Book Promotion

Readercon 18 Report

I’ll admit that I’m fairly new to the science fiction con circuit, but having been to Readercon twice now, I have no hesitation crowning it my favorite. The panels are generally high-minded and intellectually stimulating; the guest list is always first-rate; and best of all, there isn’t a single dork with a Klingon outfit or a lightsaber to be found.

Of course, the flip side is that once the bar closes at 12:30 pm, there’s pretty much nothing to do but go back to your room and sleep. Peter Watts, Jenny Rappaport, and I tried to find a party after last call on Saturday, only to get accosted by a very angry woman asking “us people” to keep the noise down. When we did find the one open party in the hotel, security arrived two minutes later to shut it down.

Highlights of my weekend include:

  • Getting to ogle Mary Robinette Kowal‘s steampunk laptop (as recently featured on Boing Boing) and listening to plenty of stories about her beaver. And how did I thank her for being one of the coolest people on Earth? By going into an unstoppable coughing fit during her panel on techniques for reading aloud and having to duck out of the room.
  • David Louis Edelman and Scott Edelman at Readercon 18Sharing many a beer, many a story, and many a laugh with George Mann and Christian Dunn of Solaris Books. The fact that George and Christian accepted my SF short story “Mathralon” for publication in their forthcoming second Solaris Anthology of Science Fiction helped my mood quite a bit too. I introduced George and Christian to Mary Robinette Kowal, which may have been a mistake, because the rest of the con they kept making obscure comments about clockwork monkeys.
  • Continuing to confound the world by appearing at the same con with Scott Edelman (see photo to the right) and insisting that we’re not related.
  • Sharing a panel on alternative points-of-view in fiction with (among others) Peter Watts (of Blindsight fame) and gossiping about the biz with him and Jenny Rappaport over beers until closing time. Turns out Peter is just a fabulously nice guy with a very wry sense of humor and a big ol’ Canadian accent.
  • Gabbing over meals and beers with Matthew Jarpe, author of the David Hartwell-edited debut novel Radio Freefall, and listening to his humorous reading from same.
  • Breakfasting with the divine Elizabeth Bear not once, but twice. I will even forgive her for accidentally calling me “Scott” during one conversation.
  • Discussing J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, among other things, with Realms of Fantasy slushmaster and all-around nice guy Doug Cohen.
  • Watching fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon promote the hell out of her new novel, Bright of the Sky, through readings, panels, talks, fliers, signings, ads, and who knows what else. I also got a chance to share drinks and a ride back to Logan Airport with Kay and fellow Seattle-area author Louise Marley.

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My Readercon Schedule

This weekend, I’ll be at Readercon 18 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Readercon’s kind of special for me, since last year’s Readercon was my first exposure to the SF con scene. (Read my recap of Readercon 17.) Last year, I headed off to Readercon knowing literally one person two people in the SF field: my editor, Lou Anders and my copy editor, Deanna Hoak. This year, I can look at the programming schedule and see all kinds … Read more

Penguicon 5.0 Wrapup

For me, the defining moment of the Penguicon science-fiction-and-open-source-software convention this past weekend came on Saturday night in the bar. Nick Sagan and I wandered in already fairly blitzed from boozing in another bar, and were quickly joined by Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily. People started streaming in. And at one point, I found myself sitting halfway between a) Charles Stross talking about the socioeconomic policy failures of the John Major administration, and b) John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear talking about Rob Sawyer in taffeta.

So there’s Penguicon in a nutshell, from my perspective: one part serious business, two parts goofy SFnal fun.

The programming seemed slanted towards the science fiction side of things, with relatively little in the way of crossover. There were panels on Explaining PostgreSQL and panels on Pirates, Ninja, Jedi, and Dwarves, but not a huge amount of mashup between the two. Luckily most of the SF authors on hand were technogeeks themselves (e.g. Charles Stross and Karl Schroeder) or at least pseudo-technogeeks (e.g. me).

Jay Maynard, the Tron GuyBut the folks wandering the halls seemed to lean heavily towards the SF fanboy (and fangirl) sphere. You had the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Character from Tron (pictured to the right), the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like Zorro, the Chubby Guy Who Filks Like a Zen Master, the Not-at-All-Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Jedi, and the Attack of the Thousand Chubby Women Showing Enormous (And Occasionally Inappropriate) Amounts of Cleavage. As for the technogeeks, occasionally you’d see some scrawny, bespectacled soul with a Linux advocacy t-shirt huddled over his laptop in the corner.

Of the half-dozen cons I’ve been to in this past year, Penguicon certainly seemed to be one of the most organized. The ops booth was clearly marked and continuously staffed, and the programming went off pretty much where and when the program book said it would. If there were glitches — and Programming Wrangler Matt Arnold assured me there were some of those — they were largely invisible to me. It definitely helped that the Troy Hilton was very accommodating. Penguicon seems to have taken up pretty much the whole place, and a number of rooms at overflow hotels as well. Which means that just about all of the programming took place in one long, curving hallway, with the room parties and the con suites one quick flight of stairs away. The only obvious snafu I could see was the fact that there were loud anime movies screening right next door to quiet discussions about Technological Singularities, and the panelists would have to speak up to be heard.

Among the folks I got to spend a lot of time with were John Scalzi and his wife Krissy, the former of whom is about to embark on a 492-city tour for his new novel The Last Colony; Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily, the former of whom is on Locus’s shortlist for Best First Novel; and Nick Sagan, screenwriter, SF trilogy novelist, and just fabulously and terrifically nice guy.

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Rapid Fire SF Reading in DC Wednesday Night

Tomorrow (Wednesday) night, April 11, I’ll have the privilege of reading with a bunch of other science fiction folks in the Washington, DC area. It’ll be held at the Tenley Interim Branch of the DC Public Library at 4200 Wisconsin Avenue at 7:30 p.m as part of their National Poetry Month programming. (Note that the reading is at 4200 Wisconsin, and not 4450 Wisconsin, which is what the Washington Post printed over the weekend. Darn … Read more

KGB Reading Wrap-up

I arrived back late last night from my trip to New York for the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at the KGB Bar. Co-organizer Ellen Datlow was kind enough to post photos of the event on her Flickr account. The reading, I felt, went fabulous. At 40 people, the reading audience was both the largest and most attentive I’ve ever been in front of. I read my story “Mathralon,” which, as I told the audience, is … Read more

Reading at the KGB Bar This Wednesday

As a reminder to those in the New York area, I will be reading this Wednesday night at the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at the KGB Bar in Manhattan. I’m essentially the warm-up act for the legendary Carol Emshwiller, she who hath won the Philip K. Dick and World Fantasy Awards and received multiple Nebula and James Tiptree Jr. nominations as well. What will I be reading? I was told that organizers Ellen Datlow and … Read more

“Infoquake”: The Bad Reviews

I’ve noticed a few other authors posting links to bad reviews of their novels on their websites. By bad reviews, I don’t mean poorly written or incomprehensible reviews — I mean reviews that tear your book a new asshole. I mean reviews that compare your book unfavorably to various types of animal dung. There’s one site I visited recently where the author had three columns displaying the “good,” the “bad,” and the “ugly” reviews of his work.

I always thought this behavior was kind of peculiar. We’re all aware that no single book will please everybody. I’ve eagerly pressed copies of Dune and Neuromancer into the hands of intelligent, well-read, open-minded people who later told me these were lousy books. So obviously, even if your novel emits white light and a heavenly choir chants every time you crack it open, there are going to be people who think it sucks big time. Why emphasize the negative?

Infoquake Book CoverI think I’ve discovered now why authors do that.

Imagine you’re sitting in the Coliseum in ancient Rome and two gladiators come out of the pen. One of them’s slick and unblemished with hardly a mark on him. The other guy’s got scars all over his arms and he’s missing a few teeth. Which one are you gonna bet on? I’m betting on the guy with the scars. Why? Because a scar is evidence of a tough fight that you came out of alive. It’s a mark of experience. And when we see the clean and unmarked gladiator, we just don’t believe that this guy has gone through fight after fight without making a single mistake. We figure that he’s just too young and green to have earned his scars yet.

It’s the same thing with being a novelist. If you haven’t had people dislike your novel, either a) you’ve accomplished something that nobody on this Earth has yet accomplished, or b) not enough people have read your book yet.

Lately I’ve been seeing some negative reviews of Infoquake cropping up on the web, and I’m in the mood to show them off like a gladiator shows off his scars. There was a rush of great reviews for the book when it first came out, and I’ve been wondering how much those reviews colored other people’s readings. I wonder how many people picked up Infoquake because they had heard good things about it, and were tremendously disappointed, but just didn’t feel like bucking the trend.

So I’m going to list here some of the bad reactions I’ve read over the web and some of the bad comments I’ve heard about the novel. (Of course, I encourage you to sample some of the reviews from the praise page to balance out the criticism.)

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Hugo/Campbell Nomination Deadlines

Just a friendly public service announcement that just so coincidentally happens to pertain to, well, um, me. The deadline to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. Campbell Best New Science Fiction Writer Award is not until March 3, 2007. Plenty of time. However… in order to nominate someone, you must have either been an attending or supporting member of last year’s WorldCon in Anaheim, CA or this year’s WorldCon in … Read more