Interview

Infoquake Author on NPR this Sunday

David Louis Edelman, author of Infoquake, which, did I mention, B&N.com just picked as the # 1 SF novel of the year in their Editor’s Choice: Top Ten SF&F Novels of 2006 – is scheduled to be on NPR’s Weekend Edition this Sunday, in a feature report from the Agony Column’s Rick Kleffel which also includes such notables as TC Boyle, Jeff VanderMeer, Charlie Stross, Amir D. Aczel…and John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE.

As Rick says, “Not Your Usual NPR Lineup. Not anyone’s usual lineup for that matter.” Reportedly, the chances are that the piece will air in the second hour of Weekend Edition.

Update: The piece, entitled “Writers Find New Fiction Source in Economic Genre” is now online at NPR.org, where it is available in both RealAudio and Windows Media formats.

Infoquake Author on NPR this Sunday Read More »

Fast Forward Review, Lou Anders Interview

Ernest Lilley, over on SFRevu, has just posted his interview with Yours Truly, where we talk about Pyr, Fast Forward 1, media SF, Hollywood, and a host of authors (including Ian McDonald, Kay Kenyon, Justina Robson and Joe Abercrombie). I think it came out pretty well, considering I was typing my responses until the wee hours.

So, that goes up on SFRevu this morning, and within minutes, I get word from our wonderful publicity director that Publishers Weekly has given my upcoming anthology, Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, a Starred Review!!

They praise stories by Robert Charles Wilson, Mary A. Turzillo, Paul Di Filippo, and Ken MacLeod, and say:

“The solid, straightforward storytelling of the 19 stories and two poems that Anders (Futureshocks) gathers for this first in a projected series of all-original SF anthologies speculates on people’s efforts to “make sense of a changing world.” The contributors don’t necessarily assume that humans will find it easy or even possible to cope with all the changes around and within them-but they’ll try, which is just part of SF’s continuing dialogue about the future… All the selections in this outstanding volume prompt thoughtful speculation about what kind of tomorrow we’re heading toward and what we’ll do when we get there.”

What’s more, they’ve selected John Picacio’s wonderful cover illustration for the table of contents page. We’ve stopped the presses, literally, to get the PW quote on the cover, so the timing couldn’t be better.

Meanwhile, Fast Forward 1 debuts in February, with the following TOC:

Introduction:Welcome to the Future…Lou Anders
YFL-500…Robert Charles Wilson
The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One…Justina Robson
Small Offerings…Paolo Bacigalupi
They Came From the Future…Robyn Hitchcock
Plotters and Shooters…Kage Baker
Aristotle OS…Tony Ballantyne
The Something-Dreaming Game…Elizabeth Bear
No More Stories…Stephen Baxter
Time of the Snake…A.M. Dellamonica
The Terror Bard…Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper
p dolce…Louise Marley
Jesus Christ, Reanimator…Ken MacLeod
Solomon’s Choice…Mike Resnick & Nancy Kress
Sanjeev and Robotwallah…Ian McDonald
A Smaller Government…Pamela Sargent
Pride…Mary A. Turzillo
I Caught Intelligence…Robyn Hitchcock
Settlements…George Zebrowski
The Hour of the Sheep…Gene Wolfe
Sideways from Now…John Meaney
Wikiworld…Paul Di Filippo

Not bad, yes?

Fast Forward Review, Lou Anders Interview Read More »

Love Stricken & Agoraphobic: An Interview with Sean Williams

John Scalzi, he of Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, has been interviewing an author a day all week over on his AOL blog, By the Way. After wonderful interviews with Karl Schroeder, Karen Traviss, Charles Stross and Sarah Hoyt, Scalzi concludes his week with an interview with Sean Williams. They talk about publishing on two continents, writing solo and in collaboration, creator owned worlds vs shared universes like Star Wars, and how love can strike you at the oddest moments. Along the way, they also find time to discuss Sean’s marvelous Books of the Cataclysm, of which two (The Crooked Letter, The Blood Debt) are now published here via Pyr in the US. Of The Blood Debt, Sean says:

“The book is simultaneously a chase novel and a romance, with various people trying to rescue family members and maintaining or starting relationships along the way. Love strikes us in the oddest places sometimes, and at the most awkward times. Its perversity is what makes it so addictive, I think. If it always came when and how we wanted to, where would be the fun in that? I’m getting married next year, to a wonderful woman who, like me, thought she would never tie the knot. That we’re both willing and eager to do this thing that we’ve resisted for so long, with other people, is testimony to the amazing transformations that love can wreak, for good or ill, on the unsuspecting. To a certain extent, The Blood Debt is also about that.”

Love Stricken & Agoraphobic: An Interview with Sean Williams Read More »

Lightening Up the Shadows: An Interview with Joe Abercrombie

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist runs an interview with Joe Abercrombie today. Joe is the author of The Blade Itself, the first book in The First Law trilogy, published by Gollancz in the UK and forthcoming from Pyr September 2007.

I’m very excited by this book. First, it’s one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in a long time, and second, when it debuts in the US next fall, it will mark our first serious foray into epic fantasy. Yes, we’ve done some (I think) excellent fantasy already – more of it than people realize – with books like The Prodigal Troll and The Crooked Letter that I am very, VERY proud of. But those are fantasy plus, in this case fantasy plus wonderfully-realized Tarzan of the Apes pastiche and fantasy plus brilliant metaphysical quantum physics inspired afterworlds. They are tremendous books and you should read them right now if you haven’t already (Go ahead; I’ll wait) – just not what people think of when they speak of the post-Tolkien epic fantasy genre, the sure enough, dyed-in-the-wool fantasy of knights and wizards on a quest in an invented, secondary world. Which I’ve held off on publishing at Pyr until now, because, well, The Blade Itself is the first such work that came across my desk and knocked both my socks off at once. (I’ve had one or the other sock knocked off at a time before, but not both! Not both I tell you!) Because The Blade Itself is brilliant and subversive and imaginative and hysterical and dark, with great, great characters, none of which are entirely good or entirely bad, moments that make you ache and moments that are laugh out loud they are so funny without the book actually being a comedy. And I can’t wait for you to see what I mean. (Of course, if you live in the US, I do urge you to wait. If you live in the UK, go right out and get the Gollancz edition right now, then come tell me what you thought.)

Meanwhile, check out Joe’s interview, where he pontificates on such important concerns as:

“Characters, dialogue, humour, action. And the unfolding of the whole series will hopefully demonstrate that I can put a plot together in a tight spot as well (fingers crossed). The area for which I’ve garnered the most praise, however, is the nice feeling paper in which my books are bound. If you like nice feeling books, you can’t go wrong with The Blade Itself.”

Lightening Up the Shadows: An Interview with Joe Abercrombie Read More »

Wall to Wall Pirates

David Louis Edelman is interviewed by John Joseph Adams over on SciFi Wire, where he talks about the science of bio/logics that make up a large part of his extrapolative future in Infoquake:

“”There are programs to help you stay awake, and … the beginning chapters revolve around a program called ‘NightFocus 48,’ which enables you, during the nighttime, to see better… “There’s [also] a program … called ‘PokerFace 83. 4b.’ If you want to project zero emotion, to prevent somebody from getting a read on what you’re thinking, you fire up this program real quick, and your face just goes to this poker face, essentially. There are lots of programs like that, and I tried to give the impression these people are operating these programs all day long. It’s almost like when you’re sitting at a computer, there’s the antivirus program going on in the background, there’s a defragmenting program going on, Windows Update is updating, or a Linux package is updating. So these people are running thousands of programs all day long, [with] 90 percent of them just going on in the background; they’re probably not even aware of them.”

Meanwhile, good words from the December 15th Library Journal regarding Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate:

“After his crew rescued him from trumped-up court martial charges, Capt. Wilson Cole, formerly a member of the galactic Republic and now an outlaw, decides to turn to piracy to survive. His version of what pirates do, however, differs from the standard pillage-and-plunder mode; other pirates are his chosen quarry. This sequel to Starship: Mutiny, set in Resnick’s Birthright Universe (A Hunger in the Soul; “The Widowmaker” series) shows the author’s genuine flair for spinning a good yarn. Snappy dialog, intriguing human and alien characters, and a keen sense of dramatic focus make this a strong addition to most sf collections, with particular appeal to the sf action-adventure readership.”

Wall to Wall Pirates Read More »

Sean Williams: On Wings of Metal and Feathers

Rob H. Bedford has interviewed Sean Williams over on SFFWorld. The interview covers Sean’s two related fantasy series, the Books of the Cataclysm and the Books of the Change, as well as his Star Wars novels, and his space opera – the books written with Shane Dix and his upcoming solo effort Saturn Returns. In other words, it’s quite a broad interview.

On the differences in writing science fiction vs. fantasy, Sean says:

“I do find that writing SF and fantasy can be very different on both a nuts-and-bolts level and in terms of other fundamental perspectives. Fantasy is more overtly about character and landscape, while good SF self-consciously uses science and the scientific method to take us places on wings made of metal, not feathers. There are crossovers, of course: the Star Wars novels felt like fantasy half the time, and I was more strict with The Crooked Letter’s worldbuilding than I am with some of my SF. I like both approaches to speculative fiction. It keeps me fresh. “

On blowing up the world:

“I wanted to show how the world we live in, which we tend to take for granted and assume will be around forever, is just one part of a long history of change and cataclysm. In this view of the world, many other people have made the same assumptions we make only to have the rug violently pulled out from under them. There are no guarantees, except for there being no guarantees, so the Books of the Change and the Books of the Cataclysm are stories about the philosophy underpinning the world, as well as what goes on inside it. I think that sets them apart from a lot of other fantasy novels, which are often about maintaining or returning a proper order, and while I’d never say that this makes my books better for that reason, I do think I’m tapping into a readership that sometimes prefers stories a little different from normal.”

Elsewhere on SFFWorld, Rob reviews the second Book of the Cataclysm, the Blood Debt:

” I don’t know that subverting is exactly the right word for what Williams does, but the way he plays with the clichés, his creativity and his storytelling ability make The Blood Debt a uniquely satisfying work. In a sense, this a more straightforward novel than was The Crooked Letter, but this makes The Blood Debt all the more entertaining and fun to play along as Williams throws predictability to the wind. Throughout the characters’ travels across the landscape and their encounters with creatures such as the man-kin, who resemble zombies; the Stone Mages and Sky Wardens, who both feel like the archetypical mages/councilors; and the Homunculus itself, the created man, Williams provides readers with seemingly familiar elements, that come across as both fresh and natural aspects of his inspired imagination. Not only do these, and all the elements of the story, feel natural, but there is also a sense of interconnectivity between everything in this world. Nothing is without reason…. Between the characters, the strange creatures, and the landscape, Sean Williams gives readers something fresh and mildly familiar in Epic Fantasy with his Books of the Cataclysm.”

Sean Williams: On Wings of Metal and Feathers Read More »

Sitting Down with Ian McDonald: The Christian Bale of SF

Ian McDonald is interviewed on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, in a long, indepth piece that’s one of the best interviews I’ve read in some weeks. Ian talks about both River of Gods and the forthcoming Brasyl, as well as a host of other subjects. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here are some highlights for me:

On Brasyl:

It’s definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you’ll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb’s magisterial ‘A Death in Brazil’ carries the line ‘Brazil is one of the world’s greatest and strangest countries’, and it’s only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else –certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it’s history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.

On his favorite novel from the Pyr catalog:

David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It’s so bloody obvious! That’s a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called ‘Noble House’ about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that’s in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.

On growing the readership for SF:

I’m with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the ‘lapsed Catholic’ audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn’t doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it’s all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the ‘back-to-basics’ movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there’s always going to be a need for space-fic –what the general public think of and call ‘sci-fi’, and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won’t hold them. ‘Mediaesque’ sci-fi may, in that sense, ‘save’ science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it’s not that geeky stuff…

Sitting Down with Ian McDonald: The Christian Bale of SF Read More »

Sean Williams Interview & Review

Ken of Neth Space interviews author Sean Williams about everything from Star Wars to atheism, writing in collaboration to owning monkeys. The interview is online at both Neth Space and Wotmania. Speaking of writing The Crooked Letter, Sean says:

“I have a fascination with religion that goes right back to Sunday school, when I persistently queried theological points that didn’t make sense to me. When I was in High School, my father had just started studying for the priesthood, so I was exposed to nuts and bolts of theology from a practitioner’s perspective, as well as a parishioner. Later, I realized that any faith I had once had in Christianity had evaporated, and I became an atheist, where I’ve been comfortable ever since–but my fascination with religion has never gone away. There’s an awful amount of energy invested in world-building and story-telling behind every religion. It’s not so different from science fiction, in that sense, if you look at it long enough. So wanting to devise a natural system that might be the big picture lurking behind all human religions was a perfectly natural step. The world behind the Books of the Cataclysm was the result, in which there is a form of reincarnation as well as an afterlife (in fact there are two afterlives, which reflect the belief of some cultures that we have two souls), and there is an almost-supremely powerful deity ruling over a lesser pantheon. Magic used to work, but does no longer. The world has undergone several apocalyptic changes, and might yet go through another one. As theological world-building goes, this one has everything.”

Meanwhile, Rick Kleffel sounds off about monsters in his thoughts on the second book in Williams’s Books of the Cataclysm, The Blood Debt:

“Williams is one of those writers that I suspect readers will someday twig to en masse and wonder why the hell they weren’t rabidly buying his books long, long ago. That said, these Books of the Cataclysm are particularly appealing to me, combining as they do big chunks of monsterific horror with a surreal science fictional / fantasy setting and characters from the here-and-now who give us regular folks something to grab on to. Book One, The Crooked Letter set Seth and Hadrian Castillo loose in a wildly-conceived universe chock-a-block with monsters and underpinned by a couple of master’s theses worth of religious imagery…Dirigibles. Monsters. Boatloads of research. What more can you ask for?”

Sean Williams Interview & Review Read More »

InfoView – David Louis Edelman on SFFWorld

Rob H. Bedford has just posted a new interview with David Louis Edelman on SFFWorld.

Speaking of his recent World Science Fiction convention appearance, Edelman says, “A few people did recognize me from the hat, but most people had no idea who I was until someone would say, “you know, the Infoquake guy.” They seemed to recognize the title of the book. I guess it’s a good thing I decided on something short and punchy rather than the book’s original title, Randomly Generated Pleasurable Startle 37b.”

Meanwhile, Edelman says he will make his next convention appearance at CapClave in Silver Spring, MD (October 20-22). Look for the guy in the hat!

InfoView – David Louis Edelman on SFFWorld Read More »

Infoquake: Agony Column Interview & SFRevu Review

Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column has conducted a long, in-depth interview with Infoquake author David Louis Edelman. The interview is online in its entirety in both MP3 and RealAudio formats. Meanwhile, it will air in edited form on KUSP on September 22nd, and will appear at some point as part of another program on NPR (details as we have them).

In his online introduction, Rick says, “I loved this novel, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. It stayed with me, this economic vision of the future as one giant marketing meeting and product development push. The characters were quite well delineated, the vision of the future seemed an entertaining twist on the present and the plot, about a last-minute product-launch crush, was so reminiscent of my own experiences that it seemed really gripping.”

Now, this is really interesting to me.

Infoquake is getting rave reviews, with some sites calling it “a triumph of speculation,” and “the science fiction book of the year,” with multiple comparisons to the work of Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and Vernor Vinge. But you notice that one of the things which Rick – who is very enthusiastic about the work overall – responds to is that Infoquake was “so reminiscent of my own experiences.”

Now, why is that interesting to me? Well, my own love for Infoquake is probably coupled tightly with the fact that in 2000 I worked right in the heart of the dot com bubble, for an online publishing start-up in downtown San Francisco. And I worked for Natch. Utterly. He was a she, but it was Natch.

I remember coming into work one day, and my boss started enthusing about this “terrific” book she was reading on the “three stages of company building.” She explained that first you hired trail blazers, whose job was to hack out the territory from the jungle. Then, she said, you fired them and replaced them with company builders, who knew how to build the infrastructure. They were in turn to be replaced by managerial types, who had the skills necessary to run a sustainable company on a day-to-day basis.

“Wait,” I said, “Are you telling me now that after we’ve busted our humps building this company for you, you are going to fire us all and replace us with suits?”

“Any of us,” she said with a air of incredulity at my ignorance that dared me to take issue, “should be willing to step down for the good of the company. Why, I’d stand aside myself if I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“Yes,” I thought, but didn’t say aloud, “but you’d still own it.”

So you see, I was uniquely suited to appreciate David’s work.

But while the book is getting rave reviews everywhere, the one or two folks who haven’t liked it, or have minor problems with it, seem to also be people who have also worked for a Natch of their own.

Now, I see that SFRevue, who likes the book enough to continue with the series and says, “he’s got a good grasp of corporate warfare and I’m interested enough to want to see where he goes with the story from here,” nonetheless complains that “the characters in the book are quite like people I’ve known in the world of international entrepreneurship. Work is their life, and much as I channel the puritan ethos myself, it’s hard to do anything other than feel sorry for them as they ramp themselves up for another 36 hour stint to prepare for the next dog and pony show.”

Now, I’m not arguing with the SFRevue review, not at all. Please don’t think that. And there review is a 90% positive one. The more apropo examples I’m thinking of are from private conversations. I’m just interested to see that Rick and I liked the book because we knew the characters, where others have seen this as a detriment. And I wonder why that is.

I wonder too if it has to do with the fact that some readers today have a problem with flawed protagonists. I’m just posing a question here, but it may be a side effect of the Hollywood formula film that we are less prepared to enjoy unsympathetic or unethical leads these days. Certainly, I’ve seen a few critics call out flawed leads as “daring” choices in their reviews. But that suggests they are also rare choice in today’s clime. So, is it a problem for today’s audience – to read about someone who is less than perfect? I don’t know. And yet, wasn’t the Achilles Heel one of the essentials of Greek tragedy?

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