Science Fiction

A Self-Serving Award Nomination Suggestion

Since John Scalzi has already gotten the ball rolling by pointedly mentioning that his novels The Ghost Brigades and The Android’s Dream are eligible for the Hugo Award this year, I’m going to follow suit by pointedly mentioning that I, David Louis Edelman, am eligible for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award.

So I hereby declare with all requisite humility that I would like to get nominated for the John W. Campbell Award this year, so I can get my ass handed to me forthwith by Brandon Sanderson, who will probably win.

Campbell Award(My book Infoquake is eligible for the Hugo and the Nebula, too, of course, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead I’m going to go the Peter Jackson route and try to sweep every award in existence when Geosynchron, the last book in the trilogy, comes out. I really think I deserve a Tony Award, don’t you?)

So how do you nominate someone for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award? I really have only the foggiest idea. But here’s what the Writertopia site says on its John W. Campbell Eligible Authors page:

To be able to nominate a writer for the 2007 award, you must have either been an attending member of the 2006 Worldcon in Los Angeles or be a supporting or attending member of the 2007 Worldcon in Japan by Jan. 31, 2007.

The nominating deadline will probably be March 2007. We will update the site as more information becomes available.

To be able to vote for the award, you must be a supporting or attending member of the 2007 Worldcon. If you are not a member of the Nippon 2007 Worldcon and wish to vote, you must purchase a supporting membership or an attending membership before January 31.

This should prove to be an interesting year for the awards regardless, given that the only eligible voters are those who are traveling to Japan for Worldcon, or who have purchased a supporting membership. If I were an optimist, I could say this works to my advantage, because theoretically the pool of voters will be somewhat skewed from the normal representation. On the other hand, the fact that Infoquake isn’t available at all in Asia except by mail order does put a dent in that optimism.

If you browse through the list of eligible authors, you’ll see that there’s quite an impressive list of newcomers there as well. The Writertopia folks haven’t updated the page with the final eligible list yet, so I’m unclear who’s still eligible and who’s not. It would kind of be nice to have a succinct list by, say, January 31. But I’m on there myself, so I can’t complain.

This will be Brandon Sanderson‘s second year of eligibility for the award, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he won it. I got a brief opportunity to meet Brandon at last year’s Worldcon, and he certainly seemed like a nice guy. Orson Scott Card called his debut novel Elantris “the finest novel of fantasy to be written in many years,” and plenty of other reviewers have followed suit. His follow-up Mistborn has been receiving a ton of accolades as well.

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Why Did You Buy That Book?

One of the regular commenters on the DeepGenre blog I belong to, Jellyn Andrews, posted this in response to author Elaine Isaak‘s comment on some of her promotional methods:

Elaine, I wanted to let you know you’re doing something right. My father and I were at Albacon and attended your reading where you did the drawing for prizes. So now I’m on your mailing list and I recognize your name. I think it was your appeal to bloggers on the fliers you posted that initially caught my attention.

And my father also recognizes your name now, because when we were in Borders Express, he took note when he saw your books. You’d been in there and signed them. And one of the staff overheard us talking about it and joined in. I think he said he went to high school with you, so he liked to promote your work whenever he could.

We often hear in the book business that word of mouth is what sells books, and this comment is a prime indicator of that. In fact, this comment shows that a number of Elaine’s promotional efforts came together to help her out here: word of mouth, a convention reading, a mailing list, fliers, a book signing, and encouraging old friends/classmates to act as evangelists. (Of course, I’m unclear from this comment whether Jellyn or her father actually bought a book, but we’ll let that slide.)

Traditional marketers have a variety of tools they use to test the efficacy of their methods. If you’ve ever registered your DVD player with the manufacturer, you’ve given the manufacturer vital information about where you bought it, what influenced you to buy it, and what factors you took into consideration. Booksellers don’t have that option, because the incentive for the customer isn’t there; you’re very, very unlikely to encounter a defective book that needs returning or servicing. (Although remind me to tell you the story about the time I was trapped on a cruise to the Bahamas with a defective copy of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld that was missing 50 pages.)

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PhilCon 2006 Wrapup

I’ve mentioned before that I’m new to science fiction conventions. ReaderCon 2006 was the first con I ever attended (if you don’t count an experience at Balticon in 1990 that’s better left unexplained). That makes this weekend’s PhilCon 2006 only my fourth con ever.

So don’t take my word for it when I say that PhilCon was a tad disorganized. Take the word of other veteran congoers I talked to who said they wouldn’t be coming back to PhilCon. The word “sucks” was tossed around more than once. The best opinion that could be heard came from an insider, who said that “there have been better PhilCons, and there have been worse.”

Keep in mind that my circle of friends is pretty much confined to the Literary track. You know, the people who were more excited about seeing Charles Stross than dressing up like their favorite Buffy character. To the gamers and the filkers and the people dressed up in chain mail and goth makeup, PhilCon might very well have been a blast. But to the Literary folks, the common wisdom was that PhilCon 2006 was a bust.

Some of the frustrations included:

  • A rather lackluster keynote interview with Charles Stross. There was nothing lackluster about Stross himself, who appeared relaxed and humorous and fully engaged. But the MCing by Darrell Schweitzer was quite haphazard, as if someone either threw him a microphone at the last minute or he lost his prepared list of questions.
  • None of the moderator assignments were given out ahead of time. I arrived at PhilCon on Friday only to discover from the program booklet that I was moderating two panels that weekend. Some moderators didn’t realize they had been assigned to moderate until they arrived at the panel.
  • Room changes were rampant. Everything was constantly moving around at the last minute. And because the panels were spread liberally among at least five floors of confusingly labeled rooms, salons, parlours, ballrooms, and (in at least one instance) the middle of some random hallway, finding one’s way around was close to impossible. My understanding from various sources is that the Sheraton hotel was mostly to blame for this.
  • The hotel closed the bar on Saturday night for a private function involving some very well-dressed people who had some involvement with Barbados. No bar to hang out at on Saturday night at an SF con? Lame.
  • Parties died down early. The SFWA party was the place to be on Saturday night, but even that was on life support by midnight. When you hear lots of people say on Sunday that they retired to their rooms a little after 11 p.m., you know that something’s a little askew with the social vibe.
  • The reading schedule bordered on the farcical. I had hoped to do a reading from Infoquake at PhilCon. But as late as Saturday noon — halfway through the con — we were being told that the reading schedule was “still being worked out.” Finally, mid-afternoon on Saturday, a sign-up board materialized at the top of the escalator with slots for each hour and a few names scribbled in (illegibly, in one case). How could one sign up to do a reading? Well, if you could decipher the (also pen-scrawled) message in the bottom corner of the sign, you would be directed to someone in room 1200-something who could get you on the list. Where were the actual readings held? Who knows? The room listed in the program booklet was wrong, and the sign didn’t say.
  • Bizarre panel assignments. I’m not sure how I ended up moderating “Teleportation Is More Than a Way of Getting Somewhere” and “Navigating Amazon,” while I wasn’t even on panels for “Blogging and SF” and “Websites for Writers.” I suppose this could have just been me, however.
  • Nobody in the dealer’s room was carrying Infoquake. I’ve just about given up on getting con dealers to carry my book. The only people on the programming they go out of their way to stock are the guests of honor. Hell, it doesn’t matter, I get a much better margin hand-selling them anyway.

But don’t let my list of gripes give you the impression that I didn’t enjoy myself despite the confusion. Some highlights:

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Whose Books Do You Buy in Hardcover?

I happened to look at the listing for Infoquake on Amazon the other day and see that there are 57 (update: actually only 19) used copies for sale there, going as low as $7.50 per. People sometimes ask if I “mind” them purchasing used copies of my book at a discount rather than paying the full $15 cover price for a brand-spanking-new copy. And my answer is always “no, buy the book anywhere you can … Read more

Quake Up Your Book Group

If your book group wants to read and discuss “Infoquake,” just e-mail me and I’ll join the discussion by phone. If the members of your book group have purchased five or more copies of “Infoquake,” then I’ll throw in a signed sixth copy for free to the member of your choice.

20 Reasons Why I Want to Live in a Cheesy SF Dome City

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted anything here on DeepGenre, so pardon me if I indulge in something frivolous. I’ve always had a secret desire to live in one of those sci-fi domes you see in hopelessly dated ’60s and ’70s films. Logan’s Run. Sleeper. THX-1138. The Island. Yeah, I want to live there. Why? No insects. I hate insects. Haaaaaate them. If we could create an entirely indoor civilization where I’d never have to see an insect … Read more

Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige”

If Christopher Nolan continues to mine the vein of tortured protagonists with such rich results as he does in “The Prestige,” he just might become our foremost cinematic chronicler of obsession. But then again… wasn’t everyone saying something very similar about M. Night Shyamalan?

Reverse Engineering the Turing Test

As part of the research for my next book, MultiReal, I’ve been thinking a lot about mind uploading.

Brain in a jarMind uploading is a transhumanist concept wherein you take a human brain and digitize it. We’re not just talking about scanning and mapping here; the goal is to have a fully functioning mind that can exist outside of all this defective muscle, bone, and tissue you cart around with you. Science fiction authors have been kicking the idea around forever. Wikipedia cites Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny as some of the earliest SFnal treatments of mind uploading, but you could make a good argument that Mary Shelley got there first with her Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818.

In theory, mind uploading is a pathway to immortality, and there are real organizations of thinkers, philosophers, and scientists working to make it happen. I’m betting that not only will it happen, but that it’s possible that the writers are going to get there first.

Let me back up.

Suppose you manage to “digitize” the human brain — whatever that means — and store the whole thing on a massive supercomputer. You run the program, virtual neurons start firing. How do you know it’s actually working? How can you tell that you’ve got an actual mind and not just a random collection of hopped-up virtual nerves?

Naturally you’d use the Turing Test. The Turing Test, created by visionary Alan Turing in 1950, says that if a machine can successfully fool other humans into believing it’s an intelligent entity, then for all practical purposes it is. So if we plug your spouse in to that supercomputer, have her talk to your uploaded mind, and she can’t tell whether she was talking to the flesh-and-bone you or the bits-and-bytes you, we’ve succeeded.

(Now there have been lots of objections raised to Alan Turing’s hypothesis. Some of them are of the predictable, nonsensical, religious variety, but some of them do seem legit. The Wikipedia article on the Turing Test spells them out quite nicely. My experience with cognitive science is limited to a semester in college, reading books by Ray Kurzweil and Rudy Rucker, six years of therapy, and futzing around in Wikipedia, so take my scientific opinions here with a gargantuan pillar of salt. But it seems to me that if you could put a digital brain and a meat brain in the same situation and they both make identical choices, you’ve succeeded in mind uploading.)

So the bar to clear in order to declare ourselves successfully uploaded isn’t as high as you might initially think. We need a program that can successfully imitate everything you do and convince anyone on the planet it’s the real thing. Once we had that program, we could then theoretically rebuild your mind, back it up, even transfer it into the body of a super-soldier a la John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. (Although only Scalzi can make them wisecrack so).

We probably don’t need to map out every single one of the umpty-ump trillion molecules in the human brain to do it. We can take mathematical shortcuts. We can eliminate a lot of the redundancy and vestigial functionality in the human brain that we don’t use or don’t need. (Would you really be less of an intelligent entity if we could smooth out the neurological wrinkles that cause deja vu, for instance?)

In short, we treat the human brain like the ultimate black box. We know what the desired outcome is — a program that acts just like you do — and we don’t really care how we get there.

So how would you create such a program?

Again, I’m no cognitive scientist (see caveat above). But presumably you could create such a program through pattern recognition. Feed some analytical computer gajillions and bazillions of samples of your thought processes, and let the computer sniff out the patterns and logistical rules. Eventually, if you provide this computer with enough data points — thoughts — it should be able to create a simulation that performs identically to your real brain. The more you input, the greater the precision.

Name me a class of people who routinely record their thought processes for a living.

Correct! Writers.

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Capclave 2006 Wrapup

As many of you know, this is my first go-round on the SF con circuit. So I’m finding it interesting how cons seem to have their own personalities based on some mash-up of the surrounding environment, the personalities of the organizers, and the guest list.

Capclave 2006 FlyerBy this standard, Capclave 2006 might be your kooky uncle who’s continually rushing around in a frenzy of activity. He’s a blast to hang out with, he’s smart as hell, and he can teach you a thing or two about Standing Up to The Man. But when he drops you back home at the end of the day, you can’t help thinking to yourself, “How can anyone live like that?”

It’s now evening on Sunday October 22, Capclave has officially come to a close, and any minute now I expect them to finally lock down a schedule for the weekend. Because there certainly wasn’t a definitive one available on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Events were constantly changing rooms, panels were added and subtracted, new people were appearing left and right, and the hallways were full of quickly taped-up signs of schedule changes. Programming manager Elaine Brennan could be seen rushing to and fro throughout the whole weekend, bravely and nobly jousting against the confusion.

Add to that the fact that the Hilton Silver Spring is not a well designed hotel, to put it charitably. There are two separate banks of elevators that go to different floors. The lobby is minuscule, and the bar is almost impossible to find. The hallways are narrow, the meeting spaces are strangely configured, and when you open some doors they block off the little gold plates with the room names on them. I got the impression from various overheard comments that the hotel kept fucking around with the Capclave people and altering the particulars of their agreement. (The Hilton in ominous, James Earl Jones basso profundo: “Perhaps you think you’re being treated… unfairly?”)

One could easily imagine taking this chaos in stride at a con where everyone was wearing Spock ears or gladiator costumes. But the Capclave programming was fairly high-minded, with panels on The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence, Global Warming, and Sling-Shot Endings in Fiction.

But for me, the programming side of things turned out to be a bit of a wash.

I received my panel assignments via e-mail on Thursday. I wasn’t listed in the program booklet for any of the three panels I’d been assigned to, and one of the panels I was supposed to appear on wasn’t listed in the booklet either. My reading (like everyone’s) was in a small room on the 12th floor that wasn’t listed in the program booklet. I had no idea I was scheduled to do a signing until I happened to wander past a table in the dealer’s room and see my name on it. When I arrived at one of my panels, my co-panelist apparently had no idea I was supposed to be there and had already begun a prepared 40-minute Powerpoint presentation, with handouts. Another of my panels was canceled because the hotel yanked away a block of rooms at the last minute.

Other than that? I had a great time. Programming is nice and all, but really I go to these conventions to shake hands, pass out Infoquake-related freebies, and attend the parties. The Saturday night formal, in particular, was a schmoozefest of the highest order.

So here are some of the people-related highlights of my Capclave experience:

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