Rogue Economics and the real Edge

One of the most enjoyable nonfiction reads of my past five years has been Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book, which originally came out in 2000, concerns the viral nature of ideas and the way behavioral patterns can reach a critical mass and spread out into "epidemics." Though the idea is not new, Gladwell identifies three personality types crucial in the spread of memes: Connectors, who bring people together, Mavens, who love to pass along knowledge, and Salesmen, skilled at convincing the unenlightened. In the book, Gladwell explores this notion in examples as diverse as Paul Revere's ride, the drop in crime in New York City, and Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The book was very influential in shaping my thinking about thinking and forms the basis of a lot of my own ideas about marketing. (I read Gibson's Pattern Recognition on the heels of The Tipping Point, and was so struck by the similarities that I spent a few months trying to get each to admit that they read the other, then, when that failed, to try to get each to read the other.) And though I've not read the author's follow-up, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, the book jacket combined with the few interviews I've heard has convinced me that he's describing the way my own decision making process operates.

So, Gladwell's endorsement on the cover, combined with that of the friend who had recommended Gladwell to me, was enough to get me to pick up Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. The book operates on the frequently expressed premise that if morality is how we want the world to work, economics is how it actually does. Inside its pages, the authors cover cheating in sumo wrestling, suggest that Roe vs. Wade has dramatically decreased the crime rate (ironically discrediting Gladwell's own position on the matter), and has some interesting statistics on the effects (or lack thereofs) on popular high and low income names on a child's eventual achievements. Now, don't get me wrong, the book had some interesting ideas in it, but it was hardly the fodder for "a thousand cocktail parties" worth of stories as the jacket promised. Sadly, its slender 256 pages read all to much like what they are, a heavily-padded expansion of the New York Times profile that Dubner wrote of Levitt in 2003. And, in fact, while Dubner sings Levitt's praises to the point that the reader begins to feel embarrassed for him, there's little in the book to convince one that Levitt is the maverick genius his co-author insists he is. (He may be, but the book doesn't sell it.) Most of the research cited is that of other economists and researchers, and there really are only about six or so case studies in the whole book, each stretched out and reiterated to the point of engendering irritation. A fun read for an airplane, but not the revolution in thinking I was hoping for.

Which is why I was so glad to discover this: The Edge Annual Question - 2006: What is Your Dangerous Idea? Founded in 1988, the mandate of the Edge Foundation is "to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society." Every year, The Edge asks over one hundred scientists and thinkers a question, and the results of the 2006 question, which should be required reading for any serious science fiction writer, are positively fascinating. I'm mainlining 119 ideas in its 75,000 online words, from such notables as Freeman Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Rupert Sheldrake, and Frank Tipler- not all of which I agree with, of course, but that is hardly a prerequisite for enjoyment or enlightenment, and it's so much more intellectually satisfying than Freakonomics proved to be. I was glad to see two bona fide science fiction writer in the bunch, Gregory Benford and Rudy Rucker, with comments on the Kyoto Accords and panpsychism respectively. Still, pondering both the new ideas and the familiarity of those concepts which I have already encountered through genre fiction, I would love to see the question put to such illustrious members of our community as Charles Stross, Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, Neal Stephenson... It is times like these that the dignity of our genre impresses itself upon me. Perplexing it is to me that when the greater world at large acknowledges daily that we are living the stuff of science fiction, that science fiction is not called upon to explain such stuff more often than it is.

FutureShocks on Sci FI Wire & B&N's Explorations

Some more news on the FutureShocks front.

First, SciFi.com's Sci Fi Wire runs a nice interview with yours truly.

Then, Paul Goat Allen, editor of Barnes & Noble's science fiction and fantasy newsletter, Explorations, has some very kind things to say about the book:

"Refill the prescription for your most potent anti-anxiety medication and schedule an appointment with the psychiatrist as soon as possible! From editor extraordinaire Lou Anders comes an anthology of 16 science fiction tales - some terrifying, some triumphant - from some of the masters of speculative fiction that, according to Anders, 'envisions the dangers lying in wait for us on the road ahead, or lurking just around the corner of history.' Included in this killer collection are stories by Paul Di Filippo, Kevin J. Anderson, Robert Charles Wilson, John Meaney, Alan Dean Foster, Robert J. Sawyer and Louise Marley.

Noteworthy stories include Mike Resnick and Harry Turtledove's collaboration 'Before the Beginning,' where the authors ask what would happen if humankind could construct a device capable of viewing every single second of history (did Jesus exist, who killed JFK, did OJ really do it, etc.) including the moments before the Big Bang; and Di Filippo's 'Shuteye for the Timebroker,' which envisions a future where, with the help of anti-somnolence drugs, humankind never has to sleep. Alex Irvine's 'Homosexuals Damned, Film at Eleven,' arguably the most disturbing story in the collection, visits an oppressive future America where religion and government are one and the same.

As has come to be expected from Anders (editor of 2003's Live Without a Net and editorial director of Prometheus Books' science fiction/fantasy imprint Pyr), his newest anthology is as thematically compelling and thought provoking as it is wildly original. From artificial intelligence sold on street corners to future utopias populated by genetic vigilantes, this collection is - not surprisingly - extraordinary.

Our Romantic Future

The Romantic Times reviews FutureShocks in their February 2006 issue. They single out stories by Mike Resnick & Harry Turtledove, Alex Irvine, Louise Marley, and Paul Melko, and further say:

"Taking a cue from current events, the stories are mostly dystopian, but the collection is stellar nonetheless.... every story in this volume is interesting and thought-provoking. Science fiction fans should waste no time in acquiring it."

A Nice Resolution to the Paradox

Playing off the title of John Meaney's second published novel in Britain, Robert J. Sawyer once remarked that "the only real paradox is why he's so well known in the UK and such a secret in North America."

Well, the paradox is over. Barnes and Noble have just posted their Editor's Choice: Top Ten Novels of 2005. Guess who comes in number two in the science fiction and fantasy category?

A Word of Warning for Brandon Routh

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane… It’s the Great Pretender?

George Reeves was 45 years old in 1959 when he was found dead in his home from a single gun shot. There was a lot of talk of foul play at the time, though the death was officially labeled a suicide. Depression over his typecasting as the Man of Steel and failure to find other work was the likeliest target, and rumors even spread that, in a drunken (or pain-killer) induced state, Reeves had mistakenly assumed he could fly and leapt from a tall building in a single bound. But over the years, many startling facts about the case have surfaced. One, that no fingerprints were found on the gun that fired a bullet into Reeves' right temple. Two, that the discarded shell was found under Reeves' naked corpse, difficult to explain in a suicide. Three, that Reeves had recently been the victim of a months-long harassment from mobster Toni Mannix, whose wife Reeves had had an affair with. Four, that the suicide occurred at a party at Reeves house, and the guests had waiting thirty minutes before alerting the authorities. And finally, five, that Reeves depression had ended and he was, according to friends, in the highest spirit in ages about his upcoming marriage to Lenore Lemmon and the decision by the producers to film another season of The Adventures of Superman after a three year hiatus, and thus unlikely to commit suicide at this time. In the 1980s, both costars Noel Neill (Lois Lane) and Jack Larson (Jimmy Olsen) revived the case with their claim that the man in the tights had been a victim of foul play. But whatever the actual events of his death are, they’ll most likely remain a mystery for evermore.

Now, let’s allow a quick aside to establish that synchronicity is already at work here. Bump back up and notice the name of Reeves' intended. Lenore Lemmon. Notice the alliteration of the double Ls? Well, any aficionado of the Big Blue Schoolboy worth his salts knows that all the significant people in Kal-El’s life sport that double L: from his first Smallville puppy love Lana Lang, to the lesser known ill-fated Atlantean Lori Lamoris, to his long time paramour and eventual wife Lois Lane. And, let's not forget, (and I suppose there are Freudian implications here) his number one arch enemy Lex Luthor. Reeves attraction to a real-world lover with the same name alliteration may have been an identification with his alter ego on a subconscious level, or a tip of the hat to the casual observer that the Universe is up to its old tricks again.

The next man to put on the tights was Christopher Reeve, who brought Superman to the silver screen in four adventures, two of them excellent and two of them abominable. But whether the plots supported or undermined his efforts, Reeve’s acting magically captured Superman for millions of moviegoers worldwide. No one could deny that Reeve was the character, born to play him with a dignity and humanity and small town naiveté that still defines the Last Son of Krypton to this day.

But then in May of 1995 (and here please note that 95 is the reverse of 59), Reeve’s thoroughbred, Eastern Express, pitched him forward during a cross-country and jumping “eventing” in Culpeper, Virginia. Reeves fractured his uppermost vertebrae in his spine, and was instantly paralyzed. Now, this writer has absolutely no interest in demeaning the dignity nor importance of the life that the late Christopher Reeve lead in his final decade prior to his accident. His work with the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation was a tireless crusade worthy of a real life superhero, and work perhaps more meaningful and laudable than his previous career as an actor. (In fairness, Reeve was a dedicated activist before his injury and remained a consummate actor after it). But it can’t be glossed over that it was this injury which began the idle speculation that something supernatural existed called the Superman Curse. Of course, for Lois and Clark star Dean Cane, the only injury done to him after donning the red cape was to his career. Though it is worth pointing out that Dean Cane’s inicials are D C, the name of the Warner Communications subsidiary that has reigned over Superman’s exploits since his debut in 1938. (There’s that synchronistic thing with initials again.)

But leaving Cane aside, there’s a third player that can legitimately be linked with Metropolis’ favorite son who shares some very peculiar similarities with his two big screen predecessors. What played first as subtext and metaphor in the initial film was front and center in The Matrix Reloaded. Keanu Reeves, as Neo, the martial arts superhero chosen to be “the One,” stops bullets, leaps buildings in a single bound, and flies. In The Matrix, Keanu even exits the unlikely prop of an old style phone booth (long a staple arena for Clark Kent’s costume changes) before taking off into the sky. In the second film, Nebuchadnezzar crewmember Link strips the veil of subtlety away, proclaiming when asked about Neo’s whereabouts, “He’s doing the Superman thing again.” Neo’s aerial rescuing of his own Lois Lane, the leather clad Trinity, as she is falling off a skyscraper in the film’s climax is straight out of the pages of a hundred Action comics.

What is so striking however is that, if we count this metaphoric Man of Steel as one of only three big screen appearances of Superman, than the synchronicity between all three actors becomes unbearably obvious. All have the same last name, minus the S on one of them (S for Superman?). Reeves. Reeve. Reeves.

Interestingly, a quick Internet search for the etymology of the name Reeves returns the information that it is derived from the word reeve, and means a bailiff, provost or steward. In his Christ-like assumption of responsibility for the whole of humanity, both Superman and his computer-counterpart Neo certainly shine as the greatest steward the Earth has yet produced. But let us not dally on these minor synchronicities, mere breadcrumbs to lure us deeper along the path that lies ahead.

Like the inverse of our next subject’s own career path, we’ll be jumping out of Hollywood and into politics (dare I mention that DC initial again?) to pull a strange analogy from the life of an American President – that of Ron Reagan, who sports the double initial alliteration, and whose apparent nemesis was also a bald supervillain. Gorbachev even sported a James Bond evil genius-style scar on his chrome dome. And if one manages to suffer through Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, it becomes painfully obvious how the Kryptonian’s heavy-handed dealing with the nuclear proliferation of the Arms Race and the film’s feel-good ending mirrored (and was directly inspired by) Reagan’s gradual about-face transition from viewing the USSR as the “evil empire” to advocating a cessation of the cold war. More of the Reagan / Superman connection was made in Frank Miller’s landmark graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns, but we’re concerned here only with the assassination attempt by lone gunman John Hinkley Jr.

But before we get there we have to go back to 1840, and an Indian Curse leveled on President William Henry Harrison. The legend is a fairly well known one. How the brother of the slaughtered native American chieftain Tecumseh cursed Harrison for the death of his sibling, proclaiming that if when he became the “Great Chief” Harrison would die the following year. He went on to proclaim that every twenty years, each person elected to the Highest Seat in the land would suffer a similar fate. True or not, on April 4, 1841 Harrison passed away due to pneumonia, the first US President to die in office. The Curse resurfaced two decades later when President Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was shot by John Wilkes Booth in 1856. It returned to claim President James Abram Garfield. Elected in 1880, he failed to prove “faster than a speeding bullet” when he was shot the following year by Charles Giteau. Elected to his second term in 1900, President McKinley was shot by an unnamed assailant in 1881. Warren Harding died of a heart attach two years into his term, after being elected in 1920. In 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office of a cerebral hemorrhage. Elected four times, his third term began in 1940. If you believe the Warren Commission, it was another Lone Gunman that took the life of President John F. Kennedy. Elected in 1960. Died 1963. But by the Gipper’s time the Curse must have diminished in power. Elected in 1980, Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 getting into his car by John W. Hinckley Jr. with a bullet that borrowed to within one-fourth of an inch of his heart. As 2000 came and went uneventfully, we can infer that Ancient Indian Curses have a potency of exactly 140 years, after which time they fade.

But what of our Costumed Crusader and the Curse that is supposed to follow those with the hubris to assume the role of this god among men? George Reeves died in 1959 by a gunshot to the head. Christopher Reeve suffered paralysis from the neck down from a horse-back riding mishap in 1995. And unlikely Buddha-figure Keanu Reeves? In a puzzling situation for the star of an action movie to be in, Keanu Reeves was actually seriously injured when he committed to filming the first Matrix film. Similar to Christopher before him, Reeves had suffered an injury to his cervical spine requiring surgery prior to his four months of intensive kung fu training. Whatever critics have to say about the depth of his performance, no one can fault this actor’s dedication. The one-third of a year exhaustive work with fight choreographer Yuen Wo-ping, as well as the actual filming of the fight scenes itself, was a risk that could easily have landed Keanu with permanent and serious injuries to his spine. One could almost suppose that, like the dwindling pattern breakdown of the Indian Curse that began with Harrison and fizzled out with Reagan, the Superman Curse that killed George Reeves and left Christopher Reeve a paraplegic made its play for Keanu Reeves and was rebuffed. With Superman Returns due from Warner Bros. in 2006, time will shortly tell if the Curse has finally run its course. But looking back on the long, strange screen-life of the most famous of comicbook icons, one wonders what infernal forces could orchestrate such a Sea of Synchronicity. One could even go so far as to speculate that we must be living in some unimaginably complex, artificial, scripted reality. Dare we say it? A Matrix perhaps...

FutureShocks hits shelves!

Just spotted FutureShocks on the shelf at Books & Co., the high-end store from Books-A-Million. I don't have my own copies yet from Roc, so this is the first time I've seen it. As they no longer send out cover flats, this was also my first glimpse at the spine and back cover. I'm well pleased.

Books & Co. stickers their books (ack!), which, while annoying to the collector in me, is a handy way to keep track of their sales at an individual store. (For instance, Mike Resnick's Starship: Mutiny was stickered as "1 of 4" and they only had three copies left, so I know one sold.) In this case, FutureShocks was labeled "1 of 1". Which meant that I resisted the almost-overpowering urge to buy it myself, lest I take that opportunity away from some other Alabamian, and I'll have to wait on Roc and the U.S. post to get me my (and my contributors') copies. Despite my impatience, it's a nice way to kick off the new year.

Update: I've just noticed that Rick Kleffel over at the Agony Column has posted a long piece on the relationship between Alvin Toffler's famous work and this anthology. Since the anthology's title is a deliberate allusion, I'm psyched to see someone calling it out. Thanks, Rick.

FutureShocks Review in Locus

Nick Gevers has reviewed FutureShocks in the January 2006 issue of Locus. Like Publishers Weekly, he singles out Robert Charles Wilson's "The Cartesian Theater," calling it an "extraordinary novelette." Gevers further says:

"Lou Anders is an accomplished anthologist, adept at choosing themes likely to encourage originality of concept from his writers. His latest project, FutureShocks, is not quite as inspired as his last (Live Without a Net, in 2003), but is very solid all the same.... FutureShocks does everything the great SF anthologies of old did, stunning the reader with novelty, making the future seem like a cornucopia again, sometimes a menacing one, admittedly, but something of the infinite horizon it once was."

Good Genes

I want to offer a very big and richly deserved congratulations to Keith Brooke, whose forthcoming novel Genetopia, has become the first Pyr book to receive a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. British author Brooke's engrossing far-future parable intertwines old, old human questions: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Must I go? After centuries of biotechnology gone berserk, "True" humans inhabit a land of mortal fears where a chance microbe or the changing vats of their enemies can dehumanize them forever. "Mutts," grotesque "Lost" subhumans, outwardly devote themselves to their True masters, though like pre–Civil War slaves, the mutts secretly talk of finding "Harmony," freedom from their inborn servitude. Flint, a True human, leaves his clan to find his rebellious sister, Amber, sold by their abusive father into a horrifying slavery. Though he dreads change, Flint himself passes through successive fragments of a degenerate civilization, first adopting the Lordsway of the gentle religious Riverwalkers, then becoming a "Watchman" in an army bent on purging the Lost from the world. In this impressively conceived, poignantly drawn object lesson in the implacability of mutability, Brooke (Lord of Stone) posits one constant: that only change is eternal.

A Spoonful of Sugar

In his "Strong Medicine" column on Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, the very generous John Joseph Adams has posted a review of Chris Roberson's new anthology, Adventure Vol. 1. John has some very nice things to say about the anthology overall, and I hope I can be forgiven for just quoting the following bit:

"One of the most compelling stories is the first part of Lou Anders's serial novel, 'The Mad Lands, Part 1: Death Wish.' Anders is well-known as an editor, but few know of his writing prowess, according to Roberson's introductory notes; if this story is any indication, Anders's writing prowess won't be a secret for long. In 'The Mad Lands,' Anders tells a complex and gritty tale, set in a sort of apocalyptic western landscape, peopled with con artists and gunslingers and strange animal/machine crossbreeds such as the horsecycle and the tank-turtle. This first installment is delightfully bizarre and refreshingly original, and my only complaint is that the story ended with me wanting more."

What can I say? Thanks, John. Your check's in the mail.

Evangelical Science Fiction

Much has been blogged about Gregory Benford and Darrell Schweitzer's post What Does the Rise of Fantasy Mean? since I read it last week, began a response, and was generally distracted from completing and posting by the minutia of everyday life. Not surprisingly, John Scalzi chimes in with a very considered and articulate opinion, and Hal Duncan's response is well worth the time.

Generalizing horribly, Benford decries the market share fantasy has won over science fiction, and announces he's going on a temporary haitus from writing any more novels while he writes nonfiction articles in support of science and science fiction. Schweitzer counters that a better answer to the problem might be to write better books, producing another Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land that can be the phenomenon that Harry Potter, American Gods or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was. John Scalzi argues in favor of more entry-level science fiction, as well as respect inside genre for those who would write such, and Hal Duncan enumerates a half-dozen different categories of science fiction and suggest individual points of entry for each category.

I don't have an argument with any of their responses - who can argue against more good books actively reaching out to more readers. But it was some of the comments these comments drew that fascinated me, and dovetailed with something I've been considering lately.

Now, first, I was surprised by how much ire Greg Benford drew down by daring to decry fantasy. Benford is definitely a member of the "true believer" core of the genre, for whom the "science" of science fiction is an important aspect, and sees the rise of fantasy as indicative of problems inherent in contemporary American culture. In fairness to Benford, we are not exactly living under a science-sympathetic administration at present. And the concerns Greg outlines for the future of Western civilization are very real, as recounted in Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat. (Side note: I'm not a xenophobe - if India and China are poised to take the lead, more power to them! What is bad for America is not necessarily bad for the world or humanity at large. And I will be thrilled if China's space program takes off, since somebody should be going and we sure aren't.) As Gardner Dozois writes in the introduction to Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition, "The battle of science against superstition is still going on, as is the battle to not have to think only what somebody else thinks is okay for you to think. In fact, in a society where more people believe in angels than believe in evolution, that battle may be more critical than ever. One of the major battlefields of that war is science fiction, one of the few forms of literature where rationality, skepticism, the knowledge of the inevitability of change, and the idea that wide-ranging freedom of thought and unfettered imagination and curiosity are good things are the default positions, taken for granted by most of its authors."

But what I see as far more damaging than the rise of fantasy is the rise of media tie-in works. The previously cited American Gods is a brilliant and thought-provoking work, and my personal favorite novel published the year it debuted. But that Forgotten Realms novels consistently outsell the real stuff by a factor of five-to-one is a cause for true concern. Especially given the quality of those books! (And yes, I've dabbled enough to know whereof I speak.)

In my view, it's all about narrative complexity and whether the speculative material you read (whether SF or F) serves to turn your brain on or turn it off. See Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. It's similar to Neal Stephenson's division between "vegging out" and "geeking out." The gist of it is that the complexity of the medium may be more important than the message it conveys.

And I agree with Darrell that the challenge is for science fiction to write that compelling novel, not throw in the towel. The solution is to compete not retreat. For my money, (and - disclaimer time- I publish him over here, but I've been saying this for two years before Pyr was even a possibility so I can still say it with integrity), John Meaney's Nulapeiron Sequence (Paradox, Context, Resolution) is that novel, combining all the swashbuckling adventure of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, and the world-building and scope of Dune, with some marvelous hard SF extrapolations and a real sense-o-wonder. As Paul Goat Allen writes in B&N's Explorations newsletter, "Science fiction fans looking for the next big genre classic need look no further than the Nulapeiron Sequence, a highly cerebral sci-fi trilogy by British author John Meaney that has been (deservedly) compared to Frank Herbert's epic masterwork, Dune... Meaney's Nulapeiron Sequence (Paradox, Context, and the forthcoming Resolution) is a landmark work for multiple reasons: 1) Unparalleled world building: The world of Nulapeiron is one of the most vividly described and utterly unique realms ever imagined in the history of science fiction; 2) Plot density: Like Nulapeiron's multi-leveled society, the story of Tom Corcorigan has innumerable layers, dozens of secondary themes, and subplots; and 3) Readability: Fans of hard science fiction will not be able to put this sweeping and thought-provoking saga down. Although there are no sandworms or spice on Nulapeiron, readers will inevitably compare this unforgettable epic with Frank Herbert's classic."

But leaving shameless plugs aside (and hey, I had to leave off Paul's wonderful quote on the back of our edition of Resolution's jacket earlier today, so please don't fault me for wanting to work it in somewhere), what this whole debate has me really thinking about is whether science fiction should be accessible to a large mainstream audience in the first place. There's a very interesting comment posted in response to Scalzi's take by someone called Kyeikki which says:

I don't think the problem's lack of outreach. If I had to guess - and it's only a guess - I'd say the problem was religion.

Most modern hard SF assumes a philosophy of atheistic materialism, and it's generally unfriendly to Christianity and other theistic religions. (This comes through fairly strongly in the Benford/Schweitzer article.) There are some authors who don't fit this trend, but it's the dominant trend all the same.

Now, last time I checked, the USA was about 80% monotheistic, 10% atheistic, and 10% other. So if you write a novel intended exclusively for atheists, you're excluding around 90% of the population. So it shouldn't really be all that surprising if it doesn't turn into a bestseller.

Soft SF and space opera generally isn't as strongly atheistic, and fantasy isn't atheistic at all. And they're all very popular. I think that's a big part of the reason why. Star Wars would never have been a success without the Force, and no-one would read Robert Jordan's novels if it wasn't for the upcoming battle with the Dark One.

People do pick up on these things. Your average guy in the street might not be able to spell "atheistic materialism" but he can figure out pretty well if the philosophy and beliefs behind a book are basically friendly or basically hostile to his own - and it has a huge effect on what he's going to buy.

Of course if your number one priority is to keep the faith - as I think Benford's is - then it's not really a problem. But if you want people to buy your stuff, then you have to consider your audience, too.

Now, I'm in that 10% "other" category, and earlier this week, I was mulling over how the forefathers of science fiction, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, were aetheists and rationalists, whereas the 20th century's most famous fantasicts, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien, were both Christians. Even the most-celebrated science fiction work to approach religion, the aforementioned Dune, does so in a scientific context. In this case (as in the case of the Matrix), a religion has been engineered by a powerful, technical elite as a means of control, and the self-fulfilling prophecy they've orchestrated ends up becoming a tiger by the tail which turns and bites them on their respective asses. But the religion is an emergent property of the pre-orchestrated farce, which may hint at powerful forces in the collective unconscious, but certainly is a far cry from the theophanies prevelant in a lot of popular fantasy.

I think Kyeikki has nailed an important barrier to mainstream acceptance that few others are examining - my only quibble being that I don't see accomodating the mainstream in this area as a positive thing. Which brings me back to Benford and true believers of a different sort. As someone who grew up in a much deeper south than even the region is today, it was exposure to science fiction that had a direct and measurable influence on deprogramming me from the prejudices and ignorance prevalent in a lot of my immediate childhood environment. I grew up around Christians who believed in a seven day creation, preached the reality of Hell and Judgement, and railed against the lie that was evolution. They were also, for the most part, racists and homophobes. They told jokes using the N-word, would never date a minority or someone who had, and generally represented a host of values I find base and inexcusable. And the only difference between them and me was that I had a father who shoved a science fiction paperback into my pre-teen hands and ordered me to read it. After all, it's pretty hard to be prejudice against blacks and gays when you're a-okay with Klingons and the Green Men of Mars.

Gardner Dozois has pointed out elsewhere that science fiction really began with Charles Darwin, with the notion of evolution, geological time, and the concept that there was a future that would continue for long enough to be potentially different from the now. Pre-Darwin, the world hadn't been around for more than a few thousand years, and was probably going to end in the next hundred or so, so how could you have anything like off-world colonies, alien species, or a future radically different from the present? Post-Darwin, there was no one running the show and no guarantee that the engines that ran the world wouldn't shake us off and carry on without us.

Now, I know that there are a lot more interpretations of Christianity than just the Fundamentalist angles, and also that there are some very fine writers of science fiction who happen to hold religious convictions (Louise Marley and Paul Cornell being good examples as well as friends). Furthermore, Charles Stross and others have pointed out how the Singularity, the "rapture of the nerds" may just be an eschatological wish expressing itself inside of supposedly scientific rationalism. And yes, I applaud the efforts of Christians like Jim Wallis, whose God's Politics: Why the Right gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It seeks to wrestle morality back from the religious right.

But, as a wise man once said, "A tree is known by its fruit," and I don't see a lot coming out of a very large segment of Christianity that I can condone or support. And I do see some very serious trends in contemporary America being driven by a certain segment of the population, trends which have very real, and in my mind, very negative consequences. Now I don't feel like pandering to their practicioners one iota. Quite the opposite. And one small but very real way I know to combat their evil is to open people's minds, and one way to do this is down a path of which I have direct personal experience: to expose them to ideas through fiction. And science fiction is the fiction of ideas. It's entertainment, but not just entertainment to me.

So there I've said it. Maybe I'm a true believer too when everything is said and done; and while my definition of science fiction may be broader and my solution somewhat different, ultimately I can't fault Gregory Benford for raising the issue in the way that he has. And I think his nay-sayers should cut him some slack. He's certainly generated quite a bit of food for thought, and that's the best kind of food there is for my money.

Info Blogging

David Louis Edelman, author of the upcoming novel of science fiction business, Infoquake, has just joined the bloggosphere. David's new blog opens with a post about web conventions. No, it's nothing to do with virtual fandom gatherings, as I at first supposed, but a very helpful list of the do's and dont's of web design. Something everybody should know, something you think would be common sense, but...

It's Mutiny Mr. Christian!

SF Reviews have posted a review of Mike Resnick's Starship: Mutiny, Mike's first ever military SF and the first of a planned five book series, which nails dead on what I love about Resnick's ficiton: "Resnick, a quintessential old pro, is so skilled at delivering whip-smart, fast-paced pure entertainment that he could tell tales like this in his sleep and achieve more fun and enjoyable results than any ten SF writers who sweat blood into the effort.... But with his infectious devotion to the kinds of SF 'they just don't make like they used to,' that so many of us grew up with, Mike Resnick proves that while you might not be able to teach an old dog many new tricks, the old tricks still kick plenty of ass. "

Update: SF Crowsnest agrees: "Resnick's writing is effortless, full of snappy dialogue and a fast moving plot. The real delight to reading this novel is the banter and jokes in the conversations between Cole and the crewmates he does get on with, the insults and sarcastic comments with those he doesn't get on with and the real feeling of camaraderie and society it creates. It's very easy to imagine this as a real world and setting because the characters act so naturally together.This was my first time at a Resnick book, so I had no expectations coming in. Needless to say, I was impressed. This is high quality work. It feels a lot like if they made Star Trek without all the campness and most of the scientific gaffes. There's a veneer of quality and above all believability that makes this heads above many space operas."

FutureShocks at Publishers Weekly

Yesterday, the first review of my upcoming anthology FutureShocks came out in Publishers Weekly. They singled out stories by Sean McMullen, Adam Roberts, and Robert Charles Wilson, saying "These writers stress human potential for bad choices. Evidently, we are the scariest aspect of the future. Read in short stretches, this volume offers a worthwhile assortment of jolting warnings." I'm most pleased with the review, and very happy for the writers in question. And, of course, a big thanks to everyone involved for what I humbly believe is an excellent assortment of science fiction wrapped in a beautiful cover.

Facing the Future at Sci Fi Wire

Thanks to the wonderful John Joseph Adams, an interview with Yours Truly went up today at Sci FI Wire. John talked to me about my upcoming Roc anthology, FutureShocks, due out in January 06, as well as about Fast Forward, my upcoming-unthemed-original SF anthology for Pyr.

Two Authors and One Arthur

Just returned from the World Fantasy Convention in Madison, WI, that Graham Joyce-styled mobile Brigadoon of like-minded friends meeting once a year to pick up where they left off. Highlights were meeting Pyr authors Charles Coleman Finlay and Michael Blumlein in the flesh, as well as artist Caniglia (who provided the excellent cover illustration for Michael's book). Also good to see copy editor extraordinaire Deanna Hoak, Jonathan Strahan, Toby Buckell, Greg Manchess, Irene Gallo, and a host of others. Most gratifying: seeing John Picacio win the award for Best Artist. Most surprising: finding out that Jay Caselberg is good with kids. Who knew? Pictured right is my son Arthur, who made his convention debut this weekend, seen enjoying himself in the company of authors Jess Nevins and Hal Duncan.

Ironic framing: the night before the convention, hanging out in Jonathan Strahan and Garth Nix's suite (thanks guys), discussing definitions of SF with Borderland's Alan Beatts, who floated the criteria that for a work to be SF an author had to be deliberately and consciously writing within the tradition, aware of the history of SF and part of the community, a definition which excludes works like Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Then, the night after the convention, a final late-night conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi (or someone claiming to be Paolo Bacigalupi, hugs to Cheryl). Paolo, it turns out, reads only nonfiction and The New Yorker, and confessed that he had no idea who any of the writers he met during the con were. This did not stop him from writing the Hugo-nominated "The People of Sand and Slag." My own 2 cents: When Professor Roy Hinkley Jr. invents a flying plastic disc in his new university lab in Rescue from Gilligan's Island, it's still a frisbee, whether he knows it or not.

It's all Greek to me

Back in 2003, my short story "Crowd Control" appeared in the anthology Strange Pleasures 2, edited by John Grant and Dave Hutchinson. It was a tale of virtual reality written pre-Matrix which used Alice in Wonderland metaphors in a narrative about freedom vs. control. It even had a kind of "bullet time" in it. As one of the vary rare short stories I've ever written, I'm somewhat proud of it.

Now, I'm happy to report that it has found new life in the pages of the Greek science fiction and comic book magazine, 9. The Greek language version of "Crowd Control" appears in issue 263 (8/03/05). "Crowd Control" has found a home in a number of foreign language markets, as well as an English language German magazine, but 9 is the first to appear. This is particularly gratifying to me, as I grew up amid the Greek community in my home town in Alabama - my first night of intoxication was on Ouzo - and I can now ask some old friends to translate it back for me! Also, 9's Editorial Secretary Anna Boviatsi extends an invitation to all my "fellow authors" to contribute. They appear to be weekly and are looking for science fiction stories (no fantasy or horror) between 2,000 and 4,5000 words - 9,000 if they can split it into two or three installments. I should say that my short dealings with them have been most professional. My three contributor's copies arrived promptly and in good condition, and the check, though it hasn't materialized yet, promises to be most adequate. 9's contact information and submission guidelines appear here on this wonderful foreign market list.

What I've Been Reading

I'm an excruciatingly slow reader - not a wonderful trait for an editor, I'll admit - and my modus operandi is to be continually buried under manuscripts, but I've been making a concerted effort to read outside my own submission pile, not just to keep tabs on what those other guys are doing, but more broadly so my own knowledge of the field doesn't grow myopic. Lately, I've been impressed with quite a number of books I've read which I didn't publish, and I thought I would share them here:

The Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross I'm just going to have to read everything Charlie writes, which would be a damn sight easier given my sluggish pace and my day job if he didn't write so damn much. I came at Stross initially on Michael Swanwick's recommendation, like so many of us with the Accelerando tales that Stross maintains isn't necessarily representative of the larger body of his work. Since then, I've read most of the stories in Toast, been fortunate enough to have published him twice, and read the two books in the Eschaton series. Here I was slower to engage with The Iron Sunrise than I had been with Singularity Sky, largely because the underlying concepts were new in the first book and reiterated in the second. It felt like a retread for the first few chapters, and aside from one interesting revelation about the Eschaton's motivations and concerns which I won't spoil though it isn't given a lot of space, the ball of what we know about this universe isn't carried many yards in this second novel. But what began to hook me, and, in fact, resulted in my enjoying Iron Sunrise even more than Singularity Sky, was the unfolding of the plot itself. Without giving anything away, I wasn't prepared for Iron Sunrise to turn into quite the action-novel it becomes, and I was delighted to discover that Charlie - who is the finest extrapolator out there when it comes to the intersection of cutting edge computer tech and economics - is damn good at writing action-adventure too. The second half of the book flew by for me at edge-of-your-seat pace. Now I've noticed Charlie once or twice defending the stereotypical Baen books when others dismissed them. I wonder if he's been reading them, taking notes, and applying what works very well for their audience to the" higher order" of big-concept, sophisticated-idea SF from whence so many of us look down our noses at Baen. Ironically, the net result of my reading Iron Sunrise may be that I pick up an Honor Harrington novel one of these days. Not something I would have extrapolated to be the result of my reading "Lobsters" a few years ago.

The Briar King by Gregory Keyes I've had this novel on my shelf for some years after having picked it up at a World Fantasy Convention. I don't read much epic fantasy, but Greg and I once got into a wrestling match following a drinking contest, and that plus the fact that it's a gorgeous hardcover was enough to let the novel survive several book-winnowings. Then, lately, I've been offered more and more traditional fantasy submissions at Pyr, and while fantasy is not a large percentage of what we publish, we are doing enough of it that - after reading an "almost there" first novel and perching on the fence on it for some weeks - I thought I could benefit from checking out some of the recent crop of successful fantasy writers. And was hooked from the first chapter. Keyes has constructed a remarkably believable secondary world, peopled with three dimensional characters whose personal dramas and political machinations are as interesting as the novel's fantastical elements. So much traditional fantasy seems to exist in sanitized quasi-medieval worlds, where the most notable staple of actual medieval life - the Catholic church - has been replaced by a not-very-well realized magical system, oft based on Celtic themes or goddess-worship. By contrast, Keyes constructs a church ever bit as ornate and stratified and believable as the Holy Roman Empire, but functioning along entirely different (if analogous) lines. Nor are his characters wholly black or wholly white; all are well-drawn "real" people, even (or especially) the villains. If all epic fantasy read like this, I'd be an enormous fan. I suspect that readers of George R. R. Martin might enjoy Keyes while they are between books, and possibly fans of Steve Erikson as well. At any rate, I picked up the Charnel Prince immediately upon closing the Briar King. I hope to have that read before Christmas.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi Let me say right off that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am very glad that I read it. This is surprising to me. Not only is it "not the sort of thing I normally read," but initially, I quite deliberately held off checking it out. First, because I had heard that Scalzi admitted to (cynically?) seeking out what sells (military SF) and then writing same, and second because Scalzi put me off on his blog by quoting my most hated cliché, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." I read for entertainment, yes, but part of what is entertaining to me is the act of learning, of bettering myself, and I have always held the occupation of writer as something laudable on the level of that of teacher or scientist and expect writers to be somewhat smarter than average. I read to learn, and when a writer tells me upfront they have nothing deep to say, I take them at face value and go elsewhere. But I found I kept going back to Whatever, where I (at first) reluctantly found many of Scalzi's posts to be quite entertaining, informative & altogether worthwhile. Then Charles Stross started touting Scalzi and when I spoke with him about it, Charlie told me there was more going on in Old Man's War than I was giving it credit for. Thus shamed, I sought out John in Glasgow, and while we only spoke briefly, I thought he was a genuinely nice guy and liked him immediately - and that, more than anything, always makes me want to read someone (the reverse is also true). Nor did it hurt that I love the Donato cover. So, in what was increasingly feeling like an inevitable move, I picked up Old Man's War and read it in about three evenings. Yes, I agree America needs to get over Heinlein. Yes, I agree there's something cynical (or is that brilliant?) about discovering that military SF outsells everything else, then writing a Heinlein-lite wish-fulfillment tale for a graying fandom about 75 year olds becoming young again and going off to fight in a Heinlein military SF space adventure. But the book is executed so well, the narrative so engaging, that I was drawn in from the first line: I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army. I teared up at least twice during the read, once at the start and once at the end. My wife came in the bedroom as I was finished OMW, and I tearfully told her how much I loved her. She saw right through it and laughed at me for getting emotional with Scalzi's book. Suffice to say, yes, I'll certainly be coming back for the Ghost Brigades.

Meanwhile, while there is some blatant Starship Troopering going on, I don't actually think that was Scalzi's primary model for Old Man's War. Structurally, the Heilein OMW most reminded me of was Job: A Comedy of Justice - the first Heilein novel I ever read and an altogether underrated work. With a warning about SPOILERS, if we view outer space as the afterlife (and Scalzi makes this metaphorical association clear throughout the narrative), then both novels are about a man who enters the afterworld only to find that the woman he loves isn't there, then discovers her in an adjacent afterworld he's not allowed in, and breaks rules and braves hell to be reunited with her again (in a third, "quiet" life). So, deliberately, subconsciously, or accidentally, Scalzi has actually combined the setting of one of Heinlein's most famous works with the structure of one of his little-known ones, in a narrative that is more original than derivative, and absolutely deserving of its status as one of the most impressive (and successful) authorial debuts in a long while. Pick it up if you haven't already. If I can read it in three nights, you can probably read it in three hours, but however long it takes, it will be time well spent.

Update: John Scalzi has responded at great length to my post, and I am both flattered and embarrassed to have sparked such a long and considered reply. For the record, Scalzi and Anders do seem to be in accord on most of the points enumerated, and I found his discussion of the difference between process and net result most illuminating. And minty fresh.

The Dow of Brian

Brian W. Dow is a fantastic artist that it's been my privilege to work with three times now at Pyr, on the covers of Charles Coleman Finlay's The Prodigal Troll and the forthcoming Tides by Scott Mackay and Genetopia by Keith Brooke. (Genetopia is pictured right.) Brian started in children's illustration and commercial design and is only recently striking out into adult science fiction and fantasy. Now, in order to be more reflective of his current work, Brian has just completed a woefully overdue update of his website, and I encourage everyone to check it out. The revamped site is clean, elegant and displays many of his recent professional works, as well as some of his striking personal pieces. Not to be missed is his very "Hildebrandt Brothers"-esque rendition of Hagrid delivering the mail to Harry Potter.

Pyr's Third Season, Spring/Summer 2006

I'm very pleased to announce that after much hard work on the part of virtually everyone at Prometheus, the Pyr Spring/Summer 2006 catalog is now complete, at the printers, and also available now as a pdf download here.

This time out, we have such titles as the U.S. debut of Ian McDonald's Hugo-nominated masterpiece, River of Gods, (with a gorgeous new cover from Stephan Martiniere), the final installment in John Meaney's acclaimed Nulapeiron sequence, the first of a new fantasy quartet from Sean Williams which has already won both the Ditmar and the Aurealis Awards in his native Australia (the first fantasy novel ever to do so), and an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style "planetary romance" from Chris Roberson.

Also upcoming is the next "Structure" book from Martin Sketchley, a short story collection from Mike Resnick, and debut novels from authors David Louis Edelman and Joel Shepherd, both the first novels of planned series.

In addition to the aforementioned cover by artist Stephan Martiniere, we're happy to have worked this season with such talented illustrators as Jim Burns, Greg Bridges, Dave Seeley, Jon Foster, and designer Dave Stevenson.

We've also accumulated a 16 book backlist by this point, which means that our catalog is rapidly becoming substantial and getting some physical heft to it. Paging through all the books, I still can't shake the feeling that all this started up only yesterday. Where on earth does the time go?

Beyond Cyberpunk! A decade and a half beyond...

From a vantage point here in the third-quarter of 2005, halfway through the first decade of the 21st Century, it's almost unimaginable to me that we all once lived without the Internet - without websites, online order fulfilment, blogs and podcasts and the ability to know absolutely anything, no matter how trivial or superficial, in a matter of moments. I can't begin to think how I'm going to make my son understand what life was like in the days before Google. What it meant to have a word or a song lyric on the tip of your tongue and not know what it was, and worse, to have to endure this state of not knowing for minutes, hours, even days on end. To ransack your own memory for hours to try and pull some needle out of your neural haystack. To have to ask other people, who themselves might not know. To have to get in a car, and finally, in frustration, drive to a library - a specific place, a physical location! - where knowledge was kept, and then have to hunt it up, a process that could take hours. The fact that you couldn't simply type in a string of nouns to a search engine and within seconds, if not minutes, be given any sought after fact you might desire will seem incomprehensible to my child. Even if he grasps the concept intellectually, he'll never understand, on a fundamental level, what a paradigm shift his old man's life spanned. Though, of course, in this age of information exponential explosion, he and I both should live across many more such singularities. But until we step out of our bodies or shake hands with E.T., this one will be the biggie for me.

Still, almost as intriguing to me as the Days Before Internet are it's early days - not of its conception and birth, but its emergence into popular culture. I had one of the first Apple Powerbooks, and steered by the very hip magazine Mondo 2000, I was downloading My Own Personal Jesus from the BBS, Private Idaho. Around that time, Apple came out with a hypermedia program called HyperCard, sort of a digital version of interlinked index cards. (Case in earlier point: for a moment, I couldn't remember the word "index card". I was thinking "post cards, note cards..." etc... I logged onto Office Depot, typed in "card" and...) Anyhow, Hypercard allowed you to publish a manuscript with hypertext, images, and sounds. I read William Gibson's Count Zero that way, in a program that could instantly call up the first, previous, or all appearances of any character. And I was hooked.

But my most cherished hypercard stack was Beyond Cyberpunk! A huge, sprawling, encyclopedia-cum-manifesto that sought to gather cyberculture, cutting edge tech, and science fiction under one cool interface. It was practically my bible for a few years running. This virtual tome was a major, major influence. My first screenplay, in fact, The Life and Times of Mondo Zark, was a directly derivative piece of drivel about a young hacker, whose murdered mentor survived as a distributed mind across a laboratory of various inventions, out to stop a madman from subsuming the world with nanotechnology, and aided by a tribe of technonomads who lived off the grid and traveled on computerized bicycles. Fortunately, I don't think there's a copy (soft or hard) existing anywhere of this mondo-monstrosity. But even more fortunate, the creators of Beyond Cyberpunk!, Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman, have made the whole incredible thing, wonders, warts and all, available online! It's amazing to see how much of it holds up, and to discover how many people I know and work with today who were involved with it then (as if the future was all around me and I was unawares). Beyond Cyberpunk! is an invaluable piece of pop cultural history and an amazing resource, and now it gets to live again, in the very future it engendered so much enthusiasm for in me and so many others back in 1990. In many respects, we've moved quite a bit beyond it now, but it's vision stretches further.

Takes a Lickin', But Keeps On Tickin'

Scott Westerfeld has an interesting post trying to identify the various types of time-travel elasticity in science fiction media and literature, notions of one absolute vs. multiple timelines, and whether or not you can effect change in your own timeline.

In contrast to Ray Bradbury's "butterfly effect," I believe it was Isaac Asimov, who in The End of Eternity, submitted the “wave” theory of elastic time, proposing that the effects of any change would be most noticable immediately after the point of interference/insertion, but would gradually diminish in intensity as you moved past the event. So, killing Hitler would radically alter the 20th century, marginally alter the 21st or 22nd century, and might leave the 23rd century or beyond virtually untouched and have no effect on the 30th century at all. Of course, the largest alterations would carry further forwards, while smaller ones would fade out more rapidly.

Oddly, this reminds me of a recent article I read on the resurgence of the “Great Man” theory of history. The idea that, at any given time, there are about 12 people who are creating the world had falled out of academic favor for some decades, replaced with the notion that economic, social, political trends were shaping events more than individuals, who were simply stepping in to fill roles dictated for them by larger forces. I.e., if you did assassinate Hitler, someone else would have stepped into the power vacuum in Germany and mobilized tensions there to similar effect. However, ironically, George W. has renewed interest in the “Great Man” theory. While the artile wasn’t suggesting W was in any way “great,” it pointed out that in almost-single handedly forcing a war that a) wasn’t necessary and b) wasn’t popular with congress, the people, or the world at large, he has demonstrated how much (catastrophic) effect one individual really can have on the course of history.

The other thing this discussion brings to mind is the way that science filters through into pop culture and effects our fictions even at the most visible layer. The original Star Trek very much adhered to the notion of “one timeline”, which, when broken, was always repaired - the break and it’s correction (as Spock points out in “City on the Edge of Forever”) always part of the design. This holds sway through the TNG episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” in which Guinan senses the wrongness of a universe in with the Federation and Klingon Empire are at war, and impresses Picard on the necessity of repairing the damage. (Picard raises the question, “How do we know this timeline isn’t any more right than any other?” but Guinan steamrollers him into accepting her position.)

But this notion of a single timeline begins to break down with the latter episode “Parallels,” which sees Worf permeating through a variety of alternative timelines until everything culminates in a clusterfuck of thousands of Enterprises from a myriad different universes.

By Deep Space Nine, the notion of one time-line has radically broken down, as withness an episode whose title escapes me, in which Chief O’Brien is constantly teleporting back and forth to a future in which the station is destroyed. Despite the fact that each trip exposes him to radiation poisoning, he makes one final attempt to avert the encroaching disaster, meets himself of just minutes later on, dies, and sends his minutes-into-the-future self back in his stead. Upon his return, he wonders if he really has the right to call Kieko his wife, given that “her” O’Brien died in a timeline that was then prevented from occurring, and is reassured by his best friend that he’s still the Chief, even if his memories are out of whack by a few minutes. Since “most of him” is the same, that’s good enough for government work, what?

Finally, when we get to Voyager’s first few seasons (where my knowledge of Trek ends, as my viewing of Trek did too), time has become elastic, fractal, alterable, permeable, and generally good for twisting into any shape the writers need. The two-part episode “Future’s End” sees multiple versions of characters encountered with no attempt to match cause to effect. Here, a crash-landing in the past has resulted in a boom in 1990s computer technology (seemingly the boom we ourselves experienced - thus the alteration IS the correct time, was always meant to occur, etc..), but the 29th Century timecop that is sent to prevent it is re-encountered twice, once as a sane individual aware of and contributing to the outcome of the episode’s action, and once as a homeless man wandering deranged from the initial crash. Both versions co-exist in the same (final) timeline, and alterations and corrections made in the episode do not erase or negate the mad homeless version’s existence. I quite watching soon afterwards, but kept enough tabs on the show to know that they continued to play with multiple versions of their characters, and multiple co-existing and interacting timelines.

Finally, while I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet, I do think that the move from an absolute time to fluid/fractal timelines somehow coincides with blurring questions of individuality and identity unconsciously co-opted from the general zeitgeist. It used to give me fits when Jeri Taylor would tell me “absolutely the holographic doctor is a person” and Brannon Braga would turn around and tell me “absolutely he is not.” They didn’t know themselves, but unconsciously, a lot of that series was about ascribing “personhood” to inanimate, but sentient-seeming, objects, as witness the sympathy everyone gives the doctor when his holographic family breaks down, despite the fact that a simply tripping of a reset switch would have them all up and running again. This inability to distinguish between a long-running program who had achieved self awareness over time and the game-pieces conjured into existence on the holodeck typified the entire series, which, to me, was perfectly appropriate for - and indicative of - an age where a woman driver ran over a biker because her tamaguchi needed immediate food. As tragic as that was, one day I'm sure our robot masters will cite it as a watershed in human/machine empathy.

It Still Moves! - Science Fiction in the Age of UnReason

Gardner Dozois is interviewed by John C. Snider of SciFiDimensions talking about his recent Pyr anthology, Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition. Both the book itself, and Dozois in this interview, have some very important things to say about the current anti-science environment prevalent in America today:

"...the United States is busily turning itself into a Third World nation, and at the worst possible time, too, at a time when many other nations are becoming increasingly progressive and scientifically sophisticated. American workers are already at a severe disadvantage in the global marketplace, because they're just not as well-educated, particularly in the sciences, as workers from other countries; see the recent book The World is Flat [by Thomas L. Friedman] for a discussion of this. It certainly isn't going to help that their science education is going to have to be watered-down and distorted even further to make room for stuff like 'Intelligent Design' because of political expediency."

Meanwhile, the Guardian ran a very cogent article by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne arguing that allowing "Intelligent Design" into the classroom may have seriously detrimental long term effects. At the risk of sounding like a true believer, I think that science fiction's position as a literature of rationality, skepticism, and an open mind has never been more potentially important than it is today.

Batman Begins - Part Two: Dressed to Chill

A recent comment on my earlier post about Batman Begins has me thinking more about the costume itself, and I realized in responding that I've got another post's worth of opinion to share.
Now, I love the film, and this is by no means grousing on what I think is a near-perfect effort, but I am in the camp that wishes they'd had the guts to forgo the body armor introduced in the 1989 Batman film.

The problem I have historically had with the Bat-armor is similar to the one that Sandy Collora (director of the Batman: Dead End short) has - which is that there is no body armor currently available capable of deflecting bullets that still leaves one flexible enough to do karate. Sandy argues that you are faced with a suspension of disbelief either way - either that a man can fight sans armor and survive or that a super-armor has been developed that doesn't exist in the real world. Similarly, I've always felt that Batman relied on fast moves and close combat instead of armor, and, in fact, the Batman Begins filmmakers seem to understand this too, as evidenced when Henri Ducard tells Bruce, "You know how to fight six men. I can teach you how to fight six hundred." Lucius Fox's later statement that the armor can stop anything but a direct shot also suggests they are actually "playing down" the armor of previous films, where their choice to keep Batman to the shadows reflects their understanding of his M.O. (Side note: I do like the heavier cape of some of the Batman films, which suggests that the cape itself may have some defensive qualities. Capes are impractical, yes. But you can't dispense with Batman's, so I'd like to see a martial art worked out specifically with that in mind, incorporating his cape into the combat in a way that made sense - both defensively and offensively.)

My second problem with his use of armor goes back to my analysis of his primary motivation - which you know from my previous post I conceive of as his (selfish) need to prove to himself that death cannot catch him unawares no matter what the situation. The use of armor negates the threat, and therefore, fails to feed the psychological need that compels the character in the first place. Simply put - it's a cheat. Recall again the line from Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns when Batman switches off the (rubber bullet firing) guns of the Batmobile, stepping out to face the Mutant Leader because, "he has exactly the type of body I wish he didn't, and I honestly don't know if I can beat him."

My third objection to the armor is that it is a strong connection to the previous franchise, whereas every other aspect of this film is a relaunch. The armor was the invention of the 1989 Batman (along with the unfortunate misconception that the Joker's mouth is frozen in a grin - a mistake that prevented Nicholson from using the full range of his facial expressions, and one which I hope the filmmakers will forgo for the next film in this new franchise. But I digress...) It was interesting to watch the statements released to the press before Begins was released. The studio was officially calling the film a "prequel," while the filmmakers, possibly cautioned about dismissing the previous franchise too openly, hemmed and hawed about whether it was a prequel or a reboot. However, their inclusion of Joe Chill as the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne (as opposed to the Joker) is an obvious indication of their intent to separate from the Burton/Shumacher monstrosities - and their allegiance to the continuity of the comic books - and it's even possible the body armor was a studio-insisted upon aspect of the production they were not allowed to challenge.

However, despite all of the above, I am slowly, grudgingly accepting the necessity of armor in a world where street gangs can have access to military grade weaponry, and if armor we must have, appreciate the attempts in Batman Begins to justify it as cutting-edge prototype technology. Furthermore, while no such armor currently exists, every day our technological world makes it a more credible fiction than it was in 1989. I am also a big fan of the animated spin-off Batman Beyond, so much so that I wouldn't object to that story becoming part of official DC continuity, and since that future Batman relies on a high-tech suit decked out with sensors and weaponry, it necessitates a gradual evolution from the current cloth suit to the future suit. In fact, something of the sort is already happening, as witness the computer-assisted vision and armor plating of Jeff Loeb and Jim Lee's recent two-part graphic novel, Batman: Hush.

One thing I'd really like to see incorporated into the live-action suit is the traditional white eye slits. I was hoping they'd forgo the black eye make up in favor of something like the plastic eye-bubbles used in the recent Daredevil film (the only aspect of Ben Affleck's costume I liked actually). Spiderman showed us that you don't have to have an actor's face visible at all for him to emote or for the audience to connect with him emotionally. And masking the eyes might actually lend Batman a psychological advantage and add to his intimidating visage. (It also makes it less likely that close associates like Rachel Dawes will recognize him.)

As to the cape - absolutely it should detach from the cowl. One of my favorite visuals is still the Denny O'Neil penned, Neal Adams draw desert swordfight between Ras Al Ghul and Batman, where Batman removes his shirt and cape but retains his mask. Also, the cape should fasten in the front, under his neck, not at the shoulders, so that it can hang down straight in front and completely cover him.

As to the yellow oval, revisionist history/fan opinion holds that it was added when Batman began his formal relationship with the police and was meant to reflect the Bat Signal, so its absence is justified here. Personally, I prefer the black and grey outfit to the blue and grey one, though it would be nice to see the actual blue and grey of the comics on the screen one day - just to see it "brought to life" somewhere other than (and hopefully more convincingly than) the old Adam West series.

A word on his height - Batman's height in the comics has long been established as 6'2". Of all the actors to portray him on screen, only two are this height - Adam West and Christian Bale. But Bale's Batman isn't heavily muscled. He's much closer to Bob Kane's original idea of the "acrobat-man" or Neal Adams renderings than he is to Miller's Dark Knight. (His temperament is closer to the O'Neil Batman as well.)

Finally, a few years ago, at the San Diego Comic Con, I met a guy in a Batsuit who I actually thought look the part. Both the quality of the suit, and the physique of the person inside, simply worked. Standing next to this Batman, it was the first time in my life I actually believed that someone could wear the costume and not look silly. This in broad daylight too. In fact, this guy was actually a little intimidating. And I'm not sure but what I didn't like the mask better than any of the movie versions. The utility belt could use some work, and I'd certainly go for a non-reflective grey for the tights, but otherwise I think this costume is spot on. And his torso should amply demonstrate to Hollywood producers that they can dispense with those sculpted latex muscles once and for all if they have the right actor in the part. Click on the picture for a larger view and see if you don't agree with me.

Life After WorldCon

Well, I’m sufficiently over my jet lag (which I’m told by several folks doesn’t exist and is purely psychological) and caught up enough on emails & busy work that I can hammer out a con report. This one was the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention, held at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow, Scotland from August 4th to 8th. This is a rotating convention, held in a different venue each year. Last year was held in Boston, next year will be in Los Angeles, and 2007’s will be held in Yokohama, Japan. Overseas cons usually draw less than the 5,000 to 6,000 attendees of American ones, but I’m told this year’s drew a very respectable 4,100 folks (approximately).

I arrived at 7am Wednesday morning, and forced myself to stay up 38 hours till midnight Glaswegian time so as to be on the right schedule with everybody else, whereupon I slept till 9am and felt reasonably well the rest of the week. But this was as difficult convention to work. Ordinarily, World Cons are held in one central hotel – with maybe two or three ancillary hotels, all conveniently located. I can usually plant myself in “the” bar in the evenings and trust that everyone I need to talk to will amble by at some point. But this convention, the conference center was between a river and a convoluted octopus of highways and on and off ramps, and unless you were smart enough to get into the small adjacent hotel called the Moat House (I wasn’t – it having sold out before I’d even clued in), you were a cab ride away across the octopus in one of some ten or so hotels scattered throughout Glasgow. This meant that we had to cab it to the SECC in the mornings, stay all day, and cab it back in the very late evenings, making this a very hard day. To make matters worse, the Moat House had two bars, fore and aft, functionally impossible to negotiate between without going outside, but the official “party” hotel was the Hilton a good cab ride away, so there were at least three different locations where people gathered in the evenings. This, coupled with the spread out nature of the convention, meant you really had to work to find everyone you needed to see, and, indeed, I never found several folks I was hoping to meet up with. (Additionally, there was nothing else in the way of bars or restaurants in the immediate area, so I saw very little of Glasgow despite three excursions detailed below.)

Despite all this, I did managed to locate our international authors fairly quickly, and must say that the best aspect of the convention for me was spending some real time with Ian McDonald, Keith Brooke, Martin Sketchley, and Joel Shepherd, all of whom I met for the first time. (It was wonderful to see Justina Robson as well, and John Meaney is always a pleasure). The highlight was definitely hanging out with Martin and Joel, neither of whom were anything like I was expecting. (To write such sex and action-packed, turbo-charged adventure stories, Martin Sketchley is extremely quiet, exceedingly polite, and soft-spoken. Think a mild-mannered David Byrne.) We all got on famously and I look forward to a long working relationship with all of them.

Thursday night Chris Roberson’s policy of convention bar etiquette paid off. Chris’ M.O. is to pick one member of the wait staff, treat them well (something sadly not all con attendees do), and appoint them our single waiter for the duration. This time he picked Lauren, only two weeks into the job, and by week’s end she was refusing further tips, giving us all free drinks, and serving us after hours while turning everyone else away. That's Lauren on the left, along with John Picacio, Chris Roberson, and Yours Truly. Well, Thursday night she recommended a restaurant in town, which, although they were booked up, themselves recommended The Ubiquitous Chip down a cobble-stoned alley across the street. We were joined by authors Jay Caselberg and Laura Ann Gilman (former senior editor of Roc turned novelist), as well as my good friend Paul Cornell (excellent British author, also writes for television, including Coronation Street and Doctor Who) and his wife Caroline Symcox. In addition to wonderful conversation, I must say, the Ubiquitous Chip served the only good meal I had all week. I’ve also developed a fondness for “black pudding” – to my wife’s horror when I told her upon my return. (Google it if you don’t know what it is.)

Friday afternoon, Alan Beatts of Borderlands Books (one of the finest genre bookstores in America) hosted a Pyr signing. On hand were John Meaney, Chris Roberson, and Fiona Avery. They are pictured right, along with Alan himself and John Picacio. Alan would like to make the Pyr signing a regular feature of World Con, for which I am very honored. I lived in San Francisco in 2000, and of all the things I miss about that city, attending Alan's readings and events is probably the thing I miss the most.

Friday night was an adventure in itself. I’d been asked by John Parker of MBA literary agents to join him and a group of about twelve people for dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Loon Fung in downtown Glasgow. But the adventure arrived when he phoned to say dinner was being pushed back, and could we meet him at a private party being hosted by PanMacmillan at Borders Books. The party was fun – and everyone was there, but crowded and with bad beer. However, no sooner had we (Martin and I) arrived than Parker disappeared to another party, appointing Justina in charge and asking us to follow shortly. This one was held in a private upstairs room of a bar called TigerTiger. The party was fabulous, but, of course, John Parker was nowhere in sight at TigerTiger, though our game of “chase the white rabbit” continued when he called from the restaurant to summon us on. Loon Fung was unexceptional (hence I’m not bothering to hunt up its url), but was worth it as I got to spend a relaxed hour or so outside the con talking to John Meaney and his wife Yvonne. John is still the nicest person I’ve ever met and one of the top science fiction authors working today in my admittedly-biased opinion.

Saturday morning I was on a well-attended panel entitled “Not the Hugo Panel” about who should win the fiction awards (verses who would). I was quite flattered to be asked, as my fellow panelists including Gordon Van Gelder of the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus, and Ginger Buchanan, executive editor of the Penguin imprints Roc & Ace. The general consensus was that Ian McDonald should win in a just world, and I was pleased to be able to mention our edition of his novel, along with Mike Resnick’s upcoming collection New Dreams for Old (as two of the short stories to be included therein were on the Hugo shortlist for “Best Short Story.”)

Saturday night I attended the best party I’ve ever been to at one of these things, thrown by Harper Collins’ Australian imprint Voyager. Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, John Picacio, Martin Sketchley, and Pyr & Voyager author Joel Shepherd came along. But what made it was the venue, “the Tall Ship at Glasgow Harbour,” a converted sailing vessel build in 1896, later converted to a freighter and given an engine, now a dance hall with kitchen and bar. As we boarded, we were given a pirate kit which contained pirate hats, pirate eye patches, and, for a lucky few, swords and hooks. I didn’t get the latter, but did manage to grab a necklace and some gold dubloons, which sadly were solid plastic and not the chocolate I was hoping for. (That's me with Martin Sketchley and Joel Shepherd on the left.) I was also able to catch up with English novelist Graham Joyce, and meet his wife and adorable children. I was also able to indulge my newfound fondness for black pudding (have you googled it yet?).

Sunday was a panel entitled “Where is the Heart of Genre”, addressing the question of whether short fiction or novel-length fiction drives science fiction today. I was on alongside Analog editor Stanley Schmidt (editor of the oldest running SF magazine), authors Harry Harrison and Ian R. MacLeod, and critic Paul Kincaid. Sadly, my role as moderator kept me fairly subdued, as this was a topic I felt I had quite a bit to say on. The panel went alright, but was in a huge space with a raised stage, and the combination of bright lights and four hours sleep the night before made it not as exciting as it could have been. Later in the Moat House bar, the aforementioned super barmaid Lauren came over, asked me “Can I get you anything?” and when I declined, told another drink-seeking famous author to his face, “You have to go to the bar for service!” Lauren really did make an unexceptional bar exceptional! If her boss is reading this - give her a raise!

Sunday night was, of course, the Hugo awards, made more thrilling this time by my first ever attendance of the before-hand reception and the after-hand “Losers Party”, made possibly by virtue of my being John Picacio’s date. The reception featured some really nice Glaswegian smoked salmon, along with other good finger food, and I was able to catch up with several authors, among them China Miéville, Kelly Link, Christopher Rowe, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Ian McDonald. (Pictured left are Campbell nominee Chris Roberson and Hugo nominee John Picacio.)

The Hugos themselves were quite interesting, the SECC’s Armadillo theatre being the nicest venue I’ve yet attended the ceremony in. Authors Paul McAuley and Kim Newman were splendid MC’s, preparing an hysterical speech that attributed the awards to French writer Victor Hugo (as opposed to Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback) and projecting an alternate world in which France developed the atomic bomb first due to the influence of its “fiction philosophique,” going on to dominate the world through an army of automatons who will execute any gauche enough to serve red wine with fish.

Of our folks up for awards, only Mike Resnick and Jim Burns won. (John Picacio did take a Chesley award at an earlier ceremony, for a cover he did for a Tachyon Press trade paperback). Mike’s “Travels with my Cats” took Best Short Story (to be collected in New Dreams for Old along with his other nominee, “A Princess of Earth.”) Jim Burns is the artist for John Meaney’s four novels, Paradox, Context, Resolution, and To Hold Infinity. I met him earlier in the convention, along with his agent Alison Eldred, both of whom were very nice, and they both had glowing things to say about Pyr.

But it was at the Losers Party afterwards that things got interesting. You see, Ian McDonald was up for Best Novel. Now, very predictably, that went to Susanna Clarke’s bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell. The book was Time Magazine’s pick for Best Novel of the Year, as well as the pick from BookSense. It took her ten years to write, weighs in at over 800 pages, and had sold film rights and foreign language rights in 30 countries before it even appeared in the US, so there was no way this 800-pound gorilla wasn’t going to win. (And I am very happy for Susanna that it did - make no mistake.) But up against it and River was China Miéville’s Iron Council (the finest fantasy novel I have ever read), vanguard SF writer Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise (who also had two nominations in the Best Novella category, one of which won), and bestselling Scottish author Iain Banks, (huge in his home territory). So when I learned that River of Gods came in second behind Jonathan Strange, and trailed by only a few votes, I was blown away. This can only mean good things for Ian in future.

Poor Martin Sketchley, who had managed to sneak onto the private bus after the Hugo Ceremony, couldn’t get in the party. By the time we smuggled him out an invitation (donated by Paul Cornell), he was gone. Chris Roberson did spend the rest of the evening getting folks from the bar outside into the private room, but Martin had called it a night. I did spend a late evening with Liza Trombi of Locus and Jetse de Vries, co-editor of the new Interzone, and this proved to be one of the highlights of the whole con for me.

Monday was the Pyr panel. In attendance were Keith Brooke, Ian McDonald, John Meaney, John Picacio, Justina Robson, Chris Roberson, Joel Shepherd, and Martin Sketchley. They were all crowded onto a stage on one side of the room, with Yours Truly at a podium on the other side, and a big screen between us. The room was packed to capacity with about 60 people. I gave a talk with a PowerPoint presentation, showing our second season titles and artwork from our third season. Then each of the authors said a few words. Then we opened the room for questions. Of all the panels I sat on or attended, this was the most lively, with a lot of enthusiasm, questions, interest, laughter, and even a thunderous ovation for my rapid-fire description of Martin’s The Affinty Trap. Which - with pseudo-spoilers - went something like: “Bruce Willis’ character from the Fifth Element is interrupted in his pre-credit sequence rock-climbing vacation for his Mission Impossible 2 assignment, which is that George Bush slash Barron Harkonnen of Dune wants to send him to kidnap the empathic metaphor from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But along the way, the lead falls under the grip of her pheromones and they have wild Species 2 cocoon sex before absconding to Babylon 5. Then, when George Bush slash Barron Harkonnen kidnaps her back, Willis has to team up with the riffraff outside Judge Dredd’s Megacity for an assault on Bush’s fortress.” All delivered in one run-on sentence burst, thank you. Now breathe.

Afterwards, I talked with Steven H. Segal, publisher of the upcoming Earthling lifestyles and culture magazine, and then pronounced the con well and truly done. As everyone else was too tired to move, Allison Baker (who was horribly sick but adventurous) and I left everyone behind and heading out in a cab in search of a real Irish pub (we found two), and some real Guinness (sadly, it was being served “extra cold” everywhere now, as a ploy to attract stupid young people who won’t drink it properly room-temperature. I learned for the real stuff I must now go to Dublin, but what we found in the pubs was at least better than what the hotel bars served). Along the way, we spotted a real blue Police Box, one of only 12 still in existence, and, of course, the model for Doctor Who’s time traveling TARDIS. Chris, who refused to budge from his Moat House bar seat all day, was well and truly mortified when he learned that he missed it. Sadly, neither of us had our cameras with us so this fan-produced model of the interior shall have to suffice.

And that's all folks. All in all, it was a fantastic convention.

Prepare for the Infoquake

Next summer, we'll be debuting a brand new novelist named David Louis Edelman. David is a web programmer and computer trainer, who has worked with the U.S. Army, the FBI, and the World Bank. His novel, Infoquake, isn't really like anything else I've ever read. First of a trilogy, Infoquake is a novel of science fiction business, set several centuries hence in a very detailed future world, and can only be described as Dune meets the Wall Street Journal. I'm very exciting about the book and really interested to see how it is received. But before the first volume comes out next July, David will be promoting the Jump 225 trilogy on a special website which launched earlier this week. He'll be growing the content throughout the year (and beyond), but you can already get a taste here.

Wiki Willy Wonka

I am immensely flattered. An editor at Wikipedia wrote me last week and asked if he could use the plot summation from my earlier post "Golden Tickets to Hell" Willy Wonka- Tour Guide of the Abyss" in the Wikipedia Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory entry, along with a link & a credit in the "external links" section. I must say that I am amazed at the scope of the blogosphere sometimes.