Adam Roberts's Blog, page 18

Apocalypse, Thursday

I['ll be appearing at this fascinating-looking panel. I do hope you can come:

DARK SOCIETIES PANEL: WATERSTONES, PICCADILLY

the Post-apocalyptic Book Club and Waterstones Piccadilly are hosting a discussion event, on Thursday 2nd May at 7pm, which will delve into the murky depths of dystopia, its impact on Sci-Fi literature and what the awards mean to genre fiction.

The speakers are:

Tom Hunter – Award Director of The Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature.

Robert Grant – Author of Writing The Science Fiction Film, Literary Editor for SCI-FI-LONDON and one of the jury for this years The Arthur C Clarke Award.

Anne Perry – Assistant Editor at Hodder & Stoughton, co-editor of Pornokitsch and co-founder of The Kitschies Awards.

Adam Roberts - er, me.

Frances Hardinge - British author best known for her novel 'Fly By Night' which in 2006 won the Branford Boase Award. Her 2012 novel A Face Like Glass was nominated and short listed for a Kitschie.

Jeff Norton - Canadian author, writer-director, and founder of creative incubator Awesome. Jeff is best known for the best-selling Metawars series, and MetaWars 3.0: Battle of the Immortal is released the day of the panel!

The panel will take place on Thursday 2nd May 2013 at 7.00pm at Waterstones, Piccadilly. Tickets are just £5.00/£3.00 Waterstones Card holders and you can by either emailing events@piccadilly.waterstones.co.uk or telephoning 020 7851 2400.

Spaces will be limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

SpecFic 2012

Speculative Fiction was released last Thursday (25 April); You can find it in the US for $11.99 and in the UK for £8.99. In addition to my piece on Ayn Rand, it has a wealth of brilliant articles and critical readings. Proceeds from all sales go to Room to Read. So -- c'mon! What's keeping you?

The editors say: "the Kindle version created by the Amazon computers wasn't up to snuff, so we're having it rebuilt by a human. It will will shortly, and should be on sale by 2 May".

More details here.

Strahan (ed), Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 7

My contributor copy of this handsome volume, edited by Jonathan Strahan, came through the post today. Some excellent stories therein, but also my own 'What Did Tessimond Tell You?' Actually I'm pretty proud of this tale: formally traditional, but with some (I think) nice touches. It first appeared in Ian Whates' Solaris 1.2.

If it were possible, I'd like to publish 'What Did Tessimond Tell You?' in a forking, dual format. It's a story divided (traditional Shakespearian structure, see) into five parts. In the fifth part you the reader discovers the answer to the question posed by the tale's title. But I'm not sure that the story doesn't work better if you stop reading at the end of part 4. So: my ideal format would lay these facts before the reader and ask her to choose: do you want to read 1-4, or all 5? Then the e-book would lock you into your choice. Strahan's conventional book doesn't give you that option -- but that's not to say you shouldn't buy a copy. You so should!

Here is the Nightshade Books website page for the vol, with purchase links for North Americans. Here's an amazon.co.uk link for Brits -- best I can do.

New blogs

My old blogs having been guillotined, for various reasons, there are two new blogs. One is for 19th-century literary and related matters, and may interest you less. (I don't know! How would I know?). The other, Sibilant Fricative, is SFnal; but of limited scope. Limited how, you ask? This post explains matters.

More tomorrow!

… and you’re back in the room.

There's no graceful way to apologise for falling internet-silent for a long time, so I'll hurry past that, mumbling and looking at the floor. Instead let's concentrate on:

NEWS!

1. I won my first ever award! Jack Glass won the BSFA Best Novel award, which thrilled me more than I can easily say. The shortlist was bruisingly good, and I was genuinely pleased to be nominated in an of-course-I'll-never-win sort of way; so the news bowled me over. Blacksheep won the Best Artwork award for the cover to Jack Glass, which, though I can take no personal credit for it, also pleased me mightily.

2. New Genre Army happened, at the University of Lincoln. I went, and it was most excellent. Really -- I had a marvellous time; Christos Callow and Caroline Edwards deserve All The Kudos In The World. (This was the event I mentioned on this very website, here). Glyphi are publishing the papers in a volume of Critical Essays, it seems. Hurrah.

More news tomorrow.

Farmer Roberts

Into London today for lunch with my editor, the excellent Simon Spanton. No sooner had I stepped into his office than he was mocking my jacket + hat combo, to the point of taking a photo and posting the result to twitter along with a mock-ish tagline. You'll have to follow that link if you want to see the picture. For some reason wordpress won't let me upload it here.

New Genre Army call for papers

Papers are invited for the first international conference on the work of British writer Adam Roberts.

This event aims to bring together scholars, critics, writers and fans for the first academic conference dedicated to the literature and ideas of Adam Roberts. Papers are welcome on any topic related to Roberts’ writing from academics, researchers, fans, and anyone else interested. Topics might include, but are not limited to: -‘High-Concept SF’ and the Novel of Ideas

-Writing science fiction in the 21st Century: responsibilities and challenges

-Military SF, Political SF, Philosophical SF

-Britishness / British humour, sarcasm, style

-Utopia and Dystopia

-Unreliable Narrators

-Heroes and Antiheroes

-Postmodernism: Metafiction and Intertextuality

-Writing under nicknames: alternative writer identities

-Propaganda, Deception, Conspiracy Theories

-‘Practicing what you preach’: writing fiction with an academic background

-The role of technology

-Cynicism and Satire

-Depictions of Britain

-Dictators, Mass-Murderers, Criminals

-Crime Fiction in Science Fiction, Genre within Genre, and beyond Genre

-Space Colonization and Galactic Empires

-Pop Culture and Parody

-Alternative History

-Power

The conference welcomes proposals for individual papers and panels from any discipline and theoretical perspective. Please send a title and 300-500 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to newgenrearmy@gmail.com by 15th February 2013.

The conference is organised by Christos Callow, PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Lincoln and Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Lincoln. The conference is sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher and the English Department of the University of Lincoln.

New Genre Army: An International Conference on the Writing of Adam Roberts

Friday 5th April 2013, Department of English, University of Lincoln

Sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher and the University of Lincoln. Part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers series

Keynote Speakers: Professor Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin University) Dr. Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University)

Response and Q&A from Adam Roberts

For more information or to respond to the call please contact:

Christos Callow

University of Lincoln

http://ulincoln.academia.edu/Christos...

Dr. Caroline Edwards

University of Lincoln

http://phone.online.lincoln.ac.uk/ced...

Email: newgenrearmy@gmail.com

News for January: BSFA Award Nom! Kitschies Nom! Nom-nom!

I'm always a bit leery of posting website material during pre-awards season, for fear of seeming appearing to pimp my stuff, but there has been news.

First, I am delighted and pleased and indeed stunnedelighted that Jack Glass has been shortlisted in the BSFA Award Best Novel category. The winners will be announced at EightSquared, the 2013 Eastercon, Cedar Court Hotel, Bradford this Easter; I'm genuinely sorry that I won't be able to be there to congratulate Mike Harrison in person, but Steve Baxter has kindly agreed to stand-in for me in the unlikely event that my novel etc etc.

Secondly: the same day I was staggerghasted to discover that Jack Glass has also been shortlisted for the Kitschies Red Tentacle. The winner of this will be announced on Tuesday, 26 February at the Free Word Centre, London; and I hope to be there.

This double honour has genuinely delighted me.

___

PS: On the subject of self-promotion versus awards-pimpage, this is what I tweeted a week or so back on the matter:

[1] re: awards pimpage, and to be clear: I have no problem with self-promotion, as anyone who follows my twitter feed will know.

[2] Self promotion is about making people aware of your books. Awards pimpage is something else: it's about trying to win yourself awards.

[3] The downside of self-promotion is that it may annoy people. The downside of awards pimpage is that it corrupts awards themselves ...

[4] ... turning them into prizes for Most Effective Self Promotion, rather than prizes for the best book. That hurts everybody.

I'm a bit stuck with this self-defeating Christopher-Tietjens-esque attitude that awards should be given to the best book/story/whatever, rather than to the Most Effective Self-Promoter. It's a hopeless struggle, I accept: but there you go.

Robots!

Buy yours today! (Also available in superrobotic kindle format*).

[*'superrobotic' kindle is exactly the same as regular kindle. Value of short stories may go down as well as up. £6.99 in ebook format. Pirates will incur my displeasure.]

Scrooge – Ein Zombie-Weihnachtsmärchen

Sie können kaufen Sie dieses Buch für alle deutschsprachigen Freunde.

Ja.