Reminder for Londoners! I’m doing a live event tonight at 7PM with China Mieville in Exmouth Market (EC1R 4QE), through the excellent Clerkenwell Tales bookstore. We’ve outgrown the store, so Pete, our host, has booked the Church of the Redeemer next door; but we’re nearly full there, too! If you’d like to come, RSVP (quickly!) to info@clerkenwell-tales.co.uk or tweet @booksellerpete. We’ll be emceed by the wonderful Rob Sharp of English PEN.
Here’s the fourth and final of the podcast of I Love Paree, a short story I co-wrote with Michael Skeet, originally published in Asimov’s Magazine in December 2000. It’s the story of a business consultant living in revolutionary Paris during an anti-corporatist uprising, and what he does after he’s conscripted into the Communard Army.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Here’s some video of interviews I did with Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine and Reason TV after my talk at Public Knowledge in DC last
month. We talk about For the Win and how technology and kids and society interrelate.
Here’s some video of interviews I did with Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine and Reason TV after my talk at Public Knowledge in DC last
month. We talk about For the Win and how technology and kids and society interrelate.
Gateways, Tor Books
I just got my contributors’ copies of the Frederik Pohl tribute anthology Gateways, and I find myself in danger of losing the afternoon’s work to re-reading it. Gateways is a collection of short stories written in appreciation of Pohl, one of science fiction’s masters and living legends. It includes fiction by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison (A new Stainless Steel Rat story in Pohl style, no less!), Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe — and me.
My story, Chicken Little is the closing novella, and it’s my take on The Space Merchants: a darkly comic story about a man whose job is to come up with products to sell to immortal quadrillionaires who’ve speciated from the human race proper and now live as sovereign states in vats that supply their life-support.
Additionally, Gateways features essays about Pohl and his work by Isaac Asimov, Gardner Dozois, Connie Willis, Robert J Sawyer, Robert Silverberg, Joan Slonczewski, Emily Pohl-Weary (Fred’s granddaughter and the Hugo-winning co-author of Judith Merril’s wonderful memoir, Better to Have Loved) and editor James Frenkel.
This is truly a smashing volume, a testament to the impact that Pohl has had on several generations of sf writers and readers (he continues to write, of course, and his blog, The Way the Future Blogs is up for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writing!). It was edited by Fred’s wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, who did yeoman duty on it while nursing Fred through several serious health crises in the past two years.
I’m so proud to be in this book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
My latest Guardian column, “Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated,” discusses the way that new media give way to newer media, and, in so doing, become truer to themselves:
Do a search-and-replace on “blog” and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.
Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what’s happened is that they’ve been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.
When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they’d always belonged (they’d been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.
Here’s part three of the podcast of I Love Paree, a short story I co-wrote with Michael Skeet, originally published in Asimov’s Magazine in December 2000. It’s the story of a business consultant living in revolutionary Paris during an anti-corporatist uprising, and what he does after he’s conscripted into the Communard Army.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Last April, I wrote about how the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grievance Committee got a magazine to pay me half of what it owed me for a story it had commissioned, but then offered a bogus contract for.
The good folks at Subterranean Press bought the right to publish the story for the other half of the money I was owed, and even bought the lovely illustration that Dave McKean did for the story.
The story is out in the current issue, and online as well. It’s called “The Ghosts in My Head,” and it’s about the end-times of neuromarketing:
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to begin by thanking you for not lynching me.
You laugh, but I’m not joking. Not entirely. There was a time when it was a tossup as to who would string me up first: the authors, the copyright lawyers, the military, or the neurologists. There was a time when it was inconceivable to me that I would be feted by a distinguished crowd such as yourself, in my heels, tights, and a dress, gifted with a fine rubber-chicken banquet. There was a time when I contemplated plastic surgery and a move to the ass-end of remotest Imaginaristan.
I didn’t set out to destroy narrative, reshape the law, and invent sixth-generation warfare. I set out to do something entirely slimier: I set out to create a genuine science of persuasion. Simply put, I set out to instrument the human brain and to discover where our representation of the other lives.
The fMRI was such a wonderful toy in those days. We were like Leeuwenhoek at his eyepiece, uncovering the secret world that had ever existed right before our eyes. Finally, neuroscience transitioned to a real science, a muscular, macho quantitative science, no longer a ghetto of twinkle-eyed Oliver Sackses, reliant on keen observations of human behavior. Finally, we could abolish empathy and retreat to the comfortable remove of empiricism as delivered on the screen of an instrument.
