http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/326075863/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1253

Just got the really cool Earthling Publications lettered edition of Conrad Williams’ The Unblemished. A contributor copy since I did the introduction.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/325949135/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1252

For a couple of years now Kate Bernheimer, in addition to all of the other wonderful editing and writing she does, has been working on Fairy Tale Review, which she founded and now helms. Contributors have included Donna Tartt, Marina Warner, Rikki Ducornet, Stacey Levine, and many more. It’s a elegant production and always thought-provoking. I have to admit that I go through phases where I get tired of folklore and re-told folktales, but each issue of The Fairy Tale Review has been near perfect, and I read each one from cover to cover.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=972

Travel + Holiday Weekend + Guest of Honor spot at InConJunction = Don’t expect much here through Sunday. I may post an entry or two, but then again I might not. Likewise comments.

For those of you who are Americans: Happy Independence Day tomorrow. For those of you who are Britians, Happy Holy Crap We Lost a Lot of Real Estate Day tomorrow. Everyone else, um, well, happy Friday tomorrow, I suppose.

And here’s Athena, from 2006:

Gotta love the classics, man.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=971

David Louis Edelman has been making a name for himself in science fiction over the last couple of years with his Jump 225 trilogy of books, the first of which Infoquake, racked up some nice reviews and helped propel Edelman into nominations for two different kinds of John W. Campbell award (one for Best Novel, and the other for Best New Writer), which is a one-two punch that not many other writers can claim. Edelman and his trilogy are back with MultiReal, and to explain the Big Idea of the book and series, Edelman’s got a set-up that… well, I’ll just let you read it for yourself.

(Holds up tarp to protect himself, cowers)

Okay, David: Take it away –

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN:

Could Adolf Hitler ever have been the good guy?

The man was a warped, murderous bastard who ordered the slaughter of millions of people, started an unnecessary war of conquest, and permanently 86′d the dreams of an entire generation or three. But seriously – let’s say you hop in a time machine, track the dude down as a teenager, and put him through a serious reeducation program. And maybe give him a heavy dose of Prozac. Or better yet, hand him a Macintosh. Could he be redeemed?

Because a non-insane Adolf Hitler would be a great guy to have on your side. He had the raw charisma to motivate tens of millions of people to get off their asses. He had the cunning to convince Neville Chamberlain that he wanted peace with Europe, and then the strategic genius to turn around and conquer it months later. He had the tenacity to never give up, even when the odds were stacked against him. If only Hitler didn’t have that whole “stinking, festering, maggot-ridden evil” thing going on – and if only he had some competent advisors who weren’t also stinking, festering, etc. — he might have accomplished some amazing things.

That was one of the Big Ideas behind my novels Infoquake and MultiReal. Create a character with Hitler-like strategic genius, with Gates-like business savvy, with Clinton-like personal magnetism, with Machiavelli-like disregard for ethics. Stick him on the fence between the ultimate selfishness and the ultimate selflessness, give him a technology that could revolutionize the world or destroy it, and see what he does.

My character, Natch, is a business entrepreneur in a far-future society where software runs the human body. To be concise, he’s a manipulative bastard. To be a little less concise, he’s a very manipulative bastard. The first time you meet Natch, he’s busy creating a complicated terror hoax that will scare millions of people, just so he can take advantage of the panic to leap to the top of the Primo’s bio/logic investment guide. (Imagine if someone started mailing suspicious envelopes filled with Sweet n’ Low to major media outlets during the anthrax scare of 2001, and you’ll get the idea.)

Natch is still a relatively young man; he hasn’t had the opportunity to do Hitler-sized damage yet. You can sense that he’s not beyond redemption; he’s just pointed in the wrong direction.

During the course of Infoquake, he manages to connive his way into co-owning a new technology called MultiReal. And MultiReal, as you discover in the book MultiReal, is a potentially epoch-changing technology. It’s like the Internet to the Internetth. Simply put, MultiReal allows you to hop through potential realities and choose the one that suits you. Hit a baseball, and choose the reality where you hit a home run every time. Shoot a gun, and choose the reality where you hit the target every time. Confront an enemy, and choose the reality where that enemy inexplicably decides to commit suicide…

(Before you start protesting about how ludicrous that sounds, let me say that MultiReal is a lot more complicated than that – complicated enough that it takes most of two novels to set up. And if you’ll excuse a little chest-thumping, let me point out that Publishers Weekly said “MultiReal is firmly established as one of the most fascinating singularity technologies in years,” and Norman Spinrad said in Asimov’s that “Edelman seems to have convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level.” The latter of which makes me cackle with glee, because it’s so not true.)

You can probably see where I’m going with this MultiReal stuff. It’s all a question of choice. How do you make the right choices? What happens when you’ve got two equally good choices – or two equally bad ones? Can you take responsibility for your choices? How important are your choices? Could even Adolf Hitler have led a life of charity, industry, and philanthropy if he had made better choices?

So during the course of Infoquake, MultiReal, and the still-in-progress Geosynchron, Natch must ask himself these questions. But he’s not alone; the entire world around him is facing difficult choices as well. Society is ideologically split between governmentalists who favor a strong central legislature and libertarians who prefer a patchwork of smaller, subscription-based authorities. Most of the world has adapted to the bio/logic technologies that have radically changed society, but there’s a vocal minority of conscientious objectors who feel they’re being shoved under the rug. Humanity has begun expanding to Luna, Mars, and a dozen orbital colonies, but the mass of Earth-bound people are having a difficult time accepting the needs of these new pioneers.

When you reach a fork in the road, how do you decide which path to take? Or could MultiReal be the key to allowing humanity to take both roads…?

I had my own choices in mind when I started writing Infoquake and MultiReal back in late 2000. I was in the middle of a fairly acrimonious divorce. I had just quit my contract job programming U.S. Army websites that nobody in the U.S. Army knew or cared about. I had changed my hair style, moved outside the DC Beltway, gotten a new pair of glasses, and sold a house. I was in a mood to take a poke at everything I thought I knew or valued with a really sharp stick to see if it held up.

And so I decided to put it all on the line for my characters. During the course of the Jump 225 trilogy, you’re going to see a man who was once one of the world’s most despicable human beings put in the ultimate hot seat. You’re going to see Natch faced with possibly the most momentous and far-reaching decision any human being has ever had to face since the dawn of history.

What’s he gonna do? The answers lie just ahead…

—-

MultiReal: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit MultiReal’s site here, which includes written and audio excerpts. Visit David Louis Edelman’s blog here, and learn about the “Jump 225 Jumbo Mega-Bonanza Summer Giveaway.”

dmw

• 14:09 www.optusiphone.com.au/pricing.aspx seems to have been brought to its knees... #
• 00:10 back from seeing lenny henry; now navigating the intricacies of phone plan pricing. it's like it's designed to confuse and obfuscate. #

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/325801843/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1235

I found a deleted scene from City of Saints & Madmen’s “Dradin, In Love” while cleaning out my electronic file folders…it’s a bit bathotic, to say the least.

In his dreams, the room he sleeps in expands until it is infinite and contracts until it is smaller than the head of a pin. There is a fireplace, with a roaring fire that makes no sound. The air is chill, but by the fire it is nicely warm. A sofa stands in front of the fireplace, orange and licked by soundless flames, and on the sofa sits a woman, facing the fireplace. Dradin stands behind the sofa, so that all he can see is the soft white of the back of her neck, and her long, sleek, black hair, backlit by the flames. The hair is beautiful, catching colors like the scales of a rainbow trout. The woman does not turn to face him and the image reminds Dradin of a still-life, a photograph, a frozen moment. Nothing moves, not even, after awhile, the flames. As Dradin watches, he is overcome by a sadness that reaches so deeply into him that every nerve is hollow and weeping, and simultaneous with the breaking of his heart, the woman says, in time to his own thoughts, in time to the shadows cast by the flames, You will never have me.

When the woman turned to face him, Dradin can see now that it is the woman from the jungle, her gaze accusing him, and then, she changes once more until her hair disappears and her face broadens and it is the face of Dvorak, with the tattoo, which seems alive, the River Moth flowing across his features and out, into the room.

Then the woman is gone, the dwarf is gone, and he is back in the religious institute, surrounded by the sleeping forms of boys training to be priests, missionaries. Anthony Toliver lies in a bunk bed above him. Together they watch the single window as the moon does strange things to the light, sends it glancing off the blanched walls here, but creating shadows there, bedsheets white then black. Outside, they can just see the steeple of the church and the bare, bleak branches of the trees in the courtyard below. The gargoyles on the roof of the building opposite leer, their cracked stone faces defiant. There is a taste of dust, of thick centuries, on the dark wood furniture.

“Do you have nightmares?” Tony asks.

“Yeah.”

“I dream about the gargoyles on the seminary building,” Tony says. “I dream they come alive at night and fly over to our window and look inside at us.” Tony shifts his weight uneasily and wood creaks, sheets rustle.

“Is that your worst nightmare?” Dradin asks.

“Yes. Because if I wake up in the middle of the night from that nightmare, I always think I see something moving at the window, and it frightens me so much I almost wet my pants.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Piss your pants.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry,” Dradin says. “I didn’t mean it.”

Silence. Then: “Okay, but tell me your worst nightmare.”

Dradin tells Tony his worst nightmare. After Dradin tells this story, Tony does not speak for a long time and Dradin supposes that he has gone to sleep or does not understand and he tries catch the hush of the branches in the window outside to lull himself into sleep.

At communion the next morning, they do not speak of it at all, so that Dradin feels sadder still, and vulnerable, and gawky, like something newly made and ill-formed.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=970

If it’s Thursday, it’s time for another AMC SF movie column. This week, I look at why so few science fiction movies are genuinely funny (and why Wall-E, which is genuinely funny, is funny in a different way from most science fiction comedies). In this column, rather than opining with heedless confidence, I admit I’m just throwing out a theory and want feedback if the theory makes any sort of sense, so here’s a chance for you to tell me “dude, you’re so totally wrong” (as long as, you know, you back it up with cites). So get on over there and comment, if you dare.

Update: Whoops, momentarily forgot to turn comments off here. Fixed that. Folks, the reason I’d prefer you comment over there as opposed to over here (and why I turn off the comments on this side) is that one of the reasons they like having mere there is because they see healthy discussion of the stuff I write. I’m not saying you have to comment over there or I’ll lose the gig (really, it’s not like that; they like me for other reasons, too), but if you do feel like commenting on one of the columns, please do, and please do it over there. Thanks.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=969

Didn’t get around to deciding the Duck Contest today, and since I’m busy through the weekend, will probably not get to it until Monday. Sorry.

But! If it’s any consolation, I’ve decided that there should be more than one winner. So now you’ve at least doubled your chances to win. See, that’s not so bad.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/325332761/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1272

Starting next Tuesday, my blog will feature a different guest blogger each week through October 10. The excitement kicks off with a celebration of the fiction of noir master Jack O’Connell (with posts by the author as well as Ellen Datlow, Ron Hogan, and Kelly Shaw). That will be followed by NYT bestseller Michelle Richmond, Tiptree Award-winning fantasist Catherynne M. Valente, Soft Skull editor Richard Nash, fantasist and children’s book author Vandana Singh, satirical SF novelist Minister Faust, Brazilian critic Fabio Fernandes, crime novelist Meg Gardiner, Romanian editor and publisher Horia Ursu, Russian-born novelist Ekaterina Sedia, publicist Matt Staggs, short story writer John Langan, and writer-editor Cat Rambo. Come visit and experience what promises to be a lively and diverse discussion.

I’ll post more information on Monday morning. As of July 8, I’ll be pretty much off the internet for three months.

P.S. And, over at Omnivoracious, Richard Morgan will be blogging.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/325252949/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1271

Very impressed with Valley of Day-Glo.

Excerpt:
Absurdist fictions tread a fine line. If they try too hard to present three-dimensional characters, they lose the pacing and quickness needed to pull off such a difficult task. If they, on the other hand, make too much fun of their characters or present characters that are too flat, the absurdity isn’t grounded in anything real. As important, good absurdism must be self-deprecating in a sense and must treat every human institution with similar suspicion. Finally, a great absurdist novel relies on fresh, uncliched images and should be, at times, biting rather than comfortable.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=968

Snippet from a phone conversation earlier today:

Me (talking as I’m lying on the bed): Just to warn you, the cat just came up on my chest and is sticking her butt in my face, so if I suddenly go “mmmphmmph” while we’re talking, you’ll know why.

Friend: Dude, I did not need to know that for some portion of this phone call you’ll be talking out of a cat anus.

Me: Mmmphmmmph!

Mmmphmmmph, indeed, my friends. Mmmphmmph indeed.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=967

Justine Larbalestier explains why blurbing a book is harder than it looks. And not just because you have to, you know, read the whole novel.

The book Justine’s talking about, incidentally, is Ekarina Sedia’s upcoming The Alchemy of Stone, which I would also agree is a lovely book.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/325021334/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1250

I loved all three of these books, as should be clear from the feature. Swamps, caves, and shorelines–how the heck can you go wrong?! I’m adding all three to my rec list on the right.

Excerpt:
But, for me at least, there’s another pleasure that comes from reading Walking the Wrack Line, and it’s selfishly personal. I’m one of those readers who also likes mucking about in tidal pools and searching the beach for seaweed, driftwood, and exotic creatures washed up far from home. On that level, Hurd’s book also has great appeal. Because nothing in Walking the Wrack Line seems false; instead, it’s as if someone had had the same experience, and knew the best way to get it down in prose.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=966

Apparently some Obama supporters are shocked and appalled to discover that now that he’s out of the primaries, their man is running to be the President of all the people in the United States, not just the people in the United States who have the “Yes We Can” YouTube video bookmarked on their Web browser. Well, you know: Surprise, people. For example, Obama’s supporting an extension, with significant caveats, of some of the faith-oriented policies started by Bush, has gotten a lot of folks spun up. But from where I stand it makes perfect sense.

1. Many evangelicals are disenchanted with the GOP, and young evangelicals in particular seem to be coloring outside the lines, politically speaking, more and more these days. Splintering off young evangelicals, perhaps on a permanent basis, would be like cutting off the GOP’s fuel supply for future elections, given that the evangelicals have been in the tank for the GOP for at least three decades. Even just putting them into play on a regular basis means the GOP has to fight (and use money to fight) for a demographic it took for granted just a single presidential election cycle ago.

2. It’s an act of political ball-cutting. There’s nowhere on Obama’s political agenda that McCain wants to go, because the GOP base is already horrified that the man is not conservative enough for them. But Obama has some room to snack on elements of McCain’s potential agenda, and in doing so make an appeal to voters (and not just those noted in the first point) that McCain’s people probably thought they wouldn’t have to fight for. Whether Obama gets those voters is immaterial to the fact that for the relatively low cost of giving a speech on the subject of faith-based programs, he’s just committed McCain to spending a lot of time and money to keep them in his camp.

3. There are still places in the United States — some which I can see right out my window, thank you very much — where there lives a significant number of people who are under the impression Barack Obama is a Islamicist mole whose first act as president will be to suicide bomb himself in the Oval Office. Obama is many things, but “dumb” isn’t one of them. If he simply denies or tries to ignore the “Obama will fly a plane into a building” meme, it’ll fester. If he offers a substantive example of an actual policy that counteracts that meme, he’s got a tool he can use to beat it, or at least beat it down.

4. The is the part where I’m confused that people haven’t figured this out yet: Obama clearly doesn’t just want to win, folks. He wants to win big. We’re talking about Super Bowl blowout big. Spanish-American War big. Friends vs. whatever the hell was on TV against Friends big. 400+ electoral votes big. He wants a generational vote, like Reagan had in 1980 — and given the abysmal standing of the GOP and the sitting president at the moment, it’s entirely possible he can get it with a little outreach and some strategic tacking to the center.

The folks who are currently braying about how Obama is where is he is right now because he didn’t swing toward the center are somewhat disingenuously forgetting how well Clinton did in the last few Democratic primaries, appealing to more conservative Democratic voters. Remember how the primaries went all the way to the end? Yes, good times, good times. Anyway, those folks can conveniently forget the lessons of the last few Democratic primaries; Obama really can’t, and apparently hasn’t.

5. Obama’s probably also aware that he’s got the left in the tank. Some folks on the left were goofy enough in 2000 to think that voting for, say, Nader, wouldn’t make a huge difference in the end, so why not make a cute little protest vote. Here in 2008, anyone on the left who isn’t planning to pull a lever for Obama probably has congenital brain damage. Seriously, there is unlikely to be another chance for the left to so definitively remake the political map as it has this year, if the folks on the left simply don’t lose their shit at the idea of Obama trying to widen his margin of victory, the better to make the case that his election represents a major shift in US politics.

Now, I’m a firm believer in never discounting the Democratic party’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; I’m still appalled at the incompetence of the Kerry campaign in 2004 and for that matter, the bad strategy of the Gore campaign in 2000, which involved separating their man from the most popular president in recent history. In this case I think the people involved in the presidential campaign are doing pretty smart things, and it might be the other folks who blow it.

To them I would suggest that they consider that the Obama campaign is paying them a compliment, in that they are making the (not necessarily self-evident) assumption that they’re all smart enough to realize that tacking toward the center in the campaign is going to pay huge dividends for the left when at the end of the 2008 election it finds itself in charge of the executive and legislative branches, and finds itself in a position to fill two or possibly even three seats on the Supreme Court in the next four years, and possibly in the bargain create a sturdy new left-leaning political base that lasts as long as the GOP base that Reagan used as a foundation three decades ago. I guess we’ll see if that compliment pays off.

Personally speaking I’m not hugely thrilled with every move Obama has made recently; I don’t like the continuation of the faith-based office that much (which should not be a huge surprise), although my real ire is for his position on the FISA “compromise” bill which will hopefully die in the Senate sometime next week. On the other hand, I have strong suspicions that President Obama would nominate to the high court the sort of judges that would see the FISA “compromise” bill as fundamentally unconstitutional, and in the meantime his positioning deprives the right-wing shouty chorus of some oxygen during his presidential campaign.

Which is to say that I’m fundamentally unsurprised to discover that Barack Obama, who has been in politics for a number of years, is a politician. And a politician who wants to win as big as he can.