Author Archive: jsomers

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.

The Decline and Fall of Quality

Author: December 30, 2008

Sometimes the advance of technology that is leading us inexorably towards a Skiffy Future (flying cars! face transplants! digital monies!) isn’t all that great. Take, for example, digital music. Most of us know that the popular MP3 format for digital audio is not the greatest as far as quality goes – it is, after all, a compression algorithm that takes the huge tracks you find on a CD and makes them small enough to be easily transmitted over Internet connections or to be stored in mass quantities on tiny handheld devices. The advantages of such a format are obvious to all of us – hell, not only is every CD I own residing on my hard drive as MP3s, every cassette tape I own is also sitting there as MP3s. Everyone loves MP3s exactly because they are portable and infinitely copyable.

At a price, of course: The MP3 format, I am told, is not so hot when it comes to audio quality. It’s compressed, after all, and that means that data that sits comfortably on a CD or in a FLAC file gets squeezed in. Which is all well and good if you’re taking a pristine, uncompressed format like a CD and making personal files for yourself – if you’re corrupting your music for portability’s sake, that’s on you. But now we hear that the music industry is mixing thier songs specifically for MP3 (this via BoingBoing via Slashdot), because they know that everyone is just going to rip the songs into that format anyway, and this means the source data on your CD is going to be sucky to begin with.

In other words, the advance of technology has ruined the technical quality of your audio. And you know what? I don’t care.

I have what Scientists of the Future call Tin Ears. My friends mock me for the large sampling of 96Kbs MP3 files I have in my collection, most made long ago before I clearly understood the process, yet I can’t be bothered to re-rip them into better quality, because, frankly, I can’t tell much difference. Which puts me in a quandary: On the one hand, if nothing is done our future will be a dystopia filled with tinny highs and muddy lows. On the other, I won’t be able to tell the difference personally, and it’s not like there isn’t a good trade off here. Personally, even if I could tell the difference between CD-quality and MP3-quality, I might accept the downgrade in exchange for the portability and ease-of-copying.

I also think there’s a certain Quality Horizon, a point beyond which improvements become meaningless. I consider, with heavy thoguht, those fancy new Blu-Ray DVDs. And I ask, who cares? Sales are sluggish precisely because folks look at the roughly 1000 DVDs they’ve bought over the last few years, peer owlishly at the supposedly greatly improved quality of the new issues, and can’t really see the point. Why bother? There’s no obvious mechanical upgrade like there was between cassettes and CDs or VHS and DVD – no better portability, longevity, or bonus features. Just the assurance that the overall quality of the thing is better. Which it probably is, but not necessarily to an extent that makes upgrading worth it.

My personal Quality Horizon, when it comes to audio, is pretty low. I’m a man whose music collection was at least 65% songs taped off the radio, commercials and all, at one point. Do I look like someone who can tell whether I’m listening to a CD or an MP3?

That’s one good thing about being a writer: Electronic formats don’t necessarily threaten to downgrade my words. I mean, sure, it might downgrade my royalties as you all gleefully download my books from torrent sites, but at least the super-high-quality prose itself will be preserved, right? Don’t answer that.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

1000 Words a Day

Author: December 18, 2008

Last night I was examining the sadly shrinking wet bar here at the Somers Compound, and pondering the ravages of time. This time of year I’m always faced with this dilemma: Everyone I know is well aware of my love for whiskey, so every holiday I am bound to receive several really nice bottles of the Good Stuff. So every year begins with Jeff rolling around on the floor clutching bottles to his chest, laughing in joy.

But by the end of the year I’m low and hesitate to buy my own, because I don’t know what I’ll be getting from well-meaning loved ones. So I hem and haw and wait to see. And ponder how in the world I drank all that whiskey during the year (well, of course we know how, the question is, how did I survive? That’s a lot of whiskey).

Anyway, this somehow has driven me to try and write a novel in the next few weeks. All that thinking about time made me realize that I have a very thin period of downtime over the coming weeks, and I decided that hell or high water I was going to accomplish something. So, 1000+ words a day it is, and we’ll just see how it goes.

I’ve never done something like this before – never tried NaNoWriMo or anything. I’ve never had any trouble putting words on paper, and generally prefer a more hippie-ish we get there when we get there kind of attitude when it comes to writing. But I do like to shake things up every now and then, changing my mechanics a little. I get into ruts where writing books becomes a fixed process, and that erodes inspiration, so every few years it’s good to try something different – a different schedule, different approach, whatever. So, something new: I’m going to write 1000 words or more in a novel, every day (though I should note: not an Avery Cates novel, a separate wholly personal project). Why not? It should be fun. Or soul-crushing. We’ll see.

If it gets soul-crushing, at least the posts on this blog will be interesting. Especially after the holidays, when delivery of gifts of spirits will make my endrunkening easier.

J

Bullshit, Writing

The Reflexes of a Dead Otter, I Tell You

Author: December 16, 2008

I have reached that stage of life where waking up is almost impossible. Meaning I’ve somehow reverted to age 14. There was a time when I slept until noon every day I could, but then I grew up and started waking up early on purpose, because I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do. Recently, though, I guess my sleep debt has caught up with me, as waking up is sort of like climbing a mountain.

Thank god for coffee.

So I’m sitting here in wet, snowy Hoboken, coffee steaming, and I’m thinking that I need a new video game. There’s really only one type of video game I’ve ever really loved: The First Person Shooter. I was there when my friend and then-roommate Ken brought home both Wolfenstein 3D and a SoundBlaster card for his PC so we could hear the Nazis scream in German when we shot them, and I was hooked immediately. I’ve played most of the FPS games since then, and no other type of game (aside from Text Adventures) has ever really grabbed me.

The last one I dug into was Portal, which was fantastic, but that was some months ago. I need something new. I’ve been mentally fondling Left 4 Dead from my beloved Valve, but I’ve heard it’s more a co-op game than a single-person game, and I don’t play co-op or multiplayer. Why? Because I have the reflexes of a dead otter. Back in The Day, Ken, my other friend Jeof (those of you who actually read The Inner Swine may know the names) used to go to Ken’s office after hours to play deathmatch games on his office network (first Doom; later Unreal) and here’s how it went for me at first:

ME: <spawns> Hey! Wow! Lookit this!

Jeof: <standing behind me> Hey.

ME: Wha? <turns around>

Jeof: SHOTGUN TO THE FACE

See? Believe me, no one wants me out on the servers, getting cheesed up by every 10-year-old with a frackin cable modem. Besides, hard lessons like that one led me to become that most despised FPS gamer: The Camper. I learned to find a dark, shadowed spot, locate and acquire whatever sniping weapon there was, and just sit back and relax, waiting for someone to wander past me. Muhahahaha!

So, anyone play L4D single-player? Is it worth $50? ‘Cause I won’t be playing it any other way.

J

Bullshit

WE ARE THE MORON BROTHERS

Author: December 16, 2008

Bad Writing in Movies

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Correspondent here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliche and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatsifaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

<tiny fists of rage>

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Sweet Romance

Author: December 15, 2008

Ugh, Monday.

Mondays are good for random thoughts. Here’s one:

I’ve never watched the new Battlestar Galactica. I watched the original when I was a kid, and I remember really digging it for a while, and I still think the Cylon design was great. But I have this weird disease when it comes to anything new: I regard it with extreme distrust until someone convinces me it really is good. I think this is a reaction to marketing – I’m convinced that whenever I’m hearing buzz about a great new show/movie/album/book, what I’m really hearing is advertising of some sort.

Then, when someone finally does convince me that something is really good, two years have gone by. It’s sad. I’m like that dimwitted hillbilly who won’t sign nothin’ because he’s convinced he’s being fleeced.

So, when the reboot of BSG came out, I ignored it. I keep hearing how good it is, but it’s just off my radar. I like what I’ve heard, and recently watched a recap over on scifi.com (here) and it does look good. I might one day fire up the dusty DVD player that doesn’t see much use these days and check it out.

One thing that I noticed in this recap is how much of the story is devoted to the romantic entanglements of the characters. I always find this a bit dull in SF/F works. Now, I know that you want your characters to appear human and thus have emotions etc., sure, but I don’t read SF in order to have lukewarm romance, I read/watch it for the frakin’ aliens and technology and mind-warping concepts. I don’t object to the characters being distracted by relationships – indeed, of course, the characterizations are deepened and made more believable and the plotting complicated by the complex relationships – but I also think stories, especially serials, get bogged down by it. Once you introduce a romance to the mix, it can send out silky tendrils through your whole story until you suddenly realize the last 4 chapters were devoted solely to your protagonist staring out a window, sighing.

This of course is not necessarily fair to BSG, which may have a perfectly balanced storyline that uses romance and interpersonal relationships to make the story that much deeper and more satisfying. But then, Mondays are for random thoughts, not fairness.

Bullshit

“The Electric Church” in Russia

Author: December 11, 2008

A long time ago, (July 2007, in fact) I mentioned that we’d sold Russian rights for The Electric Church. I had a lot of contact with the translator hired for the job, who is very smart and funny. She asked me lots of questions trying to pin down the right coloring for slang and technology, and I really enjoyed our email exchanges.

She recently emailed me with the good news that the book is out: “Good news! The Electric Church has been officially published in Russia. I found the info with the cover in the publisher’s catalogue . . . For some reason, the publishing house added another title to the book. It goes like this: “To kill an Immortal, or the Electric Church“. I have no idea why, but this is none of my doing :)”

She’s promised to keep me updated on Russian reviews, which is awfully nice of her. Her Translator School’s web site with the book info posted is here, though it’s in Russian. She also kindly provided to me her commentary posted on the site about her experience translating the book, which is fascinating:

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Filthy Lucre, Writing

Sleepy

Author: December 10, 2008

I am not a morning person.

Someday – possibly during the aforementioned Coffee Apocalypse – I may in fact be forced to start hunting down those of you who are, indeed, Morning People, and destroying you. (I just read a book on Operation Barbarossa and have been infected with the word “destroy”, which is used constantly by German Generals as in We plan to surround the 17th Red Army and destroy it.)

I used to think I wanted to eliminate sleep from my life – like, if they invented a way to safely never sleep again. I was fascinated by the time I’d get back. Hours and hours, every day! I’m a guy who needs 8 hours every night. If I skimp even a little, I feel like a dead man for days afterward, so the idea of getting back 1/3 of my life through modern chemistry or dangerously experimental brain surgery seemed attractive. Nowadays, not so much – I like sleep. I guess this is part of getting older. When I was 20, not sleeping meant more time for boozing and carousing mixed with more work. Now it would mean more time spent flipping cable channels and complaining. The attraction, she is gone. Plus, there are times – like hangovers – when sleeping is a blessing.

I wonder, if the technology was available and safe, how many folks would sign up to never sleep again. And if they did,  would that force the rest of us to do the same just to keep up? Man, that would irritate me. I resent all other humans now. I can’t imagine if you were keeping me up twenty-four hours a day.

J

Bullshit

AND I GOT SIDNEY’S LEG

Author: December 9, 2008

The Non-Transformative Nature of Technology

Have you ever noticed how two things seem to be true of just about every generation, at least in the modern age: Every generation believes they are special and will change the world. Somehow they represent a new and innovative form of human and/or citizen, and every generation seems to believe we’re just about to enter the Epoch of Science Fiction, wherein technology, human evolution, and, well, who knows—maybe magic?—combine to transform life as we know it.

I don’t really expect this to ever happen, to be honest; technology has been marching on for thousands of years, and while the pace of development, invention, and adaptation appears to be increasing, so far nothing has quite managed to alter the fundamental aspect of humanity—what it means to be human. Technology certainly augments our abilities, but the goals we ply those abilities towards haven’t changed all that much, nor have our motives and limitations as a species.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements