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 David Slater, a conscript in the 1920s Army of the Confederacy, faces a dilemma. When he and his regiment were shipped to Germany to help stage a coup there, his Limey fellow-soldier Brian was acting strangely. David now has the choice of reporting his best friend to his commanding officers, or keeping quiet and just doing his job: preparing for the arrival of Bismarck, the giant Zeppelin flying Hitler and his Nazi cohorts to meet their new allies, the Confederates.
Beneath Gray Skies follows the adventures of David and those around him in a past that never happened–where the Civil War never took place, and the Confederacy survived as a pariah slave-holding nation into the 20th century. Confederates, Unionists, British and Germans plot and counterplot in a tightly woven tale of espionage, treachery and romance.
The cast of Beneath Gray Skies includes rogue British agent “Bloody Brian” Finch-Malloy, hard-drinking Henry Dowling, and Christopher Pole, a slave who escapes from the hell of the Confederacy–living against a backdrop that includes real historical characters. Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Dr. Hugo Eckener, the brilliant anti-Nazi Zeppelin captain, all live again in this “extraordinarily well-written piece of mind candy that becomes more and more difficult to put down” (Christopher Belton). More on “About Beneath Gray Skies” here…
 Recently, a London design company produced a concept for a hotel which would hold 100 customers and float in the sky. This “airship”, as they termed it, would be filled with hydrogen–the same gas that was responsible for the Hindenburg fire, and many other airship accidents.
Remarkably, this concept was taken up by a division of the Korean giant Samsung, which asked the London company to further develop the concept as one of the “future concepts” so beloved by Japanese and Korean conglomerates, which they did, concentrating on the interior, rather than the fiddly little details, such as how to propel such an unaerodynamic object across the Atlantic in 37 hours (it’s “powered by large hydrogen fuel cells” – which do what? heat water and blow out steam jets? turn propellers? work an ion thruster drive?), and how to moor and embark and disembark the passengers (the only picture of this shows a demonstrably unsafe design which would almost certainly result in a fatal accident after about the third mooring). More pictures and details here and here. Note how most of the pictures are of Bryce-rendered landscapes with an added rendered object, or beautifully rendered interiors, showing kettles on ranges (in a hydrogen airship!?).
But wait, there’s more…
Incredibly, this nonsense got taken up by the mainstream media, for example, the Daily Telegraph, which shows the “docking concept”, and, possibly the worst offender of all, CNN, who report that although the design is a “concept” and only a “feasibility study”:
designers have developed a detailed and achievable technical plan for the craft that could allow it to be built in the future
The point is that there are no technical plans available in the release. Materials, propulsion, hard calculations (other than gross lifting force) are totally ignored. Moreover, the headline: “Could we soon be staying in floating hotels in the future?” completely ignores the weasel words buried in the rest of the article. Many journalists, myself included, are sometimes guilty of this to a degree, but this seems to be a particularly egregious example.
I try to keep off politics in this blog, but it is worth noting that CNN is often regarded as being trustworthy and unbiased. When faced with something like this, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that many half-truths and biased points of view on the political front have been packaged as “fact” by CNN and others. Readers of the blog are left to provide their own examples, but the implication is relatively obvious–read past the headline and look for the fnords.
Metropolis magazine (Tokyo) interviewed me late last year. I spouted off random thoughts in the general direction of a recorder, and this is how it got summarized: Indie Publishing
It doesn’t make me out to be too much of an idiot, and I am pleased to get my 15 minutes of fame.
About what the iPad uses for its viewing technology, that is. Tekla Perry in the IEEE Bulletin (a journal for geeks and those who love nuts and bolts) gives reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer.
Mainly because…
It doesn’t sport a bright OLED display; it isn’t wearing the latest Pixel Qitechnology that combines normal transmissive LCD technology with a black-and-white reflective version for easy viewing in bright sunlight.
Get that? People are going to go into the Apple Store, pick one of these things up, play with it for a while, look at the integrated Web browser, email client, photo viewer, video viewer, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and the 140,000 apps in the App Store, all on the rather nice-looking color screen, and put it back on the shelf, regretfully shaking their heads and saying “but it doesn’t have Pixel Qitechnology”. Next they rush out and order a white plastic monochrome device that looks like an albino Etch-a-Sketch with a cheap mini-QWERTY keyboard stuck on the bottom, costing them the same as the iPad. Sure they will.
So the Kindle has a non-reflective screen and the iPad doesn’t? Ever heard of matt screen protectors? And the iPad has a brightness sensor built in to adjust the screen brightness to the ambient lighting conditions. Yes, probably the Kindle is a better reading experience. Is it a better mail experience? Can it run third-party apps? How about Web browsing, or photo viewing? Can you write on it (seriously, I mean?). Add an external keyboard so you can type in landscape. It’s about the user experience, not the megapixels.
More on “Really, who gives a ****?” here…
Let’s face it, the new Apple iPad is one sexy little beast when you see it in Steve Jobs’s hands. Whether you actually need one or not is another question. I think it’s one of those gizmos that you only really lust after once you’ve picked the thing up and used it for a minute or so. Then you “get it”, and Steve Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field enfolds you in its deadly grip and slowly drags your credit card out of your wallet. As it happens, when my 12″ MacBook G4 eventually meets its end, I think an iPad (or whatever the equivalent is at that time) will be all I’ll need for entertainment, reference, mail and note-taking.
But what I am really interested in is the iBooks application and idea. Jobs shows us that the format is ePub (great news – a non-proprietary format which can have DRM added if you want it to, but doesn’t have to have it added) and that five major publishers have signed up. All good so far as it goes, and the way that Apple has integrated the reading and purchasing experiences is nothing short of what we would expect from those wonderful people who gave us the iPod.
Now, where does this leave us, the authors, and the independent publishers? Well, we don’t know how easy it’s going to be to sign up as an independent or, more to the point, whether we will be able to use the reading software to read books that are not on the iBooks store. At the moment, I can rip my own CDs and I can load them into iTunes. Will I be able to run my Pages documents through a converter (maybe a new export option within Pages and load them into my iPad? I can buy MP3s through eMusic and play them on my iPod – will I be able to do the same from Smashwords and Feedbooks? We don’t know yet.
Incidentally, the book reader looks cool. Way cool. Lots of eye candy, but I saw no annotation or sharing features enabled in the demo. Maybe they’re coming – I would actually be somewhat surprised if they were not. And is this Ray Kurzweil’s Blio that I wrote about earlier? Maybe. That would be the million books that he was talking about.
And where does this leave Amazon and B&N? Apple’s habit up to now has been to disallow (or at least discourage) apps that duplicate the built-in functionality of the Apple devices. So what happens to the Kindle and B&N and Stanza apps, etc.? Or does Apple just intend them to wither on the vine, as iBooks engulfs the universe? My guess, if Kindle achieves legality on the iPad, is that Amazon has just produced its last Kindle. It will leave hardware production to Apple, and concentrate on software products (development costs, production costs, support costs, etc. are lower, and quite honestly, who is really going to blow that sort of money on a bigger Kindle now Apple has sliced the beast off at the knees, even if the screen is bigger?). Even the nook, which is closer to the iPad than the Kindle ever has been (color, touchscreen, etc.) looks like a one-trick pony now. And the Japanese hardware manufacturers (Sony, Fujitsu, etc.) who often really still don’t “get” software as the key element of their products, are going to be frozen out of the market in the same way as they lost MP3 player market share to the iPod and iTunes.
So, if the iPad sells in even reasonable quantities (and I think it will), it’s going to be a gamechanger for digital books. Of course, that’s in the US. Japan doesn’t have the book arrangements yet. But then again, the iPod sold in large quantities here in Japan long before there was an iTunes store, and so will the iPad, if Apple opens up the Books application to allow non iStore books, and allows other retailers to put up their readers as applications and allow sales.
A friend very kindly let me know about the Amazon breakout novel competition the other day. First prize is a publishing deal with Penguin and a $15,000 advance. It’s the first writing competition I’ve ever entered (I’m not convinced that writing is a competitive sport – selling the book is, though!) but the prize is worth having, if only as a boost to my ego. Personally, I don’t think Beneath Gray Skies stands a chance–it’s not general enough, and not “literary” enough. Added to which, the final judges all seem to be female, and whatever Beneath Gray Skies may be, it’s not chick lit (nor do I think it has a great appeal for 50% of the population, even though I have had some very flattering comments from female readers).
Entries in the competition are restricted to 5,000 entries in the general field, and 5,000 in the Young Adult category.
It’s an interesting way of judging. The first stage uses a 300-word pitch (as opposed to a synopsis) to sort out the sheep from the goats. Everyone was very kind to each other on the Amazon discussion boards, and really helped each other produce some really professional-looking pitches.
This is what I came up with, with assistance from some really helpful and professional people, for Beneath Gray Skies:
More on “Competition and cooperation” here…
Book reading from Beneath Gray Skies and talk about independent publishing at Ben’s Cafe Takadanobaba (Tokyo); 5-10 minutes’ walk from Seibu, Tozai and Yamanote lines
Wednesday January 27 8pm
Admission ¥2,500 to include a drink and a signed copy of the book. Book (unsigned) is currently about ¥2,500 from Amazon Japan.
Let me know if you can make it – I want to know how many copies to bring with me.
I’ve been doing research on my next novel (almost certainly not the next one I will be publishing – that’s going through its final checks right now before I start to typeset it), but the next one which will be in the same vein as Beneath Gray Skies. Some really incredible things happened in Russia in the early 1920s, especially at the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway. They hardly need any fictionalization to make them interesting, but they form the basis for a really fascinating and gripping story.
Once again, I’m taking existing history, and twisting it a little, asking “what if?”. In this case, what if Lenin had not survived the assassination attempt of August 1918? Who would have taken over the leadership of the Bolshevik Party? Would it have been Dzhugashvili or Bronstein? And what would have been the result of the Russian Civil War? Would the Bolsheviks have been able to hold on to the whole of Russia? In other words, how much was Lenin responsible for the success of the Bolshevik Party?
And from that, many other questions related to the Civil War rear their ugly heads. Would the Japanese have been able to hold Eastern Siberia up to Lake Baikal if the Far Eastern Republic had never come into being? What would have been the role of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg? And, maybe most interesting of all to someone writing a thriller, what would have happened to the hundreds of tonnes of gold that disappeared somewhere in the wastes of Siberia while supposedly in the care of Admiral Kolchak?
I have high hopes that this will be as much fun to write and to read as Beneath Gray Skies, even if the events and people populating it aren’t as familiar. The first couple of chapters have just written themselves. All I had to do was to hold my hands over the keyboard and the characters came to life and started speaking.
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David Slater, a conscript in the 1920s Army of the Confederacy, faces a dilemma. When he and his regiment were shipped to Germany to help stage a coup there, his Limey fellow-soldier Brian was acting strangely. David now has the choice of reporting his best friend to his commanding officers, or keeping quiet and just doing his job: preparing for the arrival of Bismarck, the giant Zeppelin flying Hitler and his Nazi cohorts to meet their new allies, the Confederates.
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