Frostborn, "a ridiculously fun, super-exciting adventure" !!!

Frostborn just showed up on io9 again in a list of "16 Fun, Escapist Books To Get Your Mind off This Crazy Election Year."

Says the wonderful Charlie Jane Anders:

"OK so this is a middle-grade book, which means it’s technically for kids. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a ridiculously fun, super-exciting adventure. Karn is a nerdy kid whose dad expects him to run the family farm—but Karn just wants to play a complicated, fancy board game instead. And meanwhile, Thianna is a half-frost giant girl who gets bullied by all the other frost giants because she’s so tiny. (Only seven feet tall.) In other words, it’s about a gamer and a weird girl who have to team up to save the world. And it’s just non-stop fun."

Frostborn Is The Fantasy Adventure Book I Wish I'd Had When I Was A Kid

This high praise from io9 will have me giddy all week. Charlie Jane Anders (no relation) proclaims in the post's title that "Frostborn Is The Fantasy Adventure Book I Wish I'd Had When I Was A Kid", then goes on to say "Lou Anders' new novel Frostbornis one of those middle-grade fantasy books that you'll buy for your kid, just so you can have an excuse to read it yourself. The highest compliment I can give Frostbornis it gave me Lloyd Alexander flashbacks."

I'm also thrilled when Charlie Jane writes, "The theme of not fitting in is present in both characters, but it's different enough for each of them that they wind up complimenting each other rather than reinforcing. Thianna's status as a mixed-race kid who gets bullied by the other kids is poignant, but it's never overplayed. And Karn's desire to be something other than what his father expects is a much subtler form of identity crisis — you can see the two of them learning from each other pretty much from the moment they meet."

The Politics of Fantasy

Cover art by Steve Stone

The latest Pyr newsletter, the Pyr-A-Zine, has an amazing Q&A with James Enge, discussing his just released novel, A Guile of Dragons (A Tournament of Shadows, Book 1), that is very worth checking out.

One of the interesting questions concerns the anarchic politic system of the Graith of Guardians, which lead to a discussion of why so many fantasy novels operate in monarchies. James answer is very interesting. You'll have to go to the newsletter for the full response, but he begins by saying, "There's a complaint about imaginary-world fantasy which is partly valid and partly nonsense. The complaint runs something like this: Always with the kings, and the dukes, and the princesses. Where's the pluralistic democracy? Do you fantasy people HATE FREEDOM? Personally, I love political freedom so much that someday I'm going to buy some for myself."

Meanwhile, an excerpt from the Q&A has sparked a very interesting debate in the comments section on io9, when they used the interview as a springboard to ask, "Why do epic fantasies always take place in monarchies, instead of democracies?"

So the newsletter, the io9 debate, and, of course, the book itself, are all well worth checking out! 

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. 

Meet Swarmanoid

Via io9, this is sheer awesome:

Hey, Why Not Try the Necronomicon?

Via io9

io9's Environment Writing Contest for Science Journalists and SF Writers

From their release:

In November and December, io9.com is sponsoring an environmental writing contest for science journalists and science fiction writers. We are awarding $2000 each for the two best stories (one nonfiction, one science fiction) that deal with environmental disaster - its causes, consequences, and how to deal with both. We invite entries from people all over the world, whether they're seasoned investigative journalists or citizen scientists who have never been published
before.

For full contest rules, please go here.

Here's more information:

We can't prevent environmental disasters without preparing for them. That's why io9 is going to pay $2000 each to two people who write the best stories about environmental disaster. It's io9's Environmental Writing Contest - for science fiction and non-fiction.

io9 is looking for stories that deal with environmental disaster, whether caused by random asteroid impacts or oil drilling accidents. We believe that the first step to solving planet-scale problems is to
assess, honestly and critically, what it would mean to experience such a disaster. We need mental models that can help policy-makers, researchers, and individuals prepare for the kinds of cataclysmic
events that have occurred regularly throughout Earth's history.

We're holding this contest to reward people for coming up with ideas that could help avert the next Deepwater spill and Pacific garbage gyre - or help people prepare better for the next Indian Ocean tsunami and Haiti earthquake. Storytelling is a powerful tool. We want you to use it well.

Our team of judges includes Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker's environment reporter), National Book Award nominee Paolo Bacigalupi (author of Ship Breaker and The Windup Girl), and Jonathan Strahan (editor of the acclaimed Eclipse anthologies).

Contest Guidelines:
Stories should be between 3,000-5,000 words. It must be an original story that has not been published elsewhere.

The contest has two categories: Science Fiction and Non-Fiction. We will pick a winner from each.

Guidelines for Science Fiction Entries:
Your story should deal meaningfully and plausibly with some aspect of environmental disaster. There are no limits on the kind of disaster you explore. It could be an exploding star, a plague, tachyon pollution, nanotech diseases, climate change, or something else. What's important is that your story deal with causes and consequences. How did the disaster happen, who will benefit from it, how will people
(or other creatures) respond to it? We don't want morality tales or after school specials here - just good stories that deal realistically with the subject matter.

Guidelines for Non-Fiction Entries:
Your story can be a piece of investigative journalism, a well-researched history, biographical/autobiographical narrative, or science/technology writing for a lay audience. You can write a profile of people or groups dealing with environmental disaster, analyze the science behind environmental problems, or cover the story of a disaster that has already happened. We prefer stories that involve reporting and research. Though the story must be original, you may base it on research you have already done for another project or piece of reporting.

Winning stories will be published on io9, and we will give $2000 each to the winners in each category.

Deadline for all stories is midnight PST, December 11.

Why Science Fiction is Important!

Via io9 and the wonderful Charlie Jane. Walter Russell Mead writing in The American Interest:

"Taken as a whole, the field of science fiction today is where most of the most interesting thought about human society can be found. At a time when many academics have become almost willfully obscure, political science is increasingly dominated by arcane and uninspiring theories and in which a fog of political correctness makes some forms of (badly needed) debate and exploration off limits, science fiction has stepped forward to fill the gap. In the work of writers like David Brin and Neal Stephenson there is more interesting reflection on America's place in the world than you will find, I fear, in a whole year's worth of reading in foreign policy magazines. Robert Heinlein's work brilliantly lays out the ideology of populist libertarianism and predicted the revolt against the welfare state that has defined American politics since the 1980s. Read C. J. Cherryh's foreigner novels for insight into international relations and her Cyteen novels to sharpen your wits about both international politics and the impact of technological change on human society.
The biggest single task facing the United States today is the unleashing of our social imagination. We are locked into twentieth century institutions and twentieth century habits of mind. Science fiction is the literary genre (OK, true, sometimes a subliterary genre) where the social imagination is being cultivated and developed. Young people should read this genre to help open their minds to the extraordinary possibilities that lie before us; we geezers should read it for the same reason. The job of our times is to build a radically new world; speculative fiction helps point the way."

io9 says "This book could teach Hollywood to do superheroes right"

May the dark gods of media bless io9. Charlie Jane Anders (no relation I'm aware of, but very nice) has written a review of Masked, my forthcoming anthology of superhero prose fiction, entitled "This book could teach Hollywood to do superheroes right."

"Masked, edited by Lou Anders, is a really strong collection of stories that play with the idea of superheroes in clever, often fascinating ways. There's a fair bit of metafictional commentary on the tropes of superhero stories, like costumes and secret identities and sidekicks — but it doesn't ever become too self-referential or navel-gazey about it. The stories get dark, especially the first few outings in the book, but they're dark in a thought-provoking way, not just angsty or 'grim and gritty,' as dark superhero stories are prone to be.  ...The good thing about Masked, then, is that Anders gets stories from people who have a lot of experience with superheroes, or who obviously had a superhero story they wanted to write. The contributors include Secret Six writer Gail Simone, Incredible Hulk mastermind Peter David, X-Men: Dark Mirror author Marjorie Liu and comics veterans Bill Willingham and Mike Carey - as well as Paul Cornell, a regular Doctor Who writer and the new writer of Action Comics."

Charlie Jane talks about several stories individually, and goes on to say, "So anybody who is interested in superheroes will find enough new ideas in this book to make the already over-exposed spandex centurions seem like they could have a new lease on life, all over again. I especially want to mail a copy of this book to everyone in Hollywood who's working on the next generation of superhero blockbusters, because in the end, this book makes me think that superheroes aren't just rigidly attached to the Origin Story, the Misunderstood Hero Story, the Hero Almost Quits Story and the handful of others we keep seeing. You can use superheroes to tell any kind of story you want. And superheroes naturally tend to flourish in an environment with lots of worldbuilding, where they're surrounded by lots of other superheroes and tons of villains.   Most of all, superheroes don't just allow us to ask the tough questions about whether just having power means we have to use it, and whether the identity we present to the world is who we really are — they demand it. So yeah, not bad for one wee anthology. You should check it out. Masked comes out July 20 (just in time for Comic Con) from Gallery Books."

Masked and Swords & Dark Magic Love

A second review for Swords & Dark Magic has popped up in Locus magazine (July 2010 issue), this one by  Rich Horton.  He  calls the book, "a collection devoted to the 'New  Swords and Sorcery,' which is to say, more or less, the old Swords and Sorcery  with extra cynicism. Granting  of course that cynicism was hardly absent from  Sword and Sorcery, this book  does seem more of our time. And it’s solid from beginning to end." Getting particular attention is Gene Wolfe's "Bloodsport," which Horton calls "quite powerful."

Meanwhile, io9 has called Masked out in a post on the "coolest new books of July." They say, "The conventions of the golden age are really the focus here, but that's not to say the contributions are flat or old-fashioned. Stephen Baxter approaches the genre with hard science, while Marjorie M. Liu plays with cliche to entertaining effect. Come prepared for self-awareness and metafictional flourishes."

io9 Book Club Selects The Quiet War for Inaugural Read

io9 have announced that they are starting a book club, and choosing as their first selection, Paul McAuley's Clarke award nominated The Quiet War,conveniently just out from Pyr this month. They write:

The Quiet War explores the tensions between two factions in the solar system. The Outers, who live on the outer planets and their moons, are post-humanists by default. They're reengineering their bodies and environments to make it possible for human societies to spread far beyond Earth. But the Earth governments of Greater Brazil want to stop the Outers' blasphemy against pure, untrammeled Nature. Of course, the real threat is the Outers' greater productivity, scientific innovation, and success as a society. A series of skirmishes escalate into a war, and that's when things get explosive. We picked this novel because it's packed with great ideas and fascinating science.

The book club will discuss the book online Thursday, October 8th, at which time io9 readers will be asked to provide questions for Paul McAuley for a special Q&A follow-up session. So if you were thinking of checking the novel out, now's a good time!

Two Out of Two Anders Agree: Infoquake/MultiReal is Brilliant!

Over on the Pyr blog, Mark Chadbourn asks "Should Scientists Forget Space?", citing an article on the UK's former Chief Scientist, Sir David King, who says that we are in need of a "re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society's inner attitudes towards science and technology." Sir King wants us to forgo experiments in space and in CERN in favor of addressing more immediate concerns at him. I've already given my opinion in the comments of Mark's post, but it's interesting to me to contrast it here with Charlie Jane Anders' io9.com review of David Louis Edelman's Infoquakeand MultiReal(books one and two of his Jump 225 trilogy).

Charlie Jane beings the review, which is titled "MultiReal is your antidote to science-bashing scifi," by saying, "With so much mass-media science fiction featuring anti-science heroes who battle to stop science from "going too far," it's great to read a really smart novel about a hero who's fighting to save scientific progress from being suppressed." She characterizes the books as being "about the nature of technological progress" and says, "Where MultiReal really shines, however, is in the debates over the ethics of this reality-twisting software. There really is no right answer to the question of how society should deal with software that 'liberates you from cause and effect,' and the sequence where Natch's mentor debates the government's attorneys is easily my favorite part of both books. It's a complex issue, and Edelman draws it out enough that you can see how it applies to today's real-life challenges: should we try to suppress new technologies, should we regulate them heavily? Is it possible to suppress new knowledge after all? Does information really want to be free? It's a lot more nuanced than the 'science iz scary OMG' idea that seems to be popular in media SF right now.

Now, with the understanding that I am generalizing horribly, I think that traditionally a majority of filmic sci-fi is concerned with maintaining the status quo and getting the genies back in the bottles. Something is developed, approaching, on the loose - and its up to the protagonists to stop it. An asteroid is going to hit the earth, aliens are invading, a man has turned himself invisible and is running amok - how do we divert it, repel them, contain him... In other words, there is a threat to consensus reality and by the end of the film or television show, it's been dealt with and nicely put away. Go on with your lives. Nothing to worry about here.

By contrast, literary science fiction is often set after such an event has already happened, sometimes a good deal after, and throws us in medias res into a world in which part of the fun of the narrative is working out how the world in the tale differs from the world we know and part of the theme lies in examining how these changes act as a lens to illuminate some aspect of humanity that we take for granted. So, an asteroid hit the earth and killed everyone over 18, how do the survivors cope? Aliens invaded and are now our overlords - would you let one date your sister? 1/3 of the population is invisible, what new class of people do they form? The intrusion isn't repelled, it's part and parcel of the way things are now going forward. I find this the more honest approach, and underscores on of science fiction's strengths as the genre that embraces the reality and inevitability of change.

There are, of course, examples of both approaches in both mediums. In fact, one of the (many) failures of The Matrix trilogy is that it began from what I'm calling a more literary position of science fiction and transitioned to the filmic. At the end of the first movie, Neo promises to hang up the phone and, "then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world ... without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible." The goal of the protagonists isn't to preserve consensual reality, but to destroy it, by ushering in a world where anyone can do the things he can. But instead of this, the subsequent films shift the emphasis radically away from the Matrix (which is never anything more than a set for agents and rebels to play in henceforth) to saving Zion and restoring the status quo of balance between machine and rebel. We never actually deal with another person who still believes in/is imprisoned by the Matrix's view of reality - and the battle that is fought is all about getting things back to the way they were in the first film. I don't know why this is, though the best explanation I've heard is that 9/11 occurred between the first and second films, forcing Warner to rethink the wisdom of making two more movies staring a group of admitted terrorists out to destroy 1999. (In some ways, V for Vendetta - which was released as public opinion was beginning to change re: the current war and Bush's approval ratings were dipping, and questioning him was no longer being seen as being unpatriotic - is the film the Wachowski's should have made out of Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions and didn't/couldn't at the time). But I digress...

To bring this back to the Jump 225 trilogy: What I personally love about Edelman is that he sets his story not before (and up to the point) of the radical transformation, nor after (and at a comfortable distance from) the transformation, but that he is actually charting the course through the societal singularity, showing how all the institutions of government, business, and society rearrange, realign, and topple. To an extent, Charlie Stross did this with his brilliant and essential Accelerando (though he moves his action off-world for a good deal of it - which is no criticism, it's a different animal), but I've never personally encountered a work that did such a thorough job and concentrated so much of its focus in taking us through the shift point between paradigms. I think that's why so many readers say that the future Edelman presents is a "believable" one, and why I think, though he mixes and matches tropes we've seen before, his approach is so unique.

io9.com and Borderlands Books

If I was on the fence about Gawker's new io9.com blog, this piece on Borderlands Books has put me over the edge. This kind of support for /shout out to independent booksellers is fantastic. And Borderlands is the perfect store to kick it off. When I lived in San Francisco, I made a point of going weekly, and really miss the readings there.

But I wasn't really on the fence, after reading this from editor Annalee Newitz: “We don’t see it as a niche entertainment site. We see it as a pop culture site. So much of our mainstream culture is now talked about and thought about in science-fictional terms. I think that’s why people like William Gibson and Brian Aldiss are saying there’s no more science fiction because we are now living in the future. The present is thinking of itself in science-fictional terms. You get things like George Bush taking stem cell policy from reading parts of Brave New World. That’s part of what we are playing with. We are living in world that now thinks of itself in terms of sci-fi and in terms of the future.”