact the near future. The government believes him to be perfect for this new project. Who better to send into the future in the new time machine invented by the Bureau of Weights and Measures than a man experienced in predicting that very future?

Interestingly, Brian Cheney and the two military officers drafted into the project with him travel only as far as twenty years into the future, to the turn of the new century, because government officials are so concerned with what they see as a dark future for the United States that they hope to learn enough from the time travel to change that future. Today’s readers, of course, have lived beyond the years visited by these time travelers so their adventurous trip into the future has become our past. As a result, The Year of the Quiet Sun reads as much like an alternate history novel at times as it does as a story of time travel.

Cheney, the only civilian time-traveler of the team, has little regard for politicians and resents the way that the President and his staff order that the first trip into the future be only to 1980 so that the President can determine whether or not he will be re-elected. The three travelers, who can go into the future only one-at-a-time due to the limitations of their vehicle, get that information for him but they also return to 1978 with news of the tremendous unrest and violence that is already impacting the future of America’s major cities, especially Chicago. It is when they are sent forward to 2000, and just beyond, to learn the effectiveness of the President’s attempt to save the country that the novel really takes off.

The second half of the book centers itself around realistic military skirmishes between government troops and the rebels who are intent on overthrowing the government with help from the Chinese, but it also details the evolving relationships of the three time- travelers and the head of their project, the beautiful Katherine with whom two of the men have become particularly smitten. Readers who may have found the pace of the book’s first half to be a bit slow in its set-up of the second half action will find themselves well-rewarded for staying with the book to the end. Tucker’s vision of the horrible future that could have resulted from the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s is a horrifying one.

Tucker even saves a nice little surprise for his readers until near the end, one that more astute readers than me may figure out earlier, but one that made me laugh out loud at its cleverness.

Rated at: 4.0

Big Changes from HarperCollins

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new entity that is set to make some big changes in the traditional relationship between publishers, authors and booksellers. According to the New York Times, it will work this way:

Author advances and bookseller returns are two issues that have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances that are so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are major successes. Publishers also offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating best sellers, but often those risks do not pan out.

Ms. Friedman said the new group, which will start by publishing 25 titles a year, will offer “low or no advances.” Mr. Miller said he hoped to offer a profit-sharing plan in which both publisher and author would split the net profits.

Under current standard practices, booksellers can return any books they do not sell, saddling publishers with the high costs of shipping and pulping copies. Mr. Miller said that by eliminating returns, the publishers could share any savings with authors.

It will be interesting to see how this works out for this new segment of HarperCollins. I gather from the article that the group will only publish a certain type of book for what is called the "low end of the market." The examples given do not particularly appeal to me as a reader but I'm intrigued by the possibility that e-book and audio copies of the books might be included at no extra charge with purchase of the hardcover version of the books.

The publishing industry is searching for a new business model, one that works for everyone involved in the process, including customers. I imagine that other companies will be watching this one closely.

Special Welfare Programs for Authors?

I was going to mention Times of London article yesterday but my enthusiasm for the new baseball season got the best of me and I spent most of the evening watching baseball from several cities around the country. Direct TV has a free MLB preview this week and I have access to every game being played in the country during this preview. Luckily, I can't afford to the price to have this kind of access for the whole season, so my evening activity will soon return to normal.

The gist of the Times article is that pirated books on the internet, available for free download, are going to cause writers to put down their pens and keyboards forever, that they will prefer silence to poverty wages. Of course, writers will never do that, despite what Tracy Chevalier, author and chairperson for the U.K.'s Society of Authors wants us to believe. According to the article:

Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.

This is the bleak forecast of the Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK and believes that the havoc caused to the music business by illegal downloading is beginning to envelop the book trade.

There is so much wrong with this article that it's hard to know where to begin. True, the music industry is in somewhat of a chaotic state at the moment. But what would one expect when an industry blames its problems on its customers and begins to sue them for illegal downloads instead of using the new technology to push more product to those very customers. The general quality of today's record albums is worse than in decades past. The albums are often nothing but two hit songs surrounded by eight or ten "fillers" so that consumers can be forced to buy an entire album rather than the two songs they really want. The music industry no longer produces singles, preferring to push inferior albums instead. So consumers jumped on the new technology to find the songs they wanted, and only the songs they wanted. Who can blame them, really? When the labels didn't want to make the songs available legally, their customers found a way to get them any way they could. Finally, the labels have decided to sell single songs over the internet at reasonable prices and their customers are starting to come back to them...at least the ones who haven't been sued yet.

But three-minute recordings are not books.

So why does Chevalier want to see book publishers take a hard line approach similar to the one that almost killed off all the major record labels? Perhaps it's because she's a better writer than she is a businesswoman. Some authors are already beginning to embrace a new business model built around a willingness to give away free electronic copies of their books in the knowledge that the name recognition gained from doing so will ultimately result in the sale of more printed copies of their work than would have otherwise been the case. Books, after all, are entertainment and writers are part of the entertainment industry. Name recognition converts an author's name into a brand. Well known brands have the edge; they sell more than generic brands that no one recognizes or trusts for quality.

Chevalier, who sounds a lot like "Chicken Little" has come up with what I believe is a ludicrous solution to the problem, one that she recommends be put into place before all the writers disappear forever:

In the 19th century and before, other models of paying writers existed, including lump-sum agreements and profit-sharing. She sees no reason why the book industry should not be equally innovative. She suggested four possible sources of income at an industry discussion on copyright law last week: the Government, business, rich patrons and the public. Government funding could take the form of an “academy” of salaried writers.

Just what we need, work programs for writers similar to those used in the U.S. during the Great Depression and other sources of income that sound similarly close to being public welfare programs for authors.

Why not let the market figure this out for itself? Printed books are not going to be replaced by electronic copies. The hardware to comfortably read a whole book is just not there and it doesn't seem likely that such hardware will exist anytime soon, if ever.

Lighten up, Ms. Chevalier. The sky isn't really falling. I promise.

A Dangerous Age

Ellen Gilchrist, National Book Award winner for Victory Over Japan has become known primarily as one of the premier short story writers in America. But, as she reminds us in A Dangerous Age, her first novel in over ten years, she is also a first-rate novelist.

The United States has been engaged in war since September 2001, a fact of which many Americans seem to have lost awareness. The war, of course, is very political and that, perhaps, explains why so many media outlets seem to have lost interest in it now that the American body count has dropped so significantly. As it becomes more and more difficult for big media to damage the current administration via bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan, those in charge seem more interested in changing the subject than in reporting war news.

Ellen Gilchrist is of another mind entirely. She wants us to realize how close we all are to being personally impacted by this long war and she uses the women of the fictional Hand family to illustrate her point.

The Hands appear to have everything: money, physical grace and beauty, social standing, a close family and work they love. But it has been a more than a decade since a new baby was born into the Hand family and cousins Winifred, Louise and Olivia have begun to think seriously about doing something about that situation. So when Winifred announced her engagement it was a happy time for the whole family. Little did any of them realize how suddenly their lives were about to change.

The Hands were first impacted by the war when Winifred’s young fiancé was on time for his early morning business meeting at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, making him one of the war’s first casualties. No remains were recovered but at the memorial service held in his honor, two younger cousins of the murdered man, identical twins, vowed to join the military so that they could personally avenge his death. True to their word, they did so, a decision that would directly impact the Hand cousins just a few months later.

Winifred, Louise and Olivia Hand soon learn what so many of their countrymen learned before them, that this is not some far-off war that can be ignored or studied with detachment if it involves those you love. But the Hand women are a strong bunch with a family tradition of coping well with whatever life throws their way and this war is no exception to their ability to adjust to life’s surprises. They are in full support of the men who leave them to go off to war and, just as importantly, they are always there for each other. Ellen Gilchrist beautifully describes the war as seen through the eyes of those left behind, reminding the reader that not all war heroes wear uniforms.

Rated at: 4.5

Needed: International Fiction Recommendations

I have just taken a close look at the reading I've done through the first three months of 2008 and it's not quite what I hoped it would be when the year began. My three main goals were to read more books by women than I read last year, to revisit some of my favorites from the past and to read more by writers from countries other than the U.S.

Well, so far, I'm on a pace to read fewer books by women this year than last and, even worse, I've only reread two books and am doing almost nothing with international writers.

The problem is that I just don't seem to hear much (maybe my mind is closed to them) about writers from other parts of the world. I used to read a few writers from South America and Canada on a regular basis, plus quite a few from the U.K. But this year, if they are not authored by a Brit of some sort, I haven't read any international books at all. Obviously, I need some help here.

So, please give me some recommendations for international fiction and maybe even some good places to find the books. I'm not so much interested in non-fiction because, at this point in my life, I find international politics to be a particularly irritating subject. I realize there is (literally) a whole other world out there and that I'm missing out on it...a little help?

On Losing the Stamina to Finish a Book

Stephen McGinty, over at News.Scotsman.com, has written a tongue-in-cheek column in which he laments his ever-decreasing ability to finish a book of any length. It seems that over the last few years he has found himself abandoning every book that he starts long before he finishes it. At first, it was only long novels that he couldn't finish; now he says he is having a difficult time making it all the way even through 15-page short stories.

But McGinty has found a bright spot in his decreasing level of concentration: he has something in common with today's young people.

"Yet I take comfort in knowing that my own brand of functional illiteracy has brought me closer to the youth of today who, according to a new report, are also finding it easier to put a book down than pick a book up."

There is new concern that all the online reading of blogs and short pieces that young people are doing nowadays has decreased their ability to concentrate on one subject long enough to finish an entire book. Sue Palmer, a literary consultant quoted in the piece, explains the concern this way:

"By reading a book, you are building up the stamina to absorb words for a longer period of time. What you are doing is gradually locking brains with the author, which you do not really do in quite the same way when you read chunks of a magazine or chunks of text on a screen. This personal interaction going on in your head is that thing that's special about reading a book and the pleasure of that is what, in the end, turns someone into a reader."

That's an interesting thought. I can only speak for myself, of course, and I admit that my reading habits were firmly in place a few decades before I began to spend so much time on the internet. About the only change in my reading habits that I've noticed is a tendency to read anywhere from six to 10 books at the same time, reading in chunks of 25-35 pages and moving on to another partially read book. That might very well be the result of my internet usage, but it comes more from being exposed to so many great books that I would have missed out on completely in the "old days" than from any new inability to concentrate on the written word for long stretches of time. Now, I'm always excited about starting a new book and I find that I can't be bothered to read them one-at-a-time.

Oddly enough, I think this relatively new habit of mine ensures that I get more out of most books than I would have gotten out of them by reading them singly. I don't find myself daydreaming the way I used to and having to go back to reread four or five pages to see what in the world I had just missed. Now, if that starts to happen, I know it's time to put one book down and pick up the next one in the stack. I probably shouldn't admit it but I even go so far as to place the last book read from on the bottom of the stack and only pick it up again when it is back on top. I almost always get to each of the books on any given day and, more importantly, I never seem to get bored with them.