DNF – sorry life is short.
Lamenting the state of the current music industry, Mike Doughty (the former lead singer of Soul Coughing) said something that really resonated with me: you can do anything you want if you have an audience. To contextualize the phrase, what he was referring to is the fact that if you approach a record label now-a-days they will be uninterested in how interesting or unique your sound is, they will want you to sound like someone else or do what someone else is doing. Unless of course, you can prove in advance that you have the sales – the audience.
You cannot reasonably look at all the Harry Potter clones, Hunger Games clones, 50 shades of Grey clones, and not think to yourself “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”. Publisher hate art and love money, and the readership is the worst off for it. And we readers are left having to look outside of traditional publishing for any actual gems that are not clones of each other, or slaves to the modern zeitgeist.
If you are thinking “boy, Exurb1a is a funny name for an author” it’s because that is the handle the author goes by on his YouTube channel, and that is how I came about his book. The Fifth Science is a collection of pretty fanciful short stories all revolving around a fictitious science of consciousness.
Unfortunately, I struggled with all the stories here. At some point, I decided that the book was just not worth my time. I wish I had more to say about them than that, but alas I don’t. YouTube videos are all about style, and I think exurb1a has a pretty good sense of style for a multi-modal medium like YouTube. But while his videos are pretty charming, and often pretty good sci-fi stories by their own right, I don’t think this talent translated to the page.
But I admire the hustle, as they say, and if this person leveraged YouTube to sell some books, more power to him.
Failures in Polymathy 