I do not read online SF magazines regularly. I get a newsletter from Tordotcom, that leads me to reading some of their articles. That‘s about it. Most newsletter I read a few times and then get rid of again. Today I stumbled across Locus magazine though and read some good stuff.
JAMES PATTERSON signed on to finish an incomplete manuscript by MICHAEL CRICHTON (1942-2008) for Little, Brown via Robert Barnett for Patterson and Shane Salerno for CrichtonSun (the estate’s production company). The novel concerns “a mega-eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano that can destroy not just the island but the entire world.”
I would read that! I like apocalyptic scenarios and have always found volcanoes oddly fascinating. Then this article had me nodding my head vigorously:
As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate.
For social media, the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends, and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there’s the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place.
Isn‘t that the truth! And you need a place to switch to, once you get to that point. Or not, as the case might be. When I left FB and Twitter years ago, I did not replace them and it wasn‘t a big deal. However, leaving Goodreads would be. Where to go? There is no other booksite that has these social media qualities. I have been with them since 2008 and with my current favourite group I have been since 2017. I don‘t want to loose them. So, at the moment, the switching cost is too high.
“My latest book is called The Terraformers and it is a multigenerational epic about terraforming a planet. As it says on the tin, it is about some terraformers, the people doing the real work planetside, and it takes place over many thousands of millennia. It starts about 60,000 years in our future and ends 65,000 years in our future. I spent a lot of time working on the timeline leading up to the events of the novel. I have all these files on my computer that are full of things like, ‘Okay, but if this happened at this date, then what would happen at this date?!’
Cathy's Reading Bonanza 