The September 2007 issue features a story by one of my more recent slush survivors, “Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge” by Kevin N. Haw. Click on the extended entry to read an interview I did with Kevin.
My interview with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel about Slipstream has been translated into Italian. Fancy!
SCI FI Weekly just published a Q&A interview I did with David Weber:
[Excerpt:]
Off Armageddon Reef could be read as an anti-religion book. Would that be fair?
Weber: I’m sure some people will read this book as an attack on organized religion. After all, the primary force for the restriction and manipulation of human freedom and character, not to mention corruption, on Safehold is to be found in a world-wide religion. I think, however, that reading this book that way would be a mistake. Yes, the Church of God Awaiting is a monstrous, deliberately fabricated, enslaving lie imposed upon the people of Safehold. But the very impetus for reform coming out of places like Charis is coming out of men and women who follow the logical implications of the Church of God Awaiting’s own moral teachings. Off Armageddon Reef is less about the evils of religion than it is about the use of any ideology or belief structure to manipulate, control and coerce. In the case of Safehold, it’s religion; it could have been communism, fascism or any other brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism. I said that my books are about choice.
To my mind, anything which removes or denies the right, ability and responsibility to make choices is evil, destructive and a perversion. Religion that closes off, that demonizes or dehumanizes the “other” as the first step in destroying him in the name of some intolerant, oppressive, thought-denying process can be a terrible force for evil. The cynical use of religion, of man’s belief in God, as a self-serving means of manipulating others is despicable. And yet religion can be an equally powerful force for good. The people who support Merlin in Charis believe firmly and fervently in God; they simply can’t accept that God is as small and mean-spirited as the Church of God Awaiting’s current leadership apparently believe He is.
SCI FI Weekly just published my Q&A interview with Robert J. Sawyer, whose latest novel, Rollback, should be hitting the bookstores any day now. Here’s a taste:
One of the themes you frequently explore in your fiction is immortality. In Mindscan, a kind of immortality is conveyed via transferring the mind into a robot body, and in your latest, Rollback, immortality is achieved through medical means–a kind of cellular regeneration. Which of these possibilities do you think is more likely to be put into practice someday, and do you think either will be available within our lifetimes?
Sawyer: I say in Rollback that, by the time of the novel–40 years from now–Vernor Vinge’s technological singularity had still not come to pass. But I do think we will see enormous technological strides in the next 40 years, and they will far exceed those of the last 40, and that will include huge breakthroughs in both the areas you’ve mentioned. Absolutely, we’ll make great progress in slowing down and conceivably rejuvenating our bodies. And I’m just as sure that we’ll make a lot of progress in scanning human brains and being able to reproduce the fine structures of the brain–and therefore the mind that arises from that structure–at any level of resolution you care to name.
So, sure, both rollbacks and mindscans will be commercially available in our lifetimes (although only the former at Wal-Mart …). Which of the two will be more popular depends on the prevailing psychology. Flesh and blood has a lot to be said for it, but it also means you can still go splat and die. Still, almost all people would immediately accept that a version of yourself that has been rejuvenated is still you; it’s a bigger philosophical leap to recognize that a copy of you that exists when the original no longer does is also still you.
SCI FI Weekly just published a Q&A I did with Kim Stanley Robinson, in which we mainly discuss his Science in the Capitol trilogy, and Global Warming.
Your Mars books were about terraforming Mars; the Science in the Capital series is to some degree are about terraforming Earth (to repair the effects of global warming). What are our chances of doing either before it’s too late?
Robinson: We are the major force changing the surface and atmosphere of Earth now (we’re faster than the natural processes changing it, I mean), so terraforming is indeed physically possible, but we’re not used to thinking of ourselves in that role. It would require a changed paradigm, which admitted that we have become some kind of conscious “global biosphere maintenance stewards,” and that environmental thinking now ought to include an openness to at least the concept of doing things deliberately to reduce our impacts. We have to reconceptualize wilderness as being a kind of ethical position as well as a piece of land, meaning active and conscious stewardship on our part. This is a kind of interaction with the Earth that has been going on semi-consciously since the beginning of humankind, but now it’s become obvious, and it is a frightening thing to contemplate, because it’s a stupendously complex system and we don’t know enough to do what we now need to. And the unintended further consequences of anything we might try are hard to predict.
Even so, we may eventually agree through the U.N. or something else to try some things, if we get desperate enough. The crux may come if the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet begins to detach in a big way. About a quarter of the world’s population lives very near the coastline, and the disruptions there could be so severe that we would contemplate mitigating actions.
Beyond that, I think it’s best not to put the problem as a question concerning whether we are “too late” or not, because either answer leads to a kind of non-active response: i.e., if it’s not too late, I don’t have to change, and if it is too late, then there’s no point in changing, so either way–party on! Also, in some sense, encompassing all life on Earth, it will never be “too late,” in that even if we trigger a mass extinction event, the surviving life would quickly fill the empty niches and evolve onward. You can’t kill life on Earth, short of toasting it in an expanding sun or whatnot. But you can kill a lot of species, and wreck a lot of biomes, and you can probably wreck human civilization for a time, which would kill a lot of people. So I think it’s better to think of it in terms of “do we save more or do we save less,” of the other species in particular.
Earlier this week, Science Fiction Weekly published my interview with Jack McDevitt.
Here’s a taste:
Your writing has been lauded for the great sense of wonder it evokes. Many of your stories and novels also have a strong mystery element driving the plot. Is mystery an important component in conveying sense of wonder?
McDevitt: “Important” sounds like “necessary.” I don’t think it’s necessary, in the sense that wondrous elements, a supernova, whatever, form the backdrop for the events being played out by the characters. I’ve read novels that evoked my sense of wonder without bringing in factors that would normally qualify as mysterious. Greg Benford’s The Sunborn is a good example, or Ben Bova’s Mercury.
But I love a good mystery. And if I can use a black hole as the takeoff point for strange goings-on, sure, I’m on my way. Deepsix employs an approaching planetary collision to get things moving, but there’s nothing mysterious about the narrative. Polaris, however, uses a collision between a star and a brown dwarf to set up a situation in which the pilot and passengers disappear from a starship, much in the manner of the Mary Celeste.
On a different level, mystery is at the heart of all these things, because we cannot watch a butterfly without being struck by the complexity of the creature. Or the quantum reality at the heart of the cosmos, which introduces an element of unpredictability. Free will. Anything can happen. Some nice engineering there. I wonder how much more wondrous a sunrise was to the early Egyptians, who could not explain how the sun got returned every morning to the east. Some of them must have suspected there was an infinity of suns, one coming up each day.
Go read the whole thing and let me know what you think!
Strange Horizons just published my interview with M. Rickert, whose collection Map of Dreams was recently published by Golden Gryphon (and which you should all go buy immediately).
Go read!
Science Fiction Weekly just published my interview with Matthew Hughes, author of the new and excellent novel Majestrum, as well as several other fine novels and terrific short stories.
[Excerpt:] I keep an “ideas” file on my hard drive. When I decided, back in 2003, that I should try selling short stories to the magazines in order to raise my profile before Black Brillion came out, I looked through the file and came across a snippet that said something like “Suppose you came to suspect that you were living in a world that was the result of someone’s three wishes going as wrong as they always do?”
I thought, “That’ll do,” and began to sketch out a story set in my Archonate milieu. It needed a point-of-view character, and out popped Henghis Hapthorn, a Sherlock Holmesian sleuth. He is hyper-intelligent, hugely successful as a “freelance discriminator” and gloriously vain about his ability to unravel mysteries. Then he suddenly finds himself transformed into an impoverished toad of a fellow whose shining intellect has been turned down to about 15 watts.
He sets out to investigate, aided by his acerbic integrator, an artificial intelligence he designed and built to be his Dr. Watson. Their search leads him to an unlikely answer–the cause of his disabilities, which are shared by every handsome, wealthy and intelligent man in Olkney, is magic. But magic, as Hapthorn well knows, is all a lot of humbunkery.
This causes a cognitive dissonance for Hapthorn, even as he solves the case, which would not have amounted to much except that when Gordon Van Gelder read the story, entitled “Mastermindless,” he quite loved it, and I recognized that Hapthorn was too good a character to use once and throw away.
Go read the rest and tell me what you think! And go buy Matt’s books!
Science Fiction Weekly just published my interview with Matthew Hughes, author of the new and excellent novel Majestrum, as well as several other fine novels and terrific short stories.
[Excerpt:] I keep an “ideas” file on my hard drive. When I decided, back in 2003, that I should try selling short stories to the magazines in order to raise my profile before Black Brillion came out, I looked through the file and came across a snippet that said something like “Suppose you came to suspect that you were living in a world that was the result of someone’s three wishes going as wrong as they always do?”
I thought, “That’ll do,” and began to sketch out a story set in my Archonate milieu. It needed a point-of-view character, and out popped Henghis Hapthorn, a Sherlock Holmesian sleuth. He is hyper-intelligent, hugely successful as a “freelance discriminator” and gloriously vain about his ability to unravel mysteries. Then he suddenly finds himself transformed into an impoverished toad of a fellow whose shining intellect has been turned down to about 15 watts.
He sets out to investigate, aided by his acerbic integrator, an artificial intelligence he designed and built to be his Dr. Watson. Their search leads him to an unlikely answer–the cause of his disabilities, which are shared by every handsome, wealthy and intelligent man in Olkney, is magic. But magic, as Hapthorn well knows, is all a lot of humbunkery.
This causes a cognitive dissonance for Hapthorn, even as he solves the case, which would not have amounted to much except that when Gordon Van Gelder read the story, entitled “Mastermindless,” he quite loved it, and I recognized that Hapthorn was too good a character to use once and throw away.
Go read the rest and tell me what you think! And go buy Matt’s books!
Here are some outtakes from the SCI FI Wire piece I did about Terry Brooks’s latest novel, Armageddon’s Children a while back. So here’s Terry Brooks…
***
…on the genesis of the book:
For years and years I have had requests from readers to write something about The Great Wars, about the beginning of the collapse of civilization and the rise of magic in place of science. I have always resisted that because I just didn’t want to go back in time, because I was always going forward and I hadn’t really thought about it . In ’96, ’97 I started work on Running with the Demon, which was the first of The Word and Void books, and I was interested in writing a dark contemporary fantasy in which there was a threat to humanity that humanity was completely unaware of and that felt like it fell into the fabric things. And I knew when I left that series in ’99, 2000 whenever it was, that whenever I got back into it, I was going to go back into it from the viewpoint of the Knights of the Word, who were the champions of the light [...]. So when I started working on that again about 24 months ago, I just started to think about the possibly of writing about here as the precursor to the Shannara world, and how would that work? Was it something that was a good idea or was it a harebrained ideas that I should forget about? And my editor basically said ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea. Can you do it?’ So I am still finding that out, I guess.
***
…on writing The Ghosts:
The hardest thing or maybe the thing that I took the most pleasure in doing was writing about the Ghosts, who are the street kids that we follow in this book. The kids are between 10 and 18 and have formed their own little family in the ruins in the city of
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