Chris Roberson

Heliotrope # 5: Michael Moorcock Tribute

Issue # 5 of Helioptrope is out. It’s available online and as a downloadable PDF, and is entirely devoted to the genius of Michael Moorcock. It opens with Neil Gaiman’s “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock,” and then a piece from Yours Truly, “Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man,” wherein I talk about Mike’s collosal influence on sf&f, “serious” literature, rock and roll, RPG and computer gaming, and quantum physics. Fortunately, Bryan Talbot is onhand to address my one serious omission. He discusses Mike’s colosal influence on comic books in “The Moorcock Effect.” Chris Roberson talks about his personal interactions with Mike the person in “Moorcock the Author, Mike the Man.” Also included are appreciates by Paul S Kemp, Hal Duncan, and Catherynne M. Valente, and Rhys Hughes. There’s a lot of Mike love in the issue, but that’s something there can never be enough of.

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Too Much Pyr News to Keep Track of!

You go out of town for a week, and look what happens:

Ian McDonald’s Brasylhas made the short list for the Nebula Awards!! Meanwhile over on Boing Boing, fellow-nominee Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) reviews Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days:

“Ian McDonald is one of science fiction’s finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for. …Cyberabad Days has it all: spirituality, technology, humanity, love, sex, war, environmentalism, politics, media — all blended together to form a manifesto of sorts, a statement about how technology shapes and is shaped by all the wet, gooey human factors. Every story is simultaneously a cracking yarn, a thoughtful piece of technosocial criticism, and a bag of eyeball kicks that’ll fire your imagination. The field is very lucky to have Ian McDonald working in it.”

And Nick Gevers interviews McDonald on SciFi Wire:

“The title Cyberabad Days is a deliberate echo of the Arabian Nights. The stories are fairy tales of New Delhi. River was an Indian—novel, fat, many-voiced, wide-screen; Cyberabad Days is tales. Mumbai movies tell stories in ways that challenge our Western aesthetics and values. They’re not afraid of sentiment, they’re not afraid of big acting, or putting in song and dance, because Bollywood cinema’s not supposed to be a mimetic art form. It’s not about realism—that most pernicious of Western values—it’s a show.”

On io9, Charlie Jane Anders interviews Infoquakeand MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman:

“I began with a vision of a futuristic world, and worked backwards to figure out how everything came together. Most of the backstory came about when I was writing the early chapters of Infoquake and just started randomly filling things in. When I’d get stuck writing the story proper, I’d just spend some time writing background articles. This kind of thing has always been attractive to me. I was the kid who bought AD&D modules just because I liked to read them, even though I didn’t have anyone to play AD&D with. I’m the guy who always liked The Silmarillion better than The Lord of the Rings.”

On the Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast episode 75, host Shaun Farrel interviews End of the Centuryauthor Chris Roberson! Here’s the direct download link. (And, as a reminder, here is part one and part two of my massive Tor.com piece on Roberson’s entire career. Part two wasn’t up when I left town.)

These guys are making it hard for me to get caught up!

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MIND MELD: Interesting Areas of Scientific Research

The latest Mind Meld is up at SFSignal. This one asks, “There is a lot of scientific research being performed across a wide array of disciplines. So much that it can be difficult to keep up with it all. What current avenue of scientific inquiry do you believe people should be paying attention to, and why?”

Answers are from Kathleen Ann Goonan, Nancy Kress, Michael S. Brotherton, Nina Munteanu, and Jennifer Ouellette, as well as our own Kay Kenyon and Alexis Glynn Latner. I am particularly struck by Kathleen Ann Goonan’s comment that, “…our system of education needs to have a scientific basis. It does not now. It is so dreadful because it was created to ready immigrant children for factory work. Be on time, follow directions, don’t talk, do what we tell you to do. One obvious negative outcome is that we do not begin to teach reading until children are far older than the optimal age for doing so.”

Also worth mentioning: Earlier on SFSignal, John DeNardo has taken it upon himself to review as many of Chris Roberson’s Celestial Empire stories as he can get his hands on.

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Conventions: Chris Roberson at Fencon IV

This weekend, Here, There & Everywhereand Paragaea: A Planetary Romanceauthor Chris Roberson will be attending Fencon IV in Addison, Texas. Catch him at the following panels:

Friday 8:00 PM Programming 1
All Things Joss
Description: A discussion of Joss Whedon and his creations.

Saturday 10:00 AM Programming 3
20th Anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation
Description: After a bit of a shaky start, TNG ran for seven years on television and spawned two other hit Trek series before moving on to the big screen. Fans discuss why this show is still special after all this time.

Saturday 11:00 AM Programming 3
Who’s Your Doctor?
Description: Everyone has their own favorite incarnation of the Time Lord. Conversation may get a bit spirited, and we ask you to turn off your Sonic Screwdrivers.

Saturday 2:00 PM Main Stage
Book Business Basics
Description: What are the steps from manuscript acceptance to publication? How are royalities paid? How is promotion of a book determined? These questions and more are answered.

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Roberson Rambles on Brasyl

Author Chris Roberson (Paragaea,Set the Seas on Fire) has started “Book Report Monday.” In his inaugural report, he looks at Soon I Will Be Invincible, Eisenhorn, and Ian McDonald’s Brasyl.The latter shares enough structural commonalities with his forthcoming End of the Century that I, as he points out, advised him not to read it until he’d finished that manuscript. Now that he has, he finds Brasyl “highly recommended. If you’ve been looking for a story featuring bisexual transvestite wheeler-dealers in the future, kick ass Irish Jesuits in the past, and complex TV producers in the modern day, complete with knives that will cut through the bonds of space-time and secret conspiracies across the multiverse, then Brasyl is the book for you. And if you haven’t been looking for that story, then you should be now.”

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An Extended Family of Adventurers and Heroes

Chris Roberson talks to Sandy Auden on the UK SF Book News site. He’s chiefly talking about his just released nautical fantasy, Set the Seas on Fire,but as always, he explains the interconnected nature of his canon:

UKSFBN: Will Set the Seas on Fire be a stand alone or part of a series? Is it necessary to read Paragaea before this one?

Chris R: “Seas is part of a series of stand-alone novels which can be read in any order. The series revolves around an extended family of adventurers and heroes, the Bonaventure-Carmody family. Paragaea: A Planetary Romanceis actually a sequel to Set the Seas on Fire, if you want to be specific about it, since the events of this novel predate those of Paragaea. But that said, either can be read on its own, and both can be read in any order. The same is true of my other Bonaventure-Carmody novels, Here, There & Everywhereand End of the Century. If you like one of them, chances are you’ll like the others. If you don’t like one, though, you still might like the others, as they’re all quite different.”

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Chris Roberson and Zombies

Chris Roberson talks to Sci Fi Wire about his latest book, a nautical adventure with zombies called Set the Seas on Fire,and explains how it ties directly into his two Pyr novels, Paragaea: A Planetary Romanceand Here, There & Everywhere. Which is, of course, through the person of Hieronymus Bonaventure, who also appears in Paragaea and who is of the same family line as H,T&E star Roxanne Bonaventure. As to similarities between himself and his protagonist, he says, “Both of us, I suppose, are fleeing from boredom and looking for stimulation to keep our brains working. The difference is that I don’t have to live on a boat, eating weevil-ridden biscuits and trying not to get scurvy.”

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Interminable Ramblings

Chris Roberson’s forthcoming Solaris title, Set the Seas on Fire,is the subject of John Berlyne’s latest review over on SFRevu. Set the Seas on Fire is actually a direct prequel to Paragaea: A Planetary Romance,which John reviewed last year. He references Paragaea again here, calling it “a hugely enjoyable pulpish adventure.” Meanwhile, he finds the new book “adds another very competent and confident story to Roberson’s ever-growing, increasingly impressive interconnected cannon – one can expect more from the characters one has met in this novel, and not necessarily in the same kind of setting.”

As John says above, Chris’s novels occur in one big, interconnected multiverse, much like those of his influences Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer and his contemporary Kage Baker. Chris himself expands on the relationship between these two particular novels on his blog, Roberson’s Interminable Ramble. Meanwhile, he is also interviewed over on Heidi’s Pick Six, a blog that asks an author to pick six out of fifteen standard questions. How standard? Question number three is “coffee, tea, or milk?”

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