Dieselpunk Nugget

Sometimes, when you’re doing research for a novel, you come across a passage that gives you chills. For example, take this quote from a lecture that Alan Turing gave to the London Mathematical Society in 1947:

Finally I should like to make a few conjectures as to the repercussions that electronic digital computing machinery will have on mathematics. I have already mentioned that the ACE will do the work of about 10,000 computers.* It is to be expected therefore that large scale hand-computing will die out. Computers will still be employed on small calculations, such as the substitution of values in formulae, but whenever a single calculation may be expected to take a human computer days of work, it will presumably be done by an electronic computer instead. This will not necessitate every-one interested in such work having an electronic computer. It would be quite possible to arrange to control a distant computer by means of a telephone line. Special input and output machinery would be developed for use at these out stations, and would cost a few hundred pounds at most.

Controlling a computer through the telephone lines. This was 1947. Damn.

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* The word “computer” had a different sense before the invention of modern digital computers. Here he’s talking about humans, usually young women, who were hired to do math problems all day.

Oyster and Scribd

There’s two new developments in the book industry that are making me salivate, both as a reader and a writer. They’re called Oyster and Scribd, and they’re both recently-opened startups that promise to let you subscribe to an ebook service, a la Netflix.

Here’s how they work. You pay a monthly subscription fee ($9.95 a month for Oyster, $8.99 for Scribd) to get in. Once you’re in, you have access to the service’s entire database of ebooks. You can read as much as you want. So why doesn’t somebody sign up for one month, download a few hundred books, and run? You can only read the books while you’re a paid subscriber. Once you let your subscription lapse, the books disappear.

Why I’m excited as a reader

Both services are still hammering out deals with the major publishers, but if they do this right, their databases will have all the books. All the books. Right now, I agonize over book purchases because it’s a $10 investment, I have to give it shelf space, and I’m not at all confident I’m even going to like it. But if I could pay to have access to all the books, I’d start trying all sorts of new things I didn’t even know I liked.

Why I’m not going to sign up quite yet

I’m not a voracious enough reader of new stuff for this service to make financial sense to me, personally. I’m still a library and Project Gutenberg fiend. But there’s enough people out there who want the latest Jodi Picoult now that I think the system is going to work.

Why I’m excited as a writer

Did I mention that you get to read all the books?

So, about those aforementioned voracious readers. These services are going to be like the buffet to them. You pay once to get in, and then what? Try everything. I don’t know about Scribd’s terms yet, but for Oyster, every time you read more than 10% of a book, the author gets paid.

This is a great deal for obscure books (like, erm, me, a very obscure fantasy writer). I wouldn’t be willing to pay $3.99 for a self-published or $9.99 for a traditionally-published book I know nothing about. But if it’s free once you’re in, people will be willing to try new things.

This will be a good thing for writers if Scribd and Oyster wind up paying writers and publishers a fair price for their work. We’ll have to wait and see how that works out, but I’m hopeful.

John of the Rhine is based on a real scientific experiment

This week, I’m promoting an e-short-story, “John of the Rhine,” that’s free on Amazon here.

Parts of this short story are based on real life. (Not the part about a piece of river mud coming alive.) But Mr. Kaufman’s research is based on a real experiment that was done by Thomas Young in the early 1800’s. At the time, scientists couldn’t agree whether light was a wave or a particle. In 1803, Young did an experiment where he forced light to split by passing it through a card with two pinholes in it, like so:

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When the light came back together, the two beams either added to each other or destroyed each other, which is something that only waves do. Everybody believed that the matter was settled, that light was only a wave, for about a hundred years. Then a more sophisticated version of the experiment found that light behaves like a particle, too.

So is light a wave or a particle? Yes.

Free Ebook: John of the Rhine

John_OfThe_RhineHello, everyone! I wanted to let you know that I have some new writing out, and just for this week, it’s free.

“John of the Rhine” is a longish short story about a golem who works as an assistant to an alchemist. In his spare time, John teaches himself how to cook.

Here’s where you can get your free copy on Amazon.

Don’t have a Kindle device? There’s a couple of things you can do. You can download a free program from Amazon that will let you read the file on your mac or PC. Or, wait a couple of months. To do this promotion, I agreed to put “John of the Rhine” only on Amazon for 90 days. When the 90 days are up, I’ll put it on Smashwords as well, where it’ll be available in just about every file format imaginable.

Come and get it!

Steam Powered Giraffe

Since I spent last week complaining about how steampunk art can go so wrong, it seems only fair this week I should point out a group that gets it totally right.

Steam Powered Giraffe calls itself a band, but it’s really a mix of music, comedy, and storytelling. Not to mention that each of their three front performers goes through the entire set while miming “the robot.” That’s right, mimes who sing. The band plays as three robots who were built in 1896 to be musicians. Each robot gets an extensive backstory that the band adds to all the time. There’s even a webcomic.

This band has a remarkable range. Not only has it built up a fantastic story about three robots who cope with the horrors of the twentieth century through music, but they can play rock, rap, and pop. They’re not trying very hard to be steampunk. They’re trying to be entertaining, and if the show happens to have an 1890’s vibe, then fine.

This is something that us folks in the steampunk community ought to remember. It’s not supposed to be about corsets and gears, it’s supposed to be about breaking out of the mold of medieval Europe to tell the best damn fantasy story you can.

Check out the awesomeness:

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