Rowan Tree and Red Thread

I love this idea. In short, modulating the variations in Cepheid luminosity could serve as an extra-galactic telegraph. Best line from the abstract: "One can construct many scenarios wherein it would be desirable for such a civilization of star ticklers to transmit data to anyone else within viewing range."

Damn, I want to read science fiction about star ticklers.

Damn, now this sound like a panel I would have enjoyed. Cheryl Morgan chaired a panel at the Denver Worldcon with Charles N Brown, Gary K Wolfe, Graham Sleight and Karen Burnham discussing their choices of the best 20 SF works of the last twenty years.

nhw pointed me to this post by Niall Harrison discussing the same panel. he comes up with a consensus list:

• The Culture Novels, Iain M Banks (starting 1987)
• The Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons (starting 1989)
• Grass, Sherri S Tepper (1989)
• The Aleutian Trilogy, Gwyneth Jones (starting 1991)
• The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (starting 1992)
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
• The Flower Cities sequence, Kathleen Ann Goonan (starting 1994)
• Fairyland, Paul McAuley (1996)
• Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997)
• Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)
• The Arabesks, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (starting 2000)
• Light, M John Harrison (2002)
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
• Evolution, Stephen Baxter (2003)
• Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (2003)
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
• Air, Geoff Ryman (2004)
• River of Gods, Ian McDonald (2004)
• Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

(thanks Niall!)

In the spirit of Nicholas' statistical analyses I've figured out my reading pattern suggests I'm 38% match for Charles N Brown, 35% Gary K Wolfe, 35% Graham Sleight, 45% Karen Burnham and 40% Cheryl Morgan. I'm only 40% caught up with the consensus too.

I guess I need to read more.

Thanks also to drcpunk for her private communication include her notes from the same panel. I really have to get booking a holiday in Canada for next August.

Recently sighted in a supermarket in Ranelagh, Dublin.

As a kid I loved both Islands in the Sky and Dolphin Island, and re-read them many times. I thought I hadn't read a lot of Clarke's fiction, or certainly not a large proportion of it, but looking at his bibliography now I realise I've read a good few earlier works and remember most of them fondly.

He saw wonder and beauty in the natural world and wrote his damnedest to share something of that awe with the rest of us. His work formed the steady shoulders many who followed him planted their feet on to see further.

Damn.

Well I guess they're a ( Sci-fi crew )

I've just finished Old Man's War by John Scalzi. I enjoyed middling-much, but really can't see what all the fuss was about. It's a well done first novel, very much in the Heinlein mould, with some hard to swallow moments where my suspension of disbelief just choked. (nhw will recognize at least one such moment.)

( spoilers follow )

That said I did enjoy the book as a quick read with some good characterisation. It just didn't set me alight the way I was expecting from some of the buzz I'd read beforehand.

One other thing. What the fuck is going on with Tor's trade paperback covers? My copy curled up like a pubic hair, front and back cover both. Most other paperback cover books in my possession manage to survive my rough touch, so what's the problem with Tor's covers?

Finally prompted to this by doc_mystery and a long incubation period.

( Long list hidden for courtesy... )

Happy birthday to autopope, who's stirring the pot with this post over on his blog.

I wouldn't usually bother with this sort of meme as it's entirely random but I liked that it got the Insane Stowaway/Spouse right. As spouse of course, sammywol. There'll be no insane stowing away in our ship, I'll tell you. I'm also somewhat relieved that our crimeboss nemesis is alaimacerc. That's certainly increases our survivability.

My Serenity Crew by ellydragon
Username
Aboard the good ship
Sweet but Stuffy Medic	agrumer
First Mate & War Buddy	bruceb
Wacky Pilot	jhkimrpg
Mysterious Shepherd	purpletigron
"Public Relations"	robin_d_laws
Charming Companion	fjm
Whimsical in the Brainpan	princeofcairo
Adorable Mechanic	whytcrow
Crimeboss Nemesis	alaimacerc
Insane Stowaway/Spouse	sammywol
Quiz created with MemeGen!

My wife and I took advantage of my in-laws yesterday to skive off for a couple of hours to go to see Serenity, Joss Whedon's new SF "western in space" movie based on the ill-fated series Firefly. sammywol and I don't get to the cinema much nowadays. It's hard to find the time and babysitters to make it happen and the whole business is too much work most of the time. This film, of course, we made an effort for.

We both greatly enjoyed the TV series and bemoaned the short-sighted accountants and producers at Fox who canned the show before it had a real chance to find its legs. We both followed the news as the film was first mentioned as a possibility and then as a certainty. We heard the rumours and avoided (or not; I'm looking at you, sammywol) the spoilers. It was inevitable that the film wouldn't match the long build up of expectations.

It came close though.

I don't know if Serenity is a good film for people coming to it without any experience of the TV show. I don't know that it would do much for an audience of non-fans, or those not already receptive to genre fiction. For me, however, it worked just fine. The dialogue was there, the character play was as I remembered it, the thrillin' heroics and the dusty planets and moons were all present and correct. Serenity is a good Firefly movie.

Only 75%? Shocking.

( Behind the curtain )

What follows are assorted notes I jotted down while we were at Worldcon, prettied up a little. I've missed some panels out that I enjoyed but don't have very clear memories of, but it's long enough as it is.

We arrived after a hard flight. It was a little Saab twin-prop job that hopped around the sky, tossed about by turbulence. I hated it. Once we were on the ground I regained my composure, but I was terrified while we were in the air.

We got to the hotel around 3.30 or 4.00. We didn't do much that afternoon and then wandered down to the conference centre to register. The dealers' room wasn't open at that stage. Afterwards we went back up towards Sauchiehall Street and ate dinner in the Argan café, a Moroccan and Mediterranean restaurant. It was delicious but marred by the very slow delivery. I know that I ate tapas-style and Sam had the more regular starter and main course, but her main course arrived about 45 minutes after I'd had my last dish. Crap.

Thursday was getting into the swing of the con, learning our way around the venues and hitting the first of the panels. ( Thursday )

Friday was a panel marathon, but we also caught up with old friends. Whisky was consumed. ( Friday )

Saturday the panel marathon continued and I began to think I'd have to write a novel just to empty my head of the hundreds of ideas that were cluttering it up after this intense SF dose. ( Saturday )

( Charlie Stross's kaffeklatsch )

( Game design: playability vs. realism and Tall Technical Tales )

( Anonymous Claire )

By Sunday my note taking was more comprehensive. Yet more panels and some incredible Indian food.

( AIs: the aliens we make )

( Forgotten children's books )

( Genre-killing ideas )

Sunday lunch at the Mother India Cafe on Argyle Street. Simply brilliant Indian food. We ate way too much, including chilli king prawns, chicken achari, lamb pasandi, curried smoked haddock, some aloo thingy in a pancake, plus nan, paratha and raitha. What an excellent meal with great combinations of flavours. I'll definitely go back there the next time I'm in Glasgow. The only drawback was the bloated stomach and burping I had for the rest of the afternoon having overeaten at lunch. Eyes bigger than stomach, I'm afraid.

( Jack Cohen's kaffeklatsch )

( The rest of Sunday )

( Scarpering home )

Apologies to anyone I met and forgot to mention, or any panellist who I didn't include. I'll plead ignorance and exhaustion in roughly equal measure. I'd like to thank the organisers of Interaction publicly. It was a fabulous con, and I really enjoyed it. SECC security might have been a pain, but the quality of the panels and the general mood of fannish good nature were splendid.

Thanks to pnh (and probably loads of other fans by the time I get this posted).

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)

A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

The Atrocity Archive is a short novel and a long short story detailing the misadventures of Bob Howard, hacker, geek and accidental member of the Laundry, a super-secret branch of the British Govt. responsible for keeping the world safe from incursions of eldritch horrors from other dimensions. While dodging ISO9000 quality reviews and questions about expenses incurred in the field, Howard romps his way in a geek-James Bond style through multiple attempts on his life ( slight spoiler  ), and lives to tell the tale.
Stross provides nicely punchy writing and a barrelling pace. The Atrocity Archive is not deep on characterisation but a lot of fun nonetheless. However, the smart, sexy, 6ft redhead is underused, unfortunately for the redhead fans in the audience.
Different to Stross' more recent info-singularity stories but obviously from the same swirling stew of ideas and madness. I really enjoyed it.

This is a new fantasy first novel by young Cambridge grad Steph Swainston. She builds an interesting world of mortals and immortals, beset by a plague of Insect invaders reminiscent of Heinlein's "bugs." The narrator and central protagonist, a drug-addicted Immortal, stumbles through the various crises, as the Immortals begin to fight amongst themselves, while the Insect overwhelm the mortal lands in a headlong rush.

The characters are good, well-drawn and convincing, though the impact of immortality is only lightly touched on. The writing is generally good, with some sudden jarring elements like modernisms that stuck out, and an irritating sliding scale that made distances seem to grow and shrink throughout the book.

I had a problem with the peculiar pacing, as it seemed to take an awfully long time to get to the meat of the Insect problem, which we're set up to view as the central plot, and then a pretty quick resolution once Comet, the narrator, kicks his drug habit in an unconvincingly speedy withdrawal. The characters were interesting enough to pull me through nonetheless, and Swainston managed to balance the various changes of scene between times and worlds well.

Despite any reservations, I loved the book, as the descriptions of both worlds visited by Comet are compelling, and the politics of the Immortals' Circle are convincingly familiar. I'd be keen to see Swainston write more, and get a firmer grip on her voice. The Year of Our War is a good start, but not the miraculous work that the cover quotes would have you believe.

Thanks to nhw for his earlier review which sparked my interest so that I picked up a copy when I saw it in Dublin recently.

Sam and I read this novel recently. As is often the case, Sam read it first and then spent days encouraging me to read it too, so we could discuss it. I wonder if we shouldn't buy two copies of some books. The groaning shelves shout a mute answer to that idea.

A mainstream "literary fiction" novel telling the love story of an unconsciously time travelling man and his wife, a girl he's known from his travelling since she was six, but won't meet until after they're together for several years. Sad and joyous in turns, it's a lovely, well-written, first novel with some absolutely perfect scenes. Oddly formulaic in places, as the emotional tugging of their attempts at parenthood are gone through, and curiously unlike a lot of genre SF attempts at descriptions of time travel. The paradoxes and the mechanics are glossed over. I felt that the time travel was sometimes nothing more than a handy mechanism to focus on separation, fear of loss, and how people love one another over distance and time. None the worse for that, and I'll watch for other books by the author.

This story is revealing about the economics of genre writing.

The typical advance for a first novel is $5000. The typical advance for
later novels, after a typical number of 5-7 years and 5-7 books is
$12,500. Having an agent at any point increases your advance.

purplecthulhu, bear this in mind as you're working to get that story accepted.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the intial pointer.

Sam and I have decided to aim for a holiday at the 2005 Worldcon, held this summer in Glasgow. Rowan has proved good so far about going to bed in the absence of her parents, and is generally so tractable with her grandparents that we're hoping that she will be able to stay with them for the long weekend of the con.

Anyone else going?

After re-reading Avram Grumer's depressing but entertaining essay 2000 Books recently I decided to make more effort to read every day. I had fallen into a habit of only really reading at bedtime, filling the other times I had to read in the day with blogs, magazines or playing Civ games (naughty). I've started keeping a list of the books I read and, while I can't come near nhw's rate, I have begun to make a slight dent in that tottering pile of unread books by the bed that threatened to undermine the structural integrity of our house.

Sabriel by Garth Nix: A young adult (i.e. aimed at kids and better than 90% of the adult market stuff) fantasy novel of a young woman's quest to defeat an ancient evil from the land of the Dead. Rattles along at a great pace, full of gorgeous setting colour and an original spin on magic (particularly necromancy), Sabriel was great fun and I'm chomping at the bit to get to the two sequels that my brother lent to me along with Sabriel

Persuasion by Jane Austen: A novel of early nineteenth century manners and suppressed sexual attraction. My first attempt at Austen and I was pleased by it. The style is a bit difficult in comparison to the modern stuff I read, but the quiet confidence of the writing and the understated observations of character are really impressive.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross: "New Space Opera" SF novel about information-based society coming into contact and conflict with old-fashioned imperialist space empire. The space empire loses. Badly. A highly entertaining novel, with plenty of humour as well as the more usual Stross touches of singularity events, post-scarcity societies and big government as a post-singularity irrelevance.

Godwalker by Greg Stolze: a RPG tie-in novel (the game is Unknown Armies) about a contest for the godwalker slot of the avatar of the Mystic Hermaphrodite. The Freak, New Inquisition goons, and a family of Entropomancers all star in a quiet town turned upside down by the arrival of the occult underground's weird brand of mayhem. Pretty good, after a weak start. The characters of the three avatars, Joe, Leslie and the Freak, are the best drawn and most interesting in the story. Quite bloody. None of that description will mean much to those who don't know the game, unfortunately. Despite that I think it would read well even if you had no prior knowledge of the game setting.