‘Were my Parents Satanists?’ Childhood Paranoia exposed by Paul Melhuish

NSFWG member Paul Melhuish examines childhood worry (and has fun doing it...)

When I was eight years old I thought that my parents were part of a satanic cult, or they might have been demons in human form, I wasn’t quite sure.  Anyway, I got it into my head that they couldn’t be trusted because they were up to something. My dad would stop at the top of the stairs after he’d put me to bed for some reason and I imagined that he was talking to the devil, or a demon, or an alien, or an alien demon. In reality I think we was just fiddling with the thermostat. Childhood paranoia was nothing new; I was also convinced that the house where we lived was haunted. In my bedroom the cupboard door never closed and I was sure there was someone in there looking out at me.

is this what my parents were up to on a Friday night? And they told me they were line dancing down the British Legion

We lived in an isolated part of Oxfordshire in a hamlet of around 15 houses located halfway down a hill. Directly north of the hamlet was a massive dark wood which was definitely haunted and that’s where they were going to take me when they sacrificed me, or took me to be possessed by the alien demon or whatever. My parents weren’t the only ones involved in this cult, everyone else who lived in this hamlet were also part of it. Mr Griggs opposite, Mrs Vernon next door. Even Mr and Mrs Howlett who walked their dog past my house every day.  However, I couldn’t be absolutely sure that any of this was true, I just had unfounded suspicions. A psychoanalyst would have a have a field day if they’d used the eight year old me as a case study.

There were other terrors to face, real terrors, such as the school bully and authoritarian teachers at the village primary school I attended. (step forward Kingham Primary School and particularly Mrs Anderson) so I couldn’t fully concentrate on my imagined terrors. As I said, I also doubted their validity.

By the time I was ten I eventually worked out that my parents weren’t Satanists and the tiny hamlet of Kingham Hill wasn’t populated by weird sect members. The school bully got moved to another class but Mrs Anderson was still a twat.

So, this is a pretty weird thing for a kid to imagine but I was a pretty weird kid and, some would say, I’m a pretty weird adult. I’ve always had an overactive imagination and I believe, as a child, you begin to identify what is real and what is not. This was one of those learning curves, I guess. My doubts about the validity of these hypotheses kept my behaviour in check; I never acted on these fears and tried to run away for home. I never of actively distrusted my parents to the point that affected our relationship abnormally. As far as I know they knew nothing about my paranoid fantasies. As an adult I’m not ‘coming to terms’ with it or ‘seeking closure’ because the experience wasn’t real.

These days I channel the same ‘what if’s’ into my writing and it gets pretty close to the knuckle sometimes using current realities I’ve twisted into fictions. The spark of the idea has to come from somewhere, so where the hell did this paranoid fantasy come from? How did I know of the existence of Satanist cults at the age of eight? Where did I get the idea of immediate family and a whole community being part of something that wished to harm or forcibly subsume me?

I dimly remember seeing the film The Devils Rain as a child. The plot runs like this: a man returns to his family to find out that they are all part of satanic cult. I don’t think my parents would have let me watch such a film at that age or let me stay up that late so as an explanation this doesn’t fit. There must have been some other stimuli to trigger this.

I think I’ve found it.

ah, there's the culprit!

I got the DVD Children of the Stones for Christmas. I watched it the other day and was quite surprised at what I saw. Children of the Stones is a TV series filmed in Avebury, the village built within the famous stone circle. Everyone in the village, apart from the protagonist and his father, are part of this cult The Happy Ones. There is one chilling scene where the protagonist stumbles upon the whole village standing on the village green holding hands singing at night.

Gotcha! So this is the guilty party. Children of the Stones was shown in 1977 and I remember watching it. I think that scene was the trigger. One year later I thought that my parents and the rest of the community were all in on something weird. Ironically, the TV series was shown at tea time, being a children’s television programme. The DVD has a 12 certificate.

I’m not saying that this should never have been shown. If I’d not seen this then something else would have triggered my paranoia. I watched Doctor Who every week, maybe I’d have believed my parents were Autons or something. I also believe these fantasies were by products of my real fears of school bullies and teachers.

The Rollright Stones - definitely a portal to another dimension

I grew up to be a normalish teenager and a normalish adult. My parents moved when I was 24 to Great Rollright, the village with the stone circle nearby. I think if they’d moved there when I was eight that really would have sent me over the edge. They’ve moved to a stone circle, they’re definitely going to sacrifice me/possess my soul/send me to the mother ship.

When I was in my twenties I asked my mother is she had ever been part of a Satanist cult when I was a child. She laughed.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘We were too busy working in the underground lab testing the subsonic paranoia machine for intended for use on children.’

Names have been changed for the purposes of anonymity.

(originally published at Paul's blog)

Thinner, reviewed by Donna Bond

As part of NSFWG member Mark West's "King For A Year" project, fellow member Donna Scott (as Donna Bond) has contributed a review of Stephen King's novel "Thinner".

The review can be read here.

Am I A Bestseller Fraud? by Tim C. Taylor

An insightful article from NSFWG member Tim C. Taylor

This blog post should have been easy.

Over Christmas and New Year 2014/15 I self-published two novels that were workshopped at Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group. The first one, in particular, was reshaped in response to workshop comments. In the US, UK, and Australia, the books quickly reached the #1 and #2 spots respectively in the military science fiction bestseller charts. Then they topped the space opera bestseller charts too. That’s not just the Kindle-only charts, but includes paperback, hardback, and audio books too.

I was ecstatic.

Like I said, this blog should have been easy. All I had to do was give a brief woo-hoo, and congratulate NSFWG on their help and our shared success. Job done. Back to writing the next book.

But I hesitated. Could I really say my books were bestsellers without embarrassing myself and the writers group? If I use the term ‘bestseller’ am I a fraud? After all, my books were exclusively available through Amazon. They didn’t appear in the ‘real’ bestseller lists you see in Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, and national newspapers. Seeing my books at the top of the Amazon charts, and seeing the sales figures come through so quickly that they were ticking up in real time — they were proud enough achievements. I don’t need to pretend I’d made it into the real bestseller charts. Like I said, I need to get on and write the next book in the series.

But, armed with actual sales figures for an Amazon-only book, I went looking at the mainstream bestseller charts to see how I compared with the big guys. What I learned left me utterly astonished. Now, I’ll say up front that I’m talking here about the categories assigned to my books: military science fiction and space opera. But in those subgenres, having started with the assumption that Amazon bestseller charts lacked the legitimacy of the real charts, I now realize I got that completely the wrong way around.

It is the charts produced through systems such as Nielsen Bookscan and publisher surveys that lack legitimacy.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s a fact to get you started.

In their 2014 end of the year reviews, the major publishers and their spokespeople have recently been touting the idea that eBook sales have stagnated. Yet the eBook sales statistics from Amazon aren’t counted when a Kindle book is sold, they come later from surveys of major publishers, and in a few cases from surveys of consumers. Or they don’t come at all!

Books sold by publishers who aren’t part of the survey are either ignored altogether, or their sales figures are extrapolated from publishers who are part of the survey.

Crucially, Amazon doesn’t share its sales figures. So if you buy a Kindle book, it normally only counts in industry statistics if it is published by a mainstream publisher. Since I self-publish, my books don’t count. And if you buy a book from a small publisher or self-publisher, your purchase doesn’t count in the statistics either.

But does that really make much difference to industry-wide pronouncements? After all, the major publishers have the book world tied up, don’t they?

Here’s a more honest statistic than anything you’ll hear through authoritative industry press releases. On 20th Jan 2015 (when I started writing this post) I checked all the books in the top20 of the amazon.com Kindle charts for the categories of military science fiction and space opera. I have little doubt (but no reliable statistics, which is the point of this article) that the amazon.com Kindle Store is the most important eBook retailer in the world, and by a long margin. For the statements of the major publishers about eBooks to have legitimacy, you would expect the vast majority of the Kindle titles on Amazon to be produced by the major publishers.

So how many of those titles in the top20 were from a major publisher? Go on, guess…

The answer is zero.

I looked at the space opera charts and got the same result. Not a single book in the top 20 was from mainstream publishers (unless you counted one that was from Amazon’s own imprint). Then I extended to the top 40. Not a single big publisher in the military sf top 40, and just one entry ("Ender’s Game") in space opera. Again, this is only my neck of the science fiction market, and these genres are probably an extreme case. Nonetheless, when the publishing industry tells you facts about eBook sales stagnating, bear in mind that in arriving at their figures, in most cases they are currently excluding every single one of the top20 bestselling Kindle books in military sf and space opera. [To be fair two eBooks in these top 20s did have an ISBN. That means their sales weren’t counted directly, or reported by the publisher (Amazon’s imprint, 47 North), but in one of the book industry surveys (BookStats), there would have been a crude attempt to extrapolate their sales. Respectable bestseller charts would still have ignored them.]

Now, I know I’m repeating myself, but I feel the need to point out that military science fiction is probably an extreme case, but the degree to which my genre is misrepresented by some industry statistics is jaw-dropping.

When they write their press statements about the state of the book industry, can you imagine the small print about methodology that the publisher organizations should have written?

In the case of military science fiction and space opera genres, we arrived at our eBook sales figures by excluding all bestselling Kindle titles, and will continue to ignore the buying habits of the vast majority of Amazon consumers, except on the rare occasions when they purchase a book published by one of our member publishing corporations. If the publisher decided to use an ISBN then we may attempt to guess sales figures by averaging every book sold by the publishers we talk to, and using that average to extrapolate the sales of all the publishers that we don’t talk to.

Getting the facts about how the various published bestseller charts are constructed is difficult or impossible to come by, because the details are often proprietary.  Some national newspapers still use the old method of surveying bookstores. In the UK and US, an organization called Nielsen has a point-of-sale system installed at a majority of traditional bookstores. It gives a fair idea of the relative sales of books traditional books sold through brick and mortar stores, but how can it report eBook sales when only a tiny proportion are bought from the old retailers?

Here in the UK, the ‘official’ charts are produced by a magazine called The Bookseller.  They take the Nielsen data for print books, and for eBooks they survey a panel of publishers. Those bestselling self-published Kindle eBooks aren’t on that panel. In the UK, when national newspapers and the BBC report on industry statistics, I expect that is the methodology used: ignore all self-published eBook sales.

The Bookseller’s charts explicitly exclude heavily discounted physical books and any eBooks under £2. A key retail price point for small and self-publishers through Amazon.co.uk (because it’s the minimum price to trigger a 70% royalty rate) is £1.99. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions…

Interestingly The Bookseller is about to change the rule that excludes the sub-£2 books. Is this an attempt to add legitimacy to their bestseller charts? The change came about because major publishers complained that some of their bestselling titles were occasionally on sub-£2 promotions, and they wanted those sales included in the bestseller charts. It seems bestseller charts are all about making money out of us by raising the profile of key titles. Nothing more.

This article isn’t an angry rant against the evils of the publishing cartel. I’m intrigued not angry. (Although I promise to get slightly vexed at the end). And what is intriguing me is the legitimacy of a slew of statistics.

Time for another statistic. For the first two weeks of January 2015, I have intimate knowledge of the Amazon.com bestseller charts for space opera and military science fiction, because I had two books race up the top20 to the #1 and #2 slots. Since then I’ve been drifting down. In other words I’ve got a shrewd idea of how to compare Amazon.com’s sales rank during that period with actual unit sales. It’s not precise, but it’s more accurate than any data possessed by Nielsen or the major publishers.

During those two weeks, for the amazon.com military science fiction top-20 I estimate the total unit sales of paperback + hardback + audio book + eBook for self- and independent publishers to be 10,000 books per day, of which a third were Kindle Unlimited borrows. For the top-20 amazon.com book sales from major publishers, I estimate an average of 100 per day. For space opera the majors fared better and there was one title that nearly reached the top-10. I estimate it sold an average of 200 per day over that period. What I haven’t done is count how many titles were in both charts. I’m going to estimate that about half were in both charts. Combine the two top-20 charts. That puts the major publishers averaging 300 sales per day over those two weeks, and self- and independents at 15,000.

In other words, the books that were counted in the ‘real’ bestseller charts were outsold by those excluded at a rate of roughly 50:1.

Up till this point I’ve considered this intriguing, but nothing more. Bestseller baubles are just so much froth. It’s interesting, but having fans who love, your books and customers who make purchases that put food on my family’s table — that’s more important.

Here’s the point where I get vexed. I’m now taking off my author’s hat and putting on my reader’s one. I have another interest in the bestseller charts: as a reader, like you. I’ve bought some of the books there because I’m a fan of the genre and enjoy reading.

It’s only natural to buy a book and want to see it do well in the charts. Just the same as you want your sports team to top their league, and your favorite band to get their album to the top of the music charts.

It’s like a vote. It’s not as important as a political election, but it feels like democracy in action.
It isn’t (at least I hope that’s not how our democracy really works!)

Most purchases I make are for eBooks and my most common price point is £1.99. They don’t count in my country’s bestseller charts. Sorry, pal, we don’t like your sort. Your vote doesn’t count. Now clear off!

If someone’s political vote in an election was ignored because they were black, or a woman, or gay, or expressed the wrong opinion or life choice… well, there would be hell to pay and quite right too.

Discounting someone’s ‘vote’ in a bestseller chart is infinitely more trivial than denying people political voting rights. All the same, it is irksome that the vote I express through my book purchases is ignored, that many of the authors I support and love are disqualified too. As I write this, my two new books have so far sold 25,000 copies. That’s thousands of individuals whose ‘vote’ was also disqualified.

Who is ‘they’ who disqualify the vast majority of the book-buying public in my genre? Unfortunately this is where my vexation dissipates because there isn’t a convenient villain.

Well, Amazon won’t share their sales data. I don’t blame them either; big data really is a key business asset, not to be given away lightly. I don’t blame the major publishers either for always trying to put a gloss on statistics to flatter their message. I held stock in a big publishing company until recently, and that’s precisely what I would want them to do. Nothing wrong there. Big publishers want to downplay the way in which self- and small-publishers have seized the market from them in some genres. I get that, although their statements about eBook statistics — the ones that forget to tell you that they don’t count all Kindle bestselling titles — well, that feels a little brazen, shall we say.

So there is no clear villain, and having journeyed through the tangled thicket of publishing ‘statistics’ in my genre, I can now happily go back to ignoring them as discredited, and having gotten an answer for the one question I asked in the first place.

Can I say with a straight face that the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group workshopped a #1 international bestseller in military science fiction, despite it only being sold through Amazon?

The answer is yes.

Turns out my wording was wrong. It’s a legitimate #1 not despite being an Amazon bestseller, but because it was an Amazon bestseller. The discovery I’ve made this week is that, in my neck of the industry at least, the Amazon bestseller charts are the only ones with any legitimacy whatsoever.

Further reading.
I recommend AuthorEarnings which takes a detailed analysis of Kindle books on amazon.com, applies surveyed data to map Amazon sales rank to estimated sales, and then presents interesting conclusions. Also, this quarter, is a lot on the subject I’ve been writing on: the legitimacy of official bestseller charts and other statistics.

Disclaimer: 
The statements made are based on a mixture of the author’s memory of Amazon bestseller charts combined with his actual sales statistics and bestseller rankings over that period. I might have failed to spot more traditionally published books in the lower reaches of the bestseller charts, but I don’t think so because I was studying them intently every day. I made a statement that self-publishers outsold major publishers by 50:1. If I’ve gotten my facts badly wrong, maybe it was only 10:1 (although it’s equally possible that it was greater than 50:1).

I don’t claim accuracy. I don’t need to because all I’m trying to do here is answer whether the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group can legitimately claim to have helped shape a bestseller. No one in the world actually has the data to state how many books were sold across all platforms in all formats, but on the way to answering my question, I stumbled across compelling-enough evidence that: (1) In my genres on Amazon, self- publishers outsold major publishers by a very large margin over this period, and (2) industry statistics on eBook sales come predominantly from publisher surveys, not retailer point-of-sale data, and so ignore most or all self-published titles, and (3) the first two points kind of go together powerfully.

And while we’re on the topic of being honest about statistics, let’s state the obvious. I’m only talking about a single 3-week period, because that is the period when I have good quality information about how many books were being sold by bestsellers in my genre. Better quality information, I might add, than the wider book-publishing industry. However, I studied the amazon.com bestseller charts for military science fiction on many occasions in 2014, and can state with utter conviction (though no statistics) that the top20 was dominated by self-publishers and Amazon’s own imprint, 47 North. Gut feel? For all Kindle military science fiction books sold through Amazon during 2014, I would be astonished if authors published by major publishers accounted for any more than 1% of those unit sales. On the basis of January 2015, that figure is probably closer to 0.1%.

Oh, yes, sometimes people say, but you’re only talking unit sales. Gross sales tell a different figure. During this period, your first book was on sale for 99 cents. That’s practically giving it away. You can’t seriously count that as a sale comparable with a $5.99 paperback.

Oh, yes I can. Gross sales don’t put food on the table: author earnings do. On a typical contract, an author with a mass market paperback selling at $5.99 will make maybe 35 cents per sale (Assuming 40%-45% is taken by retailer and/or distributor. Author earns 10%-15% of the remainder and pays out 15% of that to an agent). For a $4.99 eBook, I’m really not sure. Probably a little more, maybe as much as 60 cents. That’s a guess. My first book is 99 cents, but on average my earnings per sale were a lot more than the author with the $5.99 paperback and more than my guess of the $4.99 eBook too.

What about Kindle Unlimited book ‘sales’? This is Amazon’s new book subscription service: a Spotify for eBooks. I include those in my statistics, and in my genre they are very popular. Detractors might say they aren’t really sales at all. Each Kindle Unlimited borrow in December 2014 of my 99 cent eBook, that was read for at least 10% of its content, earned me $1.25. Compare that with the 35 cents the poor traditionally published author earns with a $5.99 paperback. So far this month, my first Human Legion book has had 3,613 borrows through Kindle Unlimited. Those subscribers will have paid at least $36,000 to Amazon for this month’s subscription (it costs $10 per month in the US and around $13.25 in the UK). That’s real hard-earned money from real book lovers. They may not be traditional sales, but they have already become an important part of the publishing industry, and earn authors (So far. I can only hope it continues…) considerably more than mass market paperback sales through major publishers. So, yes, I count Kindle Unlimited!



For more information on the books mentioned, check out Tim's website here

Characters Must Eat (part 3), by Ian Watson

After much meat and spuds (you can read these posts from Group Chairman Ian Watson here and here), a sweet...

Parmentier Potatoes
(with mince, cheese, white wine, milk, butter, oil...)

The Spanish conquerors of the Inca Empire introduced the potato into Europe in the 16th century, but it was a long road from there to chips and croquettes.  In fact until 1772 in France it was illegal to eat potatoes because potatoes were believed to cause leprosy.  Potatoes were food for pigs.  Only in poverty-stricken Ireland, out of all Europe, were potatoes generally eaten by people.  Around 1760 Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737 - 1813), a French army pharmacist, found himself a prisoner of war in Prussia, forced to eat potatoes... and he survived the experience in good health.

Back in Paris Parmentier researched the nutritional benefit of potatoes, then staged publicity stunts such as celebrity dinners (of potato dishes) and hiring armed guards for his potato patch but ordering the guards to accept bribes and also withdrawing the guards at night so that people could steal what was obviously of great value.  Thus did the potato enter the European menu.

Parmentier became Inspector General of the Health Service under Napoleon, inaugurating the first compulsory vaccinations against smallpox, and he was a pioneer investigator of refrigeration to preserve food, but his fame is inextricably linked with the potato, for which we should all be grateful.  To this day visitors to his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, place potatoes on it as a tribute, not even in the hope that he will cook them.

Romanoff Strawberries
(with vanilla ice cream, Grand Marnier, et cetera)

The original recipe for Strawberries Romanoff was created by August Escoffier when he was chef in charge at the posh Carlton Hotel, London, from 1899 to 1920—after Escoffier was dismissed from the de luxe Savoy Hotel along with the future founder of the equally luxurious Ritz Hotel (which created smoked haddock omelette for Arnold Bennett; never say this blog isn't literary) on account of huge thefts of wines and spirits and for accepting bribes from suppliers.   We might suppose that Escoffier named this dish in honour of the Russian royal family, but in fact Escoffier called it Strawberries "Americaine Style."  The dessert was then purloined and renamed in honour of himself by "Prince" Mike Romanoff (1890 - 1971), becoming a huge hit at Romanoff´s restaurant in Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, its fame soon spreading far.

This Romanoff, who claimed to be a secret son of Tsar Alexander III though actually born in Lithuania as Hershel Gezuzin, was a confidence man and impostor so charming and inventive that he truly became close friends with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and David Niven in a Hollywood where everyone knew that the Prince was fake and nobody cared if he ever really was a Colonel of Cossacks, or escaped deportation from the USA by swimming from Ellis Island through icy water, or perfected his British accent due to time in the UK´s high-security Broadmoor psychiatric hospital; and innumerable other exploits.  Strawberries Romanoff immortalises a great and genial personality.

Joyland, a review by Mark West

NSFWG member Mark West reviews "Joyland", which he considers to be Stephen King's return to top form.

 paperback cover by Glen Orbik

All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure.

It’s 1973 and Devin Jones is a 21-year-old college student, recently dumped by his long-term girlfriend (though still a virgin) and looking forward to working his summer vacation at the Joyland amusement park in North Carolina.  Over the summer and into the Autumn, he’ll meet new friends, a boy with a psychic gift and encounter the ghost of a murdered girl.

Told as a reminiscence by Devin in 2013 (“I’m in my sixties now, I’m a prostate cancer survivor, but I still want to know why I wasn’t good enough for Wendy Keegan”), this is what I would consider as prime King (and it’s the first book of his I’ve read in almost ten years).  It does take its time to get going (and the structure isn’t immediately clear) but as you read you quickly realise the pace works perfectly - we get to know his friends, the park and its people and history, the owner of the guesthouse, the area and the times (music plays a key part in that, but there’re plenty of pop culture references and there’s a lovely in-joke in the name of a travelling circus).  The characterisation is spot on and so deftly done you feel you know these people almost immediately.  From Devin, who we desperately want to see succeed (and shake off the thoughts of Wendy), to Erin Cook (Hollywood Girl) and Tom Kennedy, fellow summer workers who become a couple and life-long friends of Jones (though we later find out sad news about Tom), there’s never a false moment for any of them.  The secondary characters are just as well-drawn, springing to life with verve, like Emmalina Shoplaw who runs the guesthouse, Mr Easterbrook, the owner of Joyland, who dresses like a mortician and insists that the workers of Joyland are “here to sell fun” and Devin’s Dad, a quiet, widowed, purposeful man.  The park team - from Fred Dean, whose transformation from manager to worker is as much a surprise to us as it is for Devin to Lane Hardy, all tight-jeans and jaunty hat and rhyming couplets; from Eddie Parks a mean man who Devin saves and who maybe returns the favour, to Madame Fortuna, a Brooklyn native who channels Bela Lugosi to deliver her psychic readings.  It is she who tells Devin that he will meet a boy with a dog.

That leads us to Annie Ross and her son Michael, who has the gift of second-sight but is stricken with muscular dystrophy.  They live in a big house off the beach and whilst she doesn’t acknowledge Devin as he walks by on the way to work, the boy does.  When Devin helps him to fly his kite one day, they become friends and the gradual thawing of Annie to him is what gives this novel its heart - we come to understand why she is the way she is, we understand and empathise with the pain she feels watching her son die and we want to hold and comfort her as much as Devin does.  Their relationship, from that first meeting to the final page, is beautifully observed and as heart-warming as it is amusing.

The selling point (but not the real point) of the story - “Who dares enter the funhouse of fear?” - revolves around the fact that a young woman called Linda Gray was murdered in the Horror House ride (which Eddie Parks runs).  Madame Fortuna won’t enter it and Tom sees something in there that scares him, but Devin is intrigued and with help from Erin, he solves the crime and finally flushes out the “Carny Killer”.  I liked that angle, I enjoyed the detective part of it (though you’d be hard pressed to call it a crime novel), but that’s not what the book was about.  To me, “Joyland” is about the power of love and friendship (as a lot of King fiction is), it’s about the amusement park and a way of life that no longer really exists (and carny-speak, The Talk, is used a lot, shorthand such as ‘ride-jockeys’ for the operators, ‘rubes’ for punters and ‘points’ for pretty girls).  It’s about joy (Devin dresses up as Howie the Happy Hound, a role that other ‘greenies’ hate but he loves because of how the kids react to him) and the fun and simplicity of childhood but it’s also about loss (Wendy, Devin’s mum) and the way life often doesn’t go the way we want it to.  Stephen King, for me, is often at his best when dealing with nostalgia (“The Body” being absolutely key to that theory), telling a story that on the surface might be horror or mystery or crime when in fact it’s actually about coming of age and charting a rites of passage that speaks to most of us.

“Joyland” is a beautiful book, a well paced and gripping read, full of humanity and light and darkness and topped with an ending that made me cry.  If you only know Stephen King as a horror writer then you would be doing yourself a favour to discover this loving nod to life, to growing up and falling in love and, yes, to getting older.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

a map of Joyland, created for the hardback edition by Susan Hunt Yule

The hardback cover.  I'm a big fan of Robert McGinnis and whilst this perfectly serves the pulpy tradition of crime novels, it does include a bit of a spoiler.

this blog post originally appeared on Mark's site on 20/6/13

The holocaust that never happened

An article by NSFWG member Paul Melhuish

Channel 4 recently showed the series The 100. The premise being that 97 years ago life on Earth was wiped out by a nuclear holocaust but some humans sat it out in a space station orbiting the Earth. Now they’ve sent down a group of young criminals to investigate and see if the radiation count has dropped. What they find are mutant creatures and primitive tribes.

Watching this brought me back to the sort of stories I enjoyed in my youth. In the Eighties the threat of nuclear war was real. My childhood seemed to be spent watching Protect and Survive adverts shown on the news but when What-if-the-bomb-dropped? drama Threads was aired on BBC1 in 1984 the reality of nuclear war became clearer. Yes, it was a scary prospect but it was also kind of exiting. I went with the belief that it wouldn’t happen anyway. Well, it didn’t, did it.

The holocaust that never happened  played  huge role in the sci-fi literature, television programmes and films that I was watching at the time. Other apocalypses were possible such as mass blindness as seen in Day of the Triffids or a plague envisioned in Survivors but Nuclear War was the most probable and possible threat at the time.

One of my most enduring memories of holocaust fiction, apart from Threads, is the TV adaptation of  the novel by Robert C. O’Brian,  Z for Zachariah. A young girl is left alone in a Welsh valley that is somehow immune to radiation then a man arrives with plans to seed a new society. The Girl, Ann, understandably isn’t too keen to make babies with some beardy stranger so leaves taking his radiation suit with her.

The other holocaust story that I remember vividly is James Herbert’s Domain. The third instalment of his hugely popular Rats series. The bomb drops and the rats come out to have gnaw. The story follows a group of survivors as they make their way through a wrecked London. Also worth reading is Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.  America is nuked and an immortal force of evil walks the wasteland causing trouble. Think Stephen King’s The Stand but with a higher rad count. These are examples of apocalyptic fiction that describes a world just after the bomb had dropped. Fuel for the imagination seemed to come from trying to visualise life decades, or even centuries, after the holocaust.

So prevalent was the bomb that most sci-fi didn’t even need to mention the holocaust by name. Think of the end scene in Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston finds the statue of liberty on the shore and we all know what’s happened. Interestingly in the new Apes film it’s a global pandemic which nearly wipes us out, a possibly more relevant apocalypse for this day and age.

John Wyndham’s The Crysalids is set many years after the apocalypse. Humanity has reverted to theocracy and there are tribes of mutants out in the wastelands, banished by the religious ‘normal’ society. The religious society has the now nearly iconic phrase Thou Shall Watch for the Mutant.

By 1989 the iron curtain had collapsed. The threat of nuclear war decreased. Science fiction moved on and with the emergence of the digital age other concepts occupied sci-fi’s storylines such as virtual reality. However, the possibility of nuclear war never really went away.

In 2007 whilst at unit I showed by flatmates Threads. These guys were all in their early twenties and are too young to remember Protect and Survive or Maggie Thatcher. I thought they might find it cheesy and retro. By the end they were watching through their fingers, horrified. Of course, the nuclear threat it no less real today. The tragic events in Ukraine over the past few weeks have set the US and Russia at loggerheads again. In 2002 India and Pakistan were at the point of war, both countries are nuclear capable.

In The 100 it’s not made clear what caused the holocaust but as Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘You can’t dis-invent the bomb’. Perhaps it isn’t as forgotten as we think it is.

This article originally appeared on Paul's website here

Railgun recoil: Newton won’t be denied!, an article by Tim C. Taylor

In his last post for the blog, NSFWG member Tim C. Taylor wrote about the creep of technobabble into TV and movie Sci-Fi, and why he wanted more believability in my written fiction (which you can read here).  This time, he looks at more technology.

Back in the early 80s, I used to design ships as part of the game, Traveller. And then I designed how the elements of a multi-ship force would work together for the game expansion called Trillion Credit Squadron (anyone still play that?) Typical ship armaments included meson cannons, pulse lasers and railguns.

Science fiction is fast becoming science fact. It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s happening in my lifetime. One of those exotic theoretical space weapons, railguns, looks likely become the main medium-range ship weapon for the US Navy over the next 20 years. They are already planning how to retrofit existing ships with enough electrical power in readiness.

Armed with a whole load of real technical data on railguns, they were a pick for my weapons in the Human Legion universe. (A special thanks goes out to all those dads who filmed their children’s railgun science projects).

So, what is a railgun?

To make one, you take two parallel rails made from an electrical conductor (such as copper) and wire them up to a direct current supply. Place another conductor to touch both rails. This armature, as it’s called, must be able to move along the rails. When you supply the electrical power, a magnetic field is induced in the rails which pushes the armature along until it falls off the end of the rails, which breaks the electrical circuit.

In a school science project, the rails might be strips of aluminum foil taped to a board and the armature a steel bar that gently rolls along the board.

Real ones look might use a conducting sabot for the armature. A sabot is a jacket that wraps around a shell or bullet, enabling it to be fired more effectively. Search the ground after one of the fight scenes in my Human Legion books and you will be wading through spent sabot casings.

Anyway, back to Traveller and railguns. When I was designing heavy cruisers after school back in the 80s I used to imagine that when a railgun fired you would hear a hum of power build up followed by a whoosh. No bang. I expected it was recoilless too. Maybe that was because there was no explosive charge. With no exploding gases required to push the projectile along a barrel, there would be no recoil pushing back on the gun breech. Right?

Turns out I was wrong on all counts. It seems obvious to me now, but I knew a lot less physics when I was 13, and my misconceptions have stuck with me,

If you watch videos of real railgun test firings [such as this US Navy video below] there is a big bang when it fires. Lots of sound and lots of light. That’s what happens when you suddenly discharge a huge amount of power in an enclosed space, but it is not a chemical explosion as with conventional munitions. You don’t have all those hot, expanding gases pushing back against the breech. So does a railgun have less recoil than a conventional gun?


The answer is that it has exactly the same recoil.

Take a projectile of the same mass and push it out of a barrel at the same muzzle velocity and it will push back on the breech with the same recoil force. Whether that projectile is propelled by a chemical explosion or by electrical repulsion makes absolutely no difference. (Actually, I am simplifying slightly — recoil isn’t all felt in one go. See http://www.positiveshooting.com/RecoilMain.html.)

It’s all to do with the law of conservation of momentum. It’s the same law that makes rockets fly into space. Also… It’s a basic law of the universe that you can’t get around by waving a technobabble phrase.

So in going for believability, conservation of momentum is something I can’t ignore.

The Universe is a Conservative Place

There are many conservation laws of the Universe. These say that if can draw a ring a bunch of stuff (the technical term for this is a ‘system’) and promise not to influence that system from the outside, then a host of basic properties of that system must stay the same.

The law we’re interested in here is conservation of (linear) momentum.

What’s a system? Well, a railgun is one, the balls on a pool table are nearly another, but we’re going to start with a bomb.  I’m talking about the kind of bomb beloved of terrorists and revolutionaries of the late 19th century. The kind that somehow has become a thing of amusement today.  That bomb is a system.  We’ve lit the fuse. It’s going to blow, so you’d better take cover.

BANG!

Bits of bomb casing fly out in all directions.  Each fragment has mass and velocity. Momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, so each fragment has momentum.  There are dozens of fragments, each with its own momentum. There’s a whole lot of momentum going on here. Except…

Hold on a moment!

Conservation of momentum says that the momentum of our bomb system must not change unless we act on that system from the outside. And to start with, the bomb is at rest. Its momentum is zero.

So the momentum must still be zero after the explosion.

Yet the fragments are not at rest.

The answer to our conundrum is that momentum is mass times velocity. And velocity is not the same as speed: velocity always has a direction.

Back to our bomb. If we add up the momentum of all the exploding fragments, we will see them start to cancel out. For example, if we have a fragment flying out to the left side of the page and a fragment of equal mass and speed going right, then the combined momentum of those two parts is zero.

And that’s what we get with our bomb system. The momentum starts off as zero, and after the explosion the net momentum of the system remains zero at all times, even though individual parts of our system do acquire momentum.

Now let’s move to railguns…

BTW: if the bomb starts off on the floor, then the ground will push back on the bomb fragments, interacting with our system. So just imagine the bomb is actually in outer space and then it really is isolated from any external force.

Consider all the parts of our railgun to be one system, just as we did earlier with the bomb. That’s the breech, barrel, projectile, capacitors to store electrical charge, sabot, the firing button and anything else we need.

Now assume the gun is at rest. That means the momentum of our system is zero.

We press the firing button.

The result is something like this:


We know what’s happening here because we’ve just seen that with our bomb.

The projectile flies out with huge momentum.

Now, if the railgun system was as truly isolated as our bomb (let’s assume floating in deep space) then the gun would move backward with sufficient speed to cancel out the momentum of the projectile. It will leave net momentum as zero (which is what rocket engines do).

The cue ball hits, knocking balls everywhere. But the net momentum stays (very nearly) the same

A practical railgun fired on a planet’s surface isn’t an isolated system, though. It doesn’t fly backward. Something pushes back very hard to cancel out the momentum of the projectile.

That’s what recoil really is. It’s the practical implication of the gun trying to fly backward with an equal and opposite momentum to the projectile.

Or, if you like, it’s our way of defining our gun system so that it is not in isolation. We add a gun carriage, tripod, or a rifleman, Navy ship, or some other mechanism that is ultimately braced against the Earth’s surface.

Recoil is complicated and we can engineer tricks to manage recoil, but we can’t change the law of conservation of momentum. Which is why my teenage idea of spaceship railguns was wrong, and why the recoil force acting on the breech of a railgun is exactly the same as for a conventional (chemical propellant) gun firing a projectile of the same mass and velocity.

BTW: Imagine our railgun is mounted on a spaceship or space station. That’s a very different proposition. There’s no planet to push back against to resist the recoil. The spacecraft’s momentum will change to cancel out the momentum of the projectile.

In my Human Legion books, I’m after believability rather than science lessons. So I wanted to learn more about the practical experience of recoil, and design some of that into weapons such as the standard Marine weapon, the SA-71 carbine.

Designers of real-life rifles, for example, can lessen and use the recoil by diverting expanding gases to expel the spent round and chamber the next one. But if the gun system is not to fly backward something must still push hard against the breech.

With a rifle, that would traditionally be the firer’s shoulder.

And it’s important we get this bracing right, because it is accurate bullets that kill the enemy, not volume of fire. And if the firer can’t control the recoil, they can’t fire accurately. (The very earliest siege cannon teams knew this better than anyone: the recoil from each fire would damage the gun carriage, meaning they had to rebuild it each time. Two shots a day was a respectable rate of fire)

One of the weapons experts I consulted was my father. During the 50s, he faced off against the Russians in the Cold War. The rifle he used was the First World War issue .303 Lee-Enfield. You quickly learned how to hold the Lee-Enfield properly, he told me, because even when held correctly, every time you fired, it hurt!

He much preferred the Bren gun, a light machine gun design from the 1930s that he qualified for as a marksman (I think light might be better called ‘portable’ — they weren’t light if you carried one any distance). He said that when braced on its bipod, you couldn’t feel the recoil, and this helped to make it an extremely accurate weapon. He could put a bullet through a mug at 100 yards every time. (I think his eyesight was better back in the 50s).

The Bren used gas venting, springs, and other clever tricks to reduce the experience of recoil to near zero. The law of conservation of momentum still holds for the Bren, but if they could reduce the recoil experience so much in the 1930s, they can certainly do much better centuries later in my Human Legion books.

So there you have my journey through both railgun physics and a little practical understanding of recoil.

The SA-71 carbine is the standard personal weapon of the Human Legion, and their predecessor/ rivals, the Human Marine Corps, My starting point for its design was the Bren Gun. But the Bren Gun wasn’t designed for space combat, compatibility with stealth suits, and carrying an immense electrical charge. So, having paid homage to the law of conservation of momentum, when working out these other features, I allowed myself a little more flexibility.

And that is what I like other writers to be doing. By limiting the techno-babble, and with at least an acknowledgement of real-life physics, as a reader I’m much more ready to go with the flow of all the more fanciful future technology.

I’m happy to report that having read plenty of military sci-fi this past year, other authors are doing us proud. In fact, believability in future weapons and, to some degree, combat tactics, has been greatly improved by the introduction of so many self-published books.

To say amateurs are beating the pros seems strange, but I think it is because so many new self-published writers have military backgrounds, or go do their research first.

Mind you, there is still a tendency for spaceship lasers to have range limitations that make no sense (the effective range of lasers in vacuum is determined by diffraction). And Marines of the far future still tend to carry bolt-action rifles.

But that’s just minor niggles.

Whether you’re reading, writing or both: military science fiction is a great place to be right now.


This article originally appeared, in two parts, at Tim's website which can be found here

BSFA Awards Deadline Approaches…

a message from NSFWG member Donna Scott, on behalf of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA)

If you're a member of the BFSA, you are eligible to nominate for the BSFA Awards.  This is a membership only nominations system and these are your Awards..

I am writing now to ask you to raise awareness that the nominations period closes on 31st January.

The BSFA committee met in December and discussed our objectives with the award.  We want the BSFA Award (and the BSFA itself) to represent the full range of the genre and the diversity of talent and ability behind those working across the spectrum of short fiction, novels, art and nonfiction. Our starting point is to make sure that the suggestions list is as complete and representative of the best work as possible.

Please consider using your nominations.  You’ll see that this year we’ve asked people to put forward four nominations per category for the Awards and then click on this link to add to the recommendations section as well.

This is designed to promote as many authors and artists as possible.

If our Awards are going to reflect the best in SF published in Britain in 2014, then we need members to actively help to promote that quality. We hope you will support our aims.

It could well be that many of our members are biding their time, but we’d really like to hear from you. Everyone is just as qualified as everyone else to make their nominations.

Lastly, for your information, the rules are:

Nominations are restricted to four per category.

Nominations shall open in October each year and run to January 31st.
A minimum of three nominations will be required for a work to be
included on the ballot; if there are fewer than three works achieving
this level of support, the category will not be awarded.
You may not make multiple nominations for a single work.
Please do not nominate your own work.
Find out more about how to nominate here:

The deadline for nominations is 31st January 2015.

* * *

The BSFA was initiated by a group of fans in 1958, and was soon established and run as an official national body by readers, authors, booksellers and publishers with the aim of appreciating and encouraging science fiction in every form.  Many famous authors, critics, editors and publishers have been members through its history and many more continue to be today. Being a member of the BSFA puts you in touch with like-minded people across the country and beyond; whilst linking you to a rich tradition and enabling you to contribute to a vibrant future.

Characters Must Eat (part 2), by Ian Watson

- the second article on food from Group Chairman Ian Watson, following his popular post last November (which you can find here)

Following on from Napoleon's famous chicken, we have Napoleon's nemesis putting in the boot...

Beef Wellington
According to a British Earl memorialising 20 years of conversations with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769 - 1852), Wellington´s favourite meat was mutton, not beef; and when at war he often notoriously only ate cold meat and bread (however, the Sandwich had already been christened...) so attaching the name of the commander who beat Napoleon at Waterloo to beef in puff pastry may have played a victorious British trump to Napoleon´s propagandist Chicken Marengo—a robust rosbif reply to the stylish caprices of French cuisine even though it stole an existing French filet de bœuf en croûte.

After service in India, Wellesley rose to prominence during the campaign against Napoleon in Portugal and Spain, became British ambassador in Paris (and the first Duke of Wellington) following Napoleon´s fall, then finally put paid to Napoleon in 1815 with Prussian help after the escape from Elba.  Wellington became one of the few Prime Ministers to fight a duel while in office, and famously responded to a greedy prospective publisher of memoirs by a former mistress with: "Publish and be damned!"  Wellington certainly devised the boot named after him, and sliced Beef Wellington can somewhat resemble a battlefield amputation of a booted leg.  Like Chicken Marengo its contents can vary—to salmon, to sausagemeat, and to lamb which would probably have pleased the "Iron Duke" best.

Which we follow with beef completely uncooked and unbooted in the form of:

Carpaccio
During the 1920s the manager of the fashionable Hotel Europa in Venice encouraged his waiter Giuseppe Cipriani to become a barman, since Giuseppe was good with languages and with people.  Thus Giuseppe became well acquainted with a young man from Boston, Harry Pickering, who was in Venice with his aunt, trying to overcome alcoholism—mainly by spending time in the hotel bar.  However, Harry quarreled with his aunt and she left Italy, taking her cheque book with her.  Giuseppe took the risk of lending Harry 10,000 Lire ($5000 at the time).  In 1931 surprisingly Harry reappeared and repayed Giuseppe 50,000 Lire, so that Giuseppe could open his own bar, for which "Harry´s Bar" might be a good name.

Giuseppe converted part of a rope warehouse, at the end of a cul-de-sac so that only select clients would patronise it, not just passers-by; and soon the guest book held the signatures of Toscanini, Marconi, Charlie Chaplin amongst many of the rich and famous, while habitué Hemingway boosted Harry´s Bar in his writings.  In 1950 Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo stopped by and told Giuseppe that her doctor wouldn´t allow her to eat cooked meat.  So Giuseppe elegantly served thinly sliced raw beef, and named the dish after the Venetian painter Vittorio Carpaccio (1465 - 1525), since Giuseppe had just seen a major exhibition and been struck by Carpaccio´s fondness for the colour red in his exquisitely detailed paintings.

Happy New Year!