Story of the week: "Calved" by Sam J. Miller

I used to review short stories. Critiqued a ton of them on the sadly defunct The Fix, back when Eugie Foster edited that wonderful website of short story reviews. Also reviewed them on this site, where I tried to bring attention to great stories by recommending short stories worth reading each week.

Then I slacked off. Which is shame on me, because I still read so many short stories. But instead of sharing them I stayed silent.

No longer. Inspired by the superb work K. Tempest Bradford is doing at io9 to highlight genre short fiction I'm again picking stories of the week. And my first is "Calved" by Sam. J. Miller in the September 2015 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

Sam J. Miller is a new author whose stories have been published in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Shimmer and many other places. He's also been nominated for a Nebula Award, won a Shirley Jackson Award, and has a novel coming out next year.

His first story for Asimov's is a near-future tale set on Earth after a global environmental disaster. The narrator, Dom, is an ice-grunt, a poor immigrant cutting ice from glaciers for use as drinking water around the world. When he's not working under horrific conditions on an illegal ice boat he lives on the floating Swedish city of Qaanaaq, where he battles those who hate him because he is poor and doesn't speak the city's main language.

If this sounds like a familiar tale of an immigrant being exploited and discriminated against, that's because it is. But Miller inverts the trope by having Dom be an immigrant from New York City, who fled the USA right before the environment there went to hell and back.

If the plot I've described was all there was to "Calved," then what we'd have would be the set-up for a decent science fiction story, a tale which offers nothing more than a cautionary warning to readers against becoming too comfortable with the benefits they've been blessed with by both history and power. But the heart of Miller's story doesn't come from the backstory described above. Instead, the story derives its true power, as do all great stories, from the relationships between the characters.

You see, Dom is trying and failing to maintain a relationship with his son. Because he must spend so much time at sea harvesting ice, his son has grown up without him. Now a teenager, his son is beginning to see Dom as the rest of the citizens of Qaanaaq see him — a poor piece of trash not worth saving or helping.

Dom is desperate to change his son's opinion. And to accomplish this he ... does something which will haunt me for years to come.

When I finished this story I wanted to scream. I wanted to punish Miller for writing something which so gut my emotions. I wanted to hug him for creating a story so beautifully captivating and so perfectly devastating to read.

"Calved" by Sam. J. Miller is one of the year's best stories and will likely be on my Hugo and Nebula Award short list. Seek this story out and read it.

Do you believe in miracles?

So DeepSouthCon announces John C. Wright will be the guest of honor at their 2016 convention in Roswell, Georgia. Which is the convention's choice, this being a free country and all and people being allowed to say what they want and honor any author they desire.

Funny thing, though. Not only is it a free country and you can say and associate with anyone you like but other people can do the same. And if you honor an author known for attacking others and spewing hate all over the genre, there's a chance people may decide not to associate with your convention. Or spend their money registering for your convention.

All of which brings up an interesting coincidence — the 2016 DeepSouthCon has been cancelled. According to an announcement on their website, the people running the con "decided that it was no longer feasible to host the convention."

I have no proof the selection of Wright as guest of honor and the cancelling of the convention six months later are in any way related. These facts may simply be two isolated events swirling in the chaos we delightfully call existence.

But this is still an interesting coincidence. Or miracle, depending on your worldview.

Stick a fork in the pup's Tor boycott because their hushpuppy is done

Do you understand math? Can you agree that 1679 is larger than 1652?

If this numerical fact seems obvious, then you can easily see why the puppies' boycott of Tor books has failed.

Earlier this month I tracked the sales of a sample of ten book titles published by Tor Books. My desire was to see if the puppies' boycott of Tor was having any effect on the publisher's sales.

You can see the titles I tracked, and how I tracked the sales, in my original post or by looking at the endnote below.

But the flaw in my analysis was that I could only present two weeks of sales data since the boycott began on June 19. As a result, some people rightly said it was too early to tell if the boycott was failing or succeeding.

After examining two additional weeks of sales data it appears my initial analysis was correct. This new data shows that for the five weeks prior to the boycott starting on June 19, the total weekly sales average for these Tor titles was 1652 books per week. For those same Tor titles, their total weekly average sales for the last four weeks of the boycott has been 1679 books per week.

So on average, Tor's total sales for these titles are up slightly since the boycott started.

Here's a chart tracking the weekly sales of these Tor novels. The yellow line represents the average weekly sales of these novels prior to the start of the boycott. The red line is the weekly total sales numbers. You can see total sales for each individual week by hovering over the red line.

Total Weekly Sales for Selected Tor Titles

Red: Total sales per week for selected Tor titles (see endnote for titles)
Yellow: Average sales per week for selected Tor titles for five weeks prior to boycott

As you can see, there's a lot of variation in the week-to-week sales total for these selected Tor novels. That's normal for the sales of any publisher's titles. But what we don't see is a sharp dropoff like you'd expect if this boycott was successful. Instead, the sales are continuing to group around the average weekly sales Tor saw before the boycott began.

And it's hard to argue with 1679 being larger than 1652. With the four-week post-boycott sales average for these Tor novels slightly higher than before the boycott, I don't see how anyone can say the boycott is succeeding.

Stick a fork in that puppy boycott, because their hushpuppy campaign is done.

Endnote

For this analysis I tracked the sales for the following Tor novels over nine-week period (five weeks prior to the boycott and four weeks after it started). The sales were tracked with Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 60% of actual physical book sales.

• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (mass market paperback)
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (trade paperback)
• Willful Child by Steven Erikson (hardcover)
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (hardcover)
• Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (mass market paperback)
• Lock In by John Scalzi (hardcover)
• A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab (hardcover)
• The Just City by Jo Walton (hardcover)
• Like a Mighty Army by David Weber (mass market paperback)
• The Architect of Aeons by John C. Wright (hardcover)

It's extremely difficult to track every Tor novel on their large backlist so I selected these ten novels to demonstrate sales across a range of different publishing formats (hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback). All of these Tor titles had previously appeared on the Locus bestseller lists in the months before I began tracking their sales.

Obviously the best thing would be to have easy access to sales data for all Tor titles. But until this data is made available, I believe my analysis is the best way to track any effect the Tor boycott is having.

Tor's sales average also indicates the boycott is failing

Over on File 770 Mike Glyer wonders if the numbers I presented about the Tor boycott failing actually show the opposite. It's a good question to ask, especially if you only look at a week or two of Tor's sales.

However, comparing a single week's sales to another week's sales can be extremely misleading, especially since book sales fluctuate greatly on a week to week basis. 

A better way to look at this is to establish an average for Tor's sales prior to the boycott, which is what I tried to show by tracking five weeks of sales prior to the boycott's start on June 19. This five-week sales average was 1652 copies per week for the sample of books I tracked.

In the graph below, this pre-boycott sales average is illustrated by the yellow line. The red line tracks the week by week total sales of the books I tracked. As you can see, there was a dip in the last two weeks of the boycott, but the dip has yet to go below the average set in the previous five weeks. This is one of the reasons I said the boycott had failed.

Red: Total Sales per week
Yellow: Average sales for five weeks prior to boycott
Blue: Weekly sales without including Ender's Games sales

But looking only at total sales doesn't give the full picture of Tor's sales because the books in my sample were published in different formats, from expensive hardcovers to trade paperbacks to mass market paperbacks. If you want to determine if Tor's sales are truly falling, lumping all these different formats in together for a cumulative sales number doesn't strike me as the best way to go. After all, is it better for Tor to sell one $25 hardcover or one $6 mass market paperback? I'm guessing Tor would go with the hardcover sale.

In addition, the book which dropped the most during the two week boycott was Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a strange title for the boycott to focus on since the author's politics are in line with many of the people calling for the boycott. 

It's because of variables such as these that I looked for overall patterns in Tor's sales with my analysis of their sales numbers. If the boycott was successful, you'd expect to see a sharp drop in sales across all titles, which is not what we're seeing here. Instead, what the numbers appear to show is random fluctuation which has yet to dip below the average for Tor's sales prior to the boycott.  In short, the pattern of sales we saw prior to the boycott is the pattern of sales we're seeing during the boycott.

Of course, it's possible the slight drop in sales the last two weeks will continue or increase. But that will only be evident after another few weeks of sales data come in.

Pups all bark, no bite as Tor boycott fails

Last month SF author Peter Grant called for a boycott of science fiction publisher Tor Books after Tor messed themselves over editor Irene Gallo's comments about the Sad and Rabid Puppies Hugo campaigns. Grant's call to doggy arms was quickly embraced by others associated with the Pups. It truly seemed like the boycott was off to a greyhound-fast start.

Or maybe not. Because the boycott now appears to be more like a Greyhound bus broken down on the side of a road instead of a massive movement forcing one of the genre's leading SF/F publishers to their knees.

My proof? Turns out the boycott has had no noticeable impact on the sales of Tor's books, as determined by a sampling of Tor sales reported through Nielsen BookScan, a publishing industry sales-tracking system.

Grant first called for the Tor boycott on June 19, followed almost immediately by others affiliated with the Pup campaigns. To see if the boycott was effective, I examined BookScan numbers for a selection of Tor titles by different authors.

It's extremely difficult to track every Tor novel on their large backlist so I selected 10 novels in different publishing formats — hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback — from Tor titles which had appeared on the Locus bestseller lists over the last six months. These novels' sales were tracked for five weeks prior to the start of the boycott on June 19 to establish a sales baseline, and for the two weeks after the start of the boycott. (For more on what BookScan does and doesn't track with regards to book sales, see the note below this post.)

Here's what the sales of the Tor titles I tracked looked like for this seven week period.

View fullsize

Below is the specific sales data for these titles. The titles are alphabetized by author last name and include the title's publishing format and the specific copies sold as reported by BookScan. The number of copies sold are how many copies that book sold in the week ending in the specific date. So if I listed a book as "100 copies on 7/05," that means the book sold 100 total copies as tracked by BookScan for the week ending July 5, 2015.

• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (mass market paperback)
  137 copies on 7/05, 123 on 6/28, 116 on 6/21, 130 on 6/14, 106 on 6/7, 63 on 5/31, 101 on 5/24.
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (trade paperback)
  248 copies on 7/05, 299 on 6/28, 279 on 6/21, 231 on 6/14, 262 on 6/7, 379 on 5/31, 168 on 5/24.
• Willful Child by Steven Erikson (hardcover)
  3 copies on 7/05, 6 on 6/28, 8 copies on 6/21, 7 on 6/14, 12 on 6/7, 3 on 5/31, 7 on 5/24.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (hardcover)
  119 copies on 7/05, 118 on 6/28, 161 copies on 6/21, 106 on 6/14, 168 on 6/7, 128 on 5/31, 123 on 5/24.
• Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (mass market paperback)
  728 copies on 7/05, 744 on 6/28, 724 on 6/21, 641 on 6/14, 695 on 6/7, 623 on 5/31, 711 on 5/24.
• Lock In by John Scalzi (hardcover)
  65 copies on 7/05, 39 on 6/28, 74 on 6/21, 63 on 6/14, 46 on 6/7, 54 on 5/31, 21 on 5/24.
• A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab (hardcover)
  215 copies on 7/05, 252 on 6/28, 240 on 6/21, 232 on 6/14, 249 on 6/7, 308 on 5/31, 262 on 5/24.
• The Just City by Jo Walton (hardcover)
  43 copies on 7/05, 28 on 6/28, 21 on 6/21, 12 on 6/14, 23 on 6/7, 38 on 5/31, 23 on 5/24.
• Like a Mighty Army by David Weber (mass market paperback)
  99 copies on 7/05, 89 on 6/28, 110 on 6/21, 101 on 6/14, 112 on 6/7, 112 on 5/31, 124 on 5/24.
• The Architect of Aeons by John C. Wright (hardcover)
  10 copies on 7/05, 10 on 6/28, 8 on 6/21, 13 on 6/14, 20 on 6/7, 23 on 5/31, 20 on 5/24.

As you can see, there's no significant drop in sales due to the boycott. Yes, some titles saw a slight drop but this was offset by other titles increasing their sales or titles keeping relatively steady sales. In all, the sales of these Tor titles demonstrated similar patterns to what they sold prior to the boycott starting.

Earlier this week George R. R. Martin called for people to support Tor by purchasing their books. Boycott originator Peter Grant claimed this as proof that the boycott is succeeding. But that's not proof. That's what we call wrong-headed speculation.

Proof is looking at the actual sales numbers for Tor books. And the numbers I've examined show the boycott is failing miserably.

Guess the puppy boycott is truly all bark and no bite.
 

Note about BookScan numbers: Nielsen BookScan does not report e-book sales or some print copy sales or how many books are checked out of libraries. Based on what I've been told, Bookscan numbers represents about 60% of actual physical book sales.