Disney is reportedly stiffing writers
According to accounts on the science fiction site File 770, Disney is failing to pay royalties it owes Alan Dean Foster for tie-in novels.
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Yearly Archives: 2020
Book Discussion: Brave New World 2
The early 1930s were a bad time for people who loved freedom. The Communists had taken over in Russia, as had the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis were fast gaining power in Germany. The world economy had just crashed. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel of what the totalitarian future might be like.
It hasn’t held its popularity as well as Orwell’s 1984, but it may be a better prediction of the future. In Huxley’s dystopia, there are no secret police or torture chambers. The police use tranquilizers rather than lethal bullets. People are punished by reassignment rather than death or prison. It works because everyone is brainwashed from birth and controlled by drugs. Organized rebellions don’t happen. The models for 1984 were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Brave New World is closer to modern China.
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Alert to writers who use Audible
An article on File 770 reports that Audible has been encouraging readers to return audiobooks for refunds. They can return them as much as a year later, after reading the entire book. Surely it should take less time and reading than that to decided that you hate a book and wish you hadn’t spent the money on it.
The return counts as a revoked sale. The author gets no royalties, even though the reader got a year’s worth of use out of the book.
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Now through Christmas 2020: 50% off on The Magic Battery
Thomas gave Frieda the world’s first magic-powered flying toy for Christmas. I can’t match that, but here’s a 50% code for buying The Magic Battery or Files that Last, now through December 25, 2020. The discount code on Smashwords is NQ44E.
Please share if you’d like to make my Solstice a little brighter.
Book Discussion: Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
When I started my research on The Magic Battery, I needed to find out about the Reformation in Germany. I’d picked that period because it was a time of change and technological advancement, a good background to set changes in magic against. Learning about Martin Luther was important, since I wanted to understand the ongoing conflict of ideas. At the same time, I wanted to learn about daily life in that period. It’s easy enough to get information on the emperors and electors, the wars and alliances, the states and borders. Finding out how people traveled, ate, and married took more work.
Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet turned out to be very useful for both purposes. It tells the story of Luther’s life while including lots of details about how he lived. It gives a lot of insight into how people thought in those days.
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