Shopping for Nerds and Geeks

Someone once commented on my YouTube video, entitled A Brief History of Science Fiction, with this profundity, "Nerds." Actually, I don't think I am quite smart enough to be a nerd or a geek, but I viewed it as a compliment never-the-less. As Christmas approaches, I have begun making my list, and I sometimes get shopping information and sales pitches which appeal to the wee bit of N/G in me.

For fans of Star Trek, please check out Roddenberry.com. There are some seriously cool gift items there, including new shirts based on the 2009 new interpretation of Star Trek. Add a pair of black pants over short black leather boots, and you are ready to save the universe. N/G types with deeper wallets can also purchase props, from a tri-corder to a command chair. The latter goes for three grand, but how many folks can sit in that chair and order up warp drive?

More practical, but still kinda geeky and nerdy is the online vendor, Cyberguys. They have boring and mundane computer gear, such as bigger and better hard drives and enough cables to decorate your house and your yard, but they also have nifty "security" items, such as keyloggers and wireless video cameras. Anyone can become a private investigator with a bit of gear from this vendor. I must admit that an early Cyberguys catalog was the source for some of the gadgets which are used by the kidnappers in my debut novel, The Gift Horse.

Finally, for the smart shopper (take that either way) there is always ThinkGeek.com. Where else can you get a Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutter or a Star Wars light saber laser pointer? For more off-beat geeks, this vendor also has Bacon soap and a Staple Free Stapler. One of my friends suggested it to me, so maybe I am more nerdy and geeky than I think I am.

The Apocalypse Troll and other stories

I really like David Weber's military science fiction. A few thousand fans of this sub-genre seem to like it as well; his books, even the ones which are ridiculously swollen with unnecessary and/or undesirable content, sell well. He has also partnered with other authors, including Eric Flint and Steve White, which helps lengthen his list of published novels.

My introduction to his work was a rough go, however. The science fiction book club was touting his In Enemy Hands, which is fairly far into the Honor Harrington series, but I began with that one, not realizing that I had to catch up. There were several times I nearly abandoned it; but about three quarters of the way in, I realized this was indeed a fascinating tale; albeit one which could have been told without quite so much detail. Intrigued, I read a couple of his stand-alone novels, The Path of the Fury and The Apocalypse Troll. While featuring hardware and propulsion concepts, more than characterization, these yarns did not require any backstory, and that helped. After I finished those, I read the Honor Harrington series, from the beginning. The first book is not particularly interesting, being mostly a set up for the series, but the series hits a good stride with books two through six. The seventh book, Echos of Honor also has its moments, but the page counts grow and the synopsis gets shorter with each successive installment. I read most of the series, but I think I have been reading on At All Costs, which may or may not be book twelve, for a couple of years and I have yet to finish it. Instead, I go back and re-read earlier titles.

Some of Baen's earlier Weber titles, including The Apocalypse Troll, are available as eBooks, and I have been re-reading it. Yes, it is perhaps less polished than some of his more recent offerings, but it is also far less bulky than his newer work. No, he still doesn't really write many multi-dimensional characters. Still, I enjoyed it. No one else seems to have the ability to write large scale battle scenes, but Weber does. He also has a firm grasp of the problems and possibilities of technologically driven warfare. Too many writers of space opera write about conflict one-on-one, because that is easier. In Star Wars, there may have been a lot of blasts, but the camera follows Luke and Han, and everything else is a backdrop. That is both cheaper and easier. However, any civilization which moves to the stars will have multiple ships, weapons, and drive mechanisms. Weber writes about those situations, and when Weber is finished with a battle, the casualties are in the thousands. That is what real war is, and it will be in the future.

So, the bottom line is that fans of futuristic writing may or may not like Weber, but most fans of military science fiction do, because he delivers large scale entertainment. Readers should sample the early stories, like The Apocalypse Troll or Path of the Fury, or at the beginning of one of his many series, rather than diving in the middle, however.

Troll is the story of a twenty-fifth century monster unleashed on our current earth, with only one surviving warrior from the future to tackle it. When researching the published reviews, I read that this novel was the first David Weber wrote, but it was published long after he had become established as a writer. So, while still Weber, the complexity is not so vast, and there are not so many references to politics, which is a major flaw in some his Honorverse works. But not everyone agrees that The Apocalypse Troll is a winner, so here is a link to a differing opinion of this novel over at RPG.net.

Where are all the science fiction readers?

I recently read a post on SFReader/SFWatcher stating that there are only 20,000 regular readers of science fiction. That's fewer folks than live in my home county here in Georgia, making this a really astonishing statistic. The webmaster at SFR/SFW is now paying for movie reviews, in hopes of growing the website. No compensation is offered to reviewers of novels, of course.

When I was taking Mythology in Literature during grad school, one of our texts was by Joseph Campbell, who says that science fiction is mythology for modern people. If science fiction is so important culturally, why aren't more people reading it, and what might attract a larger readership?


In 2004, Business Week ran an article entitled ScFi: Novel Inspiration which lists four valid reasons for reading science fiction. They include looking for new inventions, understanding the social consequences of invention, learning the lexicon of the future, and inspiring young minds. As America stagnates, and it really is doing just that, I wonder if our lack of wonder is at fault.


While science fiction does more than explore invention, that is one important aspect of it. A website called Technovelgy.com lists almost two thousand ideas which began within the pages of science fiction. Most people know that Captain Nemo's ship beneath the sea predates the submarine, but how many folks know that Verne also predicted live news conferences, retro-rockets, and was the first to postulate that space travelers would have to deal with being weightless?


One of my favorite SF authors, Robert A. Heinlein, employs 3-D television, exoskeletons for the military, and smart lanes on the highway. All of these are in the later stages of development, and will be as much a part of our future as the "pocket phone" (which he used in "Assignment in Eternity" in 1953) is today.


Recently Fortune magazine published an article about the dearth of math and science students in the United States. Of the 8,000 students who graduated from U. S. colleges with a Ph.D in engineering  this spring, two-thirds were foreign nationals. Just a few years ago, most of those students might have stayed in America, but today, the majority will return to their home countries, because the opportunities to use the skills they just learned are there, and not here.


"The fastest-growing college majors in America as of 2007, says the U.S. Education Department, were parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies, as well as security and protective services." (Fortune, July 29, 2010) As Americans turn their collective backs on science (and science fiction) our nation will continue down the road to economic ruin.


In my research on why readers don't enjoy science fiction, a number of reasons were mentioned, including:
"It's too hard to read." 
"The future in science fiction literature is too dark."
"The science is bad."


All of those reasons might have some merit, but there is a reason, which should have no merit, that I encountered while promoting Trinity on Tylos: There is a social stigma associated with reading science fiction. Ouch!


Oddly, people who see movies such as Avatar, The Dark Knight, or Jurassic Park don't seem to feel that society is shunning them when they view science fiction on the big screen. In fact, many of the top grossing films of all time are either science fiction, fantasy, or have some ties to speculative literature. Now, the question is, how do we get those youngsters to make the leap from looking, to reading, and on to inventing?


That question is far more important than expanding market share for science fiction, which is stuck at a mere six percent of book sales. What America must accomplish, to expand the job market and our economy, is to expand the minds of our younger citizens. Science fiction should have a role in that, but someone, somewhere, must introduce it to them, and the earlier, the better.

A Book by the Same Name

Google Alerts let me know that another writer has recently published a book entitled The Gift Horse. When I chose the title, I looked at Amazon and a few online used bookstores to see if the title was in print, and I noted that an autobiography by Hildegard Knef was the only use of the title in works intended for an adult audience, and even that had a subtitle, "A Report on a Life." The book had been in print for more than thirty years and was not fiction, so I decided to keep using it. Since its publication, I have had a few folks ask me if I chose the title because it had been used before, and that wasn't a reason to use it, but a reason to consider changing it. After some consideration, I realized that I really did not want to dump a good idea for a title, yet I certainly did not want to confuse readers, either. As I was pulling the manuscript together for publication, my cover artist suggested that I not picture a carousel horse, because that might make readers think the book was about a horse, or that it was intended for a young audience. The artist suggested the dark green cover, and I do like it, but I don't know if it helps people figure out that I am referring to the old saying, "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

A couple of years ago, I created a YouTube video, A Brief History of Science Fiction, and that time I did play off Steven Hawking's famous title, A Brief History of Time. This video has served me well, garnering more than 1500 hits. Recently, someone posted a video with the same exact title, and I watched it a couple of times before deciding that mine really is better.

Back to that Google Alert. I had to surf a bit to see that a romance author, Jami Davenport, has used "my" title, The Gift Horse, for adult fiction— a romance. I wish her well with it. I might even read it sometime! When I began writing Angela Donalson's story, I had in mind to write a romance. Alas, it just wasn't in me. While I love and respect my hubby, I know that there are many pitfalls in life, and I threw a whole bunch of them at Angie, plus a few that I hope no one ever face, just to see what would happen. My version of The Gift Horse has plenty of suspense and conflict, but it certainly isn't a romance.

“Imitation is the sincerest flattery” according to Charles Caleb Colton, and rather than be miffed, I've decided to be glad that others thought my titles worthy enough to use them.