Crossover in the UK

Well, I've just recently granted Pyr the UK rights for Crossover, thanks to leading UK bookstore Waterstones' very pleasing offer flog the crap out of it (that's a technical bookseller's term). I understand the first copies are arriving about now, so if you're in the UK... oh hell, you know the rest. Very exciting.

Space Blogging

Lots of cool space stuff at Hobbyspace:

Anousheh Ansari, Iranian-born space tourist, is currently blogging from the International Space Station.

Armadillo Aerospace (brainchild of Doom-inventor John Cormack) have their latest test video up, this of the vehicle that will be competing for the Lunar Lander Challenge at this year's X-prize Cup. John says on hobbyspace that the video isn't very exciting... no? It bloody hovers in one spot on a rocket plume for 90 seconds! When was the last time you saw a rocket hover?

Bigelow Aerospace have announced they intend to launch the first private space station in late 2009-10, to be followed by a second, larger module in 2012, for a total capacity of nine people. Thus giving new rocket companies a new destination to fly to, and up to sixteen flights per year, thus increasing flight frequency, thus reducing cost-per-flight. There's also a plan to assist smaller nations to develop their own manned spaceflight programs, for a fraction of the cost of NASA or Russia's programs. I'm sure Malaysia would love a space program.

And finally, don't you hate it when someone starts promoting an idea you've already had? Al Globus reckons space settlement on lower-gravity planets would be complicated by the difficulties in raising children in low-G environments, thus mandating the use of large, rotational space stations that generate their own gravity for child raising in space. I already had that idea! I just hadn't gotten around to writing the series it was going to be in. I think they'll discover, in the future, that kids need gravity to grow just like plants do, we already know that long term weightlessness does nasty things to adults. I think kids in low gravity would develop brittle bones, poor cardio-vascular systems, and a whole host of accompanying health problems. So Mars settlement, for instance, would be complicated by couples wanting to have children, having to stick them on orbital stations until they stop growing -- like childhood boarding school.

Sporting Weekend

I've had a great sporting weekend. First the West Coast Eagles beat the Adelaide Crows to make it into the AFL Grand Final, and now the Australian women's basketball team, the Opals, have won gold at the basketball world championships.

The latter means the most. I've been following women's basketball for a long time -- it's much more worth following in Australia than the men because the men are mediocre, while the women are world class. The reasons for that are actually related to Australian Football, because if footy didn't exist, there'd be another thirty or forty excellent tall athletes who'd probably be playing basketball instead, and quite a few would be stars. Women don't play footy professionally, so all the best tall female athletes play basketball instead.

For a long time the Opals have been stuck with very mediocre coaching, but Jan Stirling has steadily improved to the point where I can't find anything to complain about (imagine!) and she's blessed with some awesome talent, Penny Taylor and Lauren Jackson in particular. I'd honestly rather watch those two play than just about any male player you could name, including NBA superstars. Penny and LJ have more talent than most men, and talent has always impressed me more than pure strength or athleticism. Yeah, we got a bit lucky that the USA lost in the semis... but we creamed Russia in the final, after Russia beat America, so that's nearly as good.

Then there's the Eagles, in a rematch next weekend of last year's AFL Grand Final against the Sydney Swans. This is just a battle of good versus evil, pure and simple. The Eagles play fast, exciting, offensive football, the way the game ought to be played. The Swans play defensive, slow, choke-hold football that's ugly to watch yet disturbingly effective, like mustard gas. The Swans won last year, and I was subjected to a Paris bar full of cheering Sydney fans at some unGodly hour of the morning, reflecting that I'd rather have stayed in bed. Now, it's revenge time!

Interview

There's an interview with me up at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

Interesting Review

I know authors aren't supposed to respond to reviews, but there's a new reader-review up on Crossover's Amazon site that gives me a few talking points. It's actually a pretty good review, despite only giving three stars... from reading the text alone, I'd have thought it was a four-star. So I'm not going to trash the writer, I'm actually quite happy with it.

Anyhow, firstly something I'm not sure is my fault or not... he says he's fascinated that Vanessa Rice has a five year hetero/homosexual cycle. Um... she's kidding. This raises one of those tricky dilemmas as an author -- how much do you spell out? This is one of those problems that arises perhaps because people are reading in 'science fiction mode', and assume Vanessa's being literal. But I don't want to explain out the context too much, to explain that she's kidding, because if I did that with Vanessa, every second sentence would be followed by an explanation. Vanessa's joke is that she's bi-sexual, she's been married to a man for a few years, few of her relationships last, and she's putting her current relationship problems down to the fact that she's getting sick of men and wants a woman again. Thus, kidding about her hetero/homo cycle, as she calls it.

The reviewer also likes the holdovers, like paperback books... I never understood why some SF writers thought they would disappear, myself. In an infotech-heavy society like Tanusha, I see books as becoming stylishly retro, not just as ornamental furnishing (although full bookshelves are used for that purpose today) but also as a counter-movement against the excesses of too much fast data. Like how MacDonalds-style fast food is being countered in places like Italy with a 'slow food' movement, meaning... well, exactly what you'd think it would, in Italy -- pasta, wine, salad, good company and 'What's the damn rush?!' Societies are different from economies -- in economics, efficiency is everything. Society, however, often values the inefficient. That's not always a bad thing.

The reviewer then names some stylistic issues... I've noticed some people have an issue with my style, but luckily most seem to be cool with it. For example, he names 'fragments' as something he has a problem with here... a lot of that comes from writing from Sandy's (Cassandra's) point of view. How do you convey the experience of processing so much information at once, as Sandy does? When someone perceives twenty different sources within the space of a sentence, you have to leap around a lot, within the one sentence, to convey the sensation. Yeah, the grammar and punctuation can sometimes take a beating, but a lot of people have told me they like it, too, that it gets them inside Sandy's head.

The mirror. I've never been to writing school (save a bit of creative writing at uni a long time ago) and I don't think there's a 'rule' most good writers couldn't find a good reason to break. Yes, Sandy does look at herself in a mirror in the opening scene... but I don't really describe what she looks like, because that's not the point. The point is that Sandy looks in the mirror because that's what she'd do. She's new in town, she's looking at herself and wondering if she'll fit in, if anyone will pick her as something odd, and how she'll manage in this new life she's created for herself. And because she is, in human terms, young, naive, and somewhat visually fixated -- she likes looking at things, anything stimulating or curious, it's just what she's like, and hard to explain unless you know her like I do. This is why I hate 'writing rules'... if the mirror rule means characters have to flee shrieking at the sight of a mirror for the rest of literary history, that's a bit silly. There are many things one can do with mirrors besides annoy readers by having characters observe their faces in them.

And the reviewer says the opening chapter's a little slow... if that's his only pacing problem, that's cool. Others have told me they like the first chapter for doing what it does... it's just one of those things people will have different opinions of. But I think I had to open the story like that, because it demonstrates what Sandy's come to Tanusha in hopes of finding -- peace, and the hope of happiness. Thus adding to the power when it's smashed... and yes, chapter two is not for the squeamish. I'd explain why, but that would involve serious spoilers for anyone who hasn't read it. But it's there for a reason too.

Anyhow, as I said, I liked the review, and don't mind well intentioned criticism at all, because it encourages me to justify my creative decisions. Like this.

Institutional Sexism

Given that institutional sexism is pretty much gone (or very well hidden) from most western organisations these days, it's always morbidly fascinating to see a reminder of what it used to be like.

So I was flipping cable channels last night, and found something called "Mission Udaan", which believe it or not is a reality TV competition run by the Indian Air Force, presumably for recruiting purposes. They selected five competitors from the general public, who would compete in a series of trials, from dressing quickly in a 'scramble' to get geared up and into a fighter cockpit, to being winched from the ocean by a rescue helicopter, to parachuting from a helicopter, etc. The contestant with the highest final mark would win a ride in the backseat of a Su-30, India's top-line fighterplane.

It's not hard to guess they didn't want the women to win, because one of them was scared of heights. I shit you not -- an airforce competition, and of all the applicants, they chose one who gets dizzy any higher then five stories up. She had to pass on two events, obviously ruling her out of contention. The second woman, however, did annoyingly well... so well, in fact, that she was clearly neck-and-neck with another male contestant to win the final prize at the end. Whereupon, at the final presentation, some bigwig Indian Air Force dude stands before them on a podium on the tarmac, and announces that one woman has come last, and the other has come... second-last! And the men, of course, place third, second and first. I mean, the sheer lack of subtlety was breathtaking. They didn't even bother to re-edit it to make the second woman look like she was doing worse than she was. Just "I'm in command, and I say she came second-last".

This fits with everything else I've heard about the Indian Air Force, where they have a quota system of female pilots designed, as far as I can tell, not as an affirmative action plan, but to actively limit the number of women taken in. And of course they're not allowed to fly those Su-30s themselves, because the Indian brass, obviously knowning something most western airforces don't, have declared women aren't physically up to it. Here's hoping as India's defence relationship with America improves, some of these assholes find themselves in mock combat exercises against some of these girls, and get their backsides handed to them.

But it's instructive to recall that most Western institutions used to be like that, from law to medicine to you name it.

The Butterfly Effect

I just picked up the second album by Aussie band The Butterfly Effect, called Imago... and I'm delighted to report it rocks.

The last five years or so I've barely listened to the radio, partly because they seem to think some pissant idiots yapping at each other about how pissed they got last night is more interesting than playing music, and partly because the actual music when they do get to it has been steadily getting crappier and crappier. But I've been complaining about this ever since one of my favorite songs 'Love Raises its Ugly Head', by my then-favorite band Living Colour, was remastered in dance-format, and released. They ripped its guts out, took out Vernon Reid's awesome guitar licks, replaced Will Calhoun's equally awesome drumming with a drum machine drone, and it hit the top of the charts. That was when it hit me that the popular music scene is actually talent averse, and will kill all musical talent if allowed to. Talent exists, and can succeed, but it has to fight for every inch. Bullshit, on the other hand, gets a free pass.

The '90s were rock heaven for me -- Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam's good phase, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, etc. How amazing, I thought naively, to be experiencing an era where the popular and the talented were actually the same thing. But the record labels crushed it, as they always do, and lately I've had only Tool, and Maynard Keenan's other band A Perfect Circle for consolation. The only good point was that I started listening to more classical and world music, rediscovered Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, etc (music exists for me to evoke emotion and beauty, I don't care if it's violins, sitars or amped stratocasters that do it).

But lately, rock started making a comeback. Wolfmother's good, though a little too predictable to be bothered buying. The White Stripes, Audioslave... close, but no cigar. I listen to those songs a few times, get bored and don't desperately need to hear them again. And then I hear The Butterfly Effect's new single 'Gone' and finally, that's what I've been waiting six years to hear. New rock that's complex, melodic, powerful, takes several listens to completely absorb, and sticks in your head, demanding another listen to recapture that riff, that rhythm, that thing you loved the first few times you heard but couldn't quite remember in entirety. And they're Australian! That's rare, most of my favorite bands are American.

If my taste sounds anything like your's, check it out. If you love Eminem, Shakira or 50 Cent, you'll probably hate it. But that's cool, there's enough love and hate in the world to go around...

Oh... and at the mention of Tool, if Vicarious, off the album 10,000 Days, isn't the most kick-ass rock song of the last decade... well, I'll argue!

Breakaway Cover

I've put the Pyr cover for Breakaway -- sequel to Crossover -- up on the main website. It's once again by Stephan Martiniere (of course) and needless to say I'm pretty damn pleased with it.

Worldcon Photos

There's a whole bunch of photos from my two actual appearances at Worldcon -- the Pyr panel and the Borderlands signing -- over at the Pyr blogpage. Photos on the panel courtesy of Fiona Avery, whom I could happily have spent hours more talking to than I did. Always seemed to be trailed by a cluster of men where ever she went. Pheremones, I guess...

Competition

There's a competition to win two free copies of Crossover at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist. Looks like a pretty cool blog, too...