Save the Sci-Fi!

I learned of an admirable Kickstarter project the other day thanks to Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont of the Sword and Laser podcast, and I thought those who follow my blog might be interested in knowing about it. It’s the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi project.

What they aim to do is save as many old, out of print sci-fi books as possible. Each month they pick a great classic or obscure or otherwise awesome sci-fi book that’s not in print and not online. They track down the author or whoever holds the copyright. They acquire the copyright or get permission from the rightsholder, and turn the book into an ebook for online publication. The resulting ebooks are either free or very cheap.

The Kickstarter for the project helps to fund these efforts to track down and acquire copyrights for the books they save, as well as fund development of the website and open source book scanner they make use of.

There are far too many books out there that are at serious risk of being lost if the paper degrades and nothing is done to preserve them, so this is a fantastic project well worth backing, or at the very least learning about.

There’s several bits of good news about it. The first is that they’re fully funded up to their goal of $15,000. The second is that as of this writing, they have 11 days to go, so you can still contribute and drive them even further past their goal—they sit right now at $24,059. With 11 days left, it doesn’t seem impossible that they’ll double what they were looking for.

Check them out at the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi Kickstarter! And be sure to let me know in the comments if you decided to back them.

Oncoming Displacement

I think the reason I’ve had so much with Corwin’s latest story is that while I have a good idea of what exactly it is that he wants, that he’s invested in, I’m not nearly as sure about how it comes into play within the story itself. I might need to break from this one for a bit and work it out.

I’m not going to go on another big break from fiction though. I have another story in mind that I think is pretty strong right from the outset.

The cost of living these days sucks, and it’s only getting worse. Imagine how expensive it’s going to be by 2030. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go back in time when rent and food were crazily cheap, but not sacrifice your connection to the present in the process? Sure sounds great. But would it really be great?

Displaced, starting soon…

My Favorite Kind of Writing Research

This is only tangentially related to writing, since I’m doing it in preparation for my next story, but it is SO good to play these games again.

A huge part of my early gaming life was taken up by Sierra adventure games. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Willy Beamish, and similar series from other publishers took up more hours of my life than I care to think about these days.

There was always something especially quirky and fun about the humor in Space Quest and the many send-ups of the sci-fi I grew up on that drew me in to those games. The sad part is I never played any of the series after the third. I tried, but many of the games from that era were buggy, and I never got IV, V or VI to run until now.

I’m working through both Space Quest I and IV as research, or “research” if you prefer. Thanks to the magic of ScummVM, I’ve been able to get past the first bit of Space Quest IV for the first time ever. It’s a real delight to have new Sierra games (new to me, at least) to play. There’s still one or two King’s Quest titles I never got through …

I’m not sure exactly at this point what direction I want the Space Quest inspiration to take me in. I’ll probably have to let it decide that. It certainly won’t be a carbon copy, or an attempt to write a story in the Space Quest universe. In my mind’s eye, it’s more a matter of colorings and shadings of humor and weird situations.

Thanks to ScummVM I’m able to finally(!) play the game after all these years, but there are still some issues because it’s such an old game. Wish me luck getting through the whole thing!

An Improbable Journey

Yesterday concluded The Fast and the Dead, my first take on zombies. It was a lot of fun, I enjoyed writing it, and I think I’m going to enjoy editing it, but now it’s time for something different. I’m pulling the pieces of my next story together.

I have a concept, a character in mind, and a setting. Tomorrow begins the actual writing. So far I’m thinking of something along the lines of Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth series, only science fiction. Not quite like the Phule’s Company stuff he also did though. The first thing that popped into my head was Space Quest. I’ve always been a huge fan of the old Sierra/Lucasarts adventure games, and Space Quest was such a favorite that I forgave it for not having been able to run some of the later games due to bugs.

I should dust some of those off and replay them…

Another Good Day

I don’t want to jinx anything, but today was another good day. It’s looking like it may be time to get back to game design. This ongoing project of mine won’t be changing at all; I’ll still be writing every single day and getting my work out there on Amazon and likely other eBook formats too. We’ll see what happens.

No details to offer yet. Those’ll come when things pan out, if they pan out. In the meantime, it’ll be more writing tomorrow! Both fiction and resume.