Six & 1/2 Years in Self Publishing

 

Once again, it’s time to report my first half sales – sales from May 2021 through October 2021.

Long story short: it was a good first half of my seventh year of self-publishing thanks to sales on Google.

I released one new book, a Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, Shadows of an Iron Kingdom, on 15 July 2021 and one novella, A Night on Isvalar, on that date as well, which I wrote for Amazon’s Vella serial fiction service. After 30 days in Vella, I was also able to release it on Amazon’s KDP platform for Kindle Unlimited. This novella is my only Amazon exclusive release. My thinking on writing and releasing A Night on Isvalar on Vella and the Kindle Unlimited was to use it as advertising for my other releases which, being mostly free and unadvertised, are likely never seen by most readers.. I don't think it worked. But we'll keep it in both services for now. On to the numbers.

My Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, and Google. My books are also available on Kobo, but they do not report free sales to Smashwords, and on Barnes & Noble which does report sales, but they don’t show up on my daily sales charts, so I don’t record those sales by the books – they’re just a rounding error anyway. In addition some books are also listed on other sites that offer free books. I don’t know how many, if any are downloaded from those sites.

Below is the chart comparing sales for this first half of my sales year to my sales last year for this period along with each books total sales to date from the companies that report sales. (Numbers are approximate. None of them ever quite match up. Very quantum.)

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2020 Sales	1 H 2021 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	370	223	8,039
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	163	209	4,305
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	542	511	14,053
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	439	506	7,475
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	253	438	3,230
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	221	441	2,773
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	240	391	1.268
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	55	13	96
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	174	367	950
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	n/a	648	1758
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	n/a	469	734
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom* 15 July 2021	n/a	679	679
A Night on Isvalar* 15 July 2021 (Amazon only – all $ sales only)	n/a	14	14
Total Six Month Sales * New releases.	2,217	4,909	47,550 Sales at this point 2020: 38,273 12 month Sales: 9,277

Comparing last year with this year, my my sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) works out like this for last year (2020):

Amazon 35%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 39%

Google 26%

This year in this time period the split looks like this:

Amazon 32%

Smashwords (Apple, & B & N) 18%

Google 50%

First the numbers. It was a good first half of the year. I more than doubled my sales compared to last year, helped in part by four additional books for sale. This total exceeds my record 2019 sales for this period which came in at 4,590 copies. Thanks to a surge in sales on Google, I moved 968 books in September and 1,236 books in October. Can't complain, but for both the monthly totals and the half year totals, it is important to keep in mind that this period has six more books for sale than I hand in the 2019 period. And I have to also point out that in the months after the release of my 4th book, Castaways of the Lost star in 2016, I sold 838 the first month and 1,324 books the next, and with the release of The Lost Star's Sea, in 2017 I sold 1,205 that month and 831 the next. These days I have 11 books for sale and my monthly sales are similar to what they were when I was selling three or four books. As I've been saying for some time, it gets harder every year to sell books that are not precisely targeted and effectively advertised. Looking at the numbers it is also clear that my newer books, the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories in particular are carrying us along, especially on Google. Their numbers are being held back somewhat because they are not free on Amazon US.

Significant trends

The headline news of my first fiscal half of the year is the performance of Google’s Play Store Books, especially in September and October this year. Below is a chart of my Google sales for the last three years. As you can see, sales grew slowly for the first two years, started to takeoff at the start of 2021 and exploded in September and October.

I have no explanation for this phenomena. Looking at the Play Store, I can see no reason for this jump in sales. None of the books are in the top 100 free, and when you go to the genre listing for science fiction, many of the categories are simply jokes, filled with a strange collection of books that have nothing to do with the supposed sub-genre. How readers find my books, or any book, is a mystery to me, save that if they do find one and like it, they can search for the others. I don’t expect this level of sales to continue, but I think it is clear that Google will continue to be a major contributor to my sales going forward.

Smashwords, on the other hand, continues to fade as a source of sales. New releases goose sales for a month or so, but even these peaks are ½ to 1/3 what they were in the 2015-2017 period. Once the peak is a month or so behind us, sales drop to less than 150 books a month. Below is an incomplete chart from 2018 to date. Smashwords changed their storefront in January 2020 and my sales jumped and continued to sell well, until one day in October.. On the 6 October, something at Smashwords abruptly changed. I had no sales for that day, and when they resumed they were less than half of what they had been, and have continued that trend to the point where I sell as many books on Apple some months as I do on Smashwords. In the chart below you can see the spikes when I release a new book, which, as I mentioned are much reduced since the happy days of 2015 & 16.

Amazon is always a wild card. It is feast or famine. Amazon monthly sales in this period ranged from a high of 328 to a low of 130. As you can see for the 90 day chart below, you can go for a month with sales ranging from 0 to 10 copies a day and then get 50 sales in one day for no apparent reason.

Looking Ahead

I’m hoping to publish a new Nine Star Mystery/Adventure story in February or March of 2022. I would like to write a longer, more ambitious novel after that, but then, I just spent a fruitless summer trying and failing to come up with just that, so we’ll have to see how that goes. New books drive sales, and without new books, sales languish, so it is hard to predict what lies ahead.

In addition, there are several wild cards in play. The first is that I entered A Summer in Amber in the Self Published Science Fiction Contest. Depending on how far it goes and how well or poorly it is reviewed, the contest might generate interest and increased sales for it and my other titles as well. Plus, next spring I expect to enter Beneath the Lanterns in a similar Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest, though any results from that contest are likely 18 months down the road. Finally, I am also toying with the idea of spending some money promoting my books next year as well, but more on that after the first of the year.

Summing It All Up

I’m very happy with the way sales are going, though the future, as always, is up in the air.

My Top 10 Favorite SF Books of All Time

I recently watched a Media Death Cult video on the viewers' favorite books and I have to admit that haven’t read more than one or two of them. Still it got me to thinking about my favorite books of all time. So I racked my memory to come up with a list of my ten favorite SF books. This proved to be rather hard since I've forgotten 97% of them. On the flip side, it means that if I do remember them, and remember really enjoying them -- they're a candidate for the list.

Before I begin, I should note that “all time” is the trick words here. What I’ve done is try to recall what were my favorite books during my nearly sixty years of reading SF, in one era or another. They are not necessarily my favorite SF books today. Indeed, most of them would not even being the running today, since my tastes have evolved over my lifetime. Still, at one time, they were my favorite books and I still recall them fondly because of that.

All but two of the books come from my early years of reading SF in the 1960’s and early 1970’s when I was reading  50 to 100 books a year. This means that most of the books are classic SF. I'm not going to list them in any order, and I’ll save my recent favorite books for last. 

1. Starman Jones, Robert A Heinlein. This is my favorite of Heinlein book. Farm boy with a photographic memory inherits an astro-navigator's books and saves the day when the ship he is serving on gets lost. Or something like that. I think it is my favorite Heinlein because I liked his juveniles the best and this one has just a hint of romance in it that was quickly shut down. Heinlein didn’t do romance in his juveniles. The fact that I can still remember the basic plot of the story is telling since, I can’t say that for most of his juveniles. I reread it in my early 20’s and was surprised at how much of what I remembered wasn’t actually in the book. A testimonial to how much a young reader’s imagination adds to a story. Back in our day, at least, we spend our days making up stories while playing, and this skill lingered on into adolescence. From my records of the period, I can say that I rated it “E” for excellent together with Space Cadet, a book that I have no recollection of.

Credit:  http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?258176, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48787509

2. The Star Conquers, Ben Bova. This book is a military SF, story with space battles, and an appealing young hero. Reading the Wikipedia description doesn’t bring back the story for me. I loaned this book to a friend 30 years ago to read to his son, and every time I see him he offers to return it, but since I know I'll not read it again, I tell him to keep it. Still it was a favorite of both of ours. I seem to recall that the sequel, Star Watchman wasn’t as good. I guess he wrote two more in the series years later. Who knew? I rated it a “E” back then.

3. Galactic Patrol, E E Smith. The best book, by far, of the Lensmen series. A space opera on a vast scale. I haven’t reread it, and would likely find it too grand and nonsensical for my tastes these days. I made a galactic wargame board game out of it, at the time. Still, its another “E” book in ‘65.

4.Ossian’s Ride, Fred Hoyle. An adventure set in Ireland. A recent graduate is recruited by British secret service as an amateur agent and sent to Ireland to discover the secret of a wildly successful company with amazing technology. It has a lot of hiking around Ireland, and, in a way, foreshadows my appreciation of the books like John Buchan’s 39 Steps which had his hero tramping around Scotland. I recently reread this book for the third time at least, and, indeed, I still enjoyed it. I first read it in 1966, but I wasn’t rating books that year, it seems.

5. Highways in Hiding, George O Smith. To begin with, the version I have has a wonderfully evocative cover by Roy G Krenkel, The story is a mystery story that centers around two opposing secret organization dealing with a deadly disease brought back from space. Road signs are modified by one group to lead people in the know to contact agents. This is another book of travel, thought this time it was road trips around the pre-interstate US. At the time there seemed something romantic about getting into a car and taking to the open roads which appealed to me back in the day. These days, an hour in a car is about all I can take. No contemporary rating for this book either.

6. Sands of Mars, Arthur C Clarke. I count this as the first adult SF novel I read. How could you not like a book about Mars – a Mars still unexplored by remote spacecraft when I read it. A Mars that anything could go? The hero was a middle aged SF writer visiting Mars that he wrote SF books about early in his career, which seems a strange hero for a young teen. Indeed I find in my records of the time that in 1965 I rated it only a “B” so I guess its memory must’ve aged well. The thing is that I remember it when 97% of the books from that period I have no recollection of at all, That must mean something. Plus, I know I reread it. On the other hand, another Clarke book, Dolphin Island I rated an “E” though I believe it was a juvenile. In any event, I have no recollection of the story.

7. A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of my perennial favorites. But even with so much to love about it, there's still so much I wish was better – bigger, fuller, with deeper characters. I’ve reread this book probably four or five times. I read it to the kids at bedtime. In 1971 I rated it ***½, which is a little above average. But like Sands of Mars, it seems to has aged well, and I now consider it the best of ERB's books. Contrast that with his Venus series that I rated “E” back in ‘65, but never have had any interest in rereading. The first three books of Barsoom are one of my favorites for all their flaws.

8. The Witches of Karres, James H Schmitz. I’ve read this book several times -- indeed, after pulling it out of the bookshelf for this post, I'm rereading and enjoying it once again. I’m a sucker for stories set on spaceship, and worm weather was such a cool idea. So cool, in fact, that I sort of borrowed it for an episode in my Bright Black Sea. I must have acquired the book prior to 1968 as it is on my inventory for that year, but I have no record of when I read it or my original rating.

The last two entries on this list are recent books (relatively speaking) and are still very much in favor.

9.Johannes Cabal The Detective, Jonathan L Howard. This is one of my current favorite books. In fact, I just reread it. It is the second book in a series of five featuring the necromance Johannes Cabal, and is my favorite of the series, perhaps because it is a take on an old fashioned detective story and set in a mythical Balkan country, like A Prisoner of Zenda. Howard is one of those British authors with a clever, witty style that I really enjoy reading in my old age. Each book in the series is a little different, with a nod to Lovecraft, plus werewolves, vampires, and the devil himself. Normally these types of stories would not be my cup of tea, but his writing draws me in.

10, Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde. This is my all time favorite speculative fiction book. In part because of Fforde's writing – cleaver, witty, endlessly imaginative, all of which plays a large part in my enjoyment of the story. It can be read as satire or absurd fiction, which again wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but not only is the writing wonderful, but he still manages to make the narrator and other characters seem like real people in a very unusual world where there is a strict cast system based on the color that they can see. I’ve read this book maybe four times – and will pick it up and read it again. I guess it’s my “comfort read.” Unfortunately its sales did not justify continuing on with the planned trilogy so that, Painting by Numbers, and The Gordini Protocols were never written, leaving so many mysteries left mysteries. The only bright side is that it did not give Fforde the chance to screw it up. I’ve read almost all of his adult novels and while the last two novels written after Shades of Grey were witty and endlessly imaginative, I couldn’t help wishing I was reading the last two books of the series. Life can be cruel.

So those are my nine favorite books. However, as a bonus, while looking up my old ratings for these books in my papers from the era, I found my top 22 book list from the mid-1960's. Heinlein dominated it.

1 Starman Jones – Heinlein

2 Star Conquers – Bova

3 Tunnel in the Sky & The Stars are Ours! – Heinlein & Norton

4 Sixth Column – Heinlein

5 Galactic Patrol – EE Smith

6 Space Cadet & Farmer in the Sky – Heinlein

7 Dolphin Island & Islands in the Sky – Clarke

8 Time Traders – Norton

9 Crossroad of Time & Citizen of the Galaxy – Norton & Heinlein

10 Outside the Universe & Raiders from the Rings – Hamilton and Nourse

11 Sargasso of Space & Plague Ship – Norton

12 Space Viking – Piper

13 The Star Kings – Hamilton

14 Revolt on Alpha C – Silverberg

15 Robot Rocket – Rockwell

16 Venus Series – Burroughs

Reading Beyond SF

 

In a number of my previous posts I recounted some of the reasons how I have managed not to read so many of the classic speculative fiction novels. There is, however, one more reason, and that is that my reading of SF fell by the wayside; I graduated from college and set out to make a living in the real world.

I simply no longer had the time or easy access to bookstores both new & used. Early on I had several jobs and moved about for a time, acquiring a wife and then children. We ended up in a small town with the major mall bookstores an hour away. In those olden days before the internet, I would only come across new SF books on the shelves of our local small town library or on those of a larger, small city library ten miles away. And by that time many of the authors were new and unfamiliar, plus, I still had to watch my pennies so I didn't buy books on a whim -- new mass market paperbacks were no longer fifty cents. Looking at my SF shelves, I don’t think I bought even one new SF book in the 1980’s.

However, I did not stop reading. Rather my interests expanded into other genres.

For some years I was into old mysteries, including Dorothy L Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels, Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan, John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey, Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee, and a host of other old mysteries.

And then I discovered the adventure stories from the Victorian period up to the first half of the last century. They ranged from Anthony Hope’s The Prison of Zenda, to H Rider Haggard’s African tales, to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay stories, and all his rest as well. I tracked down to read many of Compton Mackenzie’s humorous Scottish stories including Monarch of the Glen, Whiskey Galore, and the like.

I’ve already talked about the sea stories of Guy Gilpatric, W Clark Russell, and C J Cutcliffe Hyne that I loved.

And them, there were all the odd little byways that interested me. For example, I enjoyed all of Miss Read’s (Mrs Dora Saint) stories I could find about life in the village of Fairacre and other small English towns. I also read a number of Scottish author D E Stevenson’s “light romantic novels” as well. I’d pick up any Nevil Shute book I’d run across. I have four of Jean Shepherd’s (In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash) books. I own and have read a number of Booth Tarkington novels. And I’ve already mentioned my large collection of Joseph Lincoln novels. In short, I found that life was too short to spend reading just SF.

While I did buy some  new books, more and more of the books I picked up were second hand books. While on vacation I would seek out second hand bookstores to explore. However, the highlight of my book buying year was  the great, but late, Bethesda Fair. Bethesda was a local charity that each September would stage a giant rummage sale that filled up all the buildings of  the fairgrounds with a treasure trove of junk for a week. I'd be at the doors of the book building on the first day waiting for the sales to begin. I bought many’a book at the Bethesda Fair. Most were not SF.

Still, I always considered myself a science fiction fan. Almost everything I ever attempted to write was science fiction. 

However, when looking back over all the books that I’ve read and enjoyed over the years, there is no mystery as to why my books are written in a very old fashioned style of story telling. I learned to write by reading. And my reading informed my writing.

Writing as Art

 

In a Wilderness of Dunes, in my impressionistic style of painting 

I view my stories, like my paintings, as art. I write and paint to bring something new into the world. To create. I also try to make it good, though I am the sole judge of what is good, and what falls short of being good enough. I try to be critical of my work. I don’t expect to succeed all the time, or indeed, most of the time. I expect to always fall short of total success. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they are very rare. However, I don’t get discouraged by falling short of perfection. Falling short is part of the process – especially if you, like me, are exploring an art form on your own rather then by the book or in class. We must expect to learn by trial and by error. And mostly error. We have to be honest with ourselves about our shortcomings. And yet, be happy enough with our little successes to try to fix our shortcomings the next time we set out to create our art. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Big Pine Bend in my watercolor style of painting

For me, the criteria I judge my writing and painting on, are my own tastes. Period. Everyone else is welcome to their opinion, but for me, my opinion is the only one that counts. I will often come across writing advice that says that you need to get other people’s input, which I do. My wife will tell me if something seems wrong. But they also advise one to hire an editor, because you, as the writer, are too close to your work to see its flaws. This advice comes from a particular, and often unsaid mindset – that you are writing to reach a commercially viable audience – or at least you should be. A good editor knows what is selling in the fleeting moment, and will shape a manuscript to conform to the current tastes of the target audience so as to increase the chances of the book selling enough copies to make publishing it turn a profit on it. Which is all fine and dandy. Makes sense. Book publishing is a business, and business have to make money if they are to continue to be one.

Misty Morning in Crofthaven, in my impressionist style

However, I am not in the business of publishing books. I’m not in business at all. I’m terrible at business. As I said, I’m an artist. And what I seek to do is to bring my imaginary people and places to life in the imagination of other people through words and paintings. In doing so, I take the same approach to writing as I do to painting. I try to be critical of my work, and release the best book I reasonably can. Reasonably, in the sense that there are a hundred different ways of saying anything in English, and that on any given day, I know that I’ll prefer one way over the other ninety-nine. This means that I can never read more than a few pages of mine without wishing I’d said something better. However, if you are ever going to share a story, at some point you have to say, enough is enough. It is what it is. Release it, and hope to do better the next time.

Cealanda in my watercolor style, though in this I used acrylic paint on canvas

In addition to deciding when I’ve reached the point where I could fiddle with it forever without making it appreciably better, I also make decisions about what I want to tell, and how. Since I am not in the business of writing, I’m not concerned about how to make my stories appeal to the most people. Instead, I tell the stories the way I think my first person narrator would tell them. For example, in A Summer in Amber, I have two chapters devoted to weekend trips – a bicycle tour and an overnight sail. Neither chapter advances the main plot one iota. At best they can be considered world building. However, they remain in my story because I enjoyed writing the character Red Stuart, who is featured in those chapters, and secondly, because my narrator, Sandy Say, is writing essentially a “what I did on my summer vacation” story, would certainly have include those adventures in his story, since they were part of that memorable summer. All of my stories have that same priority – they are told by a character in that story, and told in a manner that character would tell the story. As such, they include things that the character would include in his telling – regardless of what an editor employed to take a creative work and make a product out of it, would think of it.

Crescent Park Study 2 in my impressionist style

And perhaps I should add here, that I write, as I paint, by instinct and, I would like to believe, talent.  I am always amazed when I hear authors talk about their books as engineering projects, with all sorts of standard components placed in standard patterns. Every component of the story is engineered to produce a desired effect. Not that I'm criticizing that approach, I'm just saying that I can't think of a story in that way, at least not in the detail they work with. I take a much more organic approach to a story. 

However, writers, like myself, live in a sort of golden age. Ebooks, the internet, and self publishing has allowed me and millions of other people to tell our stories. Now, many, but by no means, all, of those stories are written as products to sell. And many, if not most of those products, are really bad products. Still, as I said, there are those of us who simply have imaginary stories that we want to bring to a life outside of our imaginations. And judged on that basis, there are no bad stories. What counts is that journey from our imagination into the world, not the number of destinations it arrives at. Being creative is what matters.

Side Note

I've illustrated this post with several of my paintings in my two main styles of painting. I started painting regularly (50 paintings a year or so) using ink and watercolors 1992. They are of an imaginary country, Cealanda, that I, as the painter, rambled around in painting what I saw. I suspect that my paintings in this style are several times (or more) more popular than my impressionist paintings. I turned to oil and acrylic paints when I started selling paintings in 2003, as they command more money than watercolors. I found it hard to paint in thick paints, and at 53, I didn't have time to start over again. Luckily I always like impressionist paintings, so I adopted that style as my own. I think my impressionist works are better than my watercolors. I've painted a thousand of them, even though maybe only one person in a hundred (who appreciate art) really appreciates them. Like in my writing, I get to decide what is good and want isn't. Not the market. And the best of them are good.

Thoughts on The Calculating Stars

image credit: https://www.tor.com/2017/09/14/cover-reveals-mary-robinette-kowal-lady-astronaut-books/

This is another entry in my series of remarks and observations directed at the clouds – which is to say, an opinion piece.

Having joined the Tor.com ebook club, I am occasionally offered a free ebook, usually titles that they are using to promote the release of a new sequel and such. The Murderbot novellas were such books, as were a number of mostly fantasy novels and novellas, which I sampled, and did not get past the first page, or chapter. The most recent free book is The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Kowal’s novel winner of the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2019 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the 2019 Campbell Memorial Award. Since the price was right, the book is speculative fiction rather than fantasy, and very highly regarded, I eagerly downloaded my ebook copy and dived into it.

The book is an alternative history of the American space program of the 1960’s. In this story, an asteroid strikes the east coast in 1952, triggering an extinction event. An accelerated space program is launched that echoes the actual 1960’s program, but with the aim of establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars before the earth becomes uninhabitable. Its premise is a classic speculative fiction story. Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud coming immediately to my mind.

It did not, however, click with me. I found myself, at the halfway point, skimming through the book in the hopes of just getting it done. Not good. Realizing this, I called it a day. I’m not one who feels obliged to finish a book I don’t care for. After giving The Calculating Stars half a book to hook me, I couldn’t find a reason to continue.

Having read only half the book, I can’t really review it. But I will share my thoughts about the first half, just between you, me, and the clouds.

In many ways, The Calculating Stars should’ve clicked with me. I prefer first person narratives. The story is one. I prefer smaller stories. The first half of the story, anyway, is not grandiose. I like to spend my reading time with pleasant characters. The supporting characters are, for the most part, likable, though I confess to having lost track of them, given the very episodic nature of the story structure. Given that my stories are episodic in nature, that too, should not have been a problem. So it had a lot of things going for it. But…

Thinking about it, I think there are two aspects of The Calculating Stars that failed to click with me – the narrator and the premise.

I’ll start with the narrator, Elma York. She was born in Charleston SC in the early 1920’s, the daughter of an army officer, eventually a general. He taught or encouraged her to take up flying. During World War Two she was one of the group of female pilots who flew airplanes from factories and bases to other bases, freeing men for combat duty. She is a mathematical genius, earning a PhD in mathematics and physics, at some point. She is happily married to another PhD, a well known rocket scientist. At the start of the story, she is working in the government bureau, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics doing computations. She has emotional scars from her college years, when she was called to the head of the class and made to shame the male students with her ability to do math in her head that they had trouble doing on paper. This seems to have given her a great fear of calling any attention to herself – at least that is how I read it.

The problems I have with her is, first, both she, and her husband, are comfortable ignoring the fact that she’s a PhD. She’s known simply as Mrs. York (rather than Dr. York) and despite her brilliance, works in a fairly menial capacity, presumably because that’s all women were allowed to do. Yet, I find it hard to imagine that any woman of her accomplishments, even in 1952, would have settled for this situation, especially someone with her bravery and determination. While she is not quite content with her status, she wants to be an astronaut, she doesn’t really ever stand up for herself, nor, for that matter does her husband. Secondly, growing up in the south of the 1920’s and 30’s, in the household of a fairly important army officer, I would think that they would’ve had a black servant or two – a cook, a maid, a nanny, and certainly yardmen and such. She would’ve been familiar with blacks, and would’ve had a definite opinion of them, one way or the other. She is, however, written as if she grew up in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. She treats the black characters as if she is first meeting black people, and their lives are a mystery. Race relations is touched on in the story, but tiptoed around. Her treatment of them, as a southerner just didn’t feel authentic. And lastly, despite her accomplishments, she comes off as rather needy… She simply doesn’t make sense to me, at least in the first half of the book – which is probably due to me being clueless. Perhaps these issues are resolved by the end of the book, but in the first half, she never struck me as being the person she would have needed to be to have achieved what she achieved. I found it hard to relate to her, and the often mundane nature of the story she relates.

I lived through the 1950’s & 60’s, and in reading this story I never experienced even a glimmer of recognition for the time period. The same can be said for the setting and larger backdrop of the times. The backdrop of the post-asteroid world is merely hinted at with a quoted news story at the beginning of the chapters. “Mrs York” doesn’t relate much beyond her immediate concerns. Indeed, even the space program, which she is part of, mostly plays out in the background. Every so often we have a rocket launch viewed from the control room, and that’s it, at least in the first half of the book. And even her focus on everyday life doesn’t seem to bring that life into context. Once you get past the premise, there’s not a whole lot of speculative fiction in this the story – at least in the first half. And that brings us to the premise.

One of the main reasons I stop reading a book is that I find something too stupid to want to continue reading. Given the praise this book has generated, I turned a blind eye to its stupid premise. But in the end, with the story just dragging along, I could no longer ignore its nonsensical premise. That premise is, that because of the greenhouse effects, due to the amount of water put into the atmosphere by the impact of the asteroid, the earth will gradually heat up and become uninhabitable. Well, okay, I’ll give that a pass. Nothing is simple, and I would suspect that there would be a lot of unknown unknowns that might mitigate the effects somewhat, but what the heck, let’s go with it. The solution to saving humanity that the story proposes, however, doesn’t get that pass. The solution we are supposed to buy is that humans need to rapidly develop rocket ships in order to use them to escape earth and set up colonies on the moon and Mars. (Another very old and familiar premise.)

But think about it. Why would we go to all the trouble of developing a space program from scratch so that we could set up self-supporting bases on harsh, faraway, airless and/or uninhabitable worlds, in order to escape our someday uninhabitable world? I mean, if you can establish self-supporting colonies millions of miles away, and only after you perfect a whole new technology just to get there, why would you not set up those same colonies here on the earth? It would be several orders of magnitude easier, far less expensive, and it would save many, many times more people than any moon colony would. I simply can not imagine that establishing a colony on the airless, radiation bombarded moon would be easier than building underground self-supporting underground shelters here on earth – near the poles if need be.

So, long story short. The premise makes no sense to me. I suppose it makes the book more dramatic, and easier to option for a movie deal. But the reality is that the story is not all that dramatic. I have to believe that a similar story could’ve been told against an alternate cold war space race against a more accomplished Soviet Union, with, perhaps, greater effect.

All art is subjective. I don’t write criticisms. I write how stories, TV shows, and art strike me. This story, despite my best efforts, just didn’t appeal to me. Things about it just seemed off. I found that I could not relate to the narrator. It failed to make me suspend my disbelief. And well, the premise is silly. That said, I recognize that this book has much to say about the struggle for equality, something that should be said. I’m glad it found an audience.

My Library -- Andre Norton

Andre Norton in the 1950's
Source: https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2020/3/17/andre-norton-15-years-gone

I thought that I would start the exploration of my library with the books of Andre Norton. Over the past year or so, Tor.com has been running a series of articles discussing the books of Andre Norton. Plus, I’ve run across a number of other articles about her books as well. What I found amazing was all the Andre Norton books that I had no clue existed. She was one of my favorite writers when I first began to read science fiction, but given all the books that I missed, it seems that we must have had a falling out at some point rather early on. Something happened, and I think I know what, so let’s explore what that was.

First; a time line. I began reading science fiction books from the library and paperback books probably in 7^th Grade, which would be 1962. (I was a rather slow starter as a reader). This would be the point where I discovered Andre Norton books. Presently, I have 28 of them of them in my collection, pictured below. However, just for a point of reference, Night of Mask was copyrighted in 1964, and all the books to its right were copyrighted in 1964 or later.

In the ten years from 1962 to 1972 my passion for science fiction was white hot. I recorded reading 100 SF books in 1966. And yet, the vast majority of those 28 Andre Norton books I read were written in decade before I started reading science fiction. However, I know know that she wrote several dozen books during my white hot decade, but I only read a handful of them. And further, I have no recollection of ever coming across all those books of hers that I must have passed on. (That’s not too surprising, as I have a very poor memory of my life.)

Arranged in copyright date order. Ace periodically reissued these books, so that this would not be the order I acquired them. The final two books had her name, and the Solar Queen, but little else of Norton, I suspect. 

So, what happened?

I think what happened can be narrowed down to two words; “Witch World.”

I still have a typewritten list of books that I read as of January 6^th 1965. Below is the list of Norton Books with my letter grade rating for each book.

The Stars Are Ours E (Excellent)

The Crossroad of Time E

The Time Traders A

Galactic Derelict B

The Defiant Agents B

Key Out of Time B

The Beast Master B

Lord of Thunder B

Sargasso of Space A+

Plague Ship A+

Storm over Warlock B

Catseye B

Star Born C

Star Gate C

Starman’s Son C

Judgment on Janus C

Witch World F

Web of the Witch World F

I also have an upgraded list from September 1965 without grades that lists 7 more Norton books, but they were more of her earlier books. It seems that I got rid of the Witch World books, since I don’t have them in my collection, which is something that I usually don’t do, unless I really, really don’t like a book. Though, perhaps they were library books – I noticed that in one book, I marked the books I had read, and the books I owned from the books listed, and there were more that I had read then I owned at that point, so it is possible.

Given my opinion of her Witch World series, and the fact that I picked up only a handful more of her books over the following decade, I think I can clearly lay the blame for our breakup on Ms Norton. She moved on as an artist, moving more and more into fantasy, while as a reader, I didn’t, or at least, I didn’t move with her into fantasy when she moved on. My impression is that I’m far from the only one who puts a line under Witch World, as a turning point in her writing focus. She became more focused on exotic world-building and fantasy elements than she had been in her earlier books. And while I have some fantasy books in my library, they are a distinct minority. And, indeed, today, I have no interest in reading fantasy – even if Tor.com gives them to me for free. But my issues with fantasy can be another post, someday.

Andre Norton 1990's
Source: http://www.andre-norton-books.com/

Looking back, I can now see that what I liked about her early books was that they were largely “boys’ adventure stories.” Ms Norton had reliably delivered these male-orientated adventure stories – even changing her name to do so – before moving on by expanding her horizon with a wider range of characters and more fantasy settings. Now, this is all to the good. Artists of all sorts should evolve and explore the extents of their talents and interests, even if they risk alienating old fans by doing so. So I have nothing to complain about. I enjoyed her boys’ adventure books, and I moved on as well, by eventually outgrowing her target audience. And to be fair, I have never abandoned my taste for adventure stories. Indeed, I write them now. So all, in all, I have fond memories of her books – the early ones, and would like to read some of her non-SF adventure books even today. But I’ve no desire to revisit the ones I’ve read. I’ll leave that for new readers or readers who are more nostalgic than I.

My Library