Taking cyberpunk to the next level, this conclusion to Edelman’s trilogy (Infoquake, MultiReal) presents a drama of future technology that combines action with psychosocial intrigue. Tension comes as much from the clash of ideas as from physical confrontation. Highly recommended.

I’ve been telling people that I’m not going to worry about publicizing my upcoming book Geosynchron until 2010. Well, the year has arrived. Let the blitzkrieg begin!

The website for Geosynchron is live at www.geosynchron.net. See screen capture here (and more below the cut).

Not only will you find a spiffy website design that matches those of the first two book sites, you’ll also find:

• Chapters 1 through 8 in their entirety, or the entire first section of the book (titled “The Prisoners”). Wonder what happened to Quell after he got dragged out of the Revelation Spire by the Defense and Wellness Council? Wonder what happened to Natch after he blacked out on the streets of Old Chicago? Want to know what the “MultiReal-D” code that Petrucio Patel shot Natch with in the Tul Jabbor Complex does? Find out now.


• An updated glossary that contains all of the terms from all three books. (You might have noticed that the glossaries in the actual books themselves have been trimmed slightly to only include terms pertinent to that particular book.)


• Three new appendices from Geosynchron: “On the Islanders”, “On the Pharisees” and “On the Autonomous Revolt”. Here you can read about how the Band of Twelve founded the Luddite civilization in the Pacific Islands, the history of the Three Jesuses, details about the Islanders’ Dogmatic Oppositions, and details about the AI revolt that nearly destroyed humanity. One of these appendices contains a spoiler, but you won’t recognize it as such until after you’ve finished Geosynchron.


• The Afterword to the Trilogy, straight out of the back of Geosynchron. Read about how my politics affected the story, how 9/11 changed everything, regrets I have about the trilogy, and why rejecting Infoquake because the opening chapters are libertarian propaganda is kind of like rejecting Star Wars because the first 20 minutes glorify Darth Vader. (Warning: some spoilers here about what happens at the end of Geosynchron.)


• A reviews page that right now only features three reviews, and one of those is by Harriet Klausner so it hardly counts. But the page also contains a link to Fantasy Book Critic contributor Liviu Suciu’s review on GoodReads, in which he calls the book “the best mundane SF has to offer.”

Keep your eye on this space for more stuff to come, including details about cons I’ll be attending, interviews I’ll be doing, and giveaways for the complete signed Jump 225 trilogy. Go thou and retweet, blog, spread the word.

Edelman presents a gritty, tech-heavy thriller that builds on cyberpunk tropes in interesting and detailed new ways. The world developed in 2008’s MultiRealand 2009’s Infoquake has become inflamed with civil war and rebellion as MultiReal, a technology that mathematically projects possible futures to aid in decision making, suddenly becomes inaccessible. Into this chaos, MultiReal-D makes its first tentative appearance… Numerous characters seek their own goals in a labyrinthine plot, but Edelman does manage to bring his disparate threads together to create a coherent and even cohesive conclusion that’s most accessible and satisfying to those who have read the earlier books.

See? Pretty good review, though alas, not a coveted starred review. The spoiler isn’t too irksome, especially if you know that there are four or five other major surprises waiting in the book.PW also messed up the release date for Infoquake — which was the first book of the trilogy and released in 2006, not 2009. But hey, there really isn’t a bad word in there. I’ll take it!

(And hey, did I mention that Geosynchron is available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound, among others?)

This weekend I’ll be at the Capclave SF convention in Rockville, MD, a con whose slogan is “Where reading is not extinct.” Thus the dodo bird with beanie propeller hat mascot on the right. This is really only the second con I’ve attended since my twins were born a year ago, so hopefully I won’t be too out of practice. Here’s my schedule:

Friday, October 16

• 7:00 PM: LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Other Book Conversations
  Participants: Colleen Cahill (m), David Louis Edelman, C. Alan Loewen, Karen Newton
  The annual panel on online book social media, which Capclave has put me on for four years running now. Guess I haven’t made too much of a fool of myself on this panel.
• 9:00 PM: Books (and Writers) Past their Expiration Date
  Participants: Allen Wold (m), John Betancourt, David Louis Edelman, Kathy Morrow, Darrell Schweitzer, Ted White

  A discussion about why books and authors go out-of-date and/or out-of-style.

Saturday, October 17

• 4:00 PM: Even Hard SF Uses FTL
  Participants: David Louis Edelman (m), Eric Choi, Michael Flynn, Ed Lerner, James Maxey
  For some reason, somebody decided I should moderate this panel. Perhaps it’s because Norman Spinrad wrote in Asimov’s that “Edelman seems to have convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level. And cares about making his fictional combination of molecular biology and nanotech credible.” (I never get tired of that quote.)
• 7:30 PM: Reading from Geosynchron
  This will be the first public reading from my upcoming Geosynchron. I plan to read chapter 3, which features Quell the Islander running around shooting people with black code in prison. You’ve been warned.

Sunday, October 18

• 12:00 PM: Book Signing
  Alongside Allen Wold and Yoji Kondo. So, um, bring your books and I’ll sign them. Or better yet, buy new books and I’ll sign them.
• 2:00 PM: Post Consumer Economy
  Participants: James Maxey (m), Lenny Bailes, David Louis Edelman, Tom King, Kathy Morrow
  I keep asking to be put on these futuristic economy panels, despite the fact that I know almost nothing about economics, largely because I keep thinking it will help promote my books.

Hope to see you there!

It’s done.

This trilogy that began with something I dashed off on a laptop back in 1997 or 1998 is now, more or less, finished. Complete. Finito. I have some line editing and a couple of appendices still to write (”On the Islanders” and “On the Pharisees,” if you must know). But it’s a complete story.

Here are some of the things you can expect from Geosynchron, the concluding volume of the Jump 225 trilogy, when it hits the stores in late February-ish of 2010. (Pre-order it on Amazon here.) I’m going to try to keep this light on the spoilers, so don’t worry that I’ll ruin something crucial. But if you’d rather go into the book completely blind, then, you know, stop reading. Duh.

Some of what you’ll see in Geosynchron:

• Natch imprisoned in a windowless chamber where MultiReal is useless and “time has become unpredictable”
• A ruinous civil war between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee, including some actual large-scale battle scenes
• A five-chapter-long climax involving a military strike, a MultiReal choice cycle battle, a covert mission, and (of course) creative advertising and marketing techniques
• Quell again giving a one-man exhibition in whoopassery (this time with a dartgun and his bare mitts)
• My homage to the Council of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: an 18-person, 8,276-word Council of Magan Kai Lee
• A court battle between Jara’s fiefcorp and Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous cousins, Jayze and Suheil
• The introduction of several new characters, including:
  • Richard Taylor, Pharisee and member of the Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled
  • Josiah, son of Quell and novice representative in the Islander parliament
  • Bali Chandler and Triggendala, seasoned representatives in the Islander parliament
  • Plithy, a young punk caught in a Council orbital prison
  • Rodrigo and Molloy, a black code junkie and a black code dealer
  • Martika Korella, an attorney in Andra Pradesh
• Horvil imploring Jara to have sex with him in a Sigh environment called “Vat of Baked Beans”
• The truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago (hint: it involves blood sacrifice)
• The truth behind Quell’s thirty years in the compound at Andra Pradesh
• The truth behind the infoquakes that have been wreaking havoc since midway through book 1
• A political manifesto by Quell’s son Josiah, which explains the concept of Grand Reunification
• Events that happen and then unhappen, as well as events that take place in virtual time
• Chapters set in:
  • 49th Heaven, the orbital colony known for its licentiousness
  • Sao Paulo, home to the Patel Brothers
  • Manila, capital of the Free Republic of the Pacific Islands
  • Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation Facility, 12th Meridian, a Council prison
• An ending that’s — well, unique, being that it consists of six chapters that are 95% dialogue
• The climactic confrontation between Natch and Brone that you’ve all been waiting for
• The fate of the world being put to a vote by… the drudges?

A few interesting facts about Geosynchron:

• The current length of the book is 138,244 words; add in the as-yet-unfinished appendices, acknowledgments and afterwords, and the total will probably be around 145,000 words. Slightly shorter than MultiReal’s 150,000 words, a bit longer than Infoquake’s 122,000 words.
• The book is once again divided into six sections:
  1. The Prisoners
  2. A Game of Chess
  3. The Consultants
  4. Nohwan’s Crusade
  5. Tyrants and Revolutionaries
  6. The Guardian and the Keeper
• Geosynchron contains 42 chapters. The shortest chapter (Chapter 1) is 646 words long; the longest chapter (Chapter 30) is a whopping 8,276 words. (I am, however, considering splitting that chapter in two, even though the Douglas Adams fan in me recoils at the thought of adding a 43rd chapter.)
• The first sentence: “Margaret Surina is rejuvenated.”
• The book’s epigraph is a quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “Not every man is defeated. I can name you a dozen who were not, and those are the ones the world lives by.”

After reading all this, you might be asking the question, Is he really going to tie up all of those loose ends in one book? This isn’t one o’ them Robert Jordan-type situations, is it? And my answers to these questions are Yes, for the most part and No.

Geosynchron will end the Jump 225 trilogy. Meaning, the three primary stories I’m trying to tell with this trilogy will conclude at the end of this book. (For the record, those stories are: 1. Natch’s attempts to break free from his utter self-absorption, 2. Jara’s attempts to find value in herself, 3. A world trying to cope with out-of-control technological change.) Does that mean you’re going to see a nice, tidy conclusion where I summarize what every character does for the rest of their lives, Animal House style? Nope. If you’re looking for neat, foursquare endings to all of the plotlines in the trilogy, you’ll be disappointed.

I’m not going to preclude writing more in this universe at some date in the future. But at present, I’ve said all that I’ve got to say in this universe. There are other milieus and other genres that I’d like to take a stab at. There’s this YA fantasy series I’ve been itching to write since the late ’90s about an English boy who attends a school for wizards. I’m not too late, am I?

(Oh yeah, and hopefully this means I’ll have a little bit of time to blog again. Hopefully.)

Well, that was quick… Only one day after Amazon released Infoquake on the Kindle, they’ve now made MultiReal available too. Go check it out on Amazon. Expect Geosynchron to be released tomorrow.

I’ve received a number of emails from potential readers out there griping that my books aren’t available in electronic format. You’re writing about a digital future where people can call up any text in the world instantly and project it holographically on their retinas, they say. So how come I’m stuck reading your work on this crummy hunk of pulped wood, jackass?

Until now, my answer has always been, It’s not my decision, pal. I don’t own the electronic rights. And don’t call me a jackass, punk.

To which they reply… well, you get the picture.

But as of today, I can now join the ranks of the electronically published. Yes, via the Pyr-o-mania blog, I see that Infoquake is now available on the Amazon Kindle. Go check it out on Amazon. Not only is it available, but it’s one of the first five titles available on Kindle from Pyr. (For the record, the others are: Justina Robson’s Silver Screen and Going Under, Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate, and Lou Anders’ anthology Fast Forward 1.)

I’m told there are a lot more Pyr titles in the works — including, yes, MultiReal — but there’s no telling exactly when they’re going to hit the street. So hopefully by some point next year, you’ll be able to read the entire Jump 225 trilogy electronically. You won’t be able to project it holographically on your retinas yet, unless you’re Ray Kurzweil, but here’s hoping we’ll be able to do that in our lifetimes too.

(And by the way… yes, I would love to be able to post a picture of what Infoquake actually looks like on the Kindle. But unfortunately, I don’t own one and don’t anticipate buying one anytime soon. So if anyone does get a chance to email me a nice high quality digital photo of Infoquake on the Kindle, I’d really appreciate it.)

Now it can be shown: my editor Lou Anders has posted on the Pyr blog the cover art and synopsis for Geosynchron, the last book in my Jump 225 Trilogy. Here, without further ado, it is. (You can also view a larger version.)

The cover painting is once again by the incomparable Hugo Award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere, whose paintings for the covers of Infoquake and MultiReal have been blowing minds for many a month.

And here is the catalog copy for the book, which provides something of a spoiler (though a necessary one) for the cliffhanger at the end of MultiReal.

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN’S BUSINESS SCIENCE FICTION SAGA THAT BEGAN WITH INFOQUAKE AND MULTIREAL COMES TO A STUNNING CONCLUSION WITH GEOSYNCHRON, THE LAST BOOK OF THE JUMP 225 TRILOGY.

The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous heirs — even though MultiReal has completely vanished.

The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilization, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago.

Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He’s still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision — whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but figured that it couldn’t hurt to just post this stuff asap.

(Oh, and if you’re so inclined, the book’s now available for pre-order on Amazon.)

I’ve always claimed in interviews that it doesn’t really matter whether the actual future resembles the future I wrote about in Infoquake and MultiReal. There are simply too many variables in predicting the future, such that if you do get it right, it’s largely a matter of luck. But like all authors, I do secretly harbor this fantasy about the world turning out exactly like I predicted it, and my books being hailed as visionary tomes before their time, and my grave becoming a tourist spot for centuries where young kids with beards hang out writing romantic poetry late at night.

So it’s comforting to see that the visionary Ray Kurzweil (whose The Age of Spiritual Machines I heartily recommend) has, in effect, completely endorsed my idea of multi technology. Here’s what he says in an interview with GOOD Magazine:

By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain (that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries) will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. You will have a body in these virtual-reality environments that you can control just like your real body, but it does not need to be the same body that you have in real reality. We’ll be able to interact with people in any way in these virtual-reality environments. That will replace most travel, but we’ll also have new travel technologies for our real bodies using nanotechnology.

Contrast that with how I describe the multi network in the appendices for Infoquake:

A multi projection is a virtual body that “exists” in real space. While the multied body is only an illusion created by neural manipulation, it can interact with real (”meat”) bodies in a way almost indistinguishable from physical human interaction…. The multi network depends on two key components: (1) the trillions of microscopic bots that process and relay sensory information to the network, and (2) neural OCHREs that manipulate the mind into “seeing” the sights, “hearing” the sounds, and “feeling” the sensations of the network. Similarly, those who interact with multi projections allow neural manipulation to trick the mind into believing the virtual bodies are present.

The big difference between good ol’ Ray and me is that a) he actually knows what he’s talking about, and b) I didn’t figure we’d get this working for another few hundred years. Kurzweil thinks we’ll be sending multi projections around the globe about the same time that Malia Obama gets her Masters degree. I think many of Kurzweil’s predictions are a tad on the optimistic side — he thinks the singularity will happen, oh, any day now — but basically sound.

(Thanks to Richard Strayer for pointing out the interview.)

Two more pieces of book promotion for y’all to chew on.

First, I’ve been interviewed by Shaun Farrell for the Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing podcast. It’s a rather lengthy interview — 30 minutes or so — and it covers everything from whether Natch is the “hero” of Jump 225, why the series is titled Jump 225 in the first place, what is the nature of Natch’s drive to succeed, and why Moonwatcher from 2001 was in a way the first Natch.

Stargate writer and producer Joseph Mallozzi posted my answers to his book club questions about Infoquake recently. The group really seemed to delve into the book and had a very insightful discussion, not only here, but during several days of preceding blog posts. Topics covered include my favorite character, how likely I think the Infoquake future is, and why (or whether) the book ends abruptly. Excerpt:

Iamza writes: “I’m not so sure I really understand MultiReal. As outlined by Margaret, it sounds kind of great — a chance to have things turn out exactly as you wanted. But what happens when the batter wants to hit a six and the bowler wants to get his tenth wicket for no runs (hah, take that, baseball analogies! Give me cricket any day of the week). Whose reality ultimately wins out — or do both batter and bowler split off into separate universes, each achieving their individual goal? For every individual who’s installed the MultiReal program, are there a zillion universes in which things go wrong, and only one in which everything is golden.

DLE: Now you see the big dilemma with MultiReal technology. One of the main subplots in book 2 is how to resolve conflicts very much like you describe. Natch, Jara & Co. discover that there are a lot of broad sociological implications in how MultiReal resolves these conflicts. For instance: how do you charge customers for all those realities? Do you charge a flat fee, or do you charge for each alternate reality they pick? If you choose the latter, does that mean the rich would automatically win every argument?

(Admit it, you’re just making these funny cricket terms up. “The batter wants to hit a six”? “Getting his tenth wicket”? Surely you should not be using such language on a family blog like Mr. Mallozzi’s.)

Meesa bustin’ wit happiness to see all the sudden free publicity for me and my books around the blogosphere. The latest:

• Charlie Jane Anders of science fiction megasite io9 has just published an interview with me. I dig the title: MultiReal Is Your Dot-Com Nightmare Writ Large. Topics covered include my progress on writing Geosynchron, whether there are any good trilogy closers, how MultiReal technology really works, and whether there are Natch and Jara “shippers” out there. (Yeah, I had to go look it up too.) In case you’ve forgotten, io9 are the lovely, lovely folks who gave MultiReal a glowing review and named the book one of their top SF novels of 2008.
• Meanwhile, Joseph Mallozzi, writer and executive producer for TV’s Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, has been hosting a discussion about Infoquake on his blog. But this ain’t just any ol’ blog book chat. Joe’s blog attracts an incredibly devoted fan base, with dozens of people participating in the discussion and asking detailed questions. I’ve now got all the questions in one big Word document. Joe will be publishing another post with all of my answers soon. In the meantime, read Joe’s original review, the first book discussion round-up, and the second book discussion round-up. Make sure to browse through the comments on each article.
• Finally, SF Signal has published another of its famed Mind Meld columns, this one on the topic “Who Are Your Literary Influences in the Ongoing Conversation of Science Fiction?” Not only did I contribute a few paragraphs (scroll to the bottom), but so did Mike Resnick, Tobias Buckell, Peter Watts, Paul Di Filippo, Jay Lake, Sean Williams, Paul Levinson, S. Andrew Swann, Stephen Hunt, Minister Faust, Julie E. Czerneda, and David Levine. Whew! I listed my two biggest SF influences as Frank Herbert and William Gibson, which should come as no surprise to anyone.

Today on Pyr-o-mania, the house blog of Pyr (publishers of my novels Infoquake and MultiReal), I’ve posted a little piece about the importance of good characters in fiction. I use as the jumping-off point my recent forays into reading the complete Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Quick excerpt:

Doyle really didn’t have enough material to fill four novels and fifty-six short stories’ worth of paper. The plots are fairly trite, the mysteries are sometimes clever but mostly commonplace, the insights into human nature are fairly shallow, and the prose is expedient if unremarkable… But there is one thing Doyle had that makes up for all the other shortcomings: he had a frickin’ incredible character in Sherlock Holmes himself…

I find that when I think back on the great stories I’ve read in my lifetime, SF/F or otherwise, it’s generally the characters that I remember. That’s why I can barely remember a single plot from the original Star Trek, but I know the triad of McCoy, Spock and Bones like the back of my hand. (Same goes for The Next Generation, though the only truly great character from that show was Picard.) That’s why I remember Long John Silver but barely remember Treasure Island. And that’s why, for all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s insane worldbuilding and linguistic inventiveness, the first thing I think of when I think of The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf leaning on his staff (or Gollum writhing on the ground pining for his preccccccccious).

Go make my editor happy, and post your comments on the Pyr-o-mania blog.

It’s that time of year again when all 114 of us who participate in the Hugo Award voting process send in our nominations for the best science fiction and fantasy stuff from the previous year. If you’re one of those 114, might I oh-so-humbly suggest a couple of items for your consideration:

• MultiReal Is Eligible for Best Novel.
  Book 2 of my Jump 225 trilogy and the sequel to Infoquake, published by Pyr in July 2008. The book continues the story of far-future software entrepreneur Natch in his struggle to maintain control over the MultiReal technology which has fallen into his hands. In MultiReal, he’s got to cope with scheming politicians, power-hungry intelligence agency executives, an old childhood enemy, and a rebellion by his own fiefcorp apprentices. (Plus it’s got one hell of a dartgun battle between three different factions, and a scene on the virtual reality sex network featuring triple-breasted mermaids.) Accolades for the novel so far include listing on Best of the Year lists from io9, Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, SFFWorld, and Post-Weird Thoughts, and lots of shiny praise from the likes of Locus, SCI FI Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Robert J. Sawyer, etc.
• “Mathralon” Is Eligible for Best Short Story.
  My story from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, “Mathralon” concerns a planet of oppressed miners laboring in obscurity for a ruthless combine that may or may not even exist. It’s told in the first-person plural (Greek chorus) point of view, and it’s somewhat unique in that it has no characters, no dialogue, and no plot. Curious? Go read the story in full, or listen to my reading of it on my appearance on “Hour of the Wolf.” The story got a terrific reception when I read it at both the Library of Congress and the KGB Bar, and it’s made Post-Weird Thoughts’ list of top short stories for 2008.

If you’re so inclined, you might also want to nominate my two editors this year, Lou Anders of Pyr (whose Fast Forward 2 anthology has a great shot at a Hugo nom) and George Mann of Solaris.

I’ve managed to carve out enough time from all of the diaper changes, spit-ups and late-night feedings to conduct two new interviews in support of MultiReal. (And don’t even get me started about the babies.) <rim shot>

Fast Forward, the Arlington, VA-based cable science fiction TV show, conducted a 19-minute interview with me a couple of weeks ago. (Video requires QuickTime 7, but there’s an audio-only version available too.) Interviewer Tom Schaad really seems to have read Infoquake and MultiReal carefully. In our discussion before the cameras started rolling, he picked up on a number of hints in the margins of the books that nobody else has remarked on. (Hint: In which orbital colony did noted philanderer Marcus Surina die? And in which orbital colony was a certain fatherless character born?) Topics in the interview proper include MultiReal, technological paradigm shifts, the difficulty of writing the middle book in a trilogy, ethical systems in a post-religious world, and how the Jump 225 Trilogy is all about trying to find balance.

And blogger Fábio Fernandes has posted a seven-question interview with me on Post-Weird Thoughts. Topics covered include the influence of Dune and William Gibson, my favorite novels, the timeline of the Jump 225 trilogy in relation to today, and Geosynchron. Quick excerpt:

What can we expect of Geosynchron, the next novel of the Infoquake series? (BTW, it will really be a trilogy or there will be other stories in that universe?)

Geosynchron will definitely be the last novel of the trilogy. (I’m not precluding the possibility of writing additional novels in this universe down the road, but this particular story will come to an end at the conclusion of book 3.) As for what’s in store in the final book… You’re going to see the characters go off to places we haven’t been before, like the Pacific Islands and the orbital colony of 49th Heaven. You’re going to meet some of the Pharisees. You’re going to see a lot more of Quell and delve into his relationship with Margaret Surina. And you’re going to see a big ending that involves military strikes, philosophical debate, and (of course) creative marketing techniques. I think I can promise that it’s going to be a very, very unique conclusion. Currently the schedule is for the book to hit the stores in early 2010.

I’m told that Post-Weird Thoughts will have reviews of Infoquake and MultiReal up shortly as well.

Go. Watch. Read. Contemplate. Comment.

Can't believe I forgot to cross-post this from my regular WordPress blog onto my LiveJournal... This entry went up on my WordPress blog November 2.

* * *

The babies have arrived.

Abigail Blakeway Edelman, born October 31st at 8:02 am, 6 pounds 5 ounces.

Benjamin Blakeway Edelman, born October 31st at 8:04 am, 6 pounds 2 ounces.

Mom and babies are healthy, Dad’s a little frazzled but ecstatically happy.

Authors generally come in two varieties:

1. Authors for whom writing comes easily and naturally
2. Authors for whom writing takes a tremendous amount of effort and concentration

Which flavor am I? Well, here’s a clue: it’s taken me about five minutes to get this far in this blog piece already. I’ve rewritten the first sentence three or four times, backspacing before I even got to the colon. In this paragraph alone, I started off with “which camp do I fall in” before realizing that the camping metaphor clashes with the “two varieties” metaphor in the first paragraph above. (And now, here I am, re-reading through the article again two days after I started because I didn’t have time to finish it earlier.)

I’m slow. I’m not going to say that I agonize over my words, because that implies a degree of discomfort and displeasure in the process. But I certainly concentrate intensely on my words. They don’t just come gushing out. (Just changed “flowing” to “gushing.”)

And so when I find myself falling into a prolonged silence on my blog like the current two-month silence, it’s hard to get going again.

It’s especially difficult (changed from “hard”) when what I really should be concentrating on is finishing up the first draft of Geosynchon, the third book in the Jump 225 trilogy. I don’t do this writing thing full-time, and it’s difficult to find the time to blog. It’s about to become all the more difficult because I’m about to become a first-time parent. I have no idea how I’m going to find the time to write when I’ve got two squealing (changed from “screaming”) babies, and a bunch of bills that are overdue because I’ve forgotten to pay them, and a burning desire to occasionally have a, you know, life.

So how do I continue blogging on a regular or semi-regular basis?

It doesn’t help that I don’t approach blogging the way most bloggers approach blogging. Unlike, say, a newspaper column, the whole point of publishing a blog is that it’s immediate and unfiltered. Here’s what I’m thinking today! Just saw Sarah Palin say something stupid on TV, boom, here’s my take on it! What did I think yesterday or last week or last month? Who cares? It’s all now, now, now!

I’ve always resisted the impulse to publish that kind of blog, just like I’ve always resisted the impulse to write those kinds of book. Not that there’s anything wrong with the stream-of-consciousness technique; it’s just not me. I don’t want people to know what I’m thinking on a minute-by-minute basis. I don’t want to showcase my snapshot reactions to the latest flap in the news. Why? Because my off-the-cuff (changed from “snapshot”) reactions are just like everyone else’s. They’re tinged by raw emotion. They’re based on incomplete information. They’re predictable. They can get me into trouble.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the digested, reasoned, thought-through, considered response that matters. It’s the book that I’ve slaved over and over in draft after draft, carefully layering in plot and metaphor and theme like a pastry chef making phyllo dough. (Just stopped to look up “phyllo” on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t misremembering what phyllo is.)

I don’t resent the filter of editing, re-writing, re-thinking, and revising. I need that filter.

So if you’re planning on following my blog, you’re not going to get throwaways (with the exception of the occasional piece of self-promotion and/or book news) (just inserted that). You’re only going to get articles that have been well-thought-out and carefully crafted. You’re only going to get me writing about subjects I care about.

The downside of this approach is that if I don’t have the time or inclination to ponder upon any particular subject, I’m not going to publish anything. I’m not going to fall back on a summary of my day or an interesting song lyric I’ve heard on the radio. Again, perfectly valid methods of blogging. Just not my method.

Sometimes I’ll take too long to ponder over a particular topic (changed from “a particular subject”, changed from “something”), and my meanderings on that topic will become outdated before I’ve even clicked the “Publish” button. These blog articles get saved onto my hard drive where they gather digital dust, unread. Thus, you probably will never read the 752-word-and-counting blog piece I’ve been writing about “The Bizarro Election” featuring my insights on Sarah Palin — because by the time I’m finished with it, the poor woman will (deleted “hopefully”) be on her way back to Alaska where she’ll become a 2018 trivia question for Jeopardy contestants.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying:

1. No, I’m not dead;
2. No, I don’t even have the excuse of being a first-time parent yet;
3. Yes, I do intend to resume blogging on a regular basis; but
4. Yes, you’ll probably (just inserted “probably”) have to be patient.

If you’re interested in reading what I’ve got to say about stuff and you don’t want to be bothered to check back on my blog page to see if I’ve published anything new, I invite you to sign up to subscribe by email (bottom of left column), or use the site RSS feeds.

Thanks, y’all.

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(Now that I’ve finished the article, I’ve got to go back and re-read to make sure I’ve made a coherent point. I’ve got to make sure the title I’ve given the piece accurately reflects what’s in it, because I’ve been known to meander off course into totally different subjects.)

(And finally, I feel obligated to go hunt around for some pictures — generally of the humorous or ironic variety — to make the article visually interesting. So here I go… Okay, the Rodin Thinker statue is an obvious one, and it’s already in the blog media library. And for the second I’ll use one of my favorite sketches of a dude scribbling at a desk while smoking a pipe. Artist unknown, or at least I’m too lazy to look it up. Just have to do some quick image manipulation so the images fit onto the page… there.)

(Now, the final step. Save the article, and preview it. Re-read for last-minute typos and harebrained sentences that I’m going to regret later. Do last-minute tightening of the language. Make sure the pictures don’t create any funky link breaks… Done.)

(Don’t forget to add meta information for the search engines and the archive pages.)

(And finally… is this whole meta thing of the parenthetical asides too cutesy and John Barthish? Should I delete all these parenthetical comments about process? Hmm. Maybe. But I’m the kind of writer who likes to live life on the edge.)

(Have all of these parenthetical comments made this blog piece too long? Do I need another picture to fill up the space? No. Dude, stop. Just click the fucking “Publish” button already.)

(Publish.)

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(Last step, just for your folks on LiveJournal, and that's cutting and pasting the article from WordPress into my blog here. Done.)
 

Patrick St-Denis has just posted an interview with me on his popular Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist blog. Subjects covered include Infoquake, MultiReal, Lou Anders and Pyr, my strengths as a storyteller, the John W. Campbell Award, cover art, websites and interactivity with readers, the trend of high-quality British SF, and whether SF will ever get proper literary recognition by snooty academics cowering up in their white towers.

But the best part of the whole thing is that Pat has seen fit, unprompted, to post this neat little Photoshopped poster that puts the full force and weight of Uncle Sam behind getting you to read Infoquake and MultiReal. And really, ain’t that how it should be?

Brief excerpt from the interview:

What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
I feel like I’m very good at the worldbuilding aspect of things. Really, structure in general. The trilogy has layers and layers of metaphor in it, and I’m really quite proud of the way it all works together as an organic whole. My tendency is to wander off into history and background and structure, and sometimes I have to curb that impulse. If I had written The Lord of the Rings, it would have been three whole books of the Council of Elrond, and nobody would have read it.

Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write Infoquake and its sequel?

Yes, I wanted to avoid the typical mindless action set-pieces that you find in a lot of bad SF, and bad novels in general. I really wanted to write an exciting novel about business. A lot of authors just use the business aspect as window dressing, and then quickly throw their characters into the same car chases and murder mysteries and gunfights. I wanted to write books that really are about the workplace, where the excitement revolves around product demos and marketing meetings and government hearings and that kind of thing. So that’s what I’ve tried to do.

I’ve been using computers since the mid ’80s. I remember tackling CP/M and Peachtree word processing back in the day, and I remember upgrading my computer to MS-DOS 3.3. I went to college in 1989 with a no-name PC clone sporting an 8086 processor that ran at something like 4 MHz. It had an amber monitor that would have looked at home in that VW Bus they drove around in Scooby-Doo.

A lot has changed since then. But sometimes I wonder if the computing industry — all of it, from software to hardware to web services — really has the right priorities in mind. So here’s my list of the things that I hope to hell are working flawlessly by 2018. The frustrating thing is that every single one of these things can be done with today’s technology (except possibly for #7).

1. Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.
2. Automatic configuration syncing. The younger, hotter sister of automatic file syncing. Now that we’re all starting to use web applications for everything instead of sending files around, these web applications all need to be able to talk to each other. My bookmarks should follow me from machine to machine, and from browser to browser. Every time I configure my Firefox or my Windows Media Player just the way I like it, I shouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking customization process on every machine I touch.
3. Automatic backups. Macs now do this as a matter of course with Time Machine software. But Windows doesn’t. Well, let me qualify that — Windows will back up important system files as a matter of course, and create confusing “shadow copies” of documents in the background that you can roll back to. But it’s confusing as hell and inefficient to boot. What’s more, I want my computer to back up to an online storage facility, not some clunky piece of crap that’s hogging space on my desk.
4. Automatic upgrades. I’m not just talking about the operating system software here — I’m talking about every piece of software and hardware should automatically check for upgrades on a regular basis from a single, unified interface. And then give me the option to install or not install. Linux does this, and Microsoft has made efforts towards this with their Windows Update facility. But right now I have separate programs on my desktop working in the background to check for updates from Java, Logitech, Apple, Adobe, ESET, Mozilla, and Dell. And that doesn’t include all of the programs that check for updates when you fire them up.
5. Integrated security. This whole system of remembering a million different passwords in a million different places is unworkable. Not only that, but it’s not secure, because everyone on Earth except for Bruce Schneier either a) has their passwords written down on a Post-It note, b) uses ridiculously insecure passwords like their dog’s name, or c) has a handful of relatively secure passwords that they use over and over again, because we can only remember so many garbled strings of letters and numbers. I’m not a security expert, but it seems to me that biometric security would be a step up from where we are today.
6. Centralized identity management. Why do I have to constantly retype the same address information, the same email address, the same websites? Why is it that when I update my official bio to reflect a new book release, I have to log in to 4000 different websites and manually change my bios one by one? I understand the need to respect privacy — but if I want to share my information with a particular website, application, or company, shouldn’t I be able to do that with a click or two? We need trusted, universal services that can verify your identity wherever you are online.
7. Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.
8. Everything wireless. I’ve got connecting cables for my BlackBerry and my iPod. The printer’s wired to the desktop, as are the quad speakers and the subwoofer. The keyboard and mouse aren’t wired anymore — but the wireless transmitter for the keyboard and mouse is wired. I want, at most, one power cable snaking from the back of my computer to the wall. Apple is leading the way on this one, as usual. But with Bluetooth moving onto more and more devices, we’re getting close to achieving this one on all platforms.
9. True, modular upgrades. For years, I’ve had the dream of having a single system that could be upgraded in a modular fashion. I’ll snap in the newest processor every couple of years. I’ll beef up my sound card on alternate years. I’ll upgrade the video card as circumstances warrant. But it seems that no matter how hard I try, I have to scrap everything and start from scratch after a few seasons. Is it really that difficult to future-proof hardware so I can upgrade my systems one piece at a time?
10. True plug and play. Let’s say it together: every piece of equipment I buy should be able to interface with every other piece of equipment I own. I should never be in the position of having to struggle to get photographs from the camera to the printer, or having to figure out whether the DVDs I burned on one computer can be read on another — much less have trouble networking my Linux, Mac, and Windows boxes together.

Agree? Disagree? And what have I missed?

There’s an amusing comment string that’s cropped up on the Amazon page for MultiReal around Harriet Klausner’s review of the book. It began when Klausner, the (in)famous #1 reviewer on Amazon, gave MultiReal a five-star review, and folks started piling on to diss it. Then I broke the cardinal author/reviewer rule — Thou Shalt Not Criticize Thine Book’s Reviews — by saying this:

Normally I wouldn’t comment on a review of my books, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Looks like *someone* read the book, or at least skimmed it, since that bit about “Natch plead[ing] with the Melbourne legislature to no avail” isn’t in the back cover copy. (But to reinforce your point, Ghost of M, she does get that plot point wrong. It’s not Natch, but his mentor Serr Vigal, who pleads before the Melbourne legislature.)

Hard for an author to complain about a 5-star review, though, especially when it’s the only reader review currently up on Amazon…

The discussion continues on from there, and it’s still ongoing.

So now I’ve been inspired to write a little piece here answering the question: what do authors want from reviews of their work anyway? I can’t speak for anybody other than myself on this one, but what I want is very simple:

1. Opinion. Have one. Better yet: have several.
2. Honesty. Love it? Hate it? Moved? Unimpressed? Offended? Enraptured? All I want is your honest opinion, whether it’s favorable to me or not. Don’t worry about the politics, don’t worry about the personalities, don’t worry about what’s popular or unpopular in the stores or what other critics are saying. What do you think?
3. Insight. I want to know that you engaged with my work. Whether you loved it or hated it is not always the point; I want to know that you thought about it. And if my book left you with a soul-crushing emptiness that sucks light out of the universe? That’s fine too, as long as you gave the book a fair shot. Skimmers and summarizers don’t impress me.
4. Elaboration. I can handle the fact that you found the book far-fetched. But I want to know how and where. Specific examples help. Better yet, specific quotations that you took the time to type verbatim from the text.
5. Disclosure. Are you and I up for the same award? Are you the brother of the guy I dissed in an article on my blog? Are you a specialist in the field that I’m writing about? Are you my uncle? None of these things disqualifies you from writing a useful review of my books. I just want to know.
6. No anonymity. There’s a reason Slashdot’s default label for commenters who don’t leave their names is “Anonymous Coward.” Give your review a byline. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your full name or your real name; just don’t say something provocative and then duck behind the shield of anonymity. I want to know something about you; I want to be able to put your opinions about my work in some kind of context.
7. Originality. Anyone can find a detailed summary of MultiReal on the website, or on Amazon, or in other reviews for that matter. Anybody can toss around the phrases “high octane,” “edge of your seat,” and “page turner.” Feel free to confirm impressions that other readers have had, but I’m much more impressed when I see some positive or negative tidbit that I haven’t seen before.
8. Accuracy. Probably not the most important point, but important nonetheless. I can forgive misspellings of minor characters’ names; I can forgive that you said the assassination by beer bottle bludgeoning took place in Barcelona instead of Madrid. But when you completely mangle entire plot threads because you weren’t paying attention, you’re just wasting my time.
9. No pandering. It’s nice to be quotable, and yes, quotable blurbs can often find their way into the front matter of the next book. But please, don’t say pithy things just for the sake of trying to get on the book jacket or the website.
10. No spoilers. It’s not for my sake that you should avoid spoilers; it’s for the sake of my (potential) readers. When a review blithely spoils a suspenseful plot element a third of the way into the novel — like this review of MultiReal from SFRevu does — well, it’s irritating.

By the standards listed above, I’d have to say that the most interesting and plain useful reviews I’ve read of my books are probably Paul Kincaid’s take on Infoquake for the New York Review of Science Fiction, Norman Spinrad’s discussion about Infoquake in Asimov’s, and Jason Pettus’ detailed review of Infoquake on the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

Mostly positive reviews, true, but not wholly positive reviews. Paul Kincaid calls Infoquake “a brisk, well-told science fiction adventure set in the normally unadventurous world of business”; but he also takes me to task for the silly character names, the preponderance of appendices, and the backwards-looking historical quotations. He complains about the science. But Kincaid’s review did something that other wholly uncritical five-star reviews did not: it had an impact on the writing of books 2 and 3. Specifically, his point about the improbability of a multi-generational dynasty like the Surinas caused me to rethink certain background elements of the plot that will come to the forefront in Geosynchron. It cast a light on some ideas about the Surinas that I had been toying with beforehand but never quite parsed out.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of impact I want to have on the authors I review.