made its second appearance on Stargate: Atlantis last night, in the episode "First Contact." This one is a much better cover-shot than in the previous episode. Thanks to John-Mark for the screenshot, who has several more posted on his blog. Thanks also to Joe Mallozzi and the rest of the Stargate team for arranging this.
A Swiss man has become the first person to fly solo across the English Channel using a single jet-propelled wing.Hello, future. So glad you could join us.
Yves Rossy landed safely after the 22-mile (35.4 km) flight from Calais to Dover, which had been twice postponed this week because of bad weather.
The former military pilot took less than 10 minutes to complete the crossing and parachute to the ground.
The 49-year-old flew on a plane to more than 8,200ft (2,500m), ignited jets on a wing on his back, and jumped out.
by Tom Lloyd. With quotes from Yours Truly and a LOT of commentary from Lockwood himself, and 20 different sketches, roughs and detailed close-ups, the post is well worth checking out.
As I reported earlier, writer/co-executive producer of Stargate: Atlantis Joseph Mallozzi featured Justina Robson's Keeping It Real
on his blog's book club discussion. I'm a few days late on gettting the link up, but Justina has now answered, indepthly, all his readers questions. The full interview is up here. And here's one of my favorite bits:The demons and devils were really refreshing to work on for me. I’ve been a Christian fundamentalist of a kind in my youth, and an occult student, and a devotee of all things theological and then I discarded formal approaches and religions altogether for a kind of atheism and went on a more personal kind of spiritual quest, which I am still on. But I used to have very fixed ideas and literal notions of all kinds of things and being able to finally sift through all that and find my version of what the truth is was just tremendously exciting and liberating. Of course it’s just my version and although I’m passionate about writing this stuff and feeling it’s true I know it’s only a way of seeing things. Hence the book’s title.And, of course, the third book in the Quantum Gravity series, Going Under,
was just recently released. You can read a substantial excerpt on our new sample pages site here.
Check out this enormous excerpt from the soon-to-be-released fantasy epic, The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reignby Tom Lloyd.
The Barnes & Noble in the Spectrum Center in Reston, Virginia will be hosting David Louis Edelman tonight, Wednesday, September 17 at 7:00 pm. He’ll be reading from and signing copies of MultiReal.
Come on by if you are in the area! The store is at 1851 Fountain Drive, Reston, VA 20190, phone number 703-437-9490.
Stargate: Atlantis executive producer Joseph Mallozzi is Keeping It Real. Or rather, he's open for questions for this month's selection in his book discussion group, Justina Robson's Keeping It Real.Justina herself will be stopping by later to answer his readers questions. Meanwhile, he describes the book as:
I always knew Sean Williams could write. I didn't know he could speak. Sean recently gave an address to the winners of the Writers of the Future contest, and Shaun Farrell, of Adventures in SciFi Publishing, was there to record his speech and interview Sean afterwards.
Joe Abercrombie is interviewed by Andrew Brooks on SFRevu,I read a lot of history, and my observation has been that failures, mistakes, and idiocy are frequently much more important in the course of events than successes. I hadn't seen that much failure and stupidity in fantasy so I was keen to redress the balance. I wanted my characters grimy, flawed, and difficult, as I have observed real people generally to be, so it made sense that my mismatched group of champions should mostly despise each other throughout. A couple learn grudging respect for one member of the team or another, but in the main they hate each other just as much at the end as they did to begin with.John Berlyne also reviews the book for the site, and says, "The First Law is, I strongly believe, a seminal work of modern fantasy. It is a benchmark sequence that should be regarded as an example of all that is truly great in today's genre fiction. It stands way above the vast majority of the marketplace, tainted as so many fantasy works are with the lofty and portentous myth cycles bequeathed to us by Tolkien. Instead, Abercombie's work reflects today's harsher world within its pages. This is fantasy come of age, a tale for a modern generation, a story for the selfish -- for a harder, more self-aware audience, for people who live in today's litigious, cynical, unforgiving society. You know who you are! Very highly recommended."
and MultiReal(books one and two of his Jump 
225 trilogy).Now, with the understanding that I am generalizing horribly, I think that traditionally a majority of filmic sci-fi is concerned with maintaining the status quo and getting the genies back in the bottles. Something is developed, approaching, on the loose - and its up to the protagonists to stop it. An asteroid is going to hit the earth, aliens are invading, a man has turned himself invisible and is running amok - how do we divert it, repel them, contain him... In other words, there is a threat to consensus reality and by the end of the film or television show, it's been dealt with and nicely put away. Go on with your lives. Nothing to worry about here.
By contrast, literary science fiction is often set after such an event has already happened, sometimes a good deal after, and throws us in medias res into a world in which part of the fun of the narrative is working out how the world in the tale differs from the world we know and part of the theme lies in examining how these changes act as a lens to illuminate some aspect of humanity that we take for granted. So, an asteroid hit the earth and killed everyone over 18, how do the survivors cope? Aliens invaded and are now our overlords - would you let one date your sister? 1/3 of the population is invisible, what new class of people do they form? The intrusion isn't repelled, it's part and parcel of the way things are now going forward. I find this the more honest approach, and underscores on of science fiction's strengths as the genre that embraces the reality and inevitability of change.
There are, of course, examples of both approaches in both mediums. In fact, one of the (many) failures of The Matrix trilogy is that it began from what I'm calling a more literary position of science fiction and transitioned to the filmic. At the end of the first movie, Neo promises to hang up the phone and, "then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world ... without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible." The goal of the protagonists isn't to preserve consensual reality, but to destroy it, by ushering in a world where anyone can do the things he can. But instead of this, the subsequent films shift the emphasis radically away from the Matrix (which is never anything more than a set for agents and rebels to play in henceforth) to saving Zion and restoring the status quo of balance between machine and rebel. We never actually deal with another person who still believes in/is imprisoned by the Matrix's view of reality - and the battle that is fought is all about getting things back to the way they were in the first film. I don't know why this is, though the best explanation I've heard is that 9/11 occurred between the first and second films, forcing Warner to rethink the wisdom of making two more movies staring a group of admitted terrorists out to destroy 1999. (In some ways, V for Vendetta - which was released as public opinion was beginning to change re: the current war and Bush's approval ratings were dipping, and questioning him was no longer being seen as being unpatriotic - is the film the Wachowski's should have made out of Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions and didn't/couldn't at the time). But I digress...
To bring this back to the Jump 225 trilogy: What I personally love about Edelman is that he sets his story not before (and up to the point) of the radical transformation, nor after (and at a comfortable distance from) the transformation, but that he is actually charting the course through the societal singularity, showing how all the institutions of government, business, and society rearrange, realign, and topple. To an extent, Charlie Stross did this with his brilliant and essential Accelerando (though he moves his action off-world for a good deal of it - which is no criticism, it's a different animal), but I've never personally encountered a work that did such a thorough job and concentrated so much of its focus in taking us through the shift point between paradigms. I think that's why so many readers say that the future Edelman presents is a "believable" one, and why I think, though he mixes and matches tropes we've seen before, his approach is so unique.
Paul Cornell is interviewed at io9.com today. He talks about writing for Doctor Who (in the book, webisode and television mediums), Marvel comics (Wisdom, Captain Britain and MI-13, Fantastic Four: True Story), and radio (he's adapting Iain Banks' "The State of the Art" for BBC Radio 4).And yeah, "Catherine Drewe" is going to blow you away.So what are you working on now that you're most excited by?
At the moment, I'm most excited by the fact that I've got a story in all three continuing original SF short story anthologies (non-themed, that is). It's a complicated boast, but I like it. Two of the stories are in a series, the "Jonathan Hamilton" stories, which are in the style of Ian Fleming (the books, not the movies) and are vicious espionage tales set in a world where... well, I know what the difference to history is, but I haven't told the audience entirely yet. At any rate, the 'great game' of political balance in Europe continues, and the great European nations have colonised the solar system, while continuing a delicate cold war against each other.
Those two stories, 'Catherine Drewe' and 'One of our Bastards is Missing' are in Fast Forward 2
from Pyr and the Solaris Book of New SF 3, respectively. The other story, 'Michael Laurits is: DROWNING' is in the second Eclipse collection, which is I think is going to be launched at Calgary this year. I love SF short stories, and I'm hoping to get into doing more.
The parent company has a brand new website. The long overdue overhaul of Prometheus Books' online home debuts today. What do you think?The cover wasn't 100 % visible in the frame, but you'll be seeing a full, clear cover shot in a forthcoming episode. Theodore Judson's book is reportedly part of the Atlantis book club!
Citing what amounts to "creative differences," co-editor Jetse de Vries resigns from Interzone. Jetse is an amazing guy, one who has worked very hard in the cause of good short fiction, and I'm sorry to see him step down. I hope that he emerges somewhere else SOON, because I would hate for our field to have lost his valuable input.
"As for the late Trillennium, in the shadow of the Chaos: broad legends describe the age of the Mass Wars. Bosonic Ashurs had returned from their mastery of the dark light-years, seeking ascendance over all... and were subdued by the mesonic Kanjurs, who in turn were defeated by the Devas--patterned from integral quarks. Devas were then forces to give way to the nootics. Nootic mater was hardly matter at all--more like a binding compact between space, fate, and two out of seven aspects of time.This is a terrifically smart book, but in many places a very funny one as well. While not overlong, it is considerable dense in places, and having finished the book I tend to think that the journey might have been more enjoyable than the destination. But it's a wide-ranging, mind-expanding trip of a book, and something that science fiction needs more of. Recommended.
The nootics--calling themselves Eidolons--gathered survivors from the last artificial galaxies and forced nearly all to convert. The last remnants of old matter were preserved and transported to a number of reliquaries with the longest continuous histories--including Earth."
From an interview in the Village Voice with musician Robyn Hitchcock:I was also struck by his closing thoughts:Tell me the name of a book you've read at least twice.
I've read The Gormenghast Trilogy. Have you read those? Mervyn Peake's The Gormenghast Trilogy. I recommend that to anyone who likes my stuff.
You know, every artist wants to shake hands with the future. It's not just a question of the old ego in the present. It's a desperate attempt by your ego to feel that it will escape time.Hitchcock, of course, contributed two poems to Fast Forward 1.
A long time fan of his music, I highly recommend all his recent work on Yep Roc Records, particularly Spooked and the new retrospective Luminous Groove.
and Fast Forward 2. We also talk about the difference in writing for short form vs novel length, Stephen King's It and The Gunslinger, and much more. Here's the direct link.
