Jim Baen, page 51
Yes, that's also still in print. Selling quite well, in fact. The title of it is The Wizard of Karres and you can find it in almost any major bookstore in the United States. It'll be filed under Misty Lackey's name, since the credits read Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer.
(I love shameless plugs. Yes, I can do that—because I'm writing this essay. That's how it works. With intellectual labor that can be easily duplicated, the distinction between "I got paid" and "I didn't" is a lot more complicated than it is for someone who sells hardware.)
Keep in mind that because Schmitz's original novel is still under copyright, his estate receives a portion of the royalties that Wizard of Karres earns, even though Schmitz himself didn't write a word of it. And the book is selling well enough that Baen Books gave Dave Freer and me a contract to do another sequel. That will be titled The Sorceress of Karres, and—yup—the Schmitz estate will get some money from that too.
I'm also in the process of editing a resissue of most of the works of Christopher Anvil, at least four volumes of the works of Murray Leinster, almost everything Keith Laumer wrote before he suffered his stroke and the quality of his writing went to pieces—and, in 2003, Baen Books published a one volume reissue of Tom Godwin's best writings, which I edited. (That's The Cold Equations & Other Stories and it's still in print also.)
As I said, that's how it works. A book read by a twelve year old who could only read it because of the fair use provision in copyright law, became translated four decades later into a reissue of the best works of an author who'd been almost forgotten by the world at large, and almost none of whose works had remained in print after his death in 1980.
Of course, someone can now object that I'm cherry-picking my examples.
No, actually, I'm not. To be sure, these examples are very improbable, taken by themselves. How many twelve year old boys, after all, become authors and editors successful enough forty years later that they can do something like this?
"Like this," in the sense of these specific authors, very few. But if you step back and look at publishing as a whole, the answer is that all editors—and probably all publishers—started off as twelve year old readers. And all of them, except for perhaps a tiny handful who were born into wealthy families who gave them very large allowances, first developed their reading interests using one or another of the fair use provisions of copyright law.
It's true that you can't predict the way any given little stream of water will flow across a sloping landscape, if there aren't any pre-existing waterbeds. But you can predict with absolute certainty that if you pour water onto a sloping landscape, featureless as it may be, it will all flow downhill.
So it is with fair use. No author—nor the cartoonist of my opening example—can know ahead of time which specific instance of fair use of his work will wind up personally benefiting him. But what all authors—and all cartoonists—can know for sure is that a society that allows a generous and expansive amount of fair use will produce the most expansive market for them all.
To be sure, lately many authors have gotten panicked enough by the endless drumbeat concerning "digital piracy" that they've abandoned that solid old-fashioned logic and are today following the Pied Piper of DRM. But that's their problem, not mine.
This essay is now long enough that I need to break off. Here's the closing point. The claim made by the giant corporations who launched the assault on copyright and have been the mainstay of the campaign is this:
The advent of digital media makes it so effortless to copy an intellectual creator's work that traditional notions of "fair use" have to be abandoned. In today's world, any sort of "fair use" will inexorably and inevitably lead to wholesale violation of copyright.
Therefore, fair use must be banned entirely—or, at a bare minimum, have tremendous restrictions placed on it.
To paraphrase the charming words of Mary McCarthy, every word in the above statement is a lie, including "the" and "and."
I will spend many essays on this subject—that is, the practical side of dealing with the challenges of electronic publication. In the course of them, I will demonstrate that the advent of the digital era poses no genuine threat to legitimate copyright and there is absolutely no reason to abandon the practice of fair use as it has developed in our society over the past three hundred years.
"Digital Rights Management" is itself a lie. All three words in it.
The term "digital" is an excuse—a scapegoat, rather—and the term "rights" is laughable, since what's really involved is quasi-feudal monopolistic privilege.
But the biggest lie is in the last word. "Management." The reality is that the only reason giant corporations insist on DRM is because they are run by grossly overpaid executives who have demonstrated over and over again that they are utterly incapable of properly managing their businesses.
The corporations themselves, psychologically speaking, have the mindset of sociopaths. What makes it still worse is that they are run by people who are either lazy, or stupid, or incompetent—and often enough, all three put together.
* * *
The Editor's Column
December 2006
Written by Eric Flint
New members of the magazine's staff
Since our third issue came out a few weeks ago, we've expanded our staff by adding two new people. Beginning a few weeks ago, Stoney Compton became our assistant art director. And starting with this issue, Mike Resnick is going to be joining the magazine as our new executive editor, while my title changes from the former simple "editor" to "editor-in-chief." If you're wondering what those titles really mean, I'll explain in a moment.
I've known Stoney for thirteen years, since we met at the annual award presentation of the Writers of the Future contest in 1993. I'd won first place in the 1992 winter quarter's contest and Stoney had won second place. We became friends over the course of that weekend and have remained in touch ever since. Earlier this year, at my recommendation, Jim Baen bought Stoney's first novel Russian Amerika, an excellent alternate history that will be coming out in April 2007. (Yes, that's a plug. It really is good—and, better still, it doesn't retread the standard ground that so many alternate history novels do.)
Stoney started helping the magazine informally a few months ago, in all sorts of ways. Eventually, it simply made sense to officially add him to the staff. Stoney did and will wind up doing all sorts of things for the magazine. But since he's a professional graphics designer and will probably spend most of his time working with Dave Freer on the magazine's art work, we decided to give him the title of assistant art director.
My personal acquaintance with Mike Resnick is much more recent than that, although I've known who he was for . . . Jeez, I dunno. Three decades, something like that. In my years as an unpublished author—we won't dwell on that miserable period—there was no one in the field whose advice I listened to more carefully than Mike's, in the regular column he did for Speculations magazine called "Ask Bwana." So by the time I finally got to meet him earlier this year, I felt oddly familiar with him already.
Those distant impressions turned out to be quite accurate. In the course of working together as co-editors of an anthology for Baen titled The Dragon Done It, a collection of fantasy detective stories, Mike and I came to be good friends. Perhaps more to the point, we discovered that we shared very much the same attitude as editors. Mike and I are what you might call, for lack of a better term, old-fashioned story-tellers. For both of us, whether we're working as authors or editors, it's always the story that comes first and foremost, with literary style and technique a long ways second. At the same time, since we're also fairly free-wheeling souls, we're both willing to cut a writer a lot of slack in the way he or she gets around to presenting a given story, as long as we think the story itself is worth telling.
After we'd been working together for a while,. Mike asked me if there might be any room for him on the magazine's staff. He told me that the one major role in the field that he'd never taken on, even over the course of several decades, was seeing what editing a magazine was like. Mike's edited forty-four anthologies over the years, so he's a very experienced editor. But editing an anthology is a very different kettle of fish from editing a magazine, and he wanted to give that a shot as well.
I told him he was probably a damn fool, but if he really wanted to do it, I could certainly use the help. With experience, we've discovered that the single biggest problem the magazine faces when it comes to acquiring stories isn't a shortage of money so much as it is a shortage of my time. I make a living as an author, not an editor, and that means that periodically I have to more or less set the magazine's work aside while I concentrate on getting a novel finished. The end result is that the magazine's staff does a superb and quick job of sorting through the slush, and then . . . As often as not, the five percent of the stories (roughly) that they kick up to me for a final decision might languish on my desk for weeks or even months before I can get around to reading them.
That bothers me. A lot, in fact. I know exactly what it's like to be a writer, submitting a story and then having to wait for a long time to get a response. It sucks, to put it crudely but accurately—and I find I'm no more happy being the one on the editor's side of that equation than I was being on the author's side.
So, please welcome Mike Resnick. Don't take those respective titles any too seriously. The real relationship between the "executive editor" and the "editor-in-chief" will be exactly the relationship Mike and I have had working on our anthology. We're editing partners, simple as that. In the very unlikely event that we can't reach agreement on a specific story, I'll have the final sayso. But I don't expect to have to exercise that august power very often, if at all. I really wasn't kidding when I said that Mike and I look at these things very much the same way.
Mike makes his living as an author also, of course. In fact, he's one of the most successful authors in the field. (How successful? Well, fifty-one novels, thirteen short story collections—taken from one hundred and seventy-five stories published—two screenplays, and three non-fiction books. Not to mention that, at last count, I think he's piled up more science fiction awards than any but three other authors in the history of our genre.) So he'll run into the same problem that I do, from time to time. But the difference from now on is that there will be two of us doing the work, so I think we'll be able to swap it back and forth to match our writing schedules in such a way that the magazine's response time to authors with stories under final consideration gets a lot quicker than it has been.
The other thing that's new starting with this issue is that we've arranged with Stephen Cobb to establish a regular link with his very popular podcast program, "The Future and You." Steve has a short essay in this issue that explains the nature of his program—see "What's New in The Future And You"—as well as the first essay in what will be a regular column he'll be running in Universe magazine. Please check it out. I think you'll find both very interesting.
The Future is Now
December 2006
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
I am pleased to announce that your beloved online magazine, Jim Baen's Universe, has teamed with the award-winning podcast The Future And You, in an effort to benefit the patrons of both. While each of these are very different, and innovative, forms of media, this is a particularly natural alliance because the creative people behind both share passions and optimism for many of the same things, such as science fiction & fantasy and the real future in which we all hope to live.
This alliance will take the form of a mild sharing of content. The host of The Future And You (that would be me) will have a regular column here within Jim Baen's Universe in which to write about the future as well as to mention which of your favorite authors you will have the opportunity to hear, and what topics you will hear them discuss, by downloading the show.
In addition to the opportunity to hear interviews with some of your favorite authors, each monthly episode of The Future And You, beginning December 1, 2006, will contain a ten minute segment devoted exclusively to the goings on here at Jim Baen's Universe. These ten minute segments will feature the voices of Bananaslug & Stoney (Walt Boyes & Stoney Compton) JBU's own Frick & Frack. Also featured in each of these segments will be one of JBU's many famous authors reading a sample of his or her fiction.
Perhaps you're wondering:
what is The Future And You?
The Future And You is an award-winning podcast about the future which you may download for free. Each episode contains several interviews with authors, scientists, celebrities and innovators about what they expect in the future. These forward-thinking people describe their widely differing ideas of the future and often go beyond what they expect into what they hope and what they fear.
David Drake, Greg Bear, Toni Weisskopf, Alan Dean Foster and Kim Stanley Robinson have all been guests; as have John Ringo, Spider Robinson, David Brin, Joe Haldeman, Vernor Vinge, Nancy Kress, Sarah A. Hoyt, Catherine Asaro and Travis S. Taylor.
Less famous guests have included Rudi Hoffman (a cryonics insurance agent), Mike Treder (CEO of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology), Doctor Greg Matloff (an astronomer) and Lionel Vogt (a transhumanist and TV battle-robot builder).
Subjects have included: nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing, computers wired directly into the human brain, cryonics, exoplanets, faster-than-light travel, wormholes and black holes, cloning and stem cell research, global warming and the current interglacial period, genetic engineering of humans and other biotechnology, as well as transhumanism and the technology of living more-or-less forever.
What's in the latest episode?
The current episode contains all the following and more:
Eric Flint (author and editor-in-chief of Jim Baen's Universe) describes how, as a web based "e-magazine," Jim Baen's Universe compares to and competes with traditional SF&F magazines printed on paper.
Toni Weisskopf (the new head of Baen Books) describes her take on the singularity, technological immortality, global warming, the next fall of civilization, the Chinese going to the moon, faster-than-light travel, cryonics and SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence).
Sarah A. Hoyt (author and polyglot) in her beautiful and exotic accent, explains why the future is proving to be weirder that we ever expected, and also talks about how increasing longevity will dramatically alter society.
David B. Coe (author and environmentalist—with a PhD in environmental history) risks his environmentalist street creds by insisting that passionate environmentalists—like himself—need to admit that nuclear power is the only logical compromise solution to the world's energy needs.
Catherine Asaro (author, physicist and former ballerina) who personally homeschools gifted children, provides surprising insights into the rising popularity of homeschooling.
Lucienne Diver (one of SF&F publishing's top agents) describes the trends within the publishing industry as well as her worries & hopes for the future outside the biz.
Marjorie M. Liu (N.Y. Times best selling author and former lawyer) describes several of the inevitable legal and judicial problems everyone will face, such as the growing temptation for parents to use eugenics technologies to drastically improve their own children—beginning, of course, in the womb. She also startles the host with her revelation that there are judges sitting on the bench right now who have not passed the bar, have never been lawyers and have no degree in law.
What about the old episodes?
All past episodes of The Future And You will remain available for your downloading pleasure for many, many years to come (at least if your host has anything to say about it). Here are a few randomly selected items from past episodes which you may listen to at your whim.
Cryonic SWAT teams, and what you should do before the body of your friend or loved one rots. David Pascal describes what to do in those critical hours between an unexpected death and cryosuspension. February 25, 2006 Episode
Gary Jones of Stargate SG-1: A celebrity interview. December 15, 2005 Episode
David Drake, who reads and translates ancient Latin for fun and relaxation, discusses lessons from antiquity; similarities between the USA and ancient Rome; and one of the host's favorite British miniseries: I Claudius. Stephen also asks David how he thinks the USA might meet its eventual and inevitable end. After all, someday the USA, like the Roman Empire, will no longer exist. August 1, 2006 Episode
Spider Robinson suggests that our next earth might be better than this one. He also admits that faster-than-light travel is impossible, but he's quick to point out that, as humans, impossible is what we do best. April 8, 2006 Episode
Joe Haldeman feels that computers wired directly into the human brain may sweep the developed world as quickly as cell phones since those without them will be at a competitive disadvantage. He also mentions that nanotechnological invisibility is being developed at MIT where he teaches. January 15, 2006 Episode
Robin Curtis worked with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner as she played the Vulcan Starfleet officer Lieutenant Saavik in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock as well as (the host's favorite of the Star Trek movies) Star Trek IV: The Journey Home. A celebrity interview. February 11, 2006 Episode
