Paul Cornell

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.”