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Alan Moore's Advice for Young Artists

Via Chris Roberson, Alan Moore giving advice for aspiring creatives:

My WorldCon/Denvention3 Schedule

Here's my "final" schedule for the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, Denver, Colorado, August 6th to 10th:

Wednesday 2:30 PM
33 Cover Art in the Internet Age
CCC - Korbel 4CD
“Don't judge a book by its cover.” How does this maxim work in the internet age when books are sold online (with small images of the cover) or even more so in e-books.

John Picacio, (m)Laura Givens, Lou Anders

Wednesday 4pm
57 Signing (75 minutes)
CCC - Hall D
Cynthia Felice, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Lou Anders, Mike Resnick, Warren Hammond

Friday 9AM
Stroll With the Stars
A gentle, friendly 1 mile stroll with some of your favorite Authors, Artists & Editors. Leaving daily. 9AM, from the Big Blue Bear in front of the Colorado Convention Center,
returning before other Programming begins, definitely before 10.

Lou Anders, Paul Cornell, John Picacio, Stephen H. Segal

Friday 11:30 AM
304 Kaffeeklatsch
CCC - Korbel 4E

Elizabeth Moon, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, Lou Anders

Friday 5:30 PM
416 Pyr Books Presentation
CCC - Korbel 4CD

Lou Anders & authors and artists

Friday 8Pm - 11PM
Sheraton Party Floor
Pyr Party in Honor of Ian McDonald

Saturday 10AM
455 The Comeback of Original Anthology Collections
CCC - Korbel 1C
New collections of original stories are appearing more frequently now than over the recent past. Original Anthology Collections may be substituting for or supplementing magazines as a market for short fiction. Why are we seeing this and what can we expect in the near future?
Ellen Datlow, Jonathan Strahan, (m)Lee Martindale, Lou Anders

Sunday 1pm
655 The Coming Thing - what's next and newest in SF
CCC - Room 502
Panelists discuss what is next up in the SF pipeline.
What new crazy ideas and approaches should we be looking for? What's going to be popular next year, and after that?

Charles Stross, (m)Daniel Abraham, Lou Anders

Mind Meld: Favorite Examples of World Building

The guys at SFSignal are back with another Mind Meld question, this one asking, "Which sf/f story is your favorite example of worldbuilding? Why?"

Answers from such notables as Joe Abercrombie, Karl Schroeder, Nancy Kress, Orson Scott Card, Mike Brotherton, Jeffrey Ford, Jeff Vandermeer, Mike Resnick, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Jeff Somers, Paul Levinson, and Yours Truly.

This bit from Orson Scott Card caught my eye: "Science fiction is, in many ways, DEFINED by world creation. Anybody who's any good in this field knows how to create worlds, at least well enough to get by. So what we tend to value are the worlds that surprise us. The master of the surprising yet apt detail is Bruce Sterling; I point to his "Green Days in Brunei" as an exemplar."

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?

World Con in the News

Colorado Spring's The Gazette has an article on "Sci-fi writers, fans gear up for World Con." Surprisingly respectful, with quotes from Kevin J. Anderson, Paul Cornell, Lois McMaster Bujold, others.

Behold the Man: John Picacio

John Picacio guests on Stargate: Atlantis executive producer Joseph Mallozzi's blog. John answers questions from Mallozzi's readers - all his comments are well worth checking out.

Meanwhile, here's a taste: "There’s another shift that happened around the early-90’s, right around the time when Chip Kidd and the Knopf design staff was making a big splash with their Random House covers. I think an unfair stigma was placed on illustration as being an element that 'limited' a book to a genre audience, and publishers therefore relied more and more on stock photography and in-house designers to create covers. In the process, they lost sight of the full potential of original drawings and paintings to sell product in the marketplace. Kidd’s a smart designer, but I often wonder if he perhaps helped spread that stigma in interviews because it glorified designers like him, at the expense of illustration. The fact is, publishing still thinks this way today and I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that stunts the growth of ideas, profit, and outreach. Somewhere along the way there, publishers generated this self-fulfilling prophecy that illustration limited audiences. Perhaps it’s just a nice story that helps them cut costs and save in-house jobs? The fact is, there are dozens of examples of illustrators who didn’t limit audiences, but instead transcended time and context, and expanded audience and profit. The list is long and diverse – try J.C. Leyendecker in the 1910’s, Norman Rockwell in the 1940’s, the aforementioned Powers in the 1950’s, and Dave McKean in the 1990’s, to name only a few off the top of my head. We’re talking about revolutionary cover artists of their time with huge critical and commercial impact that exploded the growth of their publications beyond the existing audience. So if it’s possible in those eras, why say that today’s mainstream audiences aren’t sophisticated enough to embrace progressive, original illustration?"

Handicapping the Hugos

Interesting discussion on Tor.com on who should win the Best Novel Hugo. And very gratifying to see how many people feel Brasylshould win. Incidentally, refresh the page until you see the cool ad that Tor was kind enough to offer us space for and which our designer Amy Greenan was cool enough to put together at very short notice.

And hey, however the Hugos turn out, we're thrilled to be in such distinguished company.

Got MultiReal?

From Rob's Blog o'Stuff: “I posted my review of MultiRealtoday, the second (wonderful) novel in David Louis Edelman’s excellent Jump 225 trilogy. I know I tend to throw around the superlatives when I like something, but I try to be genuine with what I like. David’s novels are no exception…His books really work for me on a lot of levels…Where does MultiReal stand in this year’s slew of [SF] book releases? At this point it’s right at the top with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother."

From POD People, TCM Reviews, July 21, 2008: “Pyr is a new, up-and-coming science fiction press, and David Louis Edelman is one of their hot new stars…[MultiReal] is full of Big Ideas, in the best tradition of science fiction…Edelman is a programmer in real life, and his understanding of the process informs the book. Multireal is a deep book, full of plots and counter-plots, with a stunning vision of the future. It manages what seems to be impossible, making the act of computer programming exciting, while reflecting on the nature of government and business. This is high science fiction at its finest. RATING 10/10

'Nuff said.

Heard Round the Web

On her blog, science fiction author Nancy Kress discusses, "The Point of Fiction." She opinions, "It is: to decide what matters. Fiction explores this point through all sorts of subsidiary questions: What is worth expending effort on, struggling to obtain, sacrificing other things for, maybe even dying for?"

I am interested in this, and in how it can be applied to the specific Point of Science Fiction.

Meanwhile, Of Blog of the Fallen asks "Do SF/F authors have to be SF/F fans in order to be good writers?" Lots of interesting comments, and lots of names you may recognize in the comments as well - including Solaris book's Mark Newton and The First Law trilogy scribe Joe Abercrombie. My own opinion, expressed a few times already therein, that while there is no point reinventing the wheel, a good book is its own justification. And a bad book, well...

Finally, speaking of Joe Abercrombie, here he is speaking to SFX. A sample, from his advice to writers: "The best thing I've found, if you're not writing anything good, is just to sit in front of it and write something bad. Put in some chair time. Then when you come back later in a better frame of mind, you may find some gems in the rubbish you produced. You may even find what you wrote isn't that bad, and with a bit of sharpening up you have pure gold...”