Three more Pyr books have appeared for the Kindle.
Ian McDonald’s River of Gods
Justina Robson’s Mappa Mundi
David Louis Edelman’s MultiReal (Volume II of the Jump 225 Trilogy)
That was fast!
Three More Kindle Releases Materialize Read More »
The latest TEDtalks reminds me of nothing so much as the future-world portrayed in Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan and David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake
The World of Infoquake Gets Closer to Reality Read More »
You go out of town for a week, and look what happens:
Ian McDonald’s Brasyl
“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 Infoquake
“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 Century
These guys are making it hard for me to get caught up!
Too Much Pyr News to Keep Track of! Read More »
David Louis Edelman’s MultiReal
An amazing hard scifi tale, this is the second in an action-packed series from Edelman. …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. David Louis Edelman’s MultiReal, the second volume in the trilogy that begins with Infoquake,
MultiReal makes io9’s Best of 2008 Read More »
The Barnes & Noble in the Spectrum Center in Reston, Virginia will be hosting David Louis Edelman tonight, Wednesday, September 17 at 7:00 pm. He’ll be reading from and signing copies of MultiReal.
Check out the recent praise for MultiReal:
David Louis Edelman Reading Tonight Read More »
In an earlier post, 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 Infoquake
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.
Two out of Two Anders Agree: MultiReal is Brilliant Read More »
Patrick St-Denis has just posted an interview with me on his popular Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist blog. Subjects covered include Infoquake, MultiReal, Lou Anders and Pyr, my strengths as a storyteller, the John W. Campbell Award, cover art, websites and interactivity with readers, the trend of high-quality British SF, and whether SF will ever get proper literary recognition by snooty academics cowering up in their white towers.
But the best part of the whole thing is that Pat has seen fit, unprompted, to post this neat little Photoshopped poster that puts the full force and weight of Uncle Sam behind getting you to read Infoquake and MultiReal. And really, ain’t that how it should be?
Brief excerpt from the interview:
What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
I feel like I’m very good at the worldbuilding aspect of things. Really, structure in general. The trilogy has layers and layers of metaphor in it, and I’m really quite proud of the way it all works together as an organic whole. My tendency is to wander off into history and background and structure, and sometimes I have to curb that impulse. If I had written The Lord of the Rings, it would have been three whole books of the Council of Elrond, and nobody would have read it.Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write Infoquake and its sequel?Yes, I wanted to avoid the typical mindless action set-pieces that you find in a lot of bad SF, and bad novels in general. I really wanted to write an exciting novel about business. A lot of authors just use the business aspect as window dressing, and then quickly throw their characters into the same car chases and murder mysteries and gunfights. I wanted to write books that really are about the workplace, where the excitement revolves around product demos and marketing meetings and government hearings and that kind of thing. So that’s what I’ve tried to do.
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist Interviews David Louis Edelman Read More »
Paul Cornell’s belated WorldCon Report is probably my favorite convention report ever and well worth reading. He begins, “Worldcon is always too big to blog about. It’s a culture, a civilisation. It lasts just long enough that you start to think of it as a career, and then it goes away. It always leaves me inspired, wanting to write, wanting to be one of these people always.”
And look, right in the middle, this incredible review of David Louis Edelman’s MultiReal:
“I was reading David’s sequel to Infoquake, that is Multireal, during the convention, and as always it spoke to me about my life like no other author does. As much as I loved Infoquake, Multireal is better. It’s The West Wing, in the world of big business, in the future, all last second deals and human emotion finding desperate chances and tense negotiations, but this time with added sex and violence. I was almost disappointed to find some, in that last time David had me on the edge of my seat with only one burst of gunfire and the glimpse of an ankle, and I was hoping to see that feat again, but this book soars mightily, and presents me with terms I find myself mentally using in everyday life (the fiefcorp of Pyr Books, the memecorp of the BBC), and situations redolent of it. The bar and the panels and the awards map onto the fingernail biting world of freelancing in the future. It’s not, as I thought after the first book, a work of Mundane SF, because the (albeit unreliable and hardly magic) teleportation just about rules it out. But I still believe that this world, almost uniquely in modern SF, isn’t just a commentary on the modern scene, but might also come to pass. David has thought about who empties the bins. And his singularity came and went and those bins still needed to be emptied. Most wonderfully, two big set piece speeches in the middle of the book, which sum up its themes of governmentalism vs. libertarian capital, dissolve into the most brilliant shit-flinging gunfight and escape, and one can hear David laughing, shouting ‘yeah, you can have both!’ The mass market paperback of Infoquake was in the bloody airport bookstore on the way out. I’m saying not just Campbell next year but come on, let’s say it out loud, Best Novel.”
WorldCon 2008 / Paul Cornell’s Denvention3 Report Read More »
The wonderful Rob H. Bedford interviews Infoquake
Loved this bit on worldbuilding:
Science Fiction is a language of mirrors by which we (readers and writers) can compare and contrast our own society and its problems. This is clearly the case with the Jump 225 trilogy, so when you created this future history, how necessary do you feel it was to sort of destroy everything and restart?
Wiping the slate clean with an Armageddon scenario five hundred years before the events of Jump 225 was really just a narrative trick. It enabled me to focus on the things I wanted to focus on — namely, software and business and sociology — and conveniently ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about. AIs? Boom! They were destroyed in the Autonomous Revolt. Nuclear weapons? Boom! Used in the Revolt and then subsequently abandoned. Cloning and genetic engineering? Same thing.
It’s one of the things science fiction and fantasy do really well. If I had set the Jump 225 trilogy in today’s world, I would have gotten sidetracked by lots of issues that I just didn’t feel like dealing with. It’s funny, but I think setting the books in an imaginary world allowed me to get a tighter focus on the real world.
And this bit made me laugh:
If you could take any pre-existing fictional character and plunk them into the events of the Jump 225 trilogy, who would it be?
Dr. Strange. He’s a guy who hops dimensions all the time. He ought to know how to handle MultiReal.
But you should read it all, right?
David Louis Edelman: Wiping the Slate Clean Read More »
From Rob’s Blog o’Stuff: “I posted my review of MultiReal
From POD People, TCM Reviews, July 21, 2008: “Pyr is a new, up-and-coming science fiction press, and David Louis Edelman is one of their hot new stars…[MultiReal] is full of Big Ideas, in the best tradition of science fiction…Edelman is a programmer in real life, and his understanding of the process informs the book. Multireal is a deep book, full of plots and counter-plots, with a stunning vision of the future. It manages what seems to be impossible, making the act of computer programming exciting, while reflecting on the nature of government and business. This is high science fiction at its finest. RATING 10/10
‘Nuff said.
