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What SF Series Would YOU Reboot, Resurrect, or Reinvigorate??

August 3, 2011 By 3 Comments

SFSignal asked me to join in on a Mind Meld discussion. Always an interesting column. This week’s topic: If you could resurrect, reboot, or reinvigorate a book series or cycle, which one would it be and why?

The short version of my answer is:

The long version of my answer (along with several other excellent answers) is at SFSignal.

… And, yes, somehow I really did manage to misspell Diana Wynne Jones’s name. I think I’ve been working a little too hard and getting a little too little sleep of late!

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What’s in YOUR Dystopia?

July 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

Night Bazaar asked me to write a guest post about dystopias. The post turned into a long one — and that’s the drastically cut version that doesn’t talk about much of the stuff I started out to talk about. I think I will be writing more about dystopias in the medium term future. And much of it will be an attempt to find a satisfactory answer to a fan I met at Readercon last week named Adriana, who asked me a series of big questions about my treatment of the Syndicates in Spin State and Spin Control … and then vanished before I could really come up with a satisfactory answer. So, Adriana, if you’re out there, I’m still trying to answer you. Or at least I’m thinking about it….

Dystopia is about the gap between how things are and how we want them to be. That gap is called conflict. And though conflict is often invoked when writers talk about how to hook readers, most people never really unpack what it means in science fiction and fantasy. SF and Fantasy are transformational genres. They’re not just about getting a date to the prom or whether Elizabeth is going to marry Darcy. They’re about reimagining the world. So the central conflict of good SF and fantasy — the kind that readers remember and talk about long after they’ve read the final page — is not inside the book but outside of it. It’s the gap between the world the you and your readers live in and the world you and your readers want to live in….

Crack open even the most bleak and cynical dystopia, and you will find a utopia folded into it like the fortune in a fortune cookie. Or let’s put it another way: Dystopia is the subway station. Inertia (or readerly cynicism) is the gap you have to get your readers safely across if you want them to climb on your train. And Utopia is where the train is going.

Looked at in this way, the difference between dystopia and utopia is simply one of emphasis. A dystopia gets readers on the train by telling them how bad it is where they are now. A utopia does it by telling them how great things could be if they take the leap of faith and come along for the ride. But there’s always a train, and last station at the end of the line is always Utopia.

 

You can read the full post at Night Bazaar.

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Vernor Vinge is my Mother

July 20, 2011 By 3 Comments

Still underwater over here, as I just got back from Readercon, am preparing a guest post on Dystopias that will run at Night Bazaar this weekend, and need to compress the 800 page manuscript of GHOST SPIN that I just handed in to 650 pages by the end of the week.

Readercon was fantabulocious. Details mostly to follow. But I can say now that the two personal highlights of the convention for me were:

  1. getting to meet Joan Slonczewski, one of my absolute favorite hard SF writers ever.
  2. sitting on a panel where Ellen Kushner asked us to name our personal “literary matriarch” (someone we both emulate and rebel against in our own work) and being able to utter the words: “Vernor Vinge is my mother.”

To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have said it if every single other person on the panel hadn’t listed Ursula K. LeGuin. But still … I didn’t say it for laughs. Not by a long shot. And there’s something there that I’m going to have to think about for a while before I get anywhere near the bottom of it…

… Which leads me to the next piece of news. While rummaging around the internet in preparation for the Night Bazaar Dystopia Post, I discovered that Vinge has a new book coming out this fall. And not just any book, but the long-awaited sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. Do I have to say that I am a much happier person than I was when I woke up this morning?

My rummaging also turned up something else — a truly great SF classic that I’d almost forgotten reading, but that exploded back into life in my memory the moment I was reminded of it. The book is Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. It has one of the most mind-blowing representations of an alien culture I can ever remember reading, and it’s also one of  those Asimovian science fictional home runs that make you sit back and scratch your head and mutter things like, “How did he manage to write the best novel ever about climate change before anyone had ever even whispered the phrase ‘global warming?’”

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Walter Jon Williams Interview

March 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
More coolness. Lightspeed Magazine asked me to interview Walter Jon Williams for them, which I did. It was a lot of fun. It gave me a chance to read his latest book, Deep State, and reread some old favorites, like Hardwired and The Green Leopard Plague.  Good stuff. The kind of good stuff that gets better on the second read. There’s a reason why people call Walter ‘the science fiction writer’s science fiction writer.’ 

Actually, one of the unexpected benefits of doing the interview was that I found my way to the ‘books’ page of Walter’s site. This page lists all of his published work, much of it now available in ebook format. I’ve been working my way through the list, catching up with all the stuff of his I’ve missed through the years. I’m having a lot of fun — and losing a certain amount of sleep too, since Walter specializes in writing the kinds of books you can’t put down.

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From this Crooked Timber….

March 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
February was an insanely busy writing month for me, with several things going on that I promise to post about soon. For now, however, here’s a lovely article from the always thoughtful Irish political blog Crooked Timber about looking to science fiction writers for intelligent predictions about the political ramifications of mechanization and globalization. Notably, the writers it mentions are Iain Banks (a personal favorite); Walter Jon Williams (with whom I just did an interview for Lightspeed Magazine in which we discussed this very question); and Frederik Pohl, my single favorite golden age writer, and the co-author of my pick for the best SFnal critique of modern consumer-based capitalism ever: The Space Merchants. 

 

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