Limitless

Hmmm, think somebody in Hollywood has read Infoquake? "I see 50 scenarios..." At the very least, it's a good proof of concept that an Infoquake movie/tv series could work.

Praise for Geosynchron and the Jump 225 Trilogy

With Geosynchron out now, and io9 selecting Infoquake for their Book of the Month Club discussion, now is a good time to look at some recent praise for Geosynchron and the series it completes:

“The Jump 225 trilogy could well be the best science fiction series of the new millennium. David Louis Edelman deserves his place among the most talented sci-fi authors in the field today. Highly recommended.” Pat's Fantasy Hotlist

“This smart, idiosyncratic blend of cyberpunk, libertarian entrepreneurship, and social engineering will, I think, stand as a seminal work of 21st century SF.” Locus

“Takes the series one level higher, beyond mundanity to true sense-of-wonder SF, so it finally plays on the level of the masters of modern SF… An A+ and so far the best core-SF novel I’ve read in 2010.” Fantasy Book Critic

“The Jump 225 trilogy is a must-read, an instant classic and a work of SF that will help define this first decade of the 21st century, and could cast a long shadow for many years to come.” SFFWorld

“Geosynchron is an engaging conclusion to a thrilling, thought-provoking saga.” io9

Jump into Infoquake with io9

io9 has announced that their bookclub selection for April will be David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, the first volume of his acclaimed Jump 225 trilogy. Here is their review of the third and final volume, the recently released Geosynchron.

Meanwhile, if you haven't checked out David Louis Edelman's work, then perhaps the io9 reading is the excuse you've been waiting for. But if you need further impetus:

Fantasy Book Critic said of Geosynchon that it "plays on the level of the masters of modern sf like A. Reynolds and PF Hamilton," and was "so far the best core-sf novel I've read in 2010."

SFFWorld agreed and said, "The Jump 225 Trilogy is a must read, an instant classic, and a work of SF that will help define this first decade of the 21st Century and could cast a long shadow for many years to come."

Meanwhile, Locus said of the whole trilogy that, "This smart, idiosyncratic blend of cyberpunk, libertarian entrepreneurship, and social engineering will, I think, stand as a seminal work of 21st century SF."

Just a few of the many enthusiastic reviews that are coming in. 

Jump 225 Contest on Goodreads

Attention Goodreads members: You can win a copy of David Louis Edelman's INFOQUAKE, MULTIREAL, and GEOSYNCHRON. All three books in the acclaimed Jump 225 series are being offered in individual contests. Click the links for details and to enter for a chance to win each of the three books. Closed to entries in seven days. US members only. Good luck!

A Word on Infoquake....

Now that David Louis Edelman's Geosynchron, the final book in the Jump 225 series,  is out, we are getting emails from folks who can't find the first book in the trilogy, Infoquake, on Amazon. The reason for this: Amazon has just changed their search results in a baffling and frustrating manner. Now, under the stated purpose of offering "more choices" to consumers, they only display what they deem the "best edition" of a volume in a search string, rather than all editions. (The "best edition" seems to mean the most recent as far as we can tell.)

Thus, in the case of Edelman's Infoquake, the Solaris mmpb, being the most recent, is the only edition they will return in a search. The Pyr edition is still in there, but it's difficult to find. You have to click on "paperback" in the "formats" box, and then it will come up.

But just in case you are having trouble, here it is. And here is Multireal.

I hope that Amazon will restore the full capabilities of their search engine, since the resource that their database used to represent was one of their primary strengths. Meanwhile, I see that the Pyr edition of Infoquake pops right up on Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Pyr Arrives on the Kindle

That's right. After what for me has been an interminably long period of "hurry up and wait," I woke up this morning to discover that our very first Pyr Kindle books have miraculously appeared. Five titles are available for download in the Kindle store. Oddly, it contains a second book in a series and a third book in a series, but I think these are just the first few to appear. There are a lot more coming in back of this, and the conversion process is on Amazon's end, so I expect we'll see more pop up in the near future as they get to them (and I'll report here as I see them.) Meanwhile, many will be happy to learn that the often-requested Infoquake is in this first list of offerings.

The books:

Silver Screen

Starship: Pirate

Going Under (Quantum Gravity, Book 3)

Infoquake (Volume I of the Jump 225 trilogy)

Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge

The World of Infoquake Gets Closer to Reality

The latest TEDtalks reminds me of nothing so much as the future-world portrayed in Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan and David Louis Edelman's Infoquakeand MultiRealnovels. This is Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group. Wow!

Too Much Pyr News to Keep Track of!

You go out of town for a week, and look what happens:

Ian McDonald's Brasylhas made the short list for the Nebula Awards!! Meanwhile over on Boing Boing, fellow-nominee Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) reviews Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days:

"Ian McDonald is one of science fiction's finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for. ...Cyberabad Days has it all: spirituality, technology, humanity, love, sex, war, environmentalism, politics, media -- all blended together to form a manifesto of sorts, a statement about how technology shapes and is shaped by all the wet, gooey human factors. Every story is simultaneously a cracking yarn, a thoughtful piece of technosocial criticism, and a bag of eyeball kicks that'll fire your imagination. The field is very lucky to have Ian McDonald working in it."

And Nick Gevers interviews McDonald on SciFi Wire:

"The title Cyberabad Days is a deliberate echo of the Arabian Nights. The stories are fairy tales of New Delhi. River was an Indian—novel, fat, many-voiced, wide-screen; Cyberabad Days is tales. Mumbai movies tell stories in ways that challenge our Western aesthetics and values. They're not afraid of sentiment, they're not afraid of big acting, or putting in song and dance, because Bollywood cinema's not supposed to be a mimetic art form. It's not about realism—that most pernicious of Western values—it's a show."

On io9, Charlie Jane Anders interviews Infoquakeand MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman:

"I began with a vision of a futuristic world, and worked backwards to figure out how everything came together. Most of the backstory came about when I was writing the early chapters of Infoquake and just started randomly filling things in. When I'd get stuck writing the story proper, I'd just spend some time writing background articles. This kind of thing has always been attractive to me. I was the kid who bought AD&D modules just because I liked to read them, even though I didn't have anyone to play AD&D with. I'm the guy who always liked The Silmarillion better than The Lord of the Rings."

On the Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast episode 75, host Shaun Farrel interviews End of the Centuryauthor Chris Roberson! Here's the direct download link. (And, as a reminder, here is part one and part two of my massive Tor.com piece on Roberson's entire career. Part two wasn't up when I left town.)

These guys are making it hard for me to get caught up!

Towards Perfection: Infoquake Inspired Artwork

Inspired by David Louis Edelman's Infoquake,and used for the cover to the newsletter for Camp Hill/Harrisburg, PA's SF&F reading group, Watch the Skies, for January 2009. Here's the link to the artwork, on Flickr.

Two out of Two Anders Agree: MultiReal is Brilliant

In an earlier post, Mark Chadbourn asks "Should Scientists Forget Space?", citing an article on the UK's former Chief Scientist, Sir David King, who says that we are in need of a "re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society's inner attitudes towards science and technology." Sir King wants us to forgo experiments in space and in CERN in favor of addressing more immediate concerns at him. I've already given my opinion in the comments of Mark's post, but it's interesting to me to contrast it here with Charlie Jane Anders' io9.com review of David Louis Edelman's Infoquakeand MultiReal(books one and two of his Jump 225 trilogy).

Charlie Jane beings the review, which is titled "MultiReal is your antidote to science-bashing scifi," by saying, "With so much mass-media science fiction featuring anti-science heroes who battle to stop science from "going too far," it's great to read a really smart novel about a hero who's fighting to save scientific progress from being suppressed." She characterizes the books as being "about the nature of technological progress" and says, "Where MultiReal really shines, however, is in the debates over the ethics of this reality-twisting software. There really is no right answer to the question of how society should deal with software that 'liberates you from cause and effect,' and the sequence where Natch's mentor debates the government's attorneys is easily my favorite part of both books. It's a complex issue, and Edelman draws it out enough that you can see how it applies to today's real-life challenges: should we try to suppress new technologies, should we regulate them heavily? Is it possible to suppress new knowledge after all? Does information really want to be free? It's a lot more nuanced than the 'science iz scary OMG' idea that seems to be popular in media SF right now.

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.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist Interviews David Louis Edelman

Patrick St-Denis has just posted an interview with me on his popular Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist blog. Subjects covered include Infoquake, MultiReal, Lou Anders and Pyr, my strengths as a storyteller, the John W. Campbell Award, cover art, websites and interactivity with readers, the trend of high-quality British SF, and whether SF will ever get proper literary recognition by snooty academics cowering up in their white towers.

But the best part of the whole thing is that Pat has seen fit, unprompted, to post this neat little Photoshopped poster that puts the full force and weight of Uncle Sam behind getting you to read Infoquake and MultiReal. And really, ain’t that how it should be?

Brief excerpt from the interview:

What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
I feel like I’m very good at the worldbuilding aspect of things. Really, structure in general. The trilogy has layers and layers of metaphor in it, and I’m really quite proud of the way it all works together as an organic whole. My tendency is to wander off into history and background and structure, and sometimes I have to curb that impulse. If I had written The Lord of the Rings, it would have been three whole books of the Council of Elrond, and nobody would have read it.

Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write Infoquake and its sequel?

Yes, I wanted to avoid the typical mindless action set-pieces that you find in a lot of bad SF, and bad novels in general. I really wanted to write an exciting novel about business. A lot of authors just use the business aspect as window dressing, and then quickly throw their characters into the same car chases and murder mysteries and gunfights. I wanted to write books that really are about the workplace, where the excitement revolves around product demos and marketing meetings and government hearings and that kind of thing. So that’s what I’ve tried to do.

David Louis Edelman: Wiping the Slate Clean

The wonderful Rob H. Bedford interviews Infoquakeand MultiRealauthor David Louis Edelman for SFFWorld today.

Loved this bit on worldbuilding:

Science Fiction is a language of mirrors by which we (readers and writers) can compare and contrast our own society and its problems. This is clearly the case with the Jump 225 trilogy, so when you created this future history, how necessary do you feel it was to sort of destroy everything and restart?

Wiping the slate clean with an Armageddon scenario five hundred years before the events of Jump 225 was really just a narrative trick. It enabled me to focus on the things I wanted to focus on -- namely, software and business and sociology -- and conveniently ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about. AIs? Boom! They were destroyed in the Autonomous Revolt. Nuclear weapons? Boom! Used in the Revolt and then subsequently abandoned. Cloning and genetic engineering? Same thing.

It’s one of the things science fiction and fantasy do really well. If I had set the Jump 225 trilogy in today’s world, I would have gotten sidetracked by lots of issues that I just didn’t feel like dealing with. It’s funny, but I think setting the books in an imaginary world allowed me to get a tighter focus on the real world.

And this bit made me laugh:

If you could take any pre-existing fictional character and plunk them into the events of the Jump 225 trilogy, who would it be?

Dr. Strange. He’s a guy who hops dimensions all the time. He ought to know how to handle MultiReal.

But you should read it all, right?

The Latest from Edelman

David Louis Edelman is funnier than I could ever be:

David Louis Edelman Writing News: May 2008 www.davidlouisedelman.com www.davidlouisedelman.com/blog www.infoquake.net www.multireal.net Something different, you say? No, there’s nothing different about this newsletter... why do you ask? Okay, yes, there is something different. I've redesigned the newsletter to match the new look and feel of my personal website. The link for which is now very prominently displayed at the top of the email, along with the address of my blog and my books. Plus I’ve made it very easy for you to order copies of the books on Amazon, just by clicking on the links in the right column. Funny how that capitalism thing works. (Can’t see anything different? Either you’re not using an HTML email client or you need to click the “Show Images” link or button to see all the pretty colors.) New Website Designs. Go ahead, click on those links at the top of the newsletter and browse around. This email will be waiting for you when you get back. My new personal website is a lot more colorful, better organized, and easier to read. And the Infoquake and MultiReal websites now show off the beautiful artwork that (Hugo Award nominee) Stephan Martiniere has provided for the books. In addition, you’ll find the entire first eight chapters of MultiReal up on that website, for the first time anywhere. Nick Sagan Praises MultiReal. Nick Sagan, author of Idlewild, Edenborn, and Everfree, screenwriter for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, and former child ambassador to the universe on the Voyager Golden Record, has read and blurbed Infoquake and MultiReal. Here’s what the esteemed Mr. Sagan has to say: “David Louis Edelman’s vision of the future is so alive and full of energy the pages are practically buzzing. Wonderfully intricate with smart, satisfying complexity, Infoquake and its sequel MultiReal serve up a world where mindbending technologies promise a freedom nearly as endless as the Machiavellian ambitions of those who would control them.” That rocks, no? Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist: Infoquake “One of the Very Best SF Debuts I Have Ever Read.” Pat of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has given Infoquake the kind of rave review that every author wants to get. “David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake just might be one of the very best science fiction debuts I have ever read,” says Pat. “The book deserves all the praise it has garnered, and then some!” It just goes on from there. (And FYI, Pat is also hosting a giveaway contest for copies of the mass market paperback. I don’t know when it ends, so if you’re interested, you'd better hurry...) More Audio Podcasts Available. I intended to finish podcasting the first seven chapters of Infoquake about two years ago, when the book was first released in trade paperback. For one reason or another, I only got up to chapter 4. I blame it on the cocaine, or the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, or perhaps Martians. But now I've posted MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and Windows Media audio versions of the first seven chapters of Infoquake, plus the first five chapters of MultiReal. All read by yours truly. Go to the Infoquake audio page and the MultiReal audio page to download them. Other Reviews. The Washington, DC area cable science fiction show Fast Forward reviews Infoquake, saying “As interesting as his world is, it is Edelman’s characters that make this book shine”... Graeme of Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review called my story “Mathralon” one of his two favorites in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two in his review ... and Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column talks about (but doesn’t actually review) MultiReal, saying “Edelman’s vision of a corporate future seems ever more relevant as each day goes by.” Upcoming Appearances. Balticon — May 23-26 in Hunt Valley, MD Readercon — July 17-20 in Burlington, MA Don't forget: the Solaris mass market edition of Infoquake comes out next month! (I’ve already received my first copy; See my blog for a peek at it.) And then in July, the Pyr edition of MultiReal hits the stands. So keep your eyes peeled and prepare your mind to be utterly blown. To quote the Zen philosopher Keanu Reeves: Whoa. Towards Perfection, David Louis Edelman www.davidlouisedelman.com Infoquake • Website • Amazon MultiReal • Website • Amazon The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2 • Amazon

Infoquake: Science Fiction's John Grisham

There's a new review of David Louis Edelman's Infoquakeup on Grasping for the Wind, which proclaims "What John Grisham has done with the legal thriller, Edelman has done with business." They describe Infoquake as "an adventure filled narrative," and conclude, "Infoquake is well-written and well-cadenced. The climax is fulfilling and exciting, yet it is only a speech, and a marketing one at that. Edelman has so well woven the elements of his plot together that Natch’s simple speech has a much power and excitement to it as another science fiction story’s destruction of a spaceship or a fantasy’s evil overlord dying hideously at the hands of a hero. That takes skill to write, and Edelman has it in spades. I highly recommend this novel."