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An SF meditation on the meaning of marriage, Triptych works by showing us a marriage which is not a marriage – one which inspires loathing in all sorts of people – and yet turns out to be one.

We begin (rather unpromisingly) with a pleasant day on an Ontario dairy farm, a day on which an spaceship crashes into our front yard and its pilot attempts to murder our infant daughter. A pair of special forces operatives – dressed in black, of course – arrive just in time to shoot the alien and save the daughter. One of those operatives is that daughter, now almost thirty, who has travelled back in time to save herself.

This complex setup gives way to a set of nicely drawn portraits of several marriages. We have the young agents, who are partnered but not married. We have the parents, who are married but seldom seem to be in the same place. We have the space aliens, who are likable and helpful refugees from an interstellar disaster who turned up on our doorstep and to whom earth has offered asylum. They’ve got some nice ideas – they have spaceships, after all. And they have some interesting ideas too, including the notion that marriage is between three adults. After all, if there are 24 (or, back home, 31) hours in the day, you need three shifts of keep an eye on the baby.

A Rose Fox suggestion from Readercon 2011. This year’s Readercon runs July 12-15.

Suppose you hear about a new book on Advanced Widget Techniques. You aren’t really building widgets now, but you’re planning to put a widget into your product this fall. You don’t expect to need any advanced techniques. You might be hiring a widget consultant to do the work in any case.

So, you definitely don’t need that new book yet, and you might not need it at all.

BUT, suppose it turns out that you do need it. Come autumn, you install your widget and the compiler starts talking about Error 1708, and suddenly you need those advanced techniques. But how long will it take you to remember that book, find it, and get it delivered? You could waste an hour tracking it down, and that’s a lot more expensive that buying the book. Your consultant might waste an hour tracking it down, and that’s a billable hour. And the consultant’s going to expense the book anyway.

So, buying the book before you need it might make sense, even if it’s likely you won’t need it at all.

When I was in college, the Classics department bulletin board was once adorned with one of the all-time classics, the Times (London) debate about Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” This familiar phrase, when you think about it, makes no sense.

In what light do the waters of the Aegean remind you of wine? And what kind of wine? You would hardly call your pinot grigio “dark,” and your nice Tuscan red is really not very like the Mediterranean’s crystalline turquoise in sunlight, nor much like it’s dark blue gray beneath looming storm clouds. Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Was the Med once red? Were there algae blooms in antiquity? Or was Greek wine blue? What are we missing?

People wrote letters, they wrote columns they wrote rebuttals. It went on for ages.

There’s another wonderful fracas right now in the TLS. Paula Byrne kicked it off with a note about a (terrible) pencil drawing she owns which, just possibly, is a portrait of Jane Austen. The case for this requires very close attention to all sorts of details. Who could have made the drawing? Why? Are the clothes right?

Then Roy Davids, who wrote the auction catalog, weighed in to defend that catalog’s skepticism. Then Richard Jenkyns, a professor, weighed in with additional reasons for doubt:

Dr Byrne treats the picture like a photograph – as though Jane Austen had visited an unattested friend who chanced to live due west of the Abbey and someone snapped her there. But of course portraits were not like that; the backgrounds signify. The sitter is a Londoner: she is at home with her cat beside her. No one would take a likeness of a person with somebody else’s cat. She may have been wife, daughter or sister of a Rector of St Margaret’s or a Dean or Canon of Westminster, or perhaps a literary lady who wrote about Westminster.

Then Dierdre Le Faye wrote a still longer and more detail refutation. If this is Jane, where are her books? Where is the topaz necklace Jane’s brother gave her? Where did all the rest of the jewelry come from?

The TLS articles are regrettably locked behind a paywall, but J. F. Wakefield, who blogs for the Jane Austen’s House Museum, has a good summary.

It’s been an exhilarating day, as the new eBook of the Tinderbox Way: 2nd Edition has been flying off the virtual shelves. Thanks.

James Fallows has a new book. Paul Krugman has a new book. David Frum has a new book. Veronica Roth has a new book . They’re all talking about the many chores of talking about one’s new book.

Why does this matter?

Trade books — books sold in bookstores, have to pay rent. American book selling is a consignment business — booksellers can return unsold books and get their money back — but books take up space and your landlord isn’t going to give you back any of last month’s rent because nobody bought War And Peace.

Bookstores need to stock lots of different books because you never know what the next person who walks in the store might want. You do know, unfortunately, that if you don’t give them whatever it was they wanted, many will often leave and not come back. So you want to have lots of books on hand.

But, to make rent, you have to sell those books occasionally. Your best-sellers will make up for some slow-moving stock, but on average you need to turn over your stock about 3.5 times a year. If you have a tiny shop with 5,000 books, you’d better sell 15,000 or 20,000 books a year. Books have to earn their keep.

In addition, those unsold books are an asset on the publisher’s books. If they’re not going to be sold soon, the publisher wants to take the loss on them now in order to minimize tax liabilities. That increases the torque on books still more.

Finally, there are only so many ways that books can get attention. Free media helps a lot, so people go on book tours and publicists cajole reviewers and everyone tries to get on TV. Advertising apparently works in Europe, but seldom works in the US; when you see book ads, they’re aimed at bookstore decision-makers, not you. You’ve got bookstore windows and tables and endcaps. You’ve got store clerks.

If you’re selling in bookstores, you’ve got to start big and the clock ticks fast. I’ve known writers who received nifty awards when their book was already out of print.

Electronic books and new media don’t have to work this way. Some of the factors still matter: Eastgate carries more inventory than I’d like, though in the greater scheme of things it’s not that much. But simply being brand new need not play as big a role as it does when you’re dealing with printed paper.

Still, those first days are big. Sales of both editions of Tinderbox Way have been far more heavily front-loaded than a new Tinderbox release. My impression is that this has held true as well for other tech publishers in the eBook space. (Want to comment? Email me. ) I’m not at all certain I understand why this is true.

This was the nadir of that thread, but most of the rest are dismal. Who wants to read long, evidence-free arguments about whether a free app will beat a $5 app? Who are these people who care so much about the cost of apps? Especially apps that cost less than a burger and fries at Five Guys?

If sites are going to have comment threads, they should (a) ban anonymous cowards, (b) require children to demonstrate that their comments are worth reading, and (c) require comments to be sufficiently lengthy to be worth reading. I think even that is inadequate.

Whatever happened to “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS”? Nobody asked their opinion of whether Marco Arment is running his business properly. Are they betting on whether Marco makes a million or goes bust? One assumes he has studied his own business and its underlying technologies. Courtesy requires that we imagine he knows what he’s doing, absent clear evidence to the contrary.

Of course, nobody knows everything. You might know something that Marco has overlooked, and maybe that something would be valuable. If so, it would be nice to tell him. It shouldn’t be hard to find his email address, or to give him a holler. Why shout at him in public?

From time to time, I get a lot of flack about publishing business models from people who don’t appear to know very much about publishing. No reason they should: they’re in the business of writing and grading papers.

They probably don’t know a hell of a lot about raising chinchillas, either.

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At sixteen, Seattle schoolgirl Astrid Llewelyn learns a few things. Unicorns exist. They’re real: powerful, magical, and very dangerous. They can be approached only by maiden girls. And they’re terrible, bloodthirsty monsters bent on the destruction of humankind.

It turns out that there’s an academy in Rome, recently revived, that trains unicorn hunters. Summer in Rome will look good on college applications. And, though she’s not exactly proud of the fact, it turns out that Astrid is fully qualified. (In other words, we’ve got the Slayerettes all over again, albeit with poorly-funded and disorganized Watchers.)

To its credit, the book lets Astrid interrogate this strange mythology, and she does a credible job. Who makes these rules? What sort of crazy, patriarchal, Manichaean power thought that this would be a nifty way to run things? That interrogation is the strongest part of the book and ties neatly into Arcade Fire’s “Abraham’s Daughter”:

The solution (and much else) is left to subsequent books. This book is structurally simple but written with a satisfactory directness and simplicity. The sense of place is shaky. That this is tourist Rome may be excused since our heroine is, after all, a tourist, and the cloisters of the Order of the Lioness are good, but school kids spending the summer in Rome would know the Metropolitana better than these do, and they’d notice more small, disturbing oddities about life in Italy. Yes, they're distracted by attacks from legendary monsters, but surely they’re also going to be noticing that the shampoo is different, the toilets have funny shapes, there’s wine with dinner (and two mains), and people park (and sometimes drive) on the sidewalk?