Prepping for WorldCon

I am busily preparing to get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Anaheim, California for the WorldCon convention. I’m going to attempt to blog from the con once or twice, but it’s certainly possible I’ll be too busy drinking in the bar to get around to it.

For those who want to know where to find me, here’s a schedule:

  • Friday at 2:30 PM: Pyr Group Panel with Lou Anders, Alan Dean Foster, Kay Kenyon, Ian McDonald, John Picacio, Mike Resnick, Chris Roberson, Dave Seeley, Joel Shepherd, and Sean Williams.
  • Saturday at 2:00 PM: Pyr Group Signing at the Borderland Books table, with Ian McDonald, Joel Shepherd, and Sean Williams
  • Sunday at 10:00 AM: Unofficial DeepGenre Group Reading with Kevin Andrew Murphy, Madeleine Robins, Sherwood Smith, and (possibly) Kate Elliott. (Officially this is Kevin’s reading spot, so shhh, don’t tell the con organizers.)

I will also be wandering around passing out free promotional CDs for Infoquake. It’s basically the stuff from the website, but it’s just about all of the stuff from the website on one handy-dandy CD. So if you’re interested, don’t be shy — come mug me in the hallway and ask for a CD or five. Here’s what you’ll get:

  • Chapters 1-7 of the book (HTML, Word, PDF, and text)
  • Chapters 1-4 of the book in audio read by the author (WMA, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis formats)
  • The complete appendices from the book
  • Large JPEG of the book cover

A few last links before I go:

  • My first piece for the Futurismic blog is up: Backing Up Things, a piece about digitizing objects like Michelangelo’s David. Quote: “What things would you digitize if you could slap down a few hundred bucks for a 3D laser scanner at Office Depot? What would you want to back up and keep safe from that potentially devastating house fire?”
  • Meme Therapy’s review of Infoquake is now up. Sayeth the Meme Therapists: “With his debut novel Infoquake, David Louis Edelman constructs a believable yet highly imaginative vision of the future…. Edelman has taken several societal trends and extrapolated them to their logical conclusions in constructing his vision of the future, and from this he comes up with something that is pretty unique…. Infoquake definitely hooks in the reader, and I for one can’t wait to get my grubby wee paws on the second installment.”
  • I’ve gotten a preview of the Infoquake review in Fantasy Magazine #4: “There’s always the risk that a complicated setting will overwhelm character and story, but Edelman avoids this pitfall, evoking a surprising amount of empathy for the amoral yet oddly charming Natch, and injecting a tremendous amount of suspense into what is essentially a saga of corporate politics…. The novel also addresses weighty themes: the destructive price of greed, the unchanging relentlessness of the human drive to innovate and to compete…. An entertaining and intelligent debut that should leave readers eager for more.”
  • Rob Bedford of SFFWorld has called Infoquake “easily one of the best of the year, and maybe last couple of years” on his Blog o’ Stuff. When the full review goes up, I’ll link to it.