Super-recursive bloghole: in response to the previous post, Cory Doctorow @ boingboing says, among other things at the link that you should read:

If I were running the mags, I’d pick a bunch of sfnal bloggers and offer them advance looks at the mag, get them to vote on a favorite story to blog and put it online the week before the issue hits the stands. I’d podcast a second story, and run excerpts from the remaining stories in podcast. I’d get Evo Terra to interview the author of a third story for The Dragon Page. I’d make every issue of every magazine into an event that thousands of people talked about, sending them to the bookstores to demand copies — and I’d offer commissions, bonuses, and recognition to bloggers who sold super-cheap-ass subscriptions to the print editions.

Sure it’s lot of work, and a huge shift in the way the mags do business. But hell, how many more years’ worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack?

Been meaning to circle back round to this for a while. Every year, Gardner Dozois’ YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION anthology runs the circulation figures for the main sf short-fiction magazines. I suspect his figures are a little off, as I’m certain there must be some direct-sales figures that go uncounted in his collation, but the Dozois summation remains the only broad year-on-year record I’m aware of. What follows, then, would be the monthly numbers for end-of-year 2006:

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 15117
A drop of 13% from 2005. No numbers given for newsstand sales.

ANALOG: subscriptions 23732 newsstand 4587
Newsstand sales are “soft,” returnable — sellthrough is reported at 32%. I’m presuming the above number is the sellthrough number, not the overall circulation before returns. 7.3% loss year-on-year.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 14575 newsstand 3691
According to Dozois, this constitutes a drop of less than 1% — losing some 600 readers overall year-on-year makes them the only magazine thus far mentioned that has made any progress at all in stemming the bleeding.

INTERZONE: “Circulation is in the 2000-to-3000 range.” Which I find a bit scary.

Someone recently said to me, “Well, what could you do to save them?” And I said, well, no-one’s asking, but there’s probably about twelve things that could be done. And they said, “Well, maybe, but what I really meant was — why try? Why not just bury them and start anew?”

And then someone else asked me why there’s still an sf magazine called “Analog.”

Comments are off again. However, I recognise the desire to, you know, jabber a lot about stuff, share links and otherwise make connections with other readers.

So I’ve stuck together a page — a social network and bulletin board — that can act as a backchannel for the site. Telephoning – http://telepho.ning.com.

Just a new toy for you, really…

Quoted in an excellent article by Paul Di Filippo:

So what if my books were translated into forty languages and the total print-run reached 27 million copies? They will all vanish, since streams of new books are flooding everything, washing down what had been written earlier. Today a book in a bookstore does not even have the time to gather some dust.

Seems to have gone off pretty well.

I’ve loved his work since I was a kid, and am delighted to find this collection of his pulp covers and sf illustration:

On writing television:

They don’t pay me to do this. I’d do this for free. They pay me not to punch executives in the neck.

Tekkonkinkreet

“Why doesn’t alt culture exist?”

The bodies of five newborn babies (born between 1999 and 2006) have been discovered in a plastic bag in a cellar in northern France.

The case is the third of its kind to make headlines in France in a year.

Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee — already unelectable due to having the surname “Huckabee” — goes off the deep end in remarks to the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit:

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

“…frankly, I?m a large human and you’re some kind of midget puce weasel, and you need to just settle for being lower on the food chain than me…”

New Burial album next month.

“Radiohead’s much-debated decision to let fans choose what they pay for its new album online is a promotional tactic to boost sales of compact discs, the band’s management said yesterday. ‘If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing,’ Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK’s industry magazine.”

This is interesting. I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of time for Springsteen beyond the social perspective he has on his work (and, like most American classic rockers, it is “work,” it assumes “authenticity,” the term “blue-collar” gets tossed around, sweat must be squeezed out). “Keep The Car Running” was head-and-shoulders the best piece of (and the only sign of rhythmic life in) the last Arcade Fire album, and their recent polite cover of the Clash’s “Guns Of Brixton” created a sort of recursive swirling black hole of fakedom. Win Butler in particular is showing worrying signs of turning into Celine Dion in drag.

Now watch the video. (If you can cope with the guy with the camera apparently spontaneously shooting his load when the band start up.) Watch Springsteen moving in and out, giving them the stage. Watch Regine just come alive about a minute in. See Win watching Springsteen working for a living and loosening up just a little bit. And at 2.30 they all look at each other and laugh out loud.

Has an Etsy store for the sale of prints. (link fixed)

Tater Z The Anti-G – febrile, spooked-out techno noises.

Egg Syntax just sent me this… thing. It’s basically sixteen pages of WTF.

Surprisingly interesting short piece at GigaOm about a possible “golden era of handheld computing”:

“So how how long before the first Google-Apple Cloud Computer appears? I would say it’s months, not years.”

Well, some of it, the rest I’ll finish listening to later:

Before We Were Voices

The Juan Pablo Trio

Steam Radio

Lenzini Cinematik

…Silence