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Reader’s Advisory: AW: Phoenix Lights

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Ezra Pound famously told writers to “make it new” even while others told them there was nothing new under the sun. Eric Tozzi has managed to do both with the latest addition to the Apocalypse Weird universe, the novel Phoenix Lights.

The title of the book is taken from the 1997 UFO sighting over Phoenix, Arizona and Tozzi uses this background as a springboard for his own world-shattering rendition of an alien invasion. In the text, super-secret lab resident Gage Slater is at odds with his sister, Kris, who deals with an apparent alien abduction by creating a UFO Busters show. In search of what? We don’t know–and neither does Kris or her crew, really–but in the end it doesn’t matter, as the aliens arrives in a massive city-sized ship and find them (and everyone else) first.

Gage and Kris re-connect in the ruins of Sedona, Arizona as they come across a blind musician named April Vargas, who has her own past and problems: in a world of literal blindness, she is able to see for the first time in her life, for a limited time. A much worse problem arives in the form of Vincent, who clearly knows more than he’s saying and has no one’s best interests at heart except his own.

Tozzi has set up a unique sandbox for the AW setting. Even though we get the standard setup of 88, Black Hand minions, and a band of survivors braving the end of everything, the story never seems hackneyed nor the events unnecessary. The action pulls us along on a road trip from hell and never lets up as we find out more about the aliens’ objectives and their reasons for arriving. There’s just enough real life setting to make the wackier potions of the drama seem like they could be possible, which is what good fiction does.

Bottom line is that Tozzi knows how to tell a good story and this book is too darned short. I’m waiting for his next installment and I’m curious to see if anyone will pick up the mantle of a second tier book in this particular setting. (We can hope.) In the meantime, we can buy this book and tell others about it. It’s that good.

 

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NYTSL 2015 Spring Reception and Program

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Just as a (not so) brief reminder, NYTSL’s programs are running their usual course. Here’s the latest announcement for the spring reception and spring program, which went out the other day:

NYTSL 2015 Spring Reception
Please join us for the Spring 2015 New York Technical Services Librarians Annual Reception for Librarians, Information Professionals and Library School Students.

When:
Friday, April 10, 2015
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Where:
Butler Library
Room 522-523
Columbia University Libraries
535 West 114th St.
New York, NY 10027

FREE

Wine & Cheese will be served.

Why:
This is an opportunity for librarians, archivists, and information professionals from the metropolitan area to meet informally. It is also a chance for library school students to learn about the various professional organizations in the metropolitan area and to meet future colleagues and employers.

Library students who attend will be entered in a raffle to win a myMETRO membership. You are welcome to bring announcements of professional opportunities to the reception.

Reception co-sponsors welcome. If your professional organization would like to co-sponsor the reception, please contact us to make arrangements.

Due to limited space, registration is required and we will not be able to accept walk-in registration for this event. Register online at http://nytsl.org/nytsl/nytsl-2015-spring-reception/

NYTSL 2015 Spring Program – Disaster Recovery for the Digital Library

Our presenters will present two real-world library disaster recoveries in New York City and how to better prepare for the future.
When:
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
5:00 – 7:30 p.m.

Where:
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, South Court Auditorium
476 Fifth Avenue (at 42nd Street)
New York, NY 10018

$15 for current members
$30 for event + new or renewed membership
$20 for event + new or renewed student membership
$40 for non-members

Speakers:
Frank Monaco, Frank J. Monaco and Associates LLC
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, nearby Pace University faced emergency conditions in implementing a less than perfect IT Disaster Recovery plan.  This presentation will first review, from the point of view of the then current Chief Information Officer, what his organization (and the entire University) faced and how he and his team dealt with the situation.  After this brief review, a discussion of what digital disaster recovery technologies have emerged since that fateful day, and how Universities, to include their libraries, can take better advantage of these DR developments.

Neil H. Rambo, Director, NYU Health Sciences Libraries and Knowledge Informatics

When Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York City on the evening of October 29, 2012, it produced an unprecedented storm surge along portions of the East River. The facilities and infrastructure of the NYU Langone Medical Center were overwhelmed by the violent flood. The NYU Health Sciences Library facility was destroyed. But library services and support across the Medical Center were only briefly disrupted. This review will focus on the recovery efforts made in the aftermath of the destruction, from immediate-term to the present. The focus of those efforts were and are on strengthening the digital library, increasing the presence of librarians with user groups, and redefining the nature and role of the library across the Medical Center. In parallel with these efforts and informed by them, the library facility has been reconceived and is now under construction, to be opened in late 2015.

Reader Advisory: AW: The Dark Knight

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There are many things that annoy me as a reader. Authors who insert horrific scenes about the abuse of children or animals as a quick way to move the plot forward is one of them. Nick Cole, however is not one of those authors, and his latest contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe is proof of that.

AW: The Dark Night is Cole’s second solo AW book, which immediately follows the action in AW: The Red King. In AW: TRK we read about the fall of civilization in southern California. About Holiday, a depressed drunk with repressed memories of boot camp; about Ash, a Spetznaz trained M.D. with a heart of gold; about Frank, an older guy with a taste for fine Italian cuisine and disturbing marksmanship skills; Ritter, a skinny white guy who badly wants to be a gangsta; and Braddock, a special forces soldier with orders to revenge the U.S. government against its enemies, “whatever it takes.” Over the course of the book, these folks learn to deal with the appearance of zombies, the breakdown of civilization, and the secrets that they dole out with eyedroppers to each other.

In this follow-up novel, we see that Frank, Ash, Ritter and a few others have built themselves a fortress out of the remains of their suburban housing complex, no thanks to Holiday who nearly got them all overrun in the previous book. In a self-conscious attempt to get back into Frank and Ash’s good graces, Holiday comes upon the idea of surrounding the complex with shipping containers. It works well enough to impress the others but Frank and Ash are not so easily placated.

Into this environment comes Cory, a special needs teen who has lost the only world he’s known and is not well adapted to the one he finds himself in. He has one survival technique which is adapted for the new world: he puts on a cape and gloves and mask and becomes Batman. Batman can go out at night. Batman can defend himself against the undead hordes (“stranger danger” in Cory-speak) and Batman is never scared, even as Cory is quaking in his shoes.

Batman gets Cory through the ruined landscape one step at a time: from the house where he hides with the sitter to the local pharmacy, to escaping with Heather the stock girl, to accidentally plunging into a horrific blasted wasteland populated by killer robots and malevolent computers, to his own shattered world of zombies, to the suburban castle where he finally finds refuge.

Frankly, the only way you can not be sick with worry over Cory’s plight is if you either A) have no heart, or B) have been dead for six weeks. And this gets to what I wrote about earlier: there is no sign of cheap emotional manipulation by Cole at any point in the narrative. He writes succinctly, getting deep into Cory’s head, letting us experience where the boy is coming from on every step of his adventure and it never feels overdone or sentimental. It is merely authentic story telling.

Just about the only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it was over way too soon. But that’s fine, because Wonderment Media has a lot more material in the pipe and it’s a very big world.

Reader Advisory: Reversal

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Have you ever had one of those days where things go wrong, and then instead of straightening out, they just  go wronger and wronger until everything you know is just completely screwed up? Sasha has one of those. She’s the heroine in Reversal, Jennifer Ellis’s contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe. And boy, does she have problems.

Sasha Wood, a twenty-something meteorologist, has just landed her dream job as a research assistant at the International Polar Research Station. There are the usual pitfalls of dealing with new situations: co-workers who run the gamut from friendly to hostile, the painful isolation of living at the top of the world, and the weird fact that climate change seems to be, well, reversing itself. Her workplace crush on Soren Anderson, the station’s caretaker and survival expert, does not help. But after six months of dealing with the hostile environment, she feels that she’s managed well enough.

Then the arctic literally explodes as meteors rain down, blasting open methane pockets in the permafrost. Planes streak overhead to crash into nearby mountains while an apparently worldwide episode of mass blindness causes panic all over the globe and wreaks havoc inside the research station. Sasha and her co-workers manage to cope in the face of ice storms, but at the loss of half her team to the elements. As if that’s not enough, there are strange fog banks rising up from the methane craters which twist time and space to create passageways between the arctic and antarctic circles. To add to the fun, the magnetic poles are wonky, all communications with the outside world are down, and the only voice Sasha can get on the radio is a crazy woman who chatters about the imminent arrival of The Dragon. We won’t even discuss the supposedly dead volcano that’s violently erupting in the south pole.

If all this sounds confusing, it’s because confusion is the name of the game in Reversal. Jennifer Ellis has created a scenario that manages to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic simultaneously. As we follow Sasha through her attempts to make sense of what’s going on around her, Ellis gives us small pieces of a massive puzzle one by one and trusts her readers to put them together in their heads. Some of Sasha’s co-workers are Black Hands either by design or last minute recruitment, and allies and enemies appear from the wastelands and disappear right back into them. (The penguins are relatively benign but the polar bears are literally out for blood.) There is one fixed point in the narrative: when the member of the 88 who goes by the name “Paul” (short for “Pollution”) lets her know that the world is ending and she has a chance to work for him. She refuses and navigates Hell on Ice in an attempt to save her life and Soren’s. As Ellis describes it, think The Thing meets The Core.

There are times when the narrative bogs down between the snowmobile chases and the blind treks through ice blizzards, especially as we’re constantly trying to figure who is working for which side (and I would have liked more polar bears). There are a few details that never get resolved–is the Dragon real or not, and where the heck is he, was one of my personal nitpicks–but the final result is a thoroughly enjoyable romp through Ellis’s environmental nightmares.

 

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The Apocalypse Arrives and It’s Weird

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Today sees the launch of an ambitious new series from Nick Cole  and Michael Bunker, titled Apocalypse Weird. The concept is simple: the end of the world is very f-ing nigh and you have front row seats. Five novels drop today and join The Red King, Cole’s previously released work in this ‘verse: The Dark Knight by Nick Cole; Reversal, by Jennifer Ellis; The Serenity Strain by Chris Pourteau; Immunity, by E. E. Giorgi; and Texocalypse Now by Nick Cole and Michael Bunker.

awbooks-1024x300

While shared universe series aren’t new (remember Bill Fawcett’s The Fleet? How about David Drake’s Crisis of Empire?), what makes the AW ‘verse unique is the fact that Cole and Bunker have  partnered with Rob McClellan’s ThirdScribe outfit to open the field to any and all contributors. So-called “Tier 3” authors are considered purveyors of AW fanfic. The stories are non-canonical, but they are also open to anyone who wants to publish them using the ThirdScribe platform. Readers vote on their favorite stories and well-received contributions get both the attention they deserve and perhaps a bit more.

The rules of the series are straightforward: in the not-too-distant-future (or past) a demonic mafia known as “The 88” have decided that they can’t sit around waiting for mankind to doom itself forever. Their solution: give homo sapiens a big push into the abyss. Their foot soldiers in this work are human servants known as “The Black Hand.” As civilization crashes and burns, individual actors, perpetrators, and survivors share talents, stories, actions, and supplies to manage their own little corners of the devastation. It’s up to each author to mix and match the mayhem according to his or her tastes and writing style. The results are brilliant, fresh, and exciting.

I’ve read Reversal and The Dark Night, and I’ll be posting reviews of those later today. But all five books are now up for grabs (and linked above). If what I’ve seen so far is any indication, this is the best apocalypse to come along in years.

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[books_custom amount=”6″ size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]

A Bit of an Update

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It’s been about three months since I put a real post up here. That’s a long time, even for me. You know what my track record is like: I go for a few months, my work at MCNY piles up, and I stop posting for a while. A month, sometimes two. Three is a little unusual and having had some time to think about it, I believe I know why: I’ve been in mourning over the blog entries I lost when ThirdScribe crashed.

For what it’s worth, I was and remain in love with ThirdScribe as a content platform. Alpha-testing it was like sifting through sand on the beach to see what neat stuff was available for the taking. I got used to its format, discovered new features, and eventually made it it my primary communication tool.

So after a year or so, I was posting a couple of times a week, almost every week. I was good about it. I was proud of myself. I was hot.

Then the server crashed and took 8 years of posts with it, and that was the end of that.

We recovered some of it. All the book-related content. Useful bits from September and October. And I can re-load most of what I have on the old RS site from 2008 on, but there are significant holes.

Mostly, I was really upset of having lost the tracking data for the posts I’d put up here. That tracking data shows me how many shares which posts and the numbers are valuable to  me. Those numbers, for example, tell me that my all time best shared posts were my review of The Hunger Games (190+ shares), a discussion of Brave New World (195+ shares), my obituary of Donald Sobol (135+ shares) and an apology to fans of The Great Brain books (116+ shares).

Then, real life intruded (as it does). We got through finals at MCNY and dealt with the retirement of a very long-time co-worker here. There were graduations, and holiday parties, and birthdays. And there was writing. A fair amount of it, actually: three short stories submitted to editors, a complete plan to re-write Book 2 of the Blockade series, and entry to a number of writing contests on Wattpad (no wins, but an honorable mention). And there was a ton of posts on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (well . . . not so much Twitter).

So . . . a lot of writing. Just not here.

And illness: a 3 week bout with bronchitis that I’m only now finally squeezing out of my system.

Here’s my confession: I still like ThirdScribe and I’m still using it. Now I need to export what older material from the RogueScholar blog I can and bring it here, which is a long term proposition. I’m still rewriting Blockade book 2 (and writing book 3) and those are still going to be released in 2015 one way or another. And I’m still a librarian, so library posts as often as I can manage.

Here I go . . .

We’re Back!

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So you’ll remember a few weeks ago when this site disappeared for a few days, then a few days ago when it returned with nothing more current than 2008 posted on it. The short story is that ThirdScribe had a major problem with its ISP, and many of their sites (including mine) were sacrificed to save the rest of the network. Due to the tireless efforts of founder Rob McClellan, much of this site’s data and functionality have returned (Hooray!) I’ll be filling in the bits and pieces as we go forward but hey, posting again!

Generals in the War on Ignorance

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No fewer than ten people on my FB list have shared this and tagged me with it within the past two days:

librarians are generals
Not a General

 

Guys, I love the sentiment and the fact that some many people I know think of me when they hear the word librarian. I hope every friend of every librarian shares this meme around. I object only to the word “Generals” being used when the pic is very obviously of an infantry soldier. The generals are the ones who run wars. The soldiers are the ones who fight them.  There’s a real difference, and not just in the “‘Forward!’ he cried from the rear/and the front rank died” way.

Call it macho stupidity if you have to, but I’d rather be compared to a soldier.

But thank you.

My Books

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The Day After Publishing

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As you’ll remember in our last exciting episode of The Rogue Scholar, I pushed the Publish button on Article 9, my first proper SciFi novel.

Since then, I’ve pushed the button on the Print-On-Demand version of the book as well, so if you shun electronics in favor of printed copy, you now have an option.

As you can imagine, the last few days have been most instructive.What have I learned so far from my experiment in self-publishing? Let’s make a list:

1. You do not know who your readers are. I have a reader in France, another in Canada, and two more in Denmark. The rest are from the US. I know who a few of them are  because they basically told me, “Dude, I bought your book.” I can make an educated guess about a few more. Who are the rest? No idea. But I hope they enjoy the book.

2. Your followers are not your readers. Between all my social media accounts and my blog I have around 700 followers. I do not have 700 readers. Ironically, I have many more tools available to figure out who my followers are. This is a problem from a sales point of view.

3. Amazon reports sales numbers in real time. This is incredibly useful, but I can see how this can become an addiction, as one hits all the rounds of social media and then comes back to the reports portion of the Kindle Direct Publishing site. Each sale gets instantly translated to a new value, so it’s no hard thing to keep hitting that report button: how many have I sold now? How about now? How about now?

4. As vendors go, Amazon.com can be a royal pain. As publishers go, they can be a nightmare to deal with. Amazon is indeed a one-stop shopping site for self-publishers. But they don’t make it easy. The Kindle Direct Publishing account and CreateSpace accounts are different animals. They are not connected to one’s Amazon.com Author Central account unless you go through the process of making them that way. The good news is that there are plenty of resources available to walk you through the steps needed. But don’t think it’s just matter of hitting that publishing button and watching the machine roll on. You need to be a hands-on manager.

5. Amazon sets prices. The POD is sizable–about 500 pages worth of sizable–and while I wanted to set the price around $10 Amazon flat-out refused to do that. The price tag for the print book is a hefty $17.99, above the minimum but way more than I’d like. The truth is that I don’t foresee selling more than a handful of these items, but I thought the option should exist for folks who just don’t want an electronic version.

Those are the immediate lessons. There will be more. Stay tuned . . .

Next hurdle: review copies!

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Article 9 is Live on Kindle

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Okay, folks. You remember way back, when I made these cryptic references to a book I was writing? And then completing? And then trying to get published?

Well, it’s done. The book is titled Article 9, and it’s the first in a planned series called The Blockade Trilogy, and it’s now available for $3.99 on Kindle platforms in the Amazon store. A Print-on-Demand paperback version will be available in a few days, and I’ll make versions for Nook and Kobo available later this year.

In Book One we are introduced to the Sol System of the year 2020. The Geosynch Electric Corporation has become the world’s dominant mega-conglomerate, a global monopoly on precious electricity only months from its grasp. The world is grateful; only the United States, which still relies on aging natural gas and nuclear power plants, resists. But the U.S. government wants to gain access to Geosynch’s facilities for its Air Force, and some are willing to kill to have it.

Into this intrigue arrives reporter Jack Hastings. Accompanied by Air Force officer Minnie Korson, the unlikely duo realize that while the military is indeed pushing hard, the corporate officers of Geosynch are far from innocent. Their space colony, Prometheus-3, is filled with secrets, lies, and a pair of frightening truths: Geosynch is now in the process of weaponizing space with the goal of becoming a sovereign entity, capable of asserting control over planet Earth. And even stranger and more terrifying: a massive and potentially deadly alien intelligence lies dormant at the edge of the solar system, and it is about to awaken…

And there’s a few space laser battles, plus a nuclear explosion or two.

I’ll post more on this topic as things happen, but in the meantime: BUY MY BOOK . . .

 

Article 9

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Dear FCC . . .

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Yes, it’s a bit of slacktivism, but my concern about Net Neutrality is real enough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has made sending a comment to the Federal Communication Commission as easy as possible.

Librarians should pay attention to this issue (and they are). We rely more than ever on internet resources for our livelihoods. As it is, we have regular down times and slow-downs of connection times on our public PCs. Being told to pay more for that level of intermittent service is just obnoxious.

But don’t listen to me. Lynne Bradley of the ALA says it better than I can:

Net neutrality is really important for libraries because we are, first of all, in the information business. Our business now is not just increasingly, but dramatically, online, using digital information and providing services in this digital environment. That means that we need to have solid and ubiquitous Internet services.

We’re interested in network neutrality for consumers at the home end, but also because it’s key to serving our public. And that means the public libraries, the academic libraries from two-year community colleges to advanced research institutions, as well as school librarians in the K-12 community.

Network neutrality issues must be resolved, and we hope to preserve as much of an open Internet policy as we possibly can. The public cannot risk losing access to important services provided by our libraries, our schools and other public institutions.

The point is that only by creating a flood of public commentary on this issue will the FCC even notice us. That’s fair and proper, condisering that what we call the Internet as developed with public money for an essentially public use. You don’t have to agree with me (or anyone) but please take five minutes and send the regulators the message that public resources should stay public.

My Books

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