What makes this kind of awesome (aside from, you know, getting all my stuff back) is how the folks at Reagan National tracked me down: They used one of the Redshirts ARCs from the bag. The ARC doesn’t have my contact information on it, but it does have contact information for my former publicist at Tor — so they called her, and she contacted my current publicist, who sent me an e-mail about it. So there you have it: Being an author finally pays off. As a way of thanking the fellow at Reagan National who thought to contact my publicist, I told him to feel free to take one of the ARCs as a token of my appreciation.

My computer bag will soon be winging its way back to me, and to celebrate that fact, and to commemorate the role of the Redshirts ARC in its return, I am now going to give away two Redshirts ARCs. All you have to do is put a note in this comment thread between this very instant and noon Eastern time, Thursday, May 24, 2012 Wednesday, May 23, 2012. I will then have my daughter and wife randomly select a time between now and then, and the posts closest to those times will win (in case of a tie, the one closest before the time they specify will win). One entry per person, please.

So leave a comment! My computer is coming home! w00t!

Just a reminder that “Journey to Planet JoCo,”  my interview series with Jonathan Coulton, is still chugging along nicely at Tor.com. And today, in fact, we’re covering Coulton’s biggest hit to date: “Still Alive,” the theme song to the Valve video game Portal. There’s excellent conversation to be had, plus music and videos. It’s everything you could want in an interview! Or your money back.

If you’re just catching up with the entire interview series, an index page is here, with links to every single installment, refreshed daily at 9am.

Finally, a reminder that in one week exactly, Jonathan Coulton will debut his brand new, never-before-heard song at Tor.com. I’ve heard it. It’s fantastic. I can’t wait for you to hear it too.

Kim Stanley Robinson has created such amazing futures in his Mars books and others that it’s sometimes difficult to believe he doesn’t have a direct line to what comes next — a crystal broadband line, rather than a crystal ball. But as Robinson explains in this Big Idea, today’s present changes the future even for him, and for his latest and in many ways most ambitious novel, 2312.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON:

My new novel 2312 began with an idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a saturnine person. Matching these two character types would make for quite an odd couple, I thought, and since all couples are odd, it seemed like the story might have wide appeal. That the two people should actually come from Mercury and Saturn is my kind of joke, in other words lame, but I like both those planets, and recent robotic space missions have given us a lot of new information about both of them.

However, having people call Mercury and Saturn their home requires some kind of solar system-spanning civilization. Thus the three-century time scale. This also put the story somewhere beyond the end of my Mars trilogy, and allowed me to return, not to that particular future history, but to that general story space: Humanity In the Solar System In the Next Few Centuries! I love that story space, one of the most exciting in all science fiction, so it was a pleasure to get back to it.

But so much about the future has changed since I last visited it. So much that I never believed possible is looking like it might happen anyway.But always in ways that to me seemed very unlike what all the other stories have been saying. I had a different vision of most of these startling new possibilities, and I found on reflection that I needed or wanted to retell the whole Matter of the Solar System.

That was fine, but also problematic. The big stories are hard to tell; you need special tricks, often lifted directly from Sir Walter Scott. I was forced to use the Kitchen Sink Theory of Novel Construction—again, of course—indeed, more than ever—but it was necessary, because the future is going to be a wild place, a recombinant multiplicity of clashing elements, a real mess. To do justice to realism these days, the kitchen sink is really nowhere near the end of what needs to get tossed into the mix.

So: terraforming (on purpose or not); living in space; genetic modifications in all living things; brain implants; artificial intelligences; gender manipulations; space travel; longevity treatments; big sea level rise on a hot sad old Earth; new forms of economics and governance. Sex, politics, art, revolution; and always, no matter what, human subjectivity. Our streams of consciousness. Because we read fiction to experience telepathy; we want to get inside other minds, and hear how other people think.

So my original two characters still carry this story, they struggle in their strange new world, making their way as best they can. In their travels they see the solar system from the Vulcanoids to Pluto; they body-surf the rings of Saturn, deal with some desperate moments on Mercury’s brightside, and cope with the icy dangers of frozen Venus. The plots they are caught up in are an important part of the history of their time, and just as messy and dangerous as history always is. And the romance’s end has a (spoiler alert!) surprise setting.

Writing 2312 was great fun. I got a lot of gentle but electrifying help from my editor, Tim Holman. His combination of stimulus and aid made a huge difference to the book, in both conception and execution, and I am grateful to him. Thanks Tim! And it’s been a pleasure watching his whole team at Orbit produce and promote the book, I’m happy to be part of such a high-powered team. I’m also grateful to all the people who helped me with various aspects of the book, from Chris McKay and his colleagues at NASA/Ames, to Pamela Mellon and all my other friends at UC San Diego, and all the rest who helped me (see acknowledgments at the back of the book).

I was also inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramovic, the landscape art of Andy Goldsworthy, and the novel technique of John Dos Passos. Goldsworthy and Abramovic have become simply genres in my future world, their names common nouns for what lots of artists do. I think that will happen. And it took the model of Dos Passos’ great USA trilogy to suggest to me the best form that could be used to portray a complicated culture in a novel. John Brunner used Dos Passos’ format for his Stand On Zanzibar quartet, and now I can see why; it’s not only useful, it’s lively. I hope readers will feel that way about 2312, and if so I will be happy, and grateful, because it’s the readers of a book who bring it to life.

—-

2312: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

Read an excerpt. Visit the book’s site.

The Writer Beware blog

Here’s the official page with all the winners (and nominees), and here’s the press release, posted on the Writer Beware site itself.

Congratulations to Victoria Strauss! May you continue to vex and annoy scammers and scumbags who prey on writers. No doubt some of them are grinding their teeth at you winning this award. I say: Let them grind.

Hey, remember that time I wrote a piece on how being a Straight White Male means you’re running through life on the lowest difficulty setting, and that piece was republished on the video game news site Kotaku? Well, now Kotaku has also republished my follow-up piece, minus one section that relates specifically to how I administer comments here on Whatever (which is totally reasonable, since, hey, different web site entirely). The Kotaku republished version is here.

Let me also take a moment here to comment on comments. A lot of people have noted the really astounding amount of bile that’s come out of the entries, both here and at Kotaku, and have suggested that the vitriolic nature of the comments suggest that rather than furthering the conversation, the piece fell on its face and/or showed just how unreasonable straight white men generally are on the subject of having their unearned advantages pointed out to them.

Here’s something to consider, however. Between Whatever, Kotaku and the various other Gawker sites that ran the post, the “Lowest Difficulty Setting” post and followup posts have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people to date. The number of people who have commented is probably about one percent of that overall audience; the comments run into the thousands but people often comment more than once. Not everyone who comments is antagonistic to the piece, and even many of those who disagree with the post or have specific complaints express them in cogent and reasonable manner.

All of which is to say that it’s probably not wise to assume that the foamiest of commenters, either here or over at Kotaku, are necessarily representative of the overall readership of the pieces. What they are, however, are the ones most motivated to comment, because of their own basket of personal issues/neuroses/hobby horses/whatever, and many of them have linked in from sites where people of similar personal issues/neuroses/hobby horses/whatever congregate and then set forth to make their views known to people outside their own respective man caves. In this respect, they are like many commenters on many comment threads for pieces on contentious topics.

Shorter version: Don’t freak out at the jackasses in the comments. They’re not representative of the whole crowd. They’re just loud. Outside of that tiny minority, there are lots of other people, many of them straight white males, reading without comment. Some of them are probably coming away from the piece thinking in whole new ways about the issues raised in the pieces. Which is not a bad thing.

After I lost my MacBook Air last week, I still needed a computer to do work while traveling and also at home, since I was using the laptop as my primary computer. But I didn’t want to spill out a serious amount of money, not only because there was (is) a chance the Air would still show up, but also because, you know, I’m cheap. So I ended up going for an Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ve had one before and liked it although it was ultimately a little too small; this newer edition, however, has an 11.6-inch screen (the other one was 10.1) and what feels like a full-sized keyboard, so we’ll see how it works out. I’m getting along with it just fine, although I am definitely missing the Mac trackpad; it’s ridiculous how much better those are than just about any other trackpad on the market.

Since I was feeling grumpy, I also decided to pick up a Galaxy Tab 2 7-inch tablet, which was also relatively inexpensive. I’ve been wanting something close to a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet, without being locked into either the Amazon or B&N ecosystems, and because I’m one of those people who actually prefers the 7-inch tablet size over the 10-inch size. I like it so far; it’s using Android 4.0, which is a nice operating system, and it’s doing all the things I want a tablet to do.

Between the two of them I should be able to get back to work. Which come to think of it, I need to be getting to right now. I have a backlog. Excuse me.

Bradbury Award winner Neil Gaiman and I use the award statues to fight to the death. Photo credit: Charishawk (click on photo for a Nebula Awards photoset).

As I think most of you know, I flew in to the DC area last Wednesday to take part in SFWA’s Nebula Awards Weekend, not only because was going to be an awesome time with awesome people, but because I am president of the organization, so me not showing up to the thing would be, you know, tremendously bad form. Here’s what went down.

First, as I noted earlier, I left my travel bag in my car, which unfortunately contained my Mac Air, several books, my car key, and a bunch of cables relating to electronics. This annoyed me terribly. Contacted several cab companies and the DC cab commission to locate it. The good news, such as it is, is that the Mac Air is lockable and trackable from the moment anyone tries to access the Internet with it, so I locked it and will have it post a note asking to be returned. Also, almost everything I had on the computer was also redundantly stored elsewhere, so I have lost no work. Finally, the thing is insured. The bad news: It’s still not returned. I am going to have to work on the assumption that the bag and its contents will continue to go missing, especially since I am leaving the area tomorrow morning.

Other than that the weekend was fantastic. I was pretty busy, with two board meetings and a SFWA business meeting, both of which will be of limited interest to people who are not SFWA members but which were very productive and useful. Go us. I also participated in a panel on humor in science fiction and fantasy, which also included James Patrick Kelly, James Morrow and SFWA’s newest Grandmaster, Connie Willis. I thought it went very well, personally; between the four of us we covered a lot of ground in the subject. I also participated in our mass author signing, sitting between Nebula nominees Carolyn Ives Gilman and Mary Robinette Kowal; I signed a fair number of books, which makes me happy.

The big event of the Nebula Awards weekend, not entirely surprisingly, are the Nebula Awards themselves, which this year had Walter Jon Williams as MC (he did a great job), astronaut Mike Fincke as our keynote speaker (he was very inspiring), and of course Connie Willis as Grandmaster (immensely charming and heartfelt). And we gave away some prizes too. And then there was the after party, in which everyone poured into the SFWA hospitality suite and ate and drank and talked very loudly about things until it was time to go to sleep.

I really love the Nebula Weekends because in a sense, as SFWA president, it’s my party — I get to host some of of the most interesting writers in the world and celebrate their achievements. But it would be horribly, horribly wrong for me to take any of the credit for the success of the weekend. That properly goes to Peggy Rae Sapienza, in her role of Nebula Weekend event co-ordinator, Steven Silver, and a huge raft of volunteers who have put time and energy into the event. I got thanked by people for the weekend, but I’m not foolish enough to take the credit. That goes to the people who made it work.

At the moment I’m pleasantly dazed from everything and since I have an ungodly early flight tomorrow, I’m likely to crash early tonight. But to everyone who came to the Nebula Awards Weekend and made it wonderful: Thank you.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,

Novel
Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)

Novella
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, October/November 2011)

Novelette
“What We Found,” by Geoff Ryman (F&SF, September/October 2011)

Short Story
“The Paper Menagerie,” by Ken Liu (F&SF, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” by Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult SF and Fantasy Book
The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Connie Willis

Solstice Award
Octavia Butler (posthumous) and John Clute

Service to SFWA Award
Bud Webster

Congratulations to everyone above!

I’m off today being presidential (which includes chairing the SFWA business meeting, having a couple of other meetings, and then being part of the Nebula Awards Ceremony), so I won’t be around here much today. While I am out and about, why not check out the “Journey to Planet JoCo” interviews on Tor.com, in which I interview musician Jonathan Coulton about his science fiction-related music? Today’s track is “Space Doggity,” and yesterday’s track, if you missed it, is “The Future Soon.” There’s good stuff at both of those links.

Have fun with your Saturday. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.

See you there.