Sales Report
I have managed to make two more sales, one to the unsinkable Mike Allen, and the other to the well-read and well-liked Jonathan Strahan of the Antipodes.
Just today I saw, read, corrected, and returned the galleys for CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3. It includes ‘Murder in Metachronopolis’ which is my attempt to do a Keith Laumer DINOSAUR BEACH-ish time-paradox story, which, because it is me writing it, goes into the moral philosophy behind time travel, in addition to gunfights between cataphracts, musketeers and a hard-boiled private eye. I think the private eye gets slapped in the face by the sultry dame in at least two timelines.
Mr. Strahan is putting together ENGINEERING INFINITY, an original hard SF anthology for Solaris Books, due out in 2011. To him I sold ‘Judgment Eve’, a retelling of Byron’s play HEAVEN AND EARTH, which in turn is a retelling of the story of the flood of Noah, but in inimitable Bryonesque fashion, he makes the fallen angels in love with the daughters of Eve the good guys, or, at least, the romantically doom-defiant protagonists. With considerably less poetry that his, I set the story in a post-nanotechnological future, where the star-creatures concern for the Dolphins, who are the legal owners of the Earth, requires they submerge the continents of man in a general deluge, for the benefit of the Dolphins, increasing their real estate.
My question is why other publishers do things the old fashioned way, on paper, and send me corrections on paper, dull and motionless paper which cannot be searched or cut-and-replaced. Whenever an over-zealous politically-correctoid intern marks each and every instance of "he" with "he or she" and changes "Manly" to "Humanly" and changes "A.D." to "C.E." and commits other acts of anti-linguistic atrosity that send me into a Harlanellisonian ire, I must with red pencil, with aching fingers and with tear-weary eyes track down each and every instance of the wickedness done my poor and innocent manuscript, write ‘STET’ in rage-trembling letters.
How long must we endure the tyranny of dead trees? Are we not living in the Third Millenium of the Christian Era? The year 2000 is in the past, compared to us! Did not Ben Bova predict all this things in his prophetic novel CYBERBOOKS (which, ironically, is not available in Kindle)?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
