1. Over a decade ago, a Russian paleontologist wrote an alternative take on the War of the Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Recently translated into English, Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer tells the tale from the point of view of Mordor, the bad guys in Tolkien’s epic.
   
   History is usually written by the victors, but now the truth of the War of the Ring has finally come out. Gandalf is portrayed as a warmonger bent on destroying a bastion of civilization dedicated to reason, science, technology, and industrialization because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” The elves are bent on world domination and Aragorn is a Machiavellian schemer whose strings are pulled by his wife, Arwen.
   
   If you’re intrigued, you can learn more about The Last Ringbearer from the Salon.com article “Middle-Earth according to Mordor” and, also on Salon.com, the author’s own account of why he wrote the novel. You can download The Last Ringbearer for free and give it a read. Here’s to hoping Christopher Tolkien doesn’t aggress against Yeskov by launching a copyright or trademark infringement lawsuit.
2. Finally, the print magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is entering the digital age and switching from snail mail to an electronic submissions system.
3. In my previous news roundup, I posted the trailer of the upcoming movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as well as some reports from people who had seen an advance preview and an interview with the producer. Here’s more footage, the scene in which Henry Rearden returns home and gives his wife a bracelet made from the first pouring of Rearden Metal:
   

4. There are two new trailers available for Sucker Punch, about which I’ve written previously. Follow the link for the libertarian angle and the first trailer. New trailers below:
   

5. And there’s more preview footage and talk about what to expect from HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones:
   

While its content is freely available online, Clarkesworld sells print versions of its fiction. An annual anthology series, Realms, is available in trade paperback, hardcover, and ebook formats. Additionally, several months after online publication, each month’s fiction is collected in chapbook form; the value-add here is that the chapbooks are limited print run (100), numbered editions that are signed by the authors. If you happen to have a tablet pc or ereader, you can also purchase ebook editions of each monthly online issue in epub or mobi/kindle format.

But what really caught my attention was the innovative way Clarkesworld is approaching the traditional donation model. The magazine has instituted a 4-tier membership program, with larger donations getting you access to a higher tier of membership (a status symbol) and better benefits (listing in the annual anthology, copies of Realms in one of its formats, Rejection Journal, other merchandise).

There’s a twist, however, that really intrigued me. By donating you don’t just become a “member” but a “citizen.” As a libertarian anarchist, I really get a kick out of that. Now here’s a form of citizenship I can get down with!  Completely voluntary, incredibly easy to renounce, not tied to any geographic territory, narrow in scope, provides real benefits I might actually want and supports something of actual value.

Check out the Clarkesworld Census and you’ll see they’ve made something of a game out of it too. You can be a higher ranking citizen’s minion/devoted subject or follow one of the authors as if they were a god.

For those not in the know, Locus Magazine is, as its subtitle suggests, The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field. It is the pre-eminent magazine covering the genre publishing industry, prose fiction, and conventions, featuring reviews, news, interviews, publishing data, and more.

With the January 2011 issue, which will focus on SF in the digital age, the magazine will publish its first digital edition. The digital editions will be available in pdf format at first. Epub and Kindle editions might come in the future. This is good news to be sure.

Like many traditional publishers, however, I don’t think the staff at Locus have quite grasped where things are headed in the digital age, or even what is cutting edge right now. Pdfs, and even epub and Kindle editions, are simply not enough. It’s old school even, at least for organizations that entered the digital age early (such as the visionary Ludwig von Mises Institute, which publishes all its print, audio, and video media online — for free, since it’s an educational organization).

What Locus needs to do is have a webapp (such as for the Chrome Web Store) as well as Android and iOS apps developed — really nice ones, like I’ve heard the New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Economist’s are.

The initial pricing for Locus’s digital editions also strikes me as too high. $5.50 for a single issue? Come on. That’s pushing it for entire books as far as I and, I think, many others are concerned. You can get a discount off of the “newsstand” price if you subscribe for 6 months or 1 year, of course. But a 1-year digital subscription is still $48. That’s only $12 off the also pricey 1-year print subscription. If you’re already a print subscriber, you can add digital editions for “only” $1 more per issue, for a total of $72 per year. But $60 per year for the print edition is already pretty steep in my opinion. I’m not sure why it costs so much, particularly for a magazine that is mostly black and white, but the prices really need to come down, especially for the digital editions. People don’t like to spend as much for digital versions of media they consume. A small discount over the print version just won’t cut it in the long-run.

There’s no mention of DRM though, so that’s a plus.