Well, now we’re testing the waters in Seattle to see if there are people interested here.  We did a few meetings a few years ago, but then life intervened and the meetings stopped.  So we’re trying to re-start them again.  There’s a Yahoo group, the SeaFuture Group, which you can sign up for if you’re interested in attending.  We’re planning to set up a meetup group.

We have a date and a time and a topic. That’s February 19th (a Friday) at Park Place Books in Kirkland from 6:30 to 8:00.  It’s a great location.  The people at Park Place are nice, and there are a ton of great restaurants right there in the shopping center, including Luccia, Purple, and Rikki Rikki.    We want to talk about the new design revolution.  We science fiction writers have been interested in fabricators, or machines that can make stuff out of raw materials and  a computer program, for some time.  Well, with 3D printing, this is starting to become possible.  For background reading, we’re suggesting this month’s issue of Wired Magazine.

I’ll blog more about this, but in the meantime, mark your calendar!

Jan Vandenbos is the other moderator and group leader.

One is “The Robot’s Girl” which is in the April issue of Analog (on sale now at newsstands and for the Kindle).  I’ve received three notes from people who’ve read it so far and like it.  This usually happens for books, but not so much for short stories, so I’m really pleased.  The story originated when I read an article about some people in Japan being disturbed by robots being designed to help watch children.

The second story is titled “Riding in Mexico” and is online at Jetse Devries’ new magazine, Daybreak.  I write a lot set in the Yucatan Peninsula, and this is also set partly there (and partly on a near-future version of the University of Washington campus).  Jetse did a really beautiful job matching up photos to the story, which I think make it more readable.

More writing news coming soon – I’m waiting for a few signed contracts to show up.  In the meantime, I hope you like these two stories.

And as a small postscript — the books are back on Amazon.  Geez.

The odd thing is, I’ve been fighting them becasue I want my books on the kindle. I still do. I get asked why they aren’t there all the time. I live in Amazon Country.

Maybe when it’s over I can have both – physical books on Amazon and ebooks on Kindle. And BTW, I’m fine with the ebook release date being after the hardcover release. But it should be by or before the mass market.

At least at the moment, my books are once again available at Amazon. They remain unavailable on the Kindle.

I sell content.  I like to call that content stories.  In general, I don’t control availability or format or price.

I want to wake up in a world where the stories I tell are available in print (via Amazon and my local Indie bookstore and in the local chain), on the Kindle, on the Sony eReader, on the Nook, on the iPad, in as many formats as possible.  This should be possible at a price fair to me, to my publishers, to distributors, and to readers.

I plan to strip links when I have time and re-point them to other stores or to Indie-bound.

In the meantime, I’m seriously saddened that the easiest place to find my books at this moment is not available to readers.

In general, the argument is about control of pricing (not about a particular price point for ebooks). It is between one of the largest publisher’s of physical books and one of the largest sellers of physical and electronic books.  It was probably prompted by Apple and the iPad.

For those of you who are interested in understanding the current kerfuffle, here are a few good links:

Tobias Buckell’s “Why my Books are No Longer for Sale Via Amazon.”

Charlie Stross also did an excellent job, in his post titled  “Amazon, Macmillan:  an outsider’s guide to the fight.”

My own simpler version is in the post below.

The longest discussion anywhere is surely the one at Whatever, which is John Scalzi’s blog. It’s up to about 274 comments at the moment.

Of interest, many people were already mad at Amazon for the ability to take books away (remember the removal of the book 1984 in what can’t have been an accidental statement that they can be big brother?) and for Amazon’s “mistake” regarding GLBT books.  In spite of those things, I’ve been really loyal to Amazon for a long time.  I like their recommendation engine.  I like the convenience of being a Prime customer and I like it that I can order books with my food via Amazon Fresh.  I live close to their headquarters and I spend a lot of money with them.  I like my Kindle (and yes, I want an iPad too – but I’m a tech geek and an early adopter with a Kindle, an iPhone, a fitbit and two iPods, not to mention numerous computers).

I’m reading two books on the Kindle right now and went to sleep reading it even though I’m furious with Amazon for this move.  This might be the straw that breaks my loyalty.  I woke up dreaming of smashing my Kindle on the sidewalk and talking a picture of it and posting that on YouTube.  If I do that, I will be greatly saddened by the act.

Here are the business model points as  I understand them.

Today, in print, the publishers have full control of the price.  The books are pre-ordered by bookstores and cannot be discounted (except for things which are almost surely in contracts between major chains and the publishers like the B & N loyalty program).  They can be – and often are – returned.  The super deal books you see (for example, at Half Price Books) are usually overstock the publisher has sold a very steep discount rather than paying to have it destroyed. This model has flaws, but it results in dependable pricing and a lower inventory carrying risk for bookstores.

If publishers lose all control of the price with ebooks, then a few things happen.  One is that ebook prices may approach zero (the is bad for publishers and authors and even bad for readers in the long run).  If ebooks go too low too fast, the bookstores go belly up too fast to adapt to the market.

Bookstores will go the way of record stores some day; sad but nearly inevitable.  If Amazon wins, this will happen much faster.  If they don’t, some stores and chains will be able to adapt and live.

iTunes means I buy about three times as much music as I used to.  Maybe iBooks will have the same affect, especially if it’s available widely and not just for Apple products (remains to be seen).  Kindle has driven me to buy more, too, by the way.  I like my Kindle.

But if Amazon wins the ebook price war and publishers lose complete control (whether that’s me – I’ve published some of my back list stories on Kindle — or that’s Macmillan/Tor who owns all of my novel print rights) then many of things we need in this industry will go away completely.  Publishing is changing, and we need publishers to change, too.  But this is one battle I want them to win, as a reader and an author.

I only feel comfortable talking about parts of the experience (maybe I’m still processing – I live in personal world where I don’t spend much time – and particularly not three straight days – worrying about seriously bad threats to hope, health, and humanity).  I am glad there are people who watch our borders for a living, and I can see how it might be tough for them to maintain a sunny world view.  Since the next book in my series will need a lot more military characters, this will be good for my writing.

There were no lines for the women’s rooms.  Participation was primarily white males, many with grey hair.  This wasn’t a surprising demographic for this conference although I think some more youth (such as a few open-source maker-bot user types) and a few more women would have been nice to add.  There was some diversity in race, color, gender, and age, but any analysis would have yielded over half in a single basic demographic. That said, it was certainly a smart, thoughtful, and driven group of people.  I liked them.

We started off with a presentation from England by Ian Pearson, who made up diabolical potential weapons of mass destruction based on the anticipated capabilities of future technology. Next, Peter Bishop talked about future secenario building in general (more for me to learn) and I talked about near-term hard science fiction as one door to the future and gave some reading recommendations.  The last talk was a rapid-fire run-down of numerous current and likely future threats, setting the stage to drive us off to explore ways we might use science and technology, ways they might be used against us, counters for those, and so on.  After that, we spent a day and a half working in small groups and then reported out.

I am usually a positive futurist.  These three days were pretty chilling, and I now have a wild urge to get together a bunch of people at the same level to brainstorm ways to use science and technology to make a happier society.  Of course, there is an army to feed the threats to, and I’m not sure who to feed the glass-half-full scenarios to.  Maybe that’s what we do with our stories.

Some of the biggest threats include EMP weapons  (destroying the ability of our electronics to work, Bio-weapons and bio-nano weapons – imagine a blended biological and manufactured goo that corrodes metals, and serious economic warfare.  There was a lot more technology talked about – all of it available in open literature today – and maybe some of it will sneak into my stories or into one of my Futurismic columns.

On the whole, I came away with slightly more of a few things than I went in.  I came out more scared.  I came out more full of ideas I can incorporate in my current and future series.  I came out happy that a lot of things I do reference in the Silver Ship and the Sea series make sense in light of the military tech being discussed today.  And for the week’s surprise, I came out with more respect for the military than I went in with.  I didn’t go in disrespectful by any means – maybe just ignorant.  But I found the men and women who were at the Mad Scientist 2010 Conference were smart, concerned, brave, worried, and pretty realistic as well.  They see many of the same trends we civilian futurists do – that our power balance against other large economies is unsteady, our education system needs serious help, and the next few decades are going to be risky for us and for the world.

I took slight comfort from the fact that on the flight out, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” which is a positive alternative history relating to the nuclear bomb.  Which, by the way, is a lovely story.

I’m glad I went.  And yes, I asked if it was okay to blog about it before I posted this!

What do you think we need to worry about for the next twenty years?

The linkage between man and machine is growing every day.  I call it “The Tender Mashup” in this month’s installment of my column, Today’s Tomorrow’s over at Futurismic.

I’ll be heading to the east coast (Newport news, Virginia) next week for a conference, and stopping for a day in Arizona on the way back.

10:00, Moderating the panel, Palaces and Prisons? Urban Development in the 22nd Century in Evergreen I
Is technology accelerating the divide between rich and poor? Will it make sense to live closer together in high-density zones optimized for transit and pedestrians, or will ever-longer commutes require even bigger and more comfortable cars? Will residential towers bring every indulgence to the wealthy, or simply warehouse the permanently unemployed?

Noon , talking on a panel about “Schools of the Future: From Science Fiction to Reality.” In Evergreen H
Will students sit in front of computers learning from teaching AI routines? With all the crimes in school should we continue to house students in crowded environments with a lack of adequate supervision? What will the classroom and teaching environments of the future look like?

1:00 PM, Reading in Evergreen I
1:30 PM, Autographing in Evergreen I

3:00 PM, Moderating the panel “Retro Futurism: Steam Punk and Alternate Realities” in Washington E.
What is Retro Futurism? What is the fascination with Steampunk?

5:00 PM, Moderating the panel “Have Engineering Degree, Will Travel,” in Evergreen H.
Does truly hard science fiction miss the target with the average reader? Do we care? Is this the answer to finding a new view of the future? Perhaps more collaboration between those who are hard science writers with the writers of space opera will make the resulting book something exciting technology speaking and yet of interest to the average reader

The best – the must read – is a transcript of Paul Hawken’s commencement address from May of last year to the University of Portland.  It’s moving, brilliant, and meaningful.  I think I will cut it out so I can read it again in the future.  Yes, I read a physical paper.   A small quote, just to get you hungry to go read the whole thing:  “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future my answer is always the same:  If you look at the science of what is happening with the earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data.  But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”

Yesterday I talked about what we could be doing.  One was work on education, where I cited the abysmal literacy statistics for women in Afghanistan, and talked about water.  In the times today, two articles address these same issues.  On the front page there is “Building a Future for Girls Amid War,” by Hal Bernton.  A small quote from that article is “‘If we send our children to these schools, then the Taliban, they will come to our homes at night and kill us,’  said a Pashtun elder in an Arghandab village, where a large modern school built with Japanese aid now stands empty.” In the NW Arts & Life section, there is a review of the book “Water:  The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, by Steven Soloman and reviewed by Alan Moores. Notable short quote?  “One in five people worldwide lack access to at least one gallon of safe water to drink per day.”

And then there is the pleasure of the Sunday funnies.  Here is  a great futurist strip from Sally Forth.  Note it’s the January 3rd entry if you go look for this at a later date.