I see the future. (Socially.)

Taurus:

Film deals are great. You should give due thought to any film deal you are offered this week. Especially if it comes from a reliable person. Also, beware of lobster. It’s not the claws which’ll get you, it’s the PCBs. No kidding. You could end up looking like that Yushchenko guy. Ouch. And seriously, who the hell didn’t think he had Organophosphate poisoning?

Gemini:

Today is not a good day for barbed wit. Someone’ll take you seriously and then there’ll be the sirens and the arrests. Just like Bogota. And another thing: pack your bug detector and your umbrella which fires tranquiliser darts. It pays to be prepared in your profession. 

If you’re not an international superspy, you should maybe consider it. It’s a growth area. Study kinesic interviewing – we need more interrogators who know more than just shutting the drawer of their desk in a menacing way.

Socially, it’s best to avoid starting a relationship with someone who knows about high velocity spatter. Look for elegant hands instead.

Your lucky fruit: kumkwat. Makes excellent mojitos.

Cancer:

Today is the day, man. It’s totally coming down today. You’re gettin’ the credit and yo-ho-goddam-HO! Now, if you can just murder and destroy that ass who wants to steal some of your limelight successfully negotiate appropriate personal acclaim, everything will be fine.

Your lucky colour is beige.

I said it was lucky, not exciting. 

Leo:

Remember when you were ten and you stormed out of the house screaming “I’ll never talk to you again”? And you ran off to Baikal and worked swing shift at an oil refinery, then joined the French Foreign Legion when you were sixteen and changed your name to DuBois, got involved in drugs and built a criminal empire spanning continents? You know what? Today’s a great day to reconnect with your family. Just a word of caution: having them dragged before you in chains is probably not the best way to begin the healing process.

Your lucky colour is – dude, honestly? You employ fifteen top class hitmen and a guy who eats fingers. If you need a lucky colour, you’re doing something wrong.

Virgo:

This is not a good day to improvise. If I may suggest, stay with what you know, and what you intend. Do not, under any circumstances, exchange a cow for a collection of magic beans, or ask questions like “what is the Matrix?”

Stay on the path, do not speak to weird hitchhikers or accept lifts from Kurt Russell. Tomorrow, you can run wild and throw your undergarments at a bus conductor, if that’s what you need to do. This is not, not, not that day.

I can’t make it any clearer. It’s the influence of Pluto, if you must know.

Wear your lucky sweater, even if it smells slightly of cheese.

Libra:

The perfect day to cut your own hair. Just remember, it’s not about the look, it’s about the way it makes you feel. Unless it makes you feel bald and unhappy. Then it’s probably best if you get someone else to do it. But don’t hamper your creative mood with fear and nerves, is what I’m saying. Kick back, tune in, feel the force. Destroy the Death Star or start work on that sonata.

Beware of cats, carts, courts, and cuttlefish. The last one especially, if you’re walking barefoot on a beach.

Scorpio:

Can we just being by pointing out how much you rock? You rock. Anyone who does not recognise the rocking, well, they’ve got their own damn problems. 

In terms of that minor thing you keep meaning to deal with, it may be best to temper justice with mercy, but please, no sudden moments of weakness. If you were going to put him in the shark tank or release the death-weasels when you went to bed last night, you probably shouldn’t change your mind at this stage. It looks bad in front of your international villain colleagues.

Romance: if you’re looking, take up Argentine Tango or something. Seriously. Fish in mud, get mudskippers. If you’re not looking, the question you have to ask yourself is why you’re reading this section of your chart? Feel guilt. Buy your partner something small and frivolous and make them smile. Or just hug them.

Your lucky country is Micronesia. Well, not really, but how cool would that be?

Sagittarius:

You’re on fire! You’re a man, you’re a mountain, you’re a rolling stone! I love your eyebrows. And that shirt – man, you were worried it was a bridge too far, but seriously, it makes you look like a giant alien made of glitter and snot just tried to eat your chest awesome. Where can I get one?

The only thing I can’t figure out is what you’re doing here. Shouldn’t you be out doing your thing? Well, never mind.

Your lucky scent: jasmine

Capricorn:

Those boots were made for walkin’, and that’s what they need to do. Tell those restricty nay-sayers where to get off! Cut loose! Learn to play the banjo naked with a fake Eurotrash viscount from Taipei, if that’s your thing. (Send me pictures, I love banjo-nudity.)

Don’t let anyone get you down. You’re special. It’s just that they don’t see it because they do not know about the space elves that live in your brain case they’re jealous and weak and must be destroyed.

Dude, why are you looking at me like that?

Aquarius:

Ever seen a hockey-stick graph? That’s you. Or maybe you should look further and go for catastrophe maths. It doesn’t have to be bad, but your whole world is going bye-bye today in some way. The influence of the giant asteroid which is about to flatten your town because your government was too cheap to pay for a Near Earth Object programme looms – and I do mean looms – large in your chart.

Your lucky genre is post-apocalyptic fiction. But it’s more The Road than The Gone-Away World.

Pack your suitcase with shotgun shells and water, we’re goin’ on a road trip.

(Avoid crazy groups of soldiers who will seek to breed a new generation of earth humans with you.)

Pisces:

Calm down. Calm. Take deep breaths. There is no cause for alarm. Yes, yes, I know, you just read the Aquarius chart and it freaked you out and now you want to know it’s all gonna be okay. It is, it is, it really is.

Kinda.

But enough about that. You have work issues.

Doesn’t really seem like much in the face of an asteroid strike, does it? So here’s my recommendation: put a hundred on black, dance on the table among the Mezzes, and let yourself go. You’ll wake up with a hangover and some hot muffin named V. Who cares about the downside? The world might come to an end.

Or it might not and someone will think it’s funny to put the whole thing on YouTube. World’s full of risk, man.

Your lucky game: roulette. As long as you play the odds and quit when you’re ahead.

Aries:

Several things – first up, it’s time to stop treating the people around you as cattle, and consider them as fellow human beings. Second, it is not strictly true what your mother told you about your father being the Anti-Christ who came to her in a dream and seduced her with his evil magic. Your father was a plumber named Neil, and he had really sexy arms. So you’ve got that going for you.

Third: those shoes? The French judge says non.

Other than that, take a chance on love. Or do something spontaneous. It’s grey and grim outside, and you’ll make someone’s day. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

I have been busy!

Gah. I’ve been pillar to post. I can’t even tell you what I’ve been up to – not because it’s a secret, but because I’ve done so much this month that I simply have no idea what any of it was. I feel as if I’ve just taken my finals all over again, that weird purge that shunts everything it took three years to learn onto a few bits of paper and wipes it from your brain for a year…

Anyway. News from Harkaway Towers (which as I have mentioned has no tower and in fact consists in large part of basement):

I’m a finalist in the Locus Awards, which I’m really jazzed about. I would tell you to go and vote like crazy for me, but you can’t, because, as Scalzi observes, the actual winner is already decided.

However, in general terms: bwahahahaha! Soon I shall have understanding of microwave ovens!

(Incidentally, does anyone notice a slight similarity here between David Warner as the Evil Genius talking about things being different because he has understanding, and Dick Cheney saying he had a ‘different understanding’ of the Vice-President’s job? No? Well, I won’t insist…)

Aside from that, it occasioned me to read this really heart-warming piece about the book, and go through my now-familiar pattern of delight, awe, terror (that I will never write anything that moves people this way, ever, ever again) and determination (that I bloody well will).

Elsewhere: I had a message from the Sci-Fi London festival earlier, and they’ve told me I can give a pair of tickets away for the panel I’m participating in on Sunday. I just have to come up with a way to decide who gets ‘em…

I thought about asking you define spime flu. It didn’t seem as clever when I typed it as it was in my head.

So, tell you what – if you want ‘em, drop me a line. I’ll dish ‘em out to someone on an entirely unscientific and semi-random basis. If you can come up with the question I should have asked, that will almost certainly help your chances. I’m also told that anyone who buys tickets for any of the literary panels over the weekend can have two for the price of one if they use the words AUTHOR BLOG when they book by telephone on 020 7451 9944.  This offer is good until Friday 1st May.

Must go to a meeting now…

I’m dithering about the Google Books Settlement.

Naturally. I use the internet constantly, I love social media, I’m an info junkie. So, inevitably, what is possibly the most important development in the relationship between books and digital media so far has taken me completely by surprise and I’m scrambling to catch up. I suck.

A few thoughts on that score:

The reason I don’t know about this is that the whole thing seemed lengthy, legalistic, and boring. It is, in fact, lengthy, legalistic, boring, and really important. (See also: I suck.) 

Cory Doctorow and Jay Lake (among others) have written cogently about why the Settlement is Not A Good Thing. I’m about to dive into a wad of thick, jargon-filled explanation, but at the moment, my main feeling is that Google have – probably inadvertently – done a bad thing. In an attempt to do a very good thing – to preserve and provide access to a whole host of texts which are vanishing and rotting – they have fallen nose-first into the tricksome business of reforming copyright and made life easier for any large company wishing to steamroller a small rights holder.

Way to go, fellas. I suck. But you suck bigtime.

Actually, what I suspect this points up is that Google have not cottoned on to how much effect they have and in what a web of consequence such powerful entities live. They really need to get a handle on that. May I suggest, therefore, that Google execs buy a bunch of copies of Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback and read it cover to cover a few times? Or, you know. They could read it online.

My inclination at the moment is to opt out. It’s profoundly unlikely that I will bring my own case against Google. That does not seem like a sensible thing to do. However, I don’t want to be pressured into accepting a deal I don’t like. I don’t want to signal acceptance of Google’s hamhanded rights grab. I don’t think that this deal, which may turn out to shape the landscape of electronic books and rights for the next little while, has been properly examined. I think it may suck.

I’m also not one hundred percent comfortable with being represented in a case in the US by the Author’s Guild. I realise it’s an aspect of US law that a class action suit is binding upon a class of persons, by definition. I’m just not happy about being told that my interests in a defining moment in publishing are represented by someone I have no contact with. The Guild feels that the Settlement is a good deal for authors, and that may be the case in terms of the immediate consequences – bringing out-of-print and small run books to an audience – but I’m not sure that the larger picture is positive. At the same time, I don’t know enough yet to make firm conclusions. Fortunately, I just got extra time to learn.

This ‘library model’ of electronic publishing is one of the ways the industry might survive in a world of eBooks; rather than buying individual books, you subscribe to a library and use your internet connection to access any book in the list. In that case, of course, Google have just stolen the march on conventional publishers. They’re occupying the space which is one way for publishing to continue into a paperless age. I don’t actually think we’re entering a paperless age at this point – apart from anything else, I don’t think we need to be more dependent than we already are on the small supply of rare earths which are required to make hi tech gear. (Guess what? They mostly come from places which are messed up.) That said, this is potentially a really smooth bit of corporate jujitsu and an utterly nasty thing to do. Don’t be evil? Hm.

On that note, though, this is another reason I’m wondering whether I’ll just opt out: there’s no particular reason I have to allow Google to be my online library host. I could host for myself. I could assume that – if this is a real arena for eBooks and so on – Random House will rapidly enter the game to compete for space in the business.

This deal is being bruited as the only game in town, and either it’s not or it shouldn’t be.

And finally, if anyone was going to gain the right to give access to out-of-print books, to brush aside copyright for orphaned texts and so on, why should it be Google? Why should it be a company at all? If the contention is that these books are a natural resource, why are we allowing a corporate entity to assert exclusive mining rights?

More when I have a clue what I’m talking about.