HiLoBrow.com has announced the launch of HiLo Books, an imprint dedicated to what they call Radium Age Science Fiction – because, after all, what the genre needs is more labels. By "Radium Age" they mean science fiction written between the years of 1904 and 1933, bounded on the one hand by the scientific romances of Jules Verne, Edgar Alan Poe, and H. G. Wells, and on the other (the upper?) hand by the Golden Age works of writers like Asimov and his contemporaries.

I have a problem with labels. Still, since HiLoBrow is effectively creating a brand I can understand why they’d want to find some label to distinguish it from everything it’s not.

The lineup of releases for 2012 is a pretty promising one – there’s Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; taken together, these show a united front of mainstream writers from the period who each experimented with speculative fiction.

If it all sounds a little bit like someone who’s desperate to be taken seriously, I expect that’s fine. A series like this exists in part to draw new readers into the scary, nerdy depths of science fiction in a way that seems comfortable, and even respectable .

What I can’t understand, though, is the books’ covers. They look like something out of the ranks of the worst of Amazon’s self-published novels. It’s especially confusing because the folks at HiLoBrow certainly know what good book covers look like, either for these same works or for their own. Their earlier Wage Slave’s Glossary has a handsome cover by Seth, and they’ve showcased a beautiful gallery of period book covers including this lovely one for With the Night Mail.

So there’s no question that they know that books can be beautiful. I don’t understand why they want to publish ones that are pretty much the opposite.

This led me to wonder whether these books aren’t the slapped together Amazonian things they resemble; and trying to answer that question led me right down the rabbit hole.

First, HiLoBooks has a distributor for its books. So there can’t be much doubt that there will be a warehouse of their books someplace – PGW also handles Archaia Studio Press, Nolo Press, Cricket Books, and plenty of other familiar independent and small press publishers. It sounds like we ought to be safe from some of the self-published horrors at Amazon (full disclosure: I’m also self-published, though I hope not horribly, at Amazon)

Second, HiLoBooks – according to their press release – will be an imprint of ‘Cursor, Richard Nash’s “publishing platform of the future”.’ Since a visit to the Cursor web site was completely uninformative I dug deeper, to find Nash’s talk at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum. In this talk (""Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships") Nash admits more than once that he’s speaking in very abstract terms. Those terms are in fact so abstract that at the end of the presentation I still had no idea what Cursor was supposed to be.

You’ll see in the talk that Publishing 3.0 (more labels!) is supposed to be an upgrade for the role of publishers in which books themselves become just one aspect of the relationship between readers and writers; in which that relationship has now become the focus of publishing, since so many large and small interactions within that community – including the sale of books – can be sources of profit for a publisher.

But if, like me, you’re left scratching your head and wondering first, what that means, and second, why a publisher deserves to monetize every aspect of the relationship between authors and their audience, well, your head is just going to get scraped bare from all the scratching. The answer isn’t in there. The subtitle of the talk is "From Gatekeeping to Partnerships", but it sounds more like "From Gatekeeping to Super-Gatekeeping".

Like the music industry, the book publishing industry probably feels as though it’s besieged by new technologies and the uses we find for them. Nash’s "Publishing 3.0" seems to be a response that’s in direct opposition to the way things are headed. By "the way things are headed", I mean that we seem to be on the verge of a world where there are no gatekeepers; where, for better or worse, artists are left to deal directly with the community. This requires marketing, which is one of the traditional roles of a publisher; but it’s by no means certain that publishers will be the ones doing that marketing. The "Publishing 3.0" of Cursor looks like a plan to establish a whole new level of gatekeeping in which every interaction between writers and their audience is owned by the publisher. That’s why I called it "Super-Gatekeeping".

What would publishers bring to the table, to make that look like a good deal for the writers and their readers?

There is just the glimmer of an answer – to half that question, anyway – in a post at Nash’s own blog.

For writers…

No more life-of-the-copyright contracts.

Instead: three year contracts.

Yup, from a contract that locks you in till seventy years after you’re dead, to a three year contract. Renewable annually thereafter. Which means after three years you can walk. Or stay, but stick it to us for better royalties because there’s gonna be a movie. Or stay with us because with all the additional formats and revenue opportunities we’re creating above and beyond what any publisher has to offer, you’re making more money than ever before.

This seems to translate to "We will own every cell in your body, but only for a little while". It doesn’t take too long a trek down memory lane to recall how many writers and artists were willing to do original work for hire just because they had to and how this sometimes left them excluded from very lucrative extensions to their work (Siegel and Shuster, or Jack Kirby, are the obvious examples in comics publishing). So in a Cursorized world, maybe creators would figure that assigning a publisher complete and total ownership – which might be temporary – is the price of doing business.

Nash’s talk establishes some comfy small press credentials (starting a publishing company during the night shift at Kinko’s) but the end product seems like something out of a dystopian novel. I don’t mean that in a good way, if you were wondering.

And with "dystopian novel", I seem to have come full circle and landed on the back of HiLoBooks. I wish them well, especially if they didn’t really mean for us to believe in those book covers. But I’m not sure about the company they’ve chosen to keep. I suppose that (their authors being dead, after all) one half of my misgivings about Cursor are unfounded in HiLo’s case. That leaves a not inconsiderable amount of discomfort, though.

 
 
So The Lair of the Clockwork Book is due to finish its run at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual sometime in April, if I can do the math – which I’ve often shown I can’t – and so this week I’m thinking about its print version.

In fact, I’m working on the print version. I’ve got over 50 pages laid out more or less beautifully, so far.

This is a real joy, compared to the layout for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. The interactive stories have a lot of constraints on page layouts so there’s very little room for the words to breathe. When its sequel is ready, I will probably do a second edition of Brain Thieves because I can see now how I can make some improvements.

But back to The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It is shaping up so very nicely that I’m thinking again about a Kickstarter promotion for a limited edition hardcover, in addition to the softcover book I’ve been planning all along. I think it’d make a very nice little book, with a foil stamped spine and front cover under its stylish dust jacket. The idea’s really growing on me. It would be quite expensive, which is why I mentioned Kickstarter just above.

One ingredient for a successful Kickstarter campaign is an attainable goal. Realistically I can’t be said to have a large, enthusiastic crowd of fans. (No, you’re not in Doctor Cyclops territory or anything, but… you know.) So what I’m thinking about is a very small limited edition hardcover – probably just 100 copies – with any excess funding going to a larger, unnumbered version of the same hardcover book.

There’s even more math involved in planning a Kickstarter campaign and its rewards… so who knows exactly how this would pan out. But that’s what I’m considering.

If I go forward with this it’ll need to start pretty soon. I don’t want to slow down the launch of the softcover book (in March?) if I can help it. Still, the Kickstarter campaign would need its own video, promotions, and a surprising amount of time and attention – judging by my last one.

Time? Attention? I’m not sure where I left those, come to think of it. But it would be so cool…..

Yes. There will be tentacles.

The CD packaging project I mentioned earlier has been on hiatus through the holidays – until all its text has been massaged and tickled to perfection – so in the meantime I’ve been working away at the future illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. By the time I have to switch back to the CD I hope to have lots of pages ready for you in the buffer. Well, I say lots; there are already enough illustrations done to see you through sometime in February, but I want as many done as I can manage by the time I have to switch projects again because that Clockwork Book buffer is an unforgiving beast… and these are mostly pretty challenging illustrations.

With all of that on my plate I haven’t had a chance to work on the serial that will follow The Lair of the Clockwork Book. In fact I’m so disappointed with my progress on the other story – Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – that I’m certain that something is going to have to change in the near future; I’m just not positive exactly what is going to change, and how, or when. It’s a mystery.

I’m sure we’ll all find out what that means, eventually. But until then… at least we have tentacles.

Badass Digest has dug up the very first appearance of Buck Rogers on the movie screen in a short film produced for the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair that you can now view in all its rough-hewn glory.

Notable is the space battle, featuring bunches of miniatures that could just be the same toy rocket ships that were part of the Buck Rogers merchandising empire.

Here we see Doctor Huer, musing at some (interminable) length about the mystery behind the attack of the Tiger Men of Mars.

I think there may be a couple of mistakes in the accompanying text – for example, the Just Imagine rocket ship was reused in the Flash Gordon serials, and I can’t think of any sets or miniatures from that film that showed up in Buck Rogers. Though admittedly, I might also be wrong. It’s certainly true that all of these serials recycled some of the same sets and costumes that were warehoused and rented out after the collapse of the silent epics of the twenties.

It’s the space battle that really stands out here: I was amused to find the same grinding propeller sound effects for the rockets that we heard a few years later in the serial – or was that Doctor Huer’s cosmic television tuner? – but all in all they didn’t do badly for a low budget effort from 1933.

The cynical among you might call it “The most stupendous animatic of all time!” but – as can happen – the cynical among you would have gotten it wrong.

That’s because Doctor Professor’s Thesis of Evil is meant to be a motion graphics film: it’s not an approximation of a full motion movie. I’ve mentioned this project before and just as I did then I have to stress how the excellent lighting and artful use of motion graphics make Doctor Professor a real treat to watch. The filmmakers chose a limited medium and then they just plain hammered on those limitations until they’d turned them into strengths. Which is, after all, what you need to do.

I missed the announcement that the film was complete, in early December. Unfortunately I’m also missing the finished film – it’s off on its adventure at the film festivals. So if you happen to be in Norway on January 17-22 you ought to do what I’d do, which is to hike over to the Tromsø International Film Festival and catch Doctor Professor’s screening there. It’s already been shown at the Helsinki Short Film Festival and, following that festival’s first showing, in theaters across Finland. But I guess we both missed that.

In the meantime, enjoy this teaser trailer. There’s another one over at Doctor Professor’s Web Site of Infamy, which is a name I just made up.