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My Weekend Schedule at C2E2 and University of Chicago

April 24, 2013 By 7 Comments

Hey, if you’re in the Chicagoland area this weekend, you’ll have a chance to see me at C2E2, where I will be signing and doing a panel, and, if you are a University of Chicago student, at the UofC, where I will be doing a chat. Here is my official schedule.

Friday at University of Chicago:

4:00pm: Roundtable discussion, Taft House, Midway Room 108.

Please note this is for University of Chicago students only — and if you are a student, they would surely love for you to RSVP (so they know how many snacks to get). Here’s where to RSVP online.

 

Saturday at C2E2:

4:30pm: FUTURTISTIC FRIGHT: Science-Fiction Novelists Imagine Far-Future Worlds

Panel Location: W475b

Speakers: Alex Hughes, John Scalzi

Moderator: Colleen Lindsay

Description: Get your fill of Telepaths, Tech Wars, space odysseys and alien forces on this science fiction panel. What happens when technology takes over, aliens invade, and civilizations are on the brink of destruction? Authors discuss the technological catastrophes, supernatural occurrences, and galaxy quests in the pages of their science-fiction.

6:00pm: Signing (in the autograph area).

I’m also likely to be around for at least part of Sunday, wandering around and causing no end of mischief.

See you in Chicago, folks!

 

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The Lowest Difficulty Setting as Teaching Tool

April 24, 2013 By 156 Comments

This is interesting: Writer and teacher Samantha Allen assigns my “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” piece in her Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 100 class (along with her own, similar article) and then as a teaching exercise runs her students through Halo, with the game set at varying difficulties, to see if a video game can actually be a useful teaching tool with regard to discussing privilege and intersectionality.

Did it work? Read for yourself. This is worth sharing around, I think.

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Me at the Guardian and LA Times

April 24, 2013 By 17 Comments

I’m showing up at a couple of news outlets today, so let me share those with you.

One, here’s a video interview I did with Carolyn Kellogg of The Los Angeles Times, mostly talking about The Human Division. Please to admire my fine apparel.

Two, The Guardian has a piece on the changing world of eBooks, with quotes from me specifically about the concept of “second hand eBooks.”

Enjoy!

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The Big Idea: Josin McQuein

April 24, 2013 By 14 Comments

Today’s metaphor for ideas comes to you from Josin L. McQuein, author of the new YA science fiction book Arclight. And what is that metaphor? Hint: They are small, they are many, and if you are not careful, they are coming for you — or at least at you, in their multitudes. Prepare yourself.

JOSIN L. McQUEIN:

I got my first big idea when I was an idiot.

I was a teenager, and had come to the conclusion that getting paid to make stuff up was the best invention of all time, so I was going to be a writer – YAY!

Honestly, that was entirety of my thought process. I wanted to write a novel. Any novel. The characters didn’t matter. The plot didn’t matter. Someone hand me a pencil and get out of my way. Unfortunately, those things that didn’t matter kind of did, and there was no story without them. Besides, novels were too long – I’d never be able to write that many words.

I was stuck.

Then the ants came.

They came by the thousands, descending on a rain forest hikers’ hostel in South America, skittering down walls in the pitch black of midnight. They terrified with their silence and their numbers. They spread out, filling every space, and covering every surface – human skin, included. And as they spread, they consumed. With one unimaginably tiny mouthful multiplied by a seeming infinity at a time, they devoured all of the vermin in the hotel – rats several thousand times their size, and scorpions who, by right, should have been the higher predator.

Even the hikers weren’t immune, because no matter how many they stomped, or sprayed, or torched, there were more ants waiting to replace the dead, and they had absolutely no aversion to trying a bite or twelve of human-on-the-run. By the time the sun came up, the hostel had become a battleground, barely held, where the humans chose to make their stand against the horde. In the silence that followed the struggle, they found themselves less victors, and more survivors left behind in a place that was fundamentally changed.

They were changed.

They had seen the superiority of human ingenuity fall to something that, in its individual form, was miniscule – insignificant. But together, all of those teeny tiny pieces became something fearsome and unstoppable.

And that became the big idea that mattered – the one that said “big” was the wrong way to go.

Rather than having a society fall to ruin beneath their own Tower of Babel, I wanted to go the other way, touting the brilliance of things that got smaller and smaller until those things could slip between particles, and alter the fundamental definition of reality.

Viruses were tiny enough to fit the bill, but those had been run into the ground lately. I wanted something different; I wanted my devourer. I wanted my ants with their singular focus and hive mind. And I had just enough knowledge of fact and fiction to create a use for them by pairing them off with nanotech run amok.

I started pulling scenes from different pieces I’d kept for years, and stitched them into a sort of Franken-novel that made absolutely no sense. (Zombies in space! Now, with extra vampires! Don’t ask about the unicorn. Seriously, you don’t want to know…) But it was a real start, and bit-by-tiny-bit, those ridiculous pieces transformed into something else.

A new setting came with hearing descriptions of the claustrophobia accompanying gradual blindness. Instead of starting the characters in a void, they were now on the edge of one, watching their world grow darker by the day. They’d fight it, of course, clinging to the daylight world they knew, but would also always be faced with the inevitability that the darkness was coming for them.

Local and world news fell into the mix, highlighting the dangers of viewing the world through the lens of a single opinion held by a single person. I wanted to explore how quickly paranoia can turn to mass madness, and how a charismatic individual with motives that seem logical, or at least well intentioned, can destroy a community. And with that, a queen stepped up to lead my little hive.

Each new idea bumped and jostled the others into line, creating the friction required for conflict, until, one day, I read through my notes and scribbles and realized they were all running together on a thousand tiny feet. Things clicked. They were no longer random pages or paragraphs or things I’d hastily written down while half-asleep. They’d become something both massive and cohesive, with a momentum I couldn’t stop.

I had characters! I had a plot! (I had an over attachment to ellipses, but I swear I’m getting help…) The important part was that the girl who couldn’t write a novel, now had one in her hands. And in the end, thanks to all of those little ideas, I finally had a big one.

—-
Arclight: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Filed Under: Big Idea

Big Idea Gender Breakdown

April 23, 2013 By 72 Comments

Via Annalee Newitz’s Twitter feed, I see that Strange Horizons has done a gender breakdown of reviews in SF publications, and learns that more sf/f by men is reviewed than sf/f by women. This made me curious as to how my Big Idea feature here at Whatever has been doing, gender-wise, in terms of authors/editors featured.

So I tallied up the gender of writers who contributed Big Idea pieces between 4/23/12 and 4/24/13 (I’m counting tomorrow’s Big Idea piece, as I already have it in hand). Here’s how it turned out:

44 men wrote or co-wrote Big Idea pieces during that span of time;

48 women wrote or co-wrote Big Idea pieces.

Some notes on that: One, Big Idea pieces aren’t reviews, although they perform one of the publicity-related functions of reviews, i.e., raising awareness of the work in question. Also, not every Big Idea piece was for a science fiction or fantasy work, although most were (there were several works in other genres, including non-fiction), and a couple of them were for non-books, including one for a video game and one for a calendar. The male/female division on individual works featured is closer to 50/50 because three Big Ideas were co-written by women who wrote/edited the same book, while one book was co-written by a man and a woman.

(No trans authors in the mix, so far as I am aware; if there were I would have tallied them by their preferred gender. No authors who would identify as genderfluid, as far as I know.)

I should also note that I don’t generally actively check to see if I’ve gender-balanced Big Idea posts over any span of time; I mostly operate the Big Idea on a “first-come, first-served” basis in terms of slotting people in. It would be interesting to see whether the gender balance of the Big Idea feature is this balanced over time. Someone else will need to check that, however, since I’m not planning to do it at the moment.

But in any event, interesting data. And I don’t mind admitting being happy that the Big Idea gender mix seems to be mostly balanced.

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Reminder About Signed Books From Jay & Mary’s Plus a Plea to Those Going to My Tour Events

April 23, 2013 By 34 Comments

First: Remember that through April 28 — that’s this upcoming Sunday — you can pre-order The Human Division hardcover from Jay & Mary’s Book Center (my hometown indie bookseller) and I will happily sign and personalize the book for you. All the details are here.

Second: If you are coming to see me on my book tour this May (tour itinerary here) and plan to have me sign books for you, may I make a small request?

Please purchase your copy of The Human Division from the store you will see me at.

The reason for this is simple: I want the store to see some benefit to me showing up. If you show up to the store with copies of the book that you bought elsewhere, and don’t otherwise buy any books from the store itself, then you’re not making a good argument for the store to bring in authors. And that will be no good for me, or for other authors who might otherwise come through town.

I’m not saying you have to wait until I show up in your town to buy the book; go ahead and buy it from the store earlier and then bring it in on the day of my appearance. Likewise, you can always pre-order the book from the bookstore and they will have it for you on the day or release or on the day I’m in town.

But please, support the bookstores that are gracious enough to lend me their space and attention. Buy the new book there. And maybe some of the other books I’ve written. Heck, even buy a few books I didn’t write! But let them know you appreciate that they are there. It actually does matter.

Thanks.

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Yardwork, 4/23/13

April 23, 2013 By 22 Comments

No, not by me. I have allergies (which reminds me, time to take my Claritin for the day. Okay, there we go). But others are here to do a little work for me. This fellow for example, is doing a bit of reseeding; there are some bald patches in the lawn due to a few years of heat damage and dry spells, and if you leave them too long you start having erosion and other problems. So this guy’s out there putting down new seed over those spots. And not bad timing at all, because tonight and tomorrow have showers in the forecast, followed by a couple of days of temperate, partly sunny skies. Perfect for seed to take root. Grow, little grass, grow.

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Kitchen After, 4/23/13

April 23, 2013 By 25 Comments

I know some of you have been waiting days to see the final results of the kitchen counter rehab, and so, to make you happy, here it is. For contrast, here’s what the kitchen looked like before, and during the rehab. The end result is, I should say, very nice when you’re up close to it.

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Today’s Books, 4/22/13

April 22, 2013 By 63 Comments

Just walked through the door of the house, and what is the first thing I do? Take a picture of the books that have come in so you can see what’s new and upcoming. Because that’s how much I care about you. Yes I do.

Tell what catches your eye, down below in the comments.

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The Big Idea: Brian McClellan

April 22, 2013 By 22 Comments

Nothing is constant but change — and changing times can be an interesting opportunity for a writer to document the upheaval of societies, standards and even power structures (fictional or otherwise). So Brian McClellan discovered with Promise of Blood, the first of his Powder Mage series. Here’s McClellan to explain.

BRIAN McCLELLAN:

A little over three years ago, my wife brought home the first episode of a British television program called Sharpe, based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels. It was a wonderful show that featured Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, a tough-as-nails officer rising up the ranks of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. Needless to say, I was intrigued. A show where Sean Bean doesn’t die? Sounds like a blast.

At this point I was working on ideas for my next novel. I was a little down in the dumps from rejections over my last book and was looking for an idea that would really hook the imagination. I wanted to write something that featured magic based on gunpowder, and had been toying with the idea of a short story set during the Prohibition.

This all changed when my wife brought home Sharpe. By half way through the show I had decided that I’d be writing an epic fantasy novel based on the technology level of the Napoleonic Wars. By the end of the episode I had a rough outline in my head. I started writing it the next day.

I quickly realized the wealth of inspiration for a novel that could come from that time period. Napoleon’s rise to power and the subsequent struggle for control throughout the various Coalition Wars is an epic tale all on its own that could be viewed from any of a hundred different perspectives.

Men like Napoleon were products of the changing times, somehow managing to navigate the turmoil brought about by countless factions vying for control of the political and social landscape. During the French Revolution, the decadence of monarchs like Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette was eclipsed by the brutal reign of Madame la Guillotine. The age of kings and their courts was coming to an end.

At the same time, the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe, changing the way people thought about everything from politics and manufacturing to agriculture and class roles. Technology advanced at a pace never before seen. These advances gave men the ability to feed and clothe the greater population, while also allowing armies to kill on a greater scale than previously imagined.

Kings were pulled down. Some empires expanded to include colonies in distant places; others were dissolved in favor of governments run by the people. Promise of Blood begins in this vein with a revolution; a bloody coup. Field Marshal Tamas sends his king and the high nobility of his beloved Adro to the guillotine, almost single-handedly beginning a new era of independence.

Tamas represents a rising class of sorcerers, ‘Powder Mages’, who gain speed, strength, and endurance from ingesting gunpowder. This new form of modern magic is at odds with the old elemental sorcery of the ‘Privileged’ which is practiced almost exclusively by the nobility. Caught in the middle are the common people, many of whom possess “knacks” or magical talents of their own.

I wanted the various magic systems to reflect the class struggles that follow a period of revolution and upheaval. I wanted to explore what would happen if magic evolved along with technology. How does magic change when gunpowder is introduced?  What if the very existence of this new technology of powder and steel changed the DNA of the magical world? How would it affect the outcome of a revolution?

Writing Promise of Blood allowed me to address themes of power, privilege, risk and revolution. Historical events like the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars helped inspire me to create compelling characters faced with the momentous task of rebuilding a world where not only society, but magic itself, is changing.

—-

Promise of Blood: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow the author on Twitter.

Filed Under: Big Idea

Sunday Sunday Sunday

April 21, 2013 By 8 Comments

I’ll be away from the blog today on account that today’s my busy day at the LA Times Festival of Books. If you’re at the Festival today remember to come say hello! Here’s my schedule. I may tweet a little bit though. We’ll see.

Have a good Sunday and see you tomorrow.

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How I Keep Myself Amused on Long Flights

April 20, 2013 By 42 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Question for Your Saturday

April 20, 2013 By 127 Comments

Monkeys or ponies?

Explain why. Show your work.

Jonathan Coulton fans: No half monkeys-half ponies. They do not please me.

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View From My Hotel, 4/19/13

April 19, 2013 By 10 Comments

Welcome to LA! It’s pretty much the same as I left it in January. Which, frankly, is a bit of a relief.

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Pre-order Signed, Personalized Human Division Hardcovers from Jay & Mary’s Book Center

April 19, 2013 By 17 Comments

Folks:

I’m going to head out on tour for The Human Division in May, but some of you won’t be places where I will be going and might want signed, personalized copies of the book. If this includes you, I have good news: Before I head out on tour, I’ll be stopping by my local independent bookstore, Jay and Mary’s Book Center, to sign copies of THD for them. Which means that if you’re in the US, you can call into the store and get one or more signed (and personalized) from me, for yourself or as a gift.

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Call the bookstore by April 28 (follow that link above for the number), and ask to preorder a copy of The Human Division.

2. Let the folks at the store know who the book is for (you or your intended gift recipient) and what, if any, personal message you would like added (please keep it short; I’ll have a fair number of these to write).

3. Give them your payment information when they ask. Remember your price will include shipping.

And that should pretty much be it.

Please note that all orders need to be in by April 28, so the books can arrive in time for me to sign them before I go on tour. If you try to order after April 28, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to sign your book until I get back from my tour at the very end of May.

Note that in addition to Jay & Mary’s, you can also get in touch with any of the bookstores I’m going to while I’m on tour, and I’ll be happy to sign a book for you when I’m there. But if you just can’t wait to get a signed, personalized copy, the books at Jay & Mary’s will ship the very day the book is out. Plus, you’ll be supporting my local bookstore, and that makes me happy.

Again, orders have to be in by the 28th of April, so don’t wait too long. Thanks!

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The Big Idea: Sofia Samatar

April 19, 2013 By 6 Comments

In the novel A Stranger in Olondria, reading is the thing. But author Sofia Samatar asks: Is it the only thing? Here are her further thoughts about a life of letters (and beyond).

SOFIA SAMATAR:

When I wrote A Stranger in Olondria, I wanted a whole world of my own, with all the details: hymns and hairstyles and dialects and desserts. Above all, I wanted books—and not just books, but literary history. I wanted to create both a world and its libraries.

The result is a novel about reading. Jevick, the main character, comes from a non-literate society, but his Olondrian tutor teaches him to read and write. After that, all Jevick wants is to travel to Olondria, the land of books. But when his dream comes true, his life starts falling apart: he becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young woman from his own country.

Jevick’s quest to get rid of his ghost brings up all sorts of issues he’s tried to suppress, such as his rejection of his homeland and his status as a wealthy merchant. It also throws him into a struggle he doesn’t understand, a violent conflict between rival Olondrian cults. His dilemma allowed me to explore not only the contradictions of self-imposed exile, but also the question of how well one can ever “know” a foreign culture. Jevick thinks he knows Olondria because he’s read about it, and because he possesses a single Olondrian friend, his tutor. He quickly realizes how much is missing from his view of this foreign country, including things his tutor has deliberately hidden from him.

He also begins to question the meaning of reading. Jevick lives to read, but he must come to terms with a world in which not everyone is literate, in which certain things are lost in the transition from an oral to a literate condition, and in which literacy is linked to oppressive power.

I wrote A Stranger in Olondria in Yambio, South Sudan, where I taught high school English: that is, I was working between languages, and between oral and written traditions. The experience brought home to me the links between reading and writing, my favorite activities, and the history of colonialism. This was an awareness I’d grown up with, as my father, a Somali academic, wrote a book about Somali oral poetry and the anti-colonial struggle, and dedicated it to my brother and me. It was in Sudan, though, that these issues crystallized for me, leading to a book that celebrates reading, while also expressing some anxiety about it.

Without giving too much away, I can say that Jevick’s choices reflect his growing awareness that reading, while wonderful, isn’t everything. It isn’t the story. Most stories, in both Jevick’s world and ours, can’t be read. These are the stories of those who do not or cannot write, or of those whose writings are destroyed, deprived of interpreters, illegible or lost.

Ultimately, A Stranger in Olondria is a book-lover’s book, one that takes reading seriously, in all its beauty and terror. I worked hard to reflect some of the tensions between oral and literate cultures without taking a stand in favor of either. And along the way, I got to make up religious texts, epic poetry, manuals for dream interpretation, painting styles and critiques of painting styles, pamphlets on etiquette, musical genres and children’s books.

Of course, not all of that material wound up in the novel! I’ve got enough left over to fill a library.

—-

A Stranger in Olondria: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog.

Filed Under: Big Idea

Some Unhappy News About Joe Hill and John Scalzi in San Francisco

April 18, 2013 By 18 Comments

Folks:

Some bad news on this end — Because of various scheduling issues that we didn’t properly anticipate, it turns out that Joe and I aren’t going to be able to do the joint appearances we had hoped to do in San Francisco on May 15. This makes both me and Joe sad; we were both looking forward to the events, and we’re sorry we couldn’t make it work this time around. BUT we will both still be doing our separate events: Joe at Booksmith and me at Borderlands Books. Check their sites for the updated information.

Sorry again — but look forward to seeing you in San Francisco regardless.

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Gamma Rabbit T-Shirt Donation Update

April 18, 2013 By 6 Comments

For those of you who ordered Gamma Rabbit T-Shirts, you’ll be pleased to know that today I made a $300 donation to RAINN, that amount being my cut of the t-shirt profits. RAINN, in case you don’t know, is the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, dedicated to helping those who have been sexually assaulted  It’s a serious organization helped by a silly shirt, and I thank those of you who picked up one. Wear yours with pride.

And for those who are wondering, yes, I still have plans for the Kirby Crow Gamma Rabbit design, with RAINN once again the intended recipient for any profits. More on that as it develops (probably a little later in the year because I’m coming up on my touring season).

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What To Get The Birthday Girl Who Has Everything

April 18, 2013 By 115 Comments

A kitchen sink, quite obviously.

And yes, it is my lovely wife’s birthday today. If you desire to wish her fair returns on the day, I would not look askance of it.

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13 for 13

April 18, 2013 By 18 Comments

I checked this morning and saw that “Earth Below, Sky Above,” the final episode of The Human Division, made it onto the USA Today bestseller list this week. This means that all thirteen episodes hit that particular bestseller list, one a week, for thirteen straight weeks. That’s pretty sweet.

And in fact, I pretty strongly suspect it might be a record of some sort. I mean, I suppose it’s possible that someone else has gotten on to the USA Today bestseller list with a new title a week for thirteen consecutive weeks; I haven’t checked. But given how things have usually been published up to this point in the US, I have to say I think it’s actually really unlikely. On the other hand, if the serial format takes off, I might eventually lose the record. That’s fair. Until then: Mine, baby. I will take it.

So to those of you who followed along episodically: Thank you. You’ve officially made my day.

 

 

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