So I finished writing The Apocalypse Ocean, my first experiment into crowd funding and pre-selling a novel I would write directly for fans. Right now we’re doing copy edits, and working on the other stages of production. It was a great experiment, and I’m excited enough with it I’d like to think about a couple more experiments.

Later this year, I’d obviously like to run a Kickstarter for the 5th and final Xenowealth novel (Desolation’s Gap) and finish up the series for fans (hurrah). But in between now and then, I wanted to do something else.

I have enough stories for a second short story collection. It will be called Mitigated Futures.

I even have a cover, designed by the awesome Jenn Reese of Tiger Bright Studios. Behold:

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. A Militant Peace (w/ David Klecha)
2. Lonely Islands
3. Mirror, Mirror
4. Press Enter to Execute
5. Mitigation (w/ Karl Schroeder)
6. Resistance
7. The Universe Reef
8. Placa Del Fuego
9. Love Comes To Abyssal City
10. A Jar of Goodwill

It’s a collection that focuses on SF, and various visions of the near and far future. More focused than Tides was, and the stories all group together better, I think.

So the question is, how best to roll this out and when. My thoughts?

I could set up a Kickstarter with a low kick rate of, say, $1,000 and price each e-edition of the book at the same price as I was planning for the eventual release on Amazon/B&N/iTunes: $5. In other words, this book is going to happen. You’re going to be able to get an eBook for $5, whether from this Kickstarter, or a couple months later, via Amazon/B&N/etc.

But I’d like to use Kickstarter (if they approve) to make it MOAR AWESOMER. You’re just using Kickstarter to preorder the book. And at the very end of the Kickstarter, you right away get your reward (for the eBook version, print would be delayed by a month in order to allow proofing, ordering copies, signing them, then mailing out)! No waiting. Instant rewards!

Even better, as more money is raised, I can begin bolting in different rewards for everyone who is pre-supporting the collection.

So something like:

$2,000 worth of pre-orders and I write a new short story for the collection.
$3,000 and we add in 2 pieces of b/w custom art.
$4,000 and I write a second short story
$5,000 and we add in 2 more pieces of b/w custom art

Backer rewards would be something like:

Preorder your ePub or Mobi eBook for $5.
Preorder your signed ePub or Mobi eBook (I’ll add digital signatures and a note to you) for $25
Order a limited edition hardcover print version for $50.
Order a signed edition hardcover print version for $100.

The following are ideas and would have to be commissioned by the mid month period and if total pre-orders are over 2k:

Add your name to the main character of a brand new short story $500.
Give me a story idea to write about for the collection $1,000 (the idea you gave, your name, would be credited in an intro).
Commission a hand-written story, one-of-a-kind, that will be written into a handmade paper journal, the only copy of which you will hold $2,000

So, feedback, what would get you excited, what would you want to see happen? This is a total out there project, just me seeing how much fun one could have with a short story collection. When should I run this project? What do you want out of it? I’m really curious.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

This is the second launch of the Dragon capsule and third launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the first one that will attempt to dock with the ISS, all for a significantly tinier portion of the cost of a shuttle launch (the entire SpaceX program is less than the cost of a single shuttle launch).

The Dragon spacecraft is on a technological shakedown mission, and if all goes according to plan, it will become the first commercial vehicle to reach the space station, a 450-ton orbiting complex staffed by six crew members from the United States, Russia and the Netherlands.

…

But the craft’s first job is to reliably deliver cargo to the space station. Since the retirement of the space shuttle, NASA has been dependent on Russian, European and Japanese vehicles for resupply duties. Russia’s Soyuz capsule is the sole vehicle capable of crew transportation to and from the space station.

The mission launched Tuesday is the SpaceX’s biggest test yet. NASA plans to use the Dragon spacecraft for 12 operational cargo delivery flights beginning as soon as this year, and a modified version of the Dragon is in the running to be the next U.S. spacecraft to fly humans into orbit.

Keep in mind, conservative congress critters have kept trying to shut down and stop this program due to the fact that they associate it with Obama.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

I keep mentioning that I came to realize while I wrote my latest book, Arctic Rising, that the US Military was one of the largest investors in green technology. Why? They anticipate that having more control over your own ability to *move* gives you an upper hand in war. By helping green tech along to the point where it can become cheaper (and in some cases it already is in certain military applications) they’ve been the leading edge (let us not forget the military’s role in giving us the internet via DARPA).

However, even the military has now fallen into the middle of the culture wars, as conservatives ban it from using/helping develop alternative fuels:

On Monday, the U.S. Navy will officially announce the ships for its demonstration of the “Great Green Fleet” — an entire aircraft carrier strike group powered by biofuels and other eco-friendly energy sources. If a powerful congressional panel has its way, it could be the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels to run its ships and jets.

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying an alternative fuel that costs more than a “traditional fossil fuel.”

Imagine that phrase wrapped around any other technology:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced weaponry that costs more than “traditional weaponry.”

Or:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced armor that costs more than “traditional armor.”

Or:

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying any advanced fighter planes that cost more than “traditional planes.”

It’s a fairly stunning move.

Mabus and his allies countered that the Republicans were taking an overly-simplistic view of things. Of course relatively small batches of a new fuel are going to be expensive — just like the original, 5GB iPod cost $400 and held fewer songs than today’s $129 model, which holds 8 GB. That’s the nature of research and development. With development time and big enough purchases, the costs of biofuels will come down, they argued; already, the price has dropped in half since 2009.

“It’s a false choice to say that we should concentrate on more ships versus a different kind of fuel. If we don’t get a different kind of fuel, if we don’t have a secure domestic supply of energy at an affordable price… the ships and the planes may not be able to be used because we can’t get the fuel,” Mabus told the Senate Subcommittee on Water and Power in March.

What’s more, Mabus added, there’s a value in a more stable, domestic supply of fuel; every time the price of oil goes up by a dollar per barrel, it costs the Navy $31 million. “We simply buy too much fossil fuels from places that are either actually or potentially volatile, from places that may or may not have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We would never let these places build our ships, our aircraft, our ground vehicles, but we do give them a say on whether those ships steam, aircraft fly, or ground vehicles operate because we buy so much energy from them.”

A fairly stunning step backwards, as the US military was one of the few places really helping the US keep up on the advances needed in alternative fuels.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

A big day for the possible future of space travel, and the return of US capability to launch people into orbit after the retirement of the shuttle, comes with SpaceX’s text flight of the Dragon capsule. It’s been delayed due to checking the software for the docking test over and over, and now looks to be locked in for this Saturday.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Last year I celebrated my fifth year of freelancing (every May 9th I celebrate my freelanceiversary, the day I walked off away from doing 9-5 and to steering my own life). I’ve loved being a freelancer, and it has been a joyful thing.

For the epic fifth year, I wanted to celebrate with a tattoo, but couldn’t budget for it. But for a couple of years, I’d been planning a tattoo. It would be a memento mori, to remind myself of how close I came to death more than once in 2008-2009, and it would celebrate my continued life as a freelancer, and it would also contain a quote that I’d become enamored with that would guide future decisions.

I’ve had a near-pathological fear of needles most of my life, until 2008 when I ended up in and out of hospitals due to the heart defect. So in a way, getting a tattoo in and of itself had a sort of meaning as well.

I couldn’t quite afford the tattoo last year. But this year, the novel retreat I attend every year, that has been so crucial to my growing as a writer, happened to fall on my freelanceiversary. In fact, in 2006, I choose May 9th as my last day of work because I was also leaving for a Blue Heaven workshop.

It all came together. I would get a six year celebration tattoo that I’d been planning for three years. I figured if, after three years, I still thought about, and wanted, the tattoo, that it was something I could safely imagine myself still being psyched about for many years. This was not a quick decision.

So on May 9th, with Cassie Alexander, Jenn Reese, and Ian Tregellis and got the tattoo. I wanted a skull, with a pen and pencil, and the latin for ‘create or die’ underneath.

First things. I went in with a ‘cute’ skull, stylized, almost day of the dead-ish. But after some back and forth with the artist and talking to him, we decided to go with a bit more attitude. And I’m glad I did, most of my friends agree, artist’s skull was cooler.

Secondly, the latin.

Well, I spent three weeks relearning latin. And consulting with friends. And a classicist. There were variations decided upon, and although a grammar purist could argue slightly, I went with a translation I like. If you meet me in person you can see it and talk to me about it.

Here’s a rough idea of the end result though:

What was it like?

I was worried the pain would make me chicken out. The artist said it would be an hour. The first ten or so minutes, after that first bite, I kept my game face on. No flinching, focusing on the pain, trying to figure out how long I could handle it.

After that I stopped worrying, starting listening to my friends chat, and joining in. The bits that did get me to bite my lip a bit were close to edge of my arm.

Instead of an hour, that’s what it took for just the outline! Plus another thirty minutes! We paused, and then he went back in for another hour and a half of shading, which again hurt towards the edges of the arm but weren’t too bad. But another hour in the chair was starting to wear on me (I don’t sit still well), and my arm kept falling asleep. That ended up being more painful than the tattooing up to that point.

For the last half hour, he came in with some white for emphasis on the words, and that was when I started to seriously want to get the fuck out of the chair I was in. He was retracing stuff that had been lined, then shaded, and now was back.

It was about three and a half hours, which I wasn’t anticipating. But he really got into his work and was taking his time, and I really love the details on the pencil and pen in particular. I left what I hope was a good tip, and went to dinner, because I was about ready to faint from hunger.

There was a bit of ‘holy shit, did I just do this?’ when in the bathroom washing it off. And then I thought, ‘heck yeah, write more! Create or die!’ when I saw it. And that’s why it’s there. To remind me I survived 08-09, and came out the other side with a lesson I don’t ever want to forget.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

I mentioned that this last weekend my short story All Her Children Fought was being filmed in Ireland:

All Her Children Fought will go into production in Rathdrum, Wicklow over the May Bank Holiday weekend. Directed by Patrick Ryan, the 15 minute drama explores the corruption and resilience of natural instincts in a future state of war. ‘The story has great resonance’ said Snugboro Films producer Liam Grant, ‘it deals with the forgotten details – how children grow up and how mothers cope rather than the spectacle of war on TV.’

Here are some very preliminary stills from the 15 minute film they let me see, and share with you all as they’re in the editing room:

and

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Am bunkered down for the next week to finish writing The Apocalypse Ocean with many other fellow writers around me at Blue Heaven 2012. I’ll probably be quiet the next week, though I’ll natter on via twitter, no doubt.

See you next week.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

I find this endlessly fascinating, because every time I read and think about it, I come out the other side with a different opinion. To whit, a charter city in Honduras will be adopting the governance model of Canada:

Honduras recently defined a new legal entity: la Región Especial de Desarrollo. A RED is an independent reform zone intended to offer jobs and safety to families who lack a good alternative; officials in the RED will be able to partner with foreign governments in critical areas such as policing, jurisprudence and transparency. By participating, Canada can lead an innovative approach to development assistance, an approach that tackles the primary roadblock to prosperity in the developing world: weak governance.

So:

The RED offers a new way to think about development assistance, one that, like trade, relies on mutually beneficial exchange rather than charity. It’s an effort to build on the success of existing special zones based around the export-processing maquila industry. These zones have expanded employment in areas such as garments and textiles, with substantial investment from Canadian firms such as Gildan, but they haven’t brought the improved legal protections needed to attract higher-skilled jobs. By setting up the rule of law, the RED can open up new opportunities for Canadian firms to expand manufacturing operations and invest in urban infrastructure.

By participating in RED governance, Canada can make the new city a more attractive place for would-be residents and investors. It can help immediately by appointing a representative to a commission that has the power to ensure that RED leadership remains transparent and accountable. It also can assist by training police officers.

So on one hand, what comes to mind? Colonialism, right? Here would be a western nation literally running a piece of a developing world nation. That brings up a lot of troubling past. Missteps. What happens when the Canadians running this new Honduran city decide to unleash some of the unlawful police brutality exhibited during the G20 riots in Toronto? The legal fallout of which is still continuing. What will that look like?

But you read the article, and you see that this nation is thinking, we don’t have strong rule of law, and tradition, and maybe this is a way to jumpstart it. And when other cities see the prosperity of a smoothly running, high infrastructure city with great civics, they’ll adopt (consider the ripple effects Hong Kong/Singapore have) and spread.

Do it right, you have a central American Hong Kong. Do it wrong… ?

It’s Honduras making the call, and asking for this, though. They’re wanting to bootstrap more, and as far as civic effectiveness, Canada isn’t a bad model. It ranks highly on quality of life, governance, transparency, etc.

There’ll be some racists who hear this and cheer, the optics of a country asking for help bolster the case of ultra-nationalists. You can almost hear the pro-empire cackling of Niall Ferguson.

All of which creates a knee jerk ‘ach, no, self-determination.’

But the Hondurans know all that, and are willing to ask for this experiment anyway.

Which is what impresses me. If you’re not making something work, looking for a better solution is smart. Not invented here complex ruins many structures (businesses, governance) because their ego and price and nationalism and whatever dictate that someone else *can’t* do it better because *they’re someone else.*

The fact that Hondurans went out, looked for what they thought was the best model for running something, and are kinda hiring those people to help get it off the ground reminds me of reading about how when Singapore decided to figure out its healthcare system they sent experts to travel around the world, take a look at all the systems, and come back to implement what they figured worked best.

You have to admire that approach.

But it’s still wild. Franchising a city, basically. I’ll be following this for sure.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Average life space in the US. A useful indicator of health/wealth and success of a country/governing area. But importantly, it’s done by county.

Since I’ve moved to the US, as an outsider with many international friends, I sometimes have to act as ‘Speaker for Americans’ in explaining things. Most of my friends in Western non-US countries are flabbergasted by healthcare and how its run in the US (and now that I’m a freelancer and have also gone through the experience of a major issue with multiple hospital visits, and then had a visit it Canada to compare it to, then took out several books about how healthcare is done throughout the world to educate myself, I’m a bit croggled as well), as well as other things. And what I have to explain to them is…

…the US is a really fucking big place. I mean, it’s as big as all of Europe. So it’s not so much comparing, say France and the US and how things are done, but like saying you have French hospitals and some-Eastern-European-country that just got of communism/dictatorship/whathave you and just joined the EU and has its own set up hanging in there.

There is tremendous disparity and difference from a rural West Virginian/Kentucky county and Manhattan.

And that’s because they’re really, really far apart.

That creates culture differences, expectational differences, and infrastructure differences. To whit:

In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties. This troubling trend is occurring in 84% of Oklahoma counties, 58% of Tennessee counties, and 33% of Georgia counties.

The gap between women living the longest lives and those living the shortest lives is growing, too. In Collier, Florida, women live 85.8 years on average. In McDowell, West Virginia, they live to be 74.1. That’s an 11.7-year gap. In 1989, the gap was 8.7 years. For men, the gap is larger – 15.5 years – but it has grown by less than a year since 1989. Men live the longest in Marin, California, at 81.6 years. They live the shortest lives on average in Quitman and Tunica, Mississippi, at 66.1.

The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest – Japan, Hong Kong, and France – while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care – Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.

If you live in the right place in the US, you’re living the developed world.

If you live in the wrong place, it’s similar in some cases to the developing world.

That shocked me when I moved here. I pictured the USA as being fairly uniform. And very wealthy. And it is, very wealthy. In many ways.

But in many ways, when I’m at a gas station in Allen County, Ohio and my attendant has most of their teeth pulled I have to remember I’m not living in ‘THE US-Fucking-A,’ but Allen County, which according to the research done above has an average lifespan of 71.9 years, putting it almost 10 years on average BELOW the US average, and which means I roughly am living in a part of the US with the equivalence of, according to Wikipedia, a place like El Salvador or Armenia (although, unlike those other countries, since Allen County is in the US, I can drive to a better place for opportunities if I can afford a car and transportation).

To understand where the US is the US that outsiders think it is, you need to look to metro areas.

According to the US Mayors report for 2011:

In 2010, U.S. metro economies accounted for 89.8% of the nation’s gross domestic product and wage income and 85.7% of all jobs—slightly down from 2008, but still the overwhelming majority of domestic product and wage and salary disbursements.

The New York metropolitan area ranked first, with 2010 gross metropolitan product (GMP) of $1.28 trillion, followed by Los Angeles ($738 billion), Chicago ($531 billion), Washington ($426 billion), and Houston ($379 billion).

The US economy is $15 trillion, of which NYC, LA, Chicago, DC and Houston are responsible for $3.35 trillion of.

Now, this isn’t an indictment of the county I live in or the US… if things were getting better or holding still.

But sadly, as I pointed out above, counties like Allen County are losing. People are, on average, living fewer years. Meaning something is broken. American progress in those counties that are like the developing world, are slumping, while others are moving forward.

That gap will be, if it continues, a major fissure in a future America.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Last year I declared I was trying to learn how to garden. Because our house has a lot of neat features that lend well that the previous owner left behind. We’ve, out of self defense, simplified as much as we could, and now I’m trying to learn how to love it.

Because paying for the full landscape job is a bit tough. And because I figured that I could use a hobby that gets me outside. I’m not allowed to run or lift or anything, so gardening actually burns calories (more than I realized) and has a secondary result.

I hate weeding. I don’t understand US plants. I lived on a boat.

So it’s been very uphill, but last summer I took out books, started reading. And have been learning a few things.

June of last year we cleared out this bed and planted a ring of Creeping Phloxes on the border, with Veronica Speedwells on the inside.

Planting:

This spring the phloxes flowered nicely:

The speedwell’s behind them, taller, have fluffed out and will flower in the middle summer, so the bed always has some color.

I need to put down mulch, but I’m happy with it, and it’s been fairly low maintenance.

I’m working on figuring out how to control the weeds between the flagstones out front, and tested out 4 different plants last summer and over the winter to see what came back this spring. Nothing was hardy enough.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep from the massive amount of weeding the large in front of the house beds need. I got curious about Creeping Thyme. I chose Pink Chintz because it was sun hardy and in the spring bloomed awesomely.

Last June we planted:

A surprising amount of it died, but the plants arrived pale and limp from the place I ordered them from. I ordered a second batch in September. But some of the first batch survived and spread:

I really like the way it colorfully spills over the rocks.

Once the September batch (you can see the little green patches just behind the flowering thyme near the rock) fills in by the end of this summer, I’ll calculate where and how much more to plant to fill in the left side of the house, but the aim is to replace all the mulching and weeding with a full bed of Creeping Thyme under the windows out front. Smells great, looks great in spring. I figure by the end of this summer I’ll have filled out half the left hand bed.

The next project is the flagstones, which I will tame this summer with some sort of ground cover plant, and it will be joyous and save me much weeding.

I’m not nearly as orderly and neat as my neighbors, who are constantly out picking up sticks, but I’m enjoying the slow creation of a ‘hands off’ landscaping outside.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.