The Spanish version of The Between (ENTRE MUNDOS) is out and in the wild. Look at this beautiful cover. Many thanks to the publisher, Dilatando Mentes Editorial.
Colossus is deep in the editing process. The August release date is going to be pushed back a little. I KNOW. I’M SORRY! I want it out in the world, but it has to be polished and ready. We’re almost there. Almost.
Once the Colossus edits are finished, I’ll be back to working on the sequel to The Between. I’m loving how it is coming together and am antsy to get back to it.
I might have also written a graphic novel with my wife since the last update. More on that soon…
To everyone who has sent notes: thank you! It is hard to overstate how nice it feels to know that someone out there has connected with my work.
If you’ve been looking forward to my dark and trippy SF novel, COLOSSUS, you’ll have to wait a bit longer, I’m afraid. My publisher, like many others right now, is running a bit behind with the editorial calendar. Colossus is a beast, with multiple story lines, a side narrative that takes place in footnotes, and other complexities. So I’m happy pushing things back rather than rushing. If you’re a reviewer, blogger, podcaster, fellow author, etc., that would like an advanced reader copy (ARC), those should be available in November. Shoot me a note if you want an ARC.
I just heard from my wonderful publisher in Spain, Dilitando Mentes Editorial, that The Between’s Spanish edition is still on schedule for a fall release this year will be out in January ’23. I can’t wait to hold a copy of it!
Finally, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about a sequel for The Between. I have always envisioned The Between as the first book of a trilogy, where the second book reveals much more of the bigger story at work, and the final book completes the arcs of this set of characters. Currently, I have an assortment of disconnected scenes written and a broad plan for what will happen. I’m hoping to make good progress this summer and have a solid draft of the sequel by the end of the year. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has sent me encouragement and questions. It really helps me push forward when the words are being difficult.
I recently received an excited text from my cousin, who happens to be one of the smartest people I know and a beta reader of my novels. He had just listened to a wildly entertaining podcast episode on evolutionary computation and wanted me to listen as well. “They’re talking about the same stuff that’s in your SF novel. You’ve gotta listen to it.”
The episode was part of Lex Fridman’s excellent podcast series on the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power. Fridman is an AI researcher, and on the particular episode highlighted by my cousin, he’s talking with Risto Miikkulainen a computer science professor at The University of Texas at Austin with expertise in “biologically-inspired computation.”
Check out the discussion on audio here or watch it on YouTube by clicking the image below.
So why was my cousin so excited? First off, the discussion is mind-bending and fun. You’ll learn just as much about how biological organisms learn and develop intelligence as you will about the cutting edge of AI research. Plus Fridman and Miikkulainen both have a knack for talking about complex stuff in easy-to-follow language. But what really stood out to my cousin was how their discussion focused on topics key to one of the plot-lines of my novel COLOSSUS, which will be released in November of 2022.
A little background on Colossus… I’m usually frustrated with the handling of AI in popular science fiction, particularly movies. They all seem to be Pinocchio stories or at the very least the AIs are so heavily anthropomorphized that they act like robotic humans. Those stories rarely if ever give much explanation to how those systems developed general intelligence. (Brute force and machine learning can easily create narrow intelligence for dealing with specific tasks, but those methods don’t create highly adaptable intelligence that can quickly deal with new circumstances. That’s what I mean by general intelligence–the executive function of your mind.)
In Colossus, researchers create an AI with general intelligence as a “happy accident” (as one character describes it). Their focus was creating synthetic life in synthetic universes. The novel explores how they create evolutionary pressures in these synthetic universe and how those pressures in turn create alien creatures capable of some pretty bizarre shit. I won’t go into the details. Instead, let me tell you about writing it. Writing it was hard. Really hard. Although I have some background in machine learning and advanced analytics, I am by no means an expert on AI. So I read, I studied, and I did my best. I sold the novel in 2020. I’m really proud of the story it tells and its accessibility to non-SF readers, but I’ve always wondered what an expert at the top of the AI field would think.
Colossus hadn’t yet gone through editing with my publisher, so there was still time to make tweaks to fix anything I had gotten wrong. I contacted Dr. Miikkulainen and asked if he’d be interested in helping me sharpen the details of Colossus. He accepted, and in June we had one of the most fun conversations I’ve been in for quite a while. There is no greater gift to a writer than the gift of time by a subject matter expert, whether they are scientific advisors like in this case or sensitivity readers. We write our best work when we obtain the best critical feedback possible.
The great news (to me, anyway) was that I got the science more or less right. Dr. Miikkulainen helped me with some terminology and some clever ways of describing to the reader what was going on. I plan on reconnecting with him and his colleagues when the book’s cover has been unveiled and advanced reader copies (ARCs) are available. Then I would love to be part of podcasts and discussions with experts like Lex Fridman and Risto Miikkulainen, where we connect the real world development of AI general intelligence with science fiction. If you know of or host such a podcast or other forum, please let me know!
My big takeaway for my writer friends: If there’s an expert who can help improve the accuracy of your book, reach out respectfully and with a real sensitivity toward their time. They might just say yes and have as much fun in the process as you.
The great team at Dilatando Mentes Editorial is creating a paperback version of The Between for the market in Spain. I’m honored to be among the great authors they have published, and I can’t wait to see it find new readers. Should hit shelves late ’22, right about the time the Colossus comes out.
It’s Basic Math, Isn’t It? Somewhere in late elementary school we all learned about rounding numbers. If the numbers after the decimal are .5 or higher, you round to the next whole number, right? 3.5 becomes 4. 4.5 becomes 5. Etc.
So why is it that some reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon include a rating with a half star in the body of the review but don’t round up to the next whole number of stars in the official review score? Here’s a hypothetical example. The body of the review says 3.5 stars but the reviewer assigned a score of 3 as the numeric star rating — and its the 3 that goes into Goodreads’ calculations. Did the reviewer miss that day in elementary math? Did the book lose out on a full star in that review? No. The system is working exactly the way Goodreads intended.
What’s Going On Here? Before I launch into an explanation, let me provide a little background about my perspective. I have a doctorate in an applied area of social sciences, specifically health economics and outcomes research. Part of the quantitative training in this field includes study in survey analysis, psychometrics, etc. In my non-book-writing career, I’ve spent considerable time designing and using instruments that collect subjective ratings from individuals.
I provide this background not to convince you to believe me. I do have expertise in this area, but more importantly, I want you to know my perspective when I dig into this issue. I’m looking at it from the cold, objective perspective of a social science researcher and not as an artist interpreting how others are judging my work.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the numbers. In fields like engineering, physics, and chemisty, rounding works exactly the way we learned when we were young. That’s because we’re taking objective measurements of a property or attribute, like weight or length. If you and I both use the same measurement device, we should always get the same answer.
A book star rating is an entirely different animal. It’s a subjective summary scoring, where each reviewer uses different criteria. The same reviewer might give a different score on a different day due to mood, recollection, etc. It’s messy stuff. So 4.5 stars is not a robust measurement that is meaningfully different from 4.4 stars or 4.6 stars. It’s a hand-wavy way of saying that the reviewer thought the book was better than 4 stars but not worthy of 5.
So why don’t Goodreads and Amazon allow reviewers to use half stars? Aren’t they losing information by forcing the reviewer to round? Nope. They force you to round so that they gain information. Wait… How can they gain information by reducing the precision of the score? Ahh… That is the money question. It’s the reason they don’t have half stars. They are asking you to make a distinction that only you can make. That book you’d like to rate 4.5 stars… Is it more accurate in your mind to rate it a 4 or to rate it a 5? Now the reviewer has to make a call. In the hypothetical review of the book above, where the body of the review says 3.5, the reviewer made that call and said, in their mind, it’s more accurate to go with 3. (Social scientist me says well done. Artist me says dang it!)
A single score doesn’t tell you much, but if a lot of reviewers make the same call (to round up or down), the resulting average score is pushed the direction that matches that sentiment. If the reviewers are all over the place, the up-rounders and down-rounders should offset each other.
A Question of Fairness I’ve seen a number of authors complain about improper rounding on Twitter. As you can see above, I don’t think they are right — at least not in terms of math. But I have seen a different complaint that needs acknowledgement: that persons-of-color receive ratings that are disproportionately rounded down. Since star ratings are subjective, biases definitely play in, so that is certainly plausible. (If anyone can point me to a paper or some analysis on this, I’d much appreciate it.) But if that is happening, it’s not due to a lack of precision (or what I would call false precision) in the rating scale; it’s because some people are jerks. I don’t think the jerkiness of some rating randos changes any of what I have said above. Bias is a separate problem that plagues reviews.
Amazon tries to deal with bias and rating reliability through some black box weighting of reviews in the calculation of average ratings. So two people’s 4 star reviews don’t necessarily count the same. (I’m not sure if Goodreads does this. They’re owned by Amazon, but Goodreads seems to be more like the Wild West with reviews.)
This post is long enough already. I’ll write about bias in reviews in a future post. Stay tuned.
The official launch event is happening with the world’s greatest independent bookstore, BookPeople, in Austin, Texas, on May 4th. It’s a virtual event, so you can participate from the comfort of wherever the hell you happen to be. Click here to register and pre-order.
The release date is April 27th. If you don’t go through BookPeople, pick it up from your favorite retailer. If you’re an audiobook fan, I think you’ll love Geoff Sturdevant’s narration. You can get the audio from Audible, Apple, etc.
I’m not sure yet whether there will be an in-person launch at an Austin bookstore (which I would love) or something virtual. I’ll update this space when that gets figured out.
That cover is brilliant, isn’t it? It’s the work of Shayne Leighton. I was hoping for something that would stand out and grab prospective readers’ attention. If it caught yours, check out the summary below:
While landscaping his backyard, ever-conscientious Paul Prentice discovers an iron door buried in the soil. His childhood friend and perpetual source of mischief, Jay Lightsey, pushes them to explore what’s beneath.
When the door slams shut above them, Paul and Jay are trapped in a between-worlds place of Escher-like rooms and horror story monsters, all with a mysterious connection to a command-line, dungeon explorer computer game from the early ’80s called The Between.
Paul and Jay find themselves filling roles in a story that seems to play out over and over again. But in this world, where their roles warp their minds, the biggest threat to survival may not be the Koŝmaro, risen from the Between’s depths to hunt them; the biggest danger may be each other.
A thinly-cited Wikipedia entry credits IBM with originating the “alpha/beta testing” terminology for software development. Even if you’re not a software developer, you’ve probably seen software with labels like beta and early-access. The objective of beta testing is to get real-life users to spend time with the software and find the show-stopping bugs before the product is made generally available.
In many ways, novels are like software: they are drafted, edited, optimized, tested, and (hopefully) eventually published. There are plenty of resources on the Web about how to alpha and beta test your manuscript (e.g., here and here), so I won’t duplicate their contents. Instead, I’ll provide some thoughts, based on my experience, about what makes the process work and what breaks it.
Don’t confuse alpha and beta testing. Alpha testing is early in the process and generally should use a tester that is a good big-picture thinker who can tell you if the major concepts work. Beta readers, on the other hand, are readers who resemble customers that would actually buy your book. Your betas help you polish by identifying bugs. If your betas are finding major plot and character issues, you might want to rethink where you are on your manuscript development path.
Dread, impostor syndrome, anxiety, etc. are all perfectly normal feelings once you hit send and your manuscript goes to betas. It’s rare in life that we put our flaws on display with the express purpose of having them called out. If you don’t feel uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong.
Diversify your readers. You want readers who closely resemble your target audience, but if they are all too similar in their likes and preferences, they’ll share blindspots that can be large.
Beta readers are probably right when several identify the same problems. Remember, your story doesn’t take place on the paper; it takes place in the reader’s head. If you get consistent feedback that something is broken, assume that it is, or at the very least that it can be improved.
Avoid biased readers, like close friends and family. So much can go wrong here. Overly positive feedback can be damaging — it can blind you to real problems. Also, assume that some beta readers won’t end up finishing your manuscript. If that’s going to create awkwardness each time you encounter this person going forward, maybe you don’t want them as a beta.
Cherish good beta readers and respect them by only sending work that is truly ready. You’re asking someone to several hours attentively focusing on your work. That’s a lot to ask of someone. If you’re unsure whether your manuscript is ready, use writing workshops, critique partners, and other resources first.
Ryan Leslie 