Podcast(s): RPG Gamer Dad Podcast and the Cornell Collective

This week, I'm a guest on not one but two fantastic podcasts, The RPG Gamer Dad Podcast and The Cornell Collective. And I'm joined by some other really spectacular guests.

On The RPG Gamer Dad Podcast, I am playing the title character in the fabulous Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game from Evil Hat Productions. The game is based on the incredible comic series--one of my all time favorite comics--from Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener. It's about a sentient robot created by Nikola Tesla in 1923, whose adventures span nearly a century of tales. Cut from the same cloth as Doc Savage, Buckaroo Banzai, and Tom Strong, it's one of the zaniest and best things to come out of comics in years. The whole thing is online to read for free now, though frankly I prefer to give these guys my money. The role playing game, meanwhile, is powered by the Fate Core System, a fantastic storytelling game in with which I've fallen in love and which I use to power my own home campaign, set in the world of my Thrones & Bones novels. For this episode (which is Part One of our adventure), Mike Olson, the creator of Atomic Robo RPG, is the actual GM. Shanna Germain of the fabulous Monte Cook Games is Helen ‘Nightingale’ McAllister. Devon Kelley of the Sharkbone Podcast is Donovan ‘Jack Tarot’ McAllister. And RPG Gamer Dad is Professor Pierson. It was an incredibly fun session to play, and I'm glad it's made for a great show as well.

On The Cornell Collective, my dear friend of many years, Paul Cornell (of Doctor Who and Marvel comics fame, and many other things), sits down to chat with myself, our mutual friend Joseph Mallozzi (executive producer of such wondrous shows as Stargate: Universe and Dark Matter), and the delightful comic book artist Emma Vieceli (she of the critically acclaimed independent web series, Breaks, Doctor Who for Titan comics, IDW's Jem & the Holograms, and much besides.) We discuss our secret Geek origins, the influences in our respective works, and horrendously embarrassing moments from each of our careers.

I'm really happy with both podcasts, but particularly  so as on each I got to have fun with such wonderful and exciting people, friends old and new. Please check them out!

Convergence 2013

Last weekend, July 4th to 7th, was CONvergence 2013, a convention held in Bloomington, MN that I've been hearing good things about for several years now. I had the privileged of being a Guest of Honor, and the double-thrill of having my good friends John Picacio, Paul Cornell, Melinda Snodgrass, and Charlie Jane Anders all there as Guests of Honor as well!

Attendance at the convention was apparently a record-breaking 6,789 persons, who somehow all fit inside the Double Tree hotel. And not only did they fit - the Double Tree has a large indoor courtyard and attendees rent rooms with patios opening on to it, strip the rooms of furnishings, and convert them into elaborately constructed party palaces. My son loved the Japanese Tea House, so every evening we stopped by for a different tea and biscuits. I probably went through half-a-hundred fruit smoothies at the Space Lounge. And while I didn't sample "Green" nor "Orange" in the Enterprise, I did get to stand on a teleporter and and pose as a communications officer on a Star Trek: TOS set.

It's hard to communicate the energy and enthusiasm at this show--even the
hotel staff are wearing CONvergence t-shirts throughout the weekend - or the friendliness and professionalism of the con. We were all of us very impressed by the opening ceremonies. When I heard I was going to be interviewed by a puppet mascot, I confess to a feeling of dread. Instead, the opening puppet show was of professional puppeteer quality - though how could it not be when Bill Corbett (Crow T. Robot) and Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo) are regular guests? It was a blast. And now my son is in love with robot mascot Connie and her virtual evil twin.

Comic book artist Christopher Jones (Young Justice, The Batman Strikes!) is one of the founders of CONvergence, and kindly drew a unique badge for each one of the attendees. Mine is taking from my 2011 Hugo Award win. I'm 40 lbs heavier in that picture than I am now, but I'm also holding a glowing rocket, so hey. Really, I was just grinning and showing off my badge for hours after they gave it to me. Being animated by such a great artist was really something else. And speaking of something else...

My wrangler Andrew McKay was extraordinaire too, giving us a tour of the Mall of America--which everyone should see once. Actually, the aquarium is quite nice and the mirror maze was fantastic. The roller coasters looked amazing but - alas! - no one in my family does roller coasters but me. Also, I've never been able to sit still for a game at a con - too much to see and do - but my son was very curious about Munchkins and we weren't sure if it was age appropriate, so Andrew rounded up a game and ran one for us. We loved it and Steven Jackson has scored another customer. 

Thursday night John Picacio, his assistant Tara Smith, and I snuck out to a dinner at Republic in downtown Minneapolis, where I had some great fish and chips, grilled vegetables with one of the spiciest habanero peppers I've had in a long while, and a fantastic (and fantastically named) beer called Dragon's Milk, which was rich, thick, and had the sort of bite you'd expect from a beer so called. The bartender was delighted that an appreciative audience had come from so far away and kept sending me free samples of his other wares all night too. Great place, great food and drink, great company. Highly recommended.

The whole weekend was marvelous, especially for being able to spend time with so many friends, the aforementioned guests, as well as Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, new friend Peter Lee (of WotC), and many more. I also got to put faces on some blogger's names and see some folk I haven't seen in a long while.

Huge thanks to Guest Co-Head Tanya Brody, Director Michael Lee, artist in residence and founding member Christopher Jones, my excellent wrangler Andrew McKay, programming head Craig Finseth, Picacio's wrangler Carly Buchanan who also helped me out a time or two and everyone working in front of and behind the scenes who made this such a magnificent time!  You're a great con CONvergence. I hope to come back!

San Diego Comic Con

Another San Diego Comic Con has come and gone, leaving me in a state of post-con withdrawal and well-earned exhaustion. This was probably my most enjoyable comic con to date, made so entirely by the people that I spent it with.

I roomed, as has become the tradition, with good friends John Picacio and Paul Cornell, two guys I can never see enough of. My plane Wednesday was late, but I got in just in time to make my dinner with editors Ann Sowards, Diana Gill and Ann Groell, illustrator John Picacio, and (unexpected arrival) author Paolo Bacigalupi (The Drowned Cities). io9's Charlie Jane Anders (no relation but one of my favorite people) and Annalee Newitz (also fav) dropped in at the end, making for a great night at Rocking Baja Lobster. Then it was off to the Grand Lobby Bar at the Hyatt, where I bumped into my friend Bill Willingham (Fables, Down the Mysterly River) and had drinks until late with Picacio and Paolo.

Thursday my dear friend Stephenson Crossley took the train down from LA, just for four hours, to hang. We paled around the con, the met up with Pierce Watters (Paizo), Michael Rowley (Ebury), and James Parker (Hastings) for dinner at JSix.  Great meal with great conversation with great people. Afterwards, we walked to Bootlegger for the Random House Party, which was the most comfortable location for a publishing party I've thus far attended in San Diego. Then back to the Grand Lobby Bar at the Hyatt, where Paul Cornell was nice enough to introduce John Picacio and I to some of the organizers from Convergence, a convention at which Picacio and I will both sit as Guest of Honor next year.

Friday started off with a breakfast with my buddy filmmaker Kenny Golde,  then a lunch with John Picacio and Matt Gagnon, Editor-in-Chief of BOOM! Studios. Matt and I share some authors in common and our jobs are remarkable similar across our related fields, so it's always fun to catch up with him. Afterwards I met up with Joseph Mallozzi (of Stargate fame, in town to sign his comic book, Dark Matter) and the lovely Akemi, then had drinks with Michael Alan Nelson (HEXED, Fall of Cthulhu). Midway through drinks, my friend James Waugh of Blizzard Entertainment showed up.

Then it was off to dinner at Searsucker with Joseph Mallozzi, Akemi, John Picacio and Marjorie M. Liu (Dirk & Steele, Astonishing X-Men), where Mallozzi had prairie oysters. I wasn't *afraid* to join him, as he implies on his blog; I just don't eat beef ! I was all set to dig in when I realized that a bull's testicles are still technically red meat.

Afterwards we all went to the Hilton where we met up with Night Shade Books’ Jeremy Lassen and others. But it was at the Hilton that I got to see the true and ugly cost of fame. Picacio and I were talking to George RR Martin, and I glanced down to look at my cell phone. I glanced back up, to find someone standing in front of me and moving their lips without making a sound. I wasn't sure what they were doing, and when I leaned forward, thinking I just couldn't hear them in all the ambient noise, they explained that "I'm just moving my lips so it will look like I am in the same conversation as George Martin." O-kaaaaay.

Saturday was a lunch with Marjorie M. Liu, more walking the floor with Mallozzi and Akemi, and then afternoon drinks with my good friends Miles Homes (lead designer with Gameloft) and Matt Wilson (Creative Director, Privateer Press). Drinks with Miles & Matt is an annual Comic Con tradition, now in its third year, and frankly, has come to be the cornerstone of my whole SDCC experience. Great guys who've become good friends. Oh, and Matt just wrote and directed his first short film, called Level 7.

Then it was dinner at Fleming's with some of my favorite artists: Todd Lockwood (and his wife), Stephan Martiniere (and his daughter and friend), John Picacio, and Dave Seeley (and his son), as well as with my friend Mike Colbert, who is releasing his first graphic novel soon. (It's called Crazy Mary - check it out!) Comic illustrator J.K. Woodward joined us later. Then it was off to the Westin for a last drink and then to bed.

If it sounds like San Diego Comic Con was just four days spent with a slew of people that I think are all great folk, that's because it was. 

Masked and Anonymous

Lubbock Online has posted a review of my superhero prose anthology, Masked. They write:

"Verdict: Thumbs up. Any sort of anthology like this is going to have some good stories and some not-so-good stories, and I'm glad to say that most of these fall on the good side of the equation. Far and away, my favorite stories were the ones by Gail Simone, Bill Willingham, and Paul Cornell, but the majority of the stories in this book are just plain great. ....Not a perfect anthology, but certainly one of the better ones of this type I've seen. if you're a superhero fan, this is definitely something you'll want to pick up."

The Masked Superteam Answers Your Questions

Nine authors & I in participate this morning in a Q&A on Joseph Mallozzi's blog, discussing our superhero prose anthology Masked. It's a mammoth post, with responses from Yours Truly, Matthew Sturges, James Maxey, Paul Cornell, Daryl Gregory, Gail Simone, Mark Chadbourn, Joe himself, and Marjorie M. Liu!

What's more, Joe labels us a Superteam and reveals which hero he feels we each correspond to. Surprisingly, I'm not Professor Xavier. Check out the post, "The Masked Superteam answers your questions."

Way to Go Paul! "Catherine Drewe" in Best of the Year!

Via SF Signal, I see that Rich Horton has posted the (almost-final) contents of Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2009 Edition, and that Paul Cornell's brilliant short story, "Catherine Drewe," from my own recently-released Fast Forward 2is among them!

Congrats Paul! I told you so.

Paul Cornell's Short Story From FF2 Free Online!

In support of Fast Forward 2,we've put the entirely of the opening story from the anthology online at the new Pyr Sample Chapters page. (If you are viewing this inside the frame of the Pyr site, you might right click to avoid opening a window in a window).

"Catherine Drewe" by two-time Hugo nominee Paul Cornell is a tale of a Bond-like character in an alternate history where the Great Game never ended and the British Empire - along with the other world powers - extends its reach throughout the solar system.

Paul says of the character:

"I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Ian Fleming's Bond novels (not the movies) but I'm trying to stay away from pastiche, and instead hope to explore the same debates about masculinity and Britishness he did, while perhaps coming to different conclusions."

WorldCon 2008 / Paul Cornell's Denvention3 Report

Paul Cornell's belated WorldCon Report is probably my favorite convention report ever and well worth reading. He begins, "Worldcon is always too big to blog about. It’s a culture, a civilisation. It lasts just long enough that you start to think of it as a career, and then it goes away. It always leaves me inspired, wanting to write, wanting to be one of these people always."

That he talks about me a lot didn't sway me in my opinion in the slightest, really. Okay. Maybe. But read it anyway.

Cornell Gets Some Culture

Here's a bit of very exciting news. My friend, author, comic book scribe and Hugo-nominated Doctor Who series writer Paul Cornell reports, "I've been commissioned to adapt Iain M. Banks' novella 'The State of the Art', from the collection of the same name, into a play for broadcast on BBC Radio 4 later this year. My producer is the wonderful Nadia Molinari, and we're looking to keep all the SF goodness of the original. I'm enjoying how serious and thoughtful the brief is. The story is about Banks' spaceborne utopian civilisation, the Culture, encountering Earth. Some interesting casting of a Ship voice ahead, I should think, and who should be Diziet Sma? I'm anticipating the process hugely."

Paul is also launching this Marvel title, taking up the reigns on my favorite Marvel character after the web slinger, Captain Britain, who meets up with MI-13 of Paul's recent Wisdom mini-series.

Now, how cool is that?

Human Nature / the Family of Blood

Paul Cornell and I have been friends for around twelve or thirteen years now, and while I haven't read everything he's ever written - and am quite fond of both his current Wisdom comic book from Marvel and his truly excellent science fiction novel British Summertime, (A book so good it made me vomit on an airplane. Long story, see for yourself when it comes out in the US from Monkeybrain Books), to date my favorite fiction he's ever written is an old Virgin Books Doctor Who tie-in novel called Human Nature, out of print now, but available from the BBC as a free ebook. In it, for reasons I won't spoil, the Doctor decides to become human and not only alters his DNA but his memory as well, such that he had no concept of things non-terrestrial. It's a bit of a temporal Last Temptation or a Superman II and maybe you can guess where it goes from there, but it's sheer brilliance and recounting the ending to friends has never failed to elicit a tear from me, even here a decade later.

Now, Paul has written more Doctor Who novels than I can count, as well as quite a few spin-off books, audio books, etc... But apart from Doctor Who, he's also written comic books (2000AD among them), and has written for several UK television shows - Coronation Street and the new Robin Hood among them. He's even had his own series, Wavelength, on the telly. Pretty much universally regarded as the best of the Doctor Who novel scribes and with years of television experience, in an act of cosmic justice so rare in television Paul was indeed tapped to write for the new series. His first outing gave us "Father's Day," the very touching episode in which Rose went back in time and met her deceased father. Good, certainly. One of the better episodes, yes, with good moments for the actors, but it didn't unseat the best of the new season. But the last two weeks on the BBC saw a two-parter, "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood," and as you might guess, this was the long-anticipated (by me) adaptation to the small screen of my favorite Who novel ever. So, was it any good?

Now, Paul knows that I'm not closed lipped when I don't like something, so hopefully he - and you - will believe me when I say this: Not only is it the best story to arise from the new series to date, but it just might be the best episode of Britain's number one television show in the entire five decade history of the series. It might just be tied with Steve Moffat's "The Empty Child/the Doctor Dances" (and Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace" makes any top three list), but if it's tied then it's neck-and-neck and I'm not sure but what Cornell isn't pulling ahead. I'll of have to watch it again to be sure! I've already watched part one twice and gone back to other bits. I think they're going to be talking about this one for a long, long time. Certainly, this is my vote for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form in next year's Hugo awards. Watch it, vote for it, buy the DVD when it comes out in your region. It's rare when you get perfect television and this one is a real gift.

After years of teasing him about everything I can think of, I am suddenly in awe of my friend. So before I let that get in the way, here is a picture of Paul, his wonderful wife, and David Tennat (the reigning Doctor) that I unapologetically nicked from his blog: