I contributed a piece to Suvudu yesterday on dystopias and “positive” science fiction and why the latter is one of the most dangerous things ever invented. Other than Pez Dispensers. Anyway, check it out.
And why not buy BURNING SKIES while you’re at it.
Well, it’s all over. Book Three, which bears the title I came up with back in 2002—the oldest of my three titles—is now into Bantam. Of course, there’s plenty more revision work to do, but the hard part’s over. Now I need to get on with the business of saying goodbye to the characters that have haunted my dreams for nearly a decade now . . . and since I know some of you are wondering:
—yes, this wraps up the #$# series.
—no, it’s not a fake-set-up for a book four.
—and no, it’s not an anticlimax—it’s easily the best thing I’ve ever written. Perhaps I’m not exactly the most Reliable Narrator/Witness in that regard. . . but right now my head’s spinning with the surrealism of it all—and I can’t think of a better place to process it than in southern California, where the sun always shines and traffic is a figment of everybody’s deranged imaginations. See you by the pool.
And what better book to bring to that pool than BURNING SKIES?
Well, it’s all coming down to the wire here. MACHINERY OF LIGHT is due to Bantam on Monday, which will wrap up this trilogy I’ve spent nearly a decade working on; meanwhile, Monday is also the day I transfer the base of operations out to Los Angeles for much of the rest of June. You do not want to know what my apartment looks like right now. Spartacus certainly doesn’t.
But in the meantime I did an interview with the awesome Jeff Vandermeer for Omnivoracious/Amazon where I explore (among other things) my approach to writing about the U.S. president, not to mention my take on the reaction to MIRRORED HEAVENS. Check it out . . .
Meanwhile BURNING SKIES is available at Amazon and at other fine bookstores!
So even as BURNING SKIES continues to crank away in the States, MIRRORED HEAVENS has hit the ground running in Spain as CIELOS REFLAJADOS . . . and I now have a new website which looks a lot like this one only it’s in Spanish. It’s kinda trippy to read my stuff in a language that I can’t speak: I wish I’d taken Spanish in high school instead of French, but I suspect that I would have ended up retaining very little anyway, because I was the class dunce when it came to foreign languages.
But somehow that didn’t stop me from giving two interviews in Spanish on some SF sites over there, one at BEMOnline, and the other at Axxon. If you’re interested in seeing the English versions, let me know and I’ll include ‘em in a future post.
BURNING SKIES is available at Amazon and other fine booksellers!
So after her runner-up finish in Britain’s Got Talent, Susan Boyle has been admitted to a hospital for “exhaustion”—the British tabloids are reporting some heartbreaking details, and even if the specifics aren’t true (you never know with the tabloids), the nervous breakdown probably is. As a senior doctor at Boyle’s clinic notes, sudden fame is not without its dangers, and it’s an open question whether the reality-TV shows are prepared to address this and deal with its implications by providing adequate support networks/guardrails.
Actually, I’d say it’s more of a settled question: they’re not. None of us are, really. Same reason this story is way less popular than the First Susan Boyle Saga. As of this writing, it’s not in the Twitter heavy-rotation. . . and why should it be? We’ve turned the Internet into the equivalent of one big junior high school, where popularity is everything, and all that matters is how many “friends” you have and how many cameras are pointed your way. It’s part of our fairy-tale view of life. . we believe in princesses, but if those princesses get chased by paparazzi into concrete walls, then we just go ahead and damn the photographers instead of wondering who the hell was looking at those photos. More than fifteen centuries ago, the former Roman emperor Diocletian refused to come out of retirement, saying to his erstwhile imperial colleague, “if only you could see the cabbages I grow with my own hands in my garden, you wouldn’t ask this of me.” Rare it is that a public figure finds such peace.
Okay, so we got some cool links/news:
—Top SF Twitter feeds worth checking out. UPDATE: btw, my own Twitter feed is here.
—Fellow SFNovelist Kelly McCullough’s new book MythOS is out; as the title implies, you’re looking at a world where the line between programming and magick is getting (very) blurred. Very cool stuff, and worth checking out.
—At the invitation of military science-fiction colleague and general bad-ass Andy Remic, I’m now a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics, which has the “aim of celebrating all that is positive in genre fiction.” How this translates into day-to-day implementation is by definition a work in progress, but Andy assures me it doesn’t mean I have to stop my tales of mayhem and mass-slaughter. Hopefully he won’t either. This is a really cool initiative, and I’ll be posting more on it shortly.
—In the wake of Terminator Salvation, it’s worth revisiting this James Cameron interview on why Sam Worthington is going to kick Avatar’s ass
—And if you’re living in D.C., then keep in mind that Artomatic is the only game in town for the next month. Be there or miss out . . .and I’ll be doing a reading there on July 2nd!
Meanwhile, BURNING SKIES can be found on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere!
