news

As is being reported in The Literary Saloon and Mumpsimus, Stanisław Lem's great novel Solaris has been translated from the original Polish into English for (shockingly) the first time. The existing edition is translated from Polish into French into English.

Apparently, because of rights issues, this new version is currently only available as an audiobook, though they plan on releasing an ebook and "hopefully" a print edition. Not sure what the deal is with the rights for this book or why the rights holders haven't bothered with a proper translation in the 50 years since the book came out, but someone should be deeply ashamed.

Noted indie publisher Small Beer Press has launched a web-based ebook store, Weightless Books and are currently pursuing many other independent publishers to join them in the venture. The store offers ebooks in blissfully DRM-free PDF format.

Small Beer Press is one of my favorite publishers, focusing mostly on short story collections and anthologies, and run by Kelly Link, who I have called the greatest living short story writer, and her husband Gavin Grant. There's a lot of great books on sale already at Weightless, including Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's remarkable collection A Life on Paper which I mentioned once before and the latest issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, the zine that Link edits and which is on my list of Fiction Magazines Worth Reading.

Joss Whedon's TV show Dollhouse has officially been canceled. While I'm sad something I actually watch (and I watch less and less television these days) has been shitcanned, at the same time I'm surprised a show about brainwashed rape victims and their sociopathic handlers lasted as long as it did. And I liked the show.

Michael Moorcock will be writing a Doctor Who novel. Pretty unusual for a writer I like to be working on a licensed property I like, so I'll be looking forward to this one. Though it begs the question, why doesn't Moffat just have Moorcock write an actual episode of the show? If The Wire can bring in great crime novel writers I see no reason why Doctor Who can't bring in great sf writers.

Other fun stuff: new fiction by Matt Cheney online for free, always a reason to celebrate.
And some videos:
Every time travel cliche in one video!

Awesome soviet animation! This is apparently based on a Ray Bradbury short story. (Ray Bradbury seems to have been very popular in Soviet Russia.)

I've seen a lot of articles on line about the various features of the Nook device, but most of them seem to bury the news that it's Epub-compatible, if they mention it at all. But Epub compatibility--and the fact that BN is converting its entire library to epub--is the single most important bit of news here, and the reason is simple. Sony now also sells its ebooks in the epub format. Which means if I bought a bunch of books for the Sony Reader, and then buy a Nook, those books are still usable. On the other hand, if I had a Kindle, my Kindle books would be unusable on the new device. In other words, the Nook and the Sony Reader allow me to create a library of books independent of whatever reader I have, where as the Kindle locks you into their format. That means that 10 or 20 years from now I might still have usable ebooks, for reference, for rereading, for referring to notes I might have taken. As long as there are still devices compatible with epub, I'm fine. That's huge.

Now if we can just get these ebooks off of DRM, we'd really have something...

So the FTC apparently has come out with new rules (PDF) where they can fine you up to $11,000 if you don't reveal any money or "freebies" you might have gotten in "exchange" for a review. Ed Champion does some pretty stellar reporting in interviewing a person from the FTC about this and explaining the problems with the new rules. Basically, there's a double standard; if a reviewer for a traditional newspaper get a free book as a review copy and then reviews it, that's okay, but if a blogger does the same thing suddenly he's treated as if he's being bribed. The interviewee also talking about having direct links to the product being a problem. But so what if I have direct links to where you can buy a book I've reviewed from IndieBound? And so what if I get a commission from those links? I can link to any book that's in print. No one's paying me to pimp their book, I'm pimping (or smacking down or whatever) any book I want to.

In other words, these new rules represent yet another example of clueless people in government making clueless decisions that favor old media over new because they just don't understand the new media. And it's bullshit.

Are we all going to have to wait until the people in government die off and are replaced by younger people who grew up with the new media before we get anything resembling clued-in legislation? How long are we going to have to deal with the type of folks who think the Internet is a "series of tubes" before we get people who actually know what they're talking about?

Very frustrating.

I think I've been waiting for this day for at least 15 years: Marvelman has been acquired by Marvel Comics.

A little background: Marvelman was a superhero created in England in the 1950's. In the 1980's Alan Moore revamped the character in one of his most beloved stints in comics. He later passed the book off to Neil Gaiman. Marvel Comics (who'd fought for the name Captain Marvel and won years ago, making the 1940's hero have his comics sold under the name "Shazam") sued and forbid the name "Marvelman" from being used in America, so in America the character was known as "Miracleman". But that's just the beginning of the trouble. After moving to several different publishing companies, and following the dissolution of Eclipse Comics in 1994, the ownership of the character came under dispute between Todd McFarlane, who had bought out Eclipse Comics, Neil Gaiman, who Alan Moore had given his share of the character to, and Mick Anglo, who created the character. The bottom line being that for 15 years all of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's Miracleman comics were out of print, and only available in rare, expensive copies sold in places like eBay. These stories had disappeared.

So, if this announcement means what it seems to mean, not only can the character go back to being Marvelman, but these books by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman that no one's been able to read can be brought back into print.

Of course, it's possible that they just acquired the original characters and not the stories from the 80's and 90's. Also in question is whether they'll try to shoehorn the character into the Marvel Universe. Time will tell.

Jason Boog interviews Rüdiger Wischenbart at the BEA panel on Chinese publishing.

First, in a fit of irony, the Creationists behind the movie Expelled created a video to lampoon atheist scientist and critic of religion Richard Dawkins. Except to any athiests watching, Dawkins actually comes out looking awesome. ("I'm smarter than you, I have a science degree," raps Dawkins in the video. And he is probably smarter than you, and, yes, his science degree does make him more qualified to talk about things like the origin of the universe than someone whose scientific education revolves around the Bible.)

Meanwhile the Ayn Rand branch of the Republican party are busy trying to put together events to protest bailing out homeowners. Cause, you know, giving money to poor people is so un-Christian. (The meshing of the pro-big-business libertarian mindset with Christians whose doctrine tell them to give to the poor and that a rich man has a hard time entering the kingdom of God and so on never made any sense to me at all.) No, don't give the money to the homeowners, give it to the banks who lent them the money in the first place and then repackaged it on the market and screwed up our whole economy. That's SO much better.

Meanwhile, Amazon reveals that it can cancel your Kindle account at any time, making the device you paid $400 for instantly useless. This is why DRM'd books are a bad idea, as I talked about in my review of the Sony Reader. If you're considering buying an ebook reader, for the love of god buy one that reads unencrypted ebooks, and not not not the Kindle.

Don't believe me that DRM is bad? I have mixed feelings about Cory Doctorow's fiction, but when speaking about DRM he has a knack for putting things in the right perspective. Here's his talk at the TED (Tools of Change for publishing) conference:

And lastly, thank God Time Warner Cable caved in and decided not to meter people's Internet usage anymore. If they'd tried that shit in NYC I would have switched to DSL so fast there'd be a blur where my cable jack was.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Today is the birthday of great Ukrainian/Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It's fitting that a writer of humor and satire would be born on April Fool's Day. Now, go read The Nose