So, I’ve been travelling a lot and running errands and starting the new book so I’d not checked in to Making Light over the last couple of weeks. There are a lot of interesting posts over there but one of them just blew my mind.

Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers

A&R Whitcoulls Group, a.k.a. the Angus & Robertson bookstore chain, is Australia’s largest bookseller, with 180 bookstores and about 20% of the retail market. A&R’s owners, an outfit called Pacific Equity Partners, are thinking of taking it public.

This may or may not have been why A&R’s commercial manager, Charlie Rimmer, sent a startlingly arrogant letter to Australia’s smaller publishers and distributors, demanding a substantial payment from each by August 17 (reportedly ranging from AU$2,500 to AU$20,000) if they want A&R to keep selling their books.

One of the publishers, Tower Books, made the letter (and their reply) public.  It’s brilliant.

This is another one of my posts where I’m thinking, “Hey, you guys probably already know all about this, but what the Hell….”

I’ve written before that Robert Heinlein was like unto a god for me, cementing my teen addiction to scienti-fiction, as well as shaping a lot of my political and ethical beliefs. He was one of the Big Three who basically invented the genre as we know it today. If you come new to his early and middle-period work, you may find yourself muttering “Hey, this stuff is pretty well done, but it’s such a total cliché.”

When Heinlein wrote that stuff, it wasn’t a cliché. He was the first. Everybody else has merely been trying to ring changes on themes and ideas that he explored, usually damn near definitively. Check out ‘All You Zombies’ and ‘By His Bootstraps’, for instance, if you want to see him totally own the time-travel story for reciprocating eternity.

Needless to say, I was delighted when I read the announcement in 1996 that one of Heinlein’s best, most influential novels, ‘Starship Troopers’, was being made into a big-budget movie. I had great hopes that my favorite book was going to be made into an immortal flick. It was to be directed by Paul Verhoeven, of ‘Robocop’ fame.

Then they revealed that the movie was going to omit the Mobile Infantry’s powered armor suits, due to budgetary constraints.

I knew then that they were going to shit all over the crown jewel in my orchard of adolescent bookworm memories. (Yeah, yeah. Mixed metaphor. Bite me. You know how I am about metaphors.)

: Read More »