Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (38 page)

The cord was too high for me to get over, so I lifted it and went under, and proceeded directly to the reader, ignoring the stir behind me. I inserted the chip. “James,” I said, “download the navigation logs. Any that are connected with Dr. Adam Wescott.”

Another lamp came on. White. I heard the data transmission begin. I turned and smiled at the Mutes standing behind me. Hi. How you doing? Enjoying your visit? I tried to think how this was routine maintenance. Instead it occurred to me that the Mutes might suspect I was trying to steal the ship, that I was planning to take off with it, blast out of the hall, and head for Rimway. Trailing Mutes all the way. I could see the
Falcon
rising over Borkarat’s towers, then accelerating for deep space. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.

No such scenario of course was even remotely possible. The museum had removed a bulkhead to admit the ship, and then replaced it. The engines were at least disengaged and probably missing. And there wouldn’t have been any fuel anyhow.

The chip whirred and hummed while the data collected over more than a decade flowed through the system. I looked over the other instruments, the way a technician might, just doing a little maintenance, got to adjust the thrust control here.

More Mutes were crowding up to the guide rope to see what was going on. I imagined I could feel them inside my head, checking to see whether I was deranged. It occurred to me they might conclude this was the way inferior species behaved and think no more of it. And I wondered whether that had been my own thought, or whether it had arrived somehow from outside.

A couple of them moved away but others took their places. I watched the lights, waiting for the white lamp to change color, indicating the operation was complete.

I straightened the chairs. Looked out the portals. Checked the settings on the viewscreens. Straightened my blouse.

I wished I’d thought to bring a dust cloth.

I looked out the portals again. Two Mutes in blue uniforms were converging on the
Falcon
.

The lamp stayed white.

The crowd began to shuffle, to clear out of the way. I heard heavy footsteps. And of course no sound of a voice anywhere.

Then the authorities arrived. Both in uniform. Both looking severe. But then, with an Ashiyyurean, how could you tell? I tried to cut that idea off at the pass. Tried to transmit Almost done. Just be patient a moment more.

They stepped over the cord. One took my arm and pulled me away from the reader. I looked back. The lamp was still white.

They wanted me to go with them and I was in no position to decline. They half-carried me back out through the airlock, and through a gawking crowd that now made no effort to hide the fact that they were watching. We exited the hall, went down a ramp, across a lobby, and into a passageway.

I was helpless. I was projecting all the protests I could manage. But nothing worked. You couldn’t talk to these guys. Couldn’t use nonverbals. Couldn’t even use the old charm.

They hauled me through double doors and into a corridor lined with offices. I realized I wasn’t simply being ejected. We were headed into the rear of the museum.

The doors were made of dark glass, and Mute symbols were posted electronically beside them. One opened and I was ushered inside. It was an empty office. I saw an inner door, a couple of tables and three or four chairs. All standard Mute size. My guards released me and set me down.

They stayed with me, both standing, one near the door by which we’d entered, the other by the inner door. I wondered whether my chip had finished loading yet.

We waited about five minutes. I heard noises on the other side of the inner door. Then it opened. A female emerged, wearing clothing that resembled a workout suit. The color was off-white. The suit had a hood, but it lay back on her shoulders.

She looked at me, and then at my escorts. They seemed to be exchanging information. Finally the escorts got up and left the room. Apparently I was not considered a threat.

The female reached into a pocket, produced a translator on a cord, and draped it around her neck. “Hello, Chase,” she said. “I’m Selotta Movia Kabis. You may call me Selotta.”

Even under the circumstances, it was hard not to laugh. I gave my name and said hello.

She stared at me. “We are pleased you decided to visit us today.”

“It’s my pleasure,” I said. “This is a lovely museum.”

“Yes.” She circled me and took a chair opposite. “May I ask what you were doing in the
Falcon
?”

No point lying. The translator wouldn’t help her read my thoughts, but I wondered whether she really needed it. “I was trying to download the navigation logs.”

“And why were you doing that? The
Falcon
has been in the Human Hall as long as I’ve been here. It must be twenty-five years.”

“It’s been a long time,” I agreed.

She concentrated on me. Made no effort to hide the fact she was in my head. “What’s the
Seeker
?” she asked.

I told her. I described its connection with Margolia, and then explained what Margolia was.

“Nine thousand years?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you hope to find this place? Margolia?”

“We know that’s a trifle optimistic. But we do hope to find the ship.”

Gray lids came down over her eyes. And rose again. The irises were black and diamond-shaped. She considered me for a long moment. “Who knows?” she said, finally. “Find one and it might lead you to the other.”

“As you can see,” I said, “I need your help to get the information from the
Falcon
.”

She sat quite still while she considered it. Then she seemed to come to a conclusion. The door to the passageway opened. I turned and saw one of the guards. Selotta motioned him forward. He had my chip in his right hand. I wondered if it might be possible to grab the chip and run.

“No,” said Selotta. “That would not be a good idea.”

He handed it to her, turned and left. She inspected it, switched on a lamp, and took a longer look. When she’d finished she turned those diamond eyes directly on me. I got the distinct feeling she thought she was talking to me. Suddenly she seemed surprised. She shook her head in a remarkably human gesture and tapped the translator. “It’s hard to remember sometimes I have to speak.”

“I guess,” I said.

“I was asking whether you don’t have some qualms about the possibility of a living civilization out there. Your own people, after nine thousand years. You have no way of knowing what you might find.”

“I know.”

“No offense intended, but humans tend to be unpredictable.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “We don’t expect to find a living world. But if we could find the original settlement, we could retrieve some artifacts. They’d be quite valuable.”

“I’m sure.”

I waited, hoping she’d give me the chip and wish me god-speed.

“Perhaps we can make an arrangement.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“You may have your chip.”

“If—?”

“I will expect, if you find what you’re looking for, a generous bequest.”

“You want some of the artifacts?”

“I think that would be a reasonable arrangement. Yes, I will leave the details to your generosity. I believe I may safely do that.” She got up.

“Thank you, Selotta. Yes. If we succeed I will see the museum is taken care of.”

“Through me personally.”

“Of course.”

She made no move to hand over the chip. “Chase,” she said, “I’m surprised you didn’t come to us first.”

I stood there trying to look as if attempted theft had been a rational course of action. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have. To be honest, I didn’t know whether you would allow it.”

“Or try to grab everything for ourselves.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it.” She put the chip on the table top. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you, Chase.”

 

I
n “All Our Yesterdays…” Bud Webster cast a look back on the history of science fiction and fantasy. In “Quo Vadis?” Orson Scott Card surveyed the field’s present situation and direction. Now Mike Resnick looks to the future of the field and finds new opportunities to be explored—and exploited.

Mike Resnick is the author of more than fifty science fiction novels, close to two hundred stories, and two screenplays, and the editor of almost fifty anthologies. He has won a Nebula, five Hugos, and other major awards in the USA, France, Spain, Poland, Japan, and Croatia. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In his spare time, he reports, he sleeps.

 

L
et me start by saying that I love books and magazines. I like the heft and feel of them. I grew up with the printed page. I can’t remember ever having a house where most of the wall space wasn’t covered by overflowing bookshelves. I don’t especially like reading my science fiction off the computer screen.

But as a science fiction writer—and one who has to pay the bills with his science fiction—it’s my job to look ahead and see what’s coming, and whether I like it or not makes no difference. It is not a matter of Good or Bad, but rather of True or False. And the truth is that we’re not going to be pulping as many forests in the future.

Twenty years ago, when the Internet was just taking off, just about every established science fiction writer was approached by start-up publishers. The pitch was always the same: give me something for free today and I’ll make you rich tomorrow (or maybe next week, or possibly in seventeen years, or conceivably in…). Every one of them went belly-up.

Then Omni Online, which certainly had deep pockets (or at least could borrow from
Penthouse
’s), came along, and suddenly we had a paying market. It lasted long enough for Ellen Datlow to become the very first to win a Hugo for editing an electronic publication. But it didn’t last a lot longer than that.

Then we had GalaxyOnline.com of sainted memory. My God, we writers loved it! Half a buck a word (if you wrote the minimum; it was a set amount). But it was a loss leader for a film and TV company that never made any films or TV shows, and it was gone within a year.

Then there was Scifi.com, which paid more than double the going rate of the digests, and lasted long enough to win Ellen Datlow another Hugo for editing another electronic magazine…but it, too, bit the dust.

So what’s with the title to this article (I hear you ask)? All these places had high hopes and high pay rates, and they all wound up in publishing’s graveyard.

What can I tell you? The first few settlers who tried to reach the West Coast didn’t make it either.

But they paved the way for those who came after them.

The first success story came from an unlikely source: Fictionwise.com, which publishes only reprints. They started out in 2000 with a small handful of science fiction writers—Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, myself, just a few others. And they paid twice as much for a short fiction reprint as the average anthology paid. And we all thought: wow, how long has this been going on? It’s like stealing!

And we never thought of it again—until later that same year, when the royalty checks came, and we realized that, hey, there are thousands of people out there who, when confronted by trillions of free words of drivel on the Internet, prefer to pay for reprints by known authors.

That was only eight years ago. These days Fictionwise.com has literally thousands of authors, including such heavyweights as Dan Brown, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and that whole crowd.

They proved you could sell literally billions of words of electronic reprints, many (in fact, in the beginning, most) of them science fiction. So it was only a matter of time before a major science fiction publisher took a look at the direction the world was heading and decided it was time to go electronic. As I write these words, the pioneer is Baen Books with Jim Baen’s Universe, but I’m sure by the time you read this (maybe a year from now) others will have joined the parade.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the major houses start publishing novel-length science fiction online as well.

Will they have any trouble getting writers?

Not a chance. The online magazines can pay three and four times what the print magazines can pay, and the book publishers can easily offer 30 to 40 percent royalties to the author, rather than the 10 to 12 percent most hardcovers pay and the 8 to 10 percent that usually goes for paperbacks.

How can this be?

Easy.

Let’s take a print magazine. It sells, let us hypothesize, for $5.00, give or take a nickel.

What does it cost to get that magazine into your hands?

Well, first of all, the publisher has to buy the stories.

There’s an office, which means an overhead.

There’s paper for the magazines to be printed on.

There are color separations for the covers.

There is the cost of printing tens of thousands (formerly a couple of hundred thousand) of copies of the magazine.

There are shipping costs. The subscribers don’t drive to the printing plant to pick their copies up. Neither do the distributors. Neither do the stores.

There are the distribution costs, both for the national and local distributors. They’re good guys, but they don’t place the magazines in the stores for free.

There are the stores themselves. If they sell a $5.00 magazine, most of them are going to want $1.75 or thereabouts for their trouble.

There are warehouse costs for those magazines that are neither sold nor pulped.

And a month later, every copy has vanished from the newsstands and bookstores, to be replaced by the next month’s issue, and the publisher will never make another cent on that out-of-date issue.

Now let’s take a look at how these expenses affect an electronic magazine.

There is no office expense and no overhead, because the editors work out of their houses.

There are no paper expenses, because the magazine doesn’t appear on paper.

There are no color separations, because they simply post the artwork right on the screen.

There are no printing expenses, because the magazine is not printed.

There are no shipping costs, because the magazine is not shipped.

There are no national or local distribution costs, because they are not distributed. They’re right there online, and they don’t have to pay anyone to put the magazine in your physical proximity.

There is no cut for the bookstores, because the magazine is not sold in bookstores. Or newsstands. Or supermarkets. It’s online. You pay the price, you get the magazine, and there are no middlemen. (You might think about that. When you pay $5.00 for a digest magazine, the publisher might wind up with about $1.85 of it—and that’ll be his average only if he sells the entire print run, which never happens, or even comes close to happening these days. You pay $5.00 for an electronic magazine, and the publisher gets $5.00.)

There are no warehouse costs, because the magazine exists in electronic phosphors, not paper pages. They’ll post the next issue in another month or two, but this one won’t be through earning money, because it will always be available for anyone who wants it.

Do you begin to see where the print magazines are at a bit of a disadvantage?

Now it should be clear to you why electronic publishers can outbid the print publishers for the writers they want. The print magazines are paying authors, overhead, color separations, paper, printing, shipping, national distributors, local distributors, bookstores, and warehouses.

And the electronic publishers? They’re paying…authors.

Period.

So of course they can triple or quadruple what the print magazines pay. (I assume we don’t have to go over the whole thing again with books. Just cut to the last sentence: So of course they can triple or quadruple the hardcover and paperback royalty rates.)

Ah, but is there an audience out there in the vast electronic wilderness? After all, buying
The Da Vinci Code
or
The Shining
or the Foundation trilogy from Fictionwise.com is one thing, but will computer users go for new science fiction? (The obvious answer is: Certainly they will. An electronic story has already won the Nebula, and another one has just been nominated for a Hugo the same week I am writing this. But those are voters, not masses of buyers, and you want numbers, right?)

Okay—numbers you want, numbers we got.

I’m a Luddite, especially in a forward-looking community like science fiction writers and fans. Last summer I didn’t even know what the word “podcast” meant. Then the young man who runs a website called Escape Pod, one of many such sites, bought reprint rights to some of my stories. I didn’t give it another thought until he mentioned, a few months later, that the story of mine he had run most recently had received twenty-two thousand hits in its first month online.

Twenty-two thousand hits? The issue of the science fiction magazine it had appeared in had only sold 18,500 copies. More people heard my story online (or on their iPods) than read it.

I was sure it had to be an aberration. So when my next story, which was not a traditional science fiction story, but had been sold to a young adult anthology, came out, I waited two weeks and then asked how it was doing.

Fourteen thousand hits. In two weeks. For me. Not for Kevin Anderson or Anne McCaffrey or Robert Jordan or someone else who lives on the bestseller list.

That’s when I knew beyond any doubt that the world was changing, that the readers are still out there in quantity, but they’re not necessarily browsing the bookstores or the newsstands anymore.

No sea change ever happens smoothly, especially not in as hidebound, old-fashioned, and unimaginative a business as publishing. Some of the start-ups that look good today may be dead by the time you read this. But if so, others will take their place. There are thirty-seven holes in the dike, and traditional publishers have only ten (figurative) fingers.

Like I said, I still love the feel of a book, the smell of an old pulp, the pleasure I get just from browsing a bookstore.

But I also can see the future coming at full speed, and I don’t think anything’s going to stop it. Certainly not me. I may not like reading electronic pages, but I’m editing an electronic prozine, and I’m selling to every podcaster I can find, and more than two hundred of my books and stories have been sold as electronic reprints.

I’m not happy with electronic publishing. I probably never will be. But I’d be a hell of a lot less happy if I was left behind.