Hysterical raisins: The ISBN

In the United States, ISBNs are issued exclusively by R. R. Bowker, a private company that used to be best known for publishing Books in Print. Their prices are heavily skewed in favour of large publishers: a single ISBN costs $125, a block of 10 $250, but if you are buying thousands, you can get them for as little as $1 each. (By way of contrast, in Canada ISBNs are issued by a government agency, and you can get them for free — if you can navigate the website, which is bureaucratic beyond the dreams of Byzantines.)

A certain Mark inquires, in a comment at The Passive Voice, why this private-sector monopoly is allowed to continue:

What’s wrong with letting a governmental agency register these numbers for free? They don’t charge for Social Security Numbers. Why ISBNs?

My response:

Why ISBNs?

Because, my dear fellow, it’s 1970. Computers are massively expensive beasts, mostly owned by government agencies, universities, and big businesses. There is no way for a member of the general public to get direct access to a computer — thank goodness! Imagine the damage they might do.

So if we set up a Federal agency to hand out ISBNs, we would need to spend millions on yet another IBM mainframe to handle the data, and then we’d need to hire dozens of technicians to run the mainframe, and scores of clerks to handle paper applications from publishers, and a battalion of bureaucrats to manage the technicians and the clerks. And you know there’s no money for that in the budget — not in this economy, or in this political climate — not to benefit a parcel of big New York publishers who can easily pay the cost themselves.

Instead, it will be far better to let the private sector handle it, and charge the cost to the publishers by selling them the ISBNs. And since this is Washington, and 1970, we’ll make the arrangement permanent. Because after all, everything has already been invented. Hasn’t it?

THE END OF EARTH AND SKY: Free at Amazon, March 12–16

Starting Tuesday, March 12, The End of Earth and Sky will be available for free at Amazon stores worldwide. Please do check it out if you haven’t yet — and spread the word! Blog about it, review it, let your friends know it’s free.

The promotion ends at midnight Pacific time, Saturday, March 16.

Paul Johnson on Auguste Comte’s prose style

Comte . . . has some claims to be considered the worst writer who ever lived, and his works read just as badly, if not more so, in French as in translation. In 1824, in reply to criticism, he insisted that style was of no importance. He said he wrote ‘scientifically’. Later, however, he laid down rules of style: no sentence longer than five lines of print; each paragraph to have no more than seven sentences; all books to have seven chapters; each chapter to have three parts and each part seven sections; each section must have a lead paragraph of seven sentences, followed by three paragraphs of five sentences each.

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern

Here, over a century before the New Criticism was ever thought of, we see the ultimate and sterile issue of the ‘sentence cult’. Once you consider a book merely as a ‘text’ made up of syntactic units, rather than a story or discourse made up of incidents and ideas, the idea will irresistibly suggest itself that literature consists solely of the manipulation of syntax, and has nothing to do with content.

A perfect book, according to Comte’s rules, contains exactly seven chapters, 21 ‘parts’, 147 ‘sections’, 588 paragraphs, 3,234 sentences, and therefore, not more than 16,170 lines of print. It need not be about anything at all. Indeed, it will help if it is not: for if you actually had something to say, you might be tempted to use an incorrect number of sentences to say it.

Patricia C. Wrede & Marie Brennan on epics

My own essai on managing the length of epic fantasy, ‘Zeno’s mountains’, appears to have incited Marie Brennan to write a piece of her own: ‘How to write a long fantasy series’. This, in turn, inspired Patricia C. Wrede to write a two-part essay on ‘preventing epic bloat’: ‘Epics, part 1’ and ‘Epics, part 2’. If you are interested in epic fantasy and the writing techniques that pertain to it, I can recommend them all.

(Mary Catelli has also been good enough to leave a comment to the second part of Ms. Wrede’s essay, pointing the way back to ‘Zeno’s mountains’. I thank her for her thoughtfulness, and hope that some of Ms. Wrede’s readers may enjoy my little screed, in the brief time that remains to us. You see, closing a chain of links so early, by pointing back to the first URL in the chain, could cause the entire space-time continuum to collapse on itself. Or at least the Internet. You have been warned. By the time I get to say ‘I told you so’, it will be too late.)

Reading too damned much—

—or at least, too many bits and pieces of books in an unfocused way.

At the moment, I want to quote a bit from Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, never you mind why, and I’m not sure where my copy is. It is not in my bookcases, at any rate. I went looking for it in my bedroom, and put away seventeen of the random books lying on the floor. There are still books on the bedroom floor, and I have not found the one I am looking for yet.

Sometimes I really annoy me.

Heinlein on literary snobs

A small further illustration in support of my thesis in ‘Why are dragons afraid of Americans?’:

In 1949, Robert A. Heinlein’s third juvenile SF novel, Red Planet, was summarily rejected by Alice Dalgliesh, his editor at Scribner’s. The tone of the rejection quite justifiably sent him into a fury. Here is an excerpt from a letter Heinlein wrote to his agent, Lurton Blassingame, on March 4, 1949: [Read more…]

A reply to S. Dorman

In my recent essai, ‘Why are dragons afraid of Americans?’, I made one or two passing references to Utopian Socialism. S. Dorman (cinda-cite on LiveJournal) writes the following comment:

it feels ungrateful of me not to mention…for many the misery–gone! but it’s back now. so unions?–flawed but needed again. there is no utopia, but people tend to work toward it personally, for familial reasons–when they are working.

I don’t normally write about explicitly political matters here, but when I attempted to reply on LiveJournal, I found that I had run over the limit for comments; so I beg indulgence of you all, and ask those not interested not to click on the link below, and not to bother with the remainder of this post. [Read more…]

Characterization by M. T.

I called upon Dr. Ellis with the air of a man who would create the impression that he is not so much of an ass as he looks.

—Mark Twain, ‘Letter from Steamboat Springs’ (1863)

Replying to a rejection slip

The correct etiquette, as demonstrated by Dylan Moran:

‘To do it with a flugelhorn was a stroke of genius.’

Gene Wolfe on the realism of fantasy

In an interview in Clarkesworld, Gene Wolfe was asked why his fantasy seemed ‘much truer to reality, truer to what we humans experience in this life than most of what passes for realistic, mainstream fiction’. His reply:

Because fantasy is nearer the truth, that’s all. Realistic fiction is typically about a married couple, both college teachers. He’s cheating on her with a student, so she cheats on him with whoever’s handy. Angst abounds. How true is that story for the bulk of humankind? Realistic fiction leaves out far, far too much. How old is realistic fiction? How old is fantasy?